Free Escapement by Jay Lake

Masks, persons of rank and title invisible to her. People could not be otherwise. Every tribe had a chief, every gang had a boss, every little pack had a leader.
    The drawing of the bolt startled Childress from her reverie. The coast outside had become long dunes and a sandspit. Houses dotted the rise above the storm tide line. Near Boston, perhaps?
    She turned to meet Anneke.
    “The Mask Poinsard will see you now.”
    “No.” Childress might as well make what little point was hers to make. “I require a bath, clean clothing, and a decent meal before I can present myself to a senior member of our brotherhood.”
    Anneke snorted. “I see you have not spent much time aboard ship.” She shrugged. “I can escort you to a lavatory. Do what you will there, but be quick about it.”
    “And breakfast?”
    “Tea and crackers, if you’re lucky.”
    Anneke’s patience had limits, then, something that came as no surprise to Childress. Still, she’d won a small battle, simply by standing on propriety. She had no illusions of power—a lifetime as a woman and a librarian had ensured that—but she could show that she, at least, valued herself.
     
    The lav was dreadful small, and reeked of rust and the natural uses to which it was put. The water that dropped from the little pipe overhead was bone-cold. Childress didn’t even consider washing her hair. She did undress to her chemise so she could wet her face and hands and dab elsewhere that fear and stress had left their scent. She resolutely pushed aside her feelings of humiliation at being forced to clean herself this way, like a prisoner in a cell.
    She was not a prisoner. She was a white bird, under transport now, following a guide she’d agreed to decades before. This was not a sentence. She was not being punished.
    Childress didn’t believe that for a minute, of course. But it was what she told herself to feel better. Not that it worked, but still she forced the thought. To think on a thing was the first step to creating it.
    Anneke banged on the hatch all too soon. “You’re late already,” she called, voice muffled through the metal.
    Childress buttoned herself back into her slip and dress, taking care that the high collar sat properly. She felt shoddy, dusty, and rumpled, but it was the best she had available to her in this moment. She opened the hatch.
    Anneke held a mug of tea and two rough slices of coarse brown bread. Childress reflected that if she had ever chanced to learn the arts of men, she might contrive an escape in that moment, tossing the steaming tea in her captor’s face and running toward—what? The stern of a ship she didn’t know, steaming off an unfamiliar coast?
    Instead she took the mug and sipped cautiously. It was a strong dark tea such as the coolies drank in the restaurants in East Haven, where a woman alone might safely dine on exotic foods from the Indian subcontinent. Still, the drink was warm and good and she could taste the stiff infusion, which would set her blood to pumping harder. Childress braced herself againstthe door and drained the mug as quickly as her tolerance for the heat within would allow. She pocketed one slice of bread as she handed the mug back to Anneke. She gnawed on the other.
    Childress felt like a beggar boy going before the truancy bench. This was idiotic. She was an educated woman of spacious intellect and strong will. A single grubby night of confinement and poor nutrition was insufficient to break her spirit.
    She gave Anneke a broad smile, letting her eyes twinkle—a look she’d never yet offered to a student, not in thirty-six years at the Divinity School.
    “It is now convenient for me to pay a call upon the Mask Poinsard,” she said in her most pleasant voice.
    Anneke snorted, but led her down the passage, the empty earthenware mug clutched like a club, perhaps in case weapons should suddenly be needed.
     
    The Mask Poinsard waited in a forward cabin above decks. The room was spacious, eight or ten