“BlackAdder! Got to be! Motherfuckers burned them out, grabbed all their provisions.”

What Rubio said would happen. Good if he held back the told-you-sos.

Grace gestured upward. “I gotta go get . . .”

“Yah, sorry, go!”

I rousted everyone I could find, then went back down for further orders. The carnage in Main was horrifying, fresh blood and soot mixing in an odorous smog. The bullet wounds, knife slashes, broken limbs, dislocations, and worst of all, the burns, raw and oozing. Our medics were doing their best, but they needed ice-baths and anesthetics, and mostly we had herbal balms and seawater. Rousseau sent runners to Gimme Shelter and Empire to beg for help. The whole den was in shock. Everyone who could was pitching in.

“It’s like the triage station in a refugee camp,” breathed Rubio, joining me as I tore up T-shirts from the swap shelf to bandage knife wounds.

“You seen Spunk? His bunk isn’t slept in.”

“Probably off with one of his women.” He sighted over the crowd. “There’s Maxine. Glad she made it.”

Rousseau came in from the mudroom, stunned and grim, supporting the Ladysmith’s den boss, followed by several of her crew, like maybe they’d had to drag her out of the burning building to get her to retreat. Her hair was singed nearly to her scalp, her clothing sodden—water or blood, or both. Smaller than I recalled from the meeting in Rousseau’s office, vulnerable but hardly diminished as she showered Rousseau top-volume with righteous outrage, and he tried to talk her down to reason. Someone found her a towel, then draped another across her shoulders. When she wiped her eyes, she left pale tracks under layers of oily soot. She looked ready to chew up the first mouth that backtalked her.

Rousseau left off his calming and hollered for a medic and a stretcher.

“I can fucking walk!” Maxine bellowed, clutching one arm close to her belly. “They don’t put me down that easy!”

Some of the Smiths started up a wan cheer. The rest of us joined in to make it ring big, as Rousseau and the medic helped her up the stairs to the Ward.

“And so it begins,” Rubio said quietly.

So much blood and pain, so many strange faces crowding in—men with beards, women with toddlers at the hip, kids looking lost. And weapons everywhere, out and ready: belt knives, rifles back-slung, sheathed machetes, cudgels, whatever else I couldn’t see that had made it into the den before Rousseau could say otherwise.

“Jake! Here!” I grabbed him as he rushed by with a basket of bandages and piled my T-shirt strips on top. “What do we know?”

“Poor Max! Christ Almighty!” He looked wrecked, like caught off guard by a sidelong blow. “BlackAdder, for sure this time! Stole everything they could fit in their boats, big fucking inboards, like a half-dozen of them! A fucking fleet!”