which had so alarmed Rasputina. Fae eyes gleamed with an inner light. If I were Rasputina, I’d have been losing my cool staring into them as well.
“Speak,” Rasputina said. “You’ve been loyal crew for months, Jakob. What are you going to do to this girl?”
“Cut her throat if you don’t lower that crude weapon and leave us to our business,” Jakob snarled. “And also if she declines to obey my terms.”
Fury flared in me. Tremaine still thought he controlled me, either via an agent or directly, through my fear of the Fae catching up to me. Now it had happened, and strangely, I wasn’t panicking. I was just furious. “It wouldn’t be the first time,” I told Jakob. “My brother sliced my throat. He almost killed me. I was bleeding all over myself. I’m not going to scream and beg.”
“You mad bastard,” Rasputina said, lowering the hammer on her pistol. The click echoed in the closed space, and I swallowed in fear, acutely aware that I was in the way of the bullet.
“Let the girl go.” Her voice had gone soft, placating, more like that of a kindly teacher than that of a captain. “This can still end with everyone alive, Jakob.”
“She’s a destroyer,” Jakob snarled. “When she turns the wheel and opens the kingdom, they will come and come and come, come from the stars and cover this world, and the next, and the next.…”
Finally, my opening. I recognized those ramblings—iron madness, eating into your brain until you just rambled endlessly, about the things only you could see. My mother had talked about the same things.
I snapped my head back into Jakob’s face, feeling something give—something nose-shaped. Jakob yelped, the knife skidding down my neck and over my collarbone as he wind-milled.
Rasputina’s arm never wavered; she didn’t even blink. The gunshot was impossibly loud, stole all sense of sound from me, and I felt the bullet fly through the air next to my face.
She missed Jakob by inches, the bullet digging another dent in the bulkhead, and he bared his teeth. They weren’t pointed like Tremaine’s, but they were white and sharp, ready to tear flesh.
I didn’t know for sure that it’d work, but I didn’t hesitate. I grabbed Jakob’s wrist, above the brand surrounding the curious metal rivet. Fae couldn’t survive in iron. I dug my fingernails into the spot and accessed my Weird.
Jakob groaned and swiped at me with the knife, but Sorkin darted forward and pinned his arm to the bulkhead with a roar. I felt skin, blood and metal beneath my nails, and Jakob’s screams spurred me on. I yanked on the piece of metal—silver, I saw now, carved in the shape of a tapered screw, going all the way down to Jakob’s bone—with my fingers and my Weird together.
Splitting pain in my skull, a shattering scream from Jakob, and he collapsed, still, on the floor of the engine room.
I looked down at my bloody hand, which gripped the silver screw. My shoulder throbbed at the contact with it. Powerful Fae enchantments were wound around this piece of silver—powerful enough, I thought, to keep a Fae citizen alive in the Iron Land for months.
“Jakob,” said Rasputina, bending down and feeling for his pulse. Jakob thrashed and screamed when she touched his skin, as if her touch were flame, and I darted back, into the arms of Sorkin, who held me steady.
“It’s all right, little girl,” he rumbled. “It’s going to be all right.”
I tried to pull away, to get to Jakob and make sure he was really finished. Rasputina had no idea what she’d let onto her boat, and as she shook Jakob by the shoulders, I wanted to snatch her away, to scream that she wasn’t nearly as afraid as she should be.
Jakob was even paler than he had been, all his veins standing out, as he grabbed for Rasputina.
“Burn, witch!” he shrieked. “You burn! Bright as the red fire they put into your blood!”
Rasputina jerked her hand back. “What are you saying?” Her face had gone from flushed to pale in an instant, and she drew away from Jakob’s twitching body.
He giggled, and I flinched. It wouldn’t be long now. This much iron around a full-blooded Fae … I didn’t want to think about what would happen when the poison took full effect.
It would be too much like looking into my future.
“The fire and the ice,” Jakob hissed. “The beginning and the end. The waking dreamer there, Aoife Grayson, will end you. She’ll drown the whole world, and she’ll do it with a smile.” His laughter turned into a shrill scream. “I don’t want the clockwork inside me! I don’t want the dreams!” His hand lashed out again, and he snatched Rasputina’s pistol from her belt.
“No—” she started. Not a shout, not an exclamation, just the softest beginning of a plea, before Jakob put the barrel to his chin and squeezed the trigger.
I immediately tucked my head down against my shoulder, and the force of the gunshot slapped me like a hand. Rasputina screamed, and I stayed perfectly still, with my eyes screwed shut, until she stopped. I didn’t want to look.
Footsteps raced, and other crewmembers who’d heard the shot from outside came spilling in. There was yelling, in Russian and French and half a dozen other languages, and still I stayed where I was, until Rasputina got off the floor, scraping the fine spray of blood off her cheeks, and grabbed me by the arms. I braced myself to be hit. The rage and confusion on her face were plain, and those feelings only led to one place, in my experience.
But after a long moment, she let go of me. “You better be worth it” was all she said before she picked up her cap from the floor and put it back on her head, sweeping past the crew and out of the engine room.
I stayed. I had to see, to make sure Jakob was really gone. Crewmembers bundled his body into an oilcloth sack and hauled it away, and only then, as they brought a mop and bucket to scrub up the blood, did I open my hand.
The enchanted silver had bitten deep divots into my flesh, but the thing was dead now, no more magical than a bread box.
Tremaine had known where I would be before I’d known myself. Had sent an agent ahead to retrieve me. Had willfully put close to fifty lives in danger just to get me alone, to deliver his message to me. And I wasn’t surprised at any of it. That was Tremaine’s way—destroy an Engine, destroy a city, destroy my life. Nothing mattered but the agenda of the Fae, and his agenda in particular.
I made my way back to my bunk, past crew who gave me a wide berth. I looked down at myself and saw that I was covered in Jakob’s blood. I was as numb as I’d been when Sorkin and Rasputina had pulled me from the ocean—all that mattered was that the Fae knew where I was.
My legs were rubbery and my heart was thudding as I collapsed on my bunk, listening to the
Having come that close to being taken to Tremaine again made me nauseous. Draven was malicious, but I could out-think him, outmaneuver him. I knew I was smarter, and that I could make a plan that both kept Dean alive and got me what I wanted from the Brotherhood.
With Tremaine, I had no such assurances. He’d fooled me before, made me a virtual puppet, and now he’d gotten close enough to draw blood, all without my seeing it. I’d done what he wanted, I thought, with the same burning rage I’d felt when I’d fought off Jakob. I’d started a slow hurricane that would eventually sweep the entire Iron Land bare. And yet he still wanted me. For what?
The only answer I could muster was that it was more important than ever for me to find the nightmare clock. It could deal with Draven, with the Fae, with all my mistakes. Find it, use it, set things right. That was my only course now, no matter what the cost.
Being resolute helped me calm down a little, but only a little. I wiped the blood off myself as best I could with the single towel Rasputina had provided and shut the door. I got back into bed, and pulled my legs up to my chest and a blanket around my shoulders. Draven might have given me passage that kept me safe from the Proctors, and Rasputina had agreed to carry me, but the journey to the Bone Sepulchre was turning out to be anything but easy.
Rasputina knocked on my door after a time. “Join me in my cabin,” she said, and gestured me into the corridor. I was too tired to argue, or even to wonder what she was going to do to me. Nothing she could come up with would be worse than Draven or Tremaine.
We took the same seats, the two small chairs, but there was no offer of a drink this time, and Rasputina
