what he asks and visit the Manticore with him.”
I don’t mention the fact that the boy stole my toad and refuses to give it back. That seems trifling now. “Won’t the Manticore eat us both for breakfast?”
Hal half-smiles. “I doubt anyone could have the power to eat you against your will. Especially not for breakfast.”
He’s joking with me now. As if he didn’t just say a few moments ago that he simply cannot have feelings for me. I stare down through the mists. The nevered bars of cages glow through the mist, row upon row of cages that disappear under the eaves of the catwalk. And in them are Unnaturals, scads of them, hordes of them. I glimpse the glitter of a Firebird’s wings, the curled horns of a morose Minotaur.
I tug Hal’s sleeve. “Look!”
Their voices rise up to me now through the scream of machinery—dirges of werehounds, the plaintive songs of mermaids. A cluster of dryads touches the bars with their leafy fingers, wincing and sobbing at the pain. I’ve never seen a living dryad before, only a single mounted one in the Museum basement. That one looked like little more than a pile of leaves and twigs, but these are beautiful and proud and sad. Somewhere, I know, an entire forest must be dead without its tree women.
And all because of us.
Then I see a line of people being led to a rusting boiler. I can’t see them very well, but the checkered headband gives one of them away—Tinkers.
Hal points at the same time I reach to tug his sleeve again.
We watch as the first Tinker enters the boiler. Stooping door wardens slam the boiler shut. There’s a screeching exhalation of both steam and pressure; my eardrums nearly burst from it. I tremble with the force of so much magic used at once. A door on the other side of the boiler opens then, and something airy and light is plucked out with a tool that looks much like a pitchfork.
The airy thing turns and flutters in panic like a trapped butterfly. A Refiner approaches in goggles and hood and touches it with a black device. It stills and then I can see it clearly enough to understand.
“A wight!”
“They make wights from Tinkers,” Hal says, his voice thick with disgust and remorse. He closes his eyes, leaning forward as if he might be sick.
I am again at a loss, this time from the sheer devastation of such knowledge. One more punch to the gut will leave me utterly hollow. But this is bigger than anything that has happened to me. Whatever anyone else might think, the Tinkers are people. To warp and enslave them in such a hideous way . . . I can’t even begin to comprehend the cruelty. And the poor Unnaturals . . . Their mourning songs tear me wide with grief. A little voice within reminds me that it wasn’t so long ago I was quite happily mounting sylphids on boards, little dreaming of their sentience. Now I’m taking magic lessons from one and carrying him about in my reticule. I feel him shuddering against my hip in terror.
But I still just don’t want to believe it could be true. “How can it be?” I ask. “How are they doing this? The Empress is the Head of the Church of Science and Technology. Magic is forbidden. . . .” I spout every doctrine I can think of, but none of it changes what’s beneath us.
“Because, as I told you before, it’s all a lie!” Hal shouts above the grinding blast. “The Empress and her Scientists and Refiners want to keep all the wealth and power for themselves. And this is the effect of their madness. Do you finally believe me?”
I nod. I already believed him, even though I had only the proof of the magic itself as evidence. This . . . this is something else entirely. Something incontrovertible. As ineffable as the Watchmaker is rumored to be, though I do not know if I believe in him anymore.
“This is not what magic was meant for,” Hal says, passion trembling in his voice. His knuckles are white on the metal railing.
“What are you going to do?”
He bows his head; frustration sets the muscles in his jaw twitching. “What can I do? I am the only Architect left. I—”
“What do you mean—the only one left?”
“Charles killed them all.”
“Charles?” I cover my mouth with my hands, feeling the truth sink in like a splinter. Charles has always nurtured a core of hatred, a core I’d brushed against and made fun of and mostly ignored, even though Hal warned me to be careful of him back in the Museum. But I’ve seen the burns on Hal’s hands and the scar on his cheek. I feel all the things he must have felt at seeing his fellow Architects fallen. “You narrowly escaped being killed yourself, didn’t you?”
He nods. “He is filled with a fell magic I do not understand. He was once one of us, but he left the Architects months before I came here. We were wrong to let him go, and it was nearly impossible to be sure that he was the one I sought once I did find him, so powerful is his magic. And now he knows about you.”
I think about the day I met Hal, the day someone pushed me through the field. “Do you think he pushed me through the field that day?”
Hal looks down again into the glimmering mist, as if it holds the answer. “It’s highly possible, if he was either trying to test or get rid of you. I am certain he will now make it his special mission to kill us both, especially since we know what he wants.”
“The Heart of All Matter,” I whisper.
“Yes. The Heart of All Matter. Which is why, when you’re at Virulen, you must let Syrus take you to the Manticore. Only she can stop Charles and this fell magic he possesses. I’ve never seen anything like it. Except for this,” he says, gesturing at the glimmering steam and darkness below us. “Charles and the Empress are somehow of the same magical ilk, I think. And they will destroy everything, if we do not stop them.”
I’m deep in shock at how the web has closed around me. I feel as constricted as Princess Olivia, with her mouth stitched shut by spells.
“Vespa,” he says. He grips my upper arms, shaking me a little to make me look at him. “Please say whatever happens, you will do this thing. You will go to the Manticore and help her. You are the only living witch. You have the power to save us.”
I swallow. I want to say so many things, but what comes out is a squeak.
Figures loom behind Hal, Refiners with leashed werehounds and soot-grimed boiler wardens with thunderbusses, their boots rattling the catwalk.
“Hal!”
He looks back. “Hold fast to me,” he says in my ear.
I have approximately one second to clutch his dark sleeves before his magic utterly dissolves me.
We become ourselves again in the strange Cabinet of Curiosities. Hal is pale and sweating.
“Go,” he says. “We mustn’t be seen together.”
I release him reluctantly, wishing he would say more though I know he won’t.
So I nod, slipping my abandoned shoes on at the polar bear’s feet. I pass as silently as I can back out into the hall. The clocks mock me, ticking away the precious time left to those imprisoned below. Tears feather my cheeks behind the Strix mask. But I am not crying for just myself now. I am crying for the beautiful things of this world, so perishable and fragile, and the Tinkers who have cleaved to them selflessly. I am crying for their loss and my loss and the loss that most people here cannot fathom. I am crying for what I have only brushed against but never fully known.
I take several deep breaths in the atrium before proceeding back into the ballroom.
Lucy finds me almost as soon as I step into the press of the onlookers and dancers.
“Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” she says, locking her arm firmly in mine. I’d very nearly forgotten the rose petal hidden in her glove, and the reason for my being here at all. It’s time to set the love charm into motion.
I start to apologize but she interrupts before I can do much more than stammer.
“Never mind. You’re here now.” She leans closer. “I’ve not yet seen my future fiancé, but I hear he’ll be wearing midnight blue. Are you ready?”
I swallow. I try to inhale, but either my lacings or the crowd won’t allow it. All I can do is nod.
