She picked her way slowly across the rooftop, stopping every so often to glance back at the barricades. The Metropolitan police had finally turned up, four constables and a sergeant in an Austin Twelve, with two more riding externally on either side, feet planted on the running boards, and hands gripping the roof. The sergeant had parked it between the barricades and announced he was in charge. The DI had attempted to pull rank, and the sergeant had pointed out he wasn’t in the same police force, and he shouldn’t even be here.
The DI had put the sergeant in charge and then the sergeant had realised exactly what he was in charge of, and tried to defer to the DI. Then the Sabini bear had announced he was in charge because he had the biggest guns.
Now the Met police were hiding behind their car because the City police were refusing to let them behind their barricades, and the Sabinis were demanding the cops arrest the Elephant Boys, who weren’t here and had no idea what was going on.
It made her want to skip, but that was dangerous on rooftops.
She’d learnt that lesson the hard way.
Her mother had taught her it. Everything her mother taught was the hard way.
In front of her, the Sabinis had finally realised their butt was bare, and were hastily barricading the northern end of Hatton Garden, at St. Cross Street, before the police thought to send forces round behind them. Everyone on the street was focused on what was happening at either end. No one was looking at the chewy centre. It was time for cake. Also, she was getting hungry. She’d have to see if the new brothel had food.
She lowered herself off the edge of the roof, abseiling down until she reached the highest window. A glance each way showed a growing police presence to the north and south. Police on horses had finally pushed the onlookers back, and there were several police officers with dogs. No one seemed to have fully taken charge yet, but everyone looked to be having a great deal of fun shouting at each other. She wished she could take part, or at least watch, but she had rescues to commit.
She dangled outside the window, frowning. Did one commit a rescue? One could commit theft. Was it that one could only commit things that related to inanimate objects? No, because one could commit murder. Although that created an inanimate object, she supposed. Ah, one could commit kidnap.
So something could only be committed if it was illegal, then? That seemed like a strange rule. Well, she was going to break it and commit a rescue.
Oh, someone was on the other side of the window, staring at her.
The lower sash of the window slid up. “Wah… What are you doing?” Violet asked, her Jamaican accent thicker with shock, her voice so soft anyone without Stella’s enhanced hearing might have missed it, especially with all the racket the police were making. They were always so noisy, and way too dramatic.
“I came by to visit,” Stella replied, grinning even though Violet couldn’t see it. “Sorry it was unannounced. May I come in, please?”
“I think… you should come in, before anyone sees you.” She paused, her voice almost drifting away entirely on the last word, before finding the strength to say a little more. “It is lucky they’re busy right now.”
“Not luck, skill,” Stella replied, not moving. Well, she was moving, she was swaying gently back on forth on a tentacle above a street that was going daft with drama crazed coppers, but she wasn’t moving towards the window.
“Yu…do you not want fi… to visit?” Violet asked.
“You’re in my way,” Stella pointed out, gently.
Violet moved aside and Stella slid in the window, pulling her tentacles in after her. “I am ever so sorry if I scared you, Violet. I told you the last time we met I shan’t hurt you, remember?”
“U-unless… unless I, I hurt you.”
“You’d never hurt me, Violet,” Stella replied, but carefully didn’t say she found it doubtful the girl could ever hurt anyone. She seemed a little surprised, a little less solid than the last time they had spoken. This was not the time for a critique of her faults.
“I don’t even know your name. Why… what are you doing here?”
“Plucking a violet,” Stella said, thinking it sounded debonair. She hadn’t felt debonair since she’d lost her bicorn musketeer hat last night. Violet just stared at her, blankly, and Stella blinked as she realised she still didn’t feel debonair. “Fine. I’m rescuing you, and I’ll tell you my name later, alright.” She needed a new feathered hat.
“Why?” she asked again, seeming stuck on Stella’s presence. Stella wasn’t sure if Violet had even heard her words, which was wonderful because hindsight was suggesting that plucking a violet was the second worst thing she had ever said out loud. The only worst statement she had ever made was when she had told Brick to sque- no, not the time to bring that memory up again.
“You look like you don’t want to be here,” Stella said, as gently as she could. “I have come to take you away.”
Violet considered that for a moment. “Am… is this it, then? Am I… am I dying?”
Stella blinked. What? Who thought someone sneaking in their window was… was what? She thought Stella was a spirit or something? Were there spirits that came for the dead? It hadn’t come up when she had researched saints, or when her bibi-daj had taught her about God. “Why would you think that?”
Violet stepped back, trembling, and Stella realised her tone might have been too harsh. She held her hands out, projecting calmness, as her hood pulled itself back and her mask detached and fell off, caught by a silk tendril at her stomach. She shook her long blonde hair out. “I came so you could live, not die. This is a rescue, not a… death spirit unrescue thing… eh. Come with me if you want to live.” She held her hand out.
Violet took a moment to visibly steal herself, then reached out and grasped Stella’s hand. “Okay, I’m ready,” she said, her eyes squeezed tight shut.
“Not yet,” Stella said, pulling her tentacles together and reforming them into a rucksack. “Do you have any food?”
“Wha?”
“I’m hungry.”
“Downstairs.”
Stella nodded, letting go of Violet’s hand and moving towards the door, her mask rising up before her on a tendril of silk.
“Wait,” Violet insisted. “I don’t think you should go down there. There’re guards.”
“I know,” Stella replied, turning back to face Violet as her mask finished sliding onto her face. “How many? Where? Armaments? Disposition? Rotation? Armour?” The mask straps tied themselves behind her head as the tendril returned to her stomach and her hood slid back up.
“I… four? I don’t know what most of those words mean. They don’t have armour but one has a knife. They’re all in the big room with the girls. That’s where the food is, too.”
Stella nodded. “Thank you, Violet. I’ll be back.” She walked out the room, then immediately walked back in. “Actually, count slowly to thirty then come downstairs. Bring anything you want to take with you.”
Stella used her tentacles to move down one floor, holding herself above the steps so they wouldn’t creak and give her away, and then crossed soundlessly to the room the noise was coming from. Laughter, voices, at least three men spread out amongst several women. Alright then.
She took a deep breath and walked into the room. There was a moment of silence as everyone there stopped and stared at her. Stella took in the layout in seconds. Guard 1, fourteen feet away on her left, sitting in an armchair with a girl on his lap, too far to reach. Guard 2, three feet away, to her right, frozen in mid-step towards the door she had entered by, a dumb look on his face. Guard 3, in front of her and to the left, seven feet away, but with two women between them. Guard 4… there was no fourth guard.
The noise came at once. The yelling. Guard 2 rushed forward. She ducked a wide punch as a tentacle gripped his ankle and pulled forwards and up. He crashed to his back as she pushed one of the women in front of her aside.
Guard 3 was rushing towards her, and she met him and attacked. He took her punch on his arm and swung his own that smashed into her face. She staggered back, her mask askance, blocking her vision. She could take much harder blows than that easily enough, and her silk ties were slipping her mask back into place when something hurtled into her from the side, guard 2 probably, and then she was on the floor. Blows rained down on silk canopies as her tentacles domed to protect her.
Her hood twitched, fixing her mask in time to see the boot coming at her face. She threw her hands up, and blocked it, not wanting her mask to break.
There was nothing these men could do to hurt her, not unless they started wielding sledgehammers. A human punch could not bring enough force to truly harm her, nor close to it, and even the knife one wielded wouldn’t penetrate her skin with human force pushing it forward. Still, this was not going to plan.
Step five: inferno!
No, not that, not yet. There was always… she took a boot to the ribs that derailed her train of thought. Fine, they wanted to play hard, she could play hard. She’d put down Brick twice. Well, one a half times, but she didn’t need a journalist in a milk float right now.
The third kick took her in the stomach, but the leather in her jacket shielded her from most of the blow’s power. She wanted this idiot who was sitting on her hip to get off.
They were shouting things at her, but she wasn’t really paying attention to that. She had three tentacles catching the blows the one atop her was throwing down, whilst she watched the kicks from the one in front. The third guard wasn’t near her, as far as she could tell.
“If your opponents are men, they will be larger than you, more powerful than you. They will have the physical advantage,” her mother had said.
“Yes, mama.”
“Most people are not trained to fight. They may have picked up how to throw a punch, or a kick. They may have been in a few messy fights, been hit a couple of times. That is the extreme for the average person. It may be different after the world ends, but you will still have an advantage. They will not have trained daily for years. You are ten years old and already more skilled than most men.”
“Thank you, mama.”
“Yet they could still easily defeat you, because you are ten years old. They are double your height and weight, and their punches will feel like it. Even when you are older, it is likely they will outsize you. They can easily overpower you.”
“I won’t let them, mama.”
“At times you won’t have a choice, Stella. What will you do then? What price will you pay to win?”
“I’ll do whatever it takes, mama.”
“Come, child, show me what you have. If I win, you’re going to bed without supper.”
“When I win, I’m eating yours.”
Stella was used to pain. She was used to hunger. She was used to losing, but she wasn’t that optimistic little girl any more. She’d learned multiple fighting styles, she’d studied war, she’d sparred every day against her mother, and never once won. For the past several months, she’d practised against the criminals of London, and she’d learned a new form of combat, unique to her. The art of silk in war.
She was still workshopping the name.
Silk was stronger than steel. Layered, it could stop a knife. More importantly, it responded to her every thought. As the man atop her tried to punch through her domed silk, the silk responded by wrapping around his arms.
“Madre di Dio, il demone mangerà le nostre anime,” he screamed as the silk tied his arms together and rose towards his face. The man in front aimed a kick at her head, and she pulled the arms of the man atop her forwards, down, sideways.
He toppled, and the kick landed on his spine.
Her tentacles pushed her upright, rising at a ninety degree angle until she stood before them. “Deja de pretender que no eres español,” she told them, and the Italians lost their temper. The kicker leapt over his fallen comrade, and her tentacles plucked him from the air and smashed him into the floor, then lifted him before he could recover, and smashed him again. She kept three tentacles on that, as she placed her boot on the prone man’s throat. When she pressed her weight down, his face turned red. “Dile a Sabini, tiene amigos esperándolo en el infierno.” Then she lifted her boot, and brought it down hard on his head, knocking him out. Her tentacles dropped the unconscious second guard at the same time.
The last guard was standing in front of the chair he had been on, holding one of the women before him, a knife at her throat. “I’ll cut her,” he warned Stella. She ignored him, walking over to a table at the side of the room. There were sandwiches on it. She picked one up, feeling how hard the bread was under her fingertips. She’d had worse than stale bread and… was that wilted lettuce?
“Whoever imagined lettuce was a fitting sandwich filling?” she asked. “There isn’t even anything else here, just lettuce. This is a tragedy.”
“I swear I’ll cut her,” the guard repeated. In her peripheral vision, she could see the woman’s obvious fear. The man’s arm was shaking, her whole body trembling. She was like to have her throat slit unintentionally.
Stella took two of the sandwiches and walked over to the window. Outside, everyone was still yelling at each other, the police determined to be the most dramatic in any room. Perhaps that was why she didn’t like any police officers except Donald; she was not a fan of drama.
“Are you listening to me?” the man yelled.
Stella turned back to face him. “No’ par’c’lary,” she mumbled, her mouth full of hard bread and soggy lettuce. She lifted a half-eaten sandwich up and waved it at him, chewing rapidly, then swallowing. “Not particularly. Sorry, I simply do not believe that any one of Sabini’s men could be so idiotic as to kill someone that Sabini thinks belongs to him. He expects to make money from her. What, will you put a little black dress on and take her place? Don’t be absurd. This isn’t a plan, it’s desperation. Stop hiding, you pathetic worm,” she said, staring at the sandwich as she wandered a few steps closer. “Was this lettuce grown in London? It tastes like London lettuce, and that is not a compliment.”
“I don’t know where the damn lettuce was grown!”
“Oh,” she replied, still staring at the sandwich. “I wasn’t asking you, I was just, you know, asking.” Her hood pulled on the top of her mask and the bottom tilted upwards. She slipped the sandwich under and bit it, and her mask resettled as she chewed and wandered a few more steps closer.
“Asking who?”
“As’in’ ’n gen’ra’,” she said, then swallowed. “Asking in general. Forgive me, but I haven’t eaten in hours.”
“I’ll cut her, I swear.”
“Am I supposed to care? I just organised the greatest embarrassment Sabini has ever had. I had his men barricade Hatton Garden and point guns at police officers. How do you think that’s going to end, even if no one shoots? It won’t end in a way that’s good for Sabini, that’s for sure. Last night, I did the same to the Elephant Boys and the Forty Elephants, and pointed them at each other, and at Sabini. I had the police arrest thirteen of the Birmingham Boys. I’m telling you this, now, because even if Sabini knows, he’s powerless to stop the war that’s coming for him. And if he does survive it, he’ll face me. So why should I care you if you cut away his earning potential, hmm? Put the knife down, and I won’t kill you.” It was a bluff, but she didn’t make it a threat. It was just a statement, in the same tone as she’d talked about the lettuce.
He dropped the knife. The woman he’d been holding lunged, grabbed it, and spun, punching him in the chest. The both of them slowly looked up at the silk tentacle holding the knife over their heads.
“Houdini,” Stella said, with a laugh.
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