In the dark narrow confines of her bunk in Room Thirteen, Lily had spent an uncomfortable night wide awake. Her scarf was wound round her neck and Malkin was wound down around her feet. But her thoughts itched, and so did her scars as she thought of all she’d learned that evening while she and the hybrids had waited anxiously for the fox’s return.

It had been an uncomfortable few hours, hoping upon hope that Malkin would not get caught and would eventually make it back. So, partly to pass the time, partly to assuage their nerves and mostly because Lily had given them her story, each of the hybrids had told Lily the terrible tale of their past.

Luca had gone first. His parents had died when he was thirteen and he’d lost his hands in an accident working in a factory. After that he was sent to a children’s home in Manchester where he never went out or spoke to anyone. Then, one day, a doctor came and spirited him away, brought him to Paris, and made his iron claws… That doctor had turned out to be Droz. Lily had shuddered to hear the name again, and Luca had trailed off after that, as if he didn’t want to relive the rest of what had happened to him. Finally he finished with, “After it was all over I was sold to the circus.”

Deedee spoke next, telling of how she was born in a painted wagon to a family of wire-walking show people. She had no legs from birth and when her folks realized that she mightn’t be able to carry on their profession, they were distraught. “They didn’t want me to end up in a freakshow in some down-at-heel carnival, gawped at by penny punters,” she explained. “But the midwife who delivered me had heard tell of a place in Paris where I might be able to walk with the aid of mechanical prosthetics. The doctor there would pay to use me in experiments. They said it would make me ‘better’.” The rest she didn’t want to talk about. Except to say that her parents had died in a circus accident and she’d never got to go home. “Eventually,” she said, “I too was sold to the Skycircus.” Then she put her head in her hands and sobbed.

Lily shuddered at the thought of the terrible things that had happened to her.

Finally it had been Angelique’s turn. She’d leaned back on her bunk and slowly folded her arms around her knees, wrapping her wings around her body to block herself off from the others.

She’d told how her father had been an airman from Freetown in Sierra Leone on the coast of West Africa. “He always wanted to travel,” she explained, “and one day he got a job as a cabin boy on a zep that was heading to England.”

In London he had met Angelique’s ma, who was a chambermaid in a fancy hotel, and they’d fallen in love and got married. They were overjoyed when Angelique’s ma had fallen pregnant, but they didn’t have much money, so her father had found a commission on another airship where he could earn enough for his growing family. He was a crewman on the Atlantic zep Hawksmoth, flying from London to Alaska, but on the maiden voyage they were lost in a storm and he never returned. Angelique’s mother had died in the Camden Workhouse years later, when Angelique was nine. She survived them both, but her bones were brittle. Hollow in the middle, lighter than air. She’d broken her leg twice while she lived in the workhouse, and when she was sixteen, Droz had found her in the attic there, and brought her to Paris. Then the experiments lasted a year, before Angelique got her wings and was sold to the circus.

“It took me many months in rehearsals to learn how to use these extra limbs,” Angelique continued, picking at her feathers with frustration. Lily could see she found speaking about it uncomfortable. “It wasn’t a natural process, becoming a bird – it wasn’t engrained in my being, like with fledglings. I had to practise every day before I learned to glide and swoop. To fly strains every muscle in a body.”

She shook her plumage angrily. “People were not meant to live like this, Lily. Airships and zeppelins are one thing, but flying humans should never have made their way into the world. To fly is a dream, but sometimes, when you achieve your dreams, you discover nothing can stop you from falling.”

“I wish I’d never met Droz,” Deedee said sadly, when Angelique had finished.

“Me too,” Angelique answered.

Lily had been about to say something then. To tell them of her mama’s connection with Droz, when, at that moment Malkin had scrabbled at the base of the door.

They hurried to let him back in through the hatch, and he revealed the bad news. How Robert had lost the lock picks and how the clowns were bringing Madame’s coffin-machine tomorrow evening – whatever it was – and Lily was to be put into it for the show.

Thinking back on it now, Lily felt nauseous, not just for her own fate, but because before she’d met Angelique, she’d never once considered that to have wings, or any of their adjustments, might be an unpleasant affliction. Yet the way Angelique spoke about them made them sound like a curse.

It was, Lily reflected, how she felt about her heart. Some days her scars ached and the heart felt so heavy it seemed as if it might fall through her ribcage. She had to will herself through those times and know that her heart was what kept her alive and brought her moments of joy too. Maybe Angelique had lost that sense of her wings. It had become tangled up in the terrible things that had happened to her.

She was glad, in that moment, that she hadn’t told the whole truth. She’d left out the small fact that her mama had known Droz and that the doctor’s interest was something to do with why Madame had taken her in the first place.

How would Angelique feel if she knew Lily’s own mother could have provided part of the research that helped make the wings which caused her so much pain? Would she still want to help Lily escape then? That question made Lily’s chest tighten.

Angelique, Luca and Deedee had lost so much; they’d been prisoners nearly all their lives. But now she had earned their trust and she needed to honour it. Lily glanced at Malkin, who’d wound down at her feet, and thought of Robert locked up somewhere on the ship too. And she decided, no matter what, she was going to get them all out. She had no idea exactly what terrible fate Madame had planned for her with her machine, but she really couldn’t afford to wait around and find out. She hoped that Robert could get the picks to her tomorrow. Even with them, escaping was still going to be tough and she’d need the hybrids’ help to get out.

She sat up and took the ripped pages of Mama’s notebook from her pocket, and flicked through them, squinting in the low, electric light of the room in an attempt to read. She hoped she would find something to set her mind at rest and feel better, or that at least might aid her plans.

Saturday, 8th November 1884,
Riverside Walk, Chelsea

John’s partner, Professor Simon Silverfish, has visited us a number of times in the last month to discuss business. I have been telling him about my studies into hybrids when I was at college, brought about by my interest in Lovelace’s Flyology and the idea of creating someone with wings. He seems remarkably interested. He says it’s something he would like the company to work on. A second division, separate to the building of mechanicals, that would create hybrid machines that could be implanted or attached to people.

John disapproves of this work, I can tell, but says nothing.

I suggested to the professor that he might contact my old college tutor, Dr Droz, who is an expert in such matters.

Droz again. With a heavy heart, Lily read on. On the second of the ripped pages she had grabbed, almost five years had passed. She would’ve been nearly six years old at the time it was written, and soon after she’d turned six, Mama had died.

Saturday, 1st June 1889,
Riverside Walk, Chelsea

It was a beautiful afternoon. Lily and I spent the best part of it outdoors on the terrace, at the far end of the garden.

There is a good deal of shade there beneath the topiary hedges, and also a darling folly – a summer house, with a secret passage running beneath it that leads back up to the main house. At the far end of the terrace, a weeping willow masks an iron gate that opens out onto a pier on the River Thames.

Lily and I were sitting in deckchairs on the terrace around mid-afternoon when Professor Silverfish and Dr Droz paid an unannounced visit.

Lily’s heart stopped in her mouth. She hadn’t realized she’d met Droz herself. She tried hard to picture his face in her mind’s eye, but could not. The most she could come up with was a grey cloud of hair. Then again, she had, she supposed, only been five. She searched the rest of Mama’s entry for more information, but there was nothing else about him…

Mrs Rust – one of the new mechanical servants John has been constructing – brought us tea on the lawn. She was about to pour the tea when she started shaking awfully, as if she was having a terrible fit. It seems it was some kind of malfunction of the cogs in her primary motor cortex, but Dr Droz showed me how to turn her off with her winding key by setting it in her keyhole and turning it sharply anticlockwise, then opened her head and adjusted the cogs. When we subsequently rewound her and started her up again, she was perfectly fine.

I told the professor and Droz that perhaps theirs and John’s mechanicals needed some additional work before the Hartman-Silverfish Company attempts to market them commercially and this caused much amusement.

Lily seems to love Mrs Rust as much as she does me and John. She’s a remarkable child and treats these new mechanicals quite as if they were human.

Lily finished reading, and squeezed her eyes shut. Tears flooded out and she brushed them away with the end of her scarf. She’d missed Rusty since she’d been here.

And there was so much else to consider. It wasn’t true what the hybrids said about regular people – they weren’t all nasty and they wouldn’t all betray you. Mama had wanted to make hybrids because she thought it was a good thing. It was Droz and Silverfish who’d had bad motives that benefitted themselves.

Lily knew she’d have to prove that to the hybrids if she was to persuade them to go through with her plan tomorrow night and come with her when they escaped.

She tried to settle herself, but she couldn’t quite keep still. Her mind was still whirring with the new things she’d learned. She took out the next ripped page from Mama, and read on:

Monday, 5th August 1889,
Lyme Regis

This morning we went fossil-hunting on the beach at Church Cliffs. It was quite windy. John had his walking cane with him and used it to point out some landmarks at sea. Rows of iron prison ships and a tall spider platform where they are drilling for oil and gas.

Along the tideline of the bay I discovered a promising-looking stone submerged in the sand. I managed to break it open with my rock hammer and wash the two halves in the sea. Lily had been playing in the breakers nearby, but she ran up to me and asked what I had found.

“A fossil,” I said, giving her the stone.

Lily took the two halves from me and pulled them apart. When she saw the golden petrified ammonite within the stone, her eyes widened and she smiled.

“The secret’s at the heart of it,” she said.

At nearly six years old she already has the most amazing mind – sharp as a fox and flighty as a raven. She wants, no needs, to discover the truth behind everything. It compels her.

She takes that stone everywhere with her and will not put it down. She’s continually asking me about it, probing for answers. I hope she remains as inquisitive always – one can achieve so much with attention, go so far.

One day I intend to tell her about the Flyology project.

Lily could remember that afternoon at the beach vividly. In the past, she’d dreamed about it often, and she still had Mama’s stone on her bedside table. She hoped she was still asking all the questions of others that she had asked of Mama back then. Mama had always told her the truth. At least, when she could. And she too wanted to be honest, but would the other hybrids trust her once they knew her mama had been involved with their hated creator? And would they still want to come with her once she and Robert got the lock picks back?

It was all too much to think about. For now, there was only one thing left to do: sleep.