“Bentley! Filmore! Stop right there.”
My spine turned to ice. I knew that voice, even without looking at its owner. Dr. Hastings—the professor who had attacked me last year and caused me to flee London. I fought the urge to panic and forced my hand to move rhythmically over the tiles, pretending to clean the mortar with a useless soft-bristled brush. As his footsteps neared, I cringed.
“Yes, Doctor?” one of the boys said, considerably more polite now.
Dr. Hastings came to stand beside me. I glimpsed his silver-tipped shoes before quickly looking away.
Focus on the tiles. Focus on the tiles. Focus on the—
“Don’t think I don’t know about those pranks you’ve been pulling. It’s one thing for boys to have a bit of fun, but quite another to chase me down Wiltshire at night. I nearly broke a shoelace.”
“It wasn’t us, Doctor, I swear!” one of them sniveled.
I didn’t worry about being recognized by most professors here—they never bothered to glance at the cleaning crew. But Dr. Hastings had always been different. I think he liked to think of us on our hands and knees, cleaning up the messes he made. If he found me here now, he could do anything to me and not a soul would ever know.
I swallowed, wondering if I could crawl backward and scoot away. But to my relief, the two students had his entire attention. He stepped around me and started after them down the hall, chastising them about schoolboy pranks. The moment they were around the corner I leaped up, shoved the brush in my apron pocket, and snuck into the autopsy room.
I waited ten seconds, twenty, a minute, and heard no more voices. A shiver ran down my back as I found a switch on the wall. The artificial electric light snapped to life, bathing the room in a garish glow so much starker than the hurricane lamps my father used in his laboratory.
Eight tables lined the walls, four of which were occupied with cadavers. Each body was covered with a heavy cloth, but I could make out the shapes of the bodies beneath. One was large, over six and a half feet tall—that had to be Daniel Penderwick, the solicitor. In my memory he’d been tall as the devil himself, with just as black a heart. I lifted the cloth and looked at his pale, dead body. His naked chest was gutted open with slash marks now drained of blood. The wounds pulled me to them. They whispered truths—memories—I wasn’t certain I wanted to ever recall.
I approached the next body cautiously, uncertain who I’d find beneath the heavy cloth. Annie’s body would be here, as well as the thief girl’s. But what of the other unidentified one? Would it be familiar to me, like the others? Could I still call it all a coincidence if it was?
I pulled back the next cloth with stilled breath and looked upon the body of the thief. Red hair matted in blood, body bruised from a man’s heavy boot that must have trampled her. At the time I had thought her my age, but she looked far younger in death. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. A missing finger was nothing compared to the missing heart torn from her chest. More blood drained away from my face.
I stumbled to the next table, leaning over the cloth. I could tell from the shape it was another young woman. Annie—or what if it wasn’t? What if it was Lucy’s cold body, or our maid Mary, or someone else dear to me who never deserved this?
Dread scratched its tiny claws at me but the urge to know was stronger, and I dragged back the cloth. Annie Benton, though I was hardly relieved. She hadn’t deserved this. Her light brown hair and fair skin looked so much paler in death. I checked her fingers, but there was no sign of Mother’s ring. Years ago she’d slept in the bed next to mine, and we’d eaten porridge together at breakfast, and each evening we all scrubbed our single change of clothes in the boardinghouse’s laundry room. She’d shared her soap with me once.
It was hard to concentrate on anything besides the gaping tears in her chest, almost perfectly slicing her in the middle. The cuts were jagged, furious, nearly beautiful in their destruction, like all the others’. Whoever had made them had done so with a passion for destruction. Perhaps I should have looked away, but I didn’t.
I turned my head to the last body. The unnamed victim. My instincts urged me not to look, yet somehow my feet took me there, winding around the bare cadavers, their lifeless eyes watching me. I drew the cloth back and jerked away. My heart stampeded in my chest. I collided into the table behind me, brushing against Daniel Penderwick’s cold, dead hand.