She bit her lip and started for home. Surely, anything was better than being cut into pieces and having her insides strewn across the ground? Surely it was? But she felt dirty and cold and unclean down to her soul, which she never had felt even when letting the meanest, dirtiest louts in the East End spend inside her. She brushed wetness from her eyes and pressed a hand against her belly, where a child was growing. Whatever else, she had to think about far more than just herself, now. Which was why she could have done nothing else, today.
But, oh, God, she was so afraid.
And Mr. Aleister Crowley frightened her only a little less terribly than the rest.
* * *
“Kit!”
Kit Carson glanced around, peering into the nervous crowds thronging Commons, many of them wondering in shrill tones what would happen and would their vacations be cancelled and could they get a refund if Senator Caddrick closed down TT-86? He found Robert Li bearing down on him and smiled at his long-time friend.
“Hi, Robert. What’s up?”
The antiquarian stared. “What’s up? You are kidding, aren’t you? Kit, are you out of your gate-addled mind? Skeeter Jackson, Neo Edo’s house detective?”
Kit chuckled. “Oh, that. Is that all?”
His friend’s expression altered to one of deep pity. “Oh, God, it’s true. You have lost your mind.”
Kit’s lips twitched. “Glad to know you think so highly of me, pal. No, I haven’t lost my mind. But you—and just about every other ‘eighty-sixer on station—have apparently lost your sense of fair play.”
Robert Li blinked, the fair skin of his maternal Scandinavian heritage at odds with features bequeathed him by a paternal Hong Kong Chinese grandfather. “Come again?”