A hard shake jostled Mad from a piss-poor slumber. She groaned and flexed her stiff muscles. Sleeping tied to a chair was a poor comparison to the fancy feather bed in her private quarters aboard The Siren. She didn't feel the least bit rested.

"Are you awake?" asked a gruff male voice from behind her. He hadn't stopped shaking her, making her wonder how long he'd been trying to rouse her.

"Yes, I'm awake," she said irritably, shrugging his hand off her shoulder, and then blurted the first question that popped into her head. "What did you do with my sister?"

A beat of silence, and then he grabbed the arms of the chair and spun her around to face him. He growled something at her—"what are you going on about?"—but she was too busy gawking at him for it to register. She'd seen him before—his was a face that was hard to forget—but where? A flash of memory: a beautiful man bowing over Pippa's hand, inviting her to meet him at Hyde Park—with a chaperone, of course, nothing improper. Still, had he been home, Papa would never would have allowed it. Pippa's suitor was new to London, without a title or connections to recommend him, only his fair looks and fine manners. Pippa came home from their jaunt in the park flushed and glowing, her hazel eyes full of stars. But the beautiful man didn't call on her again. Her sister was crushed. And then L'Etoile came for her.

Now the same beautiful man was aboard the airship that captured Pippa. But he was no longer beautiful. Instead, he was striking, a harsher, damaged version of his former self. His posture was perfectly erect, his lips pressed together in a thin line, his black hair cut practically short, echoes of the handsome, proper man who had once courted and then spurned Pippa. Three jagged white lines cut across his cheekbone, disappearing into the eyepatch where his left eye was presumably missing, and his body was too big and brutish for respectability. His one exposed eye was gunmetal blue, glittering with a cold fire that seared into her. His frigid gaze belied the heat that came off him in waves. He fairly hummed with restrained violence. It didn't take seer-sight to see that this man was lethal. Pippa would have been terrified of him.

Mad, fool that she was, had always been attracted to danger.

"Such a shame," she murmured. He might be the scum of the earth, and her sworn enemy, but there was nothing wrong with appreciating his fine form before she put his lights out.

His nostrils flared, revealing a hint of the man beneath the ice. "What is?"

"All that—" she made a show of perusing that big, powerful body— "wasted on a man like you."

His lips curled with faint amusement, but his gaze remained hard and unforgiving. "A man like me? And what sort is that, Miss Mo?"

She snorted at his attempt at a formal address. "I'm no gentle miss. That's Captain Mad Mo to the likes of you. You may call me Captain."

The smile slid off his face, and he stooped over her chair until his face was an inch away from hers. "On my airship, you're nothing. You'll answer to whatever I decide to call you."

He thought he could intimidate her with that big and burly body. Ha! If they weren't in this forsaken boiler room, she'd light him up so fast he'd be nothing but ashes before he could blink. "You can call me whatever you'd like," she said in sultry tones, and was tickled to see his cheeks pink. "It won't change your fate."

"You do know you're tied to a chair."

"Dash my wig, I hadn't noticed!" she said sarcastically. Ignoring the bite of the ropes her skin, she leaned forward until their noses nearly touched. "You, sir, are a villain, and I will see you hang."

He backed away from her and laughed, a low, gravelly sound without any real humor. "Someone must have tied your corset strings too tight. You, my lady pirate, are the one headed for the gallows." He shook his head, his expression bemused. "Perhaps I was unclear. You are under arrest, madam, for the act of piracy in the high skies. By the authority of the Admiralty and Her Majesty the Queen."

Mad's jaw dropped. Her assumptions weren't always right, but rarely did she get it so wrong. What was an officer of the Royal Air Force doing aboard L'Etoile? And what about his connection to Pippa? "This is a slaver ship," she said, struggling to put the pieces together.

Interest tinged with suspicion flared in that singular silver-blue eye. "How do you know that?"

At least he hadn't denied it. She decided on a piece of the truth. "I collect secrets," she said airily. "No one thinks to hold their tongue in front of a known criminal. Honor among thieves, and all that."

His scarred face twisted in disgust. "You consort with slavers."

"Consort with slavers?" she sputtered. "I make sure they burn in hell for all eternity. And do a damned better job of it than your lot." She let her contempt show. Pippa was gone because of the Royal Air Force's ineptitude. "From what I can see, you're too busy seizing slaver ships for your own use instead of ending the Triangle trade properly."

He leaned back against an old relief valve, folding his arms over his broad chest. His mouth quirked up in a mocking smile. "A pirate abolitionist."

He didn't believe her. To be fair, she hadn't taken public credit for her efforts. If it were known that Captain Mad Mo was, in a roundabout way, aiding the Crown instead of stealing from it, she'd lose all credibility. And she couldn't have that, not if she wanted to find Pippa. "Did you hear about what happened to The Antelope?" she asked. The airship had exploded over London in broad daylight, the enormous fireball like a second sun. "What about the captain of La Amistad?" It was assumed he died in a tragic house fire, though they could find no remains of his body. "And let us not forget Don Francisco. An engine fire, was it?"

She could see it in his face as he put two and two together. "You're saying those incidents were your doing."

"It would be quite the coincidence otherwise, wouldn't it?" If the Admiralty paid better attention, they would have noticed a sharp increase in airship fires and explosions over the last few years. And from there, it wouldn't have been too hard to find a pattern: all of the affected airships were active in the slave trade. But the First Sky Lord and his admirals were a bunch of incompetents.

"Say I believe you," he said slowly. "Wouldn't one of the Council's Sensors have found traces of your magic?"

She grinned. "Not after I send for cleanup. I'm surprised you didn't know from all your reconnaissance. You aren't the only one with access to a Null."

He pushed off the valve and began pacing—a difficult feat for a man of his size in such a small, cluttered room. Mad would never have allowed The Siren's boiler room to reach such a state. "Alright," he said. "Alright. This doesn't absolve you of your other crimes."

"Of course not," she said easily. "I freely admit my many crimes. But before you ship me off to a cold cell in Newgate, tell me, what do you know of the Ghost Order?"

He stopped his pacing, whirling around to stare at her. "It doesn't exist."

She tilted her head, studying him. "Either you're stupid, or you've sworn an oath of secrecy. My money's on the latter." When he said nothing, she knew she'd guessed right. "I can lead you to them."

He snorted. "What was that you said earlier? Honor among thieves?"

"The Order plays by its own rules, not ours. I owe them no loyalty."

"No one has ever unmasked a Ghost."

She smiled at him coyly. "Wouldn't you like to be the first?"

He was thinking about it, she could tell. There wasn't a man alive who didn't want a taste of glory, Mad included. And the man who brought down the Ghost Order—a shadowy organization of anarchists with a long history of undermining the Empire—would be written into history. But he shook his head. "You can't bribe me to let you go free. Not even for the Ghost Order."

It had been worth a shot. She changed tacks. "I don't want you to free me. I'm suggesting a slight detour before you turn me in. All I want in exchange for my information is one small favor, and then I'll go to the authorities docilely. I swear it on The Siren."

He didn't trust her, and if he were smart, he never would. But she'd made him a tempting offer, one that, if he were careful, wouldn't impugn his honor as an officer of the Royal Air Force. After a long pause, he gritted out, as though it pained him to ask, "What favor?"

For once, she answered without artifice or ill-intent. "Help me find my sister," she said, "and I'm yours to command."

Sally Slat