rifled through it. Nothing … nothing …
“Why do you have that?” Niklas said in a low voice.
“Oh!” said Helen. “You recognize it? I’m trying to find her. I’m her sister. And she—I’m trying to find her flat, but I don’t know the address. That’s actually why I came here. To see if you knew.” She smiled up at him, trying to be her winsomest self, but she sensed it was going to have little effect on this big barrel of a man.
“Why should I give her address to you if she doesn’t want to be found?” said Niklas.
Helen stopped short. “That’s not the question I was hoping you’d ask,” she admitted.
“Which is?”
“How can you prove you’re her sister? Because that I’ve thought over and I came up with three different ways on the trolley here. One. We’re exactly the same size. Two—”
He grunted, interrupting her. “How’s the trolley running these days?”
“Slow,” she said. “It stopped twice tonight, and everyone was complaining that they’re always late to work.” It seemed as though she went up in his estimation for riding the trolley. Perhaps Niklas had an affinity for all that machinery; perhaps he liked its populist nature.
Perhaps he understood that it meant she was serious about finding Jane.
Silence, during which Helen felt the cold sinking further, creeping into her marrow. “There are an incredible number of boors on the trolley,” she added, knowing as she said it that his estimation of her would go back down. But she hated silence; it made her mouth say things. She stamped her feet in place, wishing he’d invite her inside if he was going to stand here and interrogate her. She opened her mouth to say so when the giant spoke again.
“Again,” said Niklas. “Why should I help you find her if she doesn’t want to be found?”
“Because she’s in trouble,” Helen said gently. “She was doing a facelift. It was going fine and then I went downstairs and Mr. Grimsby—of Copperhead, you know—turned on this machine and then everything went to pieces. The air went blue and roaring and the lights went out. And when I went upstairs Jane was gone. She must have run.…” She shook her head helplessly. “I just don’t know. And now—”
“And now?…” There was a dangerous rumble in his voice. “There’s worse?”
“Jane said Millicent said the fey are rising up,” she said in a hushed voice, watching his fingers tighten on the mask. “Led by … well, no, they didn’t know. Some follower of the Fey Queen, they thought.”
“The Fey King,” he breathed. Helen turned big eyes on him. “Trumped-up, self-proclaimed, of course. Ordinary fey are indolent and leaderless. But every so often, one comes along with the willpower to bring them all to heel. That one is here in the city now.”
Helen swallowed. “How do you know?”
“Been studying how to capture the blue demons,” he said calmly. “But then you’ve seen that, you said. Since I turned one of the machines over to our leader for further use and investigation.”
“To … to Mr. Grimsby?” She could hardly hear him say “
“He’s continuing to make improvements to best capture and destroy the blue demons. For my part, I have found interrogation with cold iron to be useful.”
Helen’s eyes traveled to the iron building by his forge. Her heart thumped in her chest. How could Jane have such a fondness for this man? He chilled her marrow. “So I have to find Jane,” she said faintly, “before it’s too late.”
There was more silence, which she barely stopped herself from filling with a variety of pleas.
At last he spoke. “Three blocks north, two blocks east. Over the pawnshop there.”
“Thank you,” said Helen. “Thank—”
“There’s something broken in this city,” he said. “Blue scum all over it. Something’s broken and it started with Jane and that
He steamrollered through her worry. “Jane didn’t say more. And she shouldn’t be mixing herself up with these facelifts—she was getting herself in over her head, I told her. Messing with power she couldn’t control. They should all just be shot, the lot of them. That would take care of that nonsense. We fought.” He exhaled. “Well. I guess I was right. Don’t take any pride in that.” Suddenly a hand was squeezing her shoulder—he had pushed it through a gap in the gate, and was standing right there, huge and frightening. “You find her,” he said. “You find her and make her stop.”
Helen hurried down the route Niklas had instructed. The night air was bitter on her bare face. She felt around in the carpetbag, pulled out the ironcloth, pressed it to her skin. Perhaps it made her feel safer, but it made it impossible to see in the black night. There weren’t as many gaslights down here, but there were orange- yellow rectangles where taverns let out patrons, spilling into the cold night. And bits of blue. She put the ironcloth away and hurried faster.
Niklas’s words rang through her head. “They should all just be shot, the lot of them.” The Hundred, he meant. And yet Niklas himself was ironskin, cursed just as Jane had been with fey that scarred his skin and emitted a slow stream of poisonous emotion. Helen felt nothing but compassion for The Hundred, the women who had only wanted to be prettier. But perhaps she was alone in that.
Helen had to circle the block before she found the grungy brick building with the three iron balls denoting pawnshop. There was an iron staircase on the outside. Yes, this was the sort of nasty place Jane would run to, something surrounded by iron. Wearily Helen climbed the stairs—and found a locked and no doubt iron-chained door. She banged on it, calling “Jane, Jane.” But no one came.
Helen jiggled the door handle helplessly, thinking of the long, hopeless walk home. She did not realize how thoroughly she had longed to find Jane here until she wasn’t. The frigid iron of the staircase seeped up through the soles of her shoes to her already numb toes; her fingers were curled stiff against the cold.
And then the door was opened from the inside.
Helen looked up, startled, at a figure wearing an iron mask. A lump of disappointment formed in her belly. This person was too tall.
“Oh, hurry in out of that nasty cold stuff,” the person said, quite heedless of the safety protocol that dictated one should spout clever greetings to make sure the fey were not invited over the threshold, lines ranging from the formal “An’ ye be human, enter,” to the cheeky lower-class admonition: “Stay out.” Helen realized after she spoke that it was a woman, despite the fact that she was wearing slacks. Her heavy, dark brown hair was cut in an asymmetric bob that fell across one of the mask’s eyeholes, and the thick scent of jasmine perfume lingered around her. “You must be looking for Jane,” the woman said as Helen entered, stripping off her lilac gloves and blowing on her hands.
“Yes,” said Helen. “I’m her sister. But—”
“Helen!” she said. “How delightful. And so fashionably brave, too.” Her finger inscribed a circle around her own mask, indicating Helen’s lack of one. “I think someone beat us here. Do you know if Jane’s safe?”
“I don’t know where she is,” said Helen, swallowing the crushing disaster down, willing herself to find hope. “But she probably wasn’t here when this happened. I hope.” Her sister was tidy; Helen could not imagine the room being the way it was on Jane’s account. It was unheated and tiny; cot and table and woodstove all in one room, with a single door leading to what she supposed might be the rest of the house, possibly a shared bath. The woman had turned on an oil lamp, and it cast an orange glow around the wreckage of the room.
The room had been ransacked.
“Perhaps she’s out being brave and bold and doing good works,” said the woman.
“Maybe,” temporized Helen. She could not think. If Jane had not gone here, then where would she have gone? Helen and Alistair’s home? It seemed unlikely. What had she said?
Helen sent tentative feelers out, wondering what the woman’s purpose was—and if anything could be deduced from her about Jane’s whereabouts. “I suppose you were here to see Jane? She’s trying to explain to you her—
