Copperhead

by Tina Connolly

  “Leave him,” he said. “We’re going to get Jane.”

  Helen set down her toast with trembling fingers. “I may have agreed to marry you, but I didn’t agree to do everything you ordered,” she said.

  “I’m not ordering,” Alistair said. “You’re being irrational. It must be those horrid folks you’re hanging around with—Jane and her bluestocking friends, those traitors. If she’s in the dwarfslum, it’s probably because she’s in league with those disgusting creatures.” He looked over her head, thoughtful. “Yes, she’d probably be just the sort to take up with one of them, now that she’s no longer deformed. Miscegenation would be nothing to her.…”

  That was the point that made her snap.

  She turned on him and said softly, “You will apologize now.”

  She watched until his eyes went glassy, and then he said, “I’m sorry. I am.”

  The decorative nonsense was burned away. “Mary, take Tam from the room, please,” Helen said softly. As the door shut behind them she said, “I hold to my end of the marriage contract. I see no reason for me or my family to be treated like this.”

  “Of course not,” he said.

  It was heady, saying these ridiculously domineering things. She could spout off anything she cared to and make him agree with her. It was as if someone had had a weight on her all this time and had just pulled it off. And she found that she was twice as tall as she thought.

  “I can go where I want, and if there’s danger I can damn well walk into it if I want,” she said. “I am in charge of my own safety.”

  “You are,” he agreed.

  The things Jane and Frye and Rook had said all came bubbling up. She didn’t even know they had come in and registered.

  “We are married, but you don’t own me,” she said.

  Alistair sank to one of her tufted chairs. His eyes looked concerned, and she wondered if the changes she was effecting would last while she was gone, or wear off when she turned her back. She found at the moment she didn’t really care.

  “I’m going down to a place that isn’t safe for children,” Helen said. “You will watch Tam. Send word to his father that he can stay over. You can”—she cast around—“play dominoes with him, look at maps, catch bugs. That sort of thing. You will not leave him alone. You will not, I don’t know, take him out back and teach him to smoke cigars.”

  “Of course not,” said Alistair, and he sounded shocked. She thought that was an interesting wrinkle she had introduced, that she could make Alistair sound shocked.

  “Good,” Helen said. “Ask Mary to help you. She has a bunch of little brothers. Now I am out the door.”

  “Helen?” said Alistair. He sounded almost … humble. “When are you coming back?”

  “When I discover what’s going on,” said Helen. She looked at him, sitting meekly on the small chair. His face was Alistair’s, but he wasn’t anyone she knew. It was the opposite of a mask, as if the physical body of Alistair was a mask for something else, something Helen had created and put into animate Alistair.

  She supposed it should give her the creeps. At the very least she should feel guilty, unconscionably guilty, so very guilty that she couldn’t possibly leave the house.

  Instead she gave him one more tweak. “Don’t drink any of that whiskey,” she said.

  “No, Helen.”

  “Good,” she said. She blew him a jaunty kiss. “Don’t wait up.”

  * * *

  There was a mess of factories and warehouses by the statue of Queen Maud on the pier, but only one was lit blue in the windows. The sharp lines of the factory contrasted against the misty evening as Helen crept closer through muck and stench to peer through a cracked dirty window. Inside she could see … cages? Yes, rows of iron-barred cages, she thought, and surrounding them a misty blue haze. Helen squinted through the greasy glass. The blue haze almost seemed to have forms in it—as if it were people dancing and talking and running. Helen stepped away from the warehouse and into the shadows of the building opposite, puzzled by the blue-lit windows. Did nobody care that the warehouse seemed to be fey-infested? Or were they just being cautious? People passing by the warehouse didn’t give it a second glance, though they did seem to be giving it a wide berth.

  The door was locked. She went around and around the building until at last she found a window ajar. It was head-height, but over some piles of rubbish and cans she thought she could use. The old Helen would have gone home, but this Helen adjusted the skirt on her herringbone suit and climbed up, prised the window open, and slid on through. There was a table beneath the window and so that side was easy after all.

  The warehouse was big and dim and crowded, as if it were concurrently being used both for shipping storage and illicit fey activity. The window that she had come through was about in the middle of the long rectangle, and it was right under a duct blowing hot air—surprising that the warehouse was heated. The half of the building on the right, toward the wide double doors, was crates and machinery and all manner of piles of things. On the left were the cages, and the thin blue fog.

  They were big cages, big enough to hold a person, and they lined the back half of the heated warehouse, competing for space with more crates, machinery, and junk. There were no good angles from which to see everything at once; Helen crept carefully around teetering piles, expecting something to leap out at her at any minute. A mouse skittered in front of her, and she jumped back against a cage, heart hammering fast. The blue fog crept around the cages, avoiding the iron bars, curling around her fingers. She grimaced and fought down panic. Rook had reminded her that a little bit of fey would not hurt anyone—was itself hurt, in a manner of speaking. Come to that, what was the blue fog, exactly? It was not as solid as the shimmery pieces of fey that lined the city. No, it was more vaporous even than that, as if a fey had been blown to smithereens.

  There was a square hole cut from the center door of the cage—not quite big enough for a person to fit through. Over the hole hung a dented metal funnel mounted to a pale oval. A rubber hose snaked out of the funnel, and she followed it around piles of boxes, heart again hammering in her throat until she found where it ended.

  Grimsby’s machine.

  There was the large cube of wrought iron she had seen at the meeting. In the center was the ball made of writhing curls of copper. Wired inside of the cube were the ends of dozens of these rubber hoses, all snaking through the bars and away into the warehouse. The blue fog drifted lazily around her, and she remembered Grimsby blasting that small fey to a million bits of blue, and she thought she might be sick.

  She tried to wave the fog away—stop breathing it in—tried to move away from the box, but she stumbled against all those snaking tubes, and as she put her hand out for balance it went right between the wrought iron and into the cube, and she touched the coiled copper snakes.

  A chaotic swirl of confusion, a whirlwind of colors. Helen felt pulled in a million directions at once. She was seeing things, so many things, and her eyes couldn’t make sense of the torrent of images that attacked her.

  She pulled back, stood up.

  Slowly the warehouse resolved. Breathing heavily, she let the chaos of color die away. What had she seen? Flashes of the city, she thought. Lots of blue. Faces, voices. Stronger—a building, perhaps something like this warehouse?

  Yes, she had a feeling that the warehouse itself had flashed through her mind. She narrowed her eyes, remembering the demonstration at the meeting. Grimsby had used the machine to capture a fey. Used it to destroy a fey. What else could it do? She remembered Niklas saying that he had made the machine and turned it over to Grimsby for further tinkering.

  Steadying her nerve, Helen closed her eyes, reached through the iron railing, and grasped the copper box with both hands. Her fingers fit into and under the copper snakes disturbingly well. They seemed to mold their coils to her thin fingers. Perhaps they were hollow tubes, for patterns of warmth ran along her skin. The chaotic swirl started again, but
this time she was expecting it. She tried to relax, tried to let her mind make sense of what she saw. Buildings, faces, voices … men, walking, talking. That face looked like the Prime Minister—was he nearby?

  She thought she had seen the warehouse the first time. She tried to visualize it from the outside and the pictures of it increased in response to her focus. She felt bludgeoned by it, as if it were some strange dream where she could see the building from all sides at once, and even an image of the copper box, nearly from where she would be seeing it in real life, but a trifle lower. And then another image that seemed to be the back of the warehouse; a part she hadn’t seen, but she recognized the tubes and cages.

  It was too overwhelming. Helen let go, extricated her fingers from the copper.

  But she looked at Grimsby’s machine with respect. Is that what Grimsby had seen with it, when he was attempting to pull in a piece of fey? Certainly the machine did more than just destroy. Someone could see all over the city, if they learned how to cope with the barrage of sights and sounds. Someone with a more powerful brain—or perhaps, simply someone with more fey power, since Grimsby had said the machine ran on the fey energy. Maybe that’s why she was able to see a little bit with it—the fey in her face. Perhaps with a lot of hard work she could figure out what it did and how it worked, and why she saw the back of the warehouse but not the front.

  The back of the warehouse …

  Helen turned around. But there was no one standing there, was there? Not right behind her. But maybe farther back, around the crates …

  There was a dark shape. Not a shape. A figure, a person. In the back, half-hidden behind the row of cages, holding a funnel next to her face …

  Helen’s legs were running before her head completely knew what she had seen. “Jane!” she shouted, making all the blue fog swirl and unsettle. “Jane!”

  Chapter 9

  THE TROUBLE WITH JANE

  Jane turned her perfect face to look at Helen. It was pale in the slanted light of the warehouse. Her green eyes were wide and vacant, and her dark brown hair all in a tumble.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” said Helen. “You won’t believe everything I’ve been trying to do in your name. I swear I’m making a hash of things. I know I thought I could help you, but honestly I am so ready to give this whole ridiculous The Hundred project back to you, and sweep it under the rug, and take you out for tea and cakes. It’s been a nightmare.” Helen slowed as she approached her sister. Was Jane listening? Helen repeated her sister’s name again, but now slower, wondering. “Jane?”

  Jane blinked several times. “Helen?” she said finally.

  “Yes, silly,” said Helen. “I’ve found you and will get you home. But where have you been? Did you come here on your own? And aren’t you cold?”

  Jane looked down, holding the funnel with its attached hose in one hand like a bouquet. She was still wearing the dress she had worn to the meeting—it was silky and misty grey, and still she had no coat, for Helen had that. “Perhaps I am cold,” Jane said, as if testing out the idea.

  “Well, I’ll get you your coat. Or—no, I’ll get you a better coat. That ridiculous old thing you had; it’s not even worth giving as a hand-me-down. I’d feel terrible if I saw Mary walking out in that coat. I have an allowance, and there are some new ones in fashion that would very much suit—wide shoulders, belted to a narrow waist; all these gorgeous slashing lines.”

  “Slashing lines…,” said Jane, fingering her cheek. Up close the filtered daylight revealed raw pink lines crossing the white face. The lines where the iron had been.

  Helen’s heart seized. Jane was so vulnerable. Jane had always been the strong one, when they had been together. And when Jane fled to the city she was defined by her absence. I cannot ask Jane about medicine for Mother, I cannot let Jane make the decision about the cow. Helen wanted Jane to be the strong one again. “What happened to you?” Helen said again, but gently.

  “I was working with Millicent when the room went blue,” Jane said slowly. “Everything felt strummed and tense, like when your hair stands on end. Like a lightning storm. And then … I felt I saw you standing up there in the attic. And there were people around you, but you were shouting to me. I felt as if I was being pulled in two. It hurt—not physically, exactly, but if you could be pulled in two without it hurting, then that’s what it felt like. I saw you and a tangle of copper, and then I saw Millicent and the attic. Both on top of each other. It was too much. I couldn’t take being pulled apart. I felt like there was someone behind me? Someone grabbed me? I think I blacked out. And then…” Jane looked around at the warehouse as if seeing it for the first time. “I don’t know exactly. I woke up here, and my iron was gone—it feels as though I skinned my knee, but on my face.” She put a hand to the pink lines that traced around her features. “But I didn’t really wake up, not all at once. I feel as though I’ve been sleepwalking while I try to put the two halves of me back together.”

  Helen did not like the sound of this. And the being pulled in two … “What are you doing with that funnel?” she said sharply. “Does it have chloroform coming out of it or something?” She took the funnel from Jane’s hand and sniffed at it from a good distance, but smelled nothing. “Not that that proves anything,” Helen muttered. She dropped the funnel on the ground and kicked it away. Took Jane’s hand and tugged her sister around the boxes to the copper box with its snaking black tubes. “Does this look familiar to you? Have you touched it?”

  “Perhaps I should,” Jane said, reaching for it.

  “No,” Helen said sharply, and pulled her sister’s arm away. “It might be dangerous to you.” She was so overwhelmed. Grimsby’s invention had done something to Jane two nights ago, and now here they were in this warehouse with the same device and a confused Jane. “Look, when I touched this I saw a whole bunch of things,” Helen said. “Is that how it felt in the house, with Millicent? Or maybe, your problem is because you were actually in a fey trance at the time, working on Millicent? And then she—” She bit her tongue, sure it would be too much of a shock for Jane to tell her about Millicent. Jane seemed so fragile.

  “Millicent?” said Jane. “I met a Millicent, long ago. She was all in white with a green sash, and she was dancing.…”

  Helen’s fingers clutched tightly on Jane’s arm. “Jane—,” she said, but then there was a rustle from the other end of the warehouse, a muffled thump, footsteps.…

  Helen’s fingers tightened all the way and pulled Jane through the tangle of crates and cages and machinery, back to the open window. Up on the rickety table, teetering, and now the lock on the front door was rattling.

  “Out you go,” Helen said, and locked her hands under Jane’s heel, lifting her up. Jane might not have gone as quickly as Helen would have liked, but she did pull herself through the window, and out, and Helen heard her jump to the piles of slag below.

  The lock clicked as Helen pulled herself up after Jane. It was hard without the heel boost she had given Jane. Helen had not climbed anything since she lived in the country. She felt the seams of her skirt start to go and she hoisted the material higher, painfully aware that Frye’s slacks would be better for this sort of thing. Men had it so much easier—even unfit Alistair could have managed this window more efficiently, because he would have had better clothes for it. A most unusual idea occurred to her for the first time, which was that perhaps it was all too convenient for men like Alistair that women like Helen stayed in dresses that you couldn’t run or climb in.

  The door opened with an audible creak just as she got her elbows through the window and pushed herself through the last little bit. Helen desperately wanted to know who was coming in, but she even more desperately did not want to get caught. This was all Jane’s problem. Jane could worry about who was doing what. Helen could step down and return to her original plan of merely running interference for Jane on The Hundred, sending women her way. Away from danger and decisions.

  Helen slid to the trash cont
ainers and then to the ground, tumbling onto the muddy cobblestones. She kept going till she was standing again, trying not to mind her poor ruined skirt. The cut on her palm felt as though it had opened up from the strain; she peeled that lilac glove carefully free of the bandage and stuffed it in her pocket before it could be ruined. Her good hand closed on Jane’s arm, Jane who was staring up at the sky with a vaguely curious expression, completely ignoring the goose bumps raising all the hairs on her arm from the November wind.

  Helen took off her coat and laid it over her sister’s shoulders. “Let’s get out of here,” Helen said. “Frye will know what to do.”

  * * *

  Frye’s door was opened by the gorgeous woman in orange from the party, Alberta—though tonight she was wearing bright yellow, with a drift of poppies floating down from one shoulder. Her black hair was twisted up on her head and decorated with another gauzy poppy. Perhaps she had just come from a gig with Sturm und Drang. “Come for a nightcap?” Alberta said. “Frye’s still at her show, but you can join the party.”

  “Wasn’t there a party last night?” said Helen. She tugged at her split skirt seam, vainly pushing the edges back together.

  “Oh, that party,” said Alberta. “Sure. But a few folks dropped by tonight after early gigs finished. Some people never really go home. Frye’s too kind to boot them out.”

  Alberta turned and led the way down the hall, gold T-straps clicking on the floor. Helen twisted back to point out the show posters and memorabilia to Jane, but Jane was drifting blankly along. “Do they just stay for weeks?” Helen said. The thought of jumping ship on her life came back again. She could crash on Frye’s floor like the other bohemians. Perhaps she would have to learn how to go onstage. She rather liked the idea of having a hundred people watch her sing a torch song while twenty backup men danced in top hats behind her. Except she couldn’t sing. Still, why should that matter in a daydream?