Chapter One
Mina hadn’t predicted that sugar would wreck the Marchioness of Hartington’s ball; she’d thought the dancing would. Their hostess’s good humor had weathered them through the discovery that fewer than forty of her guests knew the steps, however, and they’d survived the first quadrilles. But as the room grew warmer, the laughter louder, and the gossiping more vigorous, the refreshment table set the First Annual Victory Ball on a course for disaster.
Which meant Mina was enjoying the event far more than she’d expected to.
Not that it wasn’t as grand as everyone had said it would be; the restoration of Devonshire House had cost Hartington, and it showed. Candle-studded chandeliers displayed everyone in the great ballroom to their best advantage. Discreet gas lamps highlighted the enormous paintings gracing the room but their smoke had not yet smudged the silk-papered walls. Human musicians played in the gallery, and their violins did sound sweeter than the mechanical instruments Mina was accustomed to—and much sweeter than the hacking coughs from forty of the guests, all of them bounders.
Two hundred years ago, when most of Europe was fleeing from the Horde’s war machines, some of the English had gone with them. But an ocean passage over the Atlantic hadn’t come cheaply, and although the families who’d abandoned England for the New World hadn’t all been aristocrats, they’d almost all been moneyed. After the Iron Duke had freed England from Horde control, many of them had returned to London, flaunting their titles and their gold. Now, nine years after England’s victory over the Horde, the aristocratic bounders had decided to hold a ball celebrating the country’s new-found freedom, though they had shed no blood to gain it. They’d charitably included all of the peers who had little to their names but their titles.
At first glance, Mina could detect little distinction between the guests. The bounders spoke with flatter accents, and their women’s dresses exposed less skin at the neck and arms, but everyone’s togs were at the height of New World fashion. Mina suspected, however, that forty of the guests could not begin to guess how dear those new togs were to the rest of the company.
And they probably could not anticipate how stubborn the rest of the company could be, despite their thirst and hunger.
Near the southern wall of the ballroom, Mina sat with her friend and waited for the entertainment to begin. Considering Felicity’s condition, she might be the one to provide it. Pale blue satin covered her friend’s hugely pregnant abdomen. With such a belly to feed, Mina couldn’t see how Felicity wasn’t constantly ravenous, consuming everything in her path. If no sugarless cakes were available, she might start with the bounders.
“If it has taken Richmond this long, he hasn’t found anything.” Beneath intricately curled blond hair that had made Mina burst into laughter when she had first seen it that evening, Felicity’s gaze searched the crowd for her husband. With a sigh, she turned to regard her friend. “Oh, Mina. You are too amused. I doubt anyone will break into fisticuffs.”
“They should.”
“You think it’s an insult to supply sweet and strong lemonade? To stack cakes like towers?” Felicity rubbed her belly and looked longingly toward the towers. Mina guessed that the cakes were supposed to have been demolished by now, symbolic of England’s victory over the Horde, but they still stood tall. “Surely, they did not realize how strongly we felt about it.”
“Or they realized, but thought we must be shown like children that we can eat imported sugar without being enslaved.”
Two hundred years ago, the Horde had hidden their nanoagents in tea and sugar like invisible bugs, and traded it on the cheap. The Horde had no navy, and even though Europe had fled before the Horde, Britain was protected by water and a strong fleet of ships. And so for years, they’d traded tea and sugar, and England had thought itself safe.
Until the Horde had activated the bugs.
Now, no one born in England trusted sugar unless it came from beets grown in British soil and processed in one of the recently built refineries—and after two hundred years of the Horde’s crippling taxes, no one had enough money to pay for the luxury, anyway. New to England, beet sugar was as precious as gold was to the French, and as Horde technology was to the smugglers in the Indian Ocean and South Seas.
“You judge them too harshly, Mina. This ball itself is goodwill. And it must have been a great expense.” Felicity looked around almost despairingly, as if it pained her to think of how much had been spent.
“Hartington can obviously afford it. Look how many candles.” Mina lifted her chin, gesturing at the chandelier.
“Even your mother uses candles.”
That wasn’t the same. Gas cost almost nothing; candles, especially wax tapers of good quality, rivaled sugar as a luxury. Her mother used candles during her League meetings, but only so the dim light would conceal the worst of the wear. Repeated scouring of the walls removed the smoke that penetrated every home in London, but had worn the paper down to the plaster. Rugs had been walked threadbare at the center. The sofa hadn’t been replaced since the Horde had invaded England. But at Devonshire House, there was no need for candles to forgive what brighter gas lamps revealed.
“My mother will also make certain that each of her guests is comfortable.” Physically comfortable, at any rate. Mina supposed her mother could not help the discomforting effect that they both had on visitors. “Goodwill should not stab at scars, Felicity. Goodwill would have been desserts made with beet sugar or honey.”
“Perhaps,” Felicity said, obviously unwilling to think so little of the bounders, but acknowledging that they could have been done better. She cast another glance at the towers of cake. “Mine would have mousse.”
“Your what would have mousse?”
“My table, if I gave a ball. Do not laugh, Mina. I might one day.”
Even if her friend’s purse was full, Mina could not imagine Felicity loosening the strings enough to pay for anything resembling a ball. But her friend’s wistful expression caught Mina off guard. She swallowed her laugh and nodded.
Taking that as an invitation to continue, Felicity said, “I’ve heard that in the Antilles, they have a mousse of Liberé chocolate so light that it floats away like an airship, and éclairs filled with cream. In Lusitania, they bake massa sovada so—”
Mina shook away a vision of mousse envelopes floating about with éclairs tethered beneath. “Massa what?”
“Portuguese sweet bread.” Felicity’s eyes widened innocently. “The Lamplighter Gazette has a new section featuring New World desserts. It follows their adventure serials. Surely you looked to the recipes after reading the last Archimedes Fox story?”
Mina flushed and hoped the candlelight would hide it. Her family managed—barely—to employ two maids and a cook. Other families tended to their own homes; if left to Mina or her parents, they’d likely starve while their townhouse fell down around them.
To cover her embarrassment, she said, “And so you would lay your table out like the northern American continent. Islands of mousse for the Antilles, a peninsula of Lusitanian bread topped by . . . ?” What did they eat in the Castilian wilderness? Mina had no idea—and she couldn’t ask a bounder. After losing almost all of their territory and the native trade routes to the Spanish, the bounders spoke as if the Castilians dined on human hearts.
“Flan,” Felicity replied. She rubbed her belly again. “Lemon ices from Manhattan City, and Dutch pastries from Johannesland.”
And blubber from the natives who lived farther north. Mina stared at her friend in astonishment. “I’m beginning to think that you aren’t with child. You’ve simply become fat after reading too many recipes.”
“If one could become fat just from reading them, I would be.” She slanted a narrow look at Mina. “Don’t pretend they don’t tempt you.”
Mina could pretend very well. She had plenty of practice. “At least now I know why bounders all have such horrible teeth. And why I can differentiate a foreigner from a bugger just by opening his mouth.”
Felicity’s hand flew to her lips, and Mina was suddenly thankful that buggers didn’t suffer from pregnancy sickness. Her friend had a weak stomach even when she wasn’t with child.
“Mina, you swore! For one night, we were to have no talk of corpses.”
“I did not say a corpse.” Though she had meant one. But it hardly mattered; there was little difference. “The teeth are rotting out of the heads of the living, too.”
“Shhh.” Felicity smothered her laugh and glanced around to make sure no one had overheard. “You look to find the worst in everyone, Mina.”
“I would not be very good at my job if I didn’t.” The worst in everyone was what led them to murder.
“You like to look for the worst in bounders. But they cannot be blamed for their ancestors abandoning us, just as we cannot be blamed for buying the Horde’s sugar and teas. It seems to me, the fault can be laid on both sides of the ocean . . . and laid to rest.”
No, the bounders hadn’t abandoned England—and if that were the only grievance Mina had against them, she could have laid her resentment to rest. But neither could she explain her resentment; Felicity thought too well of them, and she was too fascinated by the New World.
The bounders were part of that fascination—and they were part of the New World, no matter that they referred to themselves as Englishmen, and were called Brits by everyone except those born on the British Isles.
Damn them all, they probably didn’t even realize there was a difference between England and Britain.
No matter what the bounders thought they were, they weren’t like Mina’s family or Felicity’s—or like those in the lower classes who’d been altered and enslaved for labor. Bounders hadn’t been born under Horde rule. And Mina resented that when they’d returned, they’d carried with them the assumption that they better knew how to live than the buggers did. This ball, for all that it celebrated victory over the Horde, reflected everything bounders thought society should be: They’d had their Season in Manhattan City and were determined for the tradition to continue in London, though most of the peers born here couldn’t dream of holding their own ball. And although the ball provided a pleasant diversion, buggers had more important things to occupy their minds and their time—such as whether they could afford their next meal, and working to earn it.
The bounders had no such worries. They’d returned, their heads filled only with grand ideas and good intentions, and they meant to force them onto the rest of England.
But their intentions did not mean they’d returned for the benefit of their former countrymen. Not at all. A good situation within Manhattan City was impossible to find, they’d run out of room on the long Prince George Island, and the Dutch would not relinquish any territory in the mainland. So the aristocrats returned to claim their estates and their Parliament seats, the merchants to buy what the aristocrats didn’t own, and all of them to look down their noses at the poor buggers who’d been raised beneath the heel of the Horde.
Or to be horrified by them. Mina’s gaze sought her mother. Even in a crowd, she was easy to locate—a small woman with white-blond hair, wearing crimson satin. Spectacles with smoked lenses dominated her narrow face. Wide brass bracelets shaped like kraken circled her gloved arms, and she was demonstrating the clockwork release mechanism to three other ladies—all bounders. When her mother twisted the kraken’s bulbous head, the tentacles wrapped around her wrist sprang open. The ladies clapped, obviously delighted, and though Mina couldn’t hear what they said, she guessed they were asking her mother where she’d purchased the unique bracelets. Such clockwork devices were prized as both novelties and jewelry—and expensive. Mina doubted her mother told them the bracelets were of her own design and made in their freezing attic workshop.
In any case, the novelty of the bracelets didn’t divert the ladies from their real interest. Even as they spoke, they cast surreptitious glances at her mother’s eyes. One lady leaned forward, as if to gain a better angle to see the bracelets—and gained a better angle to see behind her mother’s spectacles. Her mouth fell open.
Rarely did anyone hide their surprise when they glimpsed the shiny orbs concealed by the lenses. Some stared openly, as if the prosthetic eyes were blind, rather than as keen as a telescope and a microscope combined. This particular lady was no different. She continued to look, her expression a mixture of fascination and revulsion. She’d probably expected modification on a coal miner—not on the Countess of Rockingham.
But if mirrored eyes still horrified the woman, chances were she’d never actually seen a miner. And if she’d heard the story behind her mother’s eyes, the lady’s gaze would soon be seeking Mina.
Felicity must have looked to see what had caught Mina’s attention. She asked, “And what is your mother’s goal tonight? A husband for you, or new recruits for her Ladies Reformation League?”
Mina’s friend underestimated her mother’s efficiency. “Both.”
As efficient as her mother was, however, finding new recruits for her League had greater possibility for success. Finding a husband for Mina was as likely as King Edward writing his own name legibly. Mina was approaching thirty years of age without once attracting the attention of a worthy man. Only bounders searching for a taste of the forbidden, or Englishmen seeking revenge for the horrors of the Mongol occupation—and Mina resembled the people they wanted to exact their vengeance on.
A loud, hacking cough from beside Mina turned her head. A bounder, red in the face, lowered his handkerchief from his mouth. His gaze touched Mina and darted away.
She arched her brows at Felicity, inviting comment.
Felicity watched the man walk away. “I suppose it does not matter, anyway. They will all soon retreat to the countryside or back to the New World.”
Yes, they’d soon run. They’d been made too confident by their success in America. They’d built a new life out of a wild land, taming it to suit their needs. Now, they thought they could return and reshape London—but London reshaped them, instead. The only way to stay alive in the city was to infect themselves with the tiny machines that their ancestors had run from two hundred years before. Without the bugs, the insides of their lungs would become as black as a chimney.
Some bounders eventually relented and took an injection of infected blood. But even with the same nanoagents in their bodies, they still weren’t anything like those buggers born in England. They still thought like bounders, talked like bounders, and had a bounder’s interests. The bugs didn’t change that.
From directly beside Mina came the sound of a throat clearing. She turned. A ginger-haired maid in a black uniform bobbed a curtsy. Though Mina had noted that the servants from the New World usually lowered their gazes, this girl couldn’t seem to help herself. The maid studied Mina’s face, fascinated and wary. The Horde trade routes didn’t cross the Atlantic to the New World, and only a few of the Horde were left in England. Perhaps the maid had never seen a Mongol before—or, as in Mina’s case, a mongrel.
Mina raised her brows.
The maid blushed and bowed her head. “A gentleman asks to see you, my lady.”
“Oh, she is not a lady,” Felicity said airily. “She is a detective inspector.”
The mock gravity weighing down the last word seemed to confound the maid. She colored and fidgeted. Perhaps she worried that inspector was a bugger’s insult?
Mina said, “What man?”
“A Constable Newberry, my lady. He’s brought with him a message to you.”
Mina frowned and stood, but was brought around by Felicity’s exasperated, “Mina, you didn’t!”
Mina could determine the motives of opium-addled criminals, yet she couldn’t follow every jump of Felicity’s mind. “I didn’t what?”
“Send a gram to your assistant so that you could escape.”
Oh, she should have. It would be a simple thing; all of the bounders’ restored houses had wiregram lines installed.
“You mistrustful cow! Of course I didn’t.” She lowered her voice and added, “I will at the next ball, however, now that you’ve given me the idea.” As Felicity smothered a laugh into her hand, Mina continued, “Will you inform my father and mother that I’ve gone?”
“Gone? It is only a message.”
Newberry wouldn’t have come in person if it was only a message. “No.”
“Oh.” Realization swept over her friend’s expression, brushing away her amusement. “Do not keep the poor bastard waiting, then.”
The maid’s eyes widened before she turned to lead Mina out of the ballroom. She could imagine what the girl thought, but Newberry was not the poor bastard.
Whoever had been murdered was.
They’d put Newberry in a study in the east wing—probably so the guests weren’t made nervous by his size or his constable’s overcoat. He stood in the middle of the room, his bowler hat in his large-knuckled hands. Mina had to admire his fortitude. Small automata lined the study’s bookshelves. If given more than a few seconds to wait, she couldn’t have resisted winding them and seeing how they performed. She recognized a few of her mother’s more mundane creations that had been sold through the Blacksmith’s shop—a dog that would wag his tail and flip; a singing mechanical nightingale—and felt more charitable toward her hosts. They might not have provided dessert, but they’d unknowingly put food on her table.
Newberry’s eyes widened briefly when he saw her. She’d never worn a skirt in his presence, let alone a yellow satin gown that exposed her collarbone and the few inches of skin between her cap sleeves and her long white gloves.
But he must have known she wouldn’t be in her usual attire, and had apparently stopped at her home. Her overcoat, weapons, and armor were draped over his left forearm. She could have no doubt they were leaving now, and he’d come in such a hurry he hadn’t taken time to shave. Evening stubble flanked the red mustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth and swept up the sides of his jaw to meet his sideburns with his ears. The beard made him appear much older than his twenty-two years, and offered the impression of a large, protective dog—an accurate impression. Newberry resembled a wolfhound: friendly and loyal, until someone threatened. Then he was all teeth.
Not every bounder who returned had a title and a bulging purse. Newberry had come so that his young wife, suffering a consumptive lung condition, could be infected by the bugs and live.
“Report, Newberry.” She accepted the sleeveless, close-fitting black tunic whose wire mesh protected her from throat to hips. Usually she wore the armor beneath her clothing, but she did not have that option now. She pulled it on and began fastening the buckles lining the front.
“We’re to go to the Isle of Dogs, sir. Superintendent Hale assigned you specifically.”
“Oh?” Perhaps this murder touched another she had investigated. The docks east of London weren’t as rough as they’d once been, but she still visited often enough. “Who is it this time?”
“The Duke of Anglesey, sir.”
What? Her gaze skidded from a buckle up to Newberry’s earnest face. “The Iron Duke’s been killed?”
She had never met the man or seen him in person, and yet her heart kicked painfully against her ribs. Rhys Trahaearn, former pirate captain, recently titled Duke of Anglesey—and, after he’d destroyed the Horde’s tower, England’s most celebrated hero.
“No, inspector. It isn’t His Grace. He only reported the murder.”
Newberry sounded apologetic. Perhaps he hadn’t expected her to feel the same reverence for the Iron Duke that most of England did. Mina didn’t, though her racing pulse told her that she’d taken some of the stories about him to heart. The newssheets painted him as a dashing figure, romanticizing his past, but Mina suspected he was simply an opportunist who’d been in the right place at the right moment.
“So he’s killed someone, then?” It wouldn’t be the first time.
“I don’t know, sir. Only that a body has been found near his home.”
Mina frowned. Given the size of his park, that could mean anything.
When she finished fastening the tight armor, the gown’s lacings pressed uncomfortably against her spine. She slung her gun belt around her hips; one of the weapons had been loaded with bullets, the other with opium darts, which had greater effect on a rampaging bugger. She paused after Newberry passed her the knife sheath. Typically, Mina wore trousers and strapped the weapon around her thigh. If she bound the knife beneath her skirts in the same location, the blade would be impossible to draw. Driving through east London at night without as many weapons as possible would be foolish, however. Her calf would have to do.
She sank down on one knee and hoisted her skirts. Newberry spun around—his cheeks on fire, no doubt. Good man, her Newberry. Always proper. Sometimes, Mina felt sorry for him; he’d been assigned to her almost as soon as he’d stepped off the airship from Manhattan City.
Other times, she thought it must be good for him. In two centuries, the Brits who’d fled to the New World had devolved into prudes. Probably because Cromwell and his Separatists had settled there decades before the others had begun leaving England, and everyone living in Manhattan City hadn’t had the Horde scrub away all but the vestiges of religion. A few curses and traditions remained in England. Not much else did.
Mina tightened the knife sheath below her knee and grimaced at the sight of her slippers. Newberry hadn’t brought her boots—or her hat, but it was probably for the best. She wasn’t certain she could shove it down over the knot of hair the maid had teased into black curls. She took her heavy overcoat from him and turned for the door, stifling a groan as her every step kicked her yellow skirts forward.
A detective inspector turned inside out on top, and a lady below. She hoped Felicity did not see her this way. Never would Mina hear the end of it.
Newberry’s two-seater cart waited at the bottom of the front steps, rattling and hissing steam from the boot, and drawing appalled glances from the attending servants. Judging by the other vehicles in the drive, the attendants were accustomed to larger, shinier coaches, with brass appointments and velvet seats. The police cart had four wheels and an engine that hadn’t exploded, and that was the best that could be said for it.
As it wasn’t raining, the canvas top had been folded back, leaving the cab open. The coal bin sat on the passenger’s side of the bench, as if Newberry had dumped in the fuel on the run.
Newberry colored and mumbled, heaving the bin to the floorboards. Mina battled her skirts past the cart’s tin frame as he rounded the front. She resorted to hiking them up to her knees, and the constable’s cheeks were aflame again as he swung into his seat. The cart tilted and the bench protested under his weight. His stomach, though solid, almost touched the steering shaft.
Newberry closed the steam vent. The hissing stopped and the cart slowly pulled forward. Mina sighed. Though the sounds of the city were never ending, courtesy dictated that one didn’t blast the occupants of a private house with engine noise. Always polite, Newberry intended to wait until after they’d passed out of the drive before fully engaging the engine.
“We are in a hurry, constable,” she reminded him.
“Yes, sir.”
He hauled the drive lever back. Mina’s teeth rattled as the cart jerked forward. Smoke erupted from the back in a thick black cloud, obscuring everything behind them. Too bad, that. She’d wanted to see the attendants’ expressions when the engine belched in their faces, but she and Newberry were through the gate before the air cleared.
Wide and smooth, Piccadilly Street held little traffic. The ride became bumpier as they passed Haymarket. Blocks of flats crowded closer together and nearer to the street, their windows shuttered against the noise. The night hid the sooty gray that covered all the buildings in London, and concealed the smoke that created a haze during the day—a haze thickened by the fire that had raged through the Southwark slums the previous week. Though the worst of the blaze across the Thames had burned out, it still smoldered in patches. If the fog came tonight, the gas lamps lining the streets would be all but useless. So would the lanterns hanging above either side of the two-seater’s front wheels.
The rattling of the cart and the noise of the engine made hearing difficult, and conversation became near impossible when Newberry steered onto Viktrey Road, the commercial route the Horde had built from the tower to the docks. The road had once been named after London’s darga—but nine years ago, as revolutionaries marched along this route, the road signs bearing the Horde governor’s name had been destroyed. Someone had scratched “Viktrey” in its place, and the route had kept the name. In the past few years, those defaced signs had been replaced with official placards, and the misspelling had remained.
Though not the pandemonium of the day, traffic still choked the roadway. Newberry slowed as a spider-rickshaw cut in front of them. The driver’s feet rapidly pumped the hydraulic pistons that cranked the vehicle’s segmented legs, scuttling over the pocked road like a crab. His passengers kept a white-knuckled grip on the sides of the wheeled cart as the rickshaw darted left, narrowly avoiding a collision with two women riding a pedal buggy. On Newberry’s right, a huge vehicle muscled down the center lane, the back pens full of bleating sheep.
“That lorry has just passed us!” Mina shouted over the noise.
“And no wonder—it has a vent the size of the Castilian queen’s backside!” The louder Newberry became, the less proper he was. Mina enjoyed driving with him. “With enough space between him and the engine that he won’t roast the faster he goes!”
Mina could stand to roast a little more. Her satin dress was fine for a ballroom. But even with the wool overcoat, the moist cold night seeped in. Her dress—purchased at her mother’s insistence, with money that could have been put to a thousand better uses elsewhere—was just like the candles in her mother’s parlor: all show. Beneath it, Mina’s underclothes were patched and threadbare.
“At least it’d be warmer.”
Newberry glanced at her, a question in his eyes. He must have seen her speak, but hadn’t heard her reply.
She shouted, “I’ve a draft up to my pants!”
Even in the dark, Newberry’s blush shone bright.
Farther east, traffic slowed to a crawl. At the edge of Whitechapel, children sold clothes and trinkets along the walks. Deep within the borough, surrounded by thick stone walls, many children still lived within the Crèche, forming their own hierarchy, manufacturing their own goods for sale—and better off than many of the families outside. Mina watched two of the teenaged children, each carrying a length of pipe, stop to chat with the smaller ones selling the wares. The children patrolled their own territory, and human predators didn’t last long near the Crèche. Mina had come to recognize the bludgeon marks left on an adult body when the children exacted their form of justice.
Unsurprisingly, when she questioned the children, no one ever reported seeing anything.
“Have you met His Grace?”
Mina glanced over as Newberry shouted the question. He often looked for impressions of character before arriving at a scene, but Mina had no solid ones to give. “No.”
She’d eaten rice noodles at Trahaearn’s feet, however. Near the Whitehall police station, an iron statue of the duke had been erected at the center of Anglesey Square. Standing twenty feet tall, that statue did not offer a good angle to judge his features. But Mina knew from the caricatures in the newssheets that he had a square jaw, hawkish nose, and heavy brows that darkened his piercing stare into a glower. The effect was altogether strong and handsome, but Mina suspected that the artists were trying to dress up England’s Savior like her mother lighting candles in the parlor.
Perhaps all of him had been dressed up. The newssheets speculated that his parents had been Welsh landowners and that he’d been taken from them as a baby, but nothing was truly known of his family. Quite possibly, his father had pulverizing hammers for legs, his mother fitted with drills instead of arms, and he’d been born in a coal mine nine months after a Frenzy, squatted out in a dusty bin before his mother returned to work.
Twenty years ago, however, his name had first been recorded in Captain Baxter’s log on HMS Indomitable. Trahaearn, aged sixteen, had been aboard a slaver ship bound for the New World, and was pressed with the crew into the navy. Within two years he’d transferred from Indomitable to another English ship, Unity, a fifth-rate frigate patrolling the trade routes in the South Seas. Before they’d reached Australia, Trahaearn had led a mutiny, taken over the ship as its captain, and renamed the frigate Marco’s Terror. With the Terror, he’d embarked on an eight-year run of piracy—no trade route, no nation, no merchant had been safe from him. Even in London, where the Horde suppressed any news that suggested a weakness in their defenses, word of Trahaearn’s piracy had seeped into conversations. Several times, the newssheets claimed the Horde had captured him. He’d been declared dead twice.
Perhaps that was why the Horde hadn’t anticipated him sailing Marco’s Terror up the Thames and blowing up their tower.
“Is he enhanced?”
Mina almost smiled. Even shouting, Newberry didn’t unbend enough to use bugger. Enhanced had become the polite term for living with millions of microscopic machines in each of their bodies. Bugger had been an insult once—and still was in Manhattan City. Only the bounders seemed to care about that, however. Not a single bugger that Mina knew took offense at the name.
Of course, if Newberry called her by the name the Horde had used for them—zum bi, the soulless—she’d knock his enhanced teeth out.
“He is,” she confirmed.
“How did he do it?” When Mina frowned, certain she’d missed part of the question, Newberry clarified in a shout, “The tower!”
He wasn’t the first to ask. The Horde had created a short-range radio signal around their tower, preventing buggers from approaching it. Trahaearn had been infected, but he hadn’t been paralyzed when he’d entered the broadcast area. Mina’s father theorized that the frequency had changed from the time that Trahaearn had lived in Wales as a child, and so he hadn’t been affected on his return. She’d heard the same theory echoed by other buggers, but bounders preferred to think he hadn’t been infected with nanoagents—despite Trahaearn himself confirming that he’d carried the bugs since he was a boy.
Her father’s theory seemed as sound as any. “Frequencies!”
Newberry looked doubtful, but nodded.
Frequencies or not, it didn’t matter to Mina or to any other bugger. Thanks to the Iron Duke, the nanoagents no longer controlled them, but assisted them. The Horde no longer suppressed their emotions—violence, lust, ambition—or, when the darga wanted them to breed, whipped them into a rutting frenzy.
After nine years, many who’d been raised under Horde rule were still learning to control strong emotions, to fight violent impulses. Not everyone succeeded, and that was when Mina stepped in.
With luck, this murder would be the same: an unchecked impulse, easily traceable—and the murderer easy to hold accountable.
And with more luck, the murderer wouldn’t be the Iron Duke. No one would be held accountable then. He was too beloved—beloved enough that all of England ignored his history of raping, thieving, and murdering. Beloved enough that they tried to rewrite that history. And even if the evidence pointed to Trahaearn, he wouldn’t be ruined.
But as the investigating officer who arrested him, Mina would be.