IT TOOK THEM DAYS TO RETURN to Uma’s Lagos apartment using John Temple’s map. Days in which Rin could barely eat. Days of Berta berating her with questions, which Rin, in her stupefied state, could only answer with noncommittal grunts.
“Why didn’t Iris kill you? What did you say to her? Where is she going now?”
Rin’s muscles were tight and worn. Her right socket twinging with phantom pains. Her mind swirling, because it was anyone’s guess why Iris had left her alive or what she would do next. What she did know, as she burst down the steps of Uma’s basement, was that she needed his help. She needed this man, trapped in his eternal slumber in this chamber filled with flowers, crystals, and ice. If she was going to save Iris, she needed Jinn.
“You’ve got it!” Uma said when Lulu took Rin’s pouch and pulled out the tablet: the Titan Control Device. Her brown eyes sparkled from the glint of its surface. “I can’t believe you did it. Not that I thought you wouldn’t, of course; I’ve always believed in you formidable ladies, but to pull this off—”
Uma reached toward the device, mesmerized, but Lulu snatched it away before she could touch it. The child had good instincts.
With an impatient huff, Uma turned to her assistant. “Aminadab! Stoke the furnace, would you?”
Her hunched, mute assistant nodded. The furnace, a black metal monstrosity, had a little cage that Aminadab opened so he could jostle the coal with a poker. The fire roared up into a pipe that stretched through the ceiling.
“Little girl,” Uma said in all seriousness. And though it seemed to kill her to say it, she said it anyway: “Take the device and throw it inside the furnace.”
With that one command, Rin could relax. She nodded to Lulu, who pursed her lips with determination. Walking over to the furnace, she threw the tablet inside. The fires enveloped it.
“That’s that,” Berta said, dusting her hands off with a few slaps.
But Uma sighed. “One of the greatest discoveries of the nineteenth century, and I’ll never be able to study it. I guess this is what it feels like to be a good person.”
Rin smirked. “Something you might get used to?”
“We’ll see.” Uma scoffed before turning to her assistant. “Aminadab, that child has a gunshot wound,” she said, gesturing toward the bandage around Lulu’s forearm. “Find something to help her treat it. It might be infected by now.”
Aminadab motioned Lulu toward him. But Rin’s attention had turned from them. Here, in this busy lab filled with Bunsen burners and flasks and all manner of wondrous devices, Rin’s gaze was on him—the brown-skinned man living in stasis beyond the pulled violet curtains.
“Jinn,” Rin whispered. “We need him. We need him to reach Iris.” She shook her head. “It’s the only way.”
“What do you mean?” Uma said before deducing the truth. “You saw her, didn’t you?” Her eyes narrowed, her fingers pinching her smoking pipe a little more tightly. “You made contact with Iris again.”
“But she didn’t attack us. It looked like she would, but…” Berta sat on a stool next to the central table. It was a mess. Clearly neither Uma nor Aminadab had bothered to clean it up.
Uma shot the three of them an incredulous look. “She didn’t attack you?”
Berta shook her head. “Rin said something to her in some other language. I don’t know what. To be honest, I was so terrified, I could barely hear a damn thing except a weird buzzing in my ears. Probably my blood pressure. But after Rin talked to her, Iris skedaddled out of there like she’d seen the devil.” Berta scoffed. “What other devil’s out there but her?”
“The other Hiva.” Rin placed her hand upon Jinn’s glass coffin. “There’re only two people in this world she’ll go to next. The other Hiva, or—” Rin stopped and glanced quickly at Berta before pursing her lips shut. “Uma, you once said you could bring this man back to life.”
Rin tapped the glass cage with her fingers, and the flowers quivered. Then again, the petals were always swaying, if only just a little. The cold air being pumped into the case chilled the glass, but Rin could still see Jinn’s handsome features through the frost.
Uma took a puff of her pipe. “What makes you think I should? You seemed quite hostile to the idea before.”
“Iris’s demeanor changed the moment I mentioned Jinn’s name,” Rin told her. “When I told her Jinn had ‘died.’ Before I could explain what I’d meant, she ran off.”
“Hmm.” Ringlets of nicotine smoke rose from Uma’s lips. “Hiva isn’t supposed to have human feelings. Then again, there’s little we know about what Hiva is supposed to be. The cataclysm. Destroyer of man. But what does that really mean? The other Hiva seemed almost affable the last time we had a conversation, in Van der Ven’s home.” Uma rubbed her chin. “Not at all like the devil I imagined him to be…”
“Are you saying Miss Iris is still the same Miss Iris?” Lulu asked from the corner as Aminadab unraveled her bandages carefully.
“No—God no.” Uma laughed. “How could she be the same Iris after everything she’d been through? But then who was Iris originally? The girl I met spying in the train station wasn’t the same girl who felled countless civilizations. But she also wasn’t the same girl I spirited out of London. And she isn’t the same girl now. Who is she? That’s the question she seemed desperate to know that night in the Crystal Palace, when I showed her the Helios. But perhaps that was the wrong question.” Facing the world map on the wall, Uma lowered her pipe. “Perhaps the right question was always: Who does she want to be?”
Rin bit her lip in frustration. There wasn’t any time for Uma’s useless musings. Whoever Iris was now, she was on the loose. Her distress and confusion only made matters worse.
“I believe Jinn is the only way we can reach her,” Rin said. “Jinn can bring her back. He can get through to her. I know it. And so…” Rin paused.
“And so?” Uma repeated, arching an eyebrow. She waited.
The time had passed for hesitating. Rin nodded, strengthening her resolve, and looked up at Uma, resolute. “Jinn can bring Iris back. So you must bring him back. Do whatever you can to bring Jinn back to life. Whatever monstrous medicines, tools, and devices you have up your sleeve in this lab, use it. We need this man to live again.”
Rin half expected Uma to smile or shout in triumph, but she did neither. Uma looked as serious as she did. Everyone knew the gravity of the situation. It wasn’t time for laughter.
“Very well then,” Uma said. “In the meantime, I would suggest you stay here. If Iris is unstable, there’s no telling what she’ll do when she sees you again. She could spare your life, or burn you alive where you stand in seconds. Better not risk it.”
“No.” Rin stepped forward. “I should go and try to find her!”
“Are you crazy?” Berta got up from her stool. “Didn’t you hear the woman? Why would you want to track her down? You do that, you might not come back.”
Berta sounded frightened of the thought. But if she knew what Rin did—that Rin had inadvertently told Iris the truth about her murder, and who had murdered her—then Berta wouldn’t hesitate. She’d flee this basement in an instant, using the Jumps to hunt Iris down before anyone could stop her. She’d get herself killed trying to shoot Iris dead. Though not before turning her gun on Rin first.
“Damn it,” Uma said, after rummaging through a cabinet. “I’ve run out of opiates. I’ll need them for the surgery.” She turned to them. “Could one of you venture out into town and see what you can find?”
“Will do.” Rin knew by Berta’s arched eyebrow that the girl was questioning just how quickly Rin had volunteered, and Rin wasn’t surprised when Berta lifted her hand.
“I’ll go too.”
Rin grimaced. “I move more easily alone.”
Berta wasn’t backing down. “Never know when you’ll need backup.”
A stalemate. Neither girl would give in to the other.
“Both of you go! Goodness.” Rolling her eyes, Uma nodded to Aminadab, who began gathering tools for the surgery. “Just get back as quickly as you can.”
With an annoying smirk, Berta started up the steps.
Their search of Lagos had yielded nothing. Uma needed a special kind of opiate—something similar, according to the scientist, to Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral, which contained a mixture of alcohol and opium. A tincture of laudanum would be helpful too, she’d said. But none of the medicine men they visited had everything they needed.
Medicine… “What about the hospital in Ajashe?”
“Ajashe?” Berta repeated after leaving a shaman’s tent. “Why go all the way there?”
It wasn’t too long ago that she’d been there, painstakingly asking the doctor about the details of various drugs and medicines before choosing one in her scheme against the Dahomey. She recalled there had been quite a few types of opiates on the shelves.
“We’re going back to check.” Rin didn’t accept any complaints. She was going with or without her.
Thinking back to the day she’d drugged Jinn filled her with shame and regret. She’d stabbed an innocent man in the back. Worse still, it had been the betrayal of a friend, one who’d never done wrong by her. If it weren’t for Iris, he would have been executed. She would have been executed. And yet Iris had forgiven her. It was more than she’d deserved.
What can I do for you now, Iris? There must be something…
The last time they’d gone to Ajashe, the bustling city had been reduced to a wasteland of ashes. It was the curse of Hiva. But that had been days ago. News of the city’s sudden decimation must have reached colonial administrators by now—she could see officials and soldiers stationed at certain intersections of dusty roads, looking out for intruders—French, by the sound of their chatter. Of course they would take political advantage of this situation.
Rin was surprised to hear some broken English among them. It’d come from an unlikely pair. One was a woman with blond hair pulled back into a proper bun. Her high, white-collared blouse and long black skirt looked foolish here, in hot and humid Ajashe. She certainly didn’t look like she enjoyed being here either. She looked lost, as if she’d meant to go on vacation, but she’d been lied to about the destination.
Her husband, on the other hand, was all business. In his decorated military uniform, he sniffed the air with his long, pin-straight nose, his elaborately curled mustache twitching each time. “The stench of Africa. It sticks in my nose like flies to feces.”
Rin bit her lip, enraged, but though her hands curled into fists, she didn’t move. He sounded German by his accent.
“General Lothar von Trotha, I’d heard you were traveling to the continent,” said one colonial administrator, much shorter and stouter than he. “But I heard you were headed to the southwest to quell the Herero rebellions.”
Herero? Rin unconsciously gripped her shirt; she was still dressed in what the small group of rebels had given her after saving her from the soldiers.
“And so it would have been my honor to destroy the African tribes with streams of blood and streams of money,” Trotha said, and nodded as if his own validation was all he needed. “Only following such a cleansing can something new emerge, something that will remain. But my wife Bertha and I are here on other business.”
His wife moved to show the colonial administrator some kind of card in her hand. It was golden and folded with black cursive ink inside. “It is an invitation from—” she began to say, but her husband quickly smacked her mouth. Whatever he said to her in German made her lower her head in fear.
“I would like to arrange transport to the Atakora Mountains.”
“We’ll do so right away, good sir,” said the colonial administrator, nodding at a few soldiers nearby, who saluted and began to move.
The Atakora Mountains. Rin remembered Boris Bosch’s elaborate facility and began to wonder as the married couple followed the soldiers down the empty streets. Why there? Why now? An invitation… was it just a coincidence?
Rin shook her head. She couldn’t forget what she was here for. “Let’s keep moving,” she told Berta.
More soldiers were stationed around the city. But not all of them were European.
“Hey!” Berta cried, just before Rin covered her mouth and pulled her in an alleyway between two wooden buildings.
The ahosi were here. Several of them stood in front of a vendor’s tent, its pelts of animal skins still dangling from the roof, with no one to sell them. She recognized them. But the one whose eyes almost caught hers sent a spark of fright coursing through her: Izegbe. The Dahomean military’s best riflewoman. She stood there speaking to a younger soldier with her head shaved, her chest covered in basket-weave brown leather, her wrapped skirt the same dark blue as the others’ uniforms.
Izegbe had helped Rin escape Bosch’s secret facility in the Atakora Mountains. But that didn’t change the fact that Rin was still a fugitive. She didn’t have time to deal with any complications here.
Berta yanked Rin’s hand off her mouth. “Get off me, damn it,” she said, thankfully in a quiet hiss—as a bandit herself, even she could gather the delicacy of the situation. “You don’t need to be so damn rough all the time.”
“I’m sorry.” Rin muttered her apology but kept her expression stubbornly stern. “We’ll go through the back streets to the hospital to get what we need.”
But Berta had a bone to pick. And like a dog with one, she wouldn’t let it go so easily. “You’ve been acting even grimmer than usual. Don’t tell me you’re still planning to go after Iris?” she demanded as they made their way through empty, dusty alleyways.
“You convinced me not to,” said Rin, stepping quietly on the cool sand. “There’s no issue.”
“Nah, there’s an issue. There’s something you ain’t telling me.”
Rin’s heart gave an awkward thump in her chest. After one awkward glance at Berta, she concentrated her gaze on the hospital at the opposite end of the street. There were a few Dahomey warriors several strides away. With their sharp senses, there was no way Rin and Berta would be able to sneak past them. The only option was to stay in the shaded path between these tall buildings and wait for them to leave.
They had to be extra quiet. What didn’t help was Berta punching her in the back, between her shoulder blades.
Rin grimaced. “You fool—”
“Tell me the truth,” Berta hissed. “What is it you really told Iris that made her run like the devil was after her?”
Rin’s throat tightened. With a nervous clearing of her throat, she turned and continued watching the hospital. “Nothing much.”
“Nothing much ain’t nothing.”
“Just keep quiet if you don’t want to get caught.”
Berta made an irritated noise and piped down.
If only she knew.
Rin had told Iris the truth about her final death.
Max had killed her.
No, not only that. Rin had let slip that Jinn had been “killed” as a result of the ambush. And so she knew better than anyone here that there were only two places in this world Iris could head to next.
To Hiva, who’d orchestrated her and her lover’s murder.
Or to Maximo, who’d carried it out.
Rin stayed silent. Perhaps for revenge. Perhaps to save her own skin.
Or perhaps because the fact that she could no longer look Berta in the eye bothered her more than she’d thought it would.
Minutes passed. The Dahomey women began to move. Rin had been so focused on them that she barely registered the shift of wind behind her.
She should have.
Berta let out a gasp. That was what made Rin finally turn. And when Rin did, her knees nearly gave out underneath her.
The blue swirl vanished just as Rin stumbled back and collapsed in shock against the wooden building she’d been hiding behind.
“Good thing we found you,” Lawrence Hawkins told a spooked Berta, his loose blond hair fluttering in the wind. “And look, she’s with Rin.”
Another of Max’s friends, Jacob, stood behind him and nodded. Despite the casualness of their words, there was no levity to be found in any of their expressions. They both looked as if they’d witnessed hell.
“Good,” Jacob said, his brows furrowed in all seriousness. “Because we’ll need all the help we can get.”