Mina Wentworth and the Invisible City Read Free

Anne.
    Did it? Mina simply couldn’t guess. She didn’t want to alienate the girl with too many restrictions—and at least she knew where Anne was, that she was staying at her parents. Perhaps that was good for them, too. With Mina married, her brother Andrew serving as a midshipman on the Terror , and Henry living up north, perhaps Anne’s presence would ease the sudden emptiness of their house. Mina couldn’t think of anywhere safer or anywhere better for the girl to stay . . . except with her and Rhys.
    Because she’s mine. A little sister, a daughter—Mina didn’t know exactly what she felt for the girl, but Anne belonged to her now. So she’d let the girl have tonight, but if Anne didn’t return after that, Mina would go and get her.
    Rhys gave a small nod, as if reading the sudden determination on her face and agreeing with it. “Yes,” he said. “We’ll have her back.”
    “Try a smile when you do, captain, so that you don’t terrify the poor girl,” Scarsdale told him before offering one to Mina. “And how was your day, inspector?”
    Which part of it? Mina chose her favorite. “Inspector Mason brought in the body of a man whose lover said he fell down a flight of stairs. I spent the afternoon proving that the shape of the victim’s head wound matched the back side of the cutting apparatus grafted onto her arm, not the edge of a step.”
    “So she killed him?”
    “Oh, yes.”
    Scarsdale gave a mock shudder. “I hate to think of the sins you’d discover if you ever opened me up.”
    Not many that she didn’t already know. Scarsdale was one of the rare men who didn’t need to be opened up to find the truth of a story; he opened his mouth of his own volition. But then, she’d discovered that many bounders did—perhaps because they’d never lived under the oppressive rule of the Horde. Many of them talked long, they talked often, and said nothing worth hearing at all.
    With exceptions, of course. Scarsdale couched almost everything he said in humor, yet every word was sharp and only a fool refused to listen. Her assistant, Newberry, spoke only good, strong sense, and Mina often looked to Superintendent Hale’s example as a model for her own career.
    Yet even they had something in common with the others: Every bounder that Mina had ever met could tell the story of each ancestor who’d escaped to the New World before the Horde had infected England. The tales had been passed along until they’d become family legends—the nobles and the gentry almost always including descriptions of what they’d left behind and how much they’d spent for passage across the Atlantic. Those bounders who were descended from laborers always mentioned which aristocratic or moneyed family they’d attached themselves to, and whether they begged, borrowed, or stowed away—or sold themselves into indentured servitude. Some were proud that their ancestors had been among the first to go, and spoke of them as if they’d descended from prescient deities. If their forefathers had been the last to sail, they invariably included a tale of a harrowing escape, as if the Horde had conquered England with their war machines instead of nanoagents concealed in sugar and tea.
    Families like Mina’s had stories of ancestors who’d remained in England. Two hundred and fifty years ago, William Wentworth, the fourth Earl of Rockingham, had stood in Parliament and named every noble who didn’t stay to fight and to protect England, calling them all cowards. He’d stood in attendance when the Archbishop of Canterbury had placed the crown on Charles the Second’s head after the old king had died—and who had been the last king whose reign hadn’t fallen under Horde rule. Over the next half century, the Earl of Rockingham also witnessed the Horde darga coronate Charles’s son, had seen his estate in Northampton seized and the remainder of his holdings slowly shaved away to pay the Horde’s taxes, until the only property the