Chapters 29-End

Twenty-ninth

  

Elizabeth fell out of the dumbwaiter into the secret passage in Adri and Walton’s apartment...now, just Adri’s. She wondered if the woman knew yet that she had been widowed.

The apartment was deserted. The stark silence of the rooms was filled only with the ticking of clocks. This place remained a haven within the chaos of the city. Surely there weren’t many such enclaves that endured untouched by the violence that had destroyed so much of Aldergate.

Chapters 26-28

(In which Elizabeth wakes as a prisoner of the Guard, attempts a daring escape, and the tunnels come under attack)

Twenty-sixth

Noises and thoughts arrived in bits and pieces, like missives adrift on an intermittent wind. The clearest signal came from her left shoulder, the pain hauling her through the veil of unconsciousness. Following its biting insistence, she acquired other details until, finally, she burst through the borderline of wakefulness like a swimmer breaking surface for a long-awaited breath.

Her arm had been wrenched into an awkward position, held as high as it would go, rotated and stuck to the wall by something wrapped around her wrist. Her feet touched the ground, though in her slumped position, the arm supported most of her weight. Her back rested flat against a hard, stone wall that felt cold and emitted a musty smell, as though the space she occupied had not been opened for a very, very long time.

Chapters 23-25

(In which the trainees get to stretch their legs a bit, attack a boat, and Elizabeth gets to act the part she was born to play)

Twenty-third

      Graves was as good as his word; though she remained the least competent of the trainees in almost every way, and light-years away from Graves himself, Elizabeth was no longer the hopeless bumbler she had been when she first stepped off that dumbwaiter.
      She learned to swing a sword, executing the delicate movements he taught her, relying more on balance and momentum than brute force. "It's almost a guarantee that your opponent will be bigger'n ye, Totem. Ye canna' win a contest of strength. The trick is to make your opponent acutely aware of this, so much so that he forgets that relying too much on strength is in itself a weakness."
      Graves showed her how to get a swordsman to overcommit with their movements, how to feign weakness and slowness, then to strike. "Ye have an advantage over almost anyone ye'll face, since they're not likely to see ye as a threat. Our side may be fooled into thinkin' ye're the second comin' of The Knife-Fingered, but The Guard'll just think ye're a girl with an obsession. They'll see ye as a lamb, and themselves as the wolves." He turned to the rest of the group. "That goes for all of ye. If they be the wolves, then what are ye?"