Burning Up

everything she owned. Her desperation must have hung around her as thick as the mist; she wasn’t surprised when the innkeeper immediately lowered the lamp, swinging the window closed.
    “We’re full up tonight. You’ll find rooms on the cheap at The Crowing Cock.”
    “Wait!” She curled her fingers around the window frame, preventing its closure. “Please. I’m here to see Captain Machen. I’ve come from the Blacksmith’s.”
    She’d never used her connection to her mentor like this before. But two names in London would open almost any door: the Blacksmith’s, and the Iron Duke’s.
    The innkeeper paused. “The Blacksmith?”
    Ivy pulled aside her nightgown collar, exposing the guild’s mark: a chain wrapped around her neck and a hammer poised to strike. When the innkeeper began to shake his head and close the window again, Ivy quickly stripped off her glove, exposing pale gray fingers and silvery nails.
    “The mark is supposed to be around my wrist,” she told him. “But my skin won’t take a tattoo.”
    He stared at Ivy’s hand before looking into her face again—perhaps searching for a hint of how she had managed to afford mechanical flesh. Finally, the innkeeper stepped back, opening the door.
    “I’ll tell the captain you’re here.”
    Ivy waited to expel her sigh of relief until after he’d moved to a door at the back of the empty dining room and disappeared up a narrow stair. Cool and dark, with well-scrubbed walls and floors, the inn’s open dining room appeared cleaner than any she’d ever lived, worked, or eaten in. She was accustomed to pubs like the Hammer & Chain: dank and crowded, stinking of soot and sweat, and where fights broke out more often than not. But she returned every night, because the Blacksmith’s workers could buy a hot meal on the cheap, and she went home to a windowless room that smelled of smoke and mildew, and whose north and south walls she could touch with both hands outstretched. This inn smelled of lemon wax and a warm, yeasty fragrance—a scent that reminded her of walking past the bakery in the crisp early morning, while heading to the smithy in the Narrow.
    This was a good place. It gave her hope. Her grip on the satchel slowly eased as her nervousness and fear began to subside.
    She’d heard of Mad Machen before he’d come to the smithy. Everyone in England had. Born to a merchant family in Manhattan City, the youngest of four sons, he’d been a surgeon in the British Navy when Rhys Trahaearn had attacked his naval fleet. Mad Machen had been among those forced to join Trahaearn’s crew—then willingly remained aboard. He’d been with the pirate captain when Trahaearn had destroyed the Horde’s tower.
    Unlike Trahaearn, who’d been given a duke’s title—and the king’s pardon bestowed upon all of his crew—Mad Machen hadn’t reformed. After taking command of his own ship, Vesuvius , he continued pirating from the North Sea to the Caribbean.
    But despite all of the stories of murder, insanity, and pillaging, the Mad Machen that Ivy had met at the Blacksmith’s hadn’t been a cruel man. Big and intimidating, with a thick coarse scar around his neck and overgrown dark hair, he’d been a gruff man—but not cruel. Every morning for the past week, he’d accompanied his friend Obadiah Barker to the smithy, and sat with him through the excruciating process of exchanging a steel prosthetic leg for a limb made from mechanical flesh. Mad Machen had borne Barker’s curses and screams without anger; he’d offered a hand for Barker to squeeze—and more than once, to bite. And every evening, he’d carried his delirious friend to the waiting steamcoach.
    Ivy had assisted the Blacksmith in the surgery, and attended the two men during the long stretches between sessions, waiting for the flesh to grow. She’d listened to Mad Machen and Barker talk of ships they’d taken and ports they’d visited—Barker speaking a hundred words in his lilting accent to every flattened word of Mad Machen’s—and when Barker’s dread and fear of the next session became overwhelming, Ivy had told him of her own surgery, painting herself as a ridiculous shivering washrag until Barker had begun to laugh. Mad Machen’s gaze had met hers then, and she’d seen his gratitude and appreciation.
    She hoped he still felt them now. Her heart began pounding again as the innkeeper returned. He led her across the dining room and up the dark, narrow stairwell. At the