True to her word, the girl held herself back, keeping just ahead of Genevieve at an antsy, uncomfortable jog. Showing so much restraint made the girl anxious, if her fidgeting was anything to go by, but Genevieve really did need it. Most of the roads were traveled enough for the ground to be tightly packed and not too rough on her bare feet, but there were still occasional rocks, and whenever they stepped off onto a side street she found herself stepping on more gravel than she wanted to. Despite the discomfort, Genevieve kept her eyes on her guide and kept moving forward, keeping pace as best as she could and not letting herself think about anything else.

Every now and then the devil girl glanced back at her to make sure she was still following, which Genevieve appreciated. She would be completely and utterly lost without her help, and the looks of fear, confusion, and disdain they got from the few people who noticed them on the street weren’t reassuring. Everybody was hurrying inside and shutting themselves in tightly, anticipating the trouble they already knew was coming. None of them wanted anything to do with whatever mess Genevieve and the devil girl had gotten themselves into.

After a few minutes of running through the streets like that, the devil girl jerked her head up just slightly, as though she was suddenly struck by an important thought. “Oh, right,” she said, and she slowed her pace down even further to match Genevieve’s step for step. "Marcie."

Genevieve was confused for a moment before she realized what that meant. "That's… your name?"

"Yeah. Marcelle Silver. But Marcelle's kinda weird so folks just call me Marcie. Or Marce. My dad called me 'Marcester' once but I told him I was not gonna let that catch on and it didn't."

"I… I see." Every word that came out of this girl’s mouth made her significantly less intimidating. Genevieve was glad for that, though. "Well, then, my name is–"

"I know who you are!" Marcie interjected. "C'mon. You're that princess. Princess Gene… Genese? Guinevere?" She scratched the side of her head with a clawed hand. "Okay, shit, maybe I don't know," she muttered sheepishly.

"That's all right." Without slowing down, Genevieve roughly mimicked a courtly curtsy in her ripped gown. "I am Princess Genevieve of Verdane. Thank you very much for your assistance."

"Right, that was it," Marcie said. "Jen."

"...Jen?" Genevieve repeated, taken aback.

"Oh. Should I not call you that?" Marcie asked, looking away like she had been rebuked. "All right. That's fine. Uh, should I say the whole thing every time then, or–"

"That's really all right," Genevieve said, cutting her off. "You can call me whatever name you want. I’m completely in your debt right now."

"Ah, no you're not." Marcie drew her cloak around herself, her body language hunched and guarded. Her scraggly bangs hung down over her face, giving her a grumpy yet charmingly disheveled look. "All I did's the bare minimum. It's a pretty sorry state of stuff if that whole crowd could watch what was going on there without anyone even trying to raise a hand."

"You fought off a dozen automaton soldiers single-handedly," Genevieve said dumbfounded. "That's far beyond the bare minimum."

"Eh, they're really not that big a deal," Marcie said with a shrug. "They got this, like, processing center thing in the middle, and a buncha motor junctions that control the function of each individual limb and stuff, uh…"

She spoke with the halting cadence of someone about to wander off into the woods, but before she lost Genevieve completely Marcie bit at her lip with her pointed, sharklike teeth and reconsidered the trajectory of her sentence.

"...Point is they're not built with a lotta redundancy in mind? Armor's s'posed to keep all the important stuff safe, so if you got somethin' that'll punch through it and know where you need to hit they'll, uh, they'll go down pretty quick."

Marcie turned down a particularly narrow back alley, too narrow for them to walk side by side, so Genevieve followed a few steps behind. It was strange to hear a girl barely older than herself talk so casually about taking down the fearsome metal soldiers that had convinced her father to marry off one of his children in the first place. But when Genevieve thought about it, it only made sense Marcie would have some experience fighting them. "I saw your face on a wanted poster," she said. It wasn’t an accusation or even a question, just a statement of fact.

"Yeah, well… that's a misunderstandin'." Marcie's tail flicked the air behind her. "Okay, half a misunderstandin' and half a he deserved it. Times, uh, five or six. Call it three misunderstandings and three he deserved its."

"You… get into trouble like this a lot," Genevieve said. If she were thinking straight she probably wouldn’t have said something so pointless, but she was struggling to keep up in more ways than one.

"I mean, s'not like I'm tryin' to." Marcie sighed. "S'just, you know. When the creeps in charge are bein’ shitty to people and stuff. I mean, like, back there, right? No one else was doin' something about it. And it's just, like, someone should do something about it." They came to a big pile of discarded wood and furniture stacked up in the alleyway, almost fully blocking it. Genevieve assumed it was a makeshift barricade, but nobody would have had time to construct it in the short time they had been running. "So I felt like I had to. Be the one who does something, or whatever."

Before Genevieve had a chance to ask what they were going to do about the obstruction, Marcie exhaled with a sort of hoo, boy cadence and hopped up onto the furniture pile. She was unnaturally lithe and nimble, her tail out behind her flexing and curling to help her keep balance. With just a couple of graceful, fluid leaps, her athletic body stretching and bounding with ease, she was on top of the pile and bending down to offer Genevieve a hand up. "Here, c'mon."

It took a fair bit more effort for Genevieve to climb the mountain of debris, scraping and scuffing her already-ruined gown along the way. As soon as she reached the top she stumbled and swayed, nearly losing her footing, and had to crouch down to clutch the overturned dresser beneath her for dear life. Marcie, though, was completely unfazed, standing on the awkwardly angled wooden furniture as easily as if they were still on the ground.

"Besides," Marcie continued. "I'm like… scary. So folks kinda don't wanna give me that much leeway. Which is sorta unfair I think but, y'know, it is what it is."

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

"W-well," Genevieve said. She was a little too busy trying not to fall and split her head open to come up with a response to that. "I, ah… oh dear…"

The nervousness in her voice made Marcie glance down, and only then did she realize the plight Genevieve was in. "Oh!" she said. "Sorry, sorry. Didn't realize you were, uh. Having trouble. Here, hold on," she said, leaning down to help steady Genevieve. "We'll hop down real quick. Just stay close. I gotcha."

The climb down was barely less harrowing, but it only took a few moments before they were back on the ground. Genevieve stood still a moment to make sure her feet were planted firmly on the dusty earth before she started brushing off her dress, as useless as that was. "What is this pile of furniture even doing here?"

"Oh," Marcie said, "people throw stuff like this up here and there around this part of town. It screws up the metal guards' tracking. They're not clever enough to smash through 'em without someone giving an order, so they try to find the long way around. They don’t bother to send humans out this way too often, either, which means you usually get a good few weeks of privacy."

"I see," Genevieve muttered, trying to wipe some of the dry, crumbling dirt off of her hands. "The spirit of ingenuity I suppose."

"Folks'll do anything to keep the cops away." Marcie shrugged. "And can you blame 'em? Cops suck." She leaned her back against the alley wall and then let herself slide down it, settling into a sitting position with a soft ugh. The front of her cloak was open, giving Genevieve her first good look at what she was wearing underneath. A plain off-white shirt with short sleeves, brown pants made from a coarse fiber, and around her waist a thick belt where her two strange pistols were holstered. One of her arms was mostly exposed, but the other had a long, thin cotton sleeve, separate from the shirt, with a padded leather armguard wrapped around it. Genevieve wasn't sure how much protection that could possibly add, but it seemed to work for her earlier. On her feet she wore thick leather boots with the toes cut off to make room for the two large, curved claws she had at the front of each foot. "Anyway," she said, "It'll buy us a bit of time to rest. Sorry, but I kinda need it."

"Are you sure we can just stop?" Genevieve said, a little more forcefully than she meant to. "They're still after us. They can’t be far behind. Do we even have a plan to…"

She trailed off when she noticed something dark and wet staining the bottom of Marcie's pant leg. Instead of saying anything more, Genevieve knelt down by Marcie's side and rolled her pants up past the ankle to take a better look.

"Hey, what're you–"

"You're bleeding," Genevieve said. There was a gash on the back of her leg where the automaton caught her with its blade. The scales there were damaged, and blood was slowly seeping out through the wound.

"Well… yeah," Marcie said, looking away from Genevieve. She tapped her knuckle against her scaly blue face. "I got a little more protection than most folks, but there's still skin n' blood n' stuff under there."

"I wasn't expecting there to be something else."

"Good. Cuz there isn't."

Are we arguing about this? Genevieve wondered. She genuinely didn't know. But she decided to just move on. "You're going to have a difficult time if you keep running on that. At least let me dress it for you."

"It's fine," Marcie insisted. "I heal quick. Not, like, instantly or nothing. But give it a day and it'll sort itself out."

"Are we planning to sit here behind this stack of chairs for a day?" Genevieve asked, getting just a little bit snarky.

"No," Marcie admitted.

"All right. Then let me dress it." Even as she said it, she knew she was being stubborn. If they were back home she could just call up a little bit of healing magic, but all Gryst had to offer was dust and gravel. She didn't know the first thing about field dressing a wound. And she certainly wasn't carrying a first aid kit around right now. She was insisting, though, so she just had to follow through.

She pulled at the short sleeve of her dress, trying to tear off a strip of it, but the fabric was thick and layered and she had no good way to pull it apart. With a grunt, she leaned in closer towards Marcie and presented her shoulder. “Here, rip off some of the fabric for me.”

“Hey, there,” Marcie protested. “Again? I’m not a seamstress, y’know. Ripping up clothing ain’t exactly my thing.”

“Just do it,” Genevieve said in a stern voice. “This thing’s ruined anyway, and if it wasn’t I still wouldn’t want to keep it. We might as well put it to use.”

“It’s not about the dress, y’know, it’s–”

“You’re concerned about seeing my royal shoulders?” Genevieve says, cutting her off with sharp sarcasm.

“What? No, that’s not…” Marcie began, but she decided to just give up and shake her head. “Ugh, fine,” she said, and she leaned up to grab the shoulder of Genevieve’s dress and rip the sleeve off with her claws. "Just so you know,” she said petulantly, “I don't make a habit of tearin' up ladies' dresses. And I'd only ever do it if they asked me to. That’s a fact."

Genevieve looked at Marcie incredulously. "How can you possibly say something like that with a straight face?"

"I'm being sincere!" Marcie said. "People see the claws and the teeth and stuff and they always get some kinda weird about it." She huffed and crossed her arms. It was a little cute when she pouted. "I just don't want anybody thinking I'm some sexed-up brute."

The more Genevieve had to look at Marcie’s wound, the more aware she was of her complete lack of experience. But she knew you wanted to staunch the bleeding if you could, so she wrapped the dress scrap around Marcie's ankle as tightly as she could manage. "I can't claim to know you well, Marcelle Silver," she said as she worked. "But if there's anything I can say for sure about the last fifteen minutes, it's that you definitely aren’t a brute."

Marcie winced as Genevieve pulled the makeshift binding tight and tied it off. "Well, thanks," she said. "I'm glad you think so. I really am trying, believe it or not."

"I have no reason to doubt you." With nothing better to do, Genevieve scooted over and sat along the wall next to Marcie. The dry, unpaved ground was a little rocky underneath her, but she was well past complaining. "But I have to ask. Do we have somewhere to go? Are we just running until we get caught?"

"I've got somewhere," Marcie said. As she spoke she absent-mindedly scratched at the binding around her ankle.

"You shouldn't pick at that," Genevieve said, putting some of the royal authority into her voice.

"Sorry. It's just a bit tight."

"It's supposed to be, so you don't bleed all over the place."

"All right. If you say so." Marcie pulled down her pant leg. "Anyway, I've got a friend in town. Their place is hidden away. They shouldn't be able to find us there."

"That’s good. So long as there's a plan." Genevieve took a deep breath, and tried to relax for just a moment. It wasn’t a very long moment. Barely a few seconds had passed when she heard the first hints of shouting and clanking metal on the wind.

"Well, fuck," Marcie muttered, dragging herself onto her feet. "Guess we're back on the move." She offered Genevieve a hand. "C'mon. Nice as it is hanging around, break time's over."

There was no sense being proud, so Genevieve took Marcie’s hand and let herself be pulled up. "Then let’s keep running."

They were only one step ahead of Prince Cornelius and his automaton guards. One step was enough. They ran a circuitous route through the back streets, taking shortcuts through alleys and sticking to the parts of the city Marcie knew their pursuers would take longer to reach. Genevieve couldn’t hope to keep track of the winding path they took, but she had to trust Marcie’s sense of direction. No matter what, she couldn’t go back. The devil she knew was far worse than the one that she didn’t.