“Nobody told me. I didn’t even notice she wasn’t there.” Jane swallowed. “She’d been with me from the beginning. From Mrs. Wilmore’s. A lot of the girls have.”

“I know.” Winter squeezed Jane’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“I went over to the cutter’s station. I thought I could . . . help, maybe. There was this girl, Forti. Short for Fortuna. You probably didn’t know her.”

Winter shook her head.

“We found her right after we came to Vordan City. When we were still living in the swamps. She just wandered into camp one day, a skinny little thing in rags, asking for food and cringing every time someone looked at her. Like she expected to be beaten.”

Jane’s hands tightened on her knees, until her knuckles were white. Winter said nothing.

“I let her come with us,” Jane said. “Nobody knew how old she was, but she’d filled out once we gave her some proper food. She wanted to come so badly, and I told her she could.”

“Is she . . .” Winter trailed off.

Jane pressed her head into Winter’s shoulder. “When I got there, to the cutter’s tent, they had her on the table. They had a . . . a saw, the kind of thing you’d use to chop the end off a log, and they were cutting through her arm.” One of Jane’s hands came up and closed around her own biceps, in unconscious sympathy. “She’d lost the gag they’d given her, and she was screaming, ‘No, no, no, no,’ over and over, even after they were through. One of the cutters picked up the arm and tossed it on a pile. All those hands . . . and . . .”

“God,” Winter said softly. “Oh, Jane.”

“I lost my lunch,” Jane said. “Or yesterday’s dinner, maybe, since I never got anything to eat today. Right in front of everyone. Then I ran for it, puke still dripping from my shirt.”

“It’s all right,” Winter said. “They understand. Watching something like that . . .”

“I brought them here! I was supposed to be protecting them, and I brought them here. What the fuck am I doing?” Jane looked up at Winter, her eyes wide and frantic. “We should leave. Take them all and go home, back to the city, or out into the country, anywhere but here.”

Winter stared at her. This was a Jane she hadn’t seen before, the flip side of the fiery-tempered woman who’d wanted to kill the vicious tax farmer Bloody Cecil on the spot and had been ready to storm the Vendre in the face of cannon-fire. There was something childlike in her expression, a desperate need for reassurance that Winter felt ill-equipped to provide.

“Let’s start with this,” she said. “You didn’t bring them here. They brought themselves, of their own free will. You know that. Everybody who came with us knew what could happen.”

“I could have stopped them.”