by Mackenzi Lee
“And those things aren’t yours; they’re Johanna’s.”
“What things?”
“Sybille Glass’s things!” I say, louder than is advisable, for Sim clamps a hand over my mouth.
“Keep your voice down!”
I bite her thumb, and she lets go with a curse. “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?” I demand. “You thought Sybille Glass’s work was at the Hoffmans’ house. That’s what you were hoping to find there.”
Her jaw sets. “It belongs to my family. In the wrong hands—”
“Your hands are the wrong hands! Get off of me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you—”
“Then don’t!”
“Then stay out of my way.” She pushes herself up and starts back down the aisle, but I grab her around the ankle. She trips, crashing to the ground and taking out a shelf of ceramics with her. I scramble to my feet again, climbing over her with a high step so she can’t pull the same trick on me before darting down the aisle. Sim grasps a handful of my skirt, both pulling me backward and dragging herself up with me as counterweight. One hand is clawing at her boot, and I remember the marlinespike. I kick her hard in the shin and she yelps, stumbling sideways into a shelf. A pod of seeds bursts into the air like a disrupted beehive, and we are enveloped in a strange, chalky dust that starts us both coughing. My eyes burn, and I double over, hands pressed to my face and trying not to rub them, though the temptation is strong. Sim grabs my arm as I stumble blindly down the aisle, and I throw an elbow, hoping to hit her in the face, but she ducks, and I slam instead into a case of delicate spiral shells that crumble under me. We are single-handedly wiping out a slew of the world’s natural wonders.
Sim twists my arm behind my back, but I step hard on her foot in retaliation. She must barely feel it, for she’s got monstrous clomping boots on, but it’s enough that when she tries to move it throws her off balance. I snag one of the tags from the shelf before me and take a wild look, trying to gauge where we are. Thank god the case is weighted down with actual rocks, or I would have ripped it straight off the shelf. Girasol. We’re getting close.
Sim grabs me by the end of my plait and jerks me backward hard enough that I shriek for the first time. “Has anyone told you,” she hisses, her breath damp and warm against my neck, “that you are tenacious?”
“Thank you,” I reply.
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“Anything can be a compliment if you take it as one.”
I grope around on the shelf behind me for an adobe pot and aim to crack it over her head, but she flings an arm up and it breaks over her elbow instead. Shining black powder that smells volcanic rains down between us. Sim doubles backward, a stream of dark blood dripping down her arm, and I wrench myself away from her and start fumbling for tags. On the lowest shelf, there’s a hard leather case for documents with a shoulder strap, as well as a canvas sack splattered with a crust of chalky mud. The name stitched into the seam is S. Glass.
I grab the leather case and throw it over my shoulder, then snatch up the canvas sack. The drawstring isn’t pulled as tightly as I thought, and half the contents spill onto the floor. There’s the tinkle of delicate glass breaking, and I scramble to scoop it all back into the sack. I’m groping through the darkness, my fingers brushing something damp, just as, from behind, Sim jumps on top of me. I think she’ll try to wrestle the bag from me, but instead she clamps a hand over my mouth. “Shut it,” she whispers. Her voice has suddenly taken on a different tone than before—more wariness than fight. I try to throw her off, but she snaps, “Felicity, stop, someone’s coming!”
I go still. Sim raises her head, peering down the aisle into the darkness we came from. I can’t hear anything for what feels like long enough that I’m ready to dismiss her warning as a distraction in hopes I’d lower my guard, but then a light starts to play along the ceiling.
Then a man’s voice calls out, “Is someone there?”
Sim starts to scramble down the aisle on her hands and knees, in the opposite direction from the voice. And the stairs. I scramble after her, praying she has another way out. There are footsteps at the end of the aisle, and the lamp grows closer. “Who’s there?”
Sim breaks into a run and I follow suit, thick dust and shards of pottery crunching beneath our boots. The case knocks against my shoulder blades.
I chase Sim down the aisle and to a cellar door in the back corner of the basement. She yanks a large, sturdy-looking vase over so she can stand tall enough to unbolt the doors and fling them open. Sim hoists herself up and onto the snowy lawn, then looks back at me. I think for a moment she’s going to slam the doors shut in my face and leave me to the mercy of the curator, but she throws down a hand to help me up after her. It seems a moment of compassion before I realize I have Sybille Glass’s things and it’s likely that she’s saving more than me.
She’s bad at the hoisting—her hands are slick, and my knee bangs painfully into the frame when her grip slips. She ends up dragging me through the snow while I kick at the air, struggling for purchase. I get a lump of ice down my dress and leave a sleigh track across the lawn with my face. Sim kicks the cellar door shut as I clamber to my feet, spitting out mouthfuls of mud, and we take off at a run away from the cabinet, our heels kicking up sprays of wet snow.
Johanna is at our appointed meeting spot—a statue two squares over of a man on horseback who no doubt did something heroic. She’s sitting on the step up to the plinth, just beneath the horse’s rearing hoof, but stands when she sees us sprinting toward her. Her shoes have cut tiny, perfect prints in the snow, like the tracks of a mouse, that Sim and I stamp out as we approach.
Johanna shrieks when she spots my companion and points an accusatory finger. “You!”
Sim doesn’t answer—she’s doubled over, gasping for air.
“Did you lead her here as well?” Johanna demands of me, then before I can answer says, “All my tormentors in one convenient place!” She pivots back to Sim. “You sneak into my home to steal from me and now dare to follow me here to see your job finished. Well, consider yourself soundly foiled yet again. I will see you arrested; I will see you prosecuted; I will drag you back to Bavaria by the ear and take you to court there if I must.” Now back to me. At least her speechifying is giving us a chance to catch our breaths. “Did you find them?”
I hold up the case for Johanna’s inspection. I expect she’ll be pleased, but instead she yips, “You’re bleeding!”
I look down—I thought the dampness was coming from the snow I had been yanked through, but my arms and the front of my cloak are streaked with blood. “Am I?” I ask in alarm. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re not,” Sim says, and then she collapses.
Onto me. She staggers sideways and collapses onto me, and while I can’t truly blame her for her lack of aim, it is not a particularly comfortable thing to be fallen upon. We both tumble back into the street. My cloak is strangling me, and my skirt is rucked up to my knees so I’m sitting in just my stockings in the snow. The scarf around Sim’s head is coming undone, wet enough that it’s plastered to her forehead.
Instinct takes over, and I start stripping back her clothes, trying to find where the blood is coming from. It doesn’t take long—one of her arms is slashed to ribbons from palm to elbow. I cracked a pot over her arm, but the cuts are studded with small shards of amber-tinted glass, the largest the length of my thumb. I remember something glass shattering from Sybille’s bag when I pulled it free. Sim must have slid across it, the thick wool of her skirts and petticoats sparing her knees but the thin linen shirt no match.
The glass will need to be removed. The cuts stitched. But not now, and not here, in the middle of a muddy street. Right now, the bleeding must be contained. I wrench off my scarf and wrap it around her arm. As I tug the cloth tight, I notice again the ink upon the inside of her arm; the cuts stopped just short of cleaving the dagger in two.
I look around for Joha
nna, only to find that she’s bolted from our statue and is waving her arms to catch the attention of a policeman passing by. “Hallo! Polizist! Hilf mir bitte! I am a maiden and I am in distress! Pay me attention.”
“Stop it,” I snap at her.
“Stop it?” She whirls on Sim and me. “That girl has been apprehended as a robber and should be arrested.”
“Yes, but I was also robbing,” I say, pulling the makeshift bandage tight around Sim’s arm. “If Sim’s arrested, I should be too.”
“But you are reclaiming stolen property that is rightfully mine,” Johanna argues. “She’s just stealing it.”
“She’s right here,” Sim mumbles, pulling out of my grip. She tucks her injured arm to her stomach, and when she shifts, I can see the blood has already soaked through my scarf and spotted the front of her bodice. She heaves herself to her feet, then immediately tips over again and sits down hard beside me.
“I won’t leave her,” I tell Johanna. “She’s hurt and she needs help, and I can help her.” My whole body is aching from our tussle in the archive, so I’m not feeling any particular goodwill toward Sim either, but leaving her bloody and freezing in the snow goes against everything I believe. Everything I am and want to be. Johanna must know this, but she still glares at me until a wicked breeze throws handfuls of needled flakes from the snowy lawn in our faces. We both flinch. I pull my collar up over my chin, trying to protect my skin laid bare by the absence of my scarf. “We need to get out of here.”
“Back to the boardinghouse,” Johanna says.
“I can take care of myself,” Sim mumbles to me, trying to pull herself up again.
“I’m not letting you stagger off into the city with a bleeding arm,” I tell her. “Where are you staying?”
“Not far from here,” she replies. I can see the hard lines of her jaw jutting out as she clenches her teeth against the pain.
“Let us walk you,” I say. “I’ll see to your arm, and then we can work out what to do next.” Johanna starts to make a protest, but I cut her off. “Frau Engel wouldn’t allow a girl with a hangnail in, she’s so petrified of a sickness spreading. You can leave if you’d like, but I won’t.”
Johanna lets out a huff, and it frosts white against the frigid air. “Fine,” she says, then snatches up the canvas sack from where I abandoned it on the pavement. “But I’m carrying my mother’s things.”
Sim directs us back into the old town, where the bright colors of the shopfronts are muted by the storm. The snow is beginning to stick, gathering in piles on banisters and windowsills and making the road treacherous and slick. We try our best to walk as close to the shops as possible, so that the oriel windows jutting out over the boulevard shelter us. I keep a hand on Sim—her stride is growing less steady with every step. I consider telling her we need to stop somewhere closer than this mystery location we’re delivering her to and let me do something about the blood, but I can’t imagine any of the pubs we pass would be keen on me performing surgery on their barroom floor.
The street Sim finally calls for a halt upon is so narrow that the three of us side by side take up the entirety of it. No carriage could have a prayer of squeezing down it unless they were willing to knock their lamps off. The shops look unadorned, their fronts missing the bright hues and alpine imagery of the main roads. Instead, they’re simple and sand-colored. The shutters bang against the windows, testing their tethers in the wind.
“Here.” Sim tips her head in the direction of a dark shopfront. I’m nearly carrying her at this point, and when Johanna holds the door open for us, a bell jangles. I look up at the hanging sign, swinging wildly in the wind, but I don’t speak enough German to understand the words.
As soon as we have crossed the threshold, Johanna screams. I would have screamed too, had she not done it first and made me very much not want to look so silly and afraid. But even as a woman whose stomach rarely turns at a grisly sight, I feel myself go a bit light-headed. For a moment of weightless shock, Sim and I are holding each other up.
The room is full of human remains. Shelves of hands stripped of their skin so that the braided muscles are visible, legs from the knees jutting out of a bucket, a row of delicate ears and the thin, curled husks of noses. A long curtain of hair hangs upon one wall, a slow variegation from a fine cornsilk to thick black. Several busts stare at us from the counter, eyes sightless and mouths dangling open, each in varying states of decay.
No, not decay, I realize as I force myself to look closer, though my brain is screaming that what I should really be looking out for is the violent ax-wielding man who is no doubt sneaking up to turn us into so much human confetti. The faces do not look decayed as much as unfinished, like this is the workbench of some heavenly being who paused in the midst of the creation of man to get a snack and a tea.
“What are they?” Johanna asks beside me, her fingers strangling my free arm.
“They’re wax,” Sim says. She staggers to the counter and rings a bell before slumping backward against it. In the gray light leaking in through the grimy windows, her skin looks slick and sweaty.
“Wax?” I take a careful step toward a hollowed-out torso and touch a cautious finger to the rib cage. It’s sticky and firm, but I can feel the potential for give. It smells like honey, and when I pull away, I can see the whorls of my fingerprint left there.
A curtain behind the counter parts, and a woman peers out. Her skin is darker than Sim’s, and her long hair is wrapped in coils that are in turn wrapped around the top of her head. She has a leather apron thrown over her clothes, sleeves pushed up to her elbows though the workshop feels nearly as cold as the street to me. “Sim,” she hisses in English. “You said you were gone.”
“I was,” Sim says, her voice drowsy.
“You say gone, and then you return with two more unfortunates in tow. This isn’t a hotel!”
Johanna and I exchange a glance, and she mouths unfortunates?
“I haven’t room for you all here,” the woman says, bustling around from behind the counter and flapping a hand at us like we’re stray cats wandered in from the street. “Herr Krausse will have words. Are these your father’s bastards, too?”
“It’s just me,” Sim says. “They’re going.”
The woman turns to Sim, then reaches out and takes her arm. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m fine,” Sim says, but she doesn’t pull away. I’m not sure she has the strength.
“You’re clearly not,” I say. “She’s hurt. Here, let me look at it.”
“Miss Hoffman has somewhere . . . she wants to be.” Sim’s breathing is getting labored, her grip on the counter less a steadying one and more a crutch.
The shopkeeper’s face puckers. “Sim?”
“Sorry,” Sim mumbles. “I . . . I can’t feel my arm anymore.”
“All right, that’s it.” I take Sim by the waist, hoisting her good arm around my shoulder, then turn to the shopkeeper. “Do you have somewhere—”
I don’t even finish before the woman is pulling back the curtain behind the counter and ushering us forward. Johanna steps up to Sim’s other side, hoisting her with me. Sim is small, but she’s still dead weight, and neither Johanna nor I have had much occasion in our lives to heft more than an encyclopedia. Johanna has her mother’s bag and the leather case slung over her back, and it gives me a good clock in the back of the head when we duck around the counter.
Behind is a workshop, full of more disconcerting wax figures, all in various states of assembly and some with clockwork pieces jutting from the hollow limbs. One corner is littered with broken plaster, another crowded with a bench with a lamp upon it that looks just vacated—the tools are balanced on the corner beside a head, half of the scalp carefully threaded with dark hair. Opposite the bench, there’s a stove, with a pallet laid out beside it, and Johanna and I lay Sim upon it.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” the woman asks as I unwind the scarf from Sim’s arm for a better look.
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“Yes,” I say, with more confidence than I’m feeling. “Could you fetch me water, and a clean towel?” I fish into my pocket for my spectacles, give the lenses a quick rubdown upon the tail of my skirt, then smash them onto my nose. “And waxed thread and a hefty needle, if you have it.”
“There’s nothing in this shop that isn’t waxed,” the woman says, throwing a shawl hanging beside the door over her shoulders. “The pump’s half a mile. I’ll run.”
As the woman leaves, I toss the scarf from Sim’s arm aside and bend over for a closer look at the cut. It is not as much blood as I anticipated—though if there’s anything I’ve learned from being a woman, it’s how not very much blood can manage to smear itself around and masquerade as a great deal more than it truly is. It’s also not an excessively deep cut—no more than one-fourth of an inch, I estimate, with no fat or muscle peeking through. The blood is not spurting. The skin around the wound is not overly warm. The edges not particularly jagged.
But somehow, this minor abrasion upon the forearm seems to be affecting the entirety of Sim’s body. She’s awake but, in just a few minutes, almost entirely unresponsive. When she blinks, it’s slow and lethargic, like her eyelids are sticking, and I notice she hasn’t swallowed in far too long. Her breath is coming fast and shallow, like she’s struggling for it.
I can feel my forehead creasing, which Monty has always been quick to remind me will cause me to wrinkle even more prematurely than squinting at tiny print in textbooks will, but there are certain levels of bafflement that require a good pinched forehead to truly be considered.
Johanna brings me the lamp from the wax woman’s workbench, her petticoats blooming behind her like tail feathers when she crouches beside me. Since there’s really no way for me to be close to Sim without being on top of her, I swing a leg over her waist and straddle her, tipping her mouth open to see if there’s something blocking her throat and preventing the air from getting in. The bleeding has stopped, but her arm is beginning to swell, skin turning the mottled purple and black of a day-old bruise. The edges of the cuts are pulling inward before my eyes, like leaves curling into a sunbeam. “There must have been something in it,” I say, mostly to myself, but Johanna asks, “Something in what?”