The Bones of Ruin

by Sarah Raughley

  Iris lifted her heavy head. “What?”

  “You’ve met the Sparrow twins. The Exploding Man. Bellerose’s guard. They’re all players in this game. But I still have yet to complete my roster of warriors.”

  “This is madness,” said Jinn. “Why in the world should we fight?”

  “Why do you fight, Maximo Morales?”

  Max wasn’t ready for Adam’s question. He couldn’t answer.

  “What about those men and women who watch you in the Pit? Why do they draw lots on you fighters?” Adam tugged his glove again. “To win. This is nothing more and nothing less than the same. The Enlightenment Committee was created to guide this world: what it is now and what it will be. But who among us will lead? Our previous efforts to decide resulted in a dreadful massacre. The Spring Day Massacre of 1882.” Adam laughed. “Well, that was before my time. However, our numbers were reduced by half—from fourteen to a mere seven. After that day, the Committee swore that such a slaughter would never occur again. That they would find another way to decide. A fairer way.” He took off his right glove. “It was a promise I was forced to make as well, as the newest member of the order.”

  He showed them his palm. “This is the Oath Maker.” Faded pink scars there traced out the shape of a skull and a sword piercing it through its center.

  “Forcing people to fight your battles for you.” Iris could feel her blood pumping through her fists. “That’s your way of resolving things?”

  “Not my way,” Adam confessed. “But if I don’t participate, it’ll look suspicious. And there are many powerful people who know of you now, Iris.”

  How could she forget the auction? Iris shuddered.

  “Having you on my team means I can better protect and guide you. And nobody will look deeper into our connection if they think you’re simply my champion.”

  “Connection…,” Jinn repeated, glaring at Adam, who returned it with a coy shrug. “A tournament,” Jinn said instead of perhaps what he wanted to. “What are the rules?”

  Iris looked up at him in surprise. “Jinn?”

  “If Iris is to join, then so will I,” he said simply.

  Max nodded, stepping toward Adam with a challenging lift to his chin. “And me.”

  At that, Adam only smirked.

  Iris grabbed them by their wrists. “You two—”

  “No, it’s what I expected.” Adam fit his hand back into his glove. “It’s what I wanted. I can’t participate without a team of three. And as for the rules, you’ll be given them in due time. That is, if you all accept and agree with this contract.”

  Iris felt heat rising up through her body, turning itself to a quivering anger. “And if I don’t agree, I can’t imagine the Committee would leave us all alone knowing as much as we do about them. Am I wrong?”

  “You’re not,” whispered Adam. “But that’s why I want you, Iris. I want you to stay with me, under my protection. Learning of yourself. With these men as your knights.”

  Just as Adam lifted himself from the glass, a bullet came flying for his head. It pierced the case instead, which shattered. A split-second decision to miss that followed a similarly emotional decision to aim. Nobody moved as the smoke wafted from the barrel of his gun in Iris’s hand.

  Adam didn’t react. He only watched her.

  “I’ll do it.” Her voice was barely a shade of itself. Hoarse with fury.

  “What was that?”

  “You heard it,” Iris said, her eyes burning. “I want the truth. I want an end to this hell. So I’ll do it. I’ll find your blasted father. I’ll become your champion. And you will not betray me. Because if you do, I promise you, Lord Temple: I will kill you. And unlike me, you will stay dead.”

  None of the men dared to speak. But Adam Temple calmly met the rage bubbling up inside of her. No matter how neutral his expression, she knew he was probably satisfied. This was what he wanted. He seemed to want her to know her true identity almost as much as she did. That little boy at the South Kensington fair. His wonder.

  Madame, tell me… are you… a goddess?

  “Am I, Adam? A goddess?”

  “You are to me.”

  Her grasp weakened, until Adam’s gun slipped from her fingers and dropped to the floor with a clatter. Adam started for the door, picking up his gun along the way, emptying it of its bullets, perhaps so no one would get the wrong idea. Glass shards crunched beneath his boots as he walked, but then he stopped and turned back around. “The winning team of champions will receive twenty-five thousand pounds each,” he announced, sucking the air out of the room. “You can see why others have agreed to fight. As for you, Iris, I imagine the truth is more precious than gold.”

  It was. It was, but…

  As the weight of everything fell upon her, she began unraveling. “This is insanity.” Iris shook her head, avoiding the sight of her bones hanging in the case. But she’d already agreed. How could she have agreed to such madness? “I can’t possibly… How can I?”

  “Iris.”

  Suddenly Iris felt Max’s hand on her shoulder, lightly, with a hesitance that was uncharacteristic of him—almost as if he wasn’t sure it deserved to be there.

  “We can do this,” Max said. “Let’s do this. Together.” And, after casting a dark look toward Adam, he bent down and whispered so only she could hear. “There’s a lot you can do with the truth. And there’s a lot we can do with this money. I can find my sister.”

  Max’s sister. That’s right. Max had his own hopes and dreams. She couldn’t think only of herself. Her chest was still tense when she looked up at him and finally nodded.

  Adam appeared pleased. “Well, it seems you’ve accepted. Go to Club Uriel at 52 Pall Mall Street on Sunday, the twenty-sixth of October. You’re to check into the building, as it’s where you’ll be living for the duration of the tournament.”

  “Living?” Jinn and Max exclaimed at the same time.

  “Oi, nobody said I’d be giving up my rat hole to take part in this thing,” Max added.

  “You can back out if you’d like.” Adam gave him a sidelong look that Max couldn’t seem to return. “Though I’m surprised, Maximo. I thought there’d be something you wanted more than anything.”

  A shadow fell upon Max’s expression. Jinn smirked. “Money,” Jinn guessed.

  “No.” Max whipped up his head, meeting the other boy’s eyes, his own simmering. “No.” He looked from Adam to Iris and then turned from all of them. “I get that you’re Iris’s friend and all, so I won’t sock you in the jaw for that. But don’t think you know me.”

  “Stop, Jinn,” Iris chastised him. “He already said he wanted to help me.”

  Max was silent.

  “After all of the champions check into their new lodgings, you’re to go to Wilton’s Music Hall at six in the evening.”

  “The one on the East End?” Max raised an eyebrow. “Catching a show now, are we?”

  “Indeed, you are. A very exclusive show. You’ll be given further instructions there. Until then, Iris, you’re welcome to stay at my residence tonight.”

  “No, thank you,” Iris breathed, suddenly feeling weak again. Her lips trembled.

  Adam’s hand rested on the doorknob. “This may all seem terrible to you,” he told her. “But one day, you’ll understand. One day, you’ll believe.” He looked over his shoulder. “And one day, you’ll know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am on your side.”

  And so he left Iris to her determination and despair.

  A YOUNG MAN THINKING

  ADAM’S HOME FELT ODDLY EMPTY without his former guest, but he couldn’t blame her after what she’d just learned. She’d been so distraught. In truth, for many years he didn’t believe she was capable of feeling distraught—not a supernatural being such as herself. She was always surprising him, that girl. Adam could still feel the flare of the bullet that singed his ear.

  The lost look in her eyes had made him uncomfortable at first. Later, as he returned home, he began
to consider, then feel the bitter bite of her pain as if their emotions were connected. This wouldn’t be an easy path for her, but such was the path she was on, like a train rushing along its tracks until its predetermined stop. From here, things would only get worse before they got better. She had to prepare herself.

  Iris Marlow. Or so she was presently called.

  “Lord Temple?” said one of the two gentlemen standing at the threshold of his living room.

  Adam lay down on the red velvet sofa, his head on a soft pillow, his legs so long that his ankles balanced atop the edge of the sofa’s arm. He stared up at a portrait of his mother, the Baroness Charlotte Temple, a leather-bound copy of the Bible open on his stomach.

  “You had something to report?”

  “Yes, Lord Temple. Cortez has taken the Sparrow twins to the Crystal Palace.”

  The Crown’s domain.

  “I see.” That didn’t surprise him. Cortez only wanted winners on his team, and those poor little girls he’d kidnapped from their Bristol orphanage had failed the test he’d given them. Melee battles were how Cortez had decided to choose his champions, and it just so happened that Adam’s team needed assessing too. It was a mutual arrangement between the two Enlighteners.

  After Adam had returned home from the museum that night, he’d found Cortez waiting at his doorstep. Once they were inside, Adam had then turned in his newly completed roster.

  “Preposterous!” Cortez had crushed the little note in his hand. “A girl unable to die fighting in a tournament to the death. An unfair advantage, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You must not have thought so at the auction, otherwise why bid on her?”

  Simple logic seemed to embarrass the older man. He spat haughtily on the floor, which Adam didn’t appreciate.

  “There were no restrictions on the type of abilities each champion can have,” Adam reminded him. “Therefore, I’m breaking no rules.”

  Cortez’s face turned red. “But—”

  “But you can tell this to the Committee: Having Iris will ensure I make it to the final round. However, should Iris die even once during the final challenge, I will forfeit.” Adam looked at him. “I swear upon my life.”

  “And it’s precisely your life we’ll take if you try to go back on your word.”

  Once Cortez left, Adam was again left alone to his thoughts. But even though Adam wasn’t surprised to hear what Cortez had done to the Sparrow twins, he found that the news did bother him. One had to be cruel to be a member of the Enlightenment Committee. But sending the twins to the Basement was too cruel, even for that evil little man. Such young, innocent girls.

  For a moment Adam thought of his sister, Eva. Brown hair like their mother’s. The memory of her face flashed by, causing his muscles to seize so quickly that the gentlemen rushed over to see if he was okay.

  “I’m fine,” Adam said, waving them off. They backed away immediately. Yes, he was fine. There wasn’t much Adam could do about the twins without drawing attention to himself.

  Besides, in time, all suffering would come to an end.

  “Speaking of the Crystal Palace, what of Bosch?” Adam asked. “Is he still up to his usual business deals?”

  “Concerning the Crown? Yes, we believe so,” said one of the men. Both looked like unassuming middle-class gentlemen who would never come off as spies to those seeking moles. That was important. For many years, the Committee had placed a number of spies within the Crystal Palace to keep tabs on the Crown’s experiments. Double agents. His father was once one, many years ago.

  But when the British Crown approached Bosch a few years ago, it presented an even better opportunity. Bosch would sell them the weapons they so desperately wanted while feeding them false information on the strange, ancient machinery they were currently studying, keeping them in the dark as to what they truly had in their possession—and the cataclysm to come.

  So far, Bosch had done his job. The Crown was solely fixated on building their artillery. But if Adam’s father could turn traitor, no one in the Committee deserved the benefit of the doubt, especially one so driven by greed. Adam would have to watch the movements of the Bosch Guns and Ammunitions Company. And their head of Weapons Development too—Uma Malakar, that mad genius whose only true allegiance was to her own frightening intellect and curiosity…

  So many pieces in play. Adam sighed as he dismissed the spies. However did he keep track of it all? He supposed he wasn’t his father’s son for nothing—as much as he hated the man.

  “My lord?” After several minutes, a servant timidly entered the living room. “Is there anything you need? Tea, perhaps?”

  “No thank you. You’re free to retire tonight, Miss Danielle.”

  Though he didn’t look at her, he was sure she bowed before leaving him to his loneliness. He’d been surrounded by such servants, men and women, his entire life. And school friends who knew of his family legacy and treated him accordingly. Different from them—different from all the inane, self-enamored club members or the bloodthirsty Enlightenment Committee—was Iris. Iris challenged him. With strength. With nobility.

  With innocence.

  She was not like what his family’s research had described. She was not quite the woman in that old yellow-tinged photo, the warrior trapped in a human zoo, judging from behind her discerning, hardened eyes. This Iris was spirited and daring. Soft and unsure, but determined. She truly must have changed the day they met at the South Kensington fair. Without any memories, she would have had the space to develop a new persona.

  Fascinating. But that warrior was still inside her. He knew as surely as he could still feel the heat on his ear from the bullet that narrowly missed it.

  “She’s truly something.” He smiled almost boyishly to himself. “She completely exceeds my expectations. She’s…”

  He stopped. There was no point in speaking aloud. He was alone but for the portrait of his dead mother. He let out a little laugh, resting his hand atop the Bible on his stomach.

  His mother still wouldn’t have approved. She was staunchly puritanical right up until her death, and more so than ever after his siblings were brutally murdered.

  And then he saw it. The brains of his ten-year-old sister and three-year-old brother splattered across the sidewalk. As surely as he could see the coffee table in front of him. He sat up quickly, the Bible slipping onto the floor. There in the intense silence, he stared at his own dark memories, dumbfounded, the anger slowly building up inside of him until he couldn’t stop himself from pounding his leg with his fist, again and again until he’d tired himself out.

  Calm down, he scolded himself as he had many times in the past when his anger and despair got the better of him. Fool wasn’t the only one with a mask to wear.

  Adam lowered his head, ignoring the biting pain in his thigh. “What do you think of this world now, Mother?” He flicked his head toward the window. “Not too far from this place, there are children languishing on the streets. Elsewhere, the disease-ridden are being left to rot. Men and women are being thrown into asylums simply due to their differences. Murderous men live a hundred years and the innocent die in an instant.”

  An instant was all it took for his younger brother and older sister to be butchered by robbers after an outing in Yorkshire. Another two years for his mother to hang herself in her bedroom from grief. That was all it took for Adam’s world to end. And all the while John Temple was on an entirely different continent on one of his expeditions. He didn’t even attend their funerals, the bastard.

  Adam breathed in deeply to calm his hatred for the man simmering in his chest.

  Industry destroys nature. Men conquer kingdoms, and civilizations fall to ruin. Just next month, Van der Ven would be among those representatives from countries across Europe congregating at a conference in Berlin to decide how to further terrorize a continent that did not belong to them. This was a cruel and terrible world. The Enlightenment Committee knew that it would end from years of researchin
g the civilizations that came before. But as far as Adam was concerned, the world should end. He was sure Eva and Abraham would have agreed if they’d lived.

  But first came the tournament. Let Club Uriel and the Enlightenment Committee gorge themselves on that silly bit of theater. It didn’t matter who won.

  He stared at the chessboard on his coffee table. A queen and two knights. But as his fingers ached to take the king, he thought better of it. He had no right to think of himself as such. When the time came, when Iris finally regained her memories, he would gladly take his place as that girl’s pawn.

  “Matthew, chapter twenty-six, verse fifty-two.” Though he picked the Bible back up off the floor, it was merely out of respect. He did not need to flip to the page. Thanks to his mother’s brutal teachings, he could recite it from heart. “For all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”

  Such was the fate of this wicked world.

  “And what of you, Iris?” he whispered. “Will you be ready?”

  He stared out of the living room window into the quiet night

  PART TWO Tournoi

  The glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self.

  —FRANTZ FANON, Black Skin, White Masks

  16

  October 26, 1884

  56 years, 1 month, and 6 days since the Day of Darkness

  WILTON’S MUSIC HALL CLOSED DOWN three years ago due to its inability to meet fire regulations. However, just a few months ago, an “angel investor” funded what was supposed to be its short-term survival. Iris wondered which member of the Enlightenment Committee had put up the money.

  The music hall’s opening show was to be enti rely private, which, of course, made envious would-be customers eager to be among the chosen few regardless of the quality of the show. But even if the show was open to the public, the price of a ticket was astronomical. Not even the wealthy could afford it. This was to be an exclusive show. One with a very special set of customers. Which is why on Sunday morning, before they were to check in at Club Uriel, Iris decided to go to the theater first to learn what she could.