Locke's Ballistics sits between a smelting plant and a slaughterhouse and smells like both of them with a layer of gunpowder on top.
A bell rings when I push the door open.
"Don't move," a woman says.
I don't move.
She's at a workbench in the center of the room, bent over a single open bullet casing in a vise with a glass dropper held perfectly still three inches above it.
Her right jaw is scar tissue, old chemical burns healed rough. Her left eye is a brass clockwork lens that whirs and clicks when it focuses, which it can't do right now because she's watching the dropper.
Three fingers on her left hand are steel. Home-machined, by the look of the joints.
"I'm putting mercury into a primer," she says, voice flat. "You breathe heavy on these boards, the vibration sets it off and we both lose our faces. So hold still and shut up."
I hold still and shut up.
She adds the drop. Seals the casing. Presses it. Exhales.
Then she turns and looks at me properly, and her brass eye does its clicking focusing thing and I watch her read my coat, my boots, the LeMat on my hip, the bloodstain on my collar, all of it in about three seconds.
"You look like you lost a fight with a building," she says.
"I won, actually."
"Sure." She wipes her hands on a rag. "What do you want? I don't do custom work for drifters who look like they might not be alive tomorrow."
I put Vance's crumpled receipt on the counter.
She looks at it. Her expression doesn't change exactly, but something in it tightens.
"Vance," she says.
"He's dead."
"I know. News travels in the Dregs." She doesn't pick up the receipt. "He owed me fifty silver."
"I know. I've got his bags."
"I don't want his bags. I want the silver." She looks up. "Or something better."
I set the LeMat on the counter between us.
Her brass eye clicks. Once, twice, three times.
She picks it up with both hands and turns it over slowly, and I watch someone fall in love with a piece of engineering in real time.
"LeMat. Nine-round cylinder and a grapeshot barrel underneath." She tilts it to the light. "Custom second muzzle. This is beautiful work. Who did it?"
"Me."
"Liar." But she's not angry about it. She's running her thumb along the rifling.
"Bismuth-core rounds. Barium-nitrate tips. That's what you need." She sets the gun down. "Burns through Kevlar and bone armor at contact range. Cauterizes entry so they don't bleed out, they just die from shock." She tilts her head. "What are you going after?"
"Bio-Baron Vexar's cryo-silo."
Silence.
"In the Brass Canopy," she says.
"That's the one."
She looks at the ceiling for a beat. Then: "You're completely insane."
"Regularly."
"And you don't have fifty silver."
"No."
"Okay." She says it like she's agreeing to an inconvenience rather than criminal conspiracy. "The rounds on credit. You come back with a liter of pure E-1378 from Vexar's stock and we're even. Plus I want interest."
She holds up the thermobaric shell she's already pulling from a lockbox behind her, glowing orange, the size of a fat thumb.
"This goes in your under-barrel. Creates a vacuum explosion on detonation. Don't use it indoors unless you want the ceiling to meet the floor."
"There's a doctor," I say. "Disgraced. Used to work for the Barons. He has a map of Vexar's estate."
"Harrow," she says immediately. "Cathedral on Smithson Street. Drinks too much, talks too little, absolutely hates the world." She pauses. "He'll help you if you give him a good enough reason. Vexar ruined his life."
She starts loading the custom rounds into a velvet box, steel fingers moving fast.
"Name?" I ask.
"Locke. Clementine Locke." She snaps the box shut and slides it across the counter. "Everyone calls me Matchstick."
"Why?"
She smiles, and it's the first genuine expression I've seen from her, sharp and a little dangerous. "Because I've burned down three things that needed burning and I'm working on a fourth."