party! I was ready to admit I was wrong … I was ready to give up on you, accept you as Grounded…” He turned and faced her and the sun framed him so harshly she had to look away. “What am I to believe now? I thought for a while that you were right—that I was wrong, that somehow—for some godforsaken reason—the Maker had managed to torture an innocent member of the Grounded. Do you know how that made me feel?”
“I hope it made you sick,” she hissed.
He straightened. “It did!”
“I
“The same words, but you showed a far different reality out there on the street. So do it again. Do it now. Admit what you are once and for all and let us end this farce!”
“I am Grounded,” she spat out the words. “I do not know why what happened out there
“Admit what you are and we can move past the Making. I can get you out of here tomorrow. On that airship.” He pointed to the bulbous thing tethered to the Western Tower. “They need a new Conductor and can train you to the finer points of the job. Imagine. Being out of the Tanks. Being the captain of your own ship.”
“A Conductor’s no more the captain than a maid is the head Councilman,” she snapped. Lying there on the floor, she tried to get her feet free of her skirts. The right one had no trouble and she rolled onto her back and sat up, seeing her shoe peek out from under her hem.
He nodded once. Slowly. “But still it is better than the Tanks. So admit your true nature. Tell it true.”
“Tell it true? I am Grounded.” But her right foot … She shook it, but it would not come free. She pressed with it and heard stitches snap and gave a little start, immediately stopping the action. Her lips turned down at their ends and she bit the lower one, worrying it between her teeth. She did not want to ruin what might be the last dress she was given by popping stitches in a place that would surely not allow her a needle and thread. Bending, she reached forward to flip her skirts up and see the problem, but she froze, her hands curled above the hem.
The door opened and Meg stepped out onto the tower’s top.
The Maker looked at his daughter. “I do not think you will want to be here for this,” he advised her. “The lady insists she is Grounded.”
“Then let her go.”
He blinked at her. “Oh, Meggie. You are so young and so innocent. She is not Grounded, little dove. You saw what she did on the street.” He turned back to Jordan and muttered, “Even if she was Grounded, I couldn’t let her go.”
Jordan swallowed and tugged the fabric of her skirt back, immediately seeing the issue. Her heel was snared in a web of the same beautiful thread that ran throughout her ball gown. Light winked off the metallic thread and she curled over her leg to untangle her shoe.
Her foot freed, she hesitated, fingers tracing the intricate work she would have never appreciated had she not looked beneath her skirts.
“Papa, you are the Maker. You can do whatever you wish,” Meg insisted.
“Hush, Meggie. Nothing is quite so simple as all that.” He looked at the blades. “I would have to make you disappear to save my reputation,” he explained slowly to Jordan. “Only it’s not just my reputation I’d be saving—I have others to watch out for now, you see. I am a provider—a family man.”
Meg was beside him, holding his shirtsleeve, but Jordan paid them little mind, listening halfheartedly. How such a sweet child could be the offspring of a monster like the Maker … But the strange threads running like a spider’s web caught her attention again.
Why would anyone invest such time and attention to detail … Such
The web ran everywhere her skirt did. And it was fine—nearly soft—not something like a hoop that added body and support to a dress. She popped up straight for a moment, eyes darting as her mind chased a thought as doggedly as a terrier after a rat.
“Besides, how else would you explain away all the potential anomalies then? What? You have demonstrated witchery at your birthday party—twice, at the Reckoning and just now on the streets of Holgate. That seems rather damning to me…”
“No,” she whispered. “Think on the science of it—you are a man of science…” She slipped her right hand up her left sleeve, flipping the remaining ruffle as she went. Intriguing. The ruffle was simple cloth—granted, a high- class weave and thread count that created a supple fall of fabric, but … Her fingers reached higher.
She barely kept from giving a little shout at her discovery when her fingertips brushed the same netting lining her sleeves as lined her skirting. But why?
“We must all be men of science here in the New World,” he pointed out.
“What if there was another Weather Witch present at each of those moments?” she asked. “What if I was mistaken for being something I am not?”
“Accidents happen,” Meggie said with a slow and solemn nod.
“Accidents…” The Maker shook his head. “No. How? If there was another, we would have to find it. Gather it in and do whatever I must do to Make it. But…” He ran his hands through his hair and shook it out. “How? How?” he demanded, and Jordan scooted away, more frightened of him now than she had been before. “By some strange transference of power? That is the only imaginable way … No. Highly unlikely at best.” Still he paced, his hair becoming wilder and his face more frightening with every turn he made. “There are no people around you who have been in each place. It would mean the involvement of at least one additional Witch. It would mean there is one loose in Philadelphia and one loose here.”
“Yes. Perhaps,” Jordan whispered, her voice soft with desperation. “Think on it. At the Reckoning the Wardens held both my body and my chain … Are they not Witches, twisted as they now might be?”
The Maker paused and stared at her. “Yes.”
“Could they not have transferred a charge … if excited? What Makes a Witch?”
“Heritage and the proper trigger. Most frequently pain.”
“Must pain always be physical?” Jordan whispered. “Is not emotion as powerful as physical pain? Perhaps even more powerful?”
He dropped suddenly into a crouch before her and she drew back in fear. “Yes, I guess so. But pain can be regulated. It teaches control. The metal of the chain…” His head tilted, his eyes searching her face for some clue. “But the party…”
“Was emotionally charged,” Jordan said, recalling the debates, the entertainment, all of it.
Meg came forward and stood between them, her small hand on her father’s shoulder.
“A Witch had been found once before in my household; could there not be another lurking? Leaving us unawares?”
He rubbed a heavy hand from his chin up his jaw and snarled his fingers into his own hair again. “The chain conducting I can fathom. But…” His gaze raked over her, examining her body language but finally falling frozen on her underskirt.
Jordan blushed and flipped the fabric back down.
“No,” he said, grabbing the hem and throwing it back so fiercely Jordan and Meggie both gave a shout of protest. “This is the dress you wore at the party?”
“And ever since, minus my corset and stockings. And shawl,” Jordan mumbled, barely keeping herself from smacking his hand—it was unnervingly close to her thigh.
“What is this web?” he demanded, tugging at it. “It is not even attached”—he turned it to examine the artistry of the decorative front—“to the design. It is no clever method of uniformly working the back of someone’s embroidery handiwork.” He ran his hands roughly up the outside of the rest of the skirt and the side of her bodice, saying, “It is something entirely separate, something designed to nearly encase you in a shroud of metal … In a cage of conductive material. Expensive conductive material…” His expression shifted from one of horror to one of wild wonder. “Someone must hate you with a finely burning passion,” he concluded, flipping her skirts back down and staring at the wall, his mind puzzling things together. “Someone connected to this dress.”
“It was a gift from my very best friend,” she said.
His eyebrows rose simultaneously.
