It was her hearing coming back in a rush. Abi shook her head and winced. The blast must have deafened her eardrums. In her disorientation, she hadn’t even noticed till now.
The ironwork skeleton of the East Wing was shredded, its massive girders crushed by the despairing surge of Euterpe Parva’s Skill. Metal lay in twisted heaps, jumbled anyhow like bones uncovered by archaeologists in some long-ago murder pit.
Beneath the ruins, here and there, were bodies – or things that had once been bodies but which were now smears and gobbets. Exposed bones that had snapped like sticks. Limbs lying without context. She saw an unmistakably female hand, curled like a hairless baby animal near the larger huddle of a man’s black serving uniform.
The Equals were mostly up and walking.
Abi watched, unwillingly mesmerized, as a girl not much older than herself surveyed her injuries. She was clad in the tatters of a scarlet evening dress and was reaching along her legs as if performing a sit-up. She wouldn’t be touching her toes, though, because half of them weren’t there. One of her feet, still wearing a dainty golden stiletto, lay half a metre from where it should have been, attached only by a few stringy tendons. The girl’s other leg was slashed to the bone, plainly the work of an ornamental iron pinnacle that lay like a bloodied dagger nearby.
Tear tracks streaking her cheeks, the girl screwed up her face and began to tremble all over. She was Heir Ravenna of Kirton; Abi remembered the marshal’s voice booming, a lifetime ago.
Like a ball of wool being ravelled up, the stretched tendons tightened. Heir Ravenna trembled as the bone reconnected, and her hands fluttered protectively over the injury. Beneath them, raw flesh was knitting itself together. Finally, Ravenna’s hands dropped to brush over her skin, as if smoothing out a skirt. Abi almost missed what happened to the girl’s left leg. The skin there drew itself together like the gaping back of a too-tight dress pulled closed by a sympathetic pal, who zipped you up while you held your breath.
Who knew how long it had taken. But as Heir Ravenna’s shoulders slumped, her eyelashes tarred shut by tears and mascara, Abi thought that you’d never know anything had happened to her. She could just have had a few too many drinks and a tumble off her heels.
Abi shook her head, furious with herself for becoming distracted when every second might count.
Where was Luke?
She looked round the ruined ballroom and shivered. It was March, and now that the adrenaline had ebbed from her system the night was damp and chill. Was anyone looking after the injured slaves? Was Mum here?
Yes – there she was. Jackie Hadley was kneeling beside a crumpled figure, barking instructions at a kitchen-slave carrying a green satchel emblazoned with a white cross. The girl was fumbling inside the bag for something, which she passed across to Mum. It looked like a bandage. Mum obviously had no idea about Luke, or she would have been pulling down the rest of Kyneston looking for him.
What on earth had happened here? The last thing Abi remembered was Euterpe Parva screaming. Had Luke done something worse even than shooting Zelston? So much destruction had to have been the work of a bomb.
A crescendo of hysterical sobbing arose from somewhere to Abi’s right. It was a sound that no one could hear and ignore. She hurried across, stepping carefully over shatterfalls of broken glass.
But someone was already there. Incredibly, it was an Equal, a beautiful young woman in a sequinned dress. She looked vaguely familiar. Had Abi seen her picture in a magazine? The Equal’s hand was pressed to the forehead of a slave who lay pinioned across the chest by a heavy iron strut.
‘I can’t feel my legs,’ the man was whimpering. ‘I’m so cold. Please, I’ve got four kids.’
‘Best leave out the grisly details in your next letter to them,’ the girl said in a husky voice, giving him a reassuring smile. ‘Let’s get this off you, shall we?’
The fallen girder was as long as she was and must have been many times heavier. But the girl set her free hand to one end of the length of metal and, exertion plain on her pretty face, lifted it off him. When it was raised to arm’s length she flexed her elbow and shoved, sending it clattering harmlessly away.
‘Still . . . can’t . . .’ the man gasped.
The Equal shushed him gently and moved both hands to his chest, where wetness had spread across his black uniform shirt. She laid her fingers weightlessly upon him.
‘I know a doctor,’ she told the man, her smile softening. ‘He’s better at this than me. I’m afraid he’s busy looking for a friend of ours, but I promise I’m not too terrible. Be brave.’
The Equal girl was so gorgeous Abi wouldn’t be surprised if the man thought he’d died and gone to heaven already. He was gazing trustingly into her angelic face while she worked her Skill. Abi’s first aid plainly wasn’t needed here.
Only one person needed her right now. Where was Luke?
She searched the devastated scene once again for any clue.