“What is it?” asked Olga, leaning close. “Oh my.”

Miriam stared at the locket. Inside it was a design like the knotwork pattern she was learning to loathe—but this one was subtly wrong. Different. A couplet with a different rhyme. One that she knew, instinctively, at a gut level, would take her somewhere else if she stared at it too long and hard. Not to mention making her blood pressure spike so high it would give her an aneurism—if she tried it in the next few hours.

She snapped it shut again and looked up at Olga. “Do you know what this means?” she asked.

Olga nodded very seriously. “It means you and Brilliana will have to disappear,” she said. “These two—” a sniff and a nod at the barricaded doorway—“are of no account, but this—” a glance at the locket—“might be the gravest threat to the Clan in living memory.” She frowned uncertainly. “I had not imagined that such a thing might exist. But if it does—”

“—They must stop at nothing to kill anyone who knows they exist,” said Brill, completing the thought for her. She looked at Miriam with bright eyes. “Will you take me with you wherever you go, mistress? You’ll need someone to guard your back…”

Two hours later.

Painkillers and beta-blockers are wonderful things, Miriam reflected as she glanced over her shoulder at Brill. She’d managed to relax slightly as Olga organized a cleanup, marshaling a barricade inside the doorway and chivying Kara and the servants into making themselves useful. Then Olga had pointed out in words of one syllable what this meant: that two factions, at least one of them hitherto unknown, were after her and it would be a good idea to make herself scarce. Finally, still feeling fragile but now accommodating herself to the idea, Miriam had crossed over. With her passenger. Who wore a smart business suit and an expression of mild bemusement. “Where are we?” asked Brill.

“The doppelgänger warehouse.” Miriam frowned as she transferred her locket to her left hip pocket. “Other side from my own chambers. Someone should have cleaned up by now.”

Fidgeting in her pocket, she pulled out some cartridges. She shuffled quietly closer to the edge of the mezzanine and looked over the side as she reloaded her pistol.

“This wasn’t what I expected,” the younger woman said in hushed tones, staring up at the dim warehouse lights.

“Stay quiet until I’ve checked it out.” She let a sharp note creep into her voice. “We may not be alone here.”

“Oh.”

Miriam crept to the edge of the platform and looked down. There was no sign of movement below, and the front door of the warehouse—past the dismounted trailer that served as a site office—was shut. “Wait here. I’ll call you down when it’s safe,” she said.

“Yes, Miriam.”