London, September 18, 1889
HILLIARD HOUSE

6:35 p.m. Wednesday

TOBIAS ROTH SAT AT HIS SISTER’S BEDSIDE. IMOGEN SLEPT AS she always did, still and pale as a marble effigy. Good God, Im, what happened to you?

It wasn’t a new question, and he had no new answers. Though the space was quiet and dim, there was tension in the air of the sickroom. Tobias likened it to a hunter with a drawn bow—muscles quivering, breath held, gaze sharp on the target. But when would the string release, and where was that arrow going to land?

There was no telling when the wait would end. Imogen had been like this for nearly a year, sunk deep into this artificial sleep. She was lovely to look at, her long, straight hair the gold of a summer wine, or sun on ripe wheat. And yet that beauty was like a photograph, factually accurate but capturing little of the woman who was his sister. It didn’t show the flash of Im’s eyes as she teased him, or the flight of her fingers as she played the pianoforte. The real woman had been stolen away. Surely magic was involved—otherwise, she would be dead. But why wouldn’t she wake? And if she did, what would happen?

Tobias rose, apprehension driving him from his chair. He wasn’t even sure what the hunter and his arrow meant in his analogy—bad luck, retribution, fate—but he knew it didn’t bode well. He crossed the room to look out over the back garden of Hilliard House. The light was fading, and he was restless with worry that the damned bolt would end his sister’s life. He had tried to protect her, to rescue her, and he’d failed. There were fairy tales about maidens struck down by poisoned apples and wicked fairies, but he suspected it was something even darker that had wounded Imogen.

And yet suspicion was useless. The concrete facts in the case could be counted on one hand. Imogen had tried to elope. The sorcerer Dr. Magnus had plucked her from the street and taken her to his black, dragon-prowed airship, the Wyvern. Two other ships had pursued Magnus through the skies over London: a pirate vessel named the Red Jack, and Keating’s ship, the Helios. Tobias had led a rescue party from the latter and had got Imogen back. The mission should have been a success.

But it was at that point in the narrative that everything gave way to conjecture, leaving any real evidence far behind—and there was no way to know if what he saw and heard had been true. No one else was there that night except Imogen, and she couldn’t help him now.

Tobias’s memory of that night was never far, like a hidden stream that flooded the space between conscious thoughts, biding its time until it could drown him in nightmares. It didn’t take much to hurl him back to that hell:

Last November aboard the airship Helios

FLAME CURLED THROUGH the blackness, unfolding into the night sky like the petals of a fat crimson peony.

The explosion was beautiful, Tobias thought wildly, in the way that a tiger is beautiful right before it makes an hors d’oeuvre of one’s head. His gut twisted, but ordinary fear seemed a paltry response to the occasion. The charge had detonated just off their bow, close enough to feel the heat and the slap of air pressure. There were at least two airships intent on blowing the Helios to bits—and he didn’t fancy a fiery plunge to the spangled gaslights of London far below.

Another roar shook the deck, deafening passengers and crew. Imogen stumbled into him, her footing lost. Tobias grabbed his sister, as much to support himself as her. He thought he heard the crack of wood, and it couldn’t have been more terrifying had it been his own bones. The entire ship was shuddering, propellers useless against the blast.

“That’s a bit close!” he barked at the captain, but the man was bawling orders to the gunners and paid him no mind. Tobias had played his part in the fight already, and had gone from mission commander to irrelevant annoyance in the time it had taken to rescue his sister from the enemy and return to the ship.

“Come on.” He dragged Imogen closer to the cabins, looking for shelter. But then another strike hit, knocking them both off their feet. Tobias hit the deck, the force of impact shooting up his arm and into his shoulder. Imogen collapsed in a heap beside him. Ignoring the pain, Tobias put his arm around his sister’s shoulder, drawing her to a sitting position. They sat huddled in the shelter of a locker, drawing their feet in to stay out of the path of running airmen.

It felt as if they were Hansel and Gretel, hiding from the monsters. The comparison wasn’t as far off as he’d have liked. “What did Magnus want with you?” he shouted over the cries of the crew.

Like him, Imogen was tall, fair, and gray-eyed, but she’d gone from slender to frail in these last difficult months. She shook her head. “I don’t think he cared about me. I was bait. He counted on a rescue.”

Tobias understood. Besides him, someone else had come to save the day—the infamous pirate vessel, the Red Jack. Captain Niccolo—Nick—had personally delivered Imogen from danger, a noble gesture that might cost him all. He’d put the miraculous navigational device aboard the Red Jack within reach of his foes, and now both Magnus and the captain of the Helios were intent on taking the pirate ship prize.

“Tobias!” Imogen gripped his arm, surprisingly strong in her panic.

Tobias tightened his protective hold. “What is it?”

She pointed upward. A net of ropes attached the balloon to the wooden gondola beneath. In the heat of battle, the ropes looked as flimsy as a spiderweb—and they were on fire. Imogen’s eyes flared with horror.

Tobias pushed down the panic that crawled up his throat, forcing logic around his thoughts. It was like stuffing an octopus into a teacup. His breath was already coming a little too fast. “The fire is not as bad as it looks.”

“Oh?” Imogen’s voice steamed with sarcasm.

“Look, there are already men up there putting it out.” Or at least they were trying—little ants with little buckets in the vast tangle of rigging. “Warships like this one use aether distillate, which has better lift and is much less explosive than hydrogen. The ship is far safer than you would think.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said grimly, “but at the rate this is going, we don’t have much time to talk. You need to know what I learned aboard Magnus’s ship before we shower down in gory droplets over Buckingham Palace.”

Tobias opened his mouth to reply, but then grabbed her as the Helios fired on the Wyvern, the recoil jolting the deck. Grit and soot crunched between his teeth and his ears sang with the noise of explosion. More airmen stampeded past, their uniforms tarnished with ash and sweat. He saw them hauling out the huge, copper-sided water guns, pointing hoses at the burning rigging, but the wind of the ship’s movement was fanning the flames.

The Wyvern was turning, gun ports swinging into view. The black ship was hard to see against the starry sweep of the sky, but the red eyes and smoldering jaws of the dragon-shaped figurehead leered like a demon in the dark.

“Ready harpoons!” the captain bawled, and the gunners scrambled. The flaming projectiles they called hot harpoons could turn a ship into a bonfire in minutes. It meant a ruthless, horrible death for the crew.

And those harpoon guns were only a dozen yards away, the sweating gunners muttering prayers to whatever dark gods they worshipped. A misfire with a harpoon would kill anyone who came too close.

“Let’s go,” Tobias said, jumping up and pulling his sister toward the cabins. He’d meant to ensure Imogen was safely away from battle as soon as he’d set foot on deck, but there hadn’t even been time for that before the cannonades had begun.

She stumbled against him as he ran, gripping her hand too tightly in his fear. He banged through the hatch to the cabin deck, grateful when the door closed and muffled the noise. It wasn’t the best place to be if the rigging burned through, but it was safer than being on deck while the harpoons were in play.

The main corridor on the Helios was narrow and claustrophobic. A long, yodeling scream came from the far end where the taciturn surgeon ruled his white-walled domain. Imogen flinched at the noise, making a tiny cry of her own, and Tobias pulled her in the other direction, away from the sound. The amount of blood on the floor said the surgeon already had more than one customer.

Tobias pushed open doors until he found a tiny room at the fore with a table and two chairs. Imogen fell onto the closest seat, clearly exhausted. It was the first moment he’d seen his sister in good light since her rescue. Her hair was falling from its pins in a straggle of wheat-blond wisps. Tears tracked her cheeks, leaving pale stripes through smudges of soot.

Tobias’s emotions, bludgeoned into numbness, stirred back to life. If he had possessed the least talent with those harpoons, he would have cheerfully smashed Magnus from the sky.

“I know that look,” Imogen said. “What look?”

“Your older brother look.” A smile stirred her features, the merest flicker of her usual self. “But right now, I need you to listen, not to thump the schoolyard bully. You’ve already done the brave thing by coming to fetch me.”

“Your pirate captain saved you,” Tobias said, surprised by his own bitterness. Had he needed to play hero that badly? Lord knew he needed redemption, but still …

“Nick isn’t mine,” Imogen said. “He’s in love with my dearest friend. And he might have got to me first, but you brought me back here. Yet none of that matters now. There are more dire matters than our pride.”

Her voice rang whip-sharp in the silence between explosions. Imogen was normally soft-voiced and graceful, the perfect image of femininity. This mood was something new. Frowning, Tobias sat across the small table, close enough that he reached out to touch her cheek. She took his hand, squeezing until her nails bit his skin. Something boomed overhead, and dust fell from the ceiling with a sound like rain on dry leaves.

“Listen,” she said, her voice quick and low. “Magnus has automatons like I’ve never seen before. They’re far more refined. I suppose one might almost say beautiful. One of them was named Serafina.”

Tobias swallowed, his mouth tasting of blood and smoke. “I know. I saw her once.” The memory of the thing, seemingly alive, still made his flesh creep.

Imogen’s expression crumpled, her face growing pink with emotion. “I shot her to pieces! I killed her.”

Tobias blinked, putting his other hand over hers. “However realistic she might have looked, she was just a machine.”

Imogen’s eyes went wide, the gray irises translucent through her tears. “She was alive. And quite mad, but that was the least of it. Magnus had altered her in terrible ways. He had Father’s old automatons, too. And what Father said about Anna, Tobias …”

It was clear that she would have said more, but a jolt shuddered through the ship, bumping Tobias like a cart hitting a rut. The rigging. It well might have been giving way. He jumped up, throwing open the locker near the wall. This was where parachutes should be stored and, sure enough, there were half a dozen stacked neatly inside. He picked one up, hating to interrupt Imogen but more worried about getting her safely home.

Another roar rocked them where they sat. Tobias grabbed for the wall, losing his grip on the parachute. Imogen started to fall, and he caught her, her thin body so light he might have crushed her with the gentlest squeeze. He could feel the tension knotting her frame, leaving her quivering like a harp string. As the ship tilted to evade the attack, a glass decanter slid across the table with a rasp. Tobias noted with acute regret that it was empty.

“What’s happening?” Imogen demanded in a tiny voice.

Tobias let go of her and rose to peer out the window. The cabin wasn’t quite tall enough to stand up straight, so he felt like a creature peering out of its burrow. He had a good view of the starscape, the blackness shrouded by veils of smoke. He squinted in one direction, then shifted to see the other way. Fire. But this time, it wasn’t coming from their ship. The hot harpoons had done their work.

Nausea crawled up his throat, but he wiped it from his voice. “The Wyvern’s ablaze. So is the Red Jack. We must be winning.”

Guilt clawed him. All those crewmen were burning. He tried to put the image aside, but failed, breaking into a sickly sweat. Truly, he should have been glad the Helios had the upper hand, but all he felt was a different shade of panic. Before he could close his eyes, he saw crewmen leaping from the Jack, so desperate to avoid the flames that they would brave empty air. He hoped to God they had parachutes, too.

“Nick’s ship has been hit?” Imogen said with alarm. She was up in a moment, pushing him out of the way to see out the window. Her hand beat against the window, a single, hopeless gesture followed by a strangled noise from deep in her throat. “But he saved me! Does that mean nothing?”

“It’s a pirate ship.”

“He still saved me!”

Tobias’s hands made fists. Sorrow rose, lashed by anger at the despair in her voice. She was right, there would be no justice. They had their orders. They were to capture the Red Jack—preferably intact, but lightly toasted would have to do. “Nick has a special navigation tool. Keating wants it for himself, and what Keating wants, he gets. The Helios is his ship to order.”

Imogen put both hands to her mouth. “Does Nick stand a chance?”

Tobias looked inside himself and found a wasteland. “No. He’s a pirate, and he stole the device from Keating in the first place. If he’s caught, he’ll be hanged. If he dies tonight, at least he’s free.” Even as he said it, he hated himself.

“He’d like that better, I think.”

“Is that why Keating sent you? For the spoils of war?”

When did you get so worldly-wise? Tobias wondered sadly. When Father denied you a love match so that he could use your beauty to lure rich suitors? Suddenly he remembered that Imogen had been eloping when Magnus had grabbed her. She’d dared everything—a bright flame fighting the wind—and lost.

She pressed her forehead against the glass of the window.

He hardened his heart before he started to weep himself.

“Put on one of those parachutes. We need to be ready to evacuate.”

But Imogen looked up slowly, the delicate lines of her face in silhouette against the blaze of the Wyvern. Her features were shadowed in muted sepia and gray, the combination of night and the afterglow of destruction. “Then we don’t have much time, and you need to hear this. Magnus had put Anna’s soul inside Serafina, and she used that body to try to kill me. She was jealous that I had lived. Tobias, she was still alive.”

The words skimmed past Tobias, refusing to catch hold. Or maybe he shoved them away because they were too awful. “What are you saying?”

Her lips parted to answer.

The next instant, the Wyvern exploded, a flash of orange flaring outward from the midpoint of the gondola. A tiny part of Tobias’s mind—the part that thrived on mechanics and technical theory—decided it was a malfunction of the aether distiller, brought on by excessive heat. A moment later, the enormous black balloon went up in a billow of white-hot fire, scorching what was left of the sleek gondola to ash.

Imogen’s eyes flared wide, meeting his with an expression of astonishment so profound that Tobias looked over his shoulder to see what was the matter. There was nothing, the tiny room exactly as it had been a minute before. Yet as he turned back, she was falling, folding up like a scarf tossed carelessly to the floor. He barely caught her in time to ease her down.

“Imogen?” he cried. “Im, what’s the matter?”

She was shuddering, fighting against a force ravaging her body.

Tobias fell to his knees and bent over his sister, pulling off his jacket to cushion her head. “Surgeon!” he bellowed. “Surgeon, come quickly!”

She whimpered, her back bowing as if in some terrible agony. Her fingers clutched at him, her eyes holding his as if his gaze alone was keeping her tethered to her body.

“Stay with me!” he urged. “Imogen, hang on. You know you can. You’re strong.”

But her eyes slowly closed, the light in them dimming as if someone had turned down the wick inside her. Fear struck deep and true, shredding him to the quick. There was little he counted on anymore, but he counted on Im. She was all that remained of an innocence he’d lost.

“Surgeon!” he bawled, but the man never came.

The ship jolted again, and he knew the rigging was about to give way. He could feel the ship descending and he could only pray they’d reach the ground before they fell. And yet that wasn’t the thing he feared most right then.

His hands turned chill and clammy, clumsy as paws as he held his sister, trembling as the battle—barely worth noticing now—raged on outside. “Im?”

Her lips moved, her voice so faint he was sure he’d misheard it. “Im?”

She spoke again, and this time he bent close, putting his ear close to her mouth. “Surely I killed you?”

And then she did not speak again.