Wicked as They Come (29 page)

Around and around we went, Criminy’s step light behind me. I hadn’t asked him much about his own journey
over the wall, but he looked as fresh and crisp as if he’d just stepped out of his wagon. But he was missing his satchel.

Finally, the staircase opened up in a smaller, sparse room. It was the living quarters, with one narrow metal bed against the wall, a tiny potbelly stove, and dozens of sharp metal hooks hanging empty from the faded white wood. I felt as if I was being watched, but there was nowhere for a watcher to hide.

“This is where the lighthouse tender lived,” Criminy said softly. “One lonely person, tending the flame above.”

“I don’t think that was her, though.”

“I don’t see any bones,” he said. “Not even a chest or a box or a cupboard.”

“She said there was a door upstairs,” I offered.

“Only one way to go, love,” he said, pointing his chin at the stairs. “You’re not scared of heights, are you?”

“Why?”

“Because I think most of the glass has blown out, and it’s going to be windy up there.”

I stepped gingerly back onto the staircase and clung to the inside rail on my way up. The tight curve opened onto a narrow walkway with a waist-high wooden railing. He was right. It was a long, long way down, and most of the glass was gone. The jagged remains of the windows that had once sheltered the flame invited the wind to whip us with an impersonal, random violence. Thunder boomed, making the lighthouse shake and quiver beneath us.

There was a small, cylindrical room in the very center of the roof, about five steps away. A metal ring that reminded me of a giant cigarette lighter sat on top of the room. She had to be there, in the metal closet under the flame. It was
the only place we’d seen where bones might be found, and a sinister place it was for a young girl’s eternal rest.

I edged away toward the door. I felt blind and tiny, with nothing to hold on to, and the wind played with me like a cat toying with a mouse. I tried the handle, and it was unlocked. I glanced behind me to make sure Criminy was close. He raised his eyebrows at me but said nothing. When I opened the door to look inside the small room, his hand was on my shoulder.

The room had riveted metal walls, and it was about six feet square. The warm air hit us like a puff of breath, carrying the stale scent of death. The evening light from the open doorway showed a grisly scene.

Rusty bloodstains remained where fingers had once clawed helplessly at the walls. A figure huddled in the corner, mostly preserved by the dry, salty air sealed within. A mummy. The bobbed black hair was intact, and the skull was covered with taut black skin. Her dress was so thin now as to be transparent, white with a high, lacy collar.

“The poor girl,” I whispered.

Before Criminy could speak, the door slammed shut behind us.

And we were trapped in the blackness with a ghost.

22

“That little bitch!”
Criminy shouted.

I found his hand. “She’s here, you know,” I whispered.

In response, eerie, girlish laughter echoed off the metal walls. “Three ghosts in a lighthouse,” she whispered, and the voice was different from the calm, pleading sweetness I’d heard underwater. Up here, the voice was filled with madness.

She giggled, and Criminy growled, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend eternity with a little strumpet like you.” He pounded on the door. It didn’t budge. It was airtight, of course.

“You’ll never get out,” she sang. “I couldn’t. And you won’t.”

There was a pause, and I could hear myself and Criminy breathing.

And then came the gruesome scratching of fingernails on a chalkboard.

Or bones on metal walls.

“What happened to you?” I asked, my voice flat, guarded.

“He was a Bludman, and I was a maid,” she whispered. “We fell in love. But I was betrothed to my brother’s best friend. My love and I were going to stow away on a ship, go
to Almanica and start over fresh, where people wouldn’t hate us for loving each other. But my brother found our letters. He knew where we were meeting. When I came here, he and my betrothed found me, locked me in to die alone. Told me I deserved it for loving a filthy Bludman. Called me an abomination.”

She tittered in my ear. “Just like you.”

“What happened to the Bludman?” I asked softly.

“I never found out,” the voice echoed. “I died here. And I’ve been lonely.”

I felt Criminy’s hand on my arm, and it traveled down to my wrist. I could sense his urgency, so I coughed, trying to cover up the furtive noises as he pressed Uro’s head and the little snake whirred with gears. I waited to see red lights, but Criminy must have planned ahead and shielded the ruby eyes.

“Your Bludman—what was his name?” I asked, my voice loud in the tiny room.

“His name was Scarab Crumbly,” the voice said, dreamy. “We met in the market. His hair was golden and wavy, like a lion. He had eyes as deep as the sea. And he loved me.”

“I knew Rab Crumbly,” Criminy broke in, his voice booming in the tiny room. Under his words, I heard metal on metal, scraping. “He was drained twenty years ago by the Coppers. They put his head on a pike for killing a girl named Evangel. Was that you, by chance?”

A strangled cry reverberated off the walls. “Drained! Oh, Rab, my love! You were always true!”

A nightmare apparition appeared inches from my face, the ghost girl with the bob, her mouth now a gaping hole into hell. Her strangled moan turned into a shriek, and that made me scream, and our voices merged and echoed
in the blackness. I imagined the metal warping, pressing out, ready to explode. My eardrums ached with pressure, and pain shot through my head in bursts of red.

But through her, illuminated by her, I saw Criminy’s back, and he was doing something to the door, and so I shrieked louder. Which wasn’t hard, because I was terrified. I hadn’t feared the quiet ghost under the waves, but this thing was nasty.

As the ghost expanded, her hands became claws, and her eyes sank back into empty black pools. I was forced backward until I felt bones scraping against the heels of my boots, clutching at my ankles. I was still screaming, couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried. She loomed over me, mouth open, and something in the back of my brain idly wondered if there was such a thing as a soul, and where hers was, and where mine would go when the ghostly lips sucked it out through my eyeballs.

And then the door flew open, and the ghostly screaming suddenly stopped, leaving only silence and the tang of salty wind behind. I blinked, and there was Criminy, grinning, holding out his glove.

“I think you kept your promise, love,” he said, handing Uro back to me. “Thank goodness for clockworks and their lockpicks, eh? Let’s leave this place.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Hold the door open.”

I looked behind me, where the sunset let in just enough light to see the sad, moldering skeleton of a mad girl with a broken heart. I reached out to smooth the black hair, and the jolt came, soft as leaves dancing on a summer night’s breeze.

“My G-god,” I managed to stutter.

“What do you see, love?”

“Everything she said was true. But her betrothed was Jonah Goodwill himself, and Rab Crumbly was the Bludman who incited Goodwill’s crusade against your kind. And against women like me. Goodwill still wears Evangel’s engagement ring on a chain around his neck. All of this, everything he’s done. All of the horrors he committed. It’s all because of her.” I paused, studying the white dress. A wedding dress. “Because he loved her, and she chose a Bludman instead of him.”

“I didn’t think it was possible to hate him more,” Criminy said, holding out one of his many handkerchiefs, a large square of sea-green silk. “But I do.”

As tenderly as I could, I wrapped the body in the cloth and picked it up. Edging toward the railing, I threw it into the ocean.

“You’re free,” I said in benediction as I watched the bones clatter against the rocks.

23

The city was
in flames, and the docks were silent. I was still in shock. I was also half-naked and soaked through and starting to chafe with salt water. Still, there was a lot I didn’t understand. And I was in a hurry.

“If the city’s on fire, why isn’t everyone running to the docks?” I asked. “Boats are a better bet than the city gates, right?”

“Ah, but you don’t know the politics here. Brighton is a city ruled by a few rich Pinkies. Beneath them are the poor Pinkies, the servants, and the Bludmen who work in the factories. The people have been oppressed for decades. They’re not used to fighting or tactical thinking. They probably didn’t plan very well.”

“Still, even from the lighthouse, we didn’t see a single person,” I said.

“I have a theory,” he said. “But it’s not pretty.”

I stopped walking to look at him. He was troubled, more so than I had ever seen.

“The clockworks are getting quite good, you see. The mechanics are reaching a new level of genius and subtlety. Tell me, if you could use machines instead of dangerous, barely restrained workers, what would you do with the
workers? You can’t let them go—bloodthirsty, penniless, and with a grudge.”

I just stared at him, my jaw set.

He looked up at the smoke barreling from deep within the city and said more softly, “Do you smell that? Doesn’t it smell like meat?”

“Are you saying that the people in charge locked up the workers and set them on fire?” I said, incredulous.

“In the end, the winner rewrites history. Call it a bloody revolution, become the heroes who made the city safe for innocent, harmless Pinkies. And such a shame that Dark-side Brighton was lost in the workers’ riotous flames.”

“Can we help them?” I said. “Can we do anything?”

Criminy turned to me, the muscles in his face taut with fury and concern. “We
are
doing something,” he said. “The man who has your locket is the mastermind behind every atrocity against a Bludman today. He probably planned this riot. He’s the leader, and he’s just a little farther away, trapped on an island. Getting your locket back isn’t my only goal.”

There was a fierce beauty in his determination, a strength of purpose that spoke to my own will. For possibly the first time, I looked at him and didn’t see a hint of monster or charlatan or trickster—just a man, and a powerful one. In that moment, I would have followed him anywhere. But he turned toward the sea.

Our ramble along the dock took us past cutters and rowboats to a smart brass submersible, about forty feet long. It still shone with polish and didn’t have a single barnacle clinging to the hull.

“This is our girl,” Criminy said. “The newer the model, the easier to drive.”

“But what if someone’s inside?” I asked.

“Then they help us or die,” he said cheerfully, and I surprised myself by agreeing with him. Sang wasn’t a world for middle ground.

The sub was mostly underwater, leaving perhaps two feet of curved metal above the dark gray waves. She was shaped like a pill, with a propeller at the back and a shiny periscope at the front. Just visible under the waves was a glass window with banks of instruments, dark and waiting. The ship appeared empty. And the sky was getting darker.