The battery continued winding the little handle until Umma Balsum righted herself and walked closer, laid a peremptory hand on it. She stopped the watch on the table, and said: “That’s it, dear.”

Derkhan stretched out and laid her head on the table. She wept in silence. Across the city, Benjamin Flex was doing the same.

Both of them alone.

It was only two or three minutes before Derkhan sniffed sharply and sat up. Umma Balsum was sitting in her chair, calculating sums on a scrap of paper with great efficiency.

She glanced over at the sound of Derkhan’s brisk attempts to reassert control over herself.

“Feeling better, deario?” she asked breezily. “I’ve worked out your charge.”

There was a moment when Derkhan felt sick at the woman’s callousness, but it came and went quickly. Derkhan did not know if Umma Balsum could recall what she heard and said when she was harmonized. And then even if she did, Derkhan’s was only one tragedy in the hundreds and thousands throughout the city. Umma Balsum made her money as a go-between, and her mouth had told story after faltered story of loss and betrayal and torture and misery.

There was a certain obscure, lonely comfort for Derkhan in realizing that hers and Ben’s was not a special, not an unusual suffering. Ben’s would not be a special death.

“Look.” Umma Balsum was waving her piece of paper at Derkhan. “Two marks plus five for connection is seven. I was there for eleven minutes, which makes twenty-two stivers: that’s two and tuppence, brings it to nine marks two. Plus a noble for Spike danger money, and you’re looking at one noble nine and two.”

Derkhan gave her two nobles and left.

She walked quickly, without thinking, tracing her way through the streets of Brock Marsh. She re-entered the inhabited streets, where the people she passed were more than shifty-looking figures skulking hurriedly from shadow to shadow. Derkhan shouldered through stallholders and vendors of cheap and dubious potions.

She realized that she was making her way towards Isaac’s laboratory-house. He was a close friend, and something of a political comrade. He had not known Ben—had not even heard his name—but he would understand the scale of what had happened. He might have some idea of what to do . . . and if not, well, Derkhan would make do with a strong coffee and some comforting.

His door was locked. There was no answer from within. Derkhan almost wailed. She was about to wander off into lonely misery when she remembered Isaac’s enthusiastic descriptions of some vile pub that he frequented on the river’s bank, The Dead Child or something. She turned down the little alley beside the house and looked up and down the pathway by the water, flagstones broken and erupting with tenacious grass.