Mahlia considered. “So they buy things from the outside?”

“They don’t have the intelligence or the wherewithal to make their own equipment. All of them are funded by other groups who hope to profit.”

“Those other people,” she said. “Lawson & Carlson, or whoever. Would they buy stuff from other people? Not just soldiers?”

“What are you suggesting?”

Buyers. Mahlia tried to control her excitement. There were buyers, still. Just like when she’d been young and her mother had found the rich people who wanted antiques from the past. There were buyers.

She motioned Tool to follow, then guided him down a dusty stairwell.

“You can’t tell anyone,” she said, her words a whisper. Echoing her mother’s own words the first time Mahlia had seen her coming out of her secret place.

Mahlia reached the level above the canals. Scanned the hall. It was abandoned. No one was moving about. She ran her fingers along a wall, pushing on it, feeling for the latch buttons. Pushed hard. They were stuck.

Tool reached past her. He leaned and she heard the click. A portion of wall opened. Tool cocked his head. “A secret door?”

“My mom had it built, my old man’s idea. He bribed people. You’ll see.”

Mahlia waved for Tool to follow. Past the secret door, the warehouse was large. Bigger than two apartments put together. It was dim. The only light filtered in from the outside through high-up slits with bars. Barely noticeable. Barely worthwhile to investigate. With no way into this corner of the building, it had lain undiscovered, even as all the living spaces and apartments were ransacked.

Mahlia squinted in the gloom. Treasures surrounded her. They still existed. It wasn’t just her child’s dreaming mind that remembered this place.

It was truly here.

Oil paintings in gold-leaf frames. Marble busts of old men and women. Ancient muskets. A tattered banner with a circle of white stars on blue, and bars of red and white. A head, almost as tall as her, marble and craggy, knocked from some forgotten monument and moved by barge to this secret hiding place, until a buyer could be found. Old books, moth-eaten. Bits of paper curled and torn. Manuscripts. Bits and pieces of the Accelerated Age.

Mahlia’s mother had known history, and she had had an instinct for what foreign buyers might desire. And it was all here. Still undisturbed. The valuables that she’d been sure the man who had fathered her daughter would never abandon.

Tool picked up a gray uniform of some long-forgotten soldier, and held it up to the light. Set it down carefully. Dust rose. He lifted an ancient musket, peered down its sights.

“Well?” Mahlia asked.

Tool looked over at her, inquiringly.