You can push, Steris thought at herself. You have to try.
Ignoring her instincts — which wanted her to sit down and write out how she could have foreseen this situation — Steris hopped out of her seat and ran to the floor, shoving unceremoniously between a pair of senators to reach the governor.
“Your Grace,” she said. “I believe I can offer relevant insight to this council.”
“Oh!” he said, glancing toward her. “Lady Ladrian?” He then looked to the side, where Adawathwyn shook her head sharply. “Alas,” the governor said, turning back to Steris, “I feel the council is already crowded. It was wonderful of you to make the suggestion though.”
“Your Grace,” she said. “There is a dire threat to the city. You need to hear me out.”
The governor hesitated.
“She sent a letter about this earlier in the morning, Your Honor,” Adawathwyn said. “Some nonsense about a bomb capable of destroying Elendel.”
“What is this?” he said, turning toward his vice governor.
“It’s true,” Steris said. “You didn’t even give it to him?”
“Your house has a history of inflating problems,” Adawathwyn said. “Remember the time your husband claimed that voting against his workers’ rights act would cause an uproar in the city? Or when he insisted the Roughs would form its own country if we continued our tariff plans?”
“This time it’s different,” Steris said. “He … has confirmation from Harmony.”
“I see,” Adawathwyn said. “And if Harmony himself were going to speak to someone, would he not speak to the governor?”
“Has your husband seen a bomb?” the governor asked. “Does he have proof to back up your claims?”
“He’s gathering evidence now,” Steris said.
“Then,” the governor said, “why not return to us when you have that proof?”
“Because I need to be in that council with you—”
“Lady Ladrian,” he said, softer, “surely you see that this is an important, tense situation. This is not a place for a woman who has been a sitting senator for less than an hour.” He smiled. “Indeed, this situation is going to require delicacy and tact, not…”
Not whatever it is you are, the unfinished sentence seemed to imply. He nodded to her, then joined the others at the door to the governor’s chambers.
Steris was left alone in the center of the floor. Humiliated. She … well, she’d have to make another plan. Yes, plan how to deal with this situation. She could take the rest of the day …
No. She couldn’t afford to spend time planning. She had to get into that room.
And in the moment, she thought of one way she might be able to accomplish it.
32
The Sentinel of Truth broadsheet offices didn’t fit Bilming. Unlike the sleek, modern designs, its building looked like a shack. An older wooden structure, only one story, with a peaked roof, bulging walls, and small windows.
“One of the old buildings,” Kim explained, “from when this section of town held a lot of fishing shacks. The push to start knocking everything down and build anew came five years ago, but there are structures like this sprinkled throughout the city.”
“Doesn’t seem like it’s been in operation lately,” Wax said, noting the padlock on the door, the dark interior. “Is it still publishing?”
“Releases have been sporadic lately,” Kim said. “I had to wait six weeks to read the end of the ‘Survivor’s Last Testament’ arc of Jak’s explorations.”
Rusting idiot man, Wax thought. Ever since the discovery of the “Sovereign” who had ruled and helped the people of the Southern lands, Survivor fervor had been at a high point. Sightings all over the city, particularly on misty nights.
Jak, of course, had capitalized on this and had spent years “discovering” Survivor artifacts in his adventures. It wouldn’t be half as bad if the fool didn’t mention Wax now and then.
They knocked at a side door, and when they got no reply they tried the door and found it locked. So Wax wrapped a coat tassel around his fist and prepared to smash in the window.
“Wax?” Marasi said. “What are you doing?”
“Beginning an investigation.”
“Let’s wait a few minutes,” she said. “See if the owner returns.”
He stopped, his fist a few inches from the glass. “We have a writ of investigation. We can break in.”
“If it’s an emergency,” she said. “And if we’ve tried other options. This is a private citizen’s property, and we have no reason to believe the Set is here. And unlike the apartment earlier, we have no reason to believe a crime has been committed.”
“Let me do it,” Wayne said, walking up to the window. “You can all say you tried to stop me, but I done pulled a Wayne. They’ll let you off.”
“It’s not about what we can get away with, Wayne,” Marasi said, putting her hand to her face. “It’s about proper procedure. You can’t just smash into any place you want to — the world is changing. People have rights. It makes our job harder, but it makes the world better.”
Wax frowned, lowering his hand.
“We can afford to wait a few minutes,” Marasi said. “If we’re right, we want whoever owns this place to work with us — and breaking in might turn them against us. If we’re wrong, then we’ll have ransacked someone’s place of business for nothing.” She glanced at the sun. “It’s lunchtime. The owner might be out — they are still putting out papers, after all, so we have reason to think they’ll show up for work eventually.”
Wax reluctantly backed down. He expected Wayne to complain, but the shorter man just shrugged and jogged over to a street corner food stand to get something to eat. Marasi and Kim settled down on a bench beside a small nearby park, leaving Wax to put his back to a well-groomed tree set into a little piece of earth with a low fence around it.
Moments like this made him feel old. Not just of body, but of mind. He seemed to represent something that was dying. The lone lawman. And … well, it was hard to mourn. Because intellectually, he agreed with Marasi. He’d voted for legal restrictions on constable authority. Society needed robust checks on everyone’s power. Even his. Especially his.
But at the same time, that made the world seem too big to fix. Out in the Roughs he could beat in a door and talk — or sometimes shoot — sense into anyone who needed it. It had made him feel like he could solve basically any problem.
But that had been a false impression of control, hadn’t it? Acknowledging that made him uncomfortable. It wasn’t that the world was growing more complicated. It was that he was letting himself see it had always been complicated.
A minute later, Wax heard something. He swore it came from the building. He narrowed his eyes, burning steel, tracking the blue lines around him to a few moving near the top of the building. An attic? He raised a hand to the others, then slipped out Vindication. Someone was up there. He was certain of it. Had they simply not heard the calls earlier?
He dropped a bullet casing and launched off it, then landed carefully on the roof near where the shingles sloped past a small attic window, shuttered closed. Quiet though he’d tried to be, the metal lines moved sharply right as he landed — then they stilled. Mostly. They were quivering.
He narrowed his eyes at the window. One of the shutter corners was broken, letting whoever was inside peek out. He could see a metal line leading right to the hole. A part of him felt cold, because that metal was almost certainly a gun pointed at him. Shingles rattled under his feet as he engaged his steel bubble — the subtle Push he’d learned to use to deflect bullets. It made the nails in the rooftop vibrate as they tried to escape the field.