A Novel by A. J. Hartley

building’s custodian in the company of Messrs. Jacoby Smithe ( Under Secretary of Trade ) and Hanson Boothes ( of the Luxorite Commission ) , who were scheduled to meet with Mr. Ansveld that morning. The fourth-story room—which is windowless—was locked and bolted from the inside, and tools had to be brought up from stores to effect entry. Mr. Ansveld appeared to have cut his own throat with a razor that was found at the scene.
    I rubbed the back of my neck again, but did not move into the shade of the hatch. I combed through the rest of the paper, scanning the pages until I found a grainy halftone picture: a group of stuffy-looking white men in high-collared shirts and sober suits facing unsmilingly forward. The caption called them the Shadow Committee of Trade and Industry. Second and third from the left were two familiar faces, considerably younger than the others, one of them badly scarred: Mr. Josiah Willinghouse and Mr. Stefan Von Strahden.
    Shadow Committee .
    So my would-be employer had told a half truth. He was who he said he was, but he did not, strictly speaking, work for the government. He was a member of the opposition, the party not currently in power. Yes, he would work on bipartisan projects and initiatives with the current administration, but he was not in a position to make law, determine funding for state projects, or any of the other prerogatives of the ruling party.
    A slip of the tongue? I wondered. A minor embroidery designed to impress? Or a calculated misdirection?
    If it was the latter, it had been a foolish one if it could be dashed by reading a newspaper. Still, it gave me pause, and I felt a tiny disappointment that the circles in which I was moving—albeit secretly—were not quite so elevated as I had thought. It was, I knew, a stupid response, perhaps even a dangerous one, and I found myself thinking about that phrase of his about the troubling occurrences that might overwhelm us all.
    Whatever was going on, it was bigger than the death of a Lani boy, or even that of a luxorite merchant.
    *   *   *
    THE LEADER OF THE Westside boys was called Deveril, a man in his midtwenties with a taste for slim, dusty suits; gold teeth; and a battered top hat with a crow’s feather stuck rakishly into the band. His parentage was mixed, largely Lani, but his eyes were the deep, dark brown of the Mahweni, and his hair tended to twist and curl. He wore it in chaotic braids that spilled from under his top hat—half undertaker, half pirate.
    He gave me an alarming smile and waved me into his “office,” away from the prying eyes of the boys heading out for their day’s work. The Westside gang was based in a half-collapsed warehouse, and the standing of the members could be read by how close their quarters were to being structurally intact. Deveril’s office doubled as his bedroom, the only room there that had four walls and a ceiling.
    He sat in a rickety chair tipped so far back, it seemed about to go over, his feet in hobnailed boots up on a stained desk scattered with paper. “You wannna know about Berrit, eh?” he said musingly. “Poor little bugger. Should never have traded him.”
    â€œWhy did you?”
    â€œBusiness,” he said. “That’s how it goes sometimes.”
    â€œMorlak requested him specifically?”
    â€œBerrit? Nah,” he sneered, as if the question were idiotic. “To tell you the truth, I was offloading him. The boy was useless for anything but street sweeping and shoe shining, and even, then he was as like to cost me for getting bootblack all over the punters’ trousers.”
    â€œSo Morlak didn’t request him?”
    â€œDidn’t know he existed till I put the boy in front of him.”
    â€œDid he test him, watch him work?”
    â€œNah,” said Deveril, tipping his top hat forward so that the brim shaded his eyes. “Why do you want to know? He was only with