With shaky fingers Helen buckled her mask in place. She needed to get upstairs to warn Jane. But the maid was there and all eyes upon her.
“Windows open,” Grimsby said, and Helen saw that Millicent was right, that there was no iron bolted into the wooden frames. The cold November air rushed in. Grimsby folded himself around his device again, long fingers sliding over the copper curves till they found the heavy lever. He pulled it down.
The masked women gasped and Helen knew they felt it, too.
A strange, almost hypnotic pull, tickling around the edges of the iron mask. Eerie, but faint, a fingernail-on- chalkboard sensation that she did not like but could withstand. She wondered how strong the compulsion would be without the iron mask. Would it suck the bit of fey right out of her face, or would it make Helen herself get up and throw herself inside that machine?
“Nothing’s happening,” grumbled one of the men, and several iron-masked faces turned his way, staring.
“Increasing power,” said Grimsby.
He cranked the copper wheel, and suddenly there was blue in the small room, blue out in the middle of the benches. In the middle of the guests—right through the guests, who screamed. A masked woman fainted, and several men stood, angry and red-faced.
“The piece of fey is resisting,” said Grimsby, eyes gleaming. “It must be a bigger piece than I expected. More massed intelligence. It’s attempting to form a shape.” His eyes narrowed. “Except…”
Except this figure had a familiar face.
This figure held a scalpel.
“Jane,” said Helen, and it did not seem to matter how loud the room was, she was heard. The name carried around the room in waves as Helen pushed her way to the space that had formed in the center of the room.
It was a wavy blue picture of Jane, Jane who had been bending over a still form on a white bed. But Jane wore iron, Helen thought—and then she saw that the blue light was most sharply focused on her hands, the hands that she had smeared with the fey-infused clay.
Jane looked up and through Helen. Her eyes were glassy with concentration, filmed over with white fatigue. Her mouth seemed to be shouting something Helen could not hear. Millicent’s fey mask was off, the face underneath red and horrifying. Helen could not look away, even though it felt as though she was being sucked back a great distance. The blue air whirled around her, and her ears popped as the pressure in her head grew tighter and tighter, and Jane seemed to be farther and farther away.
“Jane!” Helen shouted. “Jane!”
Jane looked directly at her then. Her dark hair was wild and blowing about her head. The attic furniture loomed behind her like a crouching beast. Jane held Millicent’s old face in her hands, clutching it in front of her.
<<Impressive>> Helen heard, and it seemed to be a voice in her head alone, or not even a voice, but the memory of a voice, a thought of one. <<Not what we expected, is it?>>
Now Jane was straight, the scalpel was gone. She was arching, shrieking. The strips of iron on her face glowed, brighter than the rest of the blue that made up the strange picture of her. Voices screamed. Jane turned and Helen thought Jane was facing her, thought Jane saw her. Jane’s lips faintly moved and Helen read, “Stop it … stop it … stop it.…” Jane seemed to bend in the direction of the copper machine. Stooping, still shouting, “Stop it, stop it.”
Behind the copper ball Grimsby’s face was backlit from the blue glow, and she could not tell if it was cruelty or fear she read there.
“Turn it off, turn it off,” Helen yelled at Alistair, but he shouted back, “Do you want the fey to be freed? I’m not going near it!”
Helen was not conscious of thought in that moment, but if she had stopped to examine the impulse that made her feet pick up and run forward, not away, it would have been something like: If it destroys me, it destroys me—but it will not hurt Jane.
There were those whose lives were worth something. Those who were trying to do good. Those who were determined as all hell to set things right in the world, and didn’t waste their days spouting off nonsense about “one race” or the cut of their hemline.
Those people needed to be around to save the rest of them from themselves.
Helen threw herself onto the lever and shoved it down with all her might.
And then everything went dark.
THE IRONSKIN
The pressure slowly faded out and vanished, and then the room was the plain dark of a burned-out light. A hundred burned-out lights—all the electricity had winked out, and now the guests milled frantically about, crashing into one another, voices piling on top of the next, fluttering for explanations. Shouts rang out; orders coldly given by Grimsby: “Round the women up. Make them safe.”
Helen felt her way toward the wall, tugging her iron mask off so she could not be detected by some man feeling it and attempting to make her safe. She had to get up the stairs and make sure Jane was all right. But the crowd was frantic and just as Helen’s fingers touched solid wall a heavy man crashed into her and she thudded to the ground. She felt as if she would have enjoyed a good panic right about then, but instead she kept her head down and reached once more for the wall. This time someone tripped over her, catching their sharp-toed shoe in her belly.
As she rolled away from that she lost the wall, and ended up trying to stand in the melee and protect her head from more high heels. She was jostled and bumped and then suddenly there was a hand on her shoulder, guiding her back to safety. Alistair.
She clung to the hand and gasped out, “Help me,” as the man in blackness steered her along the wall and toward the hall that led to the back stairs to the garret. She found the stairwell railing with one hand and pressed her husband’s with the other.
But the hand did not have a ring. It was not her husband’s hand. It disentangled itself, and the man it belonged to said in her ear, “Trust none of them,” pressed something small into her hand, and was gone. From the other room came commotion still, and blinks of light as the servant girls brought in oil lamps.
Helen held on to the railing and went up the stairs.
It was pitch-black, but her hand found the worn door at the top and opened it, and there was a faint bit of light from the fog-shrouded moonlight. Enough to see that what was in her hand looked like an old-fashioned flashlight, the sort that ran on the mini-bluepacks of fey technology and had not been seen since. But when she slid the button it came on with the yellow of the modern electric lights, not fey blue.
She might have wondered more about it, but her thoughts were filled with Jane, Jane, Jane, and she ran the flashlight around the slanted room, fast at first, then slower and slower as the sweeps revealed no Jane, and her shaking nerves told her to fear the worst.
A body lay on the daybed, one arm flung down, white in the moonlight. All the candles were snuffed out. Helen crossed to the daybed. Played her flashlight slowly from feet to head. The woman’s face was white and pale.
Millicent.
She wore her beautiful face, as Helen had last seen her, though in the vision just now she thought she had seen Millicent with no face at all. Helen peered closer and saw the red line running around the outline of her face, saw it was slightly crooked, as if it had been hastily shoved back into place so she would not be lying here with no face at all.
But Millicent was not breathing, did not move. She lay in her fine black dress, sunk in the bone-stillness of fey sleep.
And there was no Jane, still there was no Jane. A cold wind swept through the garret and Helen shivered.
