25
	The break whistle of a nearby factory shrilled over the sound of a shouted argument just outside the cabin door, signalling the end of the day shift.  Catherine rolled over in bed and kept going over the edge.  She banged her head on the bedframe as she fell and the toes of her right foot cracked painfully against the wall.  The noise of the whistle made her head throb with a dull pain that made her sick, and her mouth and eyes felt gummed shut.  As she sat and blinked her vision back into order, she groaned as last night came back to her.
	Sarah’s house had started out as a brick storehouse at the back of a permanently damp alley.  It had been built to store equipment for the original guard barracks which  had themselves been turned into cheap apartments after the city militia had grown too big for them.  Nobody wanted it, so Sarah had moved in and shored it up at her own expense.  Catherine had helped some too, all the time trying to covince the girl to move into the apartment in her father’s warehouse instead, to keep her safe.  People who lived in the city slums had a tendency to sometimes vanish without warning.  Though she wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, it would have been nice to have had Sarah closer, too.
	There was only a single, narrow room with just enough space for the double bed and the four-drawer chest that were the only valuable things Sarah owned.  The floor was littered with old food wrappers and bits of broken wood that had been dragged in for some obscure purpose.  Catherine had spent the whole day in this cramped little space, left alone with a bottle of whiskey, which was a mistake.  After she had been evicted from her own house she had been as angry as she could remember.  She’d been drunk with fury and she dimly remembered screaming threats at Jacob and Marcus in turn.  Fortunately, nobody important had heard them and Sarah had bribed her off the street with a drink to shut her up.
	Just after the morning whistle, Sarah had gone off on some errand of her own, without a word of explanation.  Catherine had insisted she take the coat back, because it was raining then.  But that left her with nothing against the cold except her own thin clothes and the pile of blankets on the bed.  It was now just after five o’clock in the afternoon and she was still alone.  It scared her to think that Sarah had gone back to her house and gotten caught.  She'd asked the girl not to go, but had been so drunk she couldn’t remember Sarah’s answer.  Whatever it was been, she hoped that Sarah would hurry up and get back.  Every time someone walked by outside she imagined being found alone by robbers, or by some of Jacob’s thugs coming to hurt her.  Now that her father was dead, all of his old friends had vanished and only Sarah was left to care if something happened to her.
	One comforting thought was that she still had her grandfather’s sword.  It was propped up against the dresser within easy reach of the bed, along with what was left of the whiskey.  She had just decided to go and get them, when there was a thump against the door.  It wasn’t a loud noise, but there was an intimacy to it that froze her in place.  The thump was repeated and the tips of her fingers brushed the hilt of her sword, but she couldn’t pick it up.
	Then the door opened, and Sarah came in, bringing a gust of freezing wind in with her.  She had taken her coat off to tie it into a crude satchel, and there was a dusting of snow on her fur.  The way she smiled worried Catherine, who knew it meant she had probably just done something she shouldn’t have.
	“You had me scared to death.  If anything happens to you, I don’t know what--” she said, but Sarah cut her off with a kiss.
	“I brought some supper.  Too much to drink on an empty stomach is bad for you,”  Sarah said.
	“Trying to bribe me out of being angry?  I thought we agreed we had to be more careful now, and what have you been doing all this time?” she said.
	“Nothing.  I stopped by your house to get a few things,” Sarah said.
	She put the coat down on the bed and untied the arms to spread it open.  Catherine could feel the cold coming off of her and she took one of the blankets she’d wrapped around herself and put it on Sarah’s shoulders instead.  As she tied it around Sarah's neck, the coat came open to show its burden of bags and neatly folded clothes.  In the middle of everything was a paper box that was stained with grease and leaked smells of salt and steak sauce that made her aware of how hungry she was.
	“How can you think of taking such a risk?  Nothing in that house is as important to me as you are,” she said.
	“You need clothes, and I can’t afford to buy any new ones.  I can’t say I object to your sitting around my house naked, but we have things to do,” Sarah said.
	“We’ll find a way to manage.  Don’t you dare do something like this again, or I’ll skin you,” Catherine said.
	She clawed the box open and took one of the sandwiches.  Sauce and bits of fried onion dripped on her fingers and onto the bed, and she burned her tongue on the first bite, but none of that mattered.  It was still strange to her, even after all this time, that with Sarah she didn’t have to watch everything she did.  For Catherine, who had had to spend her life looking over her shoulder for fear of her reputation, it was a liberating experience.
	“They aren’t doing a very good job of watching your house.  I only saw four guards on patrol, and there was a twenty-minute gap between each one,” Sarah said.
	“I’m not that important.  They’re going to be much more worried about Captain Thomas and all those soldiers he talked into defecting with him,” Catherine said.
	“Which is why I don’t understand why you’re so scared of taking this chance. How much longer do you plan to wait?” Sarah said.
	“I don’t know.  Just for a little while longer, until it feels right,” Catherine said.
	“It never feels right.  You just make your plan and hope for the best.  You weren’t this cautious when you were telling Jessamine to steal her girl, now were you?”  Sarah said.
	Sarah sat down on the bed and picked up the bottle of whiskey, but she didn’t drink.  Instead, she tipped the bottle over and splashed some of the alcohol on a shallow cut on the side of her hand.
	“Neither of those girls had anything left to lose,” Catherine said.
	“Neither do you.  You know that Jacob isn’t going to give you back your house, and Marcus won’t make him,” Sarah said.
	Catherine sat down next to her and sifted through the rescued clothes.  The rather haphazard collection suggested that Sarah had just grabbed the first things she could find, so there wasn’t much that was really suitable for the cold.  But Sarah had found the old purple sweater Catherine had made for her father when she was twelve years old.  It still smelled like him from all the years he’d worn it and she held it under her nose for a moment to drink it in before she put it on.
	“You don’t really think they’re out in the forest, do you?  If that were so, Marcus would have burned it down around them,” Catherine said.
	“I don't think so.  If people thought he was that scared of the rebels, how many more would flock to join them?  He can’t fight half the city,” Sarah said.
	Catching Catherine’s glance at the second sandwich, Sarah tutted and pushed the box over to her.  Feeling only slightly guilty, Catherine devoured it, this time taking just enough to care to keep from dripping barbecue sauce down her front.
	“We know where they are, and even if they've moved they won't have gone far.  It has to be now,” Sarah said.
	“We won’t find them,” Catherine said.
	But it was the closest thing to a plan they had, and it sounded better than sitting in this little, dank room and getting drunk again.  Her father would have forbidden her from going, but at the same time she felt sure that he would have been the one to suggest it, if he was in their place.
	“We might.  It would be better than waiting around for Jacob to find us, wouldn’t it?  And we might find your brother on the road, too.  He needs to know what he's walking into,” Sarah said.
	“We’ll need supplies,” Catherine said.
	“That's not a problem for clever people like us,” Sarah said.
	“I want to get them legally.  What happened in the restaurant last night was one thing, but if we're really going to do this, we have to keep ourselves honest,” Catherine said.
	“You’re no fun,” Sarah said.
	Catherine grabbed Sarah and kissed her.  It was the first time they had kissed since the night they had become a couple, and the taste of her was intoxicating.  Sarah’s tongue was soft, her teeth were sharp and Catherine could feel her girlfriend’s hands moving up to embrace and hold her.  They parted briefly to fumble at buckles and to pile their clothing on the floor, but never let go of each other.
	“Of course, nobody said we had to start right away,” Catherine said.
	Then Sarah had her pinned on the bed and, for a time, nothing else mattered.