LONDON, 1758
Elena follows me outside to the alley beside the brothel, closing the door behind her. It is raining now, the clammy air heavy with smoke from the burned ship. The commotion on the river has thankfully drawn attention away from here. I step to the humped center of the narrow, deserted street, standing on the precipice of a jagged channel that runs down the middle.
My sister is holding a bundle of yellow silk in her hands.
The lines of her body are lost in a dark riding coat, too big for her, turning her into a shadow beneath a crimson lamp. Above us, small faces peek through one of the few dimly lit windows of the building. Girls locked inside an abattoir. We slaughtered every man in the building, and yet Elena did not free the children.
“What are you doing?” I ask her. “They are little girls.”
Elena steps out into the rain.
“Circumstances have changed, Peter,” she says. “I need to regroup, find a place where I can blend in. A girl’s school will provide me with both opportunities. You know that I am a quick thinker, and this is the best idea I’ve got.”
“This is insane,” I say to her. “Come with me back to the estate.”
Elena pulls back her hood, a dark mass of curls spilling out. Her eyes are wide and searching, lips trembling as she asks.
“Hypatia…”
“Gone. You saw.”
“Yes, but her anima?”
“Leizu kept it,” I say. “To add to her collection.”
“And what of Hypatia’s vessel—”
“Sunk to the bottom of the Thames, darling, please—”
“We could find her—”
“Come with me, Elena. Now.”
Hands curled into tiny fists, the girl stands in the middle of the broken street and throws her head back. Tensing her whole body, she screams, channeling the piercing shout into the rain-filled sky with inhuman force.
The scream lasts for a long time.
“Come,” I say, extending a hand. “Please.”
The rain is driving now, lamps guttering, drops sliding in watery veins across the leather of my face and backs of my hands. Beads of the misty rain perch like pearls in Elena’s hair. Each drop is washing away part of the horror of what just happened, but not enough.
The puddles around me are dark as blood.
“She was my only friend,” says Elena. “And she is gone because of you. Because you refused your duty.”
“I chose you,” I say.
“You were not made to serve me,” says Elena. Her voice has gone flat and emotionless in a way that I find frightening. “We each serve our own Word, Peter. Being true to that is the only path to happiness.”
She drops the silken bundle onto muddy stone. The yellow handkerchief and its precious contents lie in filth, soaking wet and stained with soot.
“There’s your destiny,” she says, nodding. “There’s who you were meant to protect. Your old master.”
“Elena, no,” I say, but I can’t take my eyes away from the handkerchief. A rivulet of rainwater tugs a corner of fabric away to reveal the anima. The glittering crescent calls to me. To hold it in my hands would feel right.
“You…I promised to protect you.”
“No, my dear Peter,” Elena urges. “There is no magic in our origin. We were simply repaired at the same time by a foolish old man who served an ambitious tsar. That does not make us brother and sister.”
I remember a grassy clearing atop a broad plateau at dusk. A little girl lighting a candle placed within a paper sky lantern, her smile lit from below. As the first stars hardened in the sky, my sister and I added our own constellations to the cosmos—
“I do not believe that,” I say.
Elena plants both hands on my thighs, pushing me back. Her clockwork voice echoes sharply in the empty alley, under the thrum of rain.
“I am not your master. I am not your sister. I’m not anything to you.”
I blink, stumbling back. It should destroy me, what she has said. But I only feel pinpricks of rain on my skin. Each needle bite is building into a crescendo of realization.
I will always be alone. I was always alone.
Could the feelings I have for Elena be an illusion? Do they exist in a false world, constructed by a blank, newborn mind? Have I made meaning out of coincidence?
We are nothing to each other.
Elena slowly draws a stiletto.
“Take the anima and go,” she says, threatening.
“Elena—”
Without hesitation, she steps forward and slides the blade into my chest. I catch her slight body in both my hands and lift her and hug her to me. My chest shudders at the bite of steel, but I am breathing in the scent of her hair and perfume, squeezing my eyes closed. For this one second I can pretend things are simple again. Perfect and safe, like when we were in Favorini’s lab, before Elena studied the world, before she—
Twisting out of my grasp, she drives the blade deeper. The steel separates my ribs and punctures the bellow of my lungs, my breath dying in my throat. Elena steps back and watches me as I crumple to my knees on rough cobblestones.
Elena grabs the cloth of my jacket and pulls me close to her.
“Go,” she says, her lips an inch from my ear. “Leave me to my studies. Protect the anima of your old master and serve your Word.”
I am mute, the world spinning away from me, and Elena along with it.
“Do your duty.”
In a haze of water and pain, knees soaking wet, shoulders hunched, I wrap my arms tight around my own punctured torso. My voice is stalled, diaphragm contracting as my final breath escapes. The silken bundle lies on the road before me.
“If you return,” says Elena, pulling her hood over her face, “I will kill you.”
The harsh words are spoken in a child’s musical voice. Where once her face seemed impish, now her features are hard and unforgiving. Her soft cheeks are beaded with rain like tears, but her eyes are blank.
It is a mask and I do not truly know the person who hides beneath it.
Perhaps I never did.
With shaking hands I pick up the anima and cradle it to my chest, letting the silk handkerchief fall away. Some mechanism fails inside me and I pitch forward onto my elbows, forehead pressing against cold stone. Now that I am not breathing, the world has become quiet and the steady drumming of rain grown to havoc in my ears.
When I lift my eyes, Elena is walking away.
For an instant, she is a little girl again. Hopping between puddles, her face is lost under the black velvet riding cloak. Her buckled shoes click over cobblestones that dance and shine under the lamplight and stars and falling rain.
I try to call her name, but nothing comes out.