Never mind that half the patrons in the market were thieves, either by vocation or necessity. Never mind that the entire operation was a clearinghouse for items stolen up and down the Eastside. These creatures protected their own. Two other shopkeepers heeded the leather man’s call, and the chase, I regret to say, began in earnest.

A greasy hand reached for my wrist. I twisted away, slamming into the rock-hard gut of a man who sold lace. He leered at me, almost licking his lips, and I slipped under his arm before he closed it around my neck, and ran. They came after me, shoving shoppers and upending pushcarts and threatening unspeakable acts of violence against my person. These men had grown fat selling stolen goods, but I take one glove—not even a pair, but a single glove—and they threaten to remove my skin, tan it, and wear me as a coat.

They were bloodthirsty and determined, those three shopkeepers, but I am small and passably nimble, and have spent my life running from bullies. I leapt over a family sleeping on the sidewalk, darted through a beer hall emptying after the lunchtime rush, and slipped through the alley toward Bleecker. When I was a child, these alleys were empty, but since the city was sliced in half, whole families have crowded into them, packed into ragged tents or huddling under the awnings of all-night oyster houses. The sun was blotted out by the makeshift shelters on the top floors of the tenements, where flimsy structures of two or three—sometimes even four—stories held apartments built of stolen timber and bedsheets that hung limp in the tepid September breeze.

I ran down the narrow strip of pavement, dodging outstretched limbs and sleeping children. The shopkeepers burst out of the beer hall and called after me. My mouth burned with the taste of metal. For that matter, my legs burned too.

I kept running.

The stink of fish faded as I stepped onto Broadway, crowded and gleaming and smelling of money and judgment, and the fence blocked my path. Even in the punishing glare of the sun, it was a dark thing—thirty feet of wrought iron topped by sharpened spikes, stretching up the middle of the avenue, dividing the healthy Eastside from the deserted west. In the middle was a little door guarded by a little man whose uniform buttons sparkled in the light. I danced through the sludgy traffic and slammed against the iron.

“Open the gate,” I said, flashing my license.

A half-witted smile spread across chapped lips. “Just what business has a nice young lady like you got on the Westside?” he said.

“Personal, and urgent.”

“I guess you’re from out of town. I can’t let you through this door without a chaperone, and even then, I would advise against it. Things over there are, well, peculiar.”