“Nothing,” I say. “Never mind. Let’s go.”
I pocket the cedalion and Peter returns to his normal, stern figure—tall and imperious with sharp features and dark eyes. He leans on me, dragging his injured leg as we move through the shadow of this mammoth skyscraper.
Instead of crossing the street to the building lobby, Peter leads me down the sidewalk to the wide mouth of an express lane tunnel. We circle around a concrete pillar to reach a rusted steel door embedded in blank concrete, a silver keypad beside it. Peter pushes a long series of numbers, ignoring the rush of traffic a few feet away. A lock thunks and he pulls the handle. As the door swings open, its metal face winks against the dawn like a bloody razor.
24
LONDON, 1750
“Never again,” I said to my sister, returning to our empty flat on the day of our disastrous outing in Tyburn. “We must be more careful from now on.”
I remember Elena looked at me darkly then, an argument waiting on her lips. But seeing the concern on my face, she chose to bite down on the words.
She chose to wait, for that night, at least.
Resisting the urge to flee, we quietly set about living a hidden life, cloistered in several apartments spread across different districts. I reduce my debt-collecting duties and restrict travel to the outskirts of town, always on the watch for avtomat markings. Offered a stake in a fledgling bank, we gamble the majority of our resources and invest.
The great paradox of London is the startling ease with which we are able to disappear among hundreds of thousands of people. We discover a faceless solitude among strangers that is only possible in such a vast metropolis. Immortal among the humans, immune to their passions and vices, Elena and I immerse ourselves in the gray anonymity of routine.
Years pass, and our investments recoup a small but thriving fortune.
Over time, I begin to convince myself the attack by Leizu was a fluke, simple bad luck. The sheer accumulation of habits, resources, and familiarity keeps us rooted to the pathways of London. Paris beckons, and even Saint Petersburg, but I do not dare push beyond our accustomed boundaries.
And all the while, a dull pain is gnawing deep in my breast—the ache of not meeting my Word. Watching over the girl like a jailer, limiting my movement and exposure, I sense that I am failing to serve pravda. My tsar is gone. The sense of loss grows slowly, an agony that laces its way through my body and mind like a disease.
This land has its own sovereign, and I find myself paying attention to King George II’s occasional proclamations. In the newspapers, they call him the “absent king” and accuse him of warmongering.
Elena continues her studies from behind closed doors, as she did for decades in the depths of the Kremlin. Through ferocious correspondence, she spreads her intellect into the world, securing and building our fortune while she is at it. The volume of letters passing to and from our properties is astonishing. No fewer than three servants busy themselves with dropping off or receiving bundles of letters at various coffee shops, depending on the pen name attached.
Even so, the girl herself is trapped, wilting in our apartments.
Out of the sheer necessity of keeping Elena sane, we take to occasionally risking a late night symphony or opera. Always in the latest fashion, Elena dons a kaleidoscopic medley of dresses and stockings and buckled shoes. Her hair is lustrous, always perfectly coiffed; her shining face as bright and alive as an immortal child’s. Perfumed and slight, her little arms are often clasped around my neck with an inhuman strength, the girl perched and alert in the crow’s nest of my embrace.
We sweep through the crowds—a vision of familial perfection under the forgiving flicker of dim lamps—unapproachable and anonymous.
Elena keeps a nanny to tend to the endless parade of tutors she researches and invites to visit, shipping them in from around Europe and the Far East. In our parlor, I am as likely to meet a composer as an inventor or painter—all of them desperate for a wealthy patron.
The girl takes to playing instruments, the harp, harpsichord, and lute. A small savant, a prodigy, she is taught in succession by waves of the best musicians produced by humanity. These men and women come to our dimly lit parlor to perform and instruct an odd little girl with incredible instincts and ferocious determination.
I shake hands at the door and excuse myself to roam the dark streets.
Walking along the Thames as the lamplighters set about their work, watching thieves and criminals ply their trade, my heart is crying out for justice. But my career has evolved beyond the knuckle-scraping collection of fugitive debtors. Over the last three decades, our investments have grown a thousandfold. My operations are watched over by stern-faced, mustached men—the grown-up children of my first partners.
Five years is the amount of time before Elena’s perpetual youth sparks suspicion. Every half decade, the precocious child must shed her life like a snake sheds its skin. We move, leaving behind nannies and tutors and friends. We learn to change our faces and our accents. We buy and sell apartments, moving in unpredictable orbits but always pushing toward the outskirts of the ever-expanding town—farther from the avtomat signs, continuing to elude the horribly powerful creature called Leizu.
The years seem to accelerate.
Certain rhythms settle into focus with the passing of time. The faces around me careen through adolescence and youth before collapsing into wrinkles and then finally disappearing. Each of these people imagines she is the same person day to day, but I can see how their lives rise and fall in cycles, moving through the same patterns as their ancestors, bricks in a city that is constantly being rebuilt.
My only solace is in seeing Elena at her writing desk, fingers clasped around a fountain pen, dipping and scrawling her messages to great minds all over the world. It always reminds me of my first sight, the gentle contour of her porcelain cheek.
More and more, glancing at her pages, I see sketches of the avtomat signs. Our late-night outings cease as she withdraws into obsession. Weeks pass when I don’t see her, our parlor thick with the pipe smoke of elderly scholars. Elena is a feral shadow in her library, lost behind desks heaped with inscrutable books written in elder languages.
She is trying so hard to understand. I am trying so hard to ignore my call to pravda. We are both trying, and failing.