She waddled faster.

The fire was spreading and whooshing behind her. The once-dim alley was alight with a flickering orange and yellow glow. The din of collapsing buildings and roaring flames was added to by the loud clanging bell of an approaching fire engine. One of the dirigibles must have spotted the blaze and drop-messaged the appropriate authorities. If anything, this made Alexia move faster. The last thing she needed was to be detained trying to explain her presence at the Pantechnicon. It also reminded her to look up to see if she could spot a dirigible.

Sure enough, there were several headed sedately in her direction, having caught sight of the fire and redirected their lazy circling toward an intriguing new attraction. They were safely above the conflagration, not yet in the aether but high enough to avoid any risk associated with even the most massive of ground fires.

Lady Maccon waved her parasol commandingly and yelled, but she was a mere speck far below, unless someone had a pair of Shersky and Droop’s latest long-distance binoculars. Since her marriage, Alexia had adopted a more respectable and somber color palette than that of the pastel-inclined unattached young lady. This made her even less visible in the flickering shadows of Motcomb Street.

It was then that Alexia noticed that the Giffard symbol (a shaping of the name that turned the G into a massive red and black balloon) on a nearby warehouse was modified with a kind of starburst pattern at its end and a phrase underneath that read PYROTECHNIC DIVISION LTD. She stopped, turned on her heel, and headed for a nearby lamppost. With barely a pause for consideration, she hauled off, took careful aim, and threw her parasol hard at the torch section. The parasol, spearlike, crashed into the lamp and brought both it and the hot coals inside down to the ground with a clang.

Lady Maccon huffed her way over to the coals, retrieved her now-slightly-scorched and sooty accessory by its tip, and, holding it like a mallet, used the chubby handle to hit one particularly nice-looking coal along the street toward the Giffard pyrotechnic warehouse. It was a excellent thing, reflected Alexia at that juncture, that she was good at croquet. At a nice distance, she took careful aim and, with a kind of scooping action, struck the wedge of coal hard. It arced splendidly upward, crashing through the window of the warehouse in a most satisfactory manner.

Then she waited, long, slow counts, hoping the coal had managed to hit upon something reliably explosive.

It had. A popping, cracking noise came first, then some whizzing and whirling sounds, and finally a series of loud gunshots. The doors and windows of the warehouse exploded outward, pushing Alexia backward. Instinctively, she popped open her parasol to shield herself as the world around her turned into a smoking cornucopia of brightly flashing lights and loud noises. The entire stockpile of what she imagined must be a very expensive collection of gunpowder display sparkles and sky-lighters exploded, shimmering and flashing in an ever-increasing series of flares.