The Heartreader's Secret

by Kate McinTyre

  Maris nodded, approaching the mirror.

  Olivia started forward, seizing Rachel by the arm and pulling her back down the hall. Chris hurried after them.

  “What are you—” Rachel asked, her voice high.

  “I’m going to make use of you. You might not know everything, but you know some things.”

  Rosemary emerged from the kitchen. Rachel took one look at her and tore herself free from Olivia’s grip, running down the hallway and scooping her charge into her arms. “Oh, Rosie,” she said, tears in her voice. “Oh, Rosie, Rosie, I am so sorry about what happened to Mabelle. You must be—I can’t even imagine, I—ah, I’m so, so sorry.”

  For the first time, Chris actually believed that she regretted her actions. He felt himself thaw, just a little.

  But Rosemary pulled herself free. “I can’t believe you,” she hissed. “You knew about Arthur Norwood being part of this? And you didn’t tell me? Didn’t tell anyone? Do you know that this makes what happened to Mabelle your fault?”

  Rachel froze. She choked down a sob. “Rosemary….”

  “Save it! Gods, you’re so lucky that we need to talk to Norwood! Because whether he’s your friend or not, the second we don’t need him anymore, I’m summoning a salamander inside of his belly!” She turned and ran off.

  “Rosemary!” Rachel called after her.

  “She clearly doesn’t want to talk to you,” Olivia said, moving forward. “Really, can you blame her? Her friend is dead! No matter how you rationalize your silence, you bear some responsibility for that happened to that girl.”

  Rachel’s shoulders shook, once. Her hand trembled as she raised it to brush back hair. Then she turned back to Olivia. She flinched when her eyes brushed across Chris, and he thought he did, too. He kept his face stony.

  “You’re going to ask all kinds of questions, I know it. But I swear to you, I don’t know where to find Garrett! I told you the truth. We almost never speak. I send my letters to a post box! Just because I know the identities of some people in his inner circle doesn’t mean I’m a part of it!”

  “Really.”

  “Yes.” She closed her eyes, grimacing in pain, and she shook with another silent sob. Another. A tear slid down her cheek. “Please, please don’t cast me as the villain of this play, Miss Faraday. I only—I never wanted anyone to be hurt. I’ve only ever…” She opened her eyes. “I love these people. My brother—yes, fine! But Norwood is in over his head, and Rosie means everything to me, and—” Her gaze slid off Olivia. She met Chris’s eyes. “And you, Christopher, I….”

  He swallowed uncomfortably and looked away.

  “I want to help you,” Rachel said quietly. “If you want to know where to find my brother, ask Arthur. And please, ask me for—for anything at all! I’ll do what I can. But I’m not holding more back. I’m not.”

  “Mn.” Olivia tapped a foot, and then she whirled about in a swirl of skirts. “Fine,” she said. “Christopher, come along. She’s right about one thing. Whatever information we might draw from her, we’re far more likely to get from Mister Norwood. He should be our focus right now before he attempts to make an ill-considered escape and the police currently surrounding this property shoot him in the head.”

  She breezed past him on his way down the hall. He caught Rachel’s eyes. She looked at him in a silent plea, and he wanted to… wanted to somehow fix it, to take them back, to reopen closed doors….

  He turned away instead, following Olivia back into the foyer.

  Maris was on the mirror. Emilia wrung her hands only a few steps behind her. Rosemary stood at the front door, which was wide open, sending cold air blowing through the foyer.

  “I know,” Maris said. “I know, but you need to understand that this is not a theft, Burke, and has nothing to do with my—relationship. This is sodding important. This tech could claim hundreds of lives in the wrong hands. Thousands. Surely you’d agree that Garrett bloody Albany’s are the worst possible hands. That man is a nightmare, and I’ve been saying that about him and his kind for years! We’re talking about large-scale chaos!”

  “Not everyone shares your politics, Officer Dawson.” The voice from the mirror was breathy and soft, but firm. Chris’s stomach twisted into knots. Hannah Burke, who oversaw any clandestine operations within Darrington City, and who was especially not fond of him.

  Emilia pushed Maris away. “At the very least, share my politics!” she said. “Because I have none, other than wanting a better world for Tarland! That’s something I know you can agree with!”

  “Miss Banks.”

  “Officer Burke. Please. Please. Spiritcell technology could cause havoc unlike what you have ever seen if even the most well-meaning person should attempt to replicate it! I built it to be impenetrable, a black box with a thousand redundancies, but they have my notes! A manual of how to build it. What happened at the Piffleman Gala House will be nothing compared to what this could unleash!”

  Hannah Burke sighed. It sounded like the breath of an angel. “Miss Banks, your efforts to fix our nation seem to result only in the worst kind of disasters.”

  “It’s my nation, too,” Miss Banks shot back.

  “I’ll authorize the operation.” Officer Burke said, and both Maris and Emilia seemed to melt into relief. “Contact me the moment you have more information than ‘a fat reformist operative is getting off a train with some papers written in Southern,’ please. This Margaret woman has already slipped through your fingers twice, once to escape the residence in question and another to board the train. I want addresses. Names. Specifics.”

  “As soon as I know a thing,” Maris promised. “You will.”

  When the mirror disconnected, Olivia cleared her throat. Maris and Em seemed surprised to see her and Chris standing there.

  “I have a mind to get her what she wants,” the Deathsniffer said airly. “Let’s see to Mister Norwood. He should give us at least some of that information.”

  Maris’s lips twisted. She touched the gun holster at her waist, undoing the buckle that kept the weapon in place. No hidden weapon, now. She was prepared to intimidate. “I think you may want me in tow.”

  Olivia opened her mouth as if she intended to protest, but then closed it again. “I think you may be right,” she admitted. “Arthur Norwood seems more likely to respond to fear than gentle coaching. Come along, then, Maris. And please, do look scary.”

  Maris knocked at the door of Norwood’s room, the last in a long line of closed, oaken doors in an ominous line. There was a scrabble of movement inside, and then nothing.

  Olivia sighed.

  “Mister Norwood,” she called. “Don’t you think it’s about time to come on out and face this? It shan’t get any better. We know what you did, and who ordered you to do it. Miss Albany was quite forthcoming about your shared history.”

  No response.

  Maris growled. “Enough of this,” she said, throwing the latch on the door. It didn’t move.

  “Very childish, Mister Norwood!” Olivia called, tapping a foot.

  Chris was rather less cavalier, listening to the movement inside the room. “What if he goes out the window?”

  “Then he’ll be experiencing a very long fall,” Olivia murmured.

  Maris cocked her icepistol. Chris stared at it, unable to avoid the thought of Mabelle’s skull caved in, crusted with frost crystals. He looked away as Maris lifted the gun and fired at the latch. She kicked the door open.

  Everything happened at once.

  A flurry of movement, so quickly that Chris’s eye could barely follow it: Arthur Norwood in a dressing gown with eyes that seemed to peer up from the bottom of an infinitely deep well. Maris starting to raise her pistol. Norwood lunging forward. A flash of reflected light.

  Blood.

  Blood, spattering forth, spraying up the wall and across the door, across Norwood’s face as he pushed Maris hard and started off running. Maris’s fingers scrabbling at her own neck. Blood. Oh, Gods. Blood s
purted from Maris’s body like an undine-fed hose.

  Maris’s knees hit the floor. Her eyes were glazed. Blood sprayed like a jet from her throat. Her fingers clutched at it, finding only more blood, wetting her hands to the wrists.

  “Emilia!” Olivia shrieked. “Mother! Oh, Gods! Oh, Gods!”

  Chris was at Maris’s side, holding her. “Maris?” he asked, pathetically, as if that would do any good at all! He looked into her eyes. They stared back at him sightlessly, glazed. He shook her. He didn’t know what he was doing. Her fingers fell from her neck and blood squirted all up his white shirt.

  “Emilia!” Olivia howled. She was running, a blur of white and red, snow and blood. Chris’s fingers fluttered helplessly. Maris’s lips were the colour of old rubber. Her body began to feel like a sack of flour in his arms as she sagged.

  “No, no, no,” he whispered hoarsely.

  He dove within her.

  He didn’t think about it. He didn’t weigh options. He acted on instinct. Her spark was dimming, and he forced urgency into her; he forced will, strength, anxiety. Stay alive, stay alive, stay alive.

  Maris gasped for breath. Her eyes flew open. They met his, wide and staring, filled with terror and despair. “Ah,” she said, and her voice was like a death rattle.

  Emilia was there.

  She threw herself on Maris, howling in pain like an animal, wrapping arms around her. “No, no, no!” she screamed, an echo of Chris’s own protests. “I won’t, I won’t allow you, Maris Dawson, do you bloody well hear me?” Her strong brown hands pushed Chris’s crimson ones aside as if they were nothing but buzzing mosquitoes, and she pressed them to the wound.

  Somehow, Maris raised a hand to her lover’s. She shook her head. It barely moved. “No,” she croaked. “Em. D-don’t—”

  “Shut up,” Emilia shot back. “Shut up, you maddening woman! Do you think some ideological purity matters one whit when you’re lying here, dying, you—”

  “H-he… got the drop….”

  “Stop talking!” Emilia’s voice was shrill and high. Chris couldn’t look away from her hands, the way they touched the wound as if they were exploring, but never letting the pressure up. “You’re compromising your airway!”

  “Em….”

  “Stop it.”

  Chris managed to tear his eyes from Emilia’s hands. When he looked at her face, he saw her features slack, her eyes unfocused, and her head weaving from side to side. He stared, uncomprehending, for a long moment.

  “You’re a lifeknitter,” he murmured.

  Her eyes flickered back to awareness, and then she dove back down, swimming through her lover’s bloodstream, breathing with her lungs, living in the curl of tendons and the tightening of the muscle.

  “But you don’t—you’ve never—do you even know what you’re doing?” he asked.

  “Mandatory training,” she said. “Stop talking.”

  He stopped talking.

  Maris’s face looked like an old bedsheet. Blood still escaped from between Emilia’s fingers in pumping spurts. Chris hated the rattling, shallow, sharp sound of the policewoman’s breaths, hated the way her fingers twitched and spasmed where they lay on the bloody floor.

  “He only got one carotid artery,” Emilia whispered as if she were praying. “Only one. You still have the other, you still have blood in your brain, you can live, Maris. You can live.”

  And then the wound began to close.

  Chris scuttled back with a sharp cry. He’d never seen anything like it, not in any terrible hospital visit he’d ever endured. It was like watching someone sew a wound closed, only there was no thread, no needle. The skin simply knitted itself, one stitch at a time.

  Miss Banks panted over Maris’s body like she was climbing a mountain with only one hand. Her whole body shuddered with effort. Her eyes were tightly closed, and her mouth hung open, and her face was curled into an expression of real pain, and Chris honestly couldn’t tell if it was from her great effort or the fear of losing the woman she loved.

  “Emilia!” Olivia called from the end of the hall, hurrying toward them. “We can’t find a lifeknitter! Oh, Gods Almighty, is she still alive? I knew that there was a risk, I knew that Norwood had it in him to snap! I should have had her hold the gun at the ready, I should have—”

  “I don’t like guns,” Emilia Banks whispered. She lifted her hands from Maris’s neck.

  The scar was thick, like a rope of distorted flesh, as wide and meaty as a finger. It was the only sign of the horrific, gushing wound that had been there mere moments before.

  Olivia stopped, staring down. She breathed hard.

  “I—wh—she’s alive.”

  “For now. She’s lost so much blood, Olivia. I don’t know how she’ll make it. I don’t know if I can save her, after all.”

  Maris’s eyes had slid closed, and she didn’t respond.

  Olivia shook her head faintly. “You saved her?”

  Miss Banks looked up. Her eyes were still unfocused as if she were staring at something over Olivia’s shoulder. “I suppose your little mystery has been solved, hasn’t it?”

  “She’s a lifeknitter, Olivia,” Chris murmured. “And a strong one. I’ve never seen….”

  “She didn’t want me to do it,” Emilia said quietly, returning her attention to Maris. One hand stroked her waxy face. Maris’s freckles stood out like chocolate drops in milk. “She didn’t want me to compromise myself. Gods, this idiot woman. She’d have died happily so I could live up to some stupid ideal. I hate her. I love her so much.” Her breath caught, and a sob came out of her throat, and she threw herself over Maris’s body. “Oh, Gods! I love her so much.”

  Olivia knelt on one knee. She laid one hand awkwardly on Miss Bank’s shoulder, which heaved with great sobs. “Em… is she… will she…” Olivia shot a glance at Chris, and it was so desperate for some sort of help that it was hard to meet her eyes. Eyes that were shining with tears.

  He honestly hadn’t thought she could cry.

  What would Elouise Faraday think, if she saw her heartless monster at this moment?

  “Will she live?” Chris asked the question for her, voice grave, and Olivia’s shoulders sank with relief. She breathed out like she’d been holding it in underwater for hours.

  “I don’t know,” Emilia said, voice muffled and shoulders shaking. “I hate that I don’t know. Her veins are like dried out canals. There’s so little life in her blood. Maris, Maris.”

  Olivia sat back on her heels, removing her hand from Miss Banks’s shoulder and closing her eyes momentarily. She looked utterly helpless. “Can you… do anything about that?”

  “I’m doing all I can,” Miss Banks murmured, shaking her head. “Feeding life into the blood. Keeping the red strong. Encouraging it to move the way it needs to.” Her fingers flexed in the bloody rag of Maris’s blouse. “I wish I could give her more, just inject it into her. Give her my blood, even! But all I can do is….”

  Olivia gave Chris another helpless look, but this time, he couldn’t discern what she wanted. She clenched her jaw and closed her eyes tight. “Em,” she said. “Em, we grabbed Norwood in the foyer. He needs to be questioned, now more than ever. We need to find out where Sister Margaret would go. Stop Albany from getting at the spiritcells. This isn’t over.”

  “It’s over for me,” Miss Banks said, looking up to fix Olivia with a helpless, furious look. “If I leave her, she’ll die.”

  “The spiritcell… you said yourself—”

  “Thousands could die,” Emilia replied. “You’re right. It isn’t over. It has to be stopped. But from here… from here, it has to be without me, Olivia. And without Maris. I know you want to think that I’m like you. Analytical and above feeling. But that’s not who I am. Not when the cards are dealt, and the chips are down.” She shook her head. “The moment I met Maris, it was like the world stopped. She had this little notebook in her hand. She wanted to take my statement. All part of the job. But when we locked eyes…
” She leaned down. Pressed a kiss into Maris’s filthy, unkempt hair. “The risk to thousands just doesn’t compare. Not to my Maris. I won’t leave her side until she’s stable, or dead. Not so long as I can swim in her blood and keep her with me.”

  Olivia closed her eyes tight but nodded. She dragged a hand down her face and stood. “Then,” she said, “please keep her alive. I’m… fond of her.” She directed her attention to Chris. “Em has the right of it, in any case. It’s all rather a shot in the dark, isn’t it? How the hell are we supposed to get to Darrington before this has already blown up in our faces?”

  It was clearly Chris she addressed, but Miss Banks looked up, and there was determination plain on her face. “I might help with that,” she said, voice clear. “Ask Rosie about Mabelle’s wings.”

  ou just murdered a policewoman, Mister Norwood,” Olivia said, standing behind the chair Arthur Norwood was restrained against. “Things are not looking especially well for you.”

  Norwood shuddered. His chin rested on his chest. The shard of the shattered mirror he’d wrapped in bedsheets and used to strike Maris lay upon the table before him, and he couldn’t look at it. “I didn’t—” he said and swallowed. “I only—”

  “Now, don’t be like that. You’re not so stupid, are you? You fashioned a weapon. Surely you knew it could kill.”

  “I d-didn’t intend for any of this!” Norwood shook all over. “Garrett said there was no risk to me! I only h-h-had to f-find what she was w-working on, steal the n-notes from her l-lab in the attic, and then all suspicion would go onto the courier. That no one would s-suspect the doctor’s n-n-n-nephew, not when…” He shook his head. “I never meant for any of this!”

  Chris stood in the corner. He weaved, and he breathed evenly. Olivia said Maris was dead. Olivia used it to leverage pressure onto Arthur Norwood. Chris still felt ill hearing it. It wasn’t right. Not when Miss Banks hovered over her, using all the will within her body to keep her lover alive.