Corroded

by Karina Cooper

  It had not gone well.

  “Did he say anything?” Maddie Ruth asked, worriedly picking at her lapels. Easy for her to be so nonchalant. I still wore her damned machine.

  “What?” The lad scoffed. “To the likes of me?”

  For some, there is not so much a physical indication as a sense when one’s hackles are raising. Though Maddie Ruth did not seem to change posture, I was aware of the impression of fear about her. Of wariness and deep concern. Perhaps it was in the eyes, suddenly skating across the hedgerows inset into this side of the menagerie grounds.

  Like a rabbit, out and about during a lean winter.

  I bit back a sigh lest I come across unkind. “Come along, then,” I said to the girl. “Best get you back where you belong.”

  Maddie Ruth’s smile wobbled some, and she turned to Tovey with her large brown eyes full of hope. “You won’t say nothing, will you?”

  The boy didn’t stand a chance. Plain she might be, but saying no to that wide-eyed supplication would be akin to putting the boot in on a wet pup in winter. “Not a word,” he avowed, and reached for a hat he did not have. Finding none, he mimicked a doff nonetheless. “Miss.” And again, a hastily affirmed, “Pleasant day to you,” in my direction.

  I seized her arm and practically dragged her down the graveled pathway. When we were a fair bit out of hearing, I hissed, “You are unkind to that lad.”

  “What?” She did not shake off my hand, but she did look behind her as if to gauge Tovey’s well-being. He had returned to his post, minding the entry, but I noted that the pale blur of his face was still aimed at us.

  Or, I suspect, her.

  Save me from doe-eyed females.

  “Bear this in mind,” I said firmly, marching her through the hedgerows. “For every person you involve in your mischief, that’s another to feel the sting of it when you’re caught.”

  That I knew intimately of what I spoke was a pain I had not dared to give acknowledgement to. Not yet. Perhaps not for a long time, if I had my say. The very hint of Earl Compton’s face was enough to send my hand plunging into my pocket.

  I had not rectified my lack of bliss. Lecturing Maddie Ruth had taken much of my interest. I regretted that fact now.

  I would fix that as soon as I saw Maddie Ruth off to her quarters. This, I vowed.

  I walked without much mind to direction. I’d been in these gardens before, though they looked a sight different without the dark to deepen the shadows. Unlike the greater grounds, the private gardens were designed specifically to cater to those who traded in subtlety for somewhat more physical proclivities. There was no pretense of discretion here, only dark corners, merrily burbling fountains and hedgerows to lose one’s self in.

  Sometimes, when the nights were quieter, the keening wail of a violin could be heard soaring across the private garden. I had not yet met the maker of such haunting music, but I hoped to.

  By day, however, much of the mystique was gone, and the gardens were still. The hedge separating the garden from the grounds was easy to find, and the gate stood open.

  All was quiet enough that I easily heard her sniff. “I wouldn’t get caught.”

  “Oh, ho,” I taunted softly, but not kindly. “Allow me to be the first to assure you of one irrefutable fact. Eventually, you will get caught.” Her head came up quickly, and I nodded. “‘Tis a matter of course. Always be prepared for the inevitable revelation.” Again, I spoke with hard-earned experience. I knew of what I assured her.

  My catching had been done after my father’s reckless scheme. To see such disappointment in Fanny’s eyes, to always be aware that my staff feared for my safety, had become a burden I dreaded.

  Yet, I would return to that life in a tick, if I could only do so again.

  I missed them. There were days, moments when I swallowed a bit more tar than I ought and allowed the lassitude to take me, that I reached for a bell that was not there. I ached to hear the arrhythmic step of my one-legged butler coming to deliver me tea. Even Mrs. Booth’s shrill voice berating the link-boy for tracking soot seemed as music to my memory.

  I had lost so much to the sweet tooth’s vicious cruelty.

  I owed him so very much in kind.

  Maddie Ruth froze so quickly that my feet ended up some distance ahead while the rest of me remained attached at the arm. Wrenched from my bitter thoughts, I stumbled back, righted myself and did not manage even a question before I saw the object of Maddie Ruth’s wide-eyed consternation.

  He lingered at the gate in a manner that put me in mind of a hungry black tomcat, all lean potential and challenging stare. He was tall as Ishmael, which said a great deal for his height, yet was only a fraction as wide. His skin was nearly as dark. Though he wore the same working togs as most everyone else who toiled in the grounds by day, he wore them with a careless sense of awareness. The collar of his plain cotton shirt and deep blue jacket revealed a corded throat, and the beginning of lean muscle just beneath. No gloves covered his hands. His hair, which I remembered as falling nearly to his waist, was plaited in a multitude of tiny braids and looped into a tail at the back of his head.

  Had it only been some months past that I’d seen him for the first time? I’d come to visit Hawke by day, demand answers regarding the sweet tooth’s activities among the girls Hawke purported to protect, and this man had been there.

  He’d stared at me, as if communicating a challenge even as he spoke a language I did not understand. I remember most that stare, much as he was staring now. A forthright scrutiny lacking in even the basest civility. His eyes were tawny gold, lighter brown than Hawke’s and tinted like the tomcat’s I’d considered him.

  They were not pinned on me this time, but on the rapidly quailing girl beside me.

  “Keep moving,” I murmured, trying to keep my lips from moving too much. “Who is that?”

  “Osoba,” she whispered, a rasped sound.

  Ah. Now, I had a face to match to the name.

  We approached the whip together: myself with a cheerful swagger and a nod, and Maddie Ruth with much more deference. Osoba may or may not have been the savage African prince his own keeper labeled him, but even in British attire, there was something about him that made me consider some truth to the charade.

  To be quite frank, there was much of him—his stance, the air of confidence and untouchable arrogance about him—that reminded me of Hawke.

  To say Osoba was less dangerous than the ringmaster himself would be doing a disservice to both men—and my own good sense. No, I would be forced to play this carefully.

  And with no small amount of boldness.

  To my surprise, Ikenna Osoba spoke first. “Caught,” he repeated, in a voice that was not as deep as Ishmael’s, but seemed many times more resonant. “Caught doing what?” Accented deeply and almost lyrical in delivery, his was a voice groomed for the rings, the kind to command attention and demand obeisance. No wonder the lions listened.

  If I were to take opium right then, put a bit on my tongue and let it burn while this man spoke of anything at all, I would be lost on a tide of musical delight.

  Beside me, Maddie Ruth gazed at the ground before her feet.

  I shook myself. “You must be Mr. Osoba,” I said, forcing a smile. I felt slightly dazed. Perhaps I was mistaken, after all. The stuff I’d eaten before I’d set out could have simply been slower to act. “Or do you prefer Your Highness?”

  He did not rise to my distraction. He did not shift, at all. Leaning against the gate’s archway, arms folded across his chest, he behaved as if he had all the time in the world. His gaze remained on Maddie Ruth.

  Blast.

  “Caught,” he repeated again, “doing what?”

  The blood rapidly drained from her face. A fine tremor rippled down her skirt, which we’d untied on the return home. No reason to fetch any more eyes than necessary.

  The fear there, the uncertainty of it, spoke louder than any words she might have summoned for me. The man scared he
r right silent.

  My shoulders tightened. I found myself stepping in front of her, so that Osoba’s eyes would fall instead upon me.

  Taller though he was, and likely stronger, I did not cower. “Maddie Ruth was helping me.”

  He was not a man to raise his eyebrows. They lowered, knotting in a ridge of black. “Oh?” A single syllable, with many pointed questions.

  Who was I to be helped by one of his own? What could she possibly help me with?

  What rights did I have to step between a whip and his mark?

  “Collector’s business,” I said, answering each of those unspoken questions with a challenge of my own.

  “I know what you are, Miss Black.”

  Hawke’s own moniker, put to use again. I resisted the urge to frown. That it bothered me, his chosen name on everyone else’s lips, was something I was not equipped to examine. Not then.

  “Then you know that I earn the highest of all collectors for Menagerie bounties,” I returned. I folded my arms across my chest in mimicry of his masculine posturing.

  He did not answer me. I hoped the Veil was not so talkative with all whips. I spoke the truth, but I did not know how much of my increasing debt was common knowledge.

  As he did not call me on it, I hoped very little of the truth was known.

  “And?” he finally asked when the silence drew out too long.

  “I needed help.” A flash of inspiration hit me, and I half-turned to show off the brass apparatus slung on my back. “I was having trouble repairing my net-launching device.”

  He did glance at it, which was something. Maddie Ruth, to her credit, did not look up, so if she was surprised by my lies, I could not be sure.

  “Maddie Ruth helped me fix and test it. ’Tis not quite up to snuff,” I added, in case he needed to know. “I apologize for taking her from her duties.”

  I didn’t like apologizing for things that were not my doing, but the alternative seemed worse. Maddie Ruth trembled silently, her breath practically held, it was so shallow.

  For a long moment, the lion-prince of Africa held my gaze.

  It took some effort to hold it. Sweat bloomed across my skin, but I had held more fearsome gazes. That of the sweet tooth, looming over my inert body. That of Mad St. Croix, my own father, as he attempted to kill me.

  Hawke’s, whose own stare was filled with a carnal knowledge he did nothing to mitigate and had not wholly earned.

  The lion prince did his level best to out-do them all.

  My mouth dried. I did not hold my breath, for such things were an easy tell, but I did mentally calculate the distance between the far exit and the likelihood of my getting Maddie Ruth out fast enough to save both our skins.

  Fortunately, I did not have to put the half-formed measures into effect. The man inclined his head. “Very well. In the future, she should be more careful of her commitments.”

  “I will be absolutely sure not to impose,” I lied, and felt nothing for it. According to Hawke, my very presence was an imposition. Bully for him.

  “Go, then,” he bid, and Maddie Ruth did not wait for a second offer. She hurried past him, shoulders rounded.

  “Maddie Ruth,” I called.

  She hesitated, turning awkwardly as if she could not be sure which direction might provoke the least dismay.

  I shrugged out of the device. “It needs some finer tuning. Would you mind? At your leisure?”

  She scooted back under the arch, snatched the straps from my hands, and all but ran as fast as she could while lugging the weight over her shoulder.

  Fair enough. Maybe next time, she would consider twice a fool move as she’d attempted.

  “You are a peculiar thing,” Osoba told me.

  I glanced at him, then again at the space between him and the rest of the open gate. “Oh?”

  “I have only just cautioned her to mind her commitment, and you demand more of her.” The observation did not land without a mark. I hid a wince. “Are you attempting to challenge my authority or her will?”

  Damn and blast, I hadn’t expected that. I shook my head. “Neither,” I said, and this one not really a lie. “I apologize. Maddie Ruth is the only one who seems to understand the nature of such apparatuses.”

  He weighed me—both with stare and, I think, based on my words and tone. This time, I held his gaze somewhat more easily. Perhaps I was getting used to it.

  Perhaps he’d dimmed that thing that made his presence nearly impossible to ignore.

  “Very well,” he said again, and seemed inclined to leave it there. He gestured with a bare hand, the skin of his palm pinker than the rest of him. “Do not let me keep you from your collections.”

  “Thank you,” I said politely, and passed through the gate. I smelled a spice about him, something reminiscent of Hawke but drier. Like burned grass in the height of summer, and the charring of wood.

  I paused, turned to find him still watching me. “I’ve news for Hawke. Where is he?”

  “He is occupied,” Osoba said. That, I think, was to be the end of my line of questioning.

  His Highness did not know me well at all. “Where can I find him?”

  “If it is important,” he said instead, “you may tell me.”

  Awareness trickled across the cold air; the fine hair on the nape of my neck, smeared down with the soot and sweat as it was, prickled in abject alarm.

  Something was amiss. Something Osoba did not want me to know.

  How I knew this, I don’t know. Only that my instincts were not dulled by the opium I consumed, or the pain radiating from my hands. Had I managed to eat the tar I kept intending to—had I found a place where no eyes could watch me do it—I would have felt neither anxiety nor pain.

  A part of me demanded I stop long enough to tend to my hands, ease the pain of heart and flesh. Another latched on to the unspoken thread in Osoba’s words and followed it.

  Was Hawke in danger?

  “Where is Hawke?” I asked quietly, my tone so serious that it must have made clear my concern. Mine was not the manner of one simply asking out of curiosity; I had no patience to play the polite miss now.

  If I had thought the man intimidating before, I had not realized he possessed the capability to project such warning that only a dead man might miss. His features closed, his eyes burned. “Leave the matter,” he advised me, so reminiscent of the ringmaster that my hackles lifted like the lions Osoba tamed.

  Unlike his lions, I was not his to pacify.

  Without another word, I turned and sprinted across the open ground. I half expected him to run after me, to keep me bodily from whatever it was that he wanted to keep me from. Perhaps to unveil a whip I had not seen wound about his person and lash it as a noose around my neck.

  He did not. To my unexpected relief, the lion-prince let me go.

  Chapter Seven

  I must have appeared quite the demon, dashing through the market stalls peppered with workers intent on evening preparations, across the paths with no regard for direction, and all the way to the small but elegant estate where some in the Menagerie lived.

  Or seemed to, anyhow. I did not know if members of the Karakash Veil lived on the grounds or merely operated here, or if anyone else truly lived here so much as work. I did know that the Veil had chosen to entertain my presence here both times I was summoned.

  Servants, startled from routine, gasped or shrieked upon my arrival. I burst through the front door, which did not step into a foyer as I was accustomed but into a large receiving hall. The décor was unapologetically Chinese in origin, again with the imprinted wallpaper and distinctly foreign furnishings. The rug was thick and much larger than my own at what had once been my home.

  Seven men and women paused in various states of surprise and dismay.

  “Hawke,” I gasped, struggling to breathe after my impromptu dash. The corset about my chest did not give. “Where is Hawke?”

  Seven pairs of eyes looked at me with one part disdain, for I was no im
age of cleanliness, and some part confusion.

  I let the door close behind me, a hard thump. “Where is Hawke?” I demanded again. “Bloody bells, never mind.” I left them staring after me, once more pushing off into a sprint. I followed corridors I had been through once, obeying nearly-forgotten directions until I found myself outside Hawke’s quarters.

  My heart pounded so loudly, it was all I could do to seize the door knob with shaking fingers.

  The last I’d been here, I had woken up lacking in clothing and detailed memory. Zylphia had sworn that I had not been taken, but it had been so close.

  Steeling myself against the wild conflict of emotions within me, I threw open the unlocked door and called, “Hawke!”

  Silence greeted me. Stillness. The lamps were unlit, the grate empty of fire. Hawke’s bed loomed at the far wall, draped in black silk and embroidered in red, gold and green design, but there was no sign of the man himself.

  I stepped out quickly, my breath shallow and too fast.

  That even a foot into that place was enough to tear the confidence from me was telling enough. But as I had not found my quarry here, the return of my anxiety only made my concerns the worse for it.

  In that moment, standing in Hawke’s chamber with perspiration itching across my shoulders and panic fluttering in my mind, I finally gave in to my own demand. I plucked the wax ball from my pocket, tore the paper in my haste to unwrap it, and bit a lump off. I did not chew it, I did not lick the pungent resin. I simply swallowed it.

  Whether it burned through my flesh quickly or the very act was enough to calm my senses, I do not know. I stopped shaking. The pain in my hands dulled, then eased to a warmth I could better manage. My breath expelled on a relieved, gusty sigh, and it did not shake.

  With a serenity I did not question, I wrapped the dwindling bit of tar once more in the torn wax parchment and replaced it into my pocket.

  So calmed, I could search for the ringmaster without fear of missing clues along the way.