Magnificent Devices 01 - Lady of Devices

under the verandah as, screaming and maddened with pain, the guard leaped into the sullen waters of the Thames below.
    “Now, lady!” Tigg and Snouts rushed past her—oh, he condescended to join them, did he, now that the field was hers?—and burst through the front door. The commotion outside had alerted everyone within that something was amiss, and a bullet pinged off the door frame inches from her head.
    “Stand aside!” she shouted, and when her crew pressed themselves against the wall, she sent a lightning bolt into the large room on the right, aiming at the fireplace. In the blue flash, the lamplight erased itself and time stopped, as though a flicker at the theater had frozen on a single image. Horrified faces. Bodies flung upon the floor. A rug. A sofa.
    “I require your immediate and unconditional surrender,” she announced amid the smell of burned stone and the shrieks and whimpers of the unprepared. “I am the Lady of Devices, and I claim this house as my own. Lightning Luke is dead and I have his body outside. If you are unable to accept my terms, I will allow you to leave. But if you stay, I demand your loyalty. Make your choice now.”
    No one moved.
    In the silence, a muffled voice asked, “You kilt Lightning Luke? For true?”
    “It’s true.” Snouts stepped forward, looking as though he were inspecting a battalion. “I saw it meself. The Lady’s a fair leader, and I’m her first lieutenant.”
    “You’re not first anything, Snouts McTavish.” A boy who couldn’t be any older than Jake pushed himself up off the floor. “You’re a thief and a rag picker and I ent belonging to any gang wot has you in it.”
    “That is perfectly fair.” With the flared barrel of the rifle, Claire gestured toward the door. “You may leave unaccosted.”
    Snouts bristled at her failure to defend his honor, but for once, in the interests of solidarity, kept his mouth shut. The boy looked about him at his prostrate companions. “Are you lot gonna just lie there and let ’em take over? Anybody gets Luke’s treasury, it’s us wot worked for it, not them.”
    Treasury?
    Slights to his manhood forgotten, she and Snouts exchanged a glance. Without a word, the Mopsies disappeared. Scouts to their fingertips, they did not need to be told where their duty lay.
    “The treasury belongs to those who have earned it,” she said loudly. “And believe me, if you stay under my—” Command? Jurisdiction? “—roof, you will earn it. There will be no more thieving and fisticuffs and pickpocketing. We will earn our bread through the force of intellect, as befits ladies and gentlemen of this modern age.”
    Murmuring rose from the corners of the room, and people began to get up, keeping one eye on the lightning rifle as they did so. A handful of them—goodness, the eldest couldn’t be more than her own age—sidled past her and out the door.
    “A pity a life on the correct side of the law does not appeal,” she observed to no one in particular.
    “Ent much money in it to most folk,” Jake responded. Then his voice grew stronger, pitched to the back of the room. “Shame they ent schooled in the ways of your devices, not to mention your foolproof stratagems at cards, innit? All the more for us, I say.”
    The slow trickle out of the room halted.
    “Devices? Stratagems?” asked a boy with a mop of curly hair, mummified to the chin in an enormous woolen muffler. “Like them Wits?”
    “The Lady is a Wit leader,” Jake said without a twitch. “We already took down Billy Crumwell’s gang afore we got around to Lightning Luke. I’ze you, I’d stick to the winning side.”
    “It’s for true, then,” the boy whispered. “She really kilt ’im.” His gaze traveled the length of Luke’s rifle in Claire’s hands. “Her own self.”
    “’Is corpse is outside, you don’t believe ’er,” Jake told him. “But touch the Lady’s landau an’ it’s worth your life.”
    “I recommend we give your former leader a decent burial.” Claire took command of the situation before the tales got any taller. “Is there any among you who would like to say a few words?” No one moved. Evidently he was not held in high regard among his confederates. How did one go about burying the man one had accidentally killed? “Are we possessed of a shovel?”
    Snouts nudged her. “You leave that to me, Lady. Once I’m done, no one will ever know what happened to ’im. You’d best see to that treasury quick-like,