Iron Cast(90)

“Guess I’m pretty good at being you,” Madeline said to Corinne, her voice weak and slurred. She started to cough. More blood.

“It’s my fault,” Corinne said. She wasn’t crying. It wasn’t a lamentation or a plea for forgiveness. Just a statement of fact. There were a dozen different ways of sneaking into the asylum. Using Madeline and James as a distraction was the one she had chosen, and now Madeline was going to die.

Madeline shook her head, still coughing. “God, Cor, it’s not all about you,” she said. She made a wheezing sound like a laugh, then winced. “It hurts—really bad.”

Corinne looked at Ada, who nodded and began to hum. After a few seconds, Charlie joined in beside her. The song settled over them slowly, gently.

The pain in Madeline’s expression began to fade. “James,” she said. She had started to cry. “James, you’ll be all right. Say you’ll be all right.” She gripped at the front of his shirt.

“Maddy,” he said, taking her hand. “Maddy, hold on.”

“Thank you for the Mythic,” she said.

“You did that. It was all you, Maddy.”

She smiled through her tears. “You are the best thing that ever happened to me,” she told him. “And I’m not just saying that because I’m—I’m—”

She squeezed her eyes shut.

“Corinne,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “Cor, I always wanted to see Paris again. Just one last time.”

Corinne gripped her hand more tightly and swallowed at the lump in her throat. She leaned forward to put her lips near Madeline’s ear. She didn’t have her grandfather’s watch, but it didn’t matter somehow with Madeline’s limp hand pressed so tightly in her own. Her focus had never been so absolute. She whispered:

“Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne . . .”

It was a French poem about trudging alone through forests and mountains, about a bouquet of holly and heather and a grave to lay it on.

As she quoted, Madeline’s eyes glazed over with the sights of Paris. By the time Corinne finished the last stanza, Madeline was gone. James buried his face in Saint’s chest, his shoulders shaking. Corinne found her feet and walked closer to the water’s edge. The sun had almost broken free from the horizon, and the water reflected its light in blinding white.

For a long time she stared at the rippling waves, cresting toward the light, then falling back into the blue-black of the harbor. Eventually, Ada joined her.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Ada said.

Her voice was thick, and when Corinne glanced at her, she could see that Ada had been crying.

“I dragged them out of their beds,” Corinne said. “I told them this was the only way, that if we did nothing, we’d all be human science experiments. I didn’t give them any choice but to help me.”

“You weren’t lying,” Ada said.

“I guess not,” Corinne said. “Probably the first time in my whole damn life that I told the honest-to-God truth, and now Madeline’s dead.”

They stood without talking for several minutes, just letting the daylight wash over them. The day was going to be warm for this time of year. Corinne had the distant, irrelevant thought that her brother was getting married today.

“Where’s Gabriel?” Ada asked.

The way she asked it was like she already knew the answer. Corinne bit her lip. She didn’t want to think about her hand in his, or the lipstick on his cheek at the Lenox, or his mother calling him myshka.

She made herself think about the room in the basement of Haversham, the glossy tile floors so white beneath so much death. She thought about the woman screaming, the scratching of Dr. Knox’s pencil, and the look in Ada’s eyes as she sang Corinne into submission.

If Gabriel had told the HPA about the secret passage at Down Street, then he was the reason that Ada and Corinne had been caught in the first place. He was the reason that Madeline was dead.

“He’s been helping the HPA this whole time,” Corinne said. “He was just going to let them take me and Saint back to the asylum.”

She felt like there was more to say. There was so much more inside her, pushing to be free. She closed her eyes.

“Cor, we can’t stay here,” Ada said. “They’re going to figure out where we are. Knox or Johnny or—”

“Johnny?” Corinne’s eyes flew open, and she looked at Ada, whose lips were twisted with uncertainty.

“He was in the basement,” she said. “He—”

“That’s impossible,” Corinne said.

She backed away from Ada and stalked toward the group. There was a sudden cluster of pain behind her eyes that made her feel ill.

“Just listen to me,” Ada said, chasing after her.

“Johnny can’t be alive,” Corinne said. He would never have abandoned them to the HPA like that. He would never have let the Cast Iron go dark.

“Who else do you think stabbed Maddy?” James was climbing to his feet. He was covered in her blood.

“What did you just say?” Corinne demanded, her fingers clenching into fists.

“You heard me,” James said, shaking off Saint when he tried to put a hand on his arm. “Your precious Johnny Dervish gutted Madeline with a knife when he still thought she was you.”