The Mark of the Dragonfly (13 page)

Piper shook her head. No one knew better than she that she didn’t belong here. A scrapper staying in a private train car, eating fresh fruit and being served a breakfast fit for royalty—she wouldn’t have believed it if she’d heard the story from Arno Weir or one of the other scrappers.

When she got back to the suite, she was surprised to see the porter standing at the door talking to Anna. He was an elderly man with a shiny bald spot, dressed in a navy blue jacket and black pants. He listened with a polite, bland expression as Anna talked and gestured animatedly about something. Piper had to look down to hide her smile. Seeing Anna’s excited expression helped dissolve some of her anger. Piper didn’t know how she managed it, but when Anna wasn’t being annoying, she had an air about her that made Piper want to grin. Kind of like a puppy.

“Piper!” Anna said when she saw her. “This is Mr. Jalin. I was just telling him what you said, that I couldn’t wear this bathrobe around the train, and he agreed with you.”

“Wholeheartedly, miss,” said Mr. Jalin, his lips twitching.

“So I asked him if there was anything else I could wear besides a bathrobe, and he told me there’s a clothing
merchant traveling on the train—Ms. Varvol. She sells dresses, coats, petticoats, hats, trousers, shirts—”

Piper held up a hand to stop the flood. “That’s great, Anna.” She looked at Mr. Jalin. “Can you tell us where to find Ms. Varvol?”

“She spends most of her time in the dining car or the library,” he told her. When Piper thanked him, the porter turned to Anna. “Is there anything else I can do for you, miss?”

Anna shook her head. “Thank you very much.”

Mr. Jalin inclined his head to them both and moved off to the passenger cars. Piper followed Anna back inside their room and flopped down on the sofa. “Well, at least something’s gone right today. We’ll go see Ms. Varvol at lunch. I just hope she doesn’t charge much.”

“Oh!” Anna, who had just sat down next to Piper on the sofa, suddenly sprang up and reached into her robe pocket. “I almost forgot. I have to show you something.” She drew out a leather money belt. “I forgot I was wearing this. I saw it when I took off my dress. It weighed me down so much, I didn’t want to put it back on, but I thought I’d better keep it in case we needed it.”

She held the belt out to Piper. Threaded onto it was a row of rectangular gold coins. Piper’s heart stopped when she saw them. Ten, twenty, thirty—Piper lost count.

“Where … did you … get those?” Piper had never seen so much money in one place before. She reached
out and caressed the gold coins, running her finger along their smooth surfaces. There was enough money on that belt to feed everyone in Scrap Town Sixteen for a year.

Anna shrugged. “I don’t know where they came from,” she said. “Is it because of the dragonfly tattoo that I have them, do you think?”

“I … maybe. I don’t know.” Piper was having trouble concentrating. She couldn’t take her eyes off the coins. “You’d better hide them someplace safe. You don’t want anyone to steal them.” Goddess, it would be like stealing a new life.

“Oh, well then, you have them. You’ll keep them safer than I could.” Anna held the money belt out to her. Piper swallowed hard and reached to take it. “Are you all right?” Anna asked. She touched Piper’s hands. “Your palms are sweating, and your body is shaking. Are you cold? You might have a fever. Are you hot, Piper?”

Piper shook her head. “No, I’m fine,” she answered, but all she could think was, who was this girl? How could she be so calm, just hand over a small fortune in gold coins as if it were nothing? Did she not understand what something like this meant to a scrapper who had to worry about starving or freezing to death in her house because she didn’t have the coin for food and firewood? Did she not care? Maybe, where she was from, money in these amounts was common, or was it that she just trusted Piper to take care of it for her, as she trusted her for everything else?

“Are you sure you’re all right, Piper?” Anna gripped Piper’s hand worriedly. “Doesn’t this solve our problem about the clothes?”

Piper laughed finally, though still uneasy. “It solves the clothing problem and a few others,” she said.
With this kind of money, we would never have needed to sneak onto the train. We could have marched on like queens
. “We’ll get clothes from Ms. Varvol, and we’ll easily get an appointment with Raenoll once we get to Tevshal.”

As long as they avoided the slave market, she added to herself. Even if the slavers gathered far outside the city limits, there was still a significant danger for two girls walking alone on the streets. Large crowds were the places to be, and they needed to stay as close to the train station as possible. Knowing that they carried such a large sum of coin didn’t make things any easier, but as long as they didn’t flash the gold around, she thought they would be relatively safe.

Piper sat on the sofa for a long time, holding the money belt, staring at the rows of gleaming gold.

At lunch, Piper went to the dining car to look for Ms. Varvol. She wasn’t hard to spot—her long, straight black hair was tucked beneath a flamboyant purple hat with hipa bird feathers on the brim, and she wore an expensive-looking jade gown. When Piper walked up to her, she was sorting through a thick book of fabric
samples, using a magnifying glass to inspect each fiber of the cloth closely.

She looked up when Piper stopped at her table. “Yes?”

“Ms. Varvol?” Piper asked, feeling suddenly nervous standing next to the elegant woman.

The woman eyed her up and down, from the tangled spirals of her hair to her oversized coat to her muddy boots, which Piper thought she’d cleaned up fairly well, but from the woman’s wrinkled nose, she guessed she was wrong. “I have no coin to spare, little one,” Ms. Varvol said, and made a shooing motion with her hand. Her fingers were large and thick, the rolls of flesh almost burying a small square emerald on her left index finger.

“I’m not here to beg,” Piper said, forcing herself to be polite. “The porter told me you sell clothing. I need to buy a dress, a warm coat, and some shoes.” She hesitated. “Also a pair of trousers and a shirt.” She couldn’t part with her dad’s coat. She didn’t want to replace
any
of her old clothes, actually—she felt at home in them—but if she was going to be traveling with Anna, she needed to look like she belonged in the girl’s company. They’d draw less attention if they looked like they came from the same social class.

Ms. Varvol went back to looking at her fabric samples. “Show me your coin, and then you can have some of my time,” she said. “As you can see, I’m extremely busy.”

“Oh, I can see that,” Piper said sarcastically. She
reached into her innermost jacket pocket, where she’d stowed Anna’s money belt. She took two gold coins off the belt—not enough to raise suspicions, but enough to get the woman’s attention—and held them under Ms. Varvol’s magnifying glass.

The woman glanced up sharply. Her expression of impatience melted into a sugary smile. “My dear! Come and sit down. I’ll order us a glass of kelpra juice, and we’ll talk measurements. I have just the dress to complement your skin tone. You’ll be lovely.”

“The dress isn’t for me,” Piper said. “It’s for a friend of mine. Listen, do you mind coming back to our suite? You can measure her there.” Piper had the satisfaction of seeing the woman’s eyes widen before she nodded vigorously.

“But of course, my dear. Just let me gather my supplies.” The woman bundled up her fabrics, grabbed a large case sitting on the seat next to her, and stood to follow Piper back to their car.

As Piper led the way back to the suite, she wondered, was this what it was like to have money—every conversation so easy, everyone so eager to please? The rich people in the cities must be absurdly spoiled. They never had to work at being polite or try to convince others to take them seriously. All they had to do to get what they wanted was flash some coin, and everyone jumped to serve them. One had to treat them that way, didn’t they, in order to get one’s own bit of coin? False civility and
money changing hands—a show, that was all it was—but Piper had never been on the other side before.

Now Piper was the stiff hip. Anna had put all that coin into her hands with nothing but the utmost trust that she would use it to help her. Piper felt the horrible burden of that trust roiling inside her.

You can step off the train at Tevshal and disappear into the crowd, and no one will ever find you. The wolf isn’t looking for you; he’s looking for Anna. You could take those coins, get on an express train, and be halfway to Ardra before Anna even thinks to notice you’re missing. A new life, just waiting for you to take it. You will never go hungry again, and you will never have to go near a factory
.

Her heart raced at the thought. To be safe, to have the security of money wrapped around her like an impenetrable shield—then she imagined the look on Anna’s face when she realized that Piper had abandoned her, that she was truly alone. Shame washed away Piper’s excitement. Even at his lowest point, her father had never resorted to stealing coin to feed them, though he could have, easily. Bandit camps and sky raiders thrived by attacking trains and trade caravans, and they were always looking for men to replenish their numbers. Piper had seen them in town talking to Arno Weir more than once. She knew that the merchant would have pointed them to her father in a heartbeat if he’d thought her father would have been interested in joining up.

Yet, choosing to stay honest had driven her father to
the factory, to his death. What had honesty gotten him in the end? It had left Piper an orphan and forced her to care for herself any way she could.

The thoughts nagged at her all during Anna’s fitting. Piper was still reluctant to replace her old clothes, but Anna insisted that she be fitted with new pairs of trousers and shirts. Piper tried to focus on picking out some clothes from Ms. Varvol’s case, but all the subtle shades of browns and blacks looked the same to her. In the end, Ms. Varvol selected two pairs of sandy-colored trousers and two white shirts of the softest material Piper had ever felt. She thought she hardly looked like herself in these new outfits. She’d never had creases down the front of her trousers, or a shirt tailored to fit the curves of her body. Anna was so excited to see the transformation she abandoned the idea of a dress and petticoats for herself and asked for outfits like Piper’s.

A small skirmish erupted over her dad’s old coat and boots, but Piper flat-out refused to part with either of them. They compromised—Ms. Varvol took the coat and patched the torn places, all the while looking as if she was secretly planning to burn the garment. There was nothing to do about the boots. Ms. Varvol refused to look at them, so Piper wrapped them in one of her old shirts and stored them in her satchel along with her tools and the medicine and food packs. She let herself be fitted for brand-new leather boots, which she had to admit were far more comfortable than her father’s oversized
ones, but still she felt like she was betraying her father somehow, discarding pieces of his memory.

Piper blinked back sudden, unwelcome tears as Ms. Varvol tied the bootlaces and sat back on her heels to admire her work. “There, aren’t you pretty?” she said.

Pretty? Piper supposed so. If Gee saw her now for the first time, he would never know she was a scrapper. Well, until she opened her mouth. Anyway, wasn’t this what she wanted? To shed all vestiges of the scrap town and her old life? She’d never felt more disconnected from them than she did at this moment.

So why did it feel wrong?

Two days later, just after dark, the train arrived at Tevshal. Thoughts of Anna’s money and what she could do with it hadn’t stopped running through Piper’s head, but thankfully, when they stepped off the train, the city itself distracted her.

Her father used to call Tevshal the Silver City or the Night Eye. Human town houses and sarnun vaults weaved together along the narrow streets, lit by the night eye flowers that spilled from baskets hung on wrought-iron posts. Unique to the city, the white blossoms only opened at night and gave off a silver glow brighter than any lantern. With the vaults and townhomes all bundled together in the light, the city reminded Piper of a tightly knotted metal star.

Absorbed by the twinkling glows, the flowers
swaying in the night breeze, Piper didn’t realize that Anna was tugging on her coat sleeve. She turned to look at the girl. “Sorry, what?”

“I said did you see their bell shapes?” Anna asked excitedly. “Like a little candle turned upside down. The flowers only grow here. It’s the combination of uniquely enriched soil, temperate climate, and the large population of sarnuns in the city.”

“What are you talking about?” Piper asked in surprise. “Do you remember being here before?”

Anna shook her head. “I found a book on rare flowers in the train’s library. There’s a fascinating section on the night eye’s bioluminescence and its connection to sarnun physiology.”

Biolu—what?
Piper thought, glancing at Anna in confusion. How did the girl remember all that? She steered them onto one of the main streets. “All right. Er, I don’t know what any of that means,” she said. “Maybe you could tell me about it later, after we find Raenoll.”