Imperial Clock

CHAPTER Six

The Steam Fair



In all the years Derek had attended the great Steam Fair in the shadow of the Roundhouse Circus, London, the air had never felt so clogged, so thick upon his chest. The absence of even a breeze didn’t help matters, nor did the sheer number of contraptions spitting out smoke—one could, from a distance, mistake them for battlefield artillery. But it was something inside the fumes this year, an unpleasant sulphurous component that struck a match on his sinuses whenever he inhaled anything more than a shallow breath.

Mother and Father didn’t seem to notice it at all as they strode from one exhibit to the next in mute fascination, goggle straps fastened too tightly under the brims of their worst and oldest hats that hardly stood out from the other patrons’—an exceedingly rare concession for Father in particular, who ordinarily went to great pains to express his social status at these public events. He was a snob, and proud of it, saw it as his duty. The Aurics were aristocracy in everything but name. With Derek’s imminent appointment to the Leviacrum, their hopes were set on titles—overdue titles and renown for the Auric name. Woe betide anything that might impede that...or anyone.

Derek wiped the moisture off his goggles and scanned the rows of prototype machines for a sign of Sonja McEwan. The note he’d slipped her before they’d parted in Keswick was bold, perhaps too bold, and certainly improper. Any such advance would be frowned upon by both families; yet if the alternative was to not see her at all before his induction into the Leviacrum, well, that was unacceptable. She was sixteen, soon to be seventeen, and he had to know if she esteemed him as highly as he did her, before he made a complete ass of himself.

If she did, and it was truly more than a girlish infatuation for her teacher, he would have to pre-empt her ritual introduction to society. With haste. The idea of London’s young dandies sweeping her off her feet while he bided his time, waiting for a permitted and propitious moment—hell, this was the propitious moment. His heart screamed it over the grinds and whistles of these rapacious metallic saplings of new industry.

Whatever happened, he couldn’t lose her to propriety. But unfortunately, Mother and Father would never assent—her family was too notorious.

So something had to give.

He wryly tipped his top hat to the loose banner slung between two flagpoles. It read, Ambition Soars, The World Is Yours.

Well, this is the age of innovation.

She suddenly strolled into view at the head of a fresh influx of visitors—Miss Sonja McEwan, alert to the world as her lovely big hazel-grey eyes took in the wonders around her. She’d just arrived on an airship whose name he couldn’t make out through the steam cloud. Her sister was with her, as was her father—the infamous Ralph McEwan, hijacker of the discovery of Subterranea, if one believed the gossip. Derek instinctively took one step toward her, halted in the mud, then shuffled back discreetly when he realised the certain end that rash approach would bring.

He stole behind a group of automobile racers who waved their flat caps at a glamour puss sashaying across a nearby podium—she was there to promote the latest speed vehicle, and loved the attention. Derek helped himself to a newspaper that was tucked under a driver’s arm. He opened it and used it as cover while he watched the McEwans making their way behind the exhibits, toward the Roundhouse Circus.

He cringed, let the pages flop to his waist. Was this what he’d been reduced to—spying on a schoolgirl? He was unfit to hold a position in the Leviacrum, unfit to call himself a gentleman, a damned disgrace to higher apes. If a man’s heart could reduce him to this, maybe he was better off without one.

He scrunched the newspaper up and shoved it back under the driver’s arm, before heading for the Big Top.



The packed circus, a two-tiered circular behemoth several hundred feet high, formerly the derelict ruins of the aborted first attempt to construct a Leviacrum tower in London, had almost finished its first show of the day. Glimpses of high-wire acts, and daredevil flying machines sputtering coloured smoke to form words and shapes in the air inside the colossal scaffold left Derek grinning. He couldn’t help it. Some of the most amazing sights he’d seen in his life had been inside the Roundhouse arena, and with this current sprint in technological advancement, he could only imagine what effect these new engineering wonders would have on today’s youth.

Hundreds of stalls and vendors circled the outside of the arena, selling everything from candy floss to steam-powered skeet launchers and rapid-fire rifles, from hot chestnuts to a ‘Have Your Portrait Drawn By An Automaton in 30 Seconds’ service.

Families swarmed around the various novelty acts, such as an electric eel that could emit messages in Morse Code—or so its slippery owner claimed—and especially The Levitating Man, a young fellow who could rise fifty feet into the air at the end of a tether, with no discernible means of uplift. It had to be a magician’s trick, but Derek was damned if he could figure it out. Another man on a ladder swiped a sword over the rising fellow’s head, to prove the protagonist wasn’t being pulled up by any kind of line.

Sonja McEwan appeared equally puzzled by it, writing secret theories in midair with her gloved finger as she looked the act up and down several times. She then seemed to sense Derek’s presence and swivelled. Feigned surprise when he caught her eye, then blushed and coyly turned away. She tugged at her sister to move on.

Meredith warded him off with a sharp glance in his direction. A little too sharp for his liking. He thought about doffing his hat, taking this opportunity to formally introduce himself to Sonja’s family—hell, to get it over with—but a flood of patrons leaving the circus swept between them, an impossible torrent to ford as the arena held forty thousand people at full capacity and the show had only just finished. He was bustled to one side, and soon found himself forced back toward the exhibition field, fingers clamped on the brim of his hat to keep it in place.

He surrendered for the time being, cursing the species.

A quarter hour later, he caught up with his parents outside the Tarot tent. Father hated to say it, but Mother’s guaranteed long life of good fortune and future grandchildren named Ned and Ruby—sired by Derek, no less—was emphatically not worth the three guineas he’d paid for it.

“Oh, and what is a fitting price for such life-affirming news, pray?” she asked him, beaming rather too grandmotherly for Derek’s liking.

“There’s news and then there’s news, Winifred. This was neither. I’ve never heard so much tosh.”

“Pssh. Our understanding of the paranormal is growing all the time, don’t you know. Not everything is within your primitive logical grasp any more, Sebastian.”

He muttered something about “especially those three guineas”.

They walked on toward the luncheon tent, several hundred yards away at the other side of the field, stopping again and again to greet Father’s colleagues and Mother’s friends. Derek couldn’t engage beyond one-word answers and polite nods. His attentions were captive to a mysterious magnetic north, one he sensed but couldn’t quite locate in the crowds, spinning him every which way like a fidgety compass needle.

A chorus of horns sounded off to the right. Mother playfully craned her neck sideways to catch Derek’s darting glance in that direction. “Have you seen the automobiles yet?” She smiled, seemed to recognise his distraction. “Why don’t you go explore for a while. Meet us in the luncheon tent shortly.”

“Thank you, Mother. Don’t mind if I do.” He kissed her cheek.

“Start by paying her a compliment...whoever she is.”

He swallowed. How much does she...? “I don’t know what you mean.”

Mother gave a gentle, vacant nod, then returned to her friends.

After completing an entire circuit of the exhibits, taking care to dodge his old teammates from football—he was almost caught offside once or twice in the attempt—Derek slumped into a frustrated malaise near the sporting set-ups. Of a sudden, a prickly paranoia made him back up against a wire mesh fence. The perimeter of a tennis court. But not any old tennis court; the lines glistened, strips of some copper-like metal, while the line judges and the umpire were in fact jerky automaton figures croaking out phrases like, “Fault,” “First service” and “Quiet, please, ladies and gentlemen!” It was at once eerie and startling to see machines dressed in purple and green uniforms, as almost exact replicas of their human counterparts, employed to adjudicate something so trivial as a racquet sport at a fair.

He was about to admire the nearest player’s figure—a human woman serving from the ad court—when she dropped her ball and turned to catch its bounce. “Mister Auric—” Her half-whispered, half-gasped address lit him from within, “—hello.”

“Good day, McEwan.”

“I thought my sister had frightened you off.”

“No, I—”

“McEwan, what’s taking so long?” screeched her opponent. An unfortunate screech, so grating and so familiar and so...Wilhelmina Challender?

“Tarry awhile, sir? At least to the end of this game. Please?”

“Your servant, ma’am.” His cartoonish bow had been charming in theory but felt dumb in execution. Positively dumb. To his relief, Sonja curtsied in equally overdone fashion before returning to the contest. Yes, the so-called contest—South Hampshire Grammar’s tenured tennis coach versus one of her least graceful protégés; determined and powerful perhaps, but Sonja was not a young lady one would count among the nimblest of racqueteers. Derek had played mixed doubles against her once or twice in the teacher-student friendlies last year, when he’d been at the receiving end of her wicked passing shots.

Most of the other girls dinked the ball daintily over the net, relying on spin and angles to out-manoeuvre their opponents. Sonja, on the other hand, liked to test the catgut to its limit. She slammed, swiped, grunted, harangued, and generally did everything in her power to win the match.

She was nothing if not entertaining to watch.

Wilhelmina Challender sliced a serve out to Sonja’s forehand and received an up-the-line humdinger in reply. Sonja threw a wild fist in celebration, while her seasoned opponent stitched on a magnanimous smile for the crowd. Underneath she must be fuming. Less than a week had passed since the incident in the Lake District, and no decision had been made by the School Board regarding whom to punish, or whom to commend for their conduct. Like Wilhelmina’s gratuitous ball toss, it was all rather up in the air.

“Fault,” a line judge croaked as the serve missed by a few inches. Going off the copper lines and the ball’s weighty flight and bounce, Derek reckoned it was some kind of electro-magnetic sensor system, perhaps a circuit, coordinating the magnetic proximity of the ball to the lines. But how was the magnetic circuit communicating with the automatons? By radio? Darn clever, whatever it was.

Two sneaky drop-shots in a row left Sonja panting as she scrambled to the net and back in vain. Teacher outwitted student by hitting a lob right on the baseline. “Advantage, server,” intoned the stoic umpire.

“Witch,” muttered Sonja.

Wilhelmina hit a deep serve into Sonja’s body, forcing her to adjust with quick footwork, which wasn’t her specialty. Caught in two minds, she failed to get out of the way and the heavy ball bounced up, striking her chin.

“Game, set and match.”

“Cack.”

Before Derek could commiserate her, Sonja ran up to the net, said something to her opponent and then motioned to the crowd behind Wilhelmina. Her teacher shrugged and walked off the court.

Derek stood up straight, fidgeted with his gloves behind his back. “Good effort,” he reassured Sonja as she ran back to him. She tossed a handful of loose white curls from her brow. “Tennis of the future, eh?” he said.

“Would you like to play doubles with me?”

“What? Now?” For some reason the idea went down about as well as a homebound ship under a wreckers’ night-light. The last thing he’d wanted today was an audience. Him and her alone together with a stolen declaration or two, yes, enough to find out how strongly she returned his affection; and if she was unsure of her feelings quite yet, to ask her permission to call on her another time, perhaps when she turned seventeen.

But this—this would gain him nothing and had the potential to lose him everything.

“Consider it a rematch.” She pointed across the arena, to where Wilhelmina and her doubles partner—that shit-eater, Eustace Challender! no less—strutted onto court. The ass removed his bowler, jacket and tie, accepted a brand new racquet from the flustered organiser, and began limbering up with an annoying lack of irony, as though the prig really thought he was at Wimbledon.

“I’m in.” Derek wove his way through the crowd to the gate on the other side, tipped his hat to Sonja’s sister as he stepped onto the court. “Miss McEwan.”

“Mister Auric.” Muted. Still frosty.

A wave of apprehension heaved over him. No, he’d never liked the limelight. No, it would not stop him now.

Eustace remonstrated, almost stormed off when he saw Derek. But he knew and his wife knew, just as Sonja and Derek knew, why he couldn’t chicken out of this match. Pride. Pride was at stake, and the settling of a score.

“This wasn’t quite what I had in mind, McEwan, but I’m ready if you are.”

“Sonja.” She handed him his racquet. “From now on, I’m Sonja, you’re Derek, they’re going down. Okay?”

He laughed. “Okay.”

“Now I want two things from you, Derek. One, crush them to a pulp. And two, keep an eye on my father, if you’d be so kind. He’s inspecting that large portable drilling gadget over there.” She pointed to a row of tool benches some fifty yards behind her sister. “Now, we might be paranoid, but Meredith and I swore we saw someone following him, someone we know for a fact shouldn’t be here at all.”

“Who, pray?”

“We can’t be sure who he is exactly. He was caught taking photographs of Father in Norway, knocked himself unconscious when he fell out of a tree in the act. As far as we were aware, he never awakened from his coma. But he was armed. That he’s here now, watching us, can’t possibly be good news. Please keep your eyes skinned?”

“You have my word. What does he look like?”

“Five-ten-ish, slender build, about thirty-five years old, with piercing blue eyes, a dark beard and moustache, and a bowler hat.”

“Not much to go on there. That could be any one from a thousand men. Anything else to identify him?”

She bounced the ball on the hard floor a few times. It was clearly heavier than a normal tennis ball, no doubt containing a trace of some magnetic metal. “A tan overcoat. Oh, it’s probably nothing. Likely it’s not even the man we saw in Norway.”

“I’ll keep a sharp eye nonetheless. Your father is a famous man, after all.”

“Thank you, Derek. And for inviting me today. It was sweet.”

He had to look twice to be sure this was a sixteen-year-old talking to him and not an accomplished woman of the world. Yet it was becoming increasingly clear that in Sonja McEwan’s case the two were one and the same. Decisive, articulate, frightened of nothing except her father’s safety, she left Derek tongue-tied.

“You’re welcome,” was all he could manage. “Shall we?”

“Your serve, McEwan,” Wilhelmina called across. “Best of three, so we don’t hog the court for too long.” The organiser checked his timepiece several times as he wound a crank in the small of the umpire’s back.

“Who’s she calling hog? Look what she married,” Sonja whispered to Derek.

A part of him wanted to laugh along, another had to chide her for her impertinence—Mrs. Challender was still her teacher. Yet still another part of him, the wisest perhaps, knew to stay quiet, to let this surreal scenario play out so he could review the madness later. For he was in uncharted regions, where magnets drew the lines of battle under his feet. And his compass had stopped spinning.

He had found his own magnetic north. She had a heck of a first serve.



***



“Fifteen-thirty.” Two senseless double faults in a row had gifted the Challenders an early lead, and only Derek Auric’s reassuring wink as he hunched ready to attack his opponents’ next return, shirt sleeves flaring out of his tight-fitting purple waistcoat, kept Sonja from smashing her racquet into the ground in frustration. She’d lured him into this grudge match after fortuitously spotting the Challenders because it had seemed a clever way to break the ice, a less scandalous way for her and Derek to spend some time together.

Merry wasn’t for leaving her alone today, had shadowed her every move since they’d left the airship; but if there was one thing her older sister disliked more than being second best in a man’s eyes, it was the game of tennis. Yet Sonja’s only self-caveat, that she must under no circumstances let Derek lose this match, began to bite at her sense of satisfaction. What would he think of her if she let his bitter enemy waddle away triumphant?

She might never see him again.

Her next serve landed in but at a fraction of the pace of which she was capable. Mrs. Challender returned with a cross-court backhand beyond Derek’s lunge—it hit the tramline and skidded away off court. At full speed and reach, Sonja barely clawed it back over the net. Immediately Mr. Challender smacked the helpless ball straight at Derek, who was standing inches from the net, shielding his face with his racquet. The ball rebounded off Derek’s strings with such force it bounced once, and only once, in the Challenders’ court before clearing the fence behind them.

“Thirty all,” the automaton umpire announced.

“What the hell was that?” Derek raged at his opponent. “This is an exhibition game, not a cock-fight.”

“Oh? Why don’t you go cry to your little peahen then.” Mr. Challender nodded at Sonja. “She’s clearly the one wearing the trousers on that side of the net.”

“Just you and I, Eustace...after the match. You name the place.”

“No need, seeing as I’m going to pulverize you right here on court. Or can’t you handle being beaten fair and square?”

Derek thrust his racquet out to arm’s length over the net, pointed straight at Mr. Challender. “You’re on. And once we’re done here, then I decide if I’m satisfied or not.”

“Ha! Hot air from a hot-head. Your kind always goes down in flames, Auric, always will. The School Board has your number.”

“And I’ve got yours. Two tonnes of horse-shit, fertilizing the court. No wonder the ball jumped the fence. It couldn’t stand the reek.”

By this time the audience had swelled to three or four times its size, and smatterings of laughter emerged. Both men glanced around, muttered under their breaths, then sheepishly returned to their positions.

“Everything all right, Derek?” Sonja asked.

“Your serve.”

Oh God. She’d made a huge mistake setting up this match. Even if she and Derek did win, he wouldn’t want to wait around afterward, fuming like this, or say the things he wanted to say to her. Heck, she’d taken away his very reason for inviting her here in the first place. She’d turned his planned tender moments into the Trojan War—not the most historically successful way to win a woman.

“Fault.”

Bugger.

Mr. Challender returned her second serve with interest, so she lobbed the ball to his wife, knowing the overhead smash was her weakest stroke. Not this time! Mrs. Challender went cross-court with relish, and Sonja had to scoop an improvised half-volley from the hem of her skirt as she rushed forward. Mr. Challender caught it on the volley, again lashing a shot straight at Derek. But Derek anticipated and, with the deftest defensive block she’d ever seen, took all the pace off the ball, dropping it just over the net. The Challenders had no chance of reaching it.

It won huge applause from the crowd.

Sonja jammed her next serve into Mr. Challender’s body, giving him no wiggle room whatsoever. He fumbled the return.

“Game.”

“Yes!” Relief spilled out as she jumped up and down and danced an un-ladylike jig along the copper baseline. The crowd laughed hard but she didn’t care. Derek kissed her hand. She patted his perfect bottom with her racquet. Cheers erupted from the audience, combined with a smell of combusted magnesium from a nearby exhibit, igniting the on-court atmosphere to a fever. Tears welled in her eyes.

The next game proved a struggle. Mr. Challender constantly—and with a distinct lack of chivalry, according to Derek—hammered away at Sonja’s backhand, her weaker side. It yielded no less than five points for the Challenders, who had clearly colluded to exploit that frailty. But she’d always been a quick study. Their tactic was unvarying and relentless, and therefore easy to anticipate. She ran around Mrs. Challender’s softer slices and let fly with several thunderous forehands, squaring the game to deuce over and over again. Derek weighed in at the net once or twice at full stretch, almost tossing himself to ground in the attempt. He was extremely athletic, if a little erratic in his shot placement.

At their opponent’s advantage—their umpteenth of the game—Sonja and Derek combined to devastating effect. First she slugged a forehand return up the line, which left Wilhelmina groaning as she slid low to recover it...barely. Then Derek hacked at the slack ball as though he were swatting a dangerous and elusive wasp. It landed under Eustace’s stepping foot—the timing could not have been reproduced—and the oaf went over sideways. His palm slapped the floor and his racquet clattered away across court.

Gasps from the crowd, and the odd muted titter, dampened Sonja’s enjoyment of the moment. It had to have hurt, damn it. He trembled in agony, the creature, inching his arm and knee together so the one could nurse the other or vice versa. Derek vaulted the net without pause and actually reached Eustace before his wife did. The organiser and a few other gentlemen ran onto the court to help.

Sonja, on the other hand, stood her ground. After all she was only sixteen and knew nothing about treating injuries or broken bones, and stares from the crowd were boring into her back now and she couldn’t care less and anyway she was only sixteen.

She looked across to where Merry...had been.

Sleeves rolled up, Father was still busy tinkering with his lunk of a drill. A rack full of spanners and screwdrivers on his workbench was already half-emptied. A ginger-bearded fellow in grimy overalls yanked at his own hair when Father took an unceremonious hammer to the whirling conical contraption.

But where was Merry? In the combined din caused by a shrieking train whistle and Father’s drill clap-clapping as it struggled to maintain an even spin, an array of well-dressed men closed in behind him. Nothing about them gave anything away individually. One munched on candy floss. Another fiddled with his leather gloves. Another blew his nose on a handkerchief. But their combined idiosyncrasies, the direction of their gazes, and the rather obvious converging formation stood out a mile. To someone not already vigilant it would not have registered. Sonja, however, saw right through it.

“Father!” A chorus of hearty steam whistles now sounded across the field, drowning her shout. She dashed off the court, screamed behind her, “Derek, it’s Father! Help him!” Amused faces dropped with concern as she barged through, teeth bared, her heart all a-riot.

No sooner had she breached the crowd when the men attacked Father. The huge iron drill head planted itself into the ground and wreaked unpiloted carnage on the surrounding area. It dragged its steam engine around by the ruptured, spitting pipe. Thwhump-whump-whump went the drill as it burrowed, tossing up chunks of soil by the barrow load. Tools clattered everywhere.

Meanwhile, Father backed away as the five attackers tried to encircle him. One lay motionless under the dirt flung up by the drill, next to the lifeless ginger-haired mechanic. The others might have rushed in to finish Father but he brandished his hammer convincingly—and now a crowbar in his other hand as well.

Yet they each boasted sandsayers—knuckledusters tipped with poisonous injectors, named after the Sandman, instant bringers of sleep—similar to those she and Merry had used on the Sorensens but far more lethal. Assassins’ weapons, designed for stealth, for brushing against one’s prey. A single strike could stop a man’s heart in a matter of seconds. Father must have spotted them in time. They now stalked him around the workbench, waiting for their chance to—

One of them lunged, received a hammer blow to the wrist. Another slipped in the mud as he tried to make room to strike. Step by step, Father gave ground to the vultures. Soon he would be surrounded and at their mercy. Incensed, Sonja snatched a large feathery hat from an elderly woman’s head, folded it to double the thickness, and ran up behind the attackers, making as little sound as she could.

Thwack!

She clocked one with her racquet, right on the ear. He wheeled to one side and immediately swiped at her with his sandsayer, but she caught the injector in her hat feathers. Feigning to one side, he ducked her best forehand and shuffled to get in close. All it would take was one prick on her skin. Luckily she had more than two limbs. Clamping his weapon between the folds of her hat, she served him an ace with her foot, right in his pair of deuces.

“Foot fault,” she hissed—dumb, but it was the first thing that sprung to mind. Then she unleashed an overhead smash to die for. This was no time for catgut. Her wooden frame hit his skull with unreturnable venom, and the man slumped into the dirt, out cold.

The chorus of steam whistles had ceased, while the unmanned drill was now well on its way to Subterranea. For a moment she wondered why no one else was helping her. Then she glimpsed Father kicking up from the ground, on his back, fending off the remaining attackers with his boots. “Father! For God’s sake, somebody help him.”

She screamed and slammed her racquet frame into a man’s face. He snatched it from her hand, so she feathered him instead, and included a desperate southpaw punch behind it. Annoyed, he grabbed her by the throat, ready to administer the toxin at his leisure. His grip hurt like hell. Kick and thrash as she might, he had her to do with as he wished. He was, after all, twice her size and deranged.

From out of nowhere the steam engine half of the drill came crashing down on his skull, its scalding liquid drenching him. His scream outpitched the chorus of steam whistles from a moment ago. Sonja went to shield her eyes from the hot spray. It didn’t touch her. Derek barged the man aside and dove into the other attackers like one of Haggard’s fictional ruffians.

“Get clear, Sonja. Get yourself—” He dodged a sandsayer aimed for his midriff and leapt onto its wielder, immediately incapacitating him with a powerful choke-hold. But it also left Derek vulnerable to attack from behind.

“Quick! Watch your stern.” Her dumb penchant for nautical terminology was a useful ally for the first time in her life. Derek let go his hold and threw the man into his onrushing colleague. Leaving three against three—and one of them a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl with a feathery hat for a weapon.

By this time Father had fought his way back to his feet. He circled slowly to Sonja, out of breath. “Who are you bastards? What have I done—why do you want to kill me? And in front of my daughter.”

No response. The assailants were all between twenty-five and forty-five, had been impeccably well-dressed before the fight, but otherwise bore no resemblance to each other. One had a dusky, Mediterranean look, another appeared bookish, with spectacles and a grey goatee, while the third survivor had thick curly hair and massive broad shoulders like a thrower in the Highland Games. Then it dawned on her—the other thing they had in common—identical cravats, black and silver, with the tower emblem embroidered on the knot.

They were Leviacrum agents?

“The police are on their way,” Derek said, accepting the crowbar from Father and facing the others, “so you have two choices: the fight of your lives, which you won’t survive now that I’m protecting the woman I love; or you can wise up and flee, and live a little longer. It’s your choice.”

Sonja gripped his upper arm, hoping the gesture might help bolster his ultimatum. If his crowbar wasn’t in that fist, she’d have held his hand for the whole world to see. But mostly for herself, and for Derek Auric, the man she’d chosen, the only man for her.

No move proved a good move on the part of the assassins, and the standoff continued for the best part of a minute, a massing horde of witnesses, probably over a thousand strong, encircling them at a distance. The assailants shared a three-way glance. Time had run out; their game was up.

So why in the next moment were they rushing Father with suicidal abandon, sandsayers cocked at their sides, dying to strike? Sonja’s heart froze. This didn’t make a jot of sense, not one, not with all London watching. Or maybe it was because all London was watching? Their superiors would know if they failed their mission and their lives would be forfeit? Derek leapt in front of her, and Father in front of Derek.

“No!”

She went to break free of Derek’s hold, to do all she could to protect Father where no one else in London seemed capable of lifting a finger to help, when...

A taut length of rope brushed the tops of their heads and lowered just ahead of Father, then shot forward. Either side, a man was running with an end of the rope. They managed to clothesline the onrushing attackers, wrap the rope around them and yank them off their feet. Keeping out of range of the sandsayers, these two brave interlopers dragged the assassins through the grass as far as they could, then one of them whipped steam-pistols from his waistcoat to complete the victory.

But still the assailants would not relent. They threw themselves at the pistoleer, who now had no choice. Hiss-crack! Hiss-crack! Hiss-crack! A bullet apiece finished the agents. Tiny columns of steam rose from the gun chambers. Father checked to see if the assassins were dead, while Derek, shivering despite his stoic heroics, held Sonja close to him.

From those crouched over the bodies, she counted the faces she knew: Father, bloodied and caked with mud, but miraculously untouched by the poison; a greying, middle-aged black man whom she’d seen at one or two of Father’s lectures—he carried the pistols; Merry, out of breath, perhaps after fetching these men to help her; and young William Elgin, Sorensen’s ward from Niflheim, who seemed to have developed a habit for helping Merry when she needed it. Sonja, too. And was it just her or had William grown taller and broader since they’d last seen him?

“Are you hurt, Sonja? Did they—”

“Just hold me.” She squeezed her arms around Derek, pressed her cheek to his breast. A section of canopy had peeled loose from the Roundhouse Circus, and the afternoon’s first golden sunrays penetrated the gap. The steam cloud overhead dissipated further, flooding the entire structure with brilliant light. Cheers went up from inside the great arena, from patrons awaiting the next performance. The goodwill seemed to spread to spectators around the field, who began clapping and yelling “Huzzah! Huzzah!” for the victors of the brave fight they’d just witnessed.

“This isn’t quite what we had in mind, is it, sir?” Sonja gazed up into his livid brown eyes, searching for the sweet and nervous biology teacher she’d had a crush on all those months. Who was this she’d found in his place?

“No, Sonja, not altogether, no.”

“So where do we go from here?”

He didn’t respond. She couldn’t blame him. Not with the whole of London closing in around them, camera flashes dazzling from every direction.