Maura Varg entered the shop and traded salutes with the man behind the register. He released something he was holding beneath the counter—tension in his shoulder and biceps was right for a blade, though maybe a shocklance or blasting rod or crossbow—stepped out front, walked past Varg, and flipped the OPEN sign in the window to CLOSED.

Varg drummed her fingers on the briefcase. Not a woman who liked waiting, Cat thought. Not a woman who liked much of anything on land. Such prejudice tended to go with the piratical territory.

The cashier took a skeleton key from his pocket, slid it into a crack in the drywall, and turned. A door opened where a door hadn’t been seconds before.

One could quibble with mystery plays on many points. Cat’s fellow Suits scorned them for a host of small inaccuracies: steel doesn’t break that way, no one holds a crossbow like that, how did they reload so fast, no officer in their right mind would go into that house alone. Small details of procedure and weaponry didn’t bother Cat much, but the plays got hidden doors wrong every single time. The young bride in “Reynardine” opens the secret passage to find a luxurious staircase, warning inscription in gold on the arch above, rich, plush, and above all clean.

Real hidden passages, now, were by definition places people didn’t look, where you never had to entertain company. You entered them only when you needed something from the space beyond, and you didn’t linger. Real hidden passages, in Cat’s experience, looked more like disused dry-goods cellars.

So she wasn’t surprised when the new door opened onto a shabby stairwell made from warped unfinished wood. Black smears marred the plaster wall.

Maura Varg jutted her chin out and up by way of a nod, and climbed the hidden stairs. The cashier closed the door behind her, removed and pocketed the key, and patted the drywall where the door had been.

Cat clutched her badge again and spoke through it to Blacksuits in and out of uniform. “Varg is upstairs. The key’s in the cashier’s left apron pocket.”

Roger, they responded, and though Cat knew the voice, and used it herself sometimes, still she shivered. It was the voice of wireglass things in nightmares, which never lived and so could never die. A year ago, the voice was simply terrifying, which hadn’t bothered her. These days there was a song beneath the scream, a face to the silver. A goddess was part of her workday now. That was harder to accept. Awaiting your signal.

“It’s time,” she told Raz.

He took his hands from his face. His cheeks were wet with blood tears. “Give them hells.”