“And finally!” roared the crier with a parting flourish. “Accused of profiteering and speculation, exploitation and grand usury, betrayal of the Great Change, royalism and incest… Citizeness Savine Brock!”

Vick’s smile was gone as quickly as it had come.

“Fuck,” she whispered.

None Saved

“I should caution you,” said Citizeness Vallimir, pausing at the front door, “it can be rather… overwhelming.” She wore a sober black dress and stained apron. Hardly recognisable as the fussy hostess Savine had dined with in Valbeck. But who had come through the Great Change quite the same?

“Believe me, it could be rather overwhelming when my parents were…

still in residence…” Savine trailed off as she crossed the threshold. Jokes did not feel appropriate.

The hallway was full of children. Crowded with them, down both sides. Ragged. Scabbed. Filthy. Five or six haggard nurses stood among them, looking hardly better. Savine’s mother had insisted on fresh flowers here, every day. There were no flowers now. Someone had taken away the chandelier, and the place smelled stale. Savine forced a queasy smile onto her face. Nodded a greeting at no one in particular. She heard Zuri take a sharp breath, as unsettling from her as a scream of horror might have been from someone else.

“Children, this is Citizeness Brock! This is her house. It is thanks to her generosity that you have food and shelter—”

“That’s all right,” said Savine. “Really.” She realised the strange carpet of rags the children were standing on were their blankets, wedged in left and right to leave a narrow path of scuffed floor to walk down. “Do they sleep here?” she muttered, flinching away from the great dark eyes of a girl who would not, could not, stop staring. They were like a bird’s eyes, unblinking.

“We need the space.” Citizeness Vallimir pushed open the door to the room where Savine had once drunk with her mother, laughed with her mother, been sick with horror at the secret her mother had told her. The windows were mostly boarded up, and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom.

She had allowed herself to imagine neat files of clean, grateful, pretty orphans. Saved orphans. The sight of those in the hall had shocked her. Now she realised they had been the presentable ones.

The children crowded into the bare room were like some other species. Twisted, stunted, wounded, strange. Shafts of dusty light fell on ugly details. A great bloom of scabs on a hollow ribcage. A hunched shape, endlessly rocking. Mouths gaped and dribbled. Flies buzzed about leaking eyes. Some of them slumped, insensible. Some of them crouched, baring blackened teeth. They were thin as stray cats. They were mad as mean dogs. One girl had puke in her hair. One boy’s face was a mass of sores. Another stared at the peeling wallpaper, slapping the side of his own half-bald head over and over. They made strange noises. Not words, exactly. Warbles and wheezes and snarls. Like an abandoned menagerie in which the animals had all gone mad.