Helen seized his free hand with relief. “Come on,” she said gently. To the men she said, “Enjoy yourselves,” and then she took Tam’s hand and hurried out the door, eyes peeled for the circling cab. Had Hattersley been interested in her? She had never particularly thought about him. She hadn’t even met him till the wedding, she thought, so what did he mean consolation prize? If Betty was the Betty Helen had met at Frye’s party, they probably had been together longer than she had been married. Betty had mentioned a Richard, and she rather thought that might be Hattersley’s first name.
Helen paused at the foot of the stairs, realizing the absence of what she sought.
The cab was not there.
She turned left, thinking the driver’s circling might take him around that corner, and hurried Tam along down the street, watching. No moving cars; all was silent. It felt as though the city were preparing for the oncoming dusk and curfew. There was only a thin lone figure at the end of the road, walking slowly along and staring at the sky.
Jane.
Helen pulled Tam along until they caught up with Jane, and she seized her arm with her free hand. “What happened? Where’s the cabbie?”
“I have bugs,” said Tam. “They flyyyyy around.”
“Do they?” said Jane.
“Jane,” repeated Helen. “What happened?”
Jane turned those green eyes on her. “I was asking the driver if he’d ever touched one of the blue bits of fey and tried to see what it’s thinking. Because I wonder how many bits have to join together to cross over into being full-fledged fey. A whole fey can lose some pieces, but they don’t like it. When does it become just unthinking little bits, like we used to power our lights with? Do the small bits dream? One of the fey made me dream. And then the driver said any amount of money wasn’t worth it and he stopped the car and opened the door and I got out and walked around the block just as we were doing in the car and now I’m here.”
“Argh,” said Helen. She did not know how she had gotten in a mess that involved standing on a street corner with an addled sister and a drunk child, late for an appointment in the dwarvven slums with a citywide curfew about to fall any moment. In that moment it seemed just more proof of her inability to make good decisions, for who else would find themselves like this? The one good thing was that surely there was nothing else to go wrong right now.
“It’s snowing!” said Tam.
Really. Snowing?
“It’s like cotton,” Jane said dreamily.
“It’s like bug guts. White floaty bug guts.” Tam hiccuped. “I’m going to make snow pterodickle—pterodackle—snow man-eating butterflies.”
“I am, too,” said Jane.
“No, no, and no,” said Helen firmly, and she got one hand on each of them before they plopped down on the as-yet-unsnowy-but-certainly-muddy ground. “We are going to find Rook. We are going on the trolley.”
“Chugga chugga choo choo,” said Tam.
“That’s a train,” said Helen, reflecting that it was hard to tell which part was drunk and which was small child. It was not something she’d ever expected to have to puzzle out. “Come on.”
She tugged them both along through the falling snow. The wind was wet and the snow fell in big fat flakes that occupied both her charges, although her wrists grew sore from keeping a tight hold on them as they attempted to chase and eat snowflakes.
“The snow’s like polka dots against the sky,” said Jane.
“Doka pots,” said Tam. “Pots pots pots.”
“Your scarf is dragging,” Helen told Jane. “Hold your bug jar with two hands, Tam.”
“Then you’d be holding it,” he said gleefully, because of course she was still holding one hand.
Grant me patience and a nice hot bath, thought Helen. “Just be careful. It’s glass.”
“Glass pots. Pots pots pots.”
They rounded a corner and there was the trolley station. “Thank goodness,” muttered Helen. There was a wait for the next trolley, in which time the sky got darker and darker and the snow got fiercer. By the time the trolley finally pulled up it was undeniably dusk, and here were two women with fey faces out against the rules. Not to mention a small drunk child, who, though he was male, still probably fell on the needs-curfew side of the curfew law. Helen hustled them onto the trolley, thinking that she had been without her iron mask all this time and hadn’t even noticed. It was funny what a single-minded purpose and two lunatics would do for knocking worries right out of your head.
She hurried them on and sat them down on either side of her, knocking wet clumps of collecting snow from everybody’s coats and cardigans and explorer hats. You could still look nice when you were on the run.
Jane clutched her carpetbag, and Tam hung on to Helen’s coat pocket. He peered around, studying the passengers as if they were an unusual species of ant. Helen put a hand on both of theirs and tried to relax her shoulders and neck.
The trolley was wet from the snow and crowded from the bodies crammed into it. The crowds eased around Helen at every stop until she realized that there were very few people left in the spots designated for humans. But there were still people hurrying home. They spilled out from the back of the trolley—the dwarvven. Helen had not realized how many of them were in the city. She had not thought much of them at all until the last couple days. But now she saw them in the soot-coated greys and browns of the new factories and she thought they were surely too worn out to be a danger to anyone, regardless of what Copperhead relentlessly repeated about dwarvven unrest, dwarvven uprisings. She studied the notices around the trolley as if looking for clues to how far Copperhead had progressed. Again she saw: YOUR EYES ARE OUR EYES! And, over the door near the dwarvven end of the trolley: BE CIVIL, BE COURTEOUS, BE A CREDIT TO YOUR RACE.
Tam’s attention was caught as well by the short people at the end of the car. He looked at them through his binoculars, then turned round eyes on Helen. “They’re not even stuffed. They’re real dwarves.”
“The word is dwarvven,” said Helen in a low voice, “and hush.”
“Father says dwarf,” Tam said positively. “When he shot one he gave me a whole terrarium for not telling. But that dwarf was dead. I never got to see a live one.”
Helen felt a peculiar mixture of horror and mortification. “Tam, tell me later,” she said. She was grateful that although the pitch of his small voice carried, the words were slurred and did not. He was looking green around the gills and she found herself hoping he would pass out rather than incite a riot on the trolley.
“No, I can’t tell you,” he said. “I promised not to tell, and Father always knows what I say and do. You can’t lie to Father. Only for him. Like about the dead dwarf. Dead dead red dead head head dead…”
Thankfully, the trolley came to its final stop and Helen rose. “Here we are,” she said, and pulled Jane and Tam along with her out of the trolley car onto the cold snowy street. The passengers slowly streamed off, parting around the three of them. “My bag,” said Jane, and before Helen could stop her she turned and vanished back into the trolley.
“Jane,” said Helen, and started after her, but then Tam, who apparently didn’t feel so well after the trolley ride, turned and started emptying his stomach into the wet snow of a nearby bush.
Helen wanted to scream. She put a gentle hand on the boy’s shoulders, waiting for him to finish.