Corroded

The smell of toast and jam, once so welcoming, now turned nauseating. The illness I’d worried over upon waking seemed to intensify, a bit of ague that hovered between aching limbs and swirling belly.

Fighting back the urge to bend, to wrap my arms around my stomach and will the ache to fade, I turned my back on Maddie Ruth’s thwarted bribery.

Let her return to find her offer rejected. Perhaps she would take the hint.

Like as not, she would only try the harder.

Foolish girl.

I used the heavy silver bowl arrayed behind a floral screen, washed my face and all exposed skin. The fire in the parlor had been allowed to die, and would not be stoked again until closer to waking. The chill in the air cooled my too-hot flesh, and I welcomed it. I quickly gathered black remnants of charcoal, worked it through my hair until I was satisfied.

Once done, I tightly plaited it before twisting it up and securing it with my dwindling supply of pins, then washed my hands again in the blackened water.

I put on my corset, the thin metal slats between leather facings fitting into place as designed. I’d made it specially so that I could lace it without help, and as I fastened the high collar in place, as the bindings tightened, I felt a little more the thing.

It was a new day. A new opportunity. Coventry was to be collected, and I needed to place some distance between myself and the Menagerie denizens who would not leave me be.

All I wanted, all I desperately needed, was to be left alone to my own devices. I needed to consider my path, how I might be able to achieve my goals. The Karakash Veil held me accountable for Hawke’s saving of my life. I had been given order to repay the debt by fetching Mad St. Croix’s alchemical serum, yet I knew I could not fulfill the request.

First, because the bloody device had long since disappeared. Second, and perhaps more importantly, I refused to hand over something that powerful—or, at least, with such potential—to the Veil.

This meant that I would be forced to act on a plan, and soon. I could no longer juggle my attempts to appease the Veil with collections acquired for no real purse and locate the sweet tooth to enact revenge. I would have to choose, and soon.

I simply needed an opportunity. A slip of the rival collector’s hand, anything upon which I could pin my next move. It had become, much to my impatient dismay, a game of patience.

So I brought in collection after collection, and did not ask for pay. I slept in the sweets’ quarters and did not make a fuss. I waited.

The devices I chose to embrace were not of anyone else’s liking, I will admit, yet I refused to give a good bloody damn.

So braced, I gathered the sheets into my arms, opened the door and stepped out into the clear air of the Menagerie grounds.

I did not make it one foot from the door. I halted abruptly, my path blocked by a stocky foreign man wearing a plain white robe-like tunic with long bell sleeves. His breeches, knotted off at the knees, were black and slightly billowing, his calves bare and his feet clad in thin black slippers.

He bowed in that uniquely obeisant way of his people, causing the high tail of his topknot plait to fall forward. When he straightened, I looked into the dark brown eyes of a Chinese envoy of the Karakash Veil and knew what it was he wanted.

I would not be left alone at all, it seemed.

My smile was small, my chest tightened.

“You are summoned,” he said in thickly accented English; the only three English words I had heard the Veil’s extremely stoic footmen speak. Possibly the only words I’d ever heard them speak at all. Usually they only gestured. Then they waited.

“I am busy,” I returned evenly. “These bedclothes require laundering and the water in the parlor needs changing.”

I did not know if he understood that much English, for he said nothing. Instead, true to form, he waited.

“I am not going right now,” I told him.

This time, I watched a faint shift of weight. It was a tiny thing, all but imperceptible to them what wouldn’t know to look, but I’d spent a great deal of time looking. I knew danger where I saw it.

I had only just bemoaned my need for patience. I truly needed to be more careful of what I wished.

I was out of time to plan.

Rashness had become my refuge. The urge to behave in such a reckless manner as was not expected of me had grown these past few weeks, but at the time I had called it anger, frustration.

Melancholy.

Dropping my sheets, I surged forward, eager to test this small foreign man’s mettle, and could not even track the motion as he turned to one side. As I sailed past him, a sharp pain bit the side of my neck. Tendons popped in that terrible way of plucked catgut strings, and my breath caught. The muted daylight turned black, and then I felt no more.

Chapter Three

I came to consciousness already perspiring, which told me more about my surroundings than the brilliant haze of crimson slowly congealing into focus around me.

“Wu’an,” said a voice, nasally spoken but pleasant enough despite.

My eyes closed again. I groaned my dismay into the floorboards beneath my overwarm face.

This room was not unfamiliar to me. I had been here before, the night after my first ill-fated brush with the alchemical serum that had nearly destroyed me, and I recognized its ambience. Even as my vision strained to merge into a single focused line, I knew without having to look that the walls were papered with the most ornate patterns I had ever seen. It gleamed like silk embroidery, reflecting back the heat and brilliant color of the fire stoked across the room in a thousand shades of red and gold. The smell I breathed, an aroma both sweet and exotic in its intensity of spice, was likely incense of some kind, whose subtle haze softened the sharp angles of the folding screens arrayed in the center of the room.

Summoning my tottering strength, I pushed myself up from my undignified sprawl on the Karakash Veil’s polished wooden floor. “Good afternoon,” I returned, though sullenly. “I have received kinder invites.”

“Our invite was kind, Miss Black. The assent was your doing.” The voice that greeted my return to consciousness did not lose even an iota of its maddeningly even character as it switched languages from what I assumed was native Chinese—a language I never had the opportunity to learn—to the Queen’s English, completely without trace of accent. “We are pleased to find you did not suffer unduly in your...haste.”

The commentary came from behind one of two embroidered screens, each gleaming red silk panel shot through with gold. The room was brilliant, illuminated brightly by fire and gaslights affixed to each wall, and decorated in matching crimson and gold panels. Tigers and dragons battled for supremacy in the uncomfortable heat.

“You look flushed,” observed the voice when I said nothing. “Are you unwell?”

I did not turn to see if two of the Chinese servants waited by the doors. I knew they would, blank-eyed men with matching top-knots, undecorated robes and slippered feet. Like Chinese soldiers made of tin, they would hold their positions and would not allow my departure unless the Veil willed it.

I tucked my hands behind me and studied the dividers with as much impassive patience as I could summon.

My neck hurt, that did not surprise me, but the ache behind it, that rasp in my throat I could not ignore, suggested I had more to worry about than a thump from a foreigner.

I was coming ill. A touch of the ague from all this frolicking about in the cold and damp, no doubt. I frowned. “As well as can be expected,” I said, giving no ground. “What can I do for you, sir?”

The voice, to be truthful, lacked all distinction of either sex. It was not as honeyed as certain feminine