“Fae,” I said, my voice strained as I tried not to move against the knife. “You’re Fae.”
He didn’t reply, just pressed the knife harder against my flesh. It didn’t make any sense. Why try to leave us helpless in the water if all he wanted was my death, in the end? Was he an agent of Tremaine’s? How was he surviving, trapped in an iron tube, when I was already getting the first symptoms of poisoning?
Jakob still didn’t say anything. The pain in my shoulder was dizzying, and I felt tears squeeze from the corners of my eyes from fear. “Who are you?” I choked out. “What are you going to do to me?”
“I got you alone to deliver a message,” Jakob said. “You always have to be the clever one, Aoife. The one to fix things.” He kicked the door to the engine compartment shut, never moving the blade from my throat. Thin, and made from pure hardened silver—Tremaine had a similar knife. He’d also held it to my neck, and it hadn’t made me any more inclined to listen to him than I was to listen to Jakob. “Nobody can break in here. Nobody will hear you scream.” The knife pressed, and I felt a thin line of blood trickle down into the hollow of my throat. “The message is this, Aoife—the Brotherhood can’t help you. The nightmare clock can’t help you. Your only chance to find your mother is to come back to Tremaine and beg for forgiveness.”
A pounding started up outside the door. “Effie! Effie, girl! What is happening in there?”
Jakob cut his eyes toward Chief Sorkin’s voice, but he was immovable, and quick as a cat besides. I stood no chance of trying to get away on my strength alone. My father’s words came back to me: You’re not much in a stand-up fight.
“Shut up, Dad,” I grumbled. Jakob cocked his head, then smiled, a thin smile. He turned his wrist to dig the knife in more, and I caught a flash of a flaw in the skin of his wrist, a brand of some sort, which surrounded a small metal rivet. My Weird responded, frantic and hot against my mind in my panic. I had an idea, just a germ of one. I might not be a fighter, but I was smart. And Jakob hadn’t counted on how badly I wanted to live.
Rasputina’s voice joined the clamor outside. “Open this door, Jakob! What’s happening in there?” Something heavy hit, and Sorkin shouted.
“Jammed, Captain! Something is wrong!”
Rather than focus on Jakob, his pointed features, his now-pupil-less blue eyes, I focused on the door. Using my Weird felt like driving a drill through my temple, and blood gushed from my nose, but the wheel that opened the door turned, ever so slowly, and then, with one last push, flew back and dented the bulkhead with a clang like a coffin lid.
Rasputina and Sorkin stood there, and Jakob spun me to face them, arm clamped across my shoulders, knife at my neck. I was closer to this Fae than I’d ever been to anyone, even to Dean, and I could feel his heart beating. “You little sneak,” he hissed in my ear.
I snarled, not willing to be afraid of his blade or the fact that a Fae was here, alive, aboard an iron ship. “What? Did Tremaine fail to mention that?”
Rasputina drew her pistol and aimed it at us. “Jakob,” she said softly. “Your eyes. What’s wrong with your eyes?”
Jakob’s laugh was short and harsh as a seal’s bark. “My eyes? Nothing, you idiot woman. My eyes are open. Yours are closed. You are ignorant to everything around you, especially me.”
I twisted my neck a bit while he ranted, trying to see if I had any give with the knife. There wasn’t much. Jakob’s skin felt cold and clammy where his bare torso pressed against me, and I caught a glimpse of his eyes, which had so alarmed Rasputina. Fae eyes gleamed with an inner light. If I were Rasputina, I’d have been losing my cool staring into them as well.
“Speak,” Rasputina said. “You’ve been loyal crew for months, Jakob. What are you going to do to this girl?”
“Cut her throat if you don’t lower that crude weapon and leave us to our business,” Jakob snarled. “And also if she declines to obey my terms.”
Fury flared in me. Tremaine still thought he controlled me, either via an agent or directly, through my fear of the Fae catching up to me. Now it had happened, and strangely, I wasn’t panicking. I was just furious. “It wouldn’t be the first time,” I told Jakob. “My brother sliced my throat. He almost killed me. I was bleeding all over myself. I’m not going to scream and beg.”
“You mad bastard,” Rasputina said, lowering the hammer on her pistol. The click echoed in the closed space, and I swallowed in fear, acutely aware that I was in the way of the bullet.
“Let the girl go.” Her voice had gone soft, placating, more like that of a kindly teacher than that of a captain. “This can still end with everyone alive, Jakob.”
“She’s a destroyer,” Jakob snarled. “When she turns the wheel and opens the kingdom, they will come and come and come, come from the stars and cover this world, and the next, and the next.…”
Finally, my opening. I recognized those ramblings—iron madness, eating into your brain until you just rambled endlessly, about the things only you could see. My mother had talked about the same things.
I snapped my head back into Jakob’s face, feeling something give—something nose-shaped. Jakob yelped, the knife skidding down my neck and over my collarbone as he wind-milled.
Rasputina’s arm never wavered; she didn’t even blink. The gunshot was impossibly loud, stole all sense of sound from me, and I felt the bullet fly through the air next to my face.
She missed Jakob by inches, the bullet digging another dent in the bulkhead, and he bared his teeth. They weren’t pointed like Tremaine’s, but they were white and sharp, ready to tear flesh.
I didn’t know for sure that it’d work, but I didn’t hesitate. I grabbed Jakob’s wrist, above the brand surrounding the curious metal rivet. Fae couldn’t survive in iron. I dug my fingernails into the spot and accessed my Weird.
Jakob groaned and swiped at me with the knife, but Sorkin darted forward and pinned his arm to the bulkhead with a roar. I felt skin, blood and metal beneath my nails, and Jakob’s screams spurred me on. I yanked on the piece of metal—silver, I saw now, carved in the shape of a tapered screw, going all the way down to Jakob’s bone—with my fingers and my Weird together.
Splitting pain in my skull, a shattering scream from Jakob, and he collapsed, still, on the floor of the engine room.
I looked down at my bloody hand, which gripped the silver screw. My shoulder throbbed at the contact with it. Powerful Fae enchantments were wound around this piece of silver—powerful enough, I thought, to keep a Fae citizen alive in the Iron Land for months.
“Jakob,” said Rasputina, bending down and feeling for his pulse. Jakob thrashed and screamed when she touched his skin, as if her touch were flame, and I darted back, into the arms of Sorkin, who held me steady.
“It’s all right, little girl,” he rumbled. “It’s going to be all right.”
I tried to pull away, to get to Jakob and make sure he was really finished. Rasputina had no idea what she’d let onto her boat, and as she shook Jakob by the shoulders, I wanted to snatch her away, to scream that she wasn’t nearly as afraid as she should be.
Jakob was even paler than he had been, all his veins standing out, as he grabbed for Rasputina.
“Burn, witch!” he shrieked. “You burn! Bright as the red fire they put into your blood!”
Rasputina jerked her hand back. “What are you saying?” Her face had gone from flushed to pale in an instant, and she drew away from Jakob’s twitching body.
He giggled, and I flinched. It wouldn’t be long now. This much iron around a full-blooded Fae … I didn’t want to think about what would happen when the poison took full effect.