The third-floor stairwell of Tenement Forty-Two smelled of cold fried lard, damp plaster, and the persistent vinegar tang of liniment.
Ren Vale climbed slowly. His left hand gripped the greasy rope handrail. Meanwhile, his right arm cradled the Speculum beneath his lambskin apron. Every wooden riser groaned under his weight. His calves burned with the deep, hollow ache of a runner who had sprinted three leagues on an empty stomach. A dull, pulsing throb in his temples reminded him that his heart was feeding two cardiovascular systems.
Two paces behind him, Vane Vale climbed with the silent, resentful grace of a cat being dragged through wet grass. The merchant held the hem of his velvet frock coat gathered in one hand to keep it clear of the cabbage leaves and dead beetles littering the corners. His gold-headed cane made no sound against the wood. He placed each step on the outer floor beams where the timber was least likely to squeak.
“Third floor,” Vane muttered under his breath, his breath pluming in the icy draft. “No porter. No gas sconces. A banister made of frayed hemp that hasn’t seen beeswax since the coronation. You truly are a master of real estate, Ren.”
“Be quiet,” Ren whispered back, pausing outside the warped deal door. “She has ears like an owl. If you start pontificating about square footage, she’ll throw a flatiron at your head.”
“A charming domestic tableau,” Vane sneered, though he reached up with both hands to straighten his white silk cravat and smoothed his silver-streaked mustache. For all his cynical posturing, his fingers had a faint, nervous tremor that he couldn’t quite suppress.
Ren drew the iron skeleton key from his pocket, slipped it into the lock. Then he turned it twice to the left. The bolt slid back with a familiar, oily click.
“Mira?” Ren called softly as he pushed the door inward. “It’s me.”
The attic was dark save for the dull red eye of the cast-iron stove. The smell of stewed turnip broth and dried chamomile flowers hung in the warm air, cutting through the freezing draft from the hallway.
Mira was sitting exactly where Ren had left her: upright on the wooden settle beside the chimney. She was wrapped in her giant charcoal-wool shawl. Her left hand held her embroidery hoop. A bone needle was poised half an inch above the stretched linen. She didn’t flinch, didn’t startle, and didn’t drop the needle.
Her silver-grey eyes flicked from Ren’s mud-spattered boots to his torn lambskin apron, stayed on the dark violet ink-stains around his fingernails. Then traveled past his shoulder to the doorway.
She stopped.
The silence in the room became so heavy that the hiss of the pine resin in the stove sounded like an escaping steam valve.
Vane stepped over the threshold, ducking his head beneath the low ceiling timber. In the cramped, six-foot clearance of the attic, the older man looked huge. His midnight-blue velvet, gold frogging, and starched linen making the room feel like a broom closet. He stood with his cane planted firmly before him, his chin lifted at that habitual, defensive angle of high commerce.
Mira didn’t scream. She didn’t ask who he was.
She lowered the embroidery hoop to her lap with her left hand. Her gaze was locked onto Vane’s face. She looked at the line of his jaw, the slight crook in the bridge of his nose where a childhood sledding accident had broken the joint padding. The small three-sided scar beside his left eyebrow where an errant awl-slip had caught him. Just then, he was twelve.
“Ren,” Mira said, her voice quiet, perfectly steady, and devoid of fear. “Why are you wearing a rich man’s coat?”
Vane’s breath hitched. A sound escaped his throat—a choked, half-strangled gasp that sounded like he had been struck in the solar nerve web by a ball of pig iron. The high-born smirk on his face cracked, peeling away to reveal something naked, scared, and profoundly broken.
“Mira,” the older man whispered. The name came out thin, fragile as spun glass.
He took a step forward, his tall calfskin boots clicking against the bare spruce floorboards. His right hand reached out toward her, unthinkingly, fingers curved as if to brush a stray lock of dark hair from her forehead.
Mira didn’t lean back, but her eyes narrowed with sharp, cold and exact care.
“You’re not him,” she said. She looked back at nineteen-year-old Ren, then returning to the older man. “You have his chin. You have his nose. You even have that ridiculous habit of checking your cufflinks when you don’t know what to say. But you smell of bergamot oil and tobacco smoke. Ren hasn’t had five coppers for tobacco in two years.”
“I’m... An associate,” Vane managed, pulling his hand back and clamping it tightly over the head of his cane. The knuckles turned ivory-white. “A senior partner in a firm of conservators running from the coastal provinces. I have come to... Audit the family accounts.”
Mira looked at his cane. Then she looked at his eyes.
“You have Ren’s eyes,” she said flatly, “when he’s about to lie to me about how much the bread cost.”
Ren stepped between them. They closed the door behind him and dropped the heavy oak crossbar into its iron brackets.
“He’s not a stranger, Mira,” Ren said gently. He crossed the room to kneel beside the settle. He reached out and touched the edge of her wool shawl. “And he’s not an associate. He came out of the Speculum.”
Mira went very still. Her gaze shifted to the heavy gold-silver metal frame tucked beneath Ren’s arm, then back to the older man standing in the center of the attic.
“The mirror from the contraband locker?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“The one you swore to me three nights ago was just an old piece of polished zinc that you were going to use for scrap metal?”
Ren winced, rubbing the back of his neck where the ink-stains met his collar. “I lied about the scrap metal.”
“I know,” Mira said calmly. “You always look at the left corner of the ceiling when you lie about contraband. It’s why you’re a terrible criminal, Ren.”
She turned her head slightly, her gaze settling back on Vane.
“If you came out of the mirror,” Mira said, addressing the older man, “then you’re one of the paths he didn’t take.”
Vane didn’t answer right away. He stared at her shawl. His slate-grey eyes burned with a desperate, hungry intensity that seemed to devour every detail of her face. The pale hollow of her cheeks, the dark circles under her eyes, the neat linen collar pinned with her carved boxwood brooch.
“I took the coastal carriage,” Vane said softly. The voice was stripped of all its commercial power. It was the voice of a boy confessing to a broken window. “I went to Port Sunder. I bought a warehouse on the North Quay. I owned twelve ships, Mira. Four schooners, six three-masted barques, and two steam tugs. The house on the hill had eight fireplaces and a terrace that looked out over the western bay. In the summer, the wind smelled of wild jasmine and salt spray.”
Mira listened, her face unreadable.
“And where was I?” she asked.
The silence that followed was terrifying.
Vane’s eyes dropped to the floor. His manicured jaw trembled, and for a fleeting second, Ren saw the phantom echo of a grand dark wood desk piled high with bills of lading, while outside, three hundred leagues away in the pauper wards of Khorat, an unmarked pine box was being lowered into an unhallowed ditch behind the city walls.
“You weren’t there,” Vane whispered.
“I died,” Mira said. It wasn’t an accusation. It was a simple arithmetic statement, stated with the same dispassionate clarity she used when calculating yards of thread.
“Yes,” Vane choked out.
“Because he left,” she said, looking at nineteen-year-old Ren.
“Because I thought I could come back with enough money to buy the cure,” Vane said. His voice rose, cracked with twenty years of unspeakable, useless regret. “I thought if I had fifty thousand sovereigns, I could buy the entire High Spire! I could hire six Arch-Physicians from the capital! I didn’t know... I didn’t understand how fast the stone takes the blood!”
Mira reached down with her left hand.
Slowly, deliberately, she folded back the heavy charcoal wool of her shawl.
Ren held his breath. He had seen it every day for six months. But the sight still made his ribs ache with helpless fury.
Her right shoulder was no longer flesh. From the hollow of her collarbone, curving across the delicate chest muscle curve and down the entire length of her arm to the tips of her slender fingers, her skin was solid, semi-clear, smoky quartz. Faint violet veins ran through the inside of the crystal like threads of frozen lightning. Where her hand rested against her dark wool skirt, the many-sided quartz caught the dull red glow of the stove. It glowed with an internal, underground violet fire.
When the draft from the cracked window stirred her hair, her chest swelled. And deep within her right chest cavity, a high, clear chime rang out.
Ting-ng-ng.
A note of pure, ringing glass, lingering in the air for three full seconds before dissolving into the wind.
Vane staggered.
The older man fell to his knees in the middle of the floorboards, his cane clattering onto the timber. He didn’t care about his velvet coat. He didn’t care about the soot on his trousers. He knelt three feet from her. He stared at the crystal-clear arm with his mouth open, tears welling in the corners of his eyes and tracked silently down through his silver-streaked mustache.
“Stage Three,” Vane breathed, his hands hovering over the floorboards, not daring to touch her. “The collar bone is fused. The deep ring has reached the lung lining.”
“The clinic told Ren it was an inflammatory humor,” Mira said. She looked down at the kneeling merchant. “Julian Voss charged him four silver crowns a month for distilled willow-bark and salt-water rinses.”
“Voss is a butcher,” Vane rasped, his voice hardening into cold, homicidal flint. “He was never curing you. He was stabilizing the crystal lattice so your arm wouldn’t fracture while he prepared you for the auction block.”
Mira looked at her frozen fingers. She tried to twitch her thumb. The quartz remained immobile, dead and heavy as a monument.
“I know,” she whispered. “I can feel them in my chest, Ren. They hum when the bells ring. They’re waiting for someone to strike the chime.”
Ren knelt beside Vane, placing his hand over Mira’s left hand. The warm, flesh-and-blood hand that still held the bone needle.
“Nobody is striking anything,” Ren said, his voice ringing with fierce, rock-steady certainty. “We have the clinic’s ledger. We have Vane’s audit. We’re going to break Voss’s contracts. We’re going to tear down his institute by stone.”
Mira looked between the two versions of her brother: the young one with ink beneath his nails and a broken apron, and the older one kneeling in the soot with a broken soul.
A tiny, faint smile touched the corner of her lips.
“Two of you,” she murmured, leaning her head back against the chimney brick. “Gods help the court guards.”