“We take vetting our people very seriously,” added Aelius, but Ilsa didn’t miss the way his eyes settled on each person in the room when they weren’t looking.
“I understand that,” said Alitz petulantly, but the fight had gone out of her. She had been betrayed with the rest of them, by someone she had trusted, and there was no denying it.
“If you ever see him again,” said Oren, “though I doubt you will, tell him he has broken the Principles. Tell him the Zoo will have his life.”
* * *
Ilsa trembled slightly as she unfastened her tea-stained dress, and nausea threatened in waves, but otherwise the antidote had done its job; she would live to teach Pyval Crespo to poison her.
She would start by making him tell her who ordered her family killed.
Ilsa’s dress had slipped down over her hips and pooled on the floor of the chamber when a sound like the squeak of wheels came towards her down the corridor. Then came a knock.
“Wait – one minute!” It was probably the maid she’d told not to bother helping her change. She threw a robe around her shoulders, not even fastening it over her chemise, and opened the door.
“I said I’m alright—”
But it wasn’t the maid. Eliot was there, the tight set of his jaw the only evidence that he was trying to keep his eyes on hers. Ilsa felt her skin heat everywhere his eyes touched her. When his gaze fell on her arms – bandaged along the length of both to cover a dozen glass cuts – its molten warmth froze over.
“It ain’t that bad,” said Ilsa, turning away from the door and hastily pushing her arms into the sleeves of her robe. She tied it closed and turned to face him. “The cuts are shallow.”
Eliot shut the door behind him. The sun had dipped behind the houses and the chamber had been plunged into a low, pink light, the kind that muffled sound and made a voice soft and low.
“You’re alright?”
“I’m fine,” Ilsa replied automatically. “Little weak, that’s all.”
Eliot came close – close enough that Ilsa could feel the warmth of him – and lifted a hand to her cheek. Ilsa held her breath as his thumb grazed her jaw with a featherlight touch. When he withdrew it, it was bloody. “You missed one.”
He stepped away abruptly, leaving Ilsa bereft, and picked up the iodine and a cloth that lay next to a bowl of warm water gone pink with her blood. He soaked the cloth with some iodine, and came back to her, eyes wary.
“It will sting,” he warned softly.
“I’ve survived worse today.”
Gently, he tilted her chin up with one hand, and carefully cleaned the cut on her cheek with the other. It did sting, but Ilsa had grown used to it over the course of cleaning dozens of scratches. Eliot was waiting for her to wince, but she didn’t, and it took some of the tension out of his shoulders. A grin pulled at one corner of his mouth.
“Was that your first time being poisoned?”
Ilsa raised an eyebrow. “Was that your first time making a joke?”
The grin widened. “It’s possible to build up a tolerance to smokeweed, if you don’t mind a tingling sensation in your hands.” He flexed his fingers, eyes straying to her mouth as he added, “And your lips.”
“You do that? You take poison on purpose?”
“The only way I could persuade Gedeon to do it was to join him. He didn’t see it as a threat. He used to say he hadn’t survived the Sage’s massacre to die by poison.”
Ilsa’s mouth fell open in surprise. She had had just as stubborn a thought when the smokeweed was working on her. She had a sudden, fierce wish to speak to her brother; to tell him the thing they had in common. Eliot studied her expression and must have seen her longing shift elsewhere, for he stepped away, tossing the cloth aside.
“I didn’t come by to check on you.”
“Oh.”
He smiled again, and Ilsa hoped her disappointment hadn’t been too telling. “Not just to check on you. I think I’ve solved our riddle.” He opened the door, and in the hallway, of all things, was the map he had liberated from Fyfe’s lab. He pulled it into the room and stood it before Ilsa.
“You and this map have got a weird thing going, you know that?”
Eliot ignored her. “I’ve been getting in my own way trying to work it out,” he said. “The Oracle girl said the shop was on Moorgate, so I started with Moorgate. I’ve been staring at a dozen starsforsaken maps of the street, histories of the area, directories of chemists in a mile radius, trying to work out what the rest of the riddle meant, but nothing fit.”
“Alright…”
“I didn’t put the rest of it together. The station, Marin Street, and she said over and over that you didn’t know the city, yes? But you do. This London is the same.”
“Well, I know that.”
“But it wasn’t what she meant. She called it a city, but she meant the quarter. The only place you’re not familiar with because it’s entirely different in the Otherworld.”
Ilsa stared at the map, finally understanding what Eliot was waiting for her to grasp. The transparent overlay was pushed over the top of the frame, but she reached up and brought it down to cover the London of the surface. Her fingers traced along the new lines, nose close to the paper as she read the tiny street names.
There it was. Marin Street, a long, curved road in the Underground.
“We just need to work out where—”
“Shh.” Ilsa was a step ahead now. She didn’t need to work anything out. She just needed to remember. Because Lila had told her exactly where she would find the chemist… if she was in the Otherworld. She lifted the overlay, her fingers hovering over where she would
