Copperhead i-2
Page 21
“Was he very drunk?” said Jane.
“As always,” Helen admitted.
Jane shook her head. “There has to be another explanation. The dwarvven I know are not like that. They’re strict. They’re fair. They love scandalous books and dancing.”
“Rook said they were having one tonight,” said Helen. She smiled ruefully. “I put a dress in your carpetbag just so I could go.”
“You should go meet him there and feel out his motives.”
“Nonsense,” said Helen. “They couldn’t possibly be dancing now. Not after the trolley.”
“Funny people, the dwarvven,” said Jane. “Nothing stops a celebration when they’ve decided to have one. Not hell, not high water. You’d like them.”
“They wouldn’t want me,” Helen demurred. She felt suddenly shy. Rook had said she was on their good side, she was the offset for Jane. These people liked her.
It could only go downhill from here.
“It’s not a date, it’s sleuthing,” Jane said with some asperity. She rummaged a thin hand through her carpetbag and produced Helen’s go-to dress, none the worse for being shoved in a bag and going through an explosion.
Helen glanced over at the sleeping boy, then quickly stepped out of the ruined peacock blue knit and into the clean apple green voile Jane held, turning so Jane could hook up the side. She felt better already. “If you’re sure you’re all right in here.”
Jane’s fingers moved nimbly up the hooks. “I feel much better,” she said. “I have a lot of thinking to do. Have you made progress with getting the women together?”
“Yes,” said Helen. “Well, I’ve done some, and Frye’s working on it right now. We’ll get them to the waterfront like you said.”
“I did?” said Jane. She looked concerned, then flashed a brilliant smile from that fey-enhanced face. “I must have had a good reason,” she said.
A cold knot began to form in Helen’s belly. Getting the women together was something Jane had ordered them to do when she was supposedly sane. Helen threw out another lead. “Grimsby’s taken Millicent somewhere, but I don’t know where.”
“I’m sure it’s someplace safe,” said Jane.
The cold knot tightened. “But she was going to run away from Grimsby.”
Again confusion flashed across Jane’s face and vanished. “Yes, but he would hardly get rid of her in this state,” she said. “Everyone knows. It would be a scandal.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Helen said. Her forehead creased as she stared at Jane and flipped the problem over and over in her mind. “Will you be safe here with Tam? Will he be all right if he wakes up?”
“You’re stalling,” Jane said.
“Perhaps,” said Helen. She wadded the torn and smoky dress into a ball. She hated to just leave it in Rook’s tidy room.
“Put it in here,” Jane said, waving those thin hands at her carpetbag. “And hurry back and tell me everything.”
“All right,” said Helen. She stuffed the dress into Jane’s carpetbag, and then stopped, her eye caught by something in the bottom.
“What is it?” said Jane.
“Oh, just wondering how I’ll ever make it up to Frye,” said Helen. Her fingers shook as she closed the bag, but she tried to keep them steady in front of her sister. “I’ll see you later. Don’t wait up.”
“Not a chance,” promised Jane.
Helen backed out of the door and into the darkness of the tunnel, where she closed her eyes against what she had just seen. Hot tears pricked her eyes, stress and memory shook her bones as she saw again and again what she had seen in Jane’s carpetbag.
Traces of blue and shrapnel.
Just like the fey bomb that had killed her brother, so many years ago.
Chapter 12
OUT PAST CURFEW
Helen found herself hurrying through the tunnels, desperate to get away. Up the stairs to the bookstore, past the woman who actually smiled at her and worriedly said, “Remember curfew—,” but Helen just kept on going, out into the dark and the cold and the whirling snow.
How could Jane be responsible for this? For this ruthless destruction?
The trolley lay there just outside the slums, a twisted pile of metal. Everyone was gone now, but the signs of the tragedy remained. The area around where the trolley had derailed had been stamped and packed into hard, dark-stained snow. The snow had lessened but still it fell, erasing the disaster, sifting a fine layer of clean white over the ice.
The icy air whipped around her bare arms, and then she was walking toward the warehouse. All these things were there, the warehouse, the wreck, the slums, all had converged on this point in time. Whatever else happened, it would be down here, she felt, down near where the statue of Queen Maud held open arms to the river to embrace her people. All people: humans and her beloved dwarvven.
Jane could not have done any such thing.
Unless she had been made to.
Once Helen thought it, she couldn’t unthink it. The thought unfurled in her mind and she knew that, deep inside, it was what she had feared all along and not acknowledged. She was out of ways to explain away Jane’s behavior.
Jane had been taken over.
It was a strange case, clearly. Jane had been protected, back when she had had iron in her face. A fey couldn’t get around that—but a human could. Boarham, she supposed, had stripped Jane of her protection when they kidnapped her.
But more, usually when a fey took someone over—that someone was gone. Vanished. Helen herself did not remember any of the few seconds that a fey had been inside her, except for a horrible erasing feeling. She certainly had not been able to communicate with anyone. Her body was no longer hers.
But Jane seemed to come and go. Sometimes she was rational. She was Jane.
Or a very good imitation?…
Helen pushed that thought down. The Jane she had talked to just now was definitely her sister, fighting for control of her body. She did not know how that was possible, but it was the only thing that made sense with her behavior.
Helen’s eyes filled with grief. Her sister. Her only family. Helen had fought, and she had tried, and Jane was still going to disappear on her in the end.
A black motorcar drove down the road ahead, yellow searchlight sweeping the sides of the street. Curfew. Helen pressed herself into the side of the buildings, into the sheltering shadow. Across from her a new sort of poster caught her eye—this time bloodred, with CURFEW on it in big black letters, and below it, a raft of rules in smaller type. She did not have to move closer to tell that it was signed the same way as the notice in the paper: BY ORDER OF PARLIAMENT AND COPPERHEAD.
She did not want to go back to the dwarvven slums, where Jane was. She did not want to go home, where Alistair was. Not that that really seemed like home anymore. Perhaps it never had been hers; it had only ever been his. Despite her best intentions to find herself a home, she had come adrift, and now there was not one place she could call her own.
She reached for a handkerchief that was not there and her fingers brushed the copper hydra that hung around her throat.
Her necklace. Her hand closed on it and the copper warmed in response. One picture glanced across her vision, a memory of the warehouse. She was inside, hand on Grimsby’s copper box, and she was looking down at a pale still figure on a white daybed.…
Helen walked along the shadowed line of the buildings, walked fast and sure to the warehouse.
* * *
The windows were lit blue, as they had been before. Helen crept around to the window above the slag, looking to see if there was still a way to make it up the snow-covered piles of junk. The high energy was wearing off and she was freezing, but at least the warehouse blocked the sharp wind. She clambered up in her ruffled voile and looked in the smeary window. Her vision was obscured this time. A pile of boxes and bars was pushed in front of the window, where the table had been. But through the clutter she saw figures moving around. She could not easily ge
t in, but perhaps they would not notice if she cracked the window, not with those boxes in front of her.
Carefully Helen pushed the window open, and was treated to a gust of warm air from a vent just above. And there, there below her was the scene she had imagined on the street. Millicent lay on the white daybed, there in the warehouse. Helen’s hand closed on the necklace. Something was strange about that necklace, the back of her brain suddenly told her. Something that she had been unable to see. It almost hurt to think about it.
She made her fingers let go, arched her shoulders so the copper fell away from her skin. Then looked more carefully at the scene in front of her.
Grimsby, one of the snaky funnels in hand, was bending over Millicent.
Helen swallowed hard as she watched him attach the funnel to Millicent’s fey face, her perfect face. It looped behind the head, held on with rubber clips. She remembered Jane standing there in the warehouse, holding the funnel to her face as if breathing in fumes, and she breathed fast, faster. When Grimsby was satisfied he strode back to the copper box in the center of the room and plunged his hands through the bars, grasping the coiling snakes.
Helen’s necklace warmed in response, grew hot. It felt like a smaller, more focused version of when she had touched the box herself and seen all the glimpses of the city.
She did not know what Grimsby was doing, but she knew that it clearly was not good for Millicent. Helen could think the best of Grimsby and wish it was something to roust Millicent from her coma—but she knew it was not. And all that remained to Helen was to shove her manicured nails into the glass window, trying to prise it all the way open and get in to stop it.
But before she could get the window all the way open, the sounds and sights of the box doubled, expanded, grew sudden and violent, raging over her with such force that she could only cling to the window, staring at things that were not real.
She was plunged into a waking dream, a feverish world where the city flickered behind her eyes in shades of blue and white and black. There were so many sights and sounds she could not make sense of it. Until one sound, one pair of sounds, seemed closer than the rest, and she let everything go, let it all float away, until she could pick out the echo of those two talking, like a scratchy gramophone.
<
<
<
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They were like the not-voice she had heard three nights ago at Grimsby’s meeting. They didn’t even seem to be words, really, though she heard them as words. More like feelings, colors, intuition.
<
<
<
<
In the warehouse, there in her half-waking state, Helen suddenly knew what that meant. She willed her feet forward, but as in dreams they would not go. <
There was a horrible sucking feeling. That horrible copper machine was using fey to power it, just as Grimsby had said at the meeting. And right now the fey it was using was the fey in Millicent’s face. It was pulling it right out of her—and with it her life. She could not sustain it—Millicent had already wasted away so much in the three days of fey-induced coma that there was hardly anything left to her at all. She had nothing with which to fight.
And Helen said to the sound, <
But she was small, far too small, and far too late. The main voices could not even hear her tiny words as she forced her frozen feet up the wall one centimeter at a time. She could feel the machine reaching into the bit of fey in Millicent, and spreading out across the city. For a moment Helen saw the city like a grid, with a few random little bits extra lit up here and there, few and far between. There was a strange pressurized feeling, as if those few random bits were struggling to coalesce somehow. But Millicent was too weak. <
And then the storm of movement finally took the last drop it could from Millicent, and imploded in a spot of grey light. The bits did not coalesce. The city faded out.
<
Everything faded and then Helen was looking at Grimsby in the center of the room, tall and stoic, examining Millicent as if she were merely a failed experiment.
Helen clutched her necklace, willing him not to see her.
As if in response he looked over to where she was. But all that happened is the air seemed to suddenly go out of him, like a popped balloon. He sagged, a ventriloquist’s dummy gone slack, limp in every joint.
“Millicent,” he said, softly, brokenly. “This is all my fault.…”
He reached down and gently unclasped the rubber funnel. Helen saw Millicent’s face then, blue-white as if all the air had gone out of her. The funnel and black rubber tube fell to the ground, one in a sea of tubes. Her eye traced the tubes back to their cages, where the funnels hung on the outside of the iron bars. With dawning horror she realized what the oval mountings actually were. She looked around—yes. There was one without the funnel.
Rows and rows and rows of them, that’s what Jane had said, looking at you with their black blank eyes.
It was a woman’s face. The original face of someone who was now startlingly beautiful, like all of them.
Calendula Smith.
The masks were placeholders for where the women were to go. This was his machine, this is why it had a hundred tubes leading to a hundred cages. It will all work when we have more power.
What will work?
With great effort Helen tore her gaze away from that oval mask, that caricatured skin, as ugly as the current Calendula was beautiful. She remembered Jane telling her how the rows and rows of masks looked when they still hung in Mr. Rochart’s house, their skin sagging and wrinkled from drying on the wall.
Helen’s eyes were tight as she watched Grimsby delicately close the eyelids of his wife. She did not know what to do. Did he care? Was this an accident? What was he?
He sank to his knees and buried his head in the long trail of dress that hung over the side of the bed like a torn banner, fraying in the wind.
Helen stood up, her eyes stinging, and pushed herself away from the window.
She pushed herself through the numb cold and black night, back through the shadows toward the dwarvven underground. There near the bookstore she stood out of sight, and waited for the next black car to drive down the block. They were circling. They knew where the dwarvven were. She did not know what they were waiting for, but she knew if she went down to the underground, she would be found with them.
She went.
She went through the bookstore and down the stairs. She had seen Millicent go and so she went through the underground tunnels to the dance to find Rook. She did not fully think through why being miserable and lost meant she wanted to find Rook, she just went and stood in that gay mad atmosphere of dwarvven who were going to damn well enjoy the dance of the last night on earth and she saw Rook dancing.
He was dancing with a girl and Helen’s heart thudded to her knees.
He was dancing with a girl, slim and lovely and so petite that Helen felt like a big oaf, even though she and Rook were of a height, and she was slim herself.
She was there and he was dancing with another and that was the way it was going to be forever and ever, all because Helen had once told herself that the true things inside didn’t matter, and that you could tell your heart what to do and it would obey.
She knew how wildly wrong she had been and she was stuck.
The music pressed in on her as they danced, laughing. Helen tu
rned to a dwarvven man next to her and said things, all manner of things, let them tumble out of her mouth, and she had no idea what any of them were a second after she said them, because her heart was breaking. She was witty, she was bright, she was a whirl of apple green ruffled voile. She made the man laugh, head thrown wildly back, and another dwarvven man brought her a bathtub gin, and Helen made him laugh, too. She let this one lead her into the dance, and she whirled around and around with the skills she had from a lifetime of tenpence dances, dances with Alistair, dances from every moment of her existence. The city could burst into blue flames and still Helen could dance.
The dance ended and Helen drew back, waving her gin glass as an excuse. “It’s not empty,” the man said, and she tossed it back and laughed, and escaped. She did not know what she had said or saw; all she knew was the skirts whisking around her, triumphant laughter belling the air as Rook danced with somebody else.
She bumped into a gentleman—said something delightfully saucy, who knew what? Admiring eyes followed her. She tried to lean into their approval, but she had been doing that for half her life and tonight it was flat and hollow. Millicent was gone and Rook was gone and when would Helen be gone? Not soon enough. It was all noise, so much noise that she could no longer hear any particular words, so much sight that she let it blur in a wash of color across her path.
The next man she bumped into did not move.
She tilted her head to let her mouth chatter wildly and found herself looking into bright hazel eyes, a face that she had surely pieced together herself out of the chaos of color and spectacle around her.
“Dance with me,” Rook said.
“I am getting gin,” Helen said, because in the merry-go-round around her ears it was the one thing she could make sense of. The words were crisp and staccato. The clever chatter left her, and all that was there was something like truth, which was that she definitely wanted a gin.