Deep shadows permeated the room in the east wing of Hartley Hall. What had once been a young woman’s bedroom was now a murky cage that stank of despair and anger. A milky white figure crouched in a ball trying to jam its body into the dark corner between a tossed bed and an overturned night table. It was hairless and its skin almost translucent. Veins and pulsing organs could be seen even in the dim gaslight. One of the figure’s arms was more machine than flesh and bristled with fierce filamentous quills from wrist to shoulder that rippled like a field of wheat. A dress that had been peach-colored was tattered and soiled.
An inhuman eye, guided by gears and wires, shifted every so often as if in fear. Its other eye, more human though utterly colorless, remained focused on what it held with long, boneless fingers. It clutched a nearly human skull, the skull of a monster, of a homunculus, half bone and half construct. The white object dripped with useless wires and in the empty cranium was an apparatus for recording and playing back sounds.
The figure’s left hand was shaped normally but bleached white. Its fingers were shoved into a gap under the jaw of the skull and manipulated a small gear inside. The jaw moved up and down in an imitation of human speech while its tinny voice grated through the stale air, repeating the same words over and over: “My sister has a gold key that our father made. It’s what you want. My sister has a gold key that our father made. It’s what you want.”
Kate knelt beside the pale shade that was barely recognizable as her sister. She slipped a metal syringe into a brass case and snapped the lid shut. After more than a month of a regime that amounted to experimenting on poor Imogen, Kate no longer had any reason to expect a reaction to the injections. She had no idea if the alchemical concoctions she devised in her lab were playing any role in undoing the terrible damage wrought on Imogen.
The horrific figure of Kate’s sister rested on top of a tangle of ripped cloth, a nest of sorts that Imogen had created by shredding all of the exquisite clothing in her closets, dresses and gowns that the young woman had once treasured. Kate listened with a pained expression to the thin recorded voice that was fully recognizable as her sister’s. She reached to take the horrible device that spoke only of betrayal. Imogen reacted wildly. Her mechanical arm grabbed Kate’s wrist and shoved her to the floor. A man darted in to assist her.
Kate picked herself up. “It’s all right, Simon. She just doesn’t want me to take the skull.” She moved slowly, careful not to make any sudden moves and to keep her emotions in check, despite the wild pounding of her heart.
Simon didn’t look convinced but deferred to Kate’s understanding of her sister’s mental state. Kate believed her sister would never hurt her intentionally. The girl was lost inside her own head, unable to speak. She had been that way since they had brought her back from Bedlam in this condition, terrified of the dark but desperate to remain hidden in the shadows.
Kate knew she could reach her sister if she could get past the guilt that plagued them both. Imogen felt she had betrayed her sister to the madman, Dr. White. In fact, she had merely been a manipulated pawn, drugged and deceived into revealing secrets to White’s homunculus spy, her traitorous words forever preserved in the skull’s recording. Imogen was the victim here.
Kate’s own culpability tore at her insides. She had labored against Imogen’s wishes to save her sister’s life after Dr. White’s horribly botched operation in that filthy chamber beneath Bedlam. White had known that Kate would never tell her secrets to save her own life, but to save Imogen’s, that was another story. The damnable thing was, Kate didn’t know the secret that Dr. White craved. The secret of the key. But White didn’t believe her, and he mutilated Imogen, transforming her into a horrible homunculus. Or at least partly transforming her since Simon and the team arrived to interrupt the procedure before White could finish it. Kate had acted instinctively and saved Imogen’s life by finishing the horrific transformation begun by the sinister White.
It was the nature of the transformation that Kate couldn’t yet fathom. Something in White’s alchemy changed Imogen’s physical state—her muscles, her blood, her very being. He had hijacked her physiology. When Kate had attempted to remove the quills on Imogen’s arm, they regenerated even though they weren’t entirely organic. It was extremely powerful magic. Kate was nowhere near that level. At least not yet. She would never accept the fact that her sister was lost.
Kate couldn’t tell if Imogen’s playing of the recording in the skull over and over was a plea to absolve her of guilt, which Kate did wholeheartedly from the first, or merely a pathetic desire for Imogen to remember how her own voice sounded. Both reasons broke Kate’s heart.
She heard Simon shift closer as she approached Imogen once more.
“Imogen, look at me,” Kate told her sister softly. Imogen’s mechanical eye darted, whirring and clicking to focus on Kate. The milky human eye remained fixed on the skull’s moving jaw as Imogen continued to turn the crank, forcing it to reiterate its foul words. Kate squeezed her hands together so hard her knuckles turned white. “I’m going to help you. By God. I’m going to help someone.”