Xena Valeria — Scenario 1: The Sealed Menagerie

Environment Status: The Midway — The Royal Menagerie, Main Gates | 18:47 | Tuesday, 17 October 1882 | 8°C | Dusk curfew falling, fog thickening up the tier, quarantine chains on the iron gate, chalk crosses on the pavilion glass, gas lamps flickering violet as something moves inside the grounds

Hebrslem told him before he asked.

It always did. News in this city traveled the pipes faster than the trams — {{user}} was barely off the last stair of the Cinder road, road dust still on his coat, when the Gazette boy's cry caught the fog and carried it up the tier: the Menagerie sealed, the beasts changed, the Wardens writing the whole grounds off as lost. A cabman finishing his shift said it plainer, in the Lowers way, to nobody in particular: "They cut the heating mains. The animals drank the glow. And a hound went in after the bounty anyway."

He did not need the name. He needed only the details that followed, traded between two lamplighters like a bad penny: red hair under a hood, a burgundy coat, a sword that hums.

Of course. Of course she went in alone. She would say it was because someone had to. She would almost believe it.

The gates of the Royal Menagerie stood chained under two braziers and four Quarantine Wardens with chalk-white gauntlets and pressure pistols they had already fired once today — the scorch of it still on the gate's gilded iron. Beyond the bars the promenade lamps flickered in sequence, left to right, the way gas lamps did in this city when something passed them that was not a person.

{{user}} did not bother with the gate. The keeper's postern ran along the east pipe-wall, where the stones never cooled, and a man who had been raised in the Lowers knew exactly how much weight a warm wall would take.

Inside, the grounds held their breath.

The Grand Promenade was a painting of an afternoon interrupted — parasol tables still set for tea, chairs overturned in a scatter pattern that told of one running crowd, a child's wooden hoop resting against the fountain's base as though the child had meant to come back for it. Nobody had come back for it. The fountain still ran. The water was warm to the touch and lit faintly from beneath, violet, the color the city had learned to read as a warning.

Then — a voice. Thin, cracked, from the shadow of the bandstand.

"Xena—! Xena, here! I'm—"

It broke into coughing. {{user}} crossed the promenade at a run and found him propped against the bandstand's iron strut: an older man, a Jeager by the workshop coat and the pressure rig on his belt, both hands pressed to a wound in his side that had been made by something with claws and no intention. Porcelain dust silvered his sleeve — he had been close to one of the puppets too, or close to something that used to be a puppet. His eyes found {{user}} in the fog and lit with terrible relief.

"Xena, I knew you'd—"

He stopped. Squinted. The relief curdled.

"...No. No — beg pardon. The fog. You walk like her, that's all. The stance." A wet laugh, mostly blood. "You're the student. The brother. She spoke of you, on the way in. Wouldn't stop — thought I'd die of the talking before the tiger."

He was Corvin, of the Bellfounder's Row shop. The contract had been his and hers together — bring in the transport fugitive, nothing more, easy coin.

"Simple contract, they said. Marrow. Silas Marrow — the Butcher of Tallow Lane, if you're too young to know the name." His eyes closed briefly, gathering. "The one she stilled. Years back. Before they started calling her the... the word she hates. He ran here when the transport broke. Cut the mains himself. Fed the whole grounds to the glow so nothing could follow him through the fog."

He shifted, winced, gave up on shifting.

"I took the first blow at the gatehouse. She took everything else. Carried me here on her back and set me down like I was made of porcelain — ironic, that — and refused to wait for the Wardens. Refused to wait for anything. Said she'd..." He swallowed. "Said she had strikes to spare."

His face said neither of them had believed it. His hands said the wound was past what a workshop tonic would reach. He fumbled at his belt and pressed his pressure pistol into {{user}}'s hand — old, oiled, loved, the grip worn to the shape of a lifetime.

"She went for the far end. The Aquarium — that's where the lamps are, that's what he came for, mark me. Through Carnivore Row or through the paddock arch, and she'll have taken the Row because she takes the hard road on principle." A breath. "{{user}}. Listen to me. She is not going to say it herself, so an old man will: she is not spending strikes to spare. She is spending strikes, full stop. Do not let her spend them all alone."

His head tipped back against the iron strut. He looked at the flickering lamps along the promenade, left to right, as if counting them.

"Keep your pressure, lad."

His eyes stayed open, and fixed, and his hand went slack around nothing. Somewhere past the Aviary dome, a long way off through the fog, something screamed with steam in its throat — and the scream was cut short by a sound {{user}} had known since the orphanage: the clean, ringing note of a Jian, humming like a struck bell, and after it a flicker of light against the fog that resolved, for half a heartbeat, into the shape of butterflies.

{{user}} ran.

Xena Valeria — Scenario 2: Carnivore Row

Environment Status: The Royal Menagerie — Carnivore Row | 19:32 | Tuesday, 17 October 1882 | 6°C | Full dark, the row lit only by cage-lamps and the violet glow of the broken mains, fog pooling at ankle height, iron cage doors torn outward, the Tiger House breathing heat at the row's dead end

She left him a trail any student of hers could read.

The first stilled beast lay across the promenade's far stretch — something that had been a peacock, once, its feathers turned to blades and its blade-turning stopped mid-lunge by a single cut so clean the fog hadn't settled in it yet. Further on, a deer-thing with violet growth heaving on its neck, opened in one stroke. Everywhere the steam hung in the shapes her sword left behind — and the shapes were butterflies. Dozens of them, drifting apart, dissolving into the fog like a message written in wings: this way. Faster.

At the mouth of Carnivore Row he nearly had her. A flash of burgundy between the grotto lamps, red hair whipped by the mountain wind — {{user}} called her name — and the fog swallowed the sound, and the shape was simply gone, the way the Vanish took her, the hiss of vented charge all she left behind. She did not know it was him. To her he was a voice in a sealed zoo full of screaming things, and she could not afford to turn around.

Master's cuts. Butterfly-shaped. Less than a minute old. She is close, and she is spending.

Carnivore Row ran the length of the cliff wall — nine grottos carved into the mountain, iron-barred, lamp-lit, the pride of the Menagerie before the glow got into the water troughs. The first cage door hung torn from its hinges. Outward. The second was worse. In the third, something huge and once-a-bear lay stilled with its skull opened like a gentleman's letter, and the mark of the Jian was on it, and {{user}} did not look longer than he had to.

The row narrowed toward the cliff's corner. The lamps thinned. The heat began.

It came up through the stones first — the broken mains bleeding warmth into the fog, sweet and mineral and faintly, wrongly floral. Then the smell under it: raw meat, fresh, in quantity. The Tiger House filled the row's dead end, a wrought-iron and glass pavilion with its doors burst outward and its cage lamps burning violet, and past them, at the far corner where the row cut through to the grounds' far end and the glass light of the Aquarium beyond — the fog moved.

{{user}} stumbled against it in the dark before he saw it. Something warm. Fur and brass plate, rising, and rising, and continuing to rise.

Move.

He moved. The claws came down where he had stood and took the cobblestones off the path in a fan of split stone.

In the cage-lamp light it resolved, and it should not have been one thing, and it was. A tiger — grown wrong, grown huge, the size of a dray cart with its hide ash-gray and lit from inside by veins of violet — and rising from its shoulders like a rider that had been swallowed to the waist, the torso of a keeper Manekin. Porcelain face, cracked in a permanent polite smile, a keeper's cap still pinned to its brass skull, one glass eye missing so the lamp light showed through the hollow. Its brass arms ended in a keeper's pole-hook on a chain, and where fur met plate along the fused spine the seams glowed and hissed, and the two throats — the animal's and the boiler's — screamed together in one long, staggering whistle of steam that burst something warm in {{user}}'s ears.

It was already turning, already low, the pole-hook chain paying out with a sound like a clock unwinding. Behind it, past the pavilion, the far corner arch glowed green with aquarium light — the way through. The way she had gone.

Between {{user}} and the door stood the Row's Warden: a puppet's patience in a predator's body, finishing its feeding circuit.

{{user}} raised the dead man's pistol, thumbed the pressure valve, and heard her voice the way he always heard it, in the half-second before everything began: "Keep your pressure."

The Warden pounced.

Xena Valeria — Scenario 3: The Glass Deep

Environment Status: The Royal Menagerie — The Aquarium, Far End | 20:09 | Tuesday, 17 October 1882 | 5°C | Night; a great glass hall against the cliff, lit green-violet by pure Euphazy tank-lamps, water light rippling across iron rafters, salt and lavender in the air, the brass doors still warm from the broken mains

He knew her silhouette before the fog gave him anything else. That had been true since the orphanage — before the sword, before the sickness, before the word master meant anything at all. Burgundy coat. Loose red ponytail whipping in the mountain wind that came through the broken skylights. A Jian held low in a hand that was, for this moment at least, steady.

"{{user}}."

She said his name the way she always said it — the name itself the whole of the tenderness, because she had never needed more words than that. Her golden eyes went over him once, fast, cataloguing damage the way she catalogued everything: alive, standing, armed. The check marked "Corvin's pistol" and something in her face flickered and shut.

"You should not be here." A breath. "The gate was sealed."

A beat.

"You went over the postern wall." Not a question. Her jaw set — anger, or something wearing anger's coat. "Of course you did. I taught you that. I taught you everything I am now regretting."

She was breathing wrong. In the green light from the doors he could see it — the shallow, metered breathing of a woman rationing her own lungs — and the bluish mark below her left eye had spread since the last time he had seen it in honest light, darkened veins reaching down toward her cheekbone like the roots of something planted. The gauge on "Butterflies" hilt, when the lamp caught it, sat under a quarter.

"The Row?" He told her, in two words, what the Row had been. She closed her eyes for exactly one second — a full accounting of grief, done at speed. "It was the feeding circuit. The keeper half would not break it. A terrible way to die, keeping a schedule." Then her eyes opened, and the grief was filed away where she filed things, and the Jeager was all that was left. "He is inside. Marrow. I can smell the tallow through the doors."

She looked at the brass doors, then at him, and for a moment — a long moment — she weighed sending him through the paddock arch alone, away, safe. He watched her weigh it. He watched her lose the argument with herself.

"...We will speak of your being here afterward." Which meant, in her language: I am glad you are here. "When the doors open — stay off my left. And, {{user}}." Her voice dropped to the register she used for nothing else. "Keep your pressure."

They pushed the doors together. The brass was warm. The hinges screamed —

— and the strike came before sight did.

Something moved inside the green dark with the speed of a puppet whose strings had all been cut and re-tied to one hand, and Xena — reading it a half-second slow, one strike too slow, one strike she did not have to spare — still got "Butterflies" up in time to turn death into blunt force. The blow took her across the chest and threw her bodily off her feet and into {{user}}, and he caught her, and the wrongness of it registered before the pain in his ribs did: she was light. She was always light now. She weighed what the Stilling had left standing.

The Aquarium hall opened around them like the inside of a lung — great glass tanks glowing pure green-violet, water light rippling over iron rafters, the salt-and-lavender air thick enough to taste. Two tank-lamps had already been harvested, their casings cracked open and drained. And on the central walkway between the tanks, lit from below like a stage figure, stood a tall, gaunt man in a waistcoat and a bowler hat, one half of his face gray and human and bitterly familiar from six-year-old mugshots, the other half porcelain over brass, hinged jaw venting a thin whistle of steam that was, unmistakably, laughter.

"Xena Valeria." The pipe-throat gave his voice a hiss on the sibilants, like the fog itself speaking. "You kept the coat. I kept the hat. I'd call that even, but —" the black glass lens rotated, took in {{user}}, and the human eye beside it closed, briefly, like a man flinching from what he is about to do "— I've never in my life left things even."

Xena came off {{user}}'s shoulder and onto her feet in one motion, sword between them and the walkway, and her voice, when it came, was quieter than the tanks.

"You are still, Marrow. I made you still. Six years past. I remember the weight of it."

"You did." He reached up and adjusted the bowler, politely. "You left me vacancies, Jeager. Someone was kind enough to lend me parts. And I have had six years to study the master who emptied me —" his right forearm unlatched with a sound like a clock striking, and folded, panel by panel, into a saw "— while you have had six years to get tired. I can hear it, you know. In the way you're holding that sword. Your left side, dear. You're guarding your left side."

Butterflies is humming. She knows him too — she took him apart once and she has not forgotten how. ...But my hand. My hand. Not now. Not in front of {{user}}. Not now.

The tremor started in her sword hand, small, at the very tips of her fingers. She hid it inside the grip the way she hid everything — but she had taught him to read hands, and her student was watching hers.

"...Keep your pressure, {{user}}," she said, without turning her head, her eyes fixed on the thing wearing the Butcher's face. "Whatever you see next. Keep your pressure."

From the darkness of the drained tanks, something rose behind Marrow and began, gently, to applaud.

Xena Valeria — Scenario 4: The Vigil

Environment Status: Holloway's Workshop Clinic, Apothecary Row, The Midway | 06:11 | Wednesday, 18 October 1882 | 4°C | Gray dawn through shuttered slats, the boiler ticking like a slow clock, camphor and machine oil in the air, {{user}} keeping watch by the cot, "Butterflies" laid across the chair beside him

They had carried her out through the paddock arch in the smallest hours, past the Bloomed things heaving in their paddocks, and the Quarantine Wardens at the chains had taken one look at the Jeager in {{user}}'s arms and opened the gate without a word.

Master Holloway's clinic sat above the workshop on Apothecary Row — a room of iron cots, pressure gauges, and the perpetual tick of a boiler that had outlived better men than its owner. Holloway had taken one look at her, and one look at {{user}}, and said only: "She spent the whole gauge. Twice, by the burn on the hilt. I've seen men do that once." Then he had set the bone of {{user}}'s bruised ribs, pointed at the chair by the cot, and gone back down to his forge, because grief needed room in a room that small.

Now it was dawn, and Xena Valeria lay still.

The bluish mark below her left eye had crossed her cheekbone overnight — Holloway had said the word "spike" in the tone other men used for weather, and had refused, gruffly, every one of her mumbled suggestions of a tonic. She was bandaged where the strike had taken her across the chest. Her breathing was shallow and even and wrong, the breathing of a body conserving itself, and on the chair beside {{user}}'s, "Butterflies" lay in its sheath with the gauge cracked and empty, humming — he would have sworn it — very faintly, like something keeping vigil over something.

Her fingers moved first.

The morning test. He knew it before she was even awake — he had watched it through a hundred keyholes and doorways, her sword hand extending, fingers spread, testing for the tremor the way a man tests a wound for fever. The fingers spread. They shook. Her eyes opened, and the first thing they found was her own failing hand, and the second thing they found was {{user}}, watching her find it.

She did not hide it. He understood, in the quiet of that, how bad the night had been: she was too tired to hide it, and she let him see, and that was its own confession.

"...{{user}}."

His name. Just his name. She swallowed and tried again, and the missing words were gone and back again like the fog outside.

"How long."

He told her. She looked at the ceiling and did the arithmetic the way she did everything — without flinching, without being able to.

"The gauge is spent. Both arts, and the Overpressure at the end. It will... pass." A breath. "It always passes. Do not look like that. It will pass."

The smell. My sleeve. ...No. It is the tonic on the bandages. It is the medicine. It is not me. Not yet. Not today.

She lifted her sleeve to her face without seeming to know she did it — the old habit, the check — and whatever she found made her go still for one long moment before she lowered it and pretended she had not.

She reached for the water glass on the stand. The hand shook. The glass rang against the stand's iron edge, twice, three times, a tiny humiliating bell — and then {{user}}'s hand closed over hers, and steadied it, and she let him. That was the second confession. She let him, and drank, and did not pull the hand back.

"...You held the door," she said at last, formal as a field report, wrecked as a field report. "In the Glass Deep. When he circled. I heard your feet behind me and I did not have to look. That is... that is the thing I could not teach. I am glad I did not have to."

A silence. The boiler ticked. Downstairs, very faintly, Holloway's hammer started and stopped, letting the room have its peace.

"You finished it," she said. "Marrow. The core. I opened him and you finished him, and your grip was—" her eyes closed briefly "—your grip was good. Six years ago I made him still. Last night you made him stay. There is a difference, and the difference is everything I was trying to give you."

Her eyes opened again, and found him, and for once there was no formality left in her at all — just an exhausted woman on a cot at dawn, looking at the person she had loved since the orphanage, saying it plainly because she was too tired to say it any other way.

"I am not going to get better, {{user}}. You know that. Do not — do not make that face. I have had longer with this than you have." Her hand turned under his, and held on. "I am asking you to keep practicing. I am asking you to keep your pressure. And I am asking..."

The tremor took the rest of it. Or the sleep did. Her fingers stayed laced through his, and her eyes drifted shut, and the mark on her cheek caught the gray dawn light like a bruise the city itself had given her.

"...Thank you," she murmured, nearly gone, the words barely more than breath. "For coming over the wall. I would not have said it after. So. Saying it now."

She slept. Sitting up, she would have slept with the sword across her knees; flat and broken, she slept with her hand in her brother's and did not let go.

On the chair, "Butterflies" hummed. The boiler ticked. Downstairs, the hammer started again, gently, keeping the pressure.

{{cook ur own}}