The Whitcombes' son-in-law was E-rank, the lowest rank in Highmoor.He was also the one who handed out the ranks.Nobody at Verity Whitcombe's birthday party knew the second part. They all knew the first, and they knew it the way they knew which fork to use. In Highmoor every citizen carried a rank card from A to E, and that card decided which school would teach you, which hospital would treat you and which streets you could walk without being stopped. Seven great Houses ran the city from the top of that ladder. Wyatt Lowry had come in from the very bottom, an E-rank servant married into House Whitcombe because its matriarch, Winifred Whitcombe, had arranged it, and nobody had dared to say no to her. They had found other ways to say it since. They called him the pet.He was standing where the family liked him best, at the far edge of the terrace near the kitchen door, when Peregrine Varley cornered his wife.Verity had her back against the stone balustrade with the city lights behind

In Highmoor, a rich man never went to prison. He bought someone to go for him.Wyatt stood in the doorway of the flat and read the contract twice, because the first time the words wouldn't stay still. Under the rank law, any A-rank convicted of a crime could buy an E-rank to serve his sentence. The law was old, it was perfectly legal, and nobody in the upper city had ever seen a reason to change it.The convicted party was Peregrine Varley. Last month he had driven drunk along the river road and killed a cyclist, a man whose name the papers printed once and then forgot. Peregrine's card was still suspended, but his father's wasn't, and the contract carried Hallam Varley's seal at the bottom.The proxy was Elsie Lowry, sixteen years old.Her papers had been sold that morning by Wyatt's landlord. In the Lowside, landlords held their tenants' rank papers as security against the rent, and the law let them sell those papers to anyone who asked. The Varleys had asked. The price was written

The servants' door at Whitcombe House had never been locked in Verity's lifetime, because nobody who mattered ever used it.She slipped through it a little after ten with her hood up and climbed the back stairs in her socks. Wyatt couldn't come. The guards had orders to call the police the moment they saw him, and the Assessor's people were still in and out of the library. But he had told her about the teacup, the one that had been on her grandmother's bedside table and then simply wasn't, and Verity hadn't slept properly since.Her grandmother's room smelled of antiseptic and lilies. Winifred lay very small in the middle of the bed, wired to a monitor that beeped softly and steadily, a clear drip bag hanging on a stand beside her. Her hand was cool and papery when Verity took it."I left, Gran," she whispered. "I climbed the garden wall like I used to when I was twelve. You'd have been furious." She swallowed. "You told me to marry him, and I didn't speak to you properly for a year.

The Council had given Zero thirty days to show its face. Wyatt answered them before the sun came up, the only way Zero could.He wrote the orders at the cellar table a little after three in the morning, under the bare bulb, while Verity and Elsie slept on the mattress in the corner. He didn't write them in anger. He had been angry for days, and anger made careless orders. He wrote them the way Winifred had taught him, slowly, reading every line back as if the person it touched were standing in front of him. There were two orders. He checked each of them three times, sent them to Odessa and sat in the dark, waiting for the city to wake.At six, a bus driver at the Lowside depot tapped his card on the reader, and the screen flashed green with a letter he had never seen beside his name. He tapped it again. He took it to his supervisor. By half past six there was a queue of drivers outside the depot office, all holding their cards up to the light like men checking banknotes for forgeries.

Winifred Whitcombe opened her eyes at twenty to five in the morning, and the first thing she asked for was a judge.The night nurse at the clinic nearly dropped her tray. For three days the old woman had lain in that quiet room with no name on the door, breathing more easily on clean fluids, the color slowly returning to her face, but she hadn't moved or spoken once. Now she was staring at the ceiling with sharp, tired eyes, her fingers plucking at the blanket as if she were already late for something.Odessa Rhodes arrived within the hour. She brought Judge Okonjo with her, a dark coat thrown over what were very obviously pyjamas. Okonjo was the only judge in Highmoor who had already defied House Varley once, in a courtroom full of people who had wanted her to look away. She pulled a chair up to the bed, took out a notebook and uncapped her pen."Mrs. Whitcombe," she said gently. "Your granddaughter's husband has been charged with poisoning you."Winifred's voice was thin, but every