"I'm… getting her dress laundered," the girl said unconvincingly, stuffing the last of her clothing into the satchel. She pulled at the broken strap, attempting to tie a knot, or at least keep everything from falling out again.

Five gestured to a bit of black trying to escape, and she quickly shoved the hint of a stocking toe back inside, watching him with wary eyes, dark and secretive. Those eyes had been hidden behind black lace and mystery, and now he was staring right into them. Any remaining aggression he'd felt dissipated as quickly as mist in the midday sun.

"I've seen your show," he said, failing to quell the admiration from his voice. "You're quite good."

"Alright, yes, you've found me out," she said in a strangled, hiccupy tone. "Please don't tell anyone."

Their knees brushed together as he stood up and offered his hand. "Who would I tell?" he asked.

She set aside the satchel and grabbed on, hoisting herself to her feet. Then she stood there, still gripping his hand, eyes narrowed. He felt her grip tighten, and then relax. And then she shook her hand out of his, pursing her lips together. She looked… disappointed?

Seeing her like this, pale and overheated from the surrounding steam, he couldn't interrogate her using threats or manipulations, or… he swallowed thickly… brute force. Never mind the fact that he wasn't supposed to be that person anymore.

Blindsided seemed to be a good word for how he was feeling right now, with an unyielding tightness clamping over his chest. The girl hugged herself tightly, stretching the damp fabric of her shirt over distinct curves that revealed just how un-boy-like she actually was.

The tightness in his chest intensified, doing some kind of twisted strangling maneuver that made it hard to prioritize his thoughts. Dammit, make a list, man. What did he know about her so far?

She was the Shroud.

She had been following him.

She was very… attractive

"What happens now?" Her voice barely carried above the rising steam.

Five snapped his attention back to her face. Her bottom lip quivered as they both regarded each other in silence. Maybe breathing in the hot air wasn't as healthy as everyone in the Upper Rooms had been saying, because Five's floundering thoughts continued to unhelpfully flip-flop between why The Shroud had been following him about town and whether her legs were the actual shape of those stockings he'd touched moments ago…

What the actual hell was wrong with him? A few unshed tears and well-placed curves shouldn't be throwing him off his game. He forced out a cough to clear his throat.

"I have questions," he managed.

Her eyes lit up, which startled him, but he pushed through before he lost his train of thought again.

"I want to know who told you about me, and where I can find them."

"No one told me. I just know." Her voice shook, but an undeniable resolve stood behind it.

"That's…" he was going to say 'impossible', but he was the last person in any reality who could realistically use that word. He'd seen her in action, too. The Shroud wasn't like the lies of leeches and lead pipes that the people above them were selling.

"Those things you say at your show… your Sitting," he corrected himself. "Are they visions, or is someone speaking to you from the Great Beyond?" Case in point: he'd known people who had done both.

She nodded without clarification.

"How does it work?"

"My Gift shows me things that are hidden," she said.

Five assumed from her vague statement that she might be some kind of mind reader, or empath at the very least. He admitted to himself that her stage presence had held him spell-bound. She was the first person he'd encountered who was anything like he used to be. Oddly, he'd found it… comforting.

She straightened and wrapped the strap of her satchel in her hand. Five braced, thinking she was going to lunge for the door, but her other hand opened, palm facing up between them.

"Pay me."

Startled, Five banged the back of his head into the row of mops behind him. "What? Why?"

"I want you to keep my secret, and you obviously have secrets of your own. We should make this agreement binding." Her hand leveled with his nose.

"How much?" Five asked automatically. His ears heard a business deal, even though his head still hadn't wrapped around what exactly was going on here.

"Doesn't matter," she said. "Any coin will bind the contract."

"One coin, got it." Five pulled out one of the two shillings he had in his trousers. "Will this do?"

She shook her outstretched palm at him, and he placed the coin in her hand.

"There," she said, stuffing it somewhere in her breeches. "Now we must keep each other's secrets, in this life and beyond." Her voice started to take on that stage-show quality that Five had heard from the back of the drawing rooms. He tried not to get mesmerized and focused on the hand she held out to him again.

"So now what? I ask you a question?"

"Take my hand."

Well, hell. This time, he was finally going to get some answers.

Her grip was firm, landing somewhere between a formal handshake and a hold capable of supporting the weight between them. Warmth spread through him that probably had more to do with the close quarters than the steam around them. Five didn't have time to analyze whatever that was. He had questions.

"What do you know about me?"

She closed her eyes. "It's the same as last time. All I see is a garden surrounded by an impassable wall and a locked gate." Her eyes snapped open. "Your secrets are safe."

"That's it?"

When she nodded and let go of him, Five's stomach gave an undefinable lurch. He'd just finished a gate job, but there were no gardens or impassable walls involved. All this time and effort to track her down, and this girl… this woman… that was all she had on him?

"What about my past?" he asked, pressing on.

"One coin," she said.

"Dammit, fine." He fished in his pocket for the other shilling. She took it, and then gripped his hand again, as if she needed it for balance.

Her lips pursed, and wrinkles formed where she squeezed her eyes together. Five winced at her strong hold on him, feeling the circulation in his fingers getting cut off. When she finally let go, he flexed his hand and waited for her to look at him again.

"Nothing is changed. The gate won't let me in. I don't See anything else about you." She sounded frustrated at something beyond her words, and she waved her hands at him before he could say anything else. "Shoving another coin at me isn't going to change what I See. But I do know that you're safe."

"What does that mean? How do you know that I'm safe?" he demanded.

"You feel safe," she insisted back.

"Then why were you following me?" he blurted out, not caring that he had no more coins. There had to be more.

He thought he saw fresh color appear in her dark complexion. She tapped her forehead. "Most people are loud up here. You are not. I was… curious."

She shook her head as if she couldn't quite believe it herself. "I'm sorry. I wanted there to be more."

"Have you found anyone else like me?"

"With an empty head? No, you're the first." She pressed her hand into his chest, frowned, and then poked at him.

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing," she said quickly, pulling her hand back like she had just touched hot coals. "But please know that you are safe."

The weird part of all of this was that Five believed her. So where was the relief? Why was he so… disappointed?

Rustling skirts from the hallway attracted both of their attentions. "Saira!" someone hissed.

She cradled her satchel in both arms and reached for the door, but Five held up an arm. "Wait. There's got to be something else," he insisted.

"I told you. It was a gate."

He felt the 'more' from the shine behind her eyes."That's not all. Tell me the rest of it."

She stared at him for a long moment with her dark eyes, and then blinked. "Another time. I have to go."

Five, against his better judgment, let his arm drop from barring the door.

"Saira!" came the whisper, this time almost on the other side of the door.

She tucked the loose strands of hair under her cap, and opened the door, careful to hide Five's form. "I take my tea on Tuesdays," she said, and closed the closet behind her.

Five listened as the whispers turned accusatory.

"What on earth were you doing in there?"

"I thought I was being followed," Saira's whisper carried to his ears. "But the danger has passed. We should leave."

Danger. Everything about this was dangerous. Hiding in the shadows, claiming false identities… The common laws on deceit and trickery mostly applied to beggars and cheaters, but no one would blink twice at carting Five off to Shepton Mallet in chains if his bribed records from Harrow's were made public. If this woman's high-paying clients claimed "deceit through false promises', the magistrate would be forced (or bribed, incidentally) to issue a verdict far worse than a simple reprimand to 'mend her silly ways'. The irony that she had to go through all this deceit to deliver hidden truths to people wasn't lost on him.

The thought that Five might have been the danger she spoke of… that hit him in all the wrong places.

"We need to get you home. Your father has been asking too many questions, and we need to air out these damp skirts before Queen's Square tonight…" The voices carried down the hall until all that remained was hissing steam and gurgling water from the hot spring.

She'd said it like a promise. Another time. Tea on Tuesdays.

At least he'd learned two important facts: Saira from Bath was the Shroud, and no one was hunting him. The scales should have evened out between them, but as Five picked his way to the northern sluice gates to finish his job, he still felt shakily unbalanced.

***

"How was your day?"

Sir Silas Newman stood in the entrance hall, his muss of snowy hair capping a long forehead and chin which matched his fully buttoned dressing gown from the neck down. The fringed beaver fur brushed the floor as he shuffled in his house shoes. As the butler ushered Five inside and locked the door behind him, the man of the house pushed a cart of rattling liquor bottles and a decanter into the foyer.

Five allowed the butler to hang up his coat and made an effort to thank the man for the sake of his host.

"I brought back the other horse," he said conversationally, avoiding Newman's question.

The butler tried to take over the cart, but Sir Newman waved him away. "Don't touch it, Smithers," he warned. "You won't let me set the clocks, so by God I will do this one thing for myself."

With a stoic sigh, Smithers left him to the cart, but not before removing Five's hat right off his head and hanging it on the rack.

Newman continued to stand in the foyer with his curious expression, monocle hanging from a chain attached to his pocket.

In that instant, he looked the way that Five's adoptive father had, or rather, the way that Five would have liked to remember the man if he had cared about anyone besides his own hidden agenda and had more than a stone for a heart.

Five shook himself out of the unpleasant thoughts and found Sir Newman still waiting. Patient. Expectant. Unyielding.

Part of the rental agreement with Newman included a list of obligations, including sitting for a weekly luncheon, taking the mail into town, and giving Mr. Smithers a purpose other than hovering over Newman's every breath. "I'm turning eighty, not turning over on my deathbed!" he proclaimed loudly at their first meeting, when the butler attempted to ink his quill. The old man insisted that their proposal talk include a brunch, stating that 'any house guest of mine must be capable of intelligent conversation through a meal'. Frankly, Five hadn't minded the social experience. It was nice to talk with someone who demanded nothing but his presence.

The man seemed to be asking for his presence now. Along with small talk, Five assumed.

How had his day been? Was there even a word for it?

Unexpected?

Enlightening?

Confusing?

It was a day that put him face to face with the person he'd spent his days and nights agonizing over, only to strike an unlikely contract of secrecy over a few shillings and a handshake. The whole episode had been surreal and… short. Something about Saira-who-was-the-Shroud teased his curiosity and made him want to give her a whole sack of coins, keep asking questions for the sake of listening to her talk. Since she'd been adamant that there was nothing left to tell him about himself, he could have asked her other things, like how she'd discovered her ability, how long she'd had it… if she had any siblings with similar abilities… If her companions hadn't swept her away, he was sure he would have gotten more out of her. To what end? He was embarrassed to admit, if only to himself, that there was no plan or purpose for it.

Sure, he'd 'felt' things before, but goals had always superseded feelings. The Mission. The Job. Survival.

This wasn't any different. His plan didn't have room for deviations of a personal nature. And yet, he'd stayed in town, loitering by the Queen's Square and ducking into the building with the wine delivery. He'd found a quiet corner in the back of the library, figuring that since she'd taken his coins that morning, there was no need to pay twice… okay, that was a cheap excuse.

He'd snuck into Saira-The-Shroud's semi-private Sitting like a shameless stalker. Watched her every move. Evaluated every technique, examined every gesture, searching for tricks and gimmicks or any other clear signs of fraud. At the end of the evening, he'd taken his leave, convinced that she did indeed have the Sight. The faces of her clients as they stepped off the platform showed the unquestionable value of her words, far more valuable than the vision she had shared with him. Clearly, she had seen a more revealing picture of these people than just a garden wall, or they wouldn't have looked so astonished or satisfied.

Maybe it was because of who he had been that she couldn't see past his gate, or whatever. He still didn't know what else she was, but one thing was crystal clear.

Saira from Bath was a young woman who had acquired an unlikely ability and chose to use it to her advantage.

As one does, Five thought wryly.

All those thoughts rattled around inside his head, keeping time with the glass bottles on Sir Newman's cart, making his pulse jump and his veins jittery, like he was on some chemically induced high. He'd almost forgotten Daniel's debriefing on the Bathampton job. His friend hadn't questioned his tardiness, but the suspicious glances told Five that he wasn't fooling anyone. He needed to get his head out of his ass, or this inner distraction would cost him more than a late meeting.

His host quirked a bushy eyebrow at him.

"Fine," Five said. "My day was fine."

His host's other eyebrow rose, and the bottles started rattling over the threshold to the Parlor. "Care to share a drink with me?"

Five's face had not yet grown back into a mature mask of seasoned indifference. It probably showed every bit of what his day had been. He might as well be screaming out loud about the girl in the steamy corridors… the young woman, he corrected himself again, who had turned his day upside down.

Alright then. He knew better than to pretend that he had nothing to talk about.

Sir Newman had lived almost two decades longer than Five's true age, and even claiming to be a hermit, had more social wits than Five would ever acquire. Spending thirty years in a wasteland with a mannequin didn't count for 'people experience'. Neither did receiving pneumatic canisters with the names of his targets inside them. Yeah, he was a veritable genius at quantum mechanics. But today's events had unequivocally illustrated that perhaps not everything inside his head was as good an idea as he thought it was.

And anyway, who was the old man going to tell? Five could spin his experiences into a fantastic yarn, and he would be none the wiser. Better yet, that cart might have something strong enough to clear Five's head. Or at least muddle it well enough for him to get some sleep. It was Friday night, and he'd earned a drink.

He set down his toolbox at the foot of the stairs, which the butler snatched away. Perhaps the old man could help him with some of the newer questions that had cropped up after his strange experiences that day. Five followed Sir Newman into the Parlor and took the proffered brandy glass.

"What does it mean when a lady tells you her schedule for taking tea?"