12
	Outside of her House, Elizabeth looked smaller and older than Thomas remembered.  Underneath the bulky black dress she always wore there was only a stick-thin vixen who didn’t weigh much at all.  This had come as a shock to Thomas when he’d picked her up, taking her away from Samantha who was already staggering under the weight of a knapsack full of bottles.
	He’d been surprised, too, at Elizabeth's complete lack of a reaction.  Ordinarily she took it on herself to play the part of mother to the whole world, and effort to get her to act her age was met with a sharp word or a slap on the wrist, but she hadn’t said a word on the trip from Silver Street to his house.  Now she sat at his kitchen table, bolt upright, with her eyes closed and her hands clenched tight in fists.  Every once in a while she bared her teeth and her whole body shook with anger.
	Samantha had followed him uninvited, and he hadn’t objected because he knew it wouldn't do a bit of good anyway.  All the years she'd spent working in the House had made her stubborn, and Thomas thought she identified with the House girls more than she let on.  She installed herself on the floor and now sat against one wall with her precious liquor in a circle around her.  She opened a bottle at random and drank half of it in three long swallows.  Her eyes streamed with tears from the smoke and the tip of her tail was singed and stank of burned hair.  None of it seemed to bother her much, though.  She just splashed whiskey over her tail and wrapped it up in the strip of gauze he offered her.  She hadn’t looked at him the whole time, but when he sat down on a chair across from Elizabeth, Samantha's ears went flat.
	“It isn’t right.  You keep these girls locked up, you use them any way you damn well please, and when one of them stands up for herself, you destroy them,” Samantha said.
	“I haven’t done anything like that.  I never went into a House, except to talk to Elizabeth,” Thomas said.
	“You’re male,” Samantha said.
	“That does a lot of good, doesn’t it?  How many people do you think there are who are actually trying to help these girls?  Are you?  There wasn’t anything anyone could do about the fire, but we’re trying to find as many from Silver Street as we can,” he said.
	Samantha took another mouthful of whiskey and splashed some more over her tail, hissing at the pain.  That got an ear twitch from Elizabeth and the old vixen finally turned away from the window to look at them.  She didn’t speak, but her hands uncurled and lay flat on her lap.
	“You’re wasting your time.  If those girls have any sense, they’re going to disappear,” Samantha said.
	“I hope so.  But if any of them do get left behind, who would you rather found them?  Us, or President Keppler?” Thomas said.
	“There aren’t enough ships in port to carry them all, even if every captain was in your pocket.  Which they’re not,” Samantha said.
	“We’ll figure something out. I thought you’d be pleased,” Thomas said.
	“Why?” Samantha said.
Elizabeth stood up with her nose in the air like she could smell something besides the stink of burned wood and singed hair.  She opened her eyes and brushed her hands across the front of her dress, smoothing it down.
	“That’s enough.  All of this crying isn’t going to get us anywhere.  And neither will sitting on your ass and getting drunk, ” Elizabeth said.
	But when Samantha held the bottle up to her, she accepted it and tipped quite a lot of liquor into her mouth.  Her hand shook so that some of it dribbled off her whiskers onto the floor, but she swallowed most of it and chased it with a second gulp.
	“It’s time for us to get started.  If we hadn’t wasted so much time I wouldn’t be homeless now,” she said.
	“Fine, let’s start.  What is it you think we can do?” Thomas said.
	“We’ll round up all of the girls from Silver Street that we can find.  I know some of us think it’s a waste of time, but I promised all of them I would take care of them.  Then we can go to the other Houses and talk to them.  Now maybe they’ll see that what happened to the Sunrise House wasn’t an accident,” Elizabeth said.
	“Then what?  You’ve got things started, but you don't have anywhere to go,” Thomas said.
	Samantha glared at him and flexed her fingers so that her claws slid in and out of their sheaths.  Elizabeth, too, looked less than pleased with him, which struck him as somewhat ungrateful, and she watched him over the top of her bottle of whiskey.
	“I haven’t heard you come up with any good ideas,” Samantha said.
	“We have to be smart about this.  House girls aren’t fighters, you know that.  Starting a revolution isn’t as easy as getting a bunch of people together and giving them weapons.  They have to know what to do, and what to do if that fails,” Thomas said.
	Samantha's ears drooped and she slumped back against the wall and picked up another bottle from her collection.  Thomas felt a little pang of sympathy for her, in spite of himself.  She tried to hide it with her attitude and her drinking, but she wasn’t much older than most of the girls who were enslaved by the Houses.  Like many of them, she was still young enough to think that things could get better.
	“Jess was outside when the fire started.  She probably ran in and burned to death trying to save everyone else,” Samantha said.
	“She cares about her friends.  Hers is the kind of blind loyalty I’ve only found in two other people,” Elizabeth said.
	She retreated back to her chair and sat with her feet propped up on the table and one hand over her eyes, nursing the bottle she'd stolen from Samantha.  None of them had slept much and Thomas knew that Elizabeth kept strange hours already, risking her health as well as her life trying to solve the impossible problems they faced.
	Thomas felt exhausted himself now that the adrenaline was starting to wear off, and in desperate need of a bath.  That meant heating water and setting up the big aluminum washtub by the fire in his living room, which was impossible while he had guests.  So he decided to make breakfast instead.  It wasn’t the most helpful thing he could do, but dawn was rising in the east, the smell of smoke was fading, and something as normal as eggs and toast might calm everyone down.  
He piled some of his supply of  firewood into the black iron stove that took up one whole corner of his kitchen and spent three matches getting it lit.  He vaguely remembered his mother doing the same thing when he’d been a pup.  In his parents' world it was the females who did the cooking, but since he lived on his own he'd had to learn.  He was pretty good at it, too, which was a violation of the way the world ought to be, if anyone ever cared enough to ask him.
He found a half a loaf of bread in the cupboard above his sink and he cut it into several democratic pieces, while scattering crumbs all over the floor.  Elizabeth swept the crumbs up and tipped them into the sink, where she washed them down the drain.  Thomas thought it was strange to see her in a domestic setting where, he imagined, she was even less comfortable than he was.  It was odd, too, to see her drunk.  She had always held herself so aloof that he’d never thought of her as an ordinary person before.
“Why did you never run away?  There must have been other chances before now,” he said.
“Where could I go?  What else would I do?  I was born in the Silver Street House, you know, the same as my little Jessie.  I never told her that in all the years we knew each other.  Like her, I never knew any other world except this city,” Elizabeth said.
“I think she knew, anyway.  That's why you adopted her after her mother died, isn't it?” Samantha said.
“She didn’t have anyone else in the world, and I thought, as long as we were both going to be stuck in the House for the rest of our lives it couldn’t do any harm.  I couldn't have any children of my own, and I wanted there to be one person in the world who really loved me,” Elizabeth said.
There weren’t any eggs in the cupbord, but a little extra digging unearthed a crock of butter Thomas had forgotten he had. He set it on the table with a quarter of a wheel of cheese and dug his toasting fork out of a drawer.  This got Samantha out of her corner.  She untangled herself with only a little difficulty and pushed herself up with just her legs.  That done, she snatched the fork out of his hand and went to the table to skewer the first piece of bread.
“Go sit down.  I can’t stand anyone else’s cooking,” Samantha said.
“I didn’t think that cats ever did anything for themselves, if they didn’t have to,” he said.
“That’s what I thought about foxes.  Have you had any more thoughts about how you’re going to help us, or are you only good at burning your house down?” she said.
With the stove door open, thick coils of smoke spilled out into the room and made him sneeze.
“You forgot to open the chimney.  You're a pretty good soldier, Tom, but I'd hate to see where you'd be without the rest of us,” Samantha said.
She turned the chimney lever while he lunged for the window and shoved it open.  Cold air rushed in and he leaned out across the sill to suck in huge lungsful of it.  Meanwhile, Lady Elizabeth found a dish towel and flapped it beside his head to blow the remaining smoke outside.
“My mother would have smacked me by now,” he said.
“Cooking is an art, like everything else, and your talents lie elsewhere.  If you’ll look up, you might see something in the street that suits you better,” Elizabeth said.
She put a hand under his muzzle and raised his head so he was looking down the street, back in the direction of Silver Street.  The light was still too dim for him to see more than dark shapes, but it was hard to miss the group of people who had gathered practically on his doorstep.  They had the sloppy look of civilians, and none of them were carrying any weapons that he could see.  Several people were holding signs and he was just as glad that he couldn’t see what they said, but it was better than what he’d thought they had.
“I suppose that’s a start.  I can get a dozen more to join us, too, or maybe a little better.  I can’t promise any officers, but at least my boys will know how to use real weapons,” he said.
“They'd better,” Elizabeth said.

Catherine rejoined them after they had left Silver Street and Sarah gave her a smile and slipped an arm around her waist.  That left Megan carrying Jess by herself, but she found she was actually glad to do so.  The little mouse had treated her more kindly than anyone else she had met in Jaspertree, and Jess was certainly the only person who had actually helped her in any real way.  She was also glad that neither Sarah nor Catherine had looked back at the once during the long and, in Megan's opinion, needlessly circuitous route to the docks.  The only thing that kept her from slipping off and finding her own way out of the city was Catherine’s promises of her father’s ship.
They reached Gold Street as the sun began to rise.  Early light shone from the masts and sails of all the ships along the docks and it made the water glitter all around them.  Jaspertree was the busiest port city in the western world, or so Megan had always heard, and she count maybe twenty large merchant ships in their side of the bay, plus any number of smaller vessels.  The sight of them all together was exciting and she had to force herself to pay attention so she wouldn’t get lost.  She'd still been a puppy the last time she was on a ship and she remembered the storm that had blown up the day before they’d landed at Jaspertree.  While everyone with any sense had hidden in their cabins, she had gone up on deck to watch the ship slide sideways down the waves.
Even this early in the day the place was crowded with people, but this morning there was a sullen, subdued air to the street.  People went about their business because ships still had to be loaded and cargo still had to be bought and sold, but everyone in the city would have heard about the fire by now and even Megan could tell they were scared.  She'd heard the talk of revolution, too, and she knew how little it would take to turn Jaspertree into a war zone.
	She didn't care much for the way people were looking at her, either.  They paid too much attention to the girl in her arms, and while Megan tried to pretend it was no big deal she knew how bad it must look to have the three of them carry an unconscious House girl through the open streets.  She quickened her pace to catch up to Catherine and Sarah who were whispering together.  She knew she ought to mind her own business, but she cocked one ear forward so she could hear what they were saying.  Keeping herself, and Jess, safe was more important right now than good manners.
“I thought we were going to take the girl to your house.  It’s too public here, and if they find her what will we do?”  Catherine said.
“It’s only for a few days and there isn’t enough space at home for both of them.  Certainly not for the wolf, or whatever she's supposed to be.  I’ve never seen such a big thing in my life, and I’ll bet she eats a lot, too,” Sarah said.
“And you don’t?  We can afford a little charity for a while,” Catherine said.
They stopped in front of a blocky, two-story warehouse with flaking red paint on the door and boarded up windows.  The windows on the ground floor that were still whole were smeared with soot and grease and this blocked anyone from seeing inside so neatly that Megan wondered if it had been done on purpose.  A metal ladder was bolted to the brick wall on the left side of the building, which led down from a corner window to the ground.  Several bolts had come out and, like the rest of the warehouse, it didn’t look safe.
Catherine freed herself from Sarah to explore her coat pockets, and she frowned when she didn't find whatever it was she was looking for.  This made Sarah grin and she produced a set of keys which she dangled in front of Catherine with a little flourish.
“One of these days I’m going to take these away from you for good, so you won’t lose them again,” Sarah said.
“Why bother, when I can just ask you to break in for me?” Catherine said.
Sarah grimaced and glanced back at Megan.  Megan smiled in what she hoped was a reassuring way and busied herself with shifting Jess into a more comfortable position in her arms.  
“Not in front of the whole world, please.  Being a thief isn't something you really want to advertise, you know,” Sarah said.
Catherine huffed and shoved the door open so it hit the wall with a bang that made Megan wince and stomped up a flight of wooden stairs that led to another badly painted door that was just visible from the outside.  Sarah retrieved the key from the front door and followed her, without looking back.  They squabbled for a moment when they both tried to unlock the next door, until Catherine pushed Sarah away and turned the key herself.  Megan’s arms were beginning to ache from holding Jess and she felt exposed out on the street by herself, but she waited until they were through the second door before she followed them.
Inside, the warehouse looked even worse than it did from the street.  The bottom floor was bare concrete, stained and mazed with so many cracks it seemed like she ought to have been able to stir it around with her toes.  The stairs were untreated, splintery wood, and even though she’d just seen that they were capable of supporting two people at once it took a good deal of courage for her to go up them.  They creaked and wobbled under her, and when she looked down she could see through to the floor below.  She only made it to the top because she didn’t dare stop and when she got to the door she kicked it until Sarah came back and opened it for her.
	On the other side of the door there was another, shorter flight of stairs, but these were solid and looked much safer.  She went up them, with Sarah at her heels, into a cramped little office where Catherine sat behind a large wooden desk, already buried in stacks of paper.
“There’s a cot in the back room for your friend.  It isn’t heated, but there are plenty of blankets.  I have to see to some things, but Sarah will look after you until I’m finished,” Catherine said.
“I think someone needs to take a look at Jess.  She’s been unconscious since we left the House and I thought she'd be awake by now,” said Megan.
“She’s fine,” Catherine said.
“How do you know?  You haven’t looked at her since you threw everything she owned into the fire.  Neither of you have done more than glance at us the whole way up.  I came here because I thought you were going to help her, but I don’t mind going somewhere else if you won’t,” Megan said.
Catherine shut the ledger she was working on and rubbed her muzzle with her fingers.
“She’s perfectly fine.  Samantha didn't give her that many pills, or else she'd have fallen asleep in the bar like she was supposed to.  After the night she had, she probably needs to sleep,” Catherine said.
“You drugged her?” Megan said.
“Only a little bit.  Only sleeping pills, like you can get in any pharmacy in the city.  I use the same stuff myself, sometimes,” Catherine said.
	“If she’d fallen asleep earlier, she could have burned to death.  It could kill her anyway.  You don’t know what she has, what she’s allergic to,”  Megan said.
“Why are you so upset?  Isn’t she the person who is supposed to be training you for your life of slavery?” Sarah said.
“That isn't her fault,” Megan said.
“Then why did you run away from her?” Catherine said.
“To show her it could be done.  They've got her so scared she won't even fight,” Megan said.
Catherine shook her head, and her expression softened into one of sympathy.
“I know.  She's all heart, and no teeth.  There are worse ways to be, though,” Catherine said.
“That's why we drugged her.  It was Samantha's idea.  Otherwise, we'd never have been able to stop her from running into that House again,” Sarah said.
“Maybe not.  But it was still a stupid thing to do,” Megan said.
When Sarah lifted Jess out of her arms, though, she didn’t resist.  Catherine came out from behind the desk and led her over to a chair near the stove.  The seat was hard and the back of the chair was splintery, but it felt so good to sit down again that Megan couldn’t be bothered to complain.  She accepted the cup of coffee that Catherine pushed into her hands and sipped at it to be polite, though it tasted like it had been cooking for a month.
“Jess and I won’t be any trouble for you while we’re here.  We’ll stay in the back and if anyone comes around we’ll stay as quiet as, well, you know.  And I don’t eat as much as you think,” Megan said.
It slipped out before she could close her mouth around the words.  Catherine’s tail twitched and she swore a couple of times, but she didn’t turn away from the sink where she was doing something with the cut on her hand.
“You have some pretty big ears, kid,” Catherine said.
“Well, what did you expect me to do?  You broke into my room in the middle of the night and you were clearly planning to kidnap me.  The only reason I followed you was because you couldn't do anything worse to me than Marcus would,” Megan said.
Catherine took a roll of fresh gauze out of a drawer under the sink and smeared some kind of sharp smelling paste on it.
“That was a dangerous gamble.  How do you know we aren't working for him?” Catherine said.
“You were too angry on the morning we met you for it to have been an act.  Anyway, if you were working for him, you had plenty of time to take care of me and Jessamine at the restaurant.  You wouldn't have had to break in at all,” Megan said.
“I’ve never been where you are now, so I’m not going to pretend I know what it’s like, but I know we can do better.  We can live without slavery.  We have to if we’re going to heal this city,” Catherine said.
	Catherine couldn’t tie the ends of her new bandage herself, so Megan got up to help her.  When she started, she found that Catherine hadn’t managed to bind her wound very tightly either.  Catherine grumbled under her breath when Megan unwound the bandage, but she held still while it was put on properly.
“It’s really a shame.  A child as young as you are shouldn’t be out on the street yet, never mind who might think he owns you.  Where are your parents, do you know?” Catherine said.
“They’re gone.  They were banished from the city, and they’re probably dead,” Megan said.
She felt a twinge of the old anger she thought she’d defeated, but she took a deep breath and kept control of herself long enough to finish tying the bandage.
“I was raised by my aunt, until she got into trouble with the law and I was taken away from her.  They never would tell me why, or what she was supposed to have done,” Megan said.
“They never do,” said Catherine.  She flexed the fingers of her bandaged hand and frowned, but the gauze held.
When Catherine returned to her desk, Megan went to the back room where Sarah had taken Jess.  The door was half hidden behind a stack of boxes and so narrow that she had to squeeze through sideways, but the room wasn’t as sparse as she’d expected.  It was cold, but there was a thick brown carpet on the floor and heavy drapes over the one window.  Half the room was taken up with the bed.  It was low to the ground, but wide enough to fit two people and the mattress looked thick and comfortable.  There were so many blankets piled on top of it that the only sign that it was occupied was the slight movement of Jess’s breathing.  Sarah stood by the window, holding the curtains open just enough for her to look out, but she turned around when she heard Megan come in.
“She’ll be fine.  She nearly woke up when I pulled the covers over her, but it might still be a while before she's ready to join us.  In the meantime, you ought to try to get some sleep yourself,” Sarah said.
“I can’t.  Someone has to look after her,” Megan said.
“You’re swaying, and you look like you’re going to fall down where you stand.  Just lie down for a little while and I’ll get you up when she’s awake.  I promise.” Sarah said.
“You'd better.  It’s going to be hard enough for her to wake up in a strange place.  It might be best for all of us if she can see she isn’t by herself from the start,” Megan said.
With the curtain pushed back a bit, Megan could see that it had a wide, padded sill that turned it into a kind of seat where someone could catch the sun on their back.  Sarah curled herself up, catlike, into the seat and hooked her arms over her knees.  When she’d gotten herself settled, she turned her attention away from them to the street below.  Megan made herself as comfortable as she could, and pulled an unused corner of one of the blankets over herself.  When the downstairs door slammed a few minutes later, Sarah leaned forward to get a better view of the street.  Megan didn’t ask, and except for a little twitch in the tip of her tail, Sarah didn’t show any inclination to move again.  Megan kept watch until her eyes grew heavy and she snuggled up to Jess, just for a moment.