Corroded

scream—a sound that could not form.

“Oh, my dove,” I whispered. I perched on the sofa beside her, cradled her shoulders with one arm. I pulled her to my chest until she could lay her good cheek upon it, and as if she realized—as if something in the act set her free—she folded in upon me, clutched at my coat and sobbed as if her very heart was breaking.

I stroked her hair, rocking gently, and let her cry her fill as Delilah and I shared a moment of helpless sorrow.

At her feet, Ephe’s rage simmered.

How I understood that.

When Lily’s sobs turned to choking hiccups, I eased my grip upon her. Carefully, feeling her weight drag in my arms, I laid her back upon the sofa. “‘Tis all right,” I whispered. “You’re safe. Delilah and Ephe are here.”

Lily’s eyes finally pinned upon mine, as if she only just realized who I was. Her fingers clutched at my hands, my arms. “Cherry,” she mumbled.

My given name, upon the lips of a sweet who had never known it.

Fear turned my innards inside out. Replaced my blood with frigid water.

If I maintained any doubt as to the motive behind Lily’s choosing, she had killed it with one word.

Gently as I could, I forced her hands to settle, linked them upon her chest and covered them with both of mine. “You are safe, now,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

My gaze flitted to the raw wound in her face, skated away.

Her laugh fractured, so heartrending tears sprung to my eyes. “I’ve a message,” she managed, through lips that would not wholly connect on the injured side.

Lord in Heaven, I could not bear it.

“‘Tis not important,” I whispered. “Rest, Lily. You need to heal. Delilah?”

“Here,” the sweet said, appearing at my elbow as if waiting for the summons. She carried a small glass, its ruby contents all too familiar.

I took it from her. “Her shoulders.”

Delilah eased her hands beneath Lily’s shoulders, helped her half sit so I could raise the glass to her lips.

Lily did not cooperate. She turned her face away, the injury falling into shadow. Her good eye pierced through my brisk care as if it were smoke. “He said,” she began, her voice shaking with the effort of pain and fear. “He said he was sorry for not sending flowers. He wants this to be thought his reparation.”

Flowers. Always, it had come down to flowers. The bouquet sent when he’d captured my Betsy. The florets he left when he’d completed a murder for coin.

The sweet whose appearance paralleled mine, and whose name was that of a flower.

How I despised flowers.

The glass shook so violently in my fingers, the liquid threatened to slosh free.

“Give me that,” Ephe said behind me, and her dark hand closed over the tumbler.

I let her have it, torn between howling my rage and doing what I could to soothe the ghosts in Lily’s pain- wracked eyes.

I compromised. It was all I could do, and still it wasn’t enough. “I am so sorry,” I said, my voice a hard, steely promise. “I will do everything I can to make this up to you, Lily. I will find this bastard who put his hands on you, and I will make him pay. I swear it.”

Delilah strained to hold the girl upright. Though her gaze flicked to me, sharp with an awareness that said she knew of Osoba’s order, she said nothing. Ephe waited in like silence, as if even she was aware of how much Lily needed to hear me say so.

Perhaps it would help her. Perhaps it was only wishful thinking for us all. Anything to make Lily stop screaming.

The wounded girl closed her eyes. “Menagerie justice?”

Given the orders to cease all action against the monsters, I didn’t think so. I could not say so. “He will scream before it’s done.” I trembled fiercely, wound so tight I felt as a clock spring coiled too far. One move, one wrong word, and I might uncoil with such violence as to lose all reason.

If she cried again, I didn’t think I could bear it.

I don’t know that she heard me. If she did, I wasn’t sure that she’d remember. Ephe reached past me to administer the laudanum, and Lily drank every last drop. As the ruby liquid vanished, I backed away from the sofa and let the sweets tend to their own.

Pulling the hat firmly on my head, feeling emptier than I ever thought possible, I made for the door, and the device beside it.

“Thank you,” Delilah called, quiet as she could.

I did not turn to acknowledge the sentiment. I didn’t deserve anything of the sort. I departed the sweets’ quarters, shouldering the net-launching weapon Maddie Ruth had given me, with my heart in tatters.

Leaving the Midnight Menagerie proved easier than I had expected.

* * *

There comes a moment when ’tis impossible to know whether all cessation of feeling stems from flagrant medicinal use, or the harrowing events of a body’s suffering.

With every step away from the Midnight Menagerie, I felt as if I were becoming a ghost—stretched so thin, hammered so brutally as to become nothing.

I was not so much a creature of logic and reason in that moment. I was not a thing of tears, or of sorrow. I simply...I simply wasn’t anything at all. I walked—which is to say, I was ambulatory, drifting through the midmorning fog as if I were an eddy to blow this way or that.

How awful things had become around me.

To think that I had begun this venture only some few short months ago, when word of a professor buying up all the opium in London’s low druggist shops had forced a confrontation between myself and the man who would be named the sweet tooth within days of our meeting. If only I had known then what had been made all the clearer now.

What a fool I had become.

Yet though I thought the words sincere, they did not engender in me fear or anger. I could not summon sorrow or pain. Where once I had taken pride in the collections I had gathered, night after night, coin after coin, I felt nothing now.

How long, I wondered. How long had this feeling crept upon me?

Did it begin with the revelation of Woolsey’s true nature? Did this emptiness form when the man exposed as my father made clear his intent to murder me in the name of my late mother?

I must have felt something then. Truly, I must have considered something when the sweet tooth whose hunt had led me on a merry chase across London had turned into my rescuer.

Disgust. Relief.

Admiration?

No. Impossible. That he was intelligent, a veritable fox among hens, was never in doubt. His machinations reached for me even now. Cunning, thorough, skilled.

But I could not admire a man who murdered so gleefully, and for so little reason.

I assured myself this, yet I retraced his steps—retraced the dance we had done that fateful night. I passed into Whitechapel, a phantom among them what made their living by day, and I could not now think of the faces I passed.

It must have been many. Whitechapel was never an empty place.

I did not enter the railyard, I simply halted near enough that I could see the first piling supporting one of the many bridges crossing the whole. The peasouper frothed around it, playing a game of hide and seek with each post.

I watched the mist for a time and did not feel fear, or the chill of ethereal memory. Something had broken, I think. Something integral to that internal mechanism that might keep a body going, hoping, slogging through a challenge until victory was assured for good or lost forever.

I turned away from the railyard and melded once more into the streets—an urchin whose rounded shoulders and lowered head, whose slow trod through the idle carts and bustling pedestrians, spoke of defeat. The weight of