That night, alone in her bedroom, Caroline Avery examined the promise she had made to Great-Aunt Mildred. The silver chain still hung around her neck and from it dangled a pendant: precious metals entwined in a tangle, each twisted loop interlocking, but falling without shape against her chest as she let it drop. It gleamed in the candlelight: brass, copper, sliver and gold rings shining brilliantly against the soft white lace of her nightgown.
Caroline didn't understand. Her aunt had said that she was to keep it safe, and made her promise to never take it off – but to what end? How could she, Caroline, keep it safe and from whom? Who, she wondered, was looking for it? And what did it do? What did it all mean?
Perhaps Great-Aunt Mildred was simply ill, as Mother had said. Still, she had been so insistent, demanding that Caroline be left alone with her before the necklace was conferred and the vow extracted, making her swear to keep the secret hidden. It certainly was a puzzle. Playing idly with metal loops, Caroline reasoned that her promise would come to nothing. And if so, it would be all the easier to keep. She slid the pendent under the neckline of her nightgown and did up the top two buttons, so that the necklace was completely out of sight.
Caroline leaned over to blow out the candle, letting the darkness overtake her little room. Of course, the streetlight outside her window still shone through the curtains and crept faintly across the floor. She stared at the encroaching parallelogram of light and the whispering movement of the curtains and contemplated the strangeness of the past few days. It seemed to her that she had been able to do little else since they'd occurred.
Alone in her bedroom, in the darkness, the gentle heaviness of the jumbled metal loops resting on her sternum was oddly reassuring. Caroline felt an easy warmth spread through her body as the pendant rose and fell with every breath – each soft swell bringing an unforeseen restfulness. As sleep stole quietly through her eyelids to dim her consciousness, Caroline was not at all troubled by the strange deathbed promise she'd given to Great-Aunt Mildred, nor the mysterious present that seemed a charge rather than a gift.
9.
8.
Kitty stared at the documents she'd thieved, assessing the paper quality and the fineness of the hand, and wishing like spit that she could decipher it. Being an unlettered, unregistered unruhe had its occasional disadvantages. Still, she found the writing to be graceful yet surprisingly devoid of ornament, and the schematics were clear enough. She traced the line o f a spring as though she could reason out the meaning of the machine through a kind of tactile osmosis. Not that Kitty could ever begin assemblage, nor comprehend what the device could possibly do once constructed, but the images appeared well drafted: clean and precise. The paper was thick and soft – and unsoiled, or had been until her thorough examination. There was great wealth written in these pages, of that she was certain. If she were able to read, this dreadful mistake might have been mitigated, a laughable misunderstanding. For Deadmen do laugh.
But as matters stood, Kitty could not avoid this foreseeably unpleasant existence. With a modicum of regret, she folded away the plans. She was still ensconced in her haunt in the upper clerestory of Kilford Station; she'd dared not descend into the crowds for the Taker must surely be hunting her. He'd have noticed his missing billfold by now, she reasoned. So she was as good as dead. With no recourse, with no sanctuary, she was trapped above the station. She'd've had to scatter moments after the discovery of her mistake if she'd any hope of seeking the shelter of the Tiere. They would not welcome this burden. Kitty considered herself well and truly severed, as one would cut off an infected limb.
Oh they would grieve – Corva perhaps the least, despite the blood between them; Corva had always been practical. – But Kitty would not consider bringing her dangers upon them. Even if she dared in desperation to seek out her sister, she would be a ghost in Corva's eyes. No, she must suffer her trespasses alone.
Only now conscious of tears threatening to dampen and stain her dress and create incongruous, light smudges on her veil of anonymity; threatening to mark her as someone to whom life had taken an interest in subjecting to its smallest indignities, Kitty stifled the sobs; for she would not allow pity and desperation to reduce her very self, in all thought and action, to her immediate, though dire, circumstances. Kitty slowly uncurled, commanding her muscles individually to relax before allowing herself to stand. She tucked the purloined wallet into her most intimate garments, not daring to leave it secreted in the metal box hidden under a particularly large rock in one of unnumbered, unremarkable rubble mounds scattered between the ceilings of Kilford. She had to find a better hiding place; but first, her stomach gently insisted, she had to eat.
Kitty carefully made her way below, invisible to the masses eddying and swirling through the station. They moved beneath her, alone and oblivious to their solitude, as one mistakes company in a crowd of unknown, unnoticed strangers. All of these people, Kitty marveled, acting merely as decoration for the individual’s hurried commute, each anonymous as the drops of rain spattering in an unsteady staccato against the leaded glass panes, so intent on their own destinations that they hadn’t spare enough mind to perceive the person next to them, and certainly not the slight, grubby girl scurrying through places they had no notion to think she’d even be. It still surprised Kitty, the things people didn’t see.
Her descent lead through doors marked “Restricted Access” and “Authorized Personnel Only”, down straight ladders affixed to walls and masked by columns, and twisting staircases hidden in the gaps between the interior and the exterior of Kilford Station’s heavy cut stone face, until she slipped in with the ‘Habitants on their ways in their worlds. As one of the many, Kitty left Kilford and lost herself in the shadow-clothed back-alleys of respectability. It was time to become someone else for a while.