The Dark Volume

against the pull of her shoulder.

“Her continued service,” she said. “Even if she is no match for Francis, she remains inordinately powerful. And in our absence, she has no doubt discovered any number of useful secrets within the Ministries.”

“Excellent practical reasoning, madame. I too am practical, and I think it is extremely important to retain control of this excellent facility—which means, of all things, Xonck.”

“That is nothing to do with Margaret—”

Again, Vandaariff did not seem to answer her words, but spoke from his own urges, the same poisonous resentment. “These machines are our future, but my vision. You deprived me of Lydia, Rosamonde. Her flesh had become my canvas.” Vandaariff's eyes sharpened. “Now my dreams have changed—they have deepened in astonishing ways… I see how I can go so much further…”

His eyes settled on his target with a hungry gleam and Miss Temple felt her gorge rise.

“My price… is the child.”

“The child?” The Contessa shook her head. “But she is not Lydia—She cannot—What will you do with her?”

“Absolutely anything”

Vandaariff looked to the glass woman, who met his gaze and sucked her lower lip, measuring the foulness she had tasted against survival and a return to servitude. She nodded, the barest dip of her chin. Vandaariff turned to the Contessa. Her face was drawn and her mouth grimly set. “Done.”

FRANCESCA TRAPPING screamed. Eloise had plucked up the girl—startling her—and run for the open door. Mrs. Trapping, shocked to life as well, shrieked after them.

“Eloise! You cannot take my daughter from me! Eloise!”

But Mrs. Trapping did not stir from where she stood—wringing her hands, tears on her cheeks—between the corpse of Mr. Leveret and the scarcely recognizable figure of her brother.

Nor was Eloise able to escape. Just at the door she stumbled—her body stopped from afar—and toppled to the floor, face blank, pulling Francesca down with her. The girl had not been occupied. Now she struggled against the unmoving arms of her tutor. Her panicked eyes met those of Francis Xonck, and she screamed even louder.

Miss Temple wheeled to the dais. It was Francis Xonck who had prevented Eloise from taking the girl.

IT WAS not often in Miss Temple's life that she received credit for being intelligent. She had never cared for her studies. She had participated rarely in discussions of substance—business or finance or politics or religion, which was to say the discussions of men—the only sphere where intelligence might be seen as a factor. Instead, it was her lot to be found (and even this less often than she liked) cunning or clever, animal associations—as if one were to admire a badger for digging—less a compliment than a condescending description. Yet in that instant, Miss Temple's mind made a small leap, one that she herself found startling.

It was also at that moment that she noticed a fallen soldier near Eloise move his arm.

Miss Temple took hold of the Doctor's uniform tunic with both hands and shoved him as hard as she could toward the doorway.

“The child is Xoncks!” Miss Temple hissed. “Get her away!”

AS A person who naturally thought the worst of everyone, Miss Temple never doubted the revelations about Eloise and Colonel Trapping (or Eloise and Francis Xonck), though she had not understood why Mrs. Trapping still suffered Eloise's presence. She remembered the Contessa's letter to Caroline Stearne—that she possessed some secret to control Mrs. Trapping. Had Mrs. Marchmoor known it too? Perhaps it had been her taste of Xonck's blood in the garden. Only after that had Andrew Rawsbarthe been ordered to collect vials of blood from each child… and Mrs. Marchmoor had sampled all three vials in the same fashion, turning them to glass. Yet only Francesca had been taken inside the factory—for only her vial had matched the glass woman's earlier taste of her hidden parent—brought to provide leverage against both mother and father. Miss Temple was dismayed by the revelation itself, but the West Indies offered innumerable examples of distressing patrimony—one was always seeing features one shouldn't on the most inconvenient faces, and she herself had studiously ignored what might be familiar noses or chins amongst her own plantation's offspring. The thought opened her heart the slightest crack to how troubled and painful the Trapping household must have been—the devastating tangle of loyalties and humiliations and betrayals, the impossibility of anything but the bitterest compromise …

“FRANCIS!” CRIED Vandaariff. “Francis—stop him!”

“Go to the devil!” barked Svenson. The Doctor stumbled as the force of Xonck's mind struck him, but then he lurched free—free of the same power that had toppled Eloise and overcome Mrs. Marchmoor. Svenson leapt forward to catch the sobbing girl's hands.

“I cannot reach him!” whispered Xonck.

“Reach her!” commanded Vandaariff.

The girl slumped into dead weight. With an exasperated cry in German, Svenson pulled with all his strength, wrenching the slender child away from Eloise, and sprawling onto his seat.

“Stop him!” Vandaariff's voice rose to a shriek. “She is my price! She is my price to spare the lot of you! If she escapes—”

The crack of the Contessa's pistol rang in Miss Temple's ear and a white seam of new wood was ripped from the planks near Svenson's head.

Miss Temple wheeled toward the Contessa and shrieked, desperately waving her arms.

“The soldiers are waking up!”

The Contessa could not help but look—and indeed the green-coated bodies were slowly writhing to life, their limbs like a welter of interlocked snakes—as did everyone else in the room.

Everyone but Chang. At Miss Temple's cry he launched himself straight for Vandaariff. Fochtmann hurled himself in front of his new master, arms outstretched. Chang struck him on the jaw with the saber hilt, and the tall man flew back like a parasol taken apart by the wind. Vandaariff stumbled into the brass machinery, and hissed with pain as his bare hand touched the hot metal. Chang raised the blade. Fochtmann, bleeding from his mouth, dove at Chang's legs, knocking him off balance and sending the stroke wide, striking sparks from a snarl of copper wire. Chang kicked Fochtmann viciously below the ribs.

Fochtmann moaned. “You cannot! You cannot!”

Chang kicked him again, then took hold of Vandaariff's coat and threw the old man brutally to the floor. Chang raised the saber. With horror Miss Temple saw the Contessa aiming her pistol at Chang's chest.

Too late, Miss Temple groped for the knife in her boot—but the Contessa's shot also went wide, as Chang stumbled, nearly falling… kicked by Francis Xonck's glass foot. Chang wheeled as Xonck rose from the nest of machinery. Without the least hesitation he hacked the fat-bladed saber at Xonck's head, but the edge was turned by the plaster cast still sheathing Xonck's right arm, chopping out a hunk of plaster and skidding past the clear blue shoulder. Before Chang could pull the saber back for a second blow, Xonck's plastered arm shot forward like a hammer, striking Chang's head with enough force to sever the glass arm at the elbow in a shower of sparking shards.

The mental explosion at Xonck's willful amputation staggered Miss Temple, but she kept her senses while across the room others toppled or stood stunned. With an anguished cry she threw herself at the Contessa. Too dazed to shoot at so fast a target, the Contessa clubbed the gun wildly, clipping Miss Temple's head with the butt. Miss Temple went to her knees, but slashed out with the knife as she fell, drawing blood on the Contessa's outer thigh. The Contessa screamed and hopped away, the distance allowing her to bring the pistol to bear and fire. The bullet plucked at Miss Temple's curls and tore a jagged gash in the planking. Miss Temple launched herself at the Contessa's bleeding leg and brought the woman down in a heap, the gun bouncing across the floor. The Contessa kicked and clawed for the knife. Miss Temple stabbed her fingers blindly at the woman's eyes. The Contessa twisted her face and very nearly caught Miss Temple's thumb between her snapping teeth. With her free hand Miss Temple slammed the Contessa's bad shoulder. The Contessa screamed—as much with rage as pain—and Miss Temple rolled away toward Robert Vandaariff, who recoiled as if she were an advancing animal, an ugly resolve coloring his eyes like a greasy black film.

Miss Temple slashed at his legs and missed, falling forward. She lunged with a grunt, and missed again, her