Only men can join the Guild of Tailors. Only women can be Mechanists, and to trade their secrets is ugly death. When Swan binds her breasts and queues her hair each morning, and when her sister Fei-Li helps with the Automated Seamstress by night, they are playing with knives.
Most people can handle two blades. It’s juggling three that gets you cut.
Lon Lao is sharp and always laughing; Swan keeps him close, as one does with rivals. She worries when she feels his following eyes as they part at dusk.
Fei-Li’s eyes in the window follow him back.
To hack the Nameless you need a Beowulf cluster, a circle in stone, two kilometers of copper wire and a serious disregard for your own safety. That’s just the basic setup, though, and in the last couple years Tach and Ashlock have kitted it out: inscriptions in slippery languages, a hotswap drive rack, staves and amulets and six monitors scrolling green on black.
All of it fails one night on a simple run for Kirrily’s money laundry. Ashlock loses a finger; Tach loses a year of his life. And in return, they get a number that wants to kill them both.