Burning Up

you.”
    Her golden eyes glistened with laughter and tears. “Then give me your coat, my love, and let us go home.”
    He took off his green uniform jacket and tenderly wrapped it around her. Together, they began the long walk over the jetty and home.

HERE THERE BE MONSTERS
    Meljean Brook
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Maili, because she made me realize that I was trying to spell “challenge” just by adding two letters, and this story is all the better for her feedback. And because, years ago, when I mentioned on my blog that I wanted to write steampunk romance, she knew what I was talking about and said she’d want to read it. So she did . . . and I’ll always be thankful she got her hands on this one early.

ONE
    B y the time Ivy found Ratcatcher Row, a stinking yellow fog smothered the docks. She inched along the unfamiliar street, holding her right hand out to her side and using the buildings facing the narrow wooden walk as a guide. Though only an arm’s length away, the thick mist dissolved Ivy’s only an arm’s length away, the thick mist dissolved Ivy’s gloved fingers into ghostly outlines. On her left, the clicking, segmented shadow of a spider-rickshaw scurried by on the cobblestones, and the hydraulic hiss of the driver’s thrusting feet seemed to whisper a single refrain.
    Hurry, hurry, hurry.
    Oh, she wanted to. Her humid breath filled the thin scarf she’d tied over her mouth and nose. Her heart pounded as if she’d sprinted through these streets instead of picking her way through the fog, stopping at each building to search for an identifying sign.
    But at least she was moving. As long as she could move, she couldn’t be taken.
    Seven years ago, after two centuries under brutal Horde rule, the pirate captain Rhys Trahaearn had destroyed the tower that the Horde used to control the nanoagents infecting every person in London. For seven years, Ivy had been free to move as she wished, to feel as she wished—until earlier that night. Only hours ago, she’d been frozen in her bed with her eyes closed, unable to move, listening to strangers search from room to room through her boardinghouse. From blacksmiths to beggars, no one in that cheap tenement owned anything of value. But when someone had come through her door, stripped away her blankets, and prodded at her thighs and breasts as if evaluating her thin body, when the strangers had left and she’d seen the empty beds in rooms that had been earlier filled, Ivy had realized each sleeping person had been valuable—as workers, as slaves . . . which were the only uses the Horde ever had for them.
    And if the Horde was returning to London with their controlling towers and paralyzing devices, nothing would stop Ivy from leaving.
    A steamcoach waited in front of the next building, rattling and puttering, its gas lanterns penetrating the fog in faint glowing spheres. By the feeble light, Ivy found the establishment’s sign, and almost moved on before her mind registered the painting on the wood: a compass.
    The Star Rose Inn. She’d been looking for a picture of a flower, or even a woman, but it was a compass rose. A sailor wouldn’t have mistaken it, but Ivy almost had—yet she was here. Finally here.
    Her heart slamming in her ribs, Ivy rose up on her toes to peer through the small glass window. No lights burned within. She’d have to wake up the innkeeper—who’d likely turn Ivy away after taking a look at her—or she could break the lock. A lock hadn’t stopped her when she’d been a child, raised in the Horde’s crèche, it hadn’t stopped her after they’d taken her arms, and it wouldn’t stop her now that the Blacksmith had given her new ones. But even if she broke through the lock, she wouldn’t know which room Mad Machen slept in.
    Raising her fist, she hammered on the door. A minute later, a stout man wearing a nightcap and with gray tufts of hair growing behind his ears swung open the small, hinged window. He lifted a gas lamp to the opening. Ivy squinted against the sudden, bright light, and tugged the scarf down, exposing her mouth and nose.
    She knew what she looked like. Soot from the day’s work still streaked her face; fog and sweat dampened her red hair. The buckles at the waist of her long coat didn’t hide the thread-bare nightgown underneath, and the trousers tucked into her boots had been old when she’d bought them. The satchel clutched to her chest was nothing but a shirt tied together, and held