Revolution Business Read Online Free

flickered in the palm of his hand, just in the corner of her vision: a fiery knot that tried to turn her eyes and her stomach inside out. "One."
    The world around them flickered and Huw collapsed under her, dry-retching. Miriam fell sideways, landing heavily on one hip.
    They were in scrubland, and alone. Someone's untended back lot, by the look of it: a few stunted trees straggling across a nearby hillside like hairs across a balding man's pate, a fence meandering drunkenly to one side. A windowless barn that had clearly seen better days slumped nearby.
    Miriam rose to her feet and dusted herself off. Her traveling clothes, unremarkable in New Britain, would look distinctly odd to American eyes: a dark woolen coat of unusual cut over the mutant offspring of a shalwar kameez. Along with her temporarily blond, permed hair it was a disguise that had outlived its usefulness. "Where are you parked?" she asked Huw as his retching subsided.
    "Front of. Barn." He staggered to a crouch. "Need. Painkillers…"
    Something moved in the corner of her sight. Miriam's head whipped round as she thrust a hand in her coat pocket, reaching for the small pistol Erasmus had given her before she recognized Elena. A few seconds later Huw's brother Hulius popped into view, followed almost immediately by Brilliana. "Come on, people!" Brill sounded more annoyed than nauseous. "Cover! Check!"
    "Check," Huw echoed hollowly. "I think we're still alone."
    RCvo!
    "Check!" trilled Elena. "Did they see you, Yul? Ooh, you don't look so good!"
    "Guuuh… Check. I don't think so. Going. Be sick."
    Brill clapped her hands. "Let's get going, people." She was almost tapping her feet with impatience. "We've got a safe house to go to. You can throw up all you like once we report in, but first we've got a job to do." She nodded at Miriam. "After you, milady."
     
    In a soot-stained industrial city nestling in the Appalachians, beneath a sky stained amber by the fires of half a million coal-burning stoves, there was a noble house defended by the illusion of poverty.
    The Lee family and their clients did not like to draw attention to themselves. The long habit of secrecy was deeply ingrained in their insular souls; they'd lived alone among enemies for almost ten generations, abandoned by the eastern Clan that had once-so they had thought until recently, so some still thought-cast them out and betrayed them. Here in the industrial heartland of Iron-gate there was little love for rich foreigners, much less wealthy Chinese merchants, at the best of times. And the times were anything but good: With the empire locked in a bewildering and expensive overseas war (to say nothing of multiple consecutive crop failures and a bare treasury, deflation, and high unemployment) the city was as inflammable as a powder keg.
    Consequently, the Lees did not flaunt their wealth and power openly. Nor did their home resemble a palatial mansion. Rather, it resembled a tenement block fronted by the dusty window displays of failing shops (for only the pawnbroker's business remained good). Between two such shops there stood a blank-faced door, a row of bellpulls discreetly off to one side. It might have been a stairwell leading to the cramped flats of shopkeepers and factory foremen. But the reality was very different.
    "Be seated, nephew," said the old man with the long, wispy beard. "And tell me what brings you here?"
    James Lee bowed his head, concealing his unease for a few more moments. As was right, he went to his knees and then sat cross-legged before the low platform on which his great uncle, the eldest of days-and his companions, the eldest's younger sibling, Great-Uncle Huan, and his first wife-perched.
    "The Clan has gone too far," he began, then paused.
    "Tea for my favorite nephew," the eldest commented, and one of the servants who had been standing behind James bowed and slipped out through a side door. "You may continue."
    James took a deep breath. "They resumed their scheme to