Page 179 of The Mask Falling

I would heed that lesson. I had hidden for too long. Queens could be steel, too.

I walked on.

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On Rue Montmartre, blue streetlamps glowed through gently falling snow. Four of us had gathered for the hunt. Le Vieux Orphelin walked at my side, Ankou on the other, Léandre just ahead.

I still didn’t have the ledger. If it was gone, so, for now, was our proof.

There were manholes here and there, each a potential door. When Ankou touched my elbow and pointed, I followed his line of sight. The façade of the nearest building was more elaborate than those around it, decorated with personifications of Scion values. One of them—Diligence—stretched out a stone arm. From its wrist hung a swatch of threadbare red cloth.

A hand surrounded by crimson silk. A soothsayer had seen a vision of this in London, when I had asked her a question about the Rag and Bone Man. The silk fluttered now, like a flag, a welcome. The hand on that pale arm pointed straight to our right.

We entered the street next to the building. Boarded-up windows and a stained mattress. No one to be seen. You could disappear without a trace into a street like this. When we reached the manhole, I crouched beside it and took out the tool Ivy had given me. Ankou helped me hoist it up.

When the way was open, the four of us stood around it. I clipped the wings that flapped in my stomach. After the carrières—after the flood—this should be nothing.

A ladder took us under Rue Montmartre and onto a bridge. Water rushed beneath it, flushed through by the storm drains, and my breathing deepened.

Blue light leaked in through a vent above us. It only took a moment to spot the ribbon: red silk again, tied around the handle of an otherwise inconspicuous hatch. Léandre crouched and lifted it, revealing a spine of rungs, brittle with rust, that led down into absolute darkness.

Nick had told me once that grief came in waves. The hot denial had come and gone. This next one must be a cold wave, come to numb me. My limbs felt wrapped in layers of lead.

I climbed in first. Into the bones of the old sewer, long since buried by the new. One of the rungs snapped under my boot near the bottom, and I plunged knee-deep into reeking water.

My throat clenched. I took off my mask so I could breathe. With a small cough, I groped in my oilskin for my flashlight and illuminated a large chamber, partly flooded. Seeing a ledge, I waded out of the sump and hoisted myself onto it.

Next, my light revealed a smaller tunnel. There had to be a dry area, somewhere the Rag and Bone Man could keep his captives until they could be transported.

A stench congealed in my throat. Something visceral, rotten. I pressed my sleeve to my nose.

“I can feel a dreamscape.” My voice belonged to someone else, someone hollow. “Very faint.”

And familiar. I just couldn’t think where I had felt it before. Ankou showed me his scanner, which confirmed that there was a single, unmoving person nearby.

We stole into the second tunnel. The Rag and Bone Man seemed to like the spaces between the ribs of citadels—the forsaken corners where dust gathered, almost lost to the world above. He must relish the fact that he alone still used them. Here and there, smeared over the crust of filth on the walls, I glimpsed a reddish spray that could only be blood.

My fear calcified into a sense of purpose. For months, I had craved this confrontation, and now, at last, I was close. I walked out of the tunnel and switched on my flashlight.

And there he was. On the floor, a dark lake was congealing around him.

There was his travel-stained greatcoat. There was the sinister helmet that magnified his labored breaths. Gauntlets covered his hands, which were holding in slick pink snakes of intestine.

Le Vieux Orphelin waded to a stop beside me. “We are too late to deliver justice,” he said.

“No,” I said. “He’s alive.”

I knelt beside the Rag and Bone Man, the specter who had haunted me since my escape from the colony. He reeked of shit and gore. With gloved hands, I unfastened the bolts that closed the helmet and lifted it from his head. And I shone my flashlight on his face—a face I knew.

Thin gray hair, slimy with sweat. A crooked mouth, meant for smiles, peeled back over bloodstained teeth. Purses of puffy skin under his eyes, which were glazed in the agony of a slow death.

Le Vieux Orphelin crouched on the other side of him. “Do you know this man, Underqueen?”

“His name is Alfred.” I set down the helmet. “An old friend of the Grand Overseer.”

Alfred from the Spiritus Club, who had helped me publish a pamphlet to warn voyants about the threat of the Rephaim. Jolly, apple-cheeked Alfred, who used books to touch the æther, who kept a tin of cookies in his office and thought reading was a miracle.

He was among the last people in the world I had expected to see behind that mask.

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