Jane had been taken over.
It was a strange case, clearly. Jane had been protected, back when she had had iron in her face. A fey couldn’t get around that—but a human could. Boarham, she supposed, had stripped Jane of her protection when they kidnapped her.
But more, usually when a fey took someone over—that someone was gone. Vanished. Helen herself did not remember any of the few seconds that a fey had been inside her, except for a horrible erasing feeling. She certainly had not been able to communicate with anyone. Her body was no longer hers.
But Jane seemed to come and go. Sometimes she was rational. She was Jane.
Or a very good imitation?…
Helen pushed that thought down. The Jane she had talked to just now was definitely her sister, fighting for control of her body. She did not know how that was possible, but it was the only thing that made sense with her behavior.
Helen’s eyes filled with grief. Her sister. Her only family. Helen had fought, and she had tried, and Jane was still going to disappear on her in the end.
A black motorcar drove down the road ahead, yellow searchlight sweeping the sides of the street. Curfew. Helen pressed herself into the side of the buildings, into the sheltering shadow. Across from her a new sort of poster caught her eye—this time bloodred, with CURFEW on it in big black letters, and below it, a raft of rules in smaller type. She did not have to move closer to tell that it was signed the same way as the notice in the paper: BY ORDER OF PARLIAMENT AND COPPERHEAD.
She did not want to go back to the dwarvven slums, where Jane was. She did not want to go home, where Alistair was. Not that that really seemed like home anymore. Perhaps it never had been hers; it had only ever been his. Despite her best intentions to find herself a home, she had come adrift, and now there was not one place she could call her own.
She reached for a handkerchief that was not there and her fingers brushed the copper hydra that hung around her throat.
Her necklace. Her hand closed on it and the copper warmed in response. One picture glanced across her vision, a memory of the warehouse. She was inside, hand on Grimsby’s copper box, and she was looking down at a pale still figure on a white daybed.…
Helen walked along the shadowed line of the buildings, walked fast and sure to the warehouse.
The windows were lit blue, as they had been before. Helen crept around to the window above the slag, looking to see if there was still a way to make it up the snow-covered piles of junk. The high energy was wearing off and she was freezing, but at least the warehouse blocked the sharp wind. She clambered up in her ruffled voile and looked in the smeary window. Her vision was obscured this time. A pile of boxes and bars was pushed in front of the window, where the table had been. But through the clutter she saw figures moving around. She could not easily get in, but perhaps they would not notice if she cracked the window, not with those boxes in front of her.
Carefully Helen pushed the window open, and was treated to a gust of warm air from a vent just above. And there, there below her was the scene she had imagined on the street. Millicent lay on the white daybed, there in the warehouse. Helen’s hand closed on the necklace. Something was strange about that necklace, the back of her brain suddenly told her. Something that she had been unable to see. It almost hurt to think about it.
She made her fingers let go, arched her shoulders so the copper fell away from her skin. Then looked more carefully at the scene in front of her.
Grimsby, one of the snaky funnels in hand, was bending over Millicent.
Helen swallowed hard as she watched him attach the funnel to Millicent’s fey face, her perfect face. It looped behind the head, held on with rubber clips. She remembered Jane standing there in the warehouse, holding the funnel to her face as if breathing in fumes, and she breathed fast, faster. When Grimsby was satisfied he strode back to the copper box in the center of the room and plunged his hands through the bars, grasping the coiling snakes.
Helen’s necklace warmed in response, grew hot. It felt like a smaller, more focused version of when she had touched the box herself and seen all the glimpses of the city.
She did not know what Grimsby was doing, but she knew that it clearly was not good for Millicent. Helen could think the best of Grimsby and wish it was something to roust Millicent from her coma—but she knew it was not. And all that remained to Helen was to shove her manicured nails into the glass window, trying to prise it all the way open and get in to stop it.
But before she could get the window all the way open, the sounds and sights of the box doubled, expanded, grew sudden and violent, raging over her with such force that she could only cling to the window, staring at things that were not real.
She was plunged into a waking dream, a feverish world where the city flickered behind her eyes in shades of blue and white and black. There were so many sights and sounds she could not make sense of it. Until one sound, one pair of sounds, seemed closer than the rest, and she let everything go, let it all float away, until she could pick out the echo of those two talking, like a scratchy gramophone.
<<You’ll let your hatred of dwarvven destroy us all.>>
<<I’m finishing the task I’ve taken up. I am the only one who can do what needs to be done.>>
<<You’re mad.>>
<<Aren’t we all?>>
They were like the not-voice she had heard three nights ago at Grimsby’s meeting. They didn’t even seem to be words, really, though she heard them as words. More like feelings, colors, intuition.
<<How far can you get? Can you find all of you?>>
<<Not yet. Need more juice.>>
<<There’s ten lined up for tomorrow.>>
<<Need more now.>>
In the warehouse, there in her half-waking state, Helen suddenly knew what that meant. She willed her feet forward, but as in dreams they would not go. <<Millicent,>> she shouted, and somehow it seemed to break and fall into that ocean of sound and hue that was all around them. She was part of it as she called <<Millicent! No, no, no!… >>
There was a horrible sucking feeling. That horrible copper machine was using fey to power it, just as Grimsby had said at the meeting. And right now the fey it was using was the fey in Millicent’s face. It was pulling it right out of her—and with it her life. She could not sustain it—Millicent had already wasted away so much in the three days of fey-induced coma that there was hardly anything left to her at all. She had nothing with which to fight.
And Helen said to the sound, <<I’ll fight for her then.>>
But she was small, far too small, and far too late. The main voices could not even hear her tiny words as she forced her frozen feet up the wall one centimeter at a time. She could feel the machine reaching into the bit of fey in Millicent, and spreading out across the city. For a moment Helen saw the city like a grid, with a few random little bits extra lit up here and there, few and far between. There was a strange pressurized feeling, as if those few random bits were struggling to coalesce somehow. But Millicent was too weak. <<I’ll fight for her. I will.>>
And then the storm of movement finally took the last drop it could from Millicent, and imploded in a spot of grey light. The bits did not coalesce. The city faded out.
<<Never mind,>> came one of the voices as the grey light vanished, <<it will all work when we have more power.>>
Everything faded and then Helen was looking at Grimsby in the center of the room, tall and stoic, examining Millicent as if she were merely a failed experiment.