13
	Whatever Catherine might think, anger over the Houses was nothing new.  Jess could remember back twenty years, when there was rioting across the whole city for six days because a House girl had been beaten to death by a customer after she’d found out he couldn’t afford to pay her.  Silver Street had survived because it had been all the way across the city from the White Hill House, but it suffered several broken windows and a wallful of graffiti that, at thirteen, Jess hadn’t really understood.  She could still remember the angry barking of the protestors when they finally caught the murderer.  They dragged him through the city, parading him through the streets until they wound up in front of White Hill.  She hid under her bed and hadn’t followed them, but she heard what happened later when the news spread all over the city.  The mob took turns clawing and biting him, and by the time they hanged him by the door of the House, nobody could even say what species he was, never mind who he'd been.  
She’d seen him once, just before they’d cut him down.  By then, he was half rotten and his bones showed through what was left of his skin.  The While Hill House was closed permanently and her glimpse of his shattered skull and broken teeth gave her nightmares for years.  She could see him now, grinning at her through the smoke pouring out of the new plate glass window at Silver Street.  She could hear the howl of the crowd getting closer, but she couldn’t run because something heavy was holding her legs down.
She woke slowly, unable to remember where she was or even what year it was.  Her thirteen-year-old self stayed with her on her way out of her dreams, held in place by the continued pressure on her hips.  There was a chemical taste in her mouth and her eyes were so gummed with sleep that it took a few minutes before she was able to see anything.  It was the smell of smoke on her wrists that brough her back to herself and brought her out of her stupor.  She sat up quickly, afraid she had passed out on the sidewalk in front of her House, and her legs tingled painfully from lack of blood.  Megan lay across them with her head pillowed on her arms, fast asleep.  From the quality of the light that came in through the slit in the curtains, she had slept for most of the day.  And she could still hear shouting.
While she was trying to slide her legs out from under Megan without waking the girl, the door opened and Sarah came in carrying a wooden tray.  It was loaded with bowls of soup and a pot of coffee that smelled like it had been laced with whiskey.  She smiled when she saw Jess was up and set the tray on a low table beside the bed.
“I was beginning to get a little bit worried you'd never wake up, but maybe it was for the best.  We needed to keep you hidden and you would have been so bored listening to Catherine scratch away at her files all day.  God knows I was,” Sarah said.
“Is that what you had in mind when you had Samantha drug me?” Jess said.
“You could tell that, could you?” Sarah said.
She poured the coffee out into the three large mugs and held one out for Jess to take.
“The drink she gave me tasted strange.  And I used to have to take pills to help me sleep when I was little, because I had nightmares.  I can remember what my mouth tasted like when I woke up every morning,” Jess said.
She picked up another cup and took a large mouthful.  She hated coffee, and she couldn’t stand to drink it straight, but the bitter taste of it was better than the taste of the pills.
“What’s going on downstairs?” she said.
The shouting was growing louder now, but too many people were talking at once for her to make any sense of it.
“Idiots.  If all the people out there were this upset over the Houses, where were they before another one got burned?  What were they doing yesterday while the people they think they care so much about were being legally raped?” Sarah said.
“Maybe in the same place as you,” Jess said.
She took another mouthful of coffee and freed one of her legs.  This made Megan moan and roll over in her sleep, which freed her other leg as well.  Jess slid out from under the covers and leaned against the wall to ease the pain in her knees.  Her new dress was wrinkled and her hair was a mess and trailed in her eyes, but she didn't care.  Just for right now, she could imagine what it was like to be a real person who didn't have to care what she looked like.
“At least we were trying.  We might not have been able to do much, but we meant well,” Sarah said.
“Remember back in the early nineties, when the mob clawed that coyote to death for killing a House girl?  They thought they meant well, too,” Jess said.
“You’re judging us before we’ve done anything, and that’s not fair.  We’re not going to kill anyone,” Sarah said.
“Can you promise that?” said Jess.
She knelt on the window seat and tried to count how many people were milling around outside.  Part of her wanted to be down there, too, to bite and rip anything in her path, to get revenge.  In the past, her collar had held her anger at bay.  It let her push her feelings aside and control them.  She could imagine they didn't belong to her but to Alice, the girl she used to be. Now, she felt naked without it.
“I thought you would have been pleased so many people turned out to support you.  Your old friend Elizabeth Frost is one of the people who organized the whole thing,” Sarah said.
“Is she?  She must have been drunk.  She has more sense than that when she’s sober, but alcohol goes right to her head,” Jess said.
	She knew she was going to go down there anyway, even though she knew better.  It was more than she could do to sit by while a House girl put herself in danger, even Elizabeth.  She pushed past Sarah’s weak attempt to keep her from the door and ran into the larger room beyond it.  She hit the office door so hard she felt the board under her hands crack and she leapt down the short flight of stairs outside without stopping.
	The street was so crowded that it was all she could do to squeeze out the door.  Several people turned to look at her, but none of them really saw her.  Their attention was focused on someone she couldn’t see at the other end of the street.  Whoever it was, he was shouting at the crowd in an effort to whip them into a frenzy.  The noise made her temples throb, reminding her again of her dream, and she pushed her way through the crowd in an effort to keep from being driven back inside.
	The lecture continued the whole time she moved forward.  The speaker didn't say anything new, not really.  He attacked the Houses and Marcus Keppler, and called for an end to both.  What took everyone by surprise was that this was the first time in years that anyone had dared say such things in public. Just after the White Hill murder there had been a lot of agitators crying for bloody revolution, then President Keppler hanged the leaders, and a lot of other people as well, and the rest lost their nerve.
	As she got closer to the front, the crowd thinned out enough for her to see the ranter.  She wasn't entirely surprised to find it was the fox from the restaurant.  Someone had dragged an old packing crate in the middle of the street for a stage, and he stood on top of it bouncing up and down in anger.  He was dressed in the uniform of the city militia, but he wasn’t carrying a sword, and there were rips on the sleeves where his rank insignia had been torn away.  As she approached the stage, he turned and pointed his finger at her.
	“How many more Houses are we going to see burned, before we do something about it?  How many more of our sisters and daughters are we going to allow to be burned to death? We let them be sold, because we were afraid, but it’s time for us to fix our mistake,” he said.
	“Do you really think this will do any good?” Jess said.
	“If enough people demand an end to the Houses, the city will have no choice but to shut them down,” he said.
	“Like they did after White Hill?  Or after the Sunrise fire?  The best thing you can do is leave the Houses alone and let the girls there fix things for themselves,” she said.
	The fox flashed his teeth at her and jumped down off the stage.  He caught her wrist before she could draw back and pulled her close enough that she could smell the whiskey on his breath.
	“You can’t do a damned thing or you’d have done it by now,” he said.
	“Do you want people to get killed?  Because that’s what is going to happen if you keep going,,” she said.
	“I've thought about that, maybe more than you have.  No matter what we do, people are going to end up dead, and I'm not going to just let it happen,” he said.
	“No, you're going to hurry it along instead.  I don't want to be free if it means all these people have to die,” she said.
	He took a step back, but he didn’t let go of her hand.  A number of the people around the two of them had stopped whatever it was they had been doing and now stood in a loose circle around them.  All the attention made Jess nervous and her free hand drifted up to her throat, where her collar was supposed to be.
	“That was your first step.  You can get used to being without it, if you let yourself,” the fox said.
	“I never would have taken it off if Catherine hadn’t done it for me.  But I liked it.  I suppose it sounds stupid to you, but it was what set me apart from everybody else,” she said.
	“Self hatred, Miss Bryar, never did anybody any good,” he said.
	He gave her a fleeting smile, then raised his head and barked once.  He was answered by a second bark from somewhere else in the crowd, and all around them people pricked up their ears.  The street fell silent, except for the scrape of feet as everyone formed themselves into neat lines across the street.
	“If you won’t help us for my sake, maybe you’ll be more willing to listen to someone else,” the fox said.
	“I doubt it.  I'd like you to let go of me now.  I'm leaving,” she said.
	“Not yet you aren't,” he said.
	Before she could protest, he pulled her behind the stage.  She felt the fur rise on the back of her neck and couldn’t quite supress a shiver.
	“What are you doing?” she said.
	“I want you, and I mean to have you one way or another,” he said.
	“I see.  There’s still a fee, you know.  Just because you took away my collar, that doesn't mean you can use me for free, and I’m not cheap,” she said.
	“That all depends on how you look at it, doesn't it?  But I’m not in the market for that today,” he said.
	“I’ve heard that before, and nobody ever means it,” Jess said.
	“He does,” Elizabeth said.
	The old vixen sat on a box behind the stage, nestled back in its shadow so well that Jess hadn’t seen her.  When Elizabeth stood up and grinned, her teeth shone in the early evening sunlight.
	“There’s my clever girl.  I knew you would get out of the House okay, but I’m glad to have you in front of me all the same,” Elizabeth said.
	She put her arms around Jess’s shoulders, and actually leaned against her for a moment, in a startling display of affection.  Jess was even more surprised at how thin Elizabeth was now and how little she weighed.
	“Are you really a part of all of this?  You know this isn’t going to do any good,” Jess said.
	Behind them, the protestors had finished lining up in straight rows and they started to move forward.  The leading edge was already even with the front of the stage. 
	“You just come along with us, my girl, and you will see what happens.  I’m not going to be turned out on the street like this without an answer,” Elizabeth said.
	Caught as she was between the two of them, Jess couldn’t stop herself from being swept up in the press of the crowd.  It was that or stand still and be trampled.  In any case she was stuck with having to bear all of Elizabeth’s slight weight on her shoulders.  She didn’t march in step with the rest of them, though.  While everyone else adopted what they thought was a military pose, she concentrated on drawing Elizabeth with her into a private little bubble of open space.
	“I suppose you'd laugh at me if I asked you to take care of yourself” Jess said.
	“My dear girl, I'm not made of glass.  I think you'll find there's still some strength in this old antique,” Elizabeth said.
	They went up Gold street, straight through the busiest part of the city just at the time of day when the ships were getting their last loads before leaving port and were thus packed with sailors.  Jess couldn’t see what was happening behind them, but on either side of the crowd people spread out to fill doorways or to block sailors from carrying their crates into the warehouses.  Most people cursed them, or waited impatiently for them to get out of the way, but a number of them dropped their bags or abandoned their carts full of boxes and marched with protestors.
	When they passed Copper Alley, a group of blacksmiths left the doorway of their foundry and joined in the march.  Jess could see the fox in front of her grinning to himself like he was at the head of some parade.  As they got close to the end of the street, he raised his head and barked twice.  The beat of the drum sped up, and so did the pace of the march.  Elizabeth pushed at Jess's arm, to make her keep up, but Jess could hear the old vixen panting in her ear.
	“Thomas, be careful.  This is supposed to be a protest, not a mass charge across a battlefield.  We don’t want to scare people,” Elizabeth said.
	“We don’t want to be stopped, either,” Thomas said.
	He pointed over at the cluster of militia soldiers sheltered in the doorway of another old warehouse.
	“What can they do?  There’s barely a dozen of them, we'd walk straight over them before they could blink.  Slow down before someone gets hurt,” Jess said.
	“They can do enough, if they know how to use those guns they’ve got,” Thomas said.
	Four of the soldiers, all wolves, held long barrelled rifles against their chests.  The sight of them sent a chill down Jess's back.
	“They only have two shots each, but that's more than enough to cause a lot of damage at this range,” Thomas said.
	“That’s nice to know.  And what do you think they’ll do if they get spooked by all the people running towards them?” Jess said.
	“That's why we've got to get to them first,” Thomas said.
	“No.  Stop this.  Go back, and really think about what you're doing,” Jess said.
	“That won't work.  These people aren't following me, not really.  I'm just an excuse to get them started,” Thomas said.
	“You're still responsible for them,” Jess said.
	“This was going to happen anyway.  You and I are just riding the waves so we won't get drowned,” Thomas said.
	The east end of Gold Street followed the natural line of the bay and curved south until it connected with one end of Silver Street.  At the point where both streets met they formed a sort of plaza which held various open air markets in the summer, but which was now deserted.  The only thing in it was a high concrete block which held an empty flag pole.  The mob poured into the open space and paused there for a moment while people caught their breaths and the lines were re-formed.  Jess took this chance to pull Elizabeth out of the way.  The old vixen didn’t appear to be tired, but she always had been good at putting on a brave face.  Jess could feel the old vixen trembling and it scared her.
	“You’ve gone far enough.  I don’t know what it was you thought you wanted to do when you started this, but if you don’t stop you’re going to save Marcus the trouble of killing you himself,” she said.
	“Maybe.  Who cares?  This is the only good thing I’ve ever done with my life and I won’t stop now,” Elizabeth said.
	“You always helped us.  Me and the rest of the girls in the House.  That’s enough,” Jess said.
	“Not for me, it isn't,” Elizabeth said.
Elizabeth took a couple of deep breaths and walked to the front of the plaza, where Thomas was waiting for her.  She pushed him to the side, and this time it was Elizabeth who raised her head and barked.  It was more of a yelp, high pitched and urgent.  There was an edge to it that hurt Jess’s ears and triggered ancient rodent instincts that made her want to run.  She bit down on the side of her tongue in an effort to overrule her fear, but not everyone had her self control.  One of them, a little white and brown spotted cat, lost her nerve and bolted.  Flat-eared, she ran through the crowd without bothering to dodge around anyone in her way and she only stopped when Thomas grabbed her.  This was all it took to spook the rest of them, and instead of continuing with their orderly advance they started to run.
Some people, the ones on the very edge of the crowd, scattered and disappeared.  They ran down alleys or turned and bolted back towards the docks.  Most of the protestors ran straight up Silver Street, towards what was left of the House.  Jess ran with them, though she couldn't have said why.  As she accelerated, she passed Thomas, who had pulled Elizabeth up with him onto the flag pole.  He made a grab for her, possibly to haul her up too, but she ducked away from him and kept running.
	Movement at the other end of the street made her look up and she saw a cluster of soldiers in front of her with their weapons drawn.  Several of them had rifles and one, a large grey wolf in full dress uniform, had his gun pointed up at the sky.  A loud crack made her ears ring and a chemical stink burned the insides of her nostrils.  There was a burst of confused shouting behind her, and more of the people behind her melted away into the shadows.  She didn’t blame them.  No matter how angry they were, unarmed civilians were no match for the city milita and it was only sense to realize that.  The rest of the crowd was still too angry for such decisions though and they kept running straight at the soldiers.
The crowd split and flowed around her as they neared their target.  Even Jess could see they were far too disorganized to even mount a proper attack, and this was what saved them.  Three of the wolves aimed their rifles into the crowd and fired, but they didn’t have time to aim and only one of them hit his target.  Two shots hit the ground, and threw up clouds of dust. The third struck a genet in his chest and he fell at Jess's feet.
The noise was incredible, and the smell of blood drove Jess back a few steps with her head swimming.  She didn’t have any breath left to run with and she was torn between the mouse's desire to run and hide and the weasel's bloodlust.  She didn’t dare turn around for fear of what she might do and so she didn’t notice the wolf until he put a hand on her shoulder.  She yelped like he’d hit her and spun around, which put her back against the wall of a nearby sweet shop.
He was an ugly creature with a scar running across his muzzle from the corner of his right eye to just above his whiskers on the left side of his face.  He didn’t look like he was much past middle age but his fur was already grizzled and running to white in places, and there was a slight tremor in his left hand.  When he smiled at her she could see that he had teeth missing.  He stood too close to her, putting his hands on the wall on either side of her and the stink of decay on his breath made her gag.
“Now this is curious.  A mouse leading a band of rebels.  You aren’t what I was expecting, my dear, but you’ll do,” he said.
His voice was soft, and a little too highly pitched for such a big wolf, and she knew who he was.  This was Jacob Metzger, Keppler's Lieutenant.
“I’m not leading them, and I’m not one of them.  I tried to stop them,” she said.
“That’s why you were running out in front, yes?  But I'm not the one you're going to have convince of that,” he said.
He was on her before she could move. He clamped one hand around her muzzle so she couldn’t bite him and he locked his other arm around her neck and squeezed.  She kicked him in the shin, but she was only wearing a pair of light sandals and he had on a pair of heavy leather boots, so she only made him grunt.
On the other side of the street, a coyote charged a small group of soldiers with only her bare hands.  The wolves closed over her when she reached them and a moment later the coyote lay on the ground with her throat torn open.
“You just come quietly with me and I’ll see to it that you get put in a good cell, maybe even with a bed.  But if you fight me, I'll see you get put in the Cannery,” Jacob said.
That stopped her cold, and he laughed when he felt her cringe.  The Cannery was the city workhouse, where disease was rampant and a lack of bed was the least of anyone’s worries.  Even a House collar would be no protection in there.
“I haven’t done anything.  None of this was my idea,” she said.
“Right now, you’d be better off if you kept your mouth shut.  I’m going to have to make a full report and you don’t want to say anything to get yourself in worse trouble, do you?” he said.
“I’ll be damned if I will. I’m not going anywhere with you,” she said.
She kicked again, aiming higher this time, but he was too close to her for her to hit him with her heel, and he was able to squeeze his knees together in time to catch her foot.
“There's no call for this kind of attitude, Miss Bryar.  I’m trying to be nice here and do you a favor.  Or do you want to go back to your friends now?” he said.
He took hold of her muzzle again and turned her head so she had to look across the street at the fight that was still going on.  The plaza was covered with the bodies of the protestors, and only one of Jacob's soldiers had fallen.  The rest of the soldiers had managed to form a circle around the rebels and they had their swords out now.  A few of the rebels still harried the soldiers, but anyone who got too close to the swords was cut down.  Jess could see that the morale of the attackers was about to break and she knew that, when it did, the soldiers would kill as many people as they could.
“I don’t want to do this, but I'm not he one giving orders,” Jacob said.
“That makes it all better, does it?” Jess said.
A trumpet blared from the direction of the old plaza and a fresh group of soldiers appeared at the end of the street.  There weren’t very many of them, but all of them had rifles and they had the room to use them.
“That’s the end of that, then.  Someone must have gotten it together enough to send some reinforcements, so I think your little coup just fizzled.  Too bad we have to go,” said Jacob.
He knocked her legs out from under her with a kick to the back of her knees.  She fell backwards against him, and he lifted her up in his arms.  Then he ran.  She squirmed and tried to bite, but her teeth closed on empty air.