Florence carried the bowl and spoon downstairs, her footsteps finding the creaking boards with the instinct of someone who had already memorised which ones complained the loudest. The kitchen was warm and damp, the air thick with boiled oats and the lingering tang of Mrs. Gable's morning tea. She washed the bowl in the stone sink, dried it with the dishcloth hanging from the nail, and set it back on the shelf beside the others.

  Mrs. Gable was at the kitchen table, folding linen napkins into neat squares with the mechanical efficiency of a woman who could do it blindfolded and probably had. She looked up when Florence reached for her satchel on the hook by the back door.

  "Off already?"

  "University business," Florence said, slinging the bag across her shoulder. The strap settled into the groove it had already worn into her coat. "Fittings for the uniform, apparently. The pamphlet made it sound quite involved."

  "Oh, it will be," Mrs. Gable said, with the grim satisfaction of someone who had housed enough students to know. "They'll have you standing on a box for an hour while a man with pins in his mouth tells you your posture's crooked. Take a book."

  Florence smiled. She reached for the door handle, then stopped.

  "Mrs. Gable—I'm terribly sorry, but I think I cracked one of your mugs this morning. The blue one with the stripe. The handle split." She pulled her hand back from the door, clasping both in front of her the way she did when she was delivering bad news. "I'll replace it."

  Mrs. Gable blinked. "Cracked? How on earth did you manage that?"

  "I must have knocked it against the sill." The lie arrived with a steadiness that would have troubled Florence more if she'd had the luxury of examining it. She was getting fluent in this particular language—half-truths, deflections, the careful architecture of plausible explanations for things that had no plausible explanation—and the fluency itself was the thing she liked least about the last two days. "I'll find one just like it."

  "Oh, don't be daft, love." Mrs. Gable waved the apology away with a napkin. "That one's been hanging on by spite since October. I'm surprised it lasted the winter. I've got a dozen in the cupboard."

  "Still. I—"

  "Shoo." Mrs. Gable flapped the napkin at her. "Go. Be measured. Stand on the box. You're burning daylight."

  "Alice is sleeping," Florence said, her hand on the latch. "She's still running warm. If you could look in on her around noon—bring something up, maybe some broth if you have it? She won't ask. She'll tell you she doesn't need anything. She's—"

  "Stubborn as a mule with a grudge?"

  "I was going to say independent."

  "Same animal, different hat." Mrs. Gable resumed her folding. "I already said I'll see to her. Now go."

  Florence went.

  The door closed behind her and Baker Street opened up like a sentence she'd only read in a book and was now being asked to speak aloud.

  The morning was grey. Not the soft grey of overcast skies back home, where the clouds sat low and woolly and the light came through diffused and gentle. This was Dunwick grey—industrial, particulate, the colour of a city that burned ten thousand coal fires before breakfast and wore the evidence in its air. The buildings across the street were soot-darkened brick, three and four storeys tall, their ground-floor shop fronts just beginning to open. A grocer was hauling crates of turnips onto the pavement. A woman in a starched apron was washing the windows of a chemist's shop with long, practised strokes. Somewhere down the block, a door opened and the smell of fresh bread hit Florence with a force that was nearly physical, and for one disorienting moment she was twelve years old and standing in the bakery at dawn, flour on her arms, her mother's voice calling from the back room.

  She blinked. The moment passed. She was standing on a doorstep in a city of four million people, and she had things to do.

  Right, then.

  She ran through the list while she adjusted the satchel strap. Fittings first. The pamphlet said the university tailor operated out of the east wing of the Merton Building, ground floor, mornings only, first-come basis. Then a walk of the campus. Library, lecture halls, the Anatomical Gardens. Get the lay of the place while it was still quiet, before term started and the corridors filled with people who already knew where they were going.

  And if there was time after that—the Cathedral. St. Silas. The Reverend had said she was welcome.

  You don't have to be devout. Just present.

  Florence had liked that. She had liked the woman who said it, too—calm, unhurried, the kind of person who could sit in a silence without needing to fill it. Florence was beginning to understand that this was a rarer quality than she'd assumed.

  The satchel sat snug against her hip, heavier than a university pamphlet and a coin purse had any right to make it. The pamphlet was there—folded into the inner pocket, her temporary pass tucked inside it. The coin purse was there too, a small drawstring pouch of brown leather that Thomas had pressed into her hand at the end of their tour yesterday, before the Swan, when the afternoon was still golden and the worst thing in the world was the price of soup.

  "For the week," he'd said, folding her fingers closed around it before she could look inside and start arguing. "Fittings, supplies, whatever you need. Don't count it, don't thank me, and for the love of the Lord don't try to give it back."

  She had counted it, of course. The moment he'd turned his back. Five gold Crowns and a scatter of silver Stags—enough to cover the fittings, a set of reference texts, and still have change left over for meals and tram fare through the first week of term. It was more than generous. It was Thomas, distilled into currency: excessive, earnest, and utterly unwilling to hear the word no.

  And beneath the coin purse, wrapped in a kerchief and sitting at the very bottom of the bag where it wouldn't shift. The revolver. Still loaded. Still there.

  Florence had not yet worked out what to do about the revolver. It was a bandit's gun, taken from a dead man's belt in a cabin in the woods, and she was carrying it through the streets of Dunwick in a satchel that also contained her university credentials. The contradiction was not lost on her. She told herself it was temporary—that she'd find somewhere safe to store it, or unload it and hide the pieces, or perhaps throw it into the river if she could work up the nerve. But the memories of the last two days were still close enough to touch, and the weight of the gun at the bottom of her bag felt less like a liability and more like a promise that the next time the world tried to drag her somewhere dark, she would not go empty-handed.

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  She was not sure what kind of person that made her. She suspected it was the kind of person who didn't carry revolvers a week ago, and now did, and hadn't fully reckoned with the distance between those two points.

  Later. Think about it later.

  Florence looked up the street. She could see the nearest tram stop from here—a cast-iron shelter at the corner of Baker and Harrowgate, already collecting a small crowd of morning commuters. Beyond it, the road widened into a commercial thoroughfare where carriages and carts jostled for space in the grey morning traffic. She knew, from the map she'd studied while she was still in Briar's Crossing, that the University was roughly forty minutes' walk northeast. Across the river, through the Greybridge district, up the long hill toward the old quarter where the spires of the academic buildings rose above the rooftops like stone fingers reaching for something they couldn't quite grasp.

  She could take the tram. Line Four ran directly from Harrowgate to the University gate, with two transfers. Or a cab—she'd seen them queuing at the rank on the next street over, black-lacquered coaches with polished brass lamps and drivers who looked like they charged by the syllable.

  She looked at the tram stop. She looked at the street ahead.

  No.

  Thomas had taken her through the city yesterday in a carriage, pointing things out through the window, narrating the streets like a tour guide with a personal stake in the architecture. It had been wonderful. But it had also been his Dunwick—the version he'd built for himself over years of living here, twelve blocks wide, fitted to his routines. She had seen it through his eyes, from his seat, at his pace.

  Today she wanted to walk. She wanted her feet on the cobblestones and the city at eye level, moving at the speed of her own legs, making her own mistakes. She had the map in her head. Every street, every bridge, every district boundary, memorised in the careful, methodical way she'd memorised anatomy diagrams and recipe measurements and the stages of bread fermentation. The city was a system. Systems could be learned.

  Florence took a breath, squared her shoulders, and stepped off the doorstep onto the pavement.

  A man hit her.

  Not violently—a shoulder, clipping hers as he barrelled past from the left, his coat flapping, his stride the aggressive, purposeful march of someone who had somewhere to be and considered other pedestrians a design flaw in the concept of streets.

  Florence stumbled sideways, her boot catching the kerb. The satchel swung on its strap and thumped against her hip—she heard the muffled clink of coins shifting in the purse, the heavier settle of the revolver against the canvas bottom—and she caught her balance with one hand on the brick wall of the boarding house.

  "Sorry! I'm so—"

  "Watch where you're standing!" the man snapped over his shoulder, already ten paces ahead and accelerating, his voice swallowed by the street noise before Florence could finish the apology.

  She stared after him. He didn't look back.

  Right. Dunwick.

  She adjusted the strap, tugging it higher so the bag sat closer to her ribs, and checked the buckle. Secure. The clink of the coins had settled. Everything was where it should be.

  She started walking.

  Baker Street fed into Harrowgate Road, and Harrowgate Road fed into the world. The morning traffic thickened around her in stages—first a trickle, then a current, then a river of bodies and vehicles that swelled as the commercial district came alive. Shopkeepers cranked open awnings. A boy in an apron swept the pavement in front of a butcher's shop with the resigned vigour of someone who would be doing this again tomorrow. Two women in matching grey dresses walked arm-in-arm, deep in a conversation pitched just below the threshold of eavesdropping. A dog nosed through a pile of refuse at the mouth of an alley, found something promising, and carried it away with the satisfied trot of a successful entrepreneur.

  Florence kept to the right side of the pavement. She walked at a steady pace, not too fast—she wanted to see things—and not too slow, because she had already learned that stopping in the flow of Dunwick foot traffic earned you the kind of looks usually reserved for people who fainted in doorways.

  At the Harrowgate junction, the road widened and the traffic split. Carriages and carts took the cobbled centre, wheels rattling and iron-shod hooves striking sparks on the stone. And on the left, running along its iron rails down the centre of the boulevard, a tram.

  Florence watched it pass. It was the dark green of the Line Four route—she recognised the colour from yesterday—and it moved with a smooth, electric hum that cut through the clatter of the street like a tuning fork through noise. The windows were full of faces, commuters pressed shoulder to shoulder, reading newspapers and staring at nothing. It overtook a horse-drawn carriage in the adjacent lane without apparent effort, gliding past the labouring animal and its creaking cab as if they existed in different centuries. Which, Florence supposed, they did.

  The horse was a bay draught, broad-chested and heavy-footed, its harness dark with sweat. It pulled its load with the patient, mechanical rhythm of an animal that had long since stopped having opinions about its work. Its driver sat hunched on the box, reins loose, watching the tram slide past with the expression of a man who understood exactly what was coming and had decided not to think about it.

  Florence felt a pang. She had grown up around horses—the baker's cart horse, old Fennel, who had known the delivery route so well that her father used to fall asleep on the bench and wake up at the right door. There was something honest about a horse. Something she trusted.

  The draught clopped on. In its wake, a trail of fresh manure steamed on the cobblestones in a lumpy, glistening line that a well-dressed woman ahead of Florence navigated with a sharp sideways step and an expression of concentrated disgust.

  Florence looked at the manure. She looked at the tram, humming clean and horseless down its iron rail.

  Perhaps things changed for a reason.

  She crossed Harrowgate at the signal, threading through a gap between a coal wagon and a man pushing a handcart stacked with wooden crates. The far side of the road opened onto a narrower street—Linnet Lane, according to the sign bolted to the brickwork, and according to the map in her head, a straight shot to the Greybridge crossing. The buildings here were older, leaning slightly, their upper storeys jutting out over the pavement in a way that turned the street into a kind of tunnel. Gas lamps still burned at intervals despite the hour, their flames pale and redundant in the grey morning, as if no one had told them the night was over.

  It was all exactly as she had imagined it.

  That was the strange part. She had spent years building Dunwick in her mind—from Thomas's letters, from maps, from the illustrations in the penny papers that reached Briar's Crossing a week late and slightly rain-damaged. She had pictured the streets, the crowds, the soot-dark buildings climbing over each other for a view of the sky. And now she was inside the picture, and it was both exactly right and completely wrong, the way a word you've only read looks unfamiliar the first time you hear it spoken aloud.

  I'm here.

  The thought kept arriving, uninvited, at odd moments. Crossing a street. Turning a corner. Catching a smell.

  I'm actually here.

  A sound cut through the ambient wash of the street—a boy's voice, high and carrying, trained for projection in the way that only newsies and auctioneers and street preachers could manage.

  "TERROR AT THE SWAN! THIRTY-TWO DEAD IN DUNWICK'S WORST ATTACK IN A DECADE! READ ALL ABOUT IT! DUNWICK STANDARD, MORNING EDITION!"

  Florence saw him before the second cry. He was perched on an overturned crate at the mouth of Greybridge Road, maybe twelve years old, a canvas sack of folded papers slung across his narrow chest. His cap was too big for his head. His voice was too big for his body. He brandished the morning edition like a weapon, snapping it open to display the headline in bold black type.

  TERROR AT THE LACQUERED SWAN

  32 Dead, Scores Injured in Brazen Evening Assault

  Great Earth Cult Claims Responsibility

  Florence's stride faltered. The surreal warmth of the morning—the simple pleasure of walking, of seeing, of being present in the city she'd dreamed of for years—curdled at the edges. She kept moving. She did not want to read that headline. She did not want to think about what was behind it

  She kept walking.

  "OFF-DUTY SENIOR INSPECTOR THOMAS BANNERMAN SAVES THE NIGHT!" the boy bellowed, pivoting to catch the passing crowd from a new angle. "HERO OF THE SWAN! BANNERMAN SINGLE-HANDEDLY ENGAGES ELEVEN CULT OPERATIVES! EXCLUSIVE ACCOUNT INSIDE!"

  Florence stopped.

  She turned. The newsie was already making a sale—a man in a bowler hat fishing a copper from his waistcoat—but the boy's eyes caught hers across the pavement, bright and commercial, and the paper in his outstretched hand might as well have had a hook in it.

  She walked toward him.