Anthony and Greg, kidnappers extraordinaire, were not far behind me. They’d lost any advantage they might have had with their longer legs and the natural athleticism that I sorely lacked. Instead, I had a small head-start.

I needed to lose them.

I ran to the University of London since it was the only landmark I knew. I’d been here once, giving a lecture on criminal activities in the Dreamscape to a room full of bored students.

They had night-guards, and I might be able to find somewhere to lose my pursuers.

This was an unusual tactic for an enemy to employ. I would have thought a dragon would attack me directly; maybe it was Coates’ friends from Aber—or Puttick. I had not been expecting anyone to be following the cab from the Yard.

The main entrance to the College was a grand, Roman-pillared affair. Gas lamps were fitted in the ground, and they lit up the place with a warm, stately glow. I didn’t try the main doors; they’d be locked at this time of night.

Instead I ran over gravel and pavement, weaving between trees and a smaller building to keep my pursuers from getting a clear line of sight so they could shoot me.

My lungs squeezed with pain, chest burning and vision wavering red and black like a strobe.

I couldn’t hear anything outside of the pained hiss of air winding through my lungs—nothing helped—no matter how much I inhaled.

I saw the building I wanted up ahead: the clankers’ workshops. An enterprising individual had carved a giant gear out of stone to mount as the mouth to their wing of the University. Built just before the war, the place was new, and the professors complained that the students and clankers were awake at all hours of the night—they never locked the doors.

I grabbed the door and threw it open.

The workshop was huge, a warehouse of grinding gears, twirling gyros and the occasional flash of lightning that had been caught in glass bowls. The clankers used either the heat of the lightning on metal to power their inventions, or steam, whichever they were feeling like at the time.

I saw a door marked production room and threw myself that way, it opened and led into a factory floor.

Blue light flickered from lightning globes at irregular intervals. For a moment I stopped, standing against the closed door and staring at the factory in front of me.

It was the stuff of nightmares.

Bodies hung from hooks: limp, dead, naked.

The lightning flickered and I stared at this fresh horror. Bodies along the walls, standing, fallen, leaning. They each had a globe of lightning at their chest.

The lightning flashed again, and I saw blank, wooden faces.

Dolls.

They were making hundreds of clockwork dolls.

Mother of God, clockwork people.

I heard the door to the workshop open and I inhaled. I couldn’t stay here. I didn’t have anything to bar the door and I needed to hide. At least for a little while.

There was another room, a small platform separated it from the production line.

I jumped up on the conveyer belt, slipping over it and climbing the ladder that lead to the platform faster than I’d ever climbed anything in my life. I stepped inside the little room, searching for a spot to hide.

There were more clockwork monsters in here too, legs removed, heads at odd angles. This was the repair office. In the corner, a clothing closet big enough to fit in. I closed the closet door and placed men’s shoes over my feet, the old jacket on a hook I turned and twisted so it was facing outward.

My ribs, chest, back all burned. My breathing, intense and laboured; surely that wheezing noise wasn’t me. I struggled to control it, exhaling as slowly as I possibly could, but each inhale was a harsh, broken noise.

Below, the workshop door opened. The creak of the hinges in the echoing silence, deafening.

I held my nose, slowly getting my breathing under control, listening at a level of alertness I had never felt before.

I needed a plan if they found me. I should have been carrying a shock-stick from the office. I hadn’t remembered to get one. I’d gotten sloppy. It might be about to kill me. I didn’t want that to be the official report: ‘Died because she was too stupid to get a good weapon to defend herself.’

One of them was a Tenebrologist; even back-alley bastards were worth their weight in gold. Hired muscle. Had to be. They weren’t anyone reputable, that was for certain. I weighed up the list of people who had the sort of money to hire a mercenary or dirty hand willing to go against the Yard.

I drew in the Ether, pulling it into me, and called up another knife, this one longer, serrated. I didn’t want to get stabbed with this one. I would kill for a gun right now, but guns have more moving parts, far too complex for me to create on the fly like this.

I couldn’t hear them moving or doing anything below. For a second, I wondered if I had imagined the door opening.

Had I merely heard a chain creaking or an arc of lightning sizzling inside its globe? I wasn’t sure. The uncertainty gnawed at me.

Most nameless horrors from the Dreamscape let you know they were there, ever lurking just out of eyesight—the sounds, the smells, the touch of something coming to gobble up children was something you could track.

I was used to a very different class of monster.

The sweat on my skin began to cool, the sound of the lightning in its containers provided a steady hum.

The hum abruptly died. Smothered.

I closed my fist around the blade. My right hand, numb and cold—hopefully just with adrenaline, but I suspected I was in trouble with the hand.

I tensed in the closet, my thoughts narrow and clear. When the blood was up, everything seemed very simple and easy to see one’s way.

The closet door swung open violently.

I lunged forward, knife first.

Anthony of the blonde hair took the blade in his gut. I put all my bodyweight behind the thrust, driving the hilt into his mass and then slicing him open, gutting a fish.

Sound returned to the world and he fell to the ground,
gasping, groaning.

I turned to the room, looking for Greg.

I didn’t see Greg. What I saw was the wrong end of a bat.

It came whooshing through the air and I heard a cracking noise. I didn’t feel anything at all, and the world went dark.