Unending punishment. That doesn’t sound nice at all. The image of the Creeping Waste sifts into my mind, but I banish it firmly. A Chamber of Curiosities. How can I help but be curious?
Besides, Hal disappeared in here just a moment ago. I must talk to him privately, no matter the cost.
I listen at the crack of the door for just a moment, shifting my shoes into one hand. I slide in and try to shut the door without letting it latch completely. I pride myself on being quieter than a mouse.
Then I turn. And nearly scream.
Shoes clatter to the floor as I cringe from the giant white beast looming above me. It’s nearly three times my height and with paws easily large enough to crush my head with one blow. Huge, yellowed teeth protrude from its black gums. I brace for the killing blow. Then I notice the dust on its muzzle, the cobwebs strung from head to shoulders. A plate reads
Light flares above my head, threatening me with brilliant pain. Instinctively, I raise my palms against it and hold it in abeyance. And then I see how to dissolve it. So, I do. Perhaps I’m better at this than I thought.
“Vespa?” Hal whispers, stalking toward me out of the shadows.
“Who else?” I ask. I can’t look into his eyes as they scan me from head to toe, so I look aside at the room instead. The light reveals things I’ve never imagined. Nearest me is a globe of a world I’ve never seen, maps of countries—Africa? China?—I’ve never heard of before. I scan city names until a familiar one jars me. London. On the river . . . Thames?
And then I understand. This is a chamber of wonders from Old London, the place we’re never to speak of in polite company, the place we all came from but know so little about. There’s a handbill for a lecture given by Charles Darwin at the Royal Academy of Sciences. A portrait shows him with a white beard in a plain dark suit. Not at all like the paintings I’ve seen of him in green robes and halo, surrounded by mythical apes. The sacrilege astounds me.
Hal glares at me. The circulating everlight in the room makes the powder on his hair and face glitter. He looks like an angry sugarplum, but I’m too hurt to laugh.
“Vespa, why in Athena’s name are you following me? Do you realize how much trouble you could get us both into if we’re discovered?”
I feel small and stupid, but I won’t let him see that. I lift my chin. “I needed to speak to you.”
“Well, what do you want?” He turns away and I follow him past skeletons and revolvers, lockets and tea cozies, past a case with a book inside it with
“You promised you would come to me. Where have you been?” I know I sound like a peevish child, and it makes me even more cross and agitated than I already am.
The edges of his mouth fall into a frown as he inspects one of the cases nearest us. “There have been many matters that begged my attention. Not the least of which is staying alive to protect you.”
“What do you mean?”
I can’t see him perfectly in this light, but his hands are burned and there’s a scrape on his cheek that didn’t come from a valet wight with an unwieldy razor. “What happened?” I reach for him without thinking. I touch his face for only a moment, before he turns his cheek and leans away from me. My fingers slide down into his collar.
“You shouldn’t do that,” he says. His voice is flat and dangerous, a tone I’ve never heard from him before.
Before he can protest, I step into him and drag his head down to mine. “Can I do this?” I whisper, brushing my lips against his. I am startled at my own audacity, but I long to enter that golden country we knew before. Magic sparks along my skin.
“No!” he cries. He seizes my shoulders and sets me aside, hard, against a wall. A giant painting looms over me, a portly, sashed queen frowning at me as the frame cuts into my lower back. Then, the painting and the wall on which it hangs vanish. I fall backward.
“Hal!” I clutch at him, my feet sliding over the edge.
His fingers catch in the folds of my skirt, just as my feet find solid ground. I look behind me. The wall has dissolved and I’m in some kind of lift. Elegant mirrors reflect Hal slowly releasing me. There’s a gear box with controls; steam hisses and machinery clinks outside the compartment.
Hal steps inside with me.
“What is this?” I ask.
He looks at the controls, touching the polished levers. He ignores what went on just before and I don’t know what to say, how to tell him all the words bubbling up inside my chest. The scent of burned bone nearly gags me.
“It smells of the Refinery in here,” he says. “I wonder . . .”
He works the levers. The wall slides closed again and we are falling, humming down toward the saints only know what.
“What are you doing?”
“Finding answers, I hope.” He stands with his back to me.
I put my hand on his arm. I must make him look at me. I must make him see me.
“Hal, what is happening between us? I thought . . .”
He looks down at me and I realize just how much taller he is than me.
“Is it because of the gown?” I ask. “I know I look different, but I’m still me. . . .”
His eyes are so cold, so distant. I remember thinking I had never seen blue eyes so warm when first we met, and now I can only think how cold they are. He will freeze me to the floor if I look at him much longer.
Behind the glacial chill lurks a shadow, a whisper, something he’s not saying. He turns, though, before I can apprehend the unspoken.
“I . . .” He swallows, staring at the wall. “I made a mistake I should not have made. I must do my duty and only train you as a colleague, not. . .” He pauses, weighing words. “It is unfair to you to treat you otherwise.”
All my dreams—all the secret wishes I can’t even admit to myself—go up in smoke. Perhaps that’s why the smell of burning is almost choking. It’s my heart smoldering in my chest like burning paper. “Did I misapprehend your intentions?” I don’t know how he hears me above the whistling gears.
Hal turns, his face so tight it could shatter, his eyes cavernous with those unspoken things. “I can’t be with you in that way. Don’t you see that I can’t?”
I close my eyes before he can say more and I feel him turn away. I can’t tell if the punch to my gut is from the desolation that sweeps me or the lift settling and stopping. Something rises up in me—a stubbornness. I will not let him have the satisfaction of seeing my pain. I square my shoulders and lift the mask to my face, hoping it’ll shade the tears glimmering in my eyes.
“Now,” he says, staring at the door, “I don’t know what will be on the other side. I may need you to help me, if we are to return to the Empress’s ballroom in one piece.”
I swallow the ugly words I want to say and simply nod. I don’t know if he sees me, but it takes all my energy to keep what little composure is left to me.
The door rattles open, and anything I might say is drowned in the howl of machinery and a chilling blast that numbs my fingers. We walk out carefully, and I repress a hiss at the cold on my stockinged feet. I regret dropping my shoes in the Cabinet. The doors slide closed behind us, the lift rumbling down out of sight. I follow Hal to an observation deck. Despite the chill, greenish steam drifts upward like the exhalation of some vast Greater Unnatural.
We stare down at the floor far below us, waiting for a break in the shifting green fog. The smell is so terrible that I cover my masked face with my handkerchief as best I can. Hal looks askance at me.
I remove my handkerchief only long enough to ask, “Where are we?”
“Deep in the bowels of the Imperial Refinery, I believe. The most secret and guarded place in all the Empire. Funny that I rescued Syrus from the roof of the Lowtown Refinery not long ago and now I’m inside an even more dangerous one.”
“Syrus? The Tinker thief?”
“You really should trust him, you know. I think his intentions are ultimately good. When you go to Virulen, do
