Elena turns her furrowed brow to the street, shrugging off my touch. We travel in silence for a long while as dawn turns to morning, listening to the chairmen huff and puff. I watch the fabric of the curtains flutter against the morning light, the obscure shadows of men and women playing on the veil as they go about their lives on the other side, oblivious to the clockwork strangers who walk among them.
Abruptly, the sedan chair stops moving. With a thump we are set down.
A throng of people have gathered in the square before us. Our chairmen are shouting and shoving to no effect, having come to a dead standstill.
“What is this?” I ask, pushing my face out the window.
“Tyburn hangings, sir,” says the lead chairman. “Can’t push through until they’re over.”
I lean back inside in time to see Elena slipping between the curtains and out the door. Her small hard feet clap to the cobblestones and she disappears instantly into the crowd of spectators.
“Elena!” I shout.
I emerge, shoving people away from the sedan chair. Pushing another few coins into the sweating driver’s hand, I stride away into the crowd, heads taller than anyone else, scanning for Elena. I catch a streak of black velvet weaving between the waistcoats and gowns of gentlemen and commoners alike.
The sense of unease from before has flowered into a full panic.
On a wooden scaffold across the square, a condemned man stands in his best clothes, a rope binding his elbows to his waist, leaving his hands free to clasp in prayer. A hairy rope is wrapped around his neck in a hangman’s noose. The executioner stands to the side, waiting patiently as his prisoner makes a final speech. He holds a white nightcap to pull over the prisoner’s face just before he is turned off.
I stop, blinking.
On the brick building behind the scaffold, a fiery mark glows. And along the roofline, a series of birds sit in a row, peculiar and still. Something about their precise arrangement puts a sudden fear in my throat. Abruptly, I recall seeing a similar pattern of birds in Moscow during our midnight walks.
I sense this is the domain of another avtomat.
The birds on the roofline take flight, wings moving in irregular lurches. Something is wrong about them, something artificial. I begin to trot through the crowd, ignoring the complaints of jostled pedestrians.
I cannot hear what the prisoner is saying, over the jeering of the hundreds of spectators. He barely flinches as they spit and curse and throw rotten fruit at the scaffold. Swiveling my head, I stalk through the crowd for agonizing minutes. Finally, I spot Elena, only a few yards away. She sees me and tries to run, but I am too fast, diving forward and sweeping her up in my arms.
“My daughter,” I say, holding her tight to me as she struggles to escape. “So that’s where you’ve got to.”
Posing as a father, I move away quickly, cradling Elena’s head against my shoulder. I hiss into her ear, “I was wrong. You are not mine, but you are precious to me. Never run from me again.”
Pausing to look at Elena, I notice her eyes have gone wide with fear. Her lips are moving, mumbling, trying to make a sound. Her arms tighten around my neck.
Spinning, I see the woman who disappeared from the doorway a few minutes ago coming from across the courtyard. I know instantly that she is avtomat.
The thing is female, a lock of straight black hair hanging long over her sharp cheekbones, the rest of it gathered in a bunch on top of her head. Her face is smooth, eyes wide set and black and narrowed. She gives the vague impression of being Eastern. Dressed impeccably, she carries a parasol and wears white gloves. When she knifes a hand out to thread through the crowd, grown men are pushed to the side like rag dolls.
My mind flashes with a vision of this woman—she is riding a fantastical horse with tiger stripes across a lush jungle clearing. She is laughing, hair flowing, looking back at me and flashing her teeth, sharp and white. Then a primeval forest swallows her, wet and dark, and from deep within it, I hear a roaring…
I shake my head to clear it.
“Go, Peter,” gasps Elena. “Take me away from her.”
The jeering crowd is facing the scaffold as the sentence is about to be carried out. No one seems to notice the woman slicing through, tossing people to the ground, closing her parasol and tucking it under her elbow.
“Peter,” Elena begs.
Wrapping one arm under Elena, I put the other around her shoulders and hold her to me as I launch away through the crowd. Pushing blindly, I soon reach the edge of the courtyard where carriages are parked.
Turning, I don’t see the woman.
“Who is she?” asks Elena, face pressed against my chest.
“Avtomat,” I say.
Then the lady appears in a gap between onlookers, her eyes narrowed.
“I am Leizu, little one. The mother of silkworms, who brought silk to China in the age before ages,” she says. “Do you not recognize me anymore?”
Holding Elena tight to me, I back away slowly.
“We do not know you,” I say.
The woman advances, her parasol held tight under her arm. She twists the umbrella with her right hand and the handle loosens.
A few inches of hidden blade emerge, shining copper.
It is the divine blade—
“Your sister does not concern me,” she says. “Only you, Pyotr.”
I stop, my back pressing against the front quarter of a hackney coach.
“What do you want?”
Stepping closer, she smiles.
“I want the pain to stop,” she says, and I feel a madness radiating from her. She exudes the intensity of a trapped animal, pushed beyond exhaustion and consuming unknown reserves of energy. “You are the only one strong enough to give me satisfaction. We will break against each other like waves on the shore—”
From his perch, the coachman shouts at me to move off and plants a boot on my shoulder. I lean harder against the carriage, hearing the wheels creak. I do not flinch as the sting of a horsewhip crosses the side of my face.
Elena wriggles out of my arms and drops to the ground.
“Horses,” she says, diving between my legs and under the carriage.
Leizu steps back and sweeps her hidden sword from its sheath, dazzling light spraying from the bright copper blade. With startling speed, she locks fingers onto my forearm. Her strength is impossible, the force of a mountain in her grasp.
I have never felt anything like it—never imagined such power.
“Come with me,” she says.
Shoving backward, I dig my boot heels into muddy cobblestones, rocking the lumbering, square carriage up onto two wheels. The coachman shouts shrilly in alarm. I hear wood splintering and horses neighing frantically.
Without looking away from the woman’s rising blade, I clamp a hand blindly up onto the coachman’s calf. Hauling him off the platform, I throw his body at the dark-haired woman. Buttons fly from his uniform as the overweight man hits the ground and rolls screaming into her legs. She sidesteps to avoid him, letting go of my arm, swallowed again into the shouting crowd.
“Peter!” Elena shouts.
The girl has thrown the traces from the horses. Now, she sits on a white mare, bareback, fingers wrapped in its mane, beckoning to me.