Free Rook by Sharon Cameron

should be sending Spear.”
    “Spear drinks at the Holiday much too often for this!”
    Orla shook her wet head. “Do you think your sister is going to pass up the chance to have all the risks to herself?”
    Tom’s frown deepened, and Sophia nearly stomped a foot. “Stop being such a grandmother, Tom! When will we have another opportunity to search LeBlanc’s room and put him off the scent?”
    Tom shook his head. He knew there might not be another opportunity. “By dawn,” he said. “And don’t be reckless.”
    “Reckless? Of course not!” She hopped onto the windowsill. “And keep an eye on my fiancé!”
    “Two of them,” Tom replied.
    Sophia gave them both one last grin, and jumped out the window.

    The roof tiles were slick with rain, but the slope was gentle, and even in the dark Sophia knew exactly when to turn and how far to slide to the edge. She made another jump and landed softly on the flatter roof over her father’s study, ran across this, shinnied down a gurgling drainpipe, swung herself around to a window ledge, and dropped. Her boots thumped on a flat stone, placed there years ago for the purpose by Tom. She had the instinctive urge to move to one side so Tom could jump down after her. But there was no need for that, not anymore. She knew he missed it, the same way she missed him now. It had always been the two of them. And Spear.
    The sea boomed on the edge of hearing, churned by the rain, filling the air with the smell of brine. Sophia lifted her face, letting the water pelt her cheeks until they stung. Then she took a deep breath and ran full tilt through the night, splashing across the lawns, around the derelict print house, taking the fence in one leap. She sloshed her way toward the woodlands, where her horse stood sheltered, saddled, and waiting for her.

    It was well after middlemoon when Sophia tied her horse in another woodland, this time in a thick copse well off the road. The rain had finally poured itself out, only the occasional fat drop smacking against her shoulders and back. She left her wet coat on the horse, making the final part of her journey on foot. There was little danger in this. To come down the A5 was to take the long way around to anywhere unless you were headed to the Holiday inn, and even that was more of a pause than a destination, a place to stop on your way to somewhere better. No one ever used the lane except the vicar, and that was only after chapel, because he liked to shuck off his robes and have a dip in the sea on his way to the pub.
    She was passing the last of the empty printer bungalows, at the place where the sea cliffs had eroded nearly to the road, when a glow caught her eye, up in the sky and far out to sea. Sophia slowed, and then stopped. There was a faint rumble, a short pop of very distant thunder, as if the storm had returned, and then the glow grew brighter, sharper. All at once a ball of light shot beneath the clouds. Sophia ran to the side of the road and jumped up to the first branch of a short, stunted tree, watching yellow fire make a streaking arc across the blackness.
    She’d seen paintings that looked like that. On the walls of Parisian chapels. Fiery streaks of light that had led the dying to the underground of the Sunken City, sent to them by the saint that took the form of a rook. They were drawn as symbols of hope on those walls, like the black feather. But not long before her mother died, when Bellamy had been a different man, her father had told her that during the Great Death the nighttime had been filled with such streaking lights. That when technology failed, all the Ancient machines of the sky, the satellites, burned as they fell, rushing to the ground in pieces of flaming metal. So many machines that they’d fallen for years.
    And she’d looked up into her father’s face and asked him why the satellites fell. He said he didn’t know. So she’d asked him what they were for, and why the Ancients had put machines in the