Corroded

by Karina Cooper

  Save that he was so polite. Bollocks!

  My hands shook as I jammed them under my chin, my gaze pinned on the fog that I did not see.

  He’d been here. I knew it. I could feel it. He must have found my challenge sooner than I expected; come to Mr. Lusk while I’d brawled with the Bakers and wasted time with Ishmael.

  Had he learned something of the kidney? Is that why he’d counseled the man give it up as a hoax?

  Had he hoped it would be destroyed before I arrived?

  How recent had I missed him? I spun, ready to return to Mr. Lusk’s door, hammer at it until it came off its blooming hinges, but I stopped mid-turn.

  Took a breath.

  It stank of acrid air, of damp refuse and always of coal, but it cleared a path through my stormy feelings. Carved a swath of logic.

  I could do nothing now. Even as I thought it, the bells of Westminster bonged faintly from up on high. Three, and then no more.

  It had taken me too long to deal with the Bakers, and longer still to cross the London Borough of the Tower Hamlets. Small enough as each district seemed, they were a right devil to cross on foot with any precision or haste.

  I could not waste the coin on a hackney.

  For now, I had no choice. I could not stay within Baker land, and I could not risk anywhere else. Spent, frustrated beyond measure, I returned to the Menagerie.

  If I was careful, quiet and blessed with a little bit of luck to offset my continued misfortune, I could slip into the sweets’ quarters and find a bed.

  It would not end here. I would not let this go. I did not like the feeling of being one step behind my rival, and I feared what might happen were he to locate the Ripper before me. Everything I planned rested on my outwitting the monster.

  I stepped into the fog. It swirled and danced about me, bloomed from the lamps flickering madly. Though I watched the shadows, half-expecting a rush from each pool of black I passed on my journey out of Whitechapel, no opponent made himself known—Ripper or otherwise.

  If I was followed this time, I did not sense the trouble. Perhaps I should have listened to my own warnings. Opium to sleep—laudanum or smoke, resin or distilled—was one thing. This habit I’d developed of licking it direct might be turning into a hindrance.

  I clenched the ball in my palm, hand fisted in my pocket, all the way back to the Menagerie.

  I would ease back on the tar. Of course I would. Once the sweet tooth was finally caught, I would return to the medicinal use Fanny had worked so hard to mitigate.

  In the interim, I would focus on the task at hand. No more sloppy collection work. No more jumping at shadows. The sweet tooth was in my grasp, and I’d be damned to perdition if he got another leg up on me.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I returned to find the Menagerie in an uproar.

  There is an order to things—a way of doing—that is not so much apparent but enjoyed subconsciously by them what attend places as a pleasure garden or a circus. Things happen as per schedule, things are allowed to happen as per need, and then there are those things that happen as per misfortune and must be dealt with quickly by staff and without fuss.

  Many would never notice the difference.

  I did. I spotted it the instant I arrived near the gates to find not two but four liveried men waiting beside them, impeccably courteous in black and green. I did not enter the Menagerie by way of obvious routes, knowing as I did the ease by which I could climb a wall generally considered too dangerous to try, but I did mark the heightened force.

  Men patrolled in the guise of footmen, the sweets walked in groups of three or more. What patrons I saw in my careful jaunt across the lantern-festooned grounds did not appear to notice anything amiss, yet there was a pall—a barely contained tension that I expected to crack at any moment.

  I could not put my finger upon it. As I walked beneath hundreds of Chinese paper lanterns, each a different color and pattern, I kept my eyes sharp for anyone—anything—that might impede my progress.

  I did not even look up to ascertain the truth of Maddie Ruth’s alchemical revelation.

  Tonight, the circus tent was quiet and dark, its canvas still. Whatever displays the gardens offered, it did not involve the rings. Was it market night? Or perhaps the amphitheater attended—it could easily house an orchestra, or a full stage performance.

  Or, I thought dourly, my cheeks flushing at the memory, another round at the Roman baths. The first time I’d walked full into one of the Menagerie’s more scandalous entertainments, I’d stumbled across Hawke looking so much more...more...

  Rumpled. Relaxed?

  No.

  Desirable.

  No. I wrenched the fog-protectives off my face, both the goggles and mask, and inhaled deeply. That night was the first I’d seen Hawke in anything but his ringmaster’s attire or working togs. His shirt had been left undone near half down his chest, and I remembered the expanse of golden skin bared for stroking by a pretty sweet at his side.

  The heat, the laughter, the sounds of pleasure from deep within the bathhouse.

  And his gesture to me. A challenge. Come.

  I did not. I’d fled, the first I remembered doing so.

  Now I fled still, but in a roundabout way. Into the Menagerie, not out. Under the very eyes of them what would own me, or cast me out.

  I was doomed to be unwanted everywhere.

  I ignored the ache that caused in my heart. It was a feeling I’d long since learned to live with. Neither Society by raising nor street poor by birth, I had lived on the fringes of too many worlds to feel the sting of a third.

  I was fumbling for the remnants of the ball of opium—damn my previous concerns, I was a desperate woman—when a bit of pale shadow detached from the greater darkness beneath a delicate garden pavilion. Only the faintest light reached the colorless structure, and the silhouette became the shape of a woman wearing white.

  “Cherry!” Hands seized my arm, causing the resin to slip from my fingers. “Thank God you’re—”

  I cried out, dropping to my knees to pat the ground. “Don’t step,” I ordered tersely. My lungs stilled. My heart stalled. Where? Where had it fallen? “Not a foot out of place!”

  It could be days before I landed the Ripper. It could be too long. I stared fiercely at the ground, scrabbling for any sign of the rock-shaped tar. Dark against dark; I couldn’t see.

  I couldn’t see it!

  Zylphia, whose face I only dimly recognized in my sudden fervor, knelt in front of me, reached out to pluck a faint shape from where it had rolled to a standstill beside a stepping stone. “This?”

  I snatched it from her fingers, shoved it into my pocket hard enough that my coat slid askew. “What do you want?”

  Her eyes, when they met mine, were infinitely bleak. “Oh, Cherry.” It was a breath, a whisper of sorrow I would not deign to hear.

  “Shush!” I found myself clutching at my coat, over the pocket. But I did not let go. My heart seemed unable to slow. “What are you doing? You near gave me a fright!”

  “There’s been an assault.” She kept her hands to herself, this time—much more the thing I expected of her. They twisted together at her waist, and I realized that she wore a bit of frothy attire reminiscent of a swan. White upon white, with black paint over her eyes and dragged to her temples in artful design. Her long legs were bare from the knee down, which must be chilly, but she showed no signs of cold.

  Fear turned her exotic features gaunt. Fear, and anger, and no small amount of terrible sorrow.

  I hesitated, torn between the urge to comfort and the desire to escape. What would be more welcome?

  What would earn me a moment’s freedom?

  I waited too long to decide. She took a deep breath and deliberately uncurled her hands, straightening her feathered shoulders. “You can’t go where they’ll see you,” she told me. “They’re looking for you all over.”

  A respectable attempt at brisk, but her voice shook.

&nb
sp; At least I saw no obvious marring from her time in Osoba’s entertainments.

  I frowned. “Aren’t you cold? Let’s get to a fire basket, and—”

  “Listen to me.” Zylphia then broke her own rules—a habit she was starting to develop—and once more seized my arm. She dragged me, protesting, under the pavilion, and I lost all sense of her features. The darkness swallowed us, leaving me invisible and her swathed in the faintest bit of pale sheen. “There’s been an attack on a sweet.”

  “What has this to do with me?” I asked, sympathetic but confused. “I’ve been gone.”

  “It’s Lily,” Zylphia said, and her voice broke on the sweet’s name. “The bastard cut Lily.”

  “Wait.” I took a deep breath, feeling the cold bite into my lungs. The shock of it, the cleansing freshness of it, helped clear away my confusion. “Start again. What exactly happened?” I’d done this dance with Zylphia before. The night she hired me to collect the sweet tooth, she’d been so upset that I’d been forced to calm her to make sense of the facts.

  It was unbearable, this sense of familiarity. I knew. Somehow, I simply knew what would come next—and I was as powerless to stop it here as I’d been those few months ago.

  Zylphia mirrored my breath. Then, quietly, she started over. “Black Lily was to be in the private gardens tonight. When we realized she wasn’t there, we looked before the whips found out, but she wasn’t anywhere. When we told Ikenna, he put out the footmen for searching.”

  I didn’t know for sure what happened to Menagerie folk who failed to attend their duties, but given my own experiences, I had at least an inkling. “I imagine he didn’t take kindly to it.”

  “Lily is reliable,” she replied sharply. “We all know it, even the whips.”

  “All right, all right,” I soothed, though impatience snapped a jarring note through my forced calm. “What next?”

  Her figure shifted in the shadows. “Suddenly, we hear a scream, and there’s Lily in the gardens. The private ones, in the maze. She’s...trussed and...blood all over...”

  Zylphia collapsed from within, nothing so outward as to swoon, but I saw it, heard it, in the struggle to speak.

  I reached out, touched her arm briefly. But only briefly. I simply could not tell whether she welcomed it or would refuse, and her own uncertain approach to it did not leave me feeling particularly confident. “Go on, Zylla. Take your time.”

  The gist was already had. A man had attacked Black Lily on her turn about the garden. A terrible thing, but why would it be pinned on me?

  “The bastard cut her, cherie.” Now I heard the burn of fury, strengthening her resolve. “Bound her so she could not fight, cut her across the face, forehead to throat, then dropped her like she was less than nothing.”

  That was terrible, certainly.

  “She lives?” I asked.

  “She lives, but she’ll not ever be a sweet again.” Her voice hardened. “We’ll find work for her here long as the Veil allows, but she’s ruined, Cherry. No man will ever take her like that, save maybe the Ferrymen.”

  I flinched. Not a position worth gloating about, that one. “Did you find any clue? Anything as to the nature of the assailant’s identity?”

  “If it wasn’t the sweet tooth,” she said fiercely, “then someone else is making a point of it to hurt us, take us like the tooth before. We’re no common doxies and we aren’t for the likes of him!”

  A point. My rival had already been inside the gardens once, as evidenced by the cameo he’d left. His calling card was violence, terror and blood.

  But he wasn’t the only. Jack the Ripper had made it his business to go after women who peddled their flesh for coin. “Are you sure it’s him and not the Chapel’s Jack?”

  “We aren’t to ask.”

  My head cocked. “Your pardon?”

  Zylphia blew out an angry breath. “The lion prince has made his declaration,” she spat. “All measures against the sweet tooth and the Ripper are to stop. No collections, no investigations. Whatever has riled this man, whichever man, he wants a stop to it.”

  “The hell he does,” I all but snarled. Ikenna Osoba was rapidly turning into a thorn in my side.

  I would be all too happy to become the shard of glass in his regal paw.

  Zylphia surprised me. “You have to leave it alone,” she whispered.

  I blinked for a moment, caught off guard. “What?” Then, as the meaning sunk in, I took a step back. “You can’t be serious!”

  She threw up her hands. “A whip has spoken! What are we to do? We risk punishment if you don’t leave it alone.”

  My lip curled. I turned away. “Where is Hawke?”

  “Cherry, don’t—”

  “Where is he?”

  There was silence. A held breath.

  Very slowly, I turned back. My fingers spasmed hard enough that they cramped, but I took the pain and tucked it aside. Settled it against the warm glow of my rage and bound it tightly to my heart. Guilt that I could not free Zylphia from Osoba’s threats, anger that the whip would dare, grief for all the burdens I carried, hunger for a vengeance that would be mine—I set them aside before they consumed me. There would be time for that soon.

  With near superhuman effort, I pulled an icy veneer of calm over it all.

  “Where,” I asked softly, “is Hawke?” If Osoba would not see reason, then I would force his hand.

  If neither would listen, then I had no choice: I would risk Zylphia’s punishment to put an end to everything.

  The recognition of this, my determination to ignore her promised suffering, broke something within me. It was as if my feeling—my ability to process emotion and empathy—had been pushed too far.

  The world went quiet around me.

  Zylphia let out her held breath on a low groan. “Last I was with him was in his quarters,” she finally said, and the crack that revelation put in my heart no longer hurt. I could not let it; dared not break free of the ice that had encased me. If she had provided the man comfort as sweets were taught to do, it could not touch me.

  “I see,” I replied, desperately calm. “Thank you.”

  “Wait, there’s something you should—”

  I gave her my back. “It does not matter,” I said, finality in every syllable.

  Leaving her to shadow, I stepped out from under the pavilion. The lantern light glided over me, picked out the shabby little creature I was as I wove among the gilded roses the Veil so carefully cultivated, but I did not care. I did not attempt to hide my progress as I walked to the main estate.

  I knew where Hawke’s quarters were. Come what may, I could not be forced to stop. I would not leave the hunt for the sweet tooth or our shared quarry.

  Jack the Ripper was all that would lead me to my vengeance.

  I expected to be waylaid. I expected a multitude of faces, demands to halt, servants to watch my every move, but fortune seemed finally on my side. Though I saw the occasional servant walking from one task to the next, it seemed as if all who could stop me had turned their attentions outward, in the grounds and to the events planned.

  Only once I reached Hawke’s quarters did I stop.

  I knocked upon the door, the very picture of polite inquiry.

  There was no answer.

  Undeterred, I tested the knob and found it unlocked. Nothing in my chest tilted when it opened. Nothing, no anxiety or hesitation, daunted me. I was impervious to all that assailed me; stony with resolve, driven beyond feeling by a bitter purpose.

  I had flailed about in this venomous net for far too long.

  Heedless of my own temerity, I walked into Hawke’s quarters and opened my mouth to speak.

  What I saw froze me in place. The words died.

  My breath broke on a gasp.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The room was in shambles. The bed was crookedly placed, the wooden headboard I remembered cracked and splintered. A heavy trunk that I remembered at the foot of the bed now lay on its side acr
oss the room, shattered at one end as if thrown with great force.

  There were swatches of material here and there, torn to shreds, and the beautiful black silk coverlet embroidered in masculine shades of red and gold and green now lay pooled in a torn heap, ruined beyond saving.

  There was no sign of Hawke, and none of the perpetrator of such chaos.

  A part of me yearned to be worried, to bristle with anger and dismay—the analytical part of my mind I now obeyed assured me that it would not be misguided to feel such things—but I could not summon it from the tomb I had sealed it all behind. I did not want to try.

  It was safer, here, hiding within my resolve.

  If I attempted anything else, allowed myself to think of the fear and anger in Zylphia’s face, the pain she must have suffered beneath the first lash of the whip, the weight of the guilt I carried might crush me.

  Instead, wordlessly, I stood in the middle of that abandoned room, surrounded by tattered furnishings, and once more fished for my little bit of opium.

  It came to my hand easily. The wax paper sealing it from dirt and lint peeled back, and I bit a chunk bigger than my usual corner. The bitter taste did not wake me. The burn did not comfort me.

  I ate it because I must, and felt no pleasure from it.

  This understanding fell victim to my apathy. I did not fear.

  Slowly, the ragged edges of my mind smoothed. Enough that the frozen rime encapsulating my lungs eased; I felt as if I could breathe again.

  I worked to convince myself that I was a thing of flesh and blood, that it was within my rights to feel something besides desperate resolution.

  Yet I stared at the remains of Hawke’s bed, and still I felt nothing.

  No logic could break through my despair. It folded around me, swallowed me whole. As I had those days after Lord Compton’s death, I ate my opium and welcomed the addling it would bring—blissful ignorance, stripping away all sense of urgency until I could simply stand in one place and listen to the music of my breath as it eased in and out of my lungs.

  This, I could carry. This much, I would claim.