The woman raised her eyebrows and flicked ash from her cigarette in a casual, masculine gesture. “Yes.”
I swallowed. “And are you some kind of, of shapeshifter, or something?”
“Goodness, what an imagination.” She reached behind her head and made a strange twisting gesture in the air, as if she were untying an invisible knot, and—
Her face sagged and fell. She caught it in her hand, except it wasn’t a wrinkled, age-spotted hand anymore, and the mouth now smiling nastily at me wasn’t a damp gash. Only the watery eyes were unchanged.
It was the red-haired man from Mr. Locke’s Society gatherings: ferrety, thin-faced, wearing a dark traveling suit now rather than gray skirts.
He swept me an insincere bow, absurd in the empty darkness of a dead world, and held the mask up in the silvered moonlight. Horsehair straggled from it in tangled ropes. “Some Indian thing—a false-face, I think they call it? Your own dear father acquired it for us ages ago from a fracture south of Lake Ontario, and we’ve found it quite useful. Ugly old women are such unremarkable creatures.” He tucked the mask into his breast pocket.
I swallowed shock, tried to make my voice sound menacing rather than stunned. “And how did you find me?”
“I’m generally agreed to be the best hunter, when things require hunting.” He sniffed dramatically, inhaling smoke, and laughed. Bad growled, the sound rolling across the plain, and Mr. Ilvane’s confident smile dimmed a little.
He reached into his breast pocket again and removed something tarnished and coppery-green. “And I had this, of course.”
I darted forward, snatched it, stepped back again. It was a sort of compass, except that there were no letters or numbers or even little tick marks indicating degrees. The arrow settled abruptly, pointing in a direction that I was fairly certain wasn’t north. I tossed it into the grass, heard it clatter against his knife.
“But why?” I waved the gun a little wildly, watched his eyes track it nervously. “I’m not doing you any harm. Why not just leave me alone? What do you want?”
He gave a coy shrug, smiling at my frustration, my fear.
I was abruptly, entirely sick of it—of secrets and lies and almost-truths, things I half knew and half suspected, patched-together stories that were never told in order from beginning to end. It seemed to be an unspoken agreement in the world that young girls without money or means were simply too insignificant to be told everything. Even my own father had waited until the very last moment to tell me his whole truth.
Enough. I felt the weight of the gun in my palm, an iron authority that meant—just for a moment—I could change the rules. I cleared my throat. “Mr. Ilvane. Please sit down.”
“Pardon me?”
“You can stand if you like, but you’re going to tell me a very long story, and I’d hate for your legs to tire.” He lowered himself to the earth, legs crossed and face sullen.
“Now.” I steadied the barrel directly over his chest. “Tell me everything, from the beginning. And if you make any sudden movements, I swear I’ll let Bad eat you.” Bad’s teeth were bared and shining blue-white; Ilvane’s throat bobbed in a swallow.
“Our Founder came through his fracture in the seventeen-somethings, in England or Scotland, I don’t recall. He possessed an uncanny ability to sway people to his cause—it didn’t take him long to rise up in the world, and to see the world for what it was: a mess. Revolutions, upheavals, chaos, and bloodshed. Waste. And at the root of it all there were the aberrations—unnatural holes letting in all sorts of mischief. He began to repair them wherever he found them.
“At first the Founder worked alone. But soon he began recruiting others: some like himself who were immigrants to this world, others who simply shared his interest in cultivating order.” I pictured Mr. Locke, young and ambitious and greedy—an ideal recruit. It must have been easy. “Together we made it our business to cleanse the world and keep it safe and prosperous.”
“And to steal things, of course,” I added.
He made a come-now sort of pout. “We found that certain objects and powers, when used sparingly by wise hands, could aid us in our mission. As do more material forms of wealth—all of us worked to gain positions of prestige and power. We pool our money and fund expeditions into every corner of the world, looking for fractures.
“By the sixties we adopted a name and a respectable function: the New England Archaeological Society.” Ilvane made a little ta-da gesture with his hands and continued with earnest urgency. “And it’s been working. Empires are growing. Profits are rising. Revolutionaries and rabble-rousers are thin on the ground. And we cannot, will not, let a spoiled little interloper like you ruin all our efforts. So tell me, girl—what objects or powers do you have?” His eyes on me were damp and bright.
I took a step backward. “It—that doesn’t matter. Now, stand up—” I wasn’t sure what I was going to do—march him back into the city and deliver him to Jane like a cat depositing something unpleasant for her owner?—but Ilvane smiled suddenly.
“You know, your father thought to thwart us. Look what happened to him.” He clucked his tongue.
I stopped moving. I may even have stopped breathing.
“You killed him, didn’t you.” All that grown-up-sounding authority had leaked out of my voice.
Mr. Ilvane’s smile grew wider and sharper, foxlike. “He’d found us a fracture in Japan, as I’m sure you’ve realized. It was generally his custom to wander around inside for a day or two and return with a few interesting trinkets for Locke, and then depart. But this time he lingered. And I grew bored of waiting, bored of wearing this hideous thing—” He tapped his breast pocket above the old-woman mask.
“One day he caught sight of me on the mountainside. He recognized me.” Ilvane shrugged, falsely apologetic. “The look on his face! I’d say he went white as a sheet, but with that complexion of his…‘You!’ he cried. ‘The Society!’ Well, really, imagine being surprised after seventeen years of being kept on a leash. Then he said some rather intemperate, tiresome things. Threatened to expose us—who would believe him, I ask you?—raved about saving his little girl, told me he’d keep this door open if it was the last thing he did… All very dramatic.”
My pulse whispered no-no-no. The gun was trembling again.
“Then he rushed back to his camp like an absolute madman. I followed.”
“And you killed him.” Now my voice was less than a whisper, a strangled breath. After all this hoping and waiting and not knowing, after all this—I pictured his body frozen and forgotten, picked over by seabirds.
Ilvane was still smiling, smiling. “He had a rifle, you know. I found it in his things, after. But he didn’t even try to reach it—he was writing when I dragged him out of his tent, writing as if his life depended on it. Fought me tooth and nail just to put his journal back in its box. Honestly, you should be thanking me for relieving you of such an unstable fellow.”
I could almost see his hand, dark and ink-twined, scratching out those last desperate words: RUN JANUARY, ARCADIA, DO NOT TRUST. Trying to warn me.
Now Ilvane’s smile prismed and blurred in my sight.