“Out of the way, girl.” One of the brutes grabbed her by the hair and dragged her off Jean-Claude. “You’ll get yours next, I—Breaker’s breath!” He leapt back and shook his hand, recoiling from the field of open sores and blisters that covered her face.

Jean-Claude sat up, the bandages on his face falling away to reveal blackened skin, cracked and rotting, dripping with pus. “Pox and plague take you all.” He spit up the wad of rice and curds he’d been holding in his cheek.

“Pest! They’ve got the pest!” shouted one of the Last Men.

Jean-Claude lurched to his feet. “Boils and blisters on your balls!”

The first ruffian bolted, and the rest followed like a shoal of aerofish fleeing a leviathan.

Jean-Claude nodded to his young accomplice. They withdrew down Three Brick Alley until they came to a dark junction where several buildings didn’t quite line up.

Jean-Claude’s heart raced and his lungs burned from the exertion, but he looked down at the girl, Rebecca, and asked, “Package delivered?”

Rebecca was on loan from St. Josephine’s Home for Foundlings, which was a front for the most lucrative urchin gang in the city. An incomparable pickpocket, Rebecca could steal a man’s wooden teeth if he smiled at her. Alternately, she could play the part of a putpocket and plant a prize on a person.

Rebecca was already scrubbing the makeup off her face, or at least smearing it more evenly. “Of course. They was distracted enough I coulda taken their boots.”

Jean-Claude pulled at a small vial of wood spirits and started scrubbing off his makeup goo. The stinging liquid chilled his face and left his skin raw. He handed the spirits to Rebecca. “Don’t get it in your eyes.”

Her nose wrinkled but she splashed it on her face and got to work peeling off boils and blisters to reveal a face full of freckles. “What’s that marble thing for anyway?”

The contraband in question was a contraption that Capitaine Isabelle had contrived: small metal sphere, not much bigger than a marble, with a tiny sliver of chartstone inside. She’d actually gone on at some length to explain to him how it worked, showed him some very detailed technical drawings which he nodded at politely and completely failed to comprehend.

Jean-Claude arched an eyebrow at her. “Why do you want to know?”