“I am from Gurkhul,” said Zuri, checking the watch. “I am well aware.”

“Nothing sells but coupling and pratfalls,” the theatre’s owner was lamenting to an acquaintance in a quavering bass. “Once great Juvens’ exhortation to the senators echoed from the rafters! Now we watch a fat man trip over the night pot and pretty people pretend to fuck.”

“Can we not admit that fucking has always been popular?”

“I suppose. These days I hardly know whether I’m hiring actors or whores.”

“There’s a difference?” Followed by stutters of forced laughter.

They all were skaters on thin ice, their smiles stretched tight over their terror, gliding on as the cracks shot out beneath them. People startled at every noise in the street, expecting Burners to burst into the theatre and drag away the membership of the Solar Society wholesale. The workmen of Adua had lived in constant fear of the people in this room. Now it was their turn. But life went on, even as the world simultaneously froze and burned around them. What was the alternative?

“Credit!” a man with immense side-whiskers frothed. “There’s no bloody credit anywhere. All the banks are shuttered!”

“Most of the bankers are in the House of Truth. Sorry, House of Purity. The ones who haven’t taken the long drop yet, anyway. Usury. Is that even a crime?”

“If it is, aren’t we all guilty?”

“If Pike wanted to strangle business he’s gone about it the right way…”

Savine had once felt nowhere more at home than here, flitting from one opportunity to another, hopes and dreams left wrecked in her wake. Now all she wanted was to slit the laces of her corset and sag down with her children, slap the stopper from the decanter and never put it back.

“By the Fates,” she muttered. “I have become my mother.”

“There are worse things one could become,” said Zuri.

It had all been so much more fun with a ready supply of pearl dust and no ever-present threat of death. But there was no pearl dust to be had, and life had never been cheaper.

“I hear old Marnavent took the long drop,” someone brayed carelessly.

“So who’s running things at the patent office now?”

“You assume there is still a patent office. Last I heard they were keeping pigs in the place.”

“Count yourself lucky if it’s just your ideas that are stolen. Yoslund lost every stick of furniture in the uprising. They made off with his damn doors!”

“At least during King Jezal’s reign one knew who to bloody bribe…”

“Citizeness Savine!”

“Citizeness Selest.”

If simplicity was the fashion, Selest Heugen bucked the trend. Her look was bread-rioting grand duchess. Militant millionaire with a dash of top-end prostitute. Dark rubies spilled down her neck like blood from a slit throat and her black dress was artfully slashed to show Burner’s scarlet. Most women had stopped wearing swords. Having Leo’s wounds in her face had entirely killed Savine’s appetite for tools of death. Selest had gone the other way, with a genuine horseman’s axe dangling from her crimson sash.