Chapter 4

The first principle of the machine is Purpose. The machine designs itself to this chosen end, aligning all
functionality to a single outcome. The machine, by its nature, cannot fathom or choose its purpose. It
must be handed down, as revelation or as doctrine, from a being of higher stature. In this way could it be
considered divine.
—IV. ii
Ticking: a thousand clocks echoing into endless dark, the motion of a million gears grinding and churning,
a morass of straining forces clashing against shaped metal, a finely tuned symphony of coordinated
motion, culminating in a single tick—repetitive, deafening, implacable.
The mind of Grandfather Clock.
Aaron had imagined himself shrieking and writhing, struggling against the bonds that held him. He
imagined a line of Boiler Men at the entrance to his prison, standing ready with rifles, rods, and steam
guns to block his eventual escape. He’d imagined a door locked with steam-powered bolts, to seal in this
man who was such a danger.
It wasn’t so. He hung now in a chair, arms and legs supported by thin scraps of brass, six copper tines
penetrating his neck. He spasmed randomly. He drooled. He bled dark oil from his eyes and ears. To his
left and right, above and below, thousands more trapped souls shuffled mindlessly, their bodies jerking in
the indecipherable rhythm of the Great Machine.
He’d fought when they dragged him here, to the Chimney. He’d despaired to see the endless column of
quivering humanity vanishing upwards into the core of the Stack, and to know the fate of those there
interred. He’d soiled himself from terror, and begged for death instead.
But the baron, in his passionless monotone, had directed the Boiler Men to string him up and keep him
conscious while the tines did their work. The baron had stood and watched with immobile copper eyes
as the encroaching cacophony of Grandfather Clock’s thoughts had hammered their way into Aaron’s
mind. Aaron’s last visual memory was of that man’s featureless face: not even a smile of triumph, nor a
vicious grin to condemn Aaron as a man. Aaron was a mere faulty part in the Great Work, now
tempered and put to better use.
Aaron threw imaginary arms over an imaginary head. He ran on imaginary legs, desperately searching for
a spot to hide, but in the Chimney all was Grandfather Clock. Every turn took him between grinding
gears or into the path of uncoiling springs.
He ran this way for ages, in an agony beyond measure, swallowed, like all the others, worn down until
he was but a dead man who hadn’t properly died. The tines tore into his neck as the gears and the noise
tore into his mind, and he gave up every secret he had ever held. He gave up his friends, his plans, his
secret hideaways, his many paltry indiscretions against propriety and against God—anything to make the
pain stop. But Grandfather Clock cared nothing for pain, as long as the gears turned.
After countless long hours, something changed. The million ticks did not come together in one. For a
single instant, they cascaded like a short but powerful wave as Grandfather Clock hesitated.
Aaron came alive again. He stole the smallest and quietest of breaths, and as he did so he felt his body
do the same. What was it he felt drawing the attention of the vast being all around him?
He reached out, felt the gears and springs around him clacking in their altered pattern. The rhythm came
to him, clearer now that it was not so loud. His subconscious did its work, and impressions formed in his
imagination: thickened, greyed images of Grandfather Clock’s purposes and directives. Huge,
unfathomable, yet with character, with flavour.
Apprehension: that the Great Work may not be finished.
And then a command: to seek, to capture, to preserve.
Joseph,Aaron realised.Joseph escaped.
He laughed.
And suddenly the ticks came together again. A crashing slap of sound battered him. A hundred thousand
bells exploded into chaotic song—church bells and electric buzzers, alarm clocks and hammers striking
anvils.
Grandfather Clock had seen and heard Aaron’s thought. All the sharply ordered energies of the machine
tumbled onto Aaron’s head. He felt bones breaking in his real body.
Stop laughing!was the command.
So Aaron laughed more, even as he screamed.
Grandfather Clock crunched him down like a mechanic scraping rust off a stubborn bolt. Aaron flaked
apart and drifted away. What remained tightened securely, then began to spin at its designated frequency.
It became part of a work greater than itself, part of an infallible string of physical logic inside the perfect
machine.
It was the chin, Missy decided. The broad chest, the muscled arms, the swept-back short blond hair
were certainly no drawback, but it was the square, almost Roman chin that really caught her attention.
The man had taken position on the edge of the road, head down, back to the closest wall. He and Missy
and all the other grubbers of the Shadwell Underbelly stood squashed to the edges of the street as the
Boiler Men passed through. The cloaks, one could have fun with: a shoe in the wrong place when passing
was always good, seeing as they were too proud to sully their dignity with childish finger pointing; a little
flash of ankle at the right moment was amusing as well, for the canaries at least—eyes like hawks, them,
but feet like an elephant on a frozen lake when their blood rose up. With Boiler Men, one just kind of got
out of their way.
If she was like most people, Missy would have dropped her eyes and tipped her ash hat down and tried
to have no more presence than a pig in a butcher’s shop. She would have held her curiosity down with
fear and shuddered in her shoes until the Ironboys passed, then gone on about her business as if all was
fine and the sun was due to come out any minute. But Missy was not like most people, and neither was
the man with the chin.
He watched the Boiler Men with narrowed eyes. Missy noticed his hand had twitched towards the large
leather-wrapped object he carried on his back the instant the Ironboys had appeared. He’d restrained
himself, evidently, and had retreated to the steps of a storefront flanked by his two companions, a
brown-clad ogre and a slim urchin boy. The vantage allowed him an unobstructed view of the grim
procession, and Missy an unobstructed view of him.
Now whatisthis lovely specimen up to? she mused. He was far too fixated on the Boiler Men to notice
her, and so she was free to study him at leisure. He stood with muscles taught, legs comfortably wide as
if he expected to dodge aside at any moment. His thick moustache and mop of hair seemed to bristle like
tiger’s fur. He stood alert, tense, exuding an aura of control.
You must not judge a client by his looks, nor his manner. To you, all men are Adonis and Casanova.
Missy frowned at the thought, and wondered if it was wrong to wish that they had all been like this one.
Even though you flee me, the lusts are still on you. You were born to this work, child.
The Boiler Men moved off, though their heavy, synchronised footsteps would echo in the Underbelly for
some time yet. The crowd began to swell out into the street again, silent at first, gradually building to
hushed conversation.
The object of Missy’s observation conferred with the ogre at his side a moment, then gestured with his
head for the lad to follow. He shot a glance sideways, directly into Missy’s eyes. Her heart jumped at
first; then her face flushed with sudden anger.He was playing me! She responded automatically with a
coquettish smile and a wave.
The man quickly looked away and down, shifting his focus to the street ahead and the crowds swarming
about.
Ready for anything but the tempting touch of womanhood,Missy realised.Refreshing, after a fashion.
The three hurried ahead at a good clip, purposeful and terribly out of place in the Underbelly. Missy
walked more naturally, mimicking the shifting wanderings of the tower’s occupants. Though her quarries
moved faster, their directness clashed with the aimless dance of the crowd, and Missy kept pace without
difficulty.
The floor of the Underbelly was like a giant bowl of concrete, warped and misshapen to conform to the
vagaries of the tower’s steel supports. She tracked the three strangers between two-and three-storey
tenements, inexpertly constructed of whatever spare wood and plaster could be scrounged from the city
above. The place had a ruined graveyard quality about it, enhanced by the few ghostly street lanterns that
Missy had always detested. When this silliness with the queen’s agents had run its course, Missy intended
to make Oliver buy her an apartment in Aldgate.Oh, why compromise on fantasy?…in Cathedral Tower!
She trailed her foxes into a nest of rum dives and two-step alleys called, for reasons unknown, the
“Blink.”They must know the area, she decided,to stride so confidently into that labyrinth. Why, then, had
she not seen them before? The other two, though odd in stance and motion, would pass for locals with a
little effort. The man with the chiseled chin, however, she would surely have remembered him. She
slipped into the alley some minutes after them, to ensure they’d passed the first of the alley’s many
pointless corners. The hem of her skirt brushed the narrow walls, and she gathered it together in front of
her to keep it from staining on the piss and puke all over. Why was it the drunks never managed to quite
make it to the street?
She stopped at the first corner. Cursing sounded from ahead, echoing off the stained walls above:
possibly the ogre having trouble manoeuvring through, and the chin man’s backpack as well. She peeked
around the edge and saw, just as she thought, the ogre’s wide shoulders stuck between loose window
trim and a pipe. The chin man must have been in the lead, for she saw only the teenaged lad. He cocked
his head, and began to turn.
She darted back into cover with a stifled yelp. Something in the lad’s posture, head lowered between
raised shoulder blades, suggested a cat about to pounce, or a dog about to growl and charge.
A sudden fear blinked in her mind like an electrical spark: why was she following these men?
Because Oliver will ask you what they were up to, and if you don’t have an answer he is sure to chastise
you like a little girl and sulk the rest of the evening.There. It was on his head now.
It is preposterous to maintain belief in the innocence of your motives, child. You sully the very idea of
goodness in people by your association.
Heedless of the noise, Missy slapped herself hard on her cheek.
I’m done with you, old woman. Leave me be!
Gradually the cursing ahead subsided, and after a few minutes in silence, Missy plucked up her courage
and followed.
After a few more turns, she emerged into one of the little plazas that were referred to by a term she
wouldn’t repeat, even to herself. Lit by a single oil lantern hanging off a second-storey windowsill, the
plaza gleamed with moisture and stank of filth of every kind. A descending stair on the left led to a rum
house entrance, a boarded door on the right to a condemned shop with broken windows.
Three more alleys led off. All three took their first turns too early to see very far along, and the only
sound audible, despite the constant muted thrum of the factories from above, was some murmuring and a
badly played tin whistle from the rum house. She could find no trace of her little foxes.
Well, that’s that. Perfectly acceptable, me losing them in here. And Oliver can’t rightly argue with me not
wanting to take my lone, feminine self into a grog house, can he?She dusted her hands together in
symbolic dismissal of the whole affair and turned to leave.
A man stepped from the dark of the rightmost alley. Missy’s hand flew to her chest as her heart began to
thunder. Words came automatically to her, rehearsed and practiced so many times before: “Goodness,
you do give a lady a fright, sir.”
The man with the exquisite chin gestured for her to step towards him, and backed into the alley.
“If you would, miss,” he said. His voice was rich with a husky Germanic accent, though it was also
scratchy, as if he had spent a lot of time yelling.
Missy fixed him with her most disarming flutter of the eyelashes. “Now that would hardly be proper,
would it? Me following a strange man into a dark place.”
“You have been following this strange man for some time, miss.”
The bastard prick knew.She smiled shyly. “Sharp eyes on you, I see.”
He made no response to that, though his eyes flicked for an instant a little lower than her face. Revulsion
surged in her gut for an instant.
Remember that your client has come to you to be toyed with. It is his wish to be led by your wiles and
have that responsibility lifted from him for a time.
Something useful from you for once, old bat.
As an experiment, Missy took one direct and intentional step inside the range of his arms. He responded
by backing away, wary, hands by his sides but open and turned out slightly to be ready to reach up at
any moment. She fancied she saw his skin pale and chuckled inwardly. Why was it the big strapping ones
were always the easiest to unman?
“Now, what’s a fellow handsome as yourself doing in the Underbelly, I wonder.” She gauged his pained
squint to mean she could safely proceed further. “Nothing that can’t wait, if the company’s right, I hope.”
His neck flushed red. Missy folded her hands sweet-as-you-please in front of her, the back one slipping
her switchblade partly out of her sleeve. Befuddled though he was, the man carried a sidearm just out of
sight in the shadow of his right hip, and she wondered if the slight lump beneath his shirt just above the
waistband might be a belt of ammunition, like Heckler carried. The man’s right hand held steady just
above the sidearm’s grip.
“I am not interested, miss,” he said.
Her fingers wrapped around the knife’s grip.Oh, but you must be, for I’m ready for you.
“Well, not yet, love. But the day is young, and you’ll find I know a mite of pleasurable conversation,
among other things, if you’d give a doe a chance.”
The flush and jitteriness vanished, to be replaced with a cold, discerning stare. The man’s entire posture
grew fierce, and Missy suddenly realised just how large he actually was.
Stupid. Too forward. Now he’s…
“Why were you following me, miss?” he asked, voice flat as cold slate.
She retreated one step from the force in the man’s eyes and managed to sound cross.
“I’ve told you already, sir. Well, I can see you’re not interested. Good day to you and I’ll be on my
way.”
She stuck her nose up and spun away. What on earth had possessed her to trail this man into the Blink
of all places?Dignified, now. Slow down. Dismiss him. He’s nothing at all.
His hand engulfed her shoulder and spun her back around like a top. She found herself staring into
startling blue eyes, as hard as steel. She tugged the flick-blade loose. A quick poke and he would drop
like a domino, just as before.
From some unexplored part of her, a primal rage welled up, a screaming order to thrust the knife
through his heart. He deserved it. They all did. All these cruel and lecherous swine that thought they had
so much power.
She pressed the catch and the blade leapt into place. Was it the eyes that made her hesitate? Was he
just that much faster?
He never broke their gaze. His other hand snatched her wrist the instant she began to thrust. Shoots of
pain darted up and down Missy’s arm and out into her fingers. She cried out and the knife clattered to
the street.
She couldn’t move her arms. She couldn’t run. He leaned in closer, filling her nose with his scent.
“Listen!” he hissed. “Do not continue following us. My associates are heartless villains and they will
murder you. Do you understand?”
She nodded meekly. He shoved her away.
“Play yourVersuchung games elsewhere.”
She nodded again, swallowed to quell the shaking of her insides, and retreated. She kept him in sight,
watching his eyes and his firing hand until she reached the little plaza, then spun and bolted down the
nearest alley. She ran through the twists and turns, bashing her elbows on the downspouts and scuffing
her dress on the walls, and did not halt until the vast lamp-lit cavern of the Underbelly opened around
her.
She found a rotting crate behind a bakery where no one could see her from the streets, and sat down.
Tears poured out of her eyes, soaking her cheeks and chin, dribbling onto her jacket.
“No, no, no,” she muttered. She crammed her fists into her eye sockets.
Do you require further demonstration of how powerless you are, child? Surrender these unladylike ideas
of independence and return to me.
Her entire body shivered. Her insides rolled and squirmed. A sharp pain began throbbing between her
legs. From inside her mind, Matron Gisella fixed her with a tight-lipped scowl.
The world abounds in examples of your weaknesses. You are as frightened a little girl now as you were
when you were dumped upon my doorstep.
No, no, no, no…
She pulled her slick fists away from her face and clamped them down on her legs and then her arms,
until they went stone still. Then she hugged her midsection so tightly she thought she might break it.
She held herself in that death’s grip until her insides stilled and Gisella’s voice fell silent. Then she inhaled
with great deliberation, rose, straightened her clothing, wiped her face.
She would get another knife. She would get a gun. Then she would teach that Kraut bastard not to make
her feel like that. She would teach anyone who crossed her that she was powerless no longer.
She headed for the hideout.

Chapter 3

My professors at the college told me that my buildings would not stand up. They pointed endlessly to
leaning walls and angled beams that could support no roof short of a canvas sheet. I nodded and vocally
agreed, and so they tolerated me, but I always knew my buildings were exactly as they should be.
No, they would not stand as I had designed them, but they would grow, and one day they would stand
on their own.
—I. xxv
Grandfather Clock was watching.
Oliver tilted his hat back enough to see the massive white marble and wrought-iron clock hanging above
the entrance to the boarding platform. Its regular ticking rang like a hammer and anvil through the space
above. Suspended on chains from the steel ceiling supports, it almost seemed to be leaning forward,
surveying the people below.
Oliver ducked his head and pulled his hat brim down. An old chill crept up his spine, the wearing,
gnawing awareness of scrutiny, and then a sharp dread at the possibility of being recognised from last
night’s operation. He hurried his pace through the crowds at Shadwell Station, a sea of men and women
in grey tweed and ash hats, stinking of coal smoke and grease and human sweat.
The operationcould have gone well, if he’d only been given time to research and plan.
“It must be tonight,” Bailey had said, overpowering all objection. “England needs you. It is your duty to
the crown.”
Oliver shouldered his way around a tin cart and the man pulling it, and wondered what Bailey thought he
owed to the crown. Oliver was Whitechapel-born and-raised, and but for blurry glances through the
smoke and ash, had never even seen this great nation he was fighting for.
Did that sour man not think Oliver had enough of his own reasons to want Baron Hume and his two
gods to be cast down?
He simply doesn’t trust me. He wouldn’t trust anyone born outside his God-blessed kingdom.
Perhaps the correct question was: why was he following Sir Bailey’s revolution, instead of running his
own?
Because I tried that before, and look at what came of it.
A series of rhythmic clacks and a screech echoed out of the boarding platform ahead, the sounds of
brakes upon the cable, stopping the car’s descent from Stepneyside Tower. A gaunt-faced ferryman
withdrew the gates from the platform’s entrance, and the crowd began to shuffle forward.
A short, round man wearing pale blue coattails and a matching silk top hat shuffled in close to him on his
right side.
“Eyes ahead, lad,” the man said. “There’s trouble.”
“There’s always trouble with you, Hews.”
“Hmph. You’re one to talk of other folk making trouble.”
The pressure of the crowd eventually pushed them through the arch and onto the boarding platform,
where a cable car sat ready. Pulleys and machinery chugged away on every wall. Oliver noted that the
crew rushing about pulling switches and turning valves all wore the black cloaks of Mama Engine’s
servants; they had some grand name in the rags, but Oliver and most folk just called them “the crows.”
They were rarely seen outside the Stack, preferring, Oliver assumed, to be near their goddess, working in her furnaces deep inside that mountain of iron. The red glow of their own heart-furnaces leaked
through burns and holes in their heavy clothes; some even had mechanical limbs, which held to no human
shape. Last time Oliver had taken this car, the crew had been ordinary men of the working classes.
“Keep your eyes straight, lad,” Hews hissed. “They’re in a mood today.”
Oliver made to turn his head forward again, but his eyes lingered. Something on the catwalk above, half
seen amongst the enormous gears and wheels that ran the car, tickled at his attention. Slowly, his eyes
made out the gleam of round black armor and the long, precise line of an Atlas repeating rifle. A bolt of
panic shot through him.
“What are the Boiler Men doing here?” he whispered.
“I don’t know. Now walk straight and don’t draw attention to yourself.”
Oliver felt a chill creeping through him. The Boiler Men: the baron’s personal army. Silent, unhesitating,
they acted and killed with the detached ease of things wholly mechanical. Unlike the cloaks, not a one of
them had ever been human. If Baron Hume had deployed them outside of the Stack, something must
have happened to cause him no small worry.
A stern-faced gold cloak held the door at the entrance to the cable car, scrutinising people as they
passed. Brass plates covered half his face, and his right eye had been replaced by an oversized orb of
porcelain. Like most of his order, he wore not an actual cloak but a short cape over finely tailored
clothes: waistcoat, jacket, slacks. Oliver had no sympathy for the cloaks. Their mechanical growths were
not the painful fruits of any disease, but rather gifts from the baron and his gods, given when a
once–human being walked into the Stack and took communion with Grandfather Clock or Mama
Engine. Their mechanisms were their thirty pieces of silver, the price of their souls.
Oliver was glaring hard at the doorman when Hews tapped him on the shoulder to bring him out of it.
“Anonymity is your friend right now, lad,” he said. As they entered, he placed himself directly between
Oliver and the gold-cloaked doorman and gave the fellow a friendly tip of the hat. The doorman’s gaze
lingered on Hews long enough for Oliver to slip into the car. He came close enough to hear the man
ticking.
Hews joined him a moment later.
“They’re looking for someone,” Oliver said.
“I had better not find out it’s you. Let’s retreat to the back.”
They pushed through the crowd to the end of the car, farthest from the door and farthest from the tin
clock set into the ceiling at the front. They found a place in a corner, where they were pressed against the
walls as the car slowly filled. Oliver turned to stare out through the wire mesh that served as a window,
hiding his face from the clock. Hews did likewise.
“They came out of the Stack in force this morning.” Hews said. “I received a telegram from one of my
old partners about it. Apparently there have been frequent arrests.”
Oliver felt himself flush. “And how does that differ from a normal day?”
Hews shushed him with a gesture, tilting his head back towards the car’s occupants. Oliver bit his tongue
until the anger passed.
They fell silent a few minutes as the last of the passengers filed on and the gold cloak shut and locked the
door. Hews slipped his fingers into the pockets of his waistcoat and rocked back on his heels.
“On a different topic,” he said, congenial once again, “how was last night’s work?”
When Oliver didn’t answer right away, Hews grimaced and rubbed his muttonchops.
“It went badly, then?”
Oliver exhaled deeply and rested his forehead on the window. “You might say that.”
“Did anyone spot you?”
“Likely.”
Hews cursed under his breath.
“Well,” he said, “nothing to be done now. This seems a lot of attention for just you, in any case. We’ll
talk when we get to Stepneyside.”
The car jolted and began to move. Wheels and gears screeched away, and hidden engines erupted into
deafening noise. The passengers braced themselves against the walls and against one another as the car
picked up speed. In a few seconds, it cleared the boarding platform and flew out into London’s
yellow-grey smog.
Oliver laced his fingers in the wire mesh as the car began to wobble side to side. Ahead, Stepneyside
Tower slowly faded into life from within the clouds and the swirling ash. Its thick steel beams arched
gracefully together, crossing and tangling, and at the top spilled back down in all directions, giving the
tower the appearance of a huge black flower. The scattered lights of human habitation blinked between
them like orphaned stars.
“Look there,” Hews said, pointing out the car’s right side. “On a clear day you can see the gun
emplacements at Wapping, and sometimes the Thames.”
Oliver turned to look but saw only more grey sky, with the twisted shades of other towers lurking in that
direction. Somewhere beyond stood the impassable wall separating Whitechapel from the rest of
London, topped with electric defences and guarded by untiring Boiler Men. Just beyond it, human
soldiers of the British army stood ever ready, standing fast against any expansion of the baron’s city.
“You’re from Wapping, Hewey?” Oliver asked.
Hews shook his head, as if ridding himself of a clinging memory. “Chelsea, actually. Someday, I’ll show
it to you, lad.”
A blast of hot, oily wind battered the car. Oliver held on to the mesh and closed his mouth and eyes
against the stinging ash that swirled past. A violent bounce caused screeching and twanging sounds to
echo through the car’s roof.
“Haven’t I always said it?” Hews grumbled from behind his kerchief. “It’s the lifts and the cables that will
be the death of us. The Boiler Men needn’t lift a bloody finger.”
A flash of red light illuminated them from the right. A half mile in that direction, Oliver made out the
square and orderly Cathedral Tower, gleaming and clean despite all the grit and dirt of the air, and
looming behind it, the black mountain of the Stack.
That was where Mama Engine’s inhuman children laboured without pause on her Great Work, and
where, day after day, good coves worked themselves to death at her machines. Red flame blasted
through the clouds around its uppermost tip. Smoke blacker than coal shot upwards, fanning out to cover
the city like a shroud.
Oliver nudged Hews in the arm.
“Seems that’s been happening more often of late.”
Hews squinted at the spectacle. “Aye. Pity we can’t get a man inside. I’d love to know what they’re
building down there.”
“Could always join up with the crows, Hewey,” Oliver said with a grin.
Hews’ expression laid plain what he was going to say, but after a quick glance at the men and women
pressed in on them at all sides, he simply replied, “I may at that, lad.”
The Stack burst once more, then guttered and went out. Smoke continued to seep into the sky.
A few more jolts brought them into the Stepneyside station. This station was much larger than the one in
Shadwell, and featured cable car passage to Montague Tower and a raised rail heading to Cathedral
Tower and the Stack. Oliver and Hews stepped into the crowd and let themselves be carried along in the
human current as it spilled out onto the boarding platform. Hews used the same trick to get Oliver past
the gold-cloak watchman.
“Peculiar,” said Oliver. “All this for some fop bookkeeper.”
Hews snorted. “He isn’t just some bookkeeper, lad. Didn’t Bailey tell you?”
“Bailey wouldn’t tell me the bloody sky was grey,” Oliver said. Then his stomach clenched a little tighter.
“Er…what was he then, if not a fop bookkeeper?"
“Washe?” Hews echoed, with a searching glance of Oliver’s face.
Oliver shook his head, an indication not to discuss it in the midst of a crowd. They shuffled along in
silence towards the exit. Above the entryway to the station hung a montage of small clocks, all ticking out
of time with one another and orbiting around a central, larger clock by the action of some mechanism
hidden from the eye. To the left of the entrance stood a half squad of six Boiler Men, five holding Atlas
rifles against their shoulders and one a steam hose connected to a copper boiler strapped to his back.
Oliver and Hews tipped their hat brims down, flipped their collars up, and walked by without a glance or
a word. Oliver felt the heat from the steam hose from a full five yards away. He wondered with a shudder
if it had been fired today and tried not to remember what he’d seen it do to the human body.
They did not speak again until they had escaped the station and found a side street hidden from the view of the station’s massive exterior clock. The alley led between two tilting tenements connected by a
slanting support beam that emerged from the second floor wall of one building and entered the third floor
of the other.
They found a recessed doorway and took a moment to remove their hats and coats and shake the ash
from them.
“I think perhaps you had better explain yourself,” Hews said.
Hews expected a direct and honest answer, Oliver saw. Oliver thought of Missy and knew immediately
he wasn’t going to give one.
“I had my knife on him to keep him quiet,” Oliver said. “He just dove onto it. I think he may have been
trying to strangle me.”
Hews’ face drooped. He swallowed hard several times before speaking. “So he skewered himself?”
Oliver nodded, fighting the guilt welling in his abdomen. “Without any warning at all. I made an honest
attempt to pull my knife aside, but it was all very sudden.”
Hews rubbed his muttonchops and stared at the ground. Oliver felt a weight of sadness coming off the
other man, feeding the gnawing sensation in Oliver’s gut.
“Sad way to meet one’s end,” Hews said. “Damned shame.”
“We got off fine with his documents,” Oliver offered. “Heckler seems to think they’re a key for
translating some sort of cypher.”
“You told him who you worked for?” Hews asked.
“He can’t exactly turncoat on us now.”
Hews flapped his hat angrily. “Damn it, lad. Did you tell him who you were?”
“Hewey, that isn’t something my crew normally discusses while on mission.”
Hews flushed red. His jowls vibrated as he spoke. “Bailey’s using you on my good word, lad, and when
he hears this he’ll have us both hauled off. Do you understand that?”
Oliver threw a finger into Hews’ face. “Well, if our muck-a-muck had told me anything more than a
name and a time I’d have brought that fox in spit polished like a brass kettle.”
“You should have bloody told him who you were.”
“And if Bailey had trusted me, I’d have known to do it. Just because I wasn’t born in the—”
“He was one ofours, Ollie.”
Oliver froze. His finger wavered. “What?”
“Your fox was one of ours.” Hewey jammed his hat back onto his head and shouldered back into his coat. “He was a bloody inside man.”
Oliver’s arms dropped limply to his side. His hat slipped from his fingers and settled quietly on the
pavement. “I…didn’t know.”
“Of course not. Bailey thought—correctly, I might add—that you would make a mess of it and might get
caught. Aaron Bolden was running a separate operation tonight which might have thrown suspicion on
your fox, so he had to be retrieved.”
Oliver moved his lips for a minute, running in his mind every conceivable apology, from humbly admitting
his mistake and resigning from Her Majesty’s service to prostrating himself on the ground and wailing
piteously for forgiveness.
“Christ” was all he said.
Hews’ face cracked and he choked out a sad laugh, which Oliver couldn’t help but echo. His gut sank
another few inches towards his toes.
“So what shall we do now?” he asked.
Hews took a deep breath. “Now we get all our ducks in a row. Was he drunk?”
Oliver nodded.
“Good. Bailey will buy that. Lawrence was always a lush.”
An image of the dead man flashed in Oliver’s imagination. His stomach churned.
“Jesus, Hewey. I didn’t need to know his name.”
“You’ll get past it, lad. It isn’t as if this is the first man you’ve killed.”
In the heat of armed rebellion, yes. But not like that: unarmed and unawares, and without offence so far
as I know.Missy had not elaborated on her justifications. In fact, she’d barely spoken at all.
“Though,” Hews continued, eyes hopping this way and that without looking at anything in particular,
“let’s have Thomas do the actual deed. He’s careless as a bull on his best days.”
“But that isn’t how it happened.”
Hews gave a chuckle that could have been a sob. “Well, I doubt a one of us is generally truthful, eh?
Though Bailey may check on it, so it would be prudent to review it with your crew.”
“He knows that Tommy never uses a knife.”
“But he carries one.”
Oliver nodded. “Good a tale as any, I suppose. We’ll look like fools no matter the details, I think.”
Hews smiled and stepped down from the doorway. “I’ve looked worse on many occasions, lad. All in
the name of queen and country, eh?”
Hews slumped off, his shoulders dropping under some unseen weight.
“Queen and country, aye.” Oliver pulled out a shilling, and for a moment gazed down at the stern female
face on the back side.
But not my queen. Not my country.
He plopped it back in and followed after.
“I don’t like the look of it,” Hews said.
Oliver bit into the ha’penny biscuit he’d bought, and spoke around the dry crumbs. “Not a coincidence,
today of all days.”
Hews faked a jovial smile for the benefit of the two gold cloaks prowling the opposite side of the street
and took an altogether too-large bite of the sausage roll he’d bought. The canaries were in what they
must have considered disguise, having traded their gold livery for identical suits of brown and fur hats.
They still moved in short jolts of motion like all of their ilk and their coats showed the conspicuous bulges
of weaponry.
The gold cloaks didn’t seem interested in Hews or Oliver. Rather, they scrutinised the people passing
close to the building across the way, which was also Oliver and Hews’ destination: a warehouse with a
condemned store in its front, which narrowed like a pyramid towards its top floor.
Oliver turned to stare down the length of the concourse, so as not to draw the cloaks’ attention. “Do
you think we’ve been discovered?”
Hews licked a bit of grease from his lips. “Possibly, though Bailey’s always careful. Would be a tough
bit of deduction, that.”
But what else could it be? The warehouse was one of Bailey’s safe houses, a hideout for him and the
agents loyal to Queen Victoria. Bailey’s safety measures were extreme: he enforced anonymity and held
all his information in his head. He kept no documents, no records, spoke to no one outside his
organisation. In fact, other than Bailey and Sims and a few others, Oliver didn’t even know who the other
crown agentswere, or what they looked like. The cloaks knew of Bailey’s crew and had been hunting
them for more than a decade, but had always, always come up empty. The thought that the cloaks had
found Bailey out was unthinkable. Yet…there they were.
Oliver turned back to Hews. He faked a smile and their talk took on the outward cast of a friendly
conversation between gentlemen.
“Well, they don’t seem likely to be off anytime soon. Is there a back entrance? Or a subterranean one?”
Hews tipped his hat to a passing lady, who glanced at him fearfully and hurried her pace. Hews sighed,
and picked some ash off his roll.
“Now that isn’t proper,” he said. “Out in London we’d have shared a smile and a few kind words.”
“You’ve told me.”
“All this,” Hews went on. “Baron and Ironboys and cloaks and clocks and all—it has everyone fearful
beyond their wits. If there’s any reason you need to be doing this, lad—that’s it.”
“I’ve always had reasons, Hewey.”
“Aye. I suppose you have.”
Oliver watched the lady stride away, her skirt stirring up dust and fallen ash from the sidewalk.
He’d never believed Hews’ tales of London. In Whitechapel, anyone a man spoke to could be an
informer to the baron and thus to his divine masters. Granted, that wouldn’t be the case outside the walls,
but even then, what guaranteed that the hawker one was speaking to one moment wouldn’t turn villain
and rob him the next?
He failed to mention this to Hews, who pulled himself out of his melancholy in due time. Then Oliver
asked again:
“Are there any other entrances, Hewey?”
Hews nodded, then stepped closer to Oliver and dropped his voice. “There is a way in from below,
though I don’t care for it owing to the fact that it’s little more than a few thin beams.”
Oliver gulped down a sudden burst of fright. “Do you think we have any other option?”
Hews sighed. “I suppose not. Just let’s finish our breakfast first.”
A few minutes later, they started off towards the far end of the concourse. The street rolled up and
down in this section of the tower, tilting and curving to take best advantage of the support of the beams
beneath it. Electric lights blazed down from above, accompanied by the occasional fuzzy hint of sunlight
bleeding though the incomplete ceiling.
After two or three buildings, Hews turned between two shops. He led them down the alley, kicking a
path through skittering clickrats, to where the pavement ended and the street fell away.
Oliver leaned over the edge as Hews paused to catch his breath. He saw a small tangle of beams just
beneath, then a drop into the murk of the downstreets dozens of storeys below. He clamped his hat on
against the gusting wind and clutched the wall for support.
A curse escaped him.
“You were never afraid of long drops as a child,” Hews snorted. “Made a habit of trundling along the
ledges as I recall. There’s a fine stair on the left.”
By “fine stair,” Hewey must have meant a set of beams crossing in a kind of thatch pattern. They
descended it carefully, Hews huffing the whole way and Oliver clamping white-knuckled fingers onto any
hold he could find. When they had gone twenty or so feet, they came to a horizontal beam wide enough
to walk abreast.
“Mind the wind,” Hews said.
Stepneyside Tower did not have an underbelly. Over the side was nothing but a drop to the invisible
streets and buildings of old Whitechapel far below. Oliver paused at one point to look over the edge,
instantly regretting it.
The braced concrete floor of the concourse blocked all the light from above. They worked their way by
feel along the beam to its opposite end, where a wooden ladder stood, tied to a crossbeam by lengths of
weathered and stained twine. Hews climbed the first few rungs and felt around on the underside of the
concrete above.
“Always bloody hard to find…”
Oliver crouched down at the foot of the ladder, trying not to acknowledge the queasiness of his
stomach.
“You may want to check before we go up,” Oliver suggested, “what with the gold cloaks out front and
all.”
Hews snorted. “I was just doing that.”
Oliver hunkered down and waited.
After a few minutes, Hews descended the ladder and squatted beside him.
“I’m hearing unfamiliar voices,” he reported. “Bailey is still up there, playing the role, trying to blather his
way out.”
Oliver shook his head. “And after he’s done that he can convince the sun to take a loaf for the day.”
“Bailey’s pigheaded enough to try it anyhow. This door opens quietly enough, and comes up through a
cabinet on the back wall. We’ll have a plain view of the warehouse.”
Already beating quickly from their precarious walk across the beams, Oliver’s heart jumped into a yet
faster rhythm. “You expect to just rush them?”
“By the saints, no.” Hews reached beneath his coat and withdrew a .45-calibre revolver from inside his
vest: a Webley British Bulldog. “But this may lend some perk to Bailey’s lack of eloquence, eh?”
“Just the one? And how many canaries do you think?”
“One?” Hewey said. “Aren’t you armed, lad?”
Oliver swallowed hard, then reached into his pocket and produced a four inch wood-handled flick
blade. Next to a firearm, the weapon looked more fit for sticking sausages than fighting. Hews’ face
constricted in a pained expression for a moment. Oliver stared dumbly down.
“I haven’t carried an iron since the Uprising,” he said.
Hews sighed and shook his head. “Just stay behind me and look like a mean-spirited Scot, or
something.”
Hews mounted the ladder again. Shortly, two clicks sounded and a faint square of light materialised
above Hewey’s head.
“Quickly, now.”
After some few seconds of manoeuvring his belly through the tight trapdoor, Hews slid up and
disappeared. Oliver clenched his miniature weapon tight in his right fist and steeled himself against the
quivering fear in his gut.Just up the ladder and to it.
He ascended.
The cabinet turned out to be not quite large enough for the two of them. Oliver had to bend his knees
and neck at an unnatural angle to fit entirely inside. Hews had a similar problem, being quite unable to
bend forward to the small crack between the cabinet’s two swinging doors on account of his belly. Hews
gestured at the trapdoor, and Oliver closed it silently by lowering it with his foot.
Bailey’s wine-rich baritone rumbled from beyond the doors.
“Well, Ido take it as an affront, sir. You and your ilk have no respect for the sanctity of a man’s
property.”
Another voice answered, punctuated by a springlike clicking sound on every glottal syllable.
“I’ve shown more respect than you rightly deserve, being traitors and spies.”
Bailey harrumphed. “How dare you, sir, after damaging my door and assaulting my comrades?”
As the crack between doors was out of Hews’ reach, Oliver bent his neck farther and lined up his eye
with the soft orange light filtering through. Already his neck had begun to ache.
Just beyond the door sat wooden boxes half the height of a man. The room seemed to extend perhaps
thirty yards to the other end. A jowled, sour-faced man stood perhaps halfway across, dressed in a grey
suit and bowler hat. He wore no cloak to signify his position but had enough gold on his person in terms
of hat ribbon, cuffs, chains, gloves, and tie to make up for it. He brandished a revolverlike weapon the
length of Oliver’s forearm.
When the man spoke, his facial muscles moved in tiny stops and starts like the hands of a clock,
eventually resting in a configuration resembling a tense grin. “I’ll savour dashing that out of you before we
hand you over to our brothers in armour.”
“You have made a threat on my person, sir,” Bailey said. Oliver heard something that might have been
Bailey spitting. “And that I will not tolerate. Let’s settle this without delay, hand to hand, as God
intended.”
The gold cloak squinted suspiciously. “I’ll not have you starting a ruckus and warning your
coconspirators.”
Oliver felt a poke in his ribs and turned to Hews, who spoke in a whisper that was little more than an
exhalation shaped by the lips.
“A view of the room.”
Oliver moved his head left to right, swinging his small slit of vision to encompass as much of the room as
possible. In order to do this without sound, he and Hews squashed and bent themselves into poses that
became downright painful. It was also getting uncomfortably hot. Oliver bent low, further craning his
neck, to whisper into Hews’ ear.
“Bailey and Sims on the left, possibly another—I saw a hand. The chief canary’s just out front, beyond a
set of boxes. Two more at the door with Enfields. Can’t see right or left wall.”
Hews nodded. “I can’t believe you don’t have a gun, lad,” he whispered.
“I’ve had enough of them,” Oliver shot back. “What now?”
“Sit tight. Ready when I say.”
Oliver nodded.
Outside the cabinet, tempers were flaring.
“I call you coward!” Bailey roared. “Pass me a pistol. I challenge you, sir.”
The gold cloak emitted a noise like a sputtering engine. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, you filthy
renegade? You’d play me for a simpleton.”
“You doubt my honour, sir, only because you have none of your own. Tell me, when they cut out your
heart, did they relieve you of your manhood as well?”
Hews held up one finger and gestured at the door. Oliver readied his knife.
“You fucking rotter,” the gold cloak bellowed. “I’ll kill you right here, Ironmen or no.”
“Praise England!” Bailey cried. “Long live the queen!”
Hews jabbed his finger forward. Oliver’s heart leapt into his throat as they crashed pell-mell out of the
cabinet. Hews fired two shots the instant the doors swung clear, then hurled himself down hard behind
the two crates. Oliver stood dumbly for a moment, watching the chief canary topple backwards, then
plopped down flat to the floor as the gold cloak on the right brought his rifle to bear. The cabinet door
splintered an instant later.
Sims dove in next to Hews. Bailey followed, rolling on his shoulder and coming to one knee suddenly
armed with a derringer in his right hand. The third man—Kerry—produced a .38 from his coat and fired
several times as he moved to join them. Then his back exploded and he dropped to the floor like an
abandoned marionette.
Things became quiet for an instant.
Groans and noises like the breaking of violin strings sounded from beyond the boxes. To Oliver’s left,
Bailey rose to an apelike crouch, muscles and tendons rigid under his sun-worn skin. The expression in
his eyes denied the age that showed in the spots at his hairline, the grey in his moustache. Silently, he
tossed Oliver the derringer and reached to the back of the second crate. He jammed his fingernail
between two slats and levered it open, revealing a set of pistols. He passed one to Sims and clasped the other in both hands.
Bailey and Hews shared a silent look. Oliver scrambled to right the derringer and fit his long fingers
around the handle. Muttered curses accompanied sounds of movement over the crates.
Bailey counted down on his fingers. Oliver turned himself over into a squat and got ready. Three. Two.
One.
They all leapt up at once, and the room filled with light and noise. Oliver’s first shot went into the ceiling.
Then he took aim on the gold cloak who’d shot at him and let fly with the second. The cloak went down,
tumbling backwards. The chief cloak, his fine coat a mess of blood, brown grease, and black oil,
staggered to the door despite the bullets slamming home in his broad back. The cloak on the left spun
and fell, his rifle tumbling from his hands.
Suddenly all firing ceased. Oliver brandished his empty derringer as fiercely as the others now held aim
on their last quarry.
“Buggers, all of you,” the man said. He grasped the door frame to stay upright, and shot a snarl over his
shoulder at them. Streams of oil streaked his face. “The noble Grandfather will bring me back, and I’ll
execute you all.”
The two cloaks from outside appeared in the doorway, eyes wide in alarm. Bailey and Hews, who,
Oliver realised, had been saving their last rounds, shot the two men through their foreheads.
“You don’t even die like a man,” Bailey scoffed, lowering his now-empty weapon.
The gold cloak’s sneer dissolved into a slack, vacant expression, and he slumped to the floor with a
sloshing sound that chilled Oliver’s bones.
Hews relaxed his arms. “Perhaps he does.”
Bailey turned to Kerry’s sprawled body. Only a small black-rimmed hole marred Kerry’s chest, but
beneath him lay a slowly spreading pool of blood.
Not a bad way for it to end,Oliver thought.Better than the Chimney or the steam guns or any of the other
horrors of this city.
The other three faced their fallen comrade and bowed their heads. Hews removed his hat.
“A great honour to die in the service of queen and country,” Bailey said, voice hard. “We salute this man
who gave his life for the cause.”
“Flights of angels,” Hews muttered. “We shall see you at the gates, my friend.”
Bailey turned to face the rest of them, dismissing Kerry’s body like so much scenery. He gestured
towards the cabinet.
“Everyone down.”
One by one they fled through the trapdoor. Hews came last, sealing it behind and fastening the unseen
catch. They knelt and huddled close against the stinking, grime-heavy wind that greeted them below.
Everyone took a moment to hide their weapons away and draw handkerchiefs to cover their mouths
against the sickening air.
“How did they find you?” Hews asked, pressing his hat down to keep it from flying off.
Oliver almost reeled back at the anger that flashed in Bailey’s eyes. Bailey made a fist with his free hand.
“Aaron has been captured.”
Oliver knew the name, having heard it passed in casual conversation between other revolutionaries. As
usual, they hadn’t trusted him with the details of Aaron’s role. Oliver had assumed he was another agent
like himself, but Hews’ startled gasp indicated otherwise.
“Lord in heaven,” Hews muttered.
“Contact your people and order them into hiding,” Bailey ordered. “Reconvene at the den in Dunbridge
Tower.” He and Sims backed up, dropped off the edge of the beam, and disappeared.
Oliver turned to Hews. “Hiding? What did he mean?”
Hews ground his teeth, staring inwardly. “If Aaron gave up this hide, he’ll give up the rest of them, lad.
Not a one of us is safe now.”
Oliver’s heart leapt back to a racehorse pace. “This man didn’t know my crew, Hews.”
“We can’t take any chances. Let’s get up and find a telegraph.”
Hews touched Oliver on the shoulder and pointed back the way they’d come.
“How’re we to get all the way to Dunbridge?” Oliver asked. “They’re certain to be watching the cars.”
Hews broke out of an internal reverie. “They didn’t seem to knowour faces. It’s Bailey and Sims who
have to be careful.”
They crawled in silence for a moment, walking on three limbs to counter the wind. Oliver glanced over
several times at Hews, whose brow grew more and more wrinkled, and his manner drew more
withdrawn.
“Hewey, who was this Aaron?”
Hews loosed a long, frustrated sigh.
“Our hope, lad. Our best bloody hope.”

Chapter 2

The whole of Her garden will grow from a single iron nail, which I will plant between the cobbles in a
back alley of Pelham Street. There, a man lies dying of consumption. His will be but the first of the souls
She will need, for Her fires grow hungrier by the day. To make great things, much heat is needed; and for
much heat, much coal.
—II. ix
The prisoner struggled. Bergen yanked on the chains and the man toppled to his face.
“That was unpleasant,” Bergen said. “Do not make me do it again.”
Muffled curses escaped from the canvas bag covering the prisoner’s head. Bergen delivered a kick to
the man’s ribs. The prisoner groaned and rolled onto his side.
“Behave yourself,” Bergen said. “Now, on your feet.”
The prisoner fought to get onto his knees and wobbled to his feet. The man’s arms had been tied
together behind his back with piano wire, which had sliced his skin in a few places. Five chains led up
under the canvas hood, attaching in some unseen way to the prisoner’s head. Bergen gave them a light
tug.
“Walk.”
The prisoner obeyed.
Bergen led the man through corridors of warped wooden floorboards and ragged plaster walls. At
uneven intervals, oil lamps hung from hooks in the ceiling, yellowing everything with their sickly light. They
passed through dozens of intersections of identical corridors and through several wooden doors, some
hanging off their hinges and splattered with castoff plaster.
Bergen frowned at the sloppy workmanship.Probably done by some urchins, hired for a pittance and
then cast off the tower to die in the streets.
Only by long habit did he know which corridors to follow and which doors to open. A wrong turn would
place him in the path of a trip wire–triggered rifle or a door that opened onto a wall of protruding
poisoned needles. It was a place to rattle a dead man’s bones.
Was it duty that kept him coming back to this tomb? Or was he so callous now that he could no longer
find fault with its madness?
He found the door he sought. Rather than reaching for the knob, he probed the topmost hinge with a
single finger until he found the trigger buried in the oak door frame. With a click, the latch sounded, and
the door swung open from the hinged side. A complex series of pulleys and gears, all fabricated of wood,
slid the door aside just enough for a man to step through.
The room beyond was as black as night, lit only by a few candles in the far corner. A quaking voice
floated out. “Tick, tick, tick, tick…”
“I know you heard me,” Bergen said. “I have the thief.”
“Ah, by all means, bring him in.”
Bergen roughly shoved the prisoner ahead. Bergen stepped in after him, turning to the corner farthest
from the candles.
“Bringing your barking iron in here?” said the voice.
Bergen laid a casual hand on the heavy Gasser revolver hanging at his hip. “This is my fist and my voice,”
he said. “Would I ask you to set aside such things?”
The corner cackled like a nervous schoolboy.
“Cautious. Heh. A good sign, that. Take note, my little grubbers. Take note.”
The corner shuffled, and John Scared slunk silently into the candles’ light. The sixteen-year-old mute that
John called “Pennyedge” emerged as well, stepping into the light from a different corner. The boy stood
loose, long-limbed, and long-fingered, waiting as always to execute Scared’s merest whim.
In his customary black long coat and top hat of beaver fur, John Scared seemed little more than a
pock-scarred face and two knobbly hands. Grinning toothily, John grasped the small table that held the
candles and moved it closer to the room’s centre.
John beckoned into the dark. “Come out, come out, my grubbers. Don’t you want to see your uncle at
work?”
Two wide-eyed, emaciated children shuffled out of the dark, dressed in naught but rags and grime. Their
eyes flittered fearfully over Bergen’s person, and they shuffled away towards Pennyedge, giving the
groaning prisoner a wide berth. They settled themselves behind Penny’s legs, peering around. The mute
kept his arms crossed, the fingers of his right hand fiddling with his sleeve. His eyes never left Bergen’s.
Do you think I cannot see that knife, boy? Do you think you can get to me before I can draw?Bergen
deliberately broke eye contact.
“Let’s get him comfortable,” John prompted.
Bergen hauled the prisoner to his feet by the collar of his vest and shoved him roughly into the oak chair.
“Tell me,” said John, placing the table to the right of the chair. The candlelight lit his chalky skin in
dancing colours. “He was one of three?”
“One of them fell from the tower. The other was taken by the Boiler Men. Hobbyhorse found this one
wandering lost in the bottom of Aldgate. He is one of them; I am certain.”
John’s eyebrows squirmed. “The Boiler Men? Tick, tick. Foul news. He’ll have to be retrieved.” He
locked iron rings around the prisoner’s legs and another around his neck. “I’ll get Boxer to handle it.
Close the door, if you would.”
Bergen reached back and tugged a small cord that hung from the door’s pulley system. A catch released
and the door slid back into place with a quiet sound. Pennyedge’s unfaltering stare began to grate on his
nerves. It was a constant reminder that he was an outsider, an employee, rather than a member of the
family. If any of John’s wretches could shoot half as well as he could, Pennyedge would have slit his
throat long ago.
The room seemed to grow hotter the instant the door closed. There was a smell as well, an organic rot
that Bergen was wary of trying to identify.
John loosened the drawstring of the bag covering the prisoner’s head. He gestured to the two small
children, flashing his yellowed and blackened teeth. “Step up, little pups. Don’t be afraid.”
They cautiously moved around to stand in front of Pennyedge, but went no closer.
Satisfied, John turned back and with a grand flourish whipped the bag off the prisoner’s head.
“Gott in Himmel!”Bergen swore. The two children screamed and fled back into the darkened corner.
Pennyedge did not react.
“My hunchback is quite a craftsman, isn’t he?” John said. He reached up with his gnarled hands and
caressed the iron bands that encircled the prisoner’s head, held there by thick nails punched into his skull.
The chains dangled from rivets in his jaw and cheeks.
“Not even much blood, considering,” John said. “Marvelous work. Don’t you think so, grubbers?”
The two children gasped unseen in the corner. Pennyedge simply nodded and returned his gaze to
Bergen.
“How dare you do this to children?” Bergen growled.
John’s eyes twinkled. “You’d prefer I left them to starve or be hauled off by the Chimney gangs, then?
Besides, I’ve done much, much worse. And so have you, I might add.”
Bergen’s hand twitched towards his gun. Duty was all that kept him from putting a bullet through the
man’s forehead.
He spat on the floorboards. “I do only what is necessary, Scared. You are an abomination.”
“Quite. And I wouldn’t trust your sanity,mein freund , if you held any other opinion.” John reached up
and unscrewed the lock holding the man’s jaw shut tight. “Now let’s hear what this one has to say, eh?”
The man spat up blood and bile as soon as he could open his mouth. He said nothing. John examined
him for some long moments, looking for a weakness.
Bergen had seen this before. John was exceptional at reading a man’s faults. Bergen, on the other hand,
was exceptional at hiding such faults. Perhaps that was why John hadn’t killed him yet—he hadn’tsolved
him as he might a chess problem or a mathematical equation.
John leaned back on his heels. “Penny, my boy, cut a piece of the fellow’s ear off, would you? The
gauze is under the chair.”
Bergen crossed his arms. “Must I witness this?”
John perked up. “The great hunter squeamish? The German Terror of Africa unmanned?”
“I was not the one burgled today,” Bergen said levelly.
John’s eyes narrowed. “Shrewd. Heh. I like that too.”
Pennyedge had retrieved the roll of gauze. He tore off a small slip of it, then held the prisoner’s head still
with one hand and drew his knife with the other. John shuffled over to Bergen. Bergen’s nose wrinkled at
the onion stench of the man.
“Our little secret is in the hands of the man who fell,” John said.
“Or in the hands of the Boiler Men.”
John shook a finger. “No, no. If that was the case, we’d already be dead, don’t you think?”
“It is your secret, Scared.”
“Ah, but I would, of course, with much hesitation and under great duress, tell them it was your idea.”
Bergen shrugged. The prisoner screamed through clenched teeth as Penny did his work.
“So it needs to be retrieved.”
“Smart. Heh.”
Bergen rubbed his fingers through his chin stubble and tried to ignore the prisoner’s moaning. “I want
Mulls and Hobbyhorse.”
“Mulls is a brute. He’s yours.” John turned briefly and assessed the prisoner. The man’s face was awash
with blood and sweat, eyes clenched and teeth locked together. Pennyedge stood behind the man,
pressing the bloodstained gauze against the man’s ear.
“Another bit, if you would, my boy,” John said. “He’s not quite ready.”
He turned back to Bergen as Penny bent to his task. John waved one yellow-nailed finger in Bergen’s
face. “Hobby will go with Boxer. You get Penny.”
Bergen glanced over at the boy’s face. It hung slack and expressionless even as he sawed away with his
knife. Bergen was about to protest that the boy was too young, but thought better of it.He may have
already killed more men than I have.
“I cannot use him,” Bergen said. “He cannot be made a scout on account of his silence, and he’s not
nearly a good enough shot.”
John knitted his fingers together. “You’ll find his talents more than make up for his little deficiency, I
think.”
John’s smile grew wider and wider.
Bergen nodded slowly, realising.Penny is along to murder me if I try to go to the baron.
John smiled, his message understood. “Lots of beasties to hunt in the downstreets, too. Like your old
grounds, eh?”
“Africa is a land of beauty,” Bergen said. “Your Whitechapel is aHö
¨ lle auf Welt.”
“It’s notmy Whitechapel,” John said, then added with a twinkle, “Yet.”
It’s the queen’s Whitechapel, you traitor.Bergen buried the thought, hoping John hadn’t read it on his
face.
He indicated Penny, who stood impassive, holding fresh gauze over the ruins of the prisoner’s ear. “The
child will need arms. Have him meet me in the warehouse when you are done with him.”
“It won’t be long” was the reply. John returned his attention to the two children still huddled down in the
shadows of a far corner.
“Come forth, come forth, my beautiful, innocent little sons,” he said, beckoning with his skeletal hands.
“This will be your trade someday. Best learn.”
Bergen’s stomach turned. He yanked the cord that rolled the door to the side and strode out.
Bergen walked into the workshop to find Mulls shouting and bashing his fist on a table.
“What do you mean it’s not done, you rotter?”
The shop master, Ferdinand von Herder, leaned comfortably back on his stool and sighed deeply, as
one might when dealing with an unruly child.
“Good sir,” he began, his voice ancient and tired, “the weapon is not ready. Nor will it become ready
until our mutual patron furnishes me with more nickel and copper.”
“Is there a problem?” Bergen asked.
Mulls whirled about, coming up straight when he saw who had just spoken. He was one of Scared’s
children, raised in the filth of the streets and badly ravaged by the clacks, but loyal and capable, if not
amiable. His already primitive features had become a mess of stray wires and misshapen bits of iron, and
his thick limbs bulged in some places into unnatural angles.
Von Herder cocked his ear and turned his sightless eyes in the direction of the door.
“Herr Keuper, is it? Welcome. Mr. Mulligan seems to think he should be the bearer of our only
functional steam rifle.”
“Wouldn’t be a problem if he’d bloody made two of them like he s’posed to,” Mulls complained.
“You will carry a flasher,” Bergen ordered. “And an air rifle loaded with steel rounds.”
“Fine.” Mulls snatched an air rifle and a belt of ammunition from the weapon racks lining the wall and
headed for the stairs leading back to the maze. He mumbled under his breath, as if the others couldn’t
hear him, “Stupid hun, hogging all the good stuff to yourself.”
Bergen and von Herder waited for his muttering to fade with distance. Two teenage assistants in the
back of the room disturbed the silence, having hardly slowed their pace at all during the argument. When
von Herder spoke, he did so in German.
“Unpleasant men are not hard to find in this country, don’t you think, Herr Keuper?”
Bergen shrugged, though he knew von Herder couldn’t see it. “Herr Scared attracts only the worst. The
Englisch are mostly a jovial people.”
The old mechanic blinked his milk-white eyes and scuffed his fist over the scraggly whiskers on his
cheeks. “Strange for you to be praising theEnglisch, I think. Your partnership with Nicholas Ellingsly was
legend in the penny magazines—always rivals for the bigger game.”
“TheEnglisch consider such contests the height of sportsmanship, Herr von Herder.”
“A silly people, to confuse friends with opponents.”
Bergen scanned the tables and racks in the rear of the workshop. “Is it ready?”
“Of course! How unprofessional of me to waste time on blather.” Von Herder swiveled slightly on his
stool and called for his two assistants to bring up the steam rifle. As one they dipped behind the far table and rose again straining and grunting. They carried the weapon up and set it on von Herder’s table with
tremendous strain.
“Thank you, my lads,” von Herder said. He ran his hands over the length of the rifle with an almost
loving touch. His eyes slowly fell closed.
Bergen surveyed the weapon from barrel to boiler: fully five feet in length, with a barrel the breadth of a
man’s fist, a coal furnace and boiler in the place of a breech, and a padded stock that allowed the butt
end of the weapon to rest atop the shoulder. It had been polished precisely, and shimmered like a mirror
in some places.
“It is a different colour,” Bergen said.
“Yes, I replaced most of it with a new alloy. Much stronger so less can be used, which should lighten it a
bit. I’ve also installed a new boiler.” He indicated each section as he spoke, dancing his fingers over the
components, checking fit and sturdiness. Then he gestured for Bergen to pick it up. “Test it. Test it.”
Bergen bent and hefted the monstrous weapon from the table. The stock fit perfectly to his shoulder. He
gripped its two handles, one perpendicular to the barrel on the inside, the other parallel on the outside.
He experimentally thumbed the trigger on the outside handle.
“It is much lighter. My compliments, Herr von Herder.”
“It will still be a heavy load to carry through the downstreets.”
Bergen smiled. “Africa has touched me, sir. It will be as nothing.”
Von Herder grinned back, displaying gums shrivelled by age. “I am told the sunsets are magnificent
there.”
“There are few greater pleasures, sir.” Bergen placed the rifle back on the table. He retrieved its special
holster and a band of ammunition and tossed them in a canvas shoulder sack. Bergen surveyed the rack
of breech-loading rifles and air rifles and considered whether Pennyedge should be armed.
The boy would be useless against the creatures of the downstreets with just his knife, and yet Bergen felt
some hesitancy at arming a boy who was under orders to kill him. The essential question was, did giving
the boy a firearm make him more dangerous than he already was?
“You were from Stuttgart, weren’t you?” von Herder asked.
“Hm?” Bergen murmured, breaking out of his thoughts.
“If I recall, you are from Stuttgart.”
“That is correct.”
Von Herder tapped two fingers absently on the table. “It is puzzling me, because you do not sound like
you are from Stuttgart.”
Bergen paused, wondering just how much the blind man’s ears could reveal. He chose his words
carefully. “I have not been back to the fatherland for years, Herr von Herder. Perhaps you are hearing some tribal variation I have acquired.”
“Of course,” said von Herder. “I’d forgotten.”
Bergen selected one air rifle and a bandolier for the boy. “Do you have any paper, Herr von Herder?”
“I haven’t much use for it,” von Herder said with a chuckle. “But Andrew is learning his letters.” He
called back for the boy to bring up some paper and a pen.
The assistant appeared, carrying a slip of paper dark around one edge with spilled ink, and a small bit of
charcoal.
“Beg pardon, sir, but me pen’s been leakin’ terrible of late.”
“Well then, fix it,” von Herder snapped. “How can I let you lay your hands on firearms if you cannot
even fix a lousy pen?”
The poor lad froze up for a moment. Bergen held out his hand. “Whatever makes a mark,” he said.
Relieved, the boy crammed the paper and charcoal onto Bergen’s palm and fled.
“Lad’s a dullard,” von Herder said in German, “though he’s competent enough on the furnace.”
“Hmm,” Bergen said. He laid the paper on the table and scribbled a few words.
One caught by Ironboys. One caught by Scared. They can’t hold. Third fell from tower, has
ticker-paper. Leading expedition to retrieve. Cannot delay; under watch.
He blew the excess charcoal off the paper and folded it in quarters.
“What were you writing, I wonder?” von Herder mused.
“My obituary.”
Bergen wrapped the steam rifle in its holster and swung the monstrous mechanism onto his back. It really
was lighter, perhaps sixty pounds. He slung the various bandoliers over his shoulder, gathered a few
more packs prepacked with food, water, and supplies, and hefted Pennyedge’s air rifle in his hand.
“Auf Wiedersehen,”said Bergen, and left.
He dropped the paper in a sewer grate on the way to the warehouse.

Chapter 1

They first came to me before I was old enough to speak. She was a red heat from beneath my crib; He,
a scratching from the shadow beneath my windowsill. They spoke to me not in words, but in intentions
and desires that my terrified infant mind could not comprehend. I cried out and hid from Them beneath
my blankets. My mother rocked me and soothed me and told me They were imaginary. How could she
have known, I wonder, when I was not old enough to tell her what I saw?
—I. xi
Bailey was not surprised when the doctor’s first incision drew up something darker than blood.
The patient writhed and struggled in the bed, fighting a pain that distorted his features into something less
than human. He was a comrade named Tor Kyrre, though Bailey could barely recognise him. Spikes of
iron had sprouted from his bald pate and his bare chest was riddled with gears and bulbs of all types of
metals, the tips of much larger growths festering beneath the skin. As the doctor made his second cut,
lateral and shallow, across the base of the rib cage, black oil welled up, slipping down Tor’s flanks and
staining the sheets and blankets.
The doctors called the disease themorbus imperceptus incrementum . Other folk called it the “clacks.”
Tor spasmed and groaned, the pain of whatever was eating him inside proving too much for even the
powerful whiskey the doctor had fed him.
Bailey sucked on his cigar, inhaling the smoke right down to the base of his lungs, where it burned in tiny
bursts of heat. It was wrong that a man should die this way, that he should be so robbed of his dignity in
his final hours.
Bailey bit back an impulse to ask Dr. Chestle to cease the surgery and let his patient pass on.
No more! Not one more life will I surrender to this horrid city.Chestle, though he looked frail and of
weak nerves, was as skilled as any two of his peers, and Tor had the fortitude of a bear. If this blasted
machine-disease insisted on taking him it would have a fight on its hands.
He was about to slip away into the hall when Chestle cried out. The doctor jumped back from his
patient, wildly flailing his left hand. Something black toppled to the floor, flinging oil and bits of foulness all
across the floorboards.
Chestle backed into the corner, holding his scalpel in front of him like a weapon.
The object twisted and gyrated, slashing at the floor with shapeless, pointed appendages. Bailey took
three steps towards it, swept up a stool, and crushed the object under the stool’s foot, bearing down on
it with the weight of his knee. A screech and a crunch followed, and the thing went still.
Bailey lifted the stool to reveal a twisted mass of metal gears and articulated fingers.
“Was this the source?”
Paler than his patient, the doctor nodded.
“Then you’re finished. Sew him up.”
The look of blank terror lingered on Chestle’s face as he again bent over Tor and went to work. Fifteen
minutes later, with Tor’s chest sealed and covered in gauze and bandages, Chestle nodded at the door.
Bailey opened it, admitting Tor’s wife, who went directly to her husband’s side and conferred with the
doctor in her broken English. Bailey extinguished his cigar now that a lady was present.
Chestle mopped the oil off his hands with a towel and tried without success to look encouraging. “Please
keep the bandages fresh, Mrs. Kyrre. He should be given only thin soup for now. I shall call tomorrow to
see how he is doing.”
“Thank, thank,” she said.
Bailey took out his handkerchief and gathered the remains of the foul object on the floor before Mrs.
Kyrre had a chance to see it.
The housekeeper brought in a bowl of heated water and soap. The doctor washed the gore and oil from
his hands and surgical instruments, the sweat from his thin moustache, and packed his tools into a leather
handbag. Bailey snatched up a candlestick and led him out into the hall.
Bailey shut the door quietly behind them. He unwrapped the crushed object and laid it in the palm of his
open hand, bringing the candle close to examine it.
“What is it?”
Chestle shook his head slowly, facing away from it, as if unwilling to even speculate. His voice shook
with repressed fright as he spoke. “I’m afraid I don’t have an answer, Winfred.”
“But you have seen it before.”
The doctor smoothed his small moustache and faltered over a few words before speaking further. His
slim figure looked skeletal in the candlelight, his close-cut hair thin and loose. “This is the fourth such case
I have treated since Sunday. I had one young woman die of it.” He straightened with obvious effort. “The
growths have always been common, particularly in the poorer towers, but up until now they have not
been…harmful.”
Bailey pocketed the object and they headed towards the stair at the hall’s far end. Seeing the hesitation
on Chestle’s face, Bailey motioned for him to continue.
“The people I have seen with this condition…,” the doctor said, “they were, the prior week, free from
any trouble. The onset is sudden, the damage at once rapid and extensive. If this were to happen to all
those who were infected…My God, Winfred, the loss of life…”
Bailey nodded that he understood, to save the man the expression of his horror. Chestle’s fingers
absently rubbed the brass bulbs on the back of his own hand.
“What is the cause of it?” Bailey asked.
“Something in the air? Something in the food?” The doctor swallowed hard. “If it were any but you, my
friend, I would not even speculate, but…since the gods…since the changes that…”
“Out with it, George.”
“I think that it is Whitechapel,” Chestle said. “Not the air or the food or the conditions, but the city
itself.”
They descended the stairs, passing into a foyer and to the front door of the dwelling before Chestle
spoke again, and when he did it was with great care.
“And it is not my opinion that it can be cured.”
“It can be.”
“Winfred, with all honesty, I—”
“Itwill be,” said Bailey. “Once we cast down Grandfather Clock and Mama Engine—once the baron
and all the rest of their servants lie burning in hell and Whitechapel belongs to England once more—then
you will have your cure.”
Chestle nodded and donned his felt bowler hat.
He moved to leave, and Bailey stopped him with a polite hand on the arm.
“Be ready. The battle may begin anytime now.”
“You need merely call on me. I…believe I will pray tonight.”
They shook hands firmly, and the doctor departed.
Bailey stood a long minute with the door open, staring out. His gaze was drawn upwards, past the
rotting rooftops of the neighbourhood, past the gleaming Cathedral Tower, where those most loyal to the
baron lived with the luxuries of health and security. He felt his jaw tighten as his eyes came to rest on the
top of the looming iron mountain barely visible through the blackened air: the Stack, home to the gods
and to the man who had betrayed his country and his kin to serve them.
Yes, things would happen quickly, one way or the other. If all went well, the means to reclaim
Whitechapel might be in Bailey’s hands by dawn. If all did not go well, he and all the agents of the crown
might soon be lying in oily graves.
Aaron had gone tonight to steal a weapon.
He was two hours overdue.
“You know what the real problem is, Ollie?”
Fighting his irritation, Oliver pulled his eyes off the street and glanced over his shoulder. Tommy
crouched behind him in the filthy alley, a madcap grin flowering on his rectangular face.
Then Tommy stabbed himself in the heart with a knife. “People don’t properly die in this town,” he said
with a smirk. Oil welled up around the blade, staining his shirt.
Oliver scowled. “We’re on mission, Tom.”
“I never tire of the look on your face, Chief,” Tom said, and yanked the knife out with a flourish. He
licked it clean. “Tastes like honey and brown sugar.”
“Vile,” Oliver said, turning back to the street. “Absolutely vile.”
“I swear it isn’t so. You want a taste?”
“I need your attention on the mission, Tom,” Oliver said, eyes darting about the street.
“Always the responsible leader, eh?” said Tommy. “A regular John Bull, if you’re a cove.”
Oliver couldn’t help but smirk. “And yet I still thump you at Heckler’s card game.”
“Ah, but you do it soseriously …”
“Quiet.”
A crowd poured out of the pub three buildings down towards Aldgate Common: a group of
middle-aged men fancied up in bowler hats and suits, carrying canes they couldn’t possibly need and all
of them three sheets to the wind. Traitors. Collaborators. The baron’s business partners and secular
employees, selling out their fellows for a few shillings and the privileges of good food and running water.
Oliver’s eyes jumped from face to face, until they settled on a handlebar moustache to rival the worst
American aristocrat.
Oliver stiffened. “That’s him. Get ready.”
With a grunt and no small manner of squealing from his joints, Tommy lifted himself to his full height. He
always seemed to be fighting his weight; he lurched like a rhinoceros trying to stand on its hind legs.
Tom took a few clanking steps forward. Oliver glanced back, teeth clenched and a grimace on his face.
“I doubt anyone will notice the difference,” said Tommy. He gestured vaguely upward at the ceiling,
where, beyond the steel crossbeams and braces that supported the next floor, some unseen factory or
mechanism chunked and chugged away. The noise echoed everywhere through the concourse.
Oliver grunted, but couldn’t argue.
Tommy noisily hunkered down behind him, peering over Oliver’s shoulder at their comrade across the
street.
An instant before, Missy had been another invisible passerby, clad in drab grey and camouflaged against
the soot-stained streets and thick air, but her pale skin popped to life as she stepped into the lamplight.
With one subtle manipulation of her arms, her short coat fell open at the shoulders, revealing a blouse
slightly too large for her frame. It hung just low enough to reveal a scintillating hint of neck, while looking
for all the world like an innocent mistake of the wardrobe; a fault of the shirt, somehow.
Tommy whistled behind him. “Good Lord, she is a peach.”
Her lips came together, pursed in a perfect, pinched look of utter disdain, a shock of red in a world of
greys and gaslight.
She’s a professional.
Missy cast one glance towards their hiding place, her lips cracking into the barest hint of a smile. She
adjusted the silk ribbons on her hat and smoothed her skirt, fingered her sandy hair where wisps of it
crept down over her ears. Then the distant look returned and she whirled pointedly towards her quarry.
She’s even working us,Oliver marveled.
“Get ready,” he whispered over his shoulder.
Tommy shifted uncomfortably. “But I want to watch.”
“Do your moving before they get here,” Oliver snapped.
“Fine.” Tommy creaked as he rose, then clanked with every step as he retreated to a doorjamb that
barely contained his shoulders.
Oliver’s eyes followed Missy’s approach to the crowd. She walked as if she had somewhere very
important to be. The men all halted and doffed their hats to her as she passed. She gave them each the
barest nod of acknowledgement, fixing each, Oliver knew, though he couldn’t see it, with her lingering
gaze, punctuated by a twitch of the eyebrow, an ever-subtle quickening of the breath. Some stepped
forward to introduce themselves even as she dismissed them with a blink and shifted to the next. This left
a gaggle of befuddled men in her wake, all looking terribly unmanned.
Oliver held his breath.
Missy slowed as she passed the man with the handlebar moustache, a falter in her step, then a pause, the
same interested look.
The target stepped up like a dog to a strip of bacon.
The noise of the factory above prevented any eavesdropping from this distance, but Oliver knew how it
went. The man was extending his hand, offering to walk her home because it was frightfully improper for
a lovely lady like herself to be wandering these streets without a gentleman escort; not the kind of place a
lady would be safe, no sir. And yes, she would quite fancy an escort. Oh! Did she use the word fancy?
Quite improper. A slip of the tongue.
Inside a minute she had the gentleman hanging on her arm. The rest strode off, engaging in excited
conversation over the grand fortune of their comrade and puffing themselves all around as if they’d had
some hand in it.
“Next time, I want to be the lookout,” Tommy said. Oliver could almost picture him stamping his foot
like a boy of five.
Oliver glanced back. “When you put some grease on those joints of yours, I may consider it.”
Tommy’s face contorted in a deep frown. “A right miser, you are. A hoarder.”
“The lion’s share, Tommy. Perks of being a regular John Bull.” He turned back to the street.
To find it empty.
He cast his eyes back and forth. The street was entirely vacant but for the remainder of the pub goers
vanishing into the smog, and the wanderings of one stray dog.
“Something up, mate?” Tommy asked.
The fizzling of the gaslight and the constant smog obscured most of the street. Oliver stuck his head
around the corner, risking detection, and peered into those shadows along the near side of the street,
where Missy was supposed to bring the fox. Nothing. Her white neck, at least, should be visible.
“We’ve lost her, then?” Tommy said.
“She’s run off.” He squinted hard to see into the alleys she would have passed walking that way.
“Maybe she wants a quick peck before we do our thing,” Tommy suggested.
Oliver felt himself flash angry. “Not when we’re on business, surely.”
“She might do it just to get your goat, Chief,” said Tommy.
“At the least, she would signal us before getting out of sight,” Oliver said.
“One would think.”
Oliver scanned the buildings lining the street, apartments stretching the entire five storeys to the roof of
the concourse. Some even went higher, tangling themselves in the braces of the next level: five storeys of
twinkling lights and their attendant residents, any one of which could bring the cloaks crashing down on
them.
There was nowhere to hide once they left the alley. The lampposts shed dim and inconsistent light, but
such was their frequency and the genius of their placement that there was no route down the sidewalk
that would not risk detection. They could not pass for locals anyway, with Oliver’s shabby clothes and
Tommy’s angular bulk sure to arouse suspicion.
“She may have ducked off too early,” Oliver thought aloud. “Do you see a way around to the next
alley?”
“Didn’t notice one,” said Tommy. “Unless you’re game to see where this door goes.”
Oliver retreated from the street into the alley’s darkness. He found Tommy leaning easily on the door
frame, arms crossed. The man’s shoulders stuck out like knife-points under his coat. His iron hand
glinted in the half-light as he tapped his fingers on the door.
Oliver looked past him. The alley ended at the rear wall of another apartment, which provided no
entrance but a blackened window. The manhole they’d come up through led to such a maze that he
balked at the time required to navigate it, especially if Missy was in trouble.
“Can you do itquietly ?” Oliver asked.
Tommy grinned toothily and put a finger to his lips. Oliver gave him a nod.
The big man placed his iron hand flat against the door at the approximate height where a locking bolt
would sit, then leaned in with his shoulder and hip. One sharp push later, the bolt clattered to the floor on
the inside and the door swung open on squealing hinges.
Oliver grimaced. Tommy just shrugged.
From the slip of light bleeding into the room, Oliver surmised it to be a storage room or pantry, of
sufficient size to service the whole building. He set a cautious foot upon the floor within and tested it with
increasing weight. The boards did not squeak. He entered and pattered swiftly across. Tommy followed,
placing each step with great deliberation to avoid clanking, with moderate success.
Oliver felt his way to a door, then scuffed his foot to guide Tommy over to him. In absolute silence
Oliver tried the latch, only to find it locked.
In the dark, no less.He knelt, drew a set of lock picks from his vest pocket and set to work.Probably
did duck for a peck, damnable woman.
In thirty heartbeats the lock ticked. Oliver replaced his lock picks and tried the latch. This time it opened
smoothly.
Oliver pulled the door open an inch and peeked through. Beyond stood a spiral staircase with a thick
oak banister that circled up to the higher floors. A candle flashed upon the stairs: a watchman.
Oliver slid back from the door. He heard the watchman take a few hesitant steps down to the main
floor.
Oliver shrank back against a shelf, wrapping himself in shadow and the scent of cabbage. A few more
steps sounded from beyond. Oliver heard the door handle jiggle.
The door shrieked again as it swung open. A candle poked into the room, followed by an extended
hand holding a billy. Oliver realised with horror that he could clearly see the shine of his own boots in the
candlelight.
A pointy nose appeared, followed by a set of shrewd eyes flicking their gaze about the edges of the
candlelight. Oliver balled his fists and tensed for a quick leap.
The eyes turned his way. Just as they began to widen, and the billy to rise, a monstrous shadow a full
head taller than the watchman materialised behind him.
Tommy popped the man sharply across the back of his head. Oliver darted forth and caught the man as
he collapsed. Burning wax splattered across his hand as he wrested the candle away. The billy clattered
to the floor.
They set him down comfortably, then wasted no time crossing into the hall beyond. They found a series
of dormant pumps and machines in the room across the hall. Oliver led Tommy through to a door on the
far wall. The bolt slid clear easily and the door opened in silence.
They found themselves on a narrow side street devoid of residents and streetlights. Directly across, a
lamplight flickered in the window of a countinghouse. Through the diagonal crosshatch of the glass, Oliver
could see a familiar statuesque figure.
He dashed across the street and silently pulled the door open. He stepped through and Missy nearly put
a knife through his eye.
Oliver clamped his fingers on Missy’s wrist before she could finish her thrust. “For Jesus’ sake!
Michelle, it’s us!”
She wrenched her hand away. “Well, had you announced yourselves like gentlemen, I might have been
more accommodating, but that is a fair amount to expect from you.”
Tommy followed through the doorway, chuckling. “No claim to be gentlemen, miss.”
Missy’s petite upturned nose wrinkled. “You did at one time claim to be part of ateam, did you not?”
She shook the knife at them. “Was it your intention to leave me to my frail, feminine self or were you
simply dawdling?”
“We were in thenext alley, Michelle,” Oliver said, hands still raised in defence, “where you were supposed to bring in the fox.”
She folded up the knife and shoved it into her handbag. “And I suppose it would have been far too much
trouble to cover two alleys.”
“There should have been no need,” Oliver said. He noted ominous blots of colour around Missy’s
fingernails. “Are you all right?”
Missy wiped her hands off on her skirt, leaving dark smears behind. “All right? There’s a plumb joke.”
Oliver’s chest tightened as he spotted a clock hanging on the wall behind her.
“Youwanted his documents,” Missy continued, “and he was lecherous enough to divulge their location.
Do not begrudge a girl a little initiative.”
Oliver saw something dark pass over Missy’s eyes, saw her jaw tighten. Tommy let out a low, buzzing
whistle that knotted up Oliver’s insides.
Dare I?“What is it, Tom?”
“A stinking pile of shit trouble, Chief.”
With clenched teeth, Oliver turned his head. The little office held two desks of black mahogany and a
tidy bookshelf of ledgers and records below the wall clock. Their target lay sprawled in a sea of
scattered papers against the far wall. Dark stains peppered his coat across the chest and stomach, and he
was perfectly still.
Oliver shut his eyes and rubbed them, trying to erase what he’d just seen.
“Thoroughly done” was Tommy’s comment. Oliver opened his eyes again to see Missy fold her arms
tight against her abdomen and stick her nose in the air.
“He overstepped the bounds of propriety,” she said.
Oliver stood aghast, looking back and forth between Missy and the dead man. Missy stared coolly at
the corpse, eyes sunken and dark.
Oliver shook his finger at her. “I’ve gone five years withoutthis, Michelle. This was all you could think
to—” He stopped himself, swallowing his reprimand for a more appropriate time.
“We’ll have words,” he warned.
Missy scowled at him. “I hardly think words are our most pressing concern, Mr. Sumner.”
“Right.” Oliver snatched the dead man’s hat and hung it over the face of the wall clock. If Grandfather
Clock had been looking through it, his gold cloaks would already be on the way. He shared an earnest
look with Tom, then spoke to Missy.
“Where are his documents?”
Missy gestured stiffly at a small steel safe in the corner.
“Tom.”
The big man raised a quizzical eyebrow.
Oliver pointed to the safe. “We can’t make less of a spectacle than we have, I think.”
Tom shrugged, then bent down and hammered the safe door in with a quick blow of his iron knuckles.
He pried it out and tossed it on a desk.
Oliver reached in and retrieved a sheaf of papers bound with string. He flipped through it.
“This is it,” he said. “Back we go.”
They slipped across the street and back through the machine room in the apartment, Oliver in the lead
and Tommy in the rear. The hall and stair beyond were vacant. Oliver led the way across, feeling ahead
of him in what was almost complete darkness. Through vague touches, the pantry door revealed itself.
Oliver grasped the handle and lifted the door slightly before opening it, which served to dull the noise to a
whimper. He waved the others forward and entered the room.
He saw a flash of movement in the shadows and ducked low. Boxes and tins from the shelf behind
rained down on him as the watchman’s next blow swept high. A warm body came in close against him,
and he tilted his shoulder and ploughed into it. He caught his foot on a tin and stumbled, but not before
propelling his assailant away. He lost track of the other man in the crash of more falling tins.
Oliver scrambled back to his feet and tried to raise his hand in front of his face. Something moved in
front of him, hidden by the darkness. He heard a few clanks, then a few wet crunches.
Tommy’s voice drifted out of the dark. “Let’s get on.”
Suddenly thankful for the dark, Oliver led the way to the door and out into the alley. Missy was next out
the door, stepping down from the stoop, the picture of poise and ladyship. Tommy shambled after,
wiping his iron hand with a white handkerchief. Oliver picked up a pry bar from where he’d hidden it and
levered the sewer hole open. Instead of escaping, Missy produced a cloth sack from beneath her skirt
and handed it to Tommy, who accepted it without comment.
Oliver stepped onto the first rung of the ladder within the manhole. The stench of sewage and grease
floated up to greet him.
Missy peeled off her tweed short coat and stuffed it in the bag.
Oliver waited a moment to be acknowledged, but Missy remained oblivious. She added her hat to the
bag, then began on her skirt.
“Surely you can do that once we get to safety.”
“I will not,” said Missy, jaw and neck tight as cords, “allow my good clothing to traverse your vile sewer
exit unprotected.”
“Aldgate hastelephones ,” Oliver stressed. “If anyone in the building heard us, they’ll be bringing the
cloaks right down on us.”
Missy made no reply. She stepped out of the grey tweed skirt and added it to the sack. Beneath she
wore a smaller skirt of worn and stained wool, a match in quality to the poorer attire Oliver and Tommy
wore.
“Be a dear and carry that for me, would you?” she asked. Tommy shrugged and nodded.
Still not gracing Oliver with a look, Missy proceeded to the manhole, shouldered him aside, and swiftly
lowered herself in.
Tommy stepped up. “You’re in for it now, mate,” he said, shooting Oliver a wink. He tucked the bag
under his arm and slipped down into the underground.
“You’ve no idea.”
These papers are probably the only thing that will keep Bailey from shooting me.
Instead of capturing their fox, they’d left him stiff and cold, and been spotted on top of it. Oliver had not
presided over so botched an operation since the Uprising. He clutched the papers tight in his hands and
forced that particular set of memories into the dark.
He placed his feet on the ladder and started his descent. As he pulled the manhole cover back into
place, he heard the clear report of approaching feet running in perfect time.
He dropped the cover down, and his world became dark and silence and stink.

Prologue

 Prologue
Ancient, let your colours fly, but have a great care of the butcher’s hooks at Whitechapel; they have
been the death of many a fair ancient.
—From Beaumont and Fletcher’sKnight of the Burning Pestle
With a hiss of steam, mechanisms inside the walls shot a steel beam across the door as Aaron slammed
it and leapt away. Something struck the door from the other side with a deafening impact, and the surface
of the steel door bent into an impression of knuckles twice the size of a man’s.
Searching his coat pockets for a weapon, Aaron stumbled back into Joseph, who grabbed him by the
shoulder and shook him.
“Lad,” Joseph cried. “There’s no way out!”
Aaron threw off the older man’s hand and shoved past him onto the walkway. “There’s always a way.”
But there wasn’t. Barely visible through the currents of smog and falling ash, the walkway took a sharp
downward twist, ending in a tangle of rent braces. It was a gap of almost thirty feet to the other tower; in
between, only hot, stinking wind and a hundred-storey drop to the street below.
Joseph moved up beside him and wrapped his white-knuckled ham fists around the bent rail. “Tell me
ye’ve got some flying machine in them pockets of yours, lad,” he said between clenched teeth.
Another impact cut the air as Aaron frantically dug through the many pockets of his greatcoat. His
fingers closed over lenses, tools, dynamite, compasses, devices for measuring pressure and voltage, and
a dozen other objects whose function he could not remember just then. Nothing that could provide a
crossing. With a shock of realisation, he willed his hands still.
“It was here,” he said. “I checked on it just an hour ago.”
“Bugger all.” Joseph slammed one fist down on the rail and looked up into the muddy sky. “A damn dog
deserves better,” he said. Then he bent forward and began to quietly pray.
Aaron struggled to control his suddenly rapid breath. “There’s a way, Joseph. I just need to think.”
“Not every problem falls to thinkin’” was the reply.
On the next impact, one of the bolt’s fittings popped loose from the wall and the door fell open an entire
inch.
“If it had been any other walkway…” Aaron looked to both sides, where similar walkways stretched
between the two hulking buildings.

 “Aye, but it isn’t,” Joseph said, drawing a heavy army revolver from his jacket pocket. “I think it’s time
ye made yer peace, lad. Let’s make a fight of it.”
“One cannot fight the Boiler Men,” said Aaron, suppressing the chill in his stomach and wishing he
hadn’t sounded so certain.
“We’ll see” was Joseph’s reply.
Trembling, Aaron withdrew a tin box from one of his pockets. He unscrewed the lid and looked at the
thin coiled strip of paper inside. Coded letters ran its length in small type.
Think…
A boot sheathed in iron slammed into the bottom corner of the door, folding it up like tin. Unblinking
electric light spilled from the hole onto the walkway, mingling with the hazy glare from the towers above.
Aaron quickly screwed the lid back onto the box and wished he’d had the time to decode it. He
withdrew a stick of dynamite and a pack of matches, conscious that the walkway was too small to
escape the explosion when it came.
How many times had he been told that he must be ready to die for England?
How many times had he told others the same thing?
He readied a match and waited.
There must be a way…
The air shuddered as a blast of steam exploded through the hole in the door. It struck Joseph first and
the Irishman’s scream cut the night. As the white cloud crashed over him, Aaron threw his arms in front
of his face. Too late: the steam swept over his hands and head, scorching every inch of exposed skin.
The pain drove him to his knees. He crawled blindly towards the walk’s edge, where he pitched his head
over the end and took a laboured breath of the foul Whitechapel air, collapsing into a fit as the ashes and
grit sanded his raw lungs.
He heard the door pop loose from its hinges with one final strike and felt it clatter to the walkway, and
he realised they would never escape.
There’s a way…
Aaron’s eyes quivered open. He spotted Joseph’s twitching form through the dissipating steam and
dragged himself towards his friend. His raw fingers tore on the walk, a sting even more painful than the
fire all over his skin.
Aaron grasped Joseph’s sleeve. “There’s a way!”
Joseph’s eyes streamed tears as he cried and screamed. Aaron shoved the tin box into Joseph’s hands
and forcibly closed the old man’s fingers around it.
“Aaron!” Joseph said. “I can’t get up! I can’t…”
Aaron shoved the tin closer to the man’s chest.
“You can take it back,” he choked out. “Find someone who can read it.”
Without waiting for an answer, he planted his foot on Joseph’s chest and shoved. The other man let out
a yelp before rolling backwards off the walk and into space. In seconds, the grey of Whitechapel’s smog
swallowed him, though his muted scream echoed from the towers for some moments longer.
The pounding of iron-shod feet shook the air. Aaron stared down after his falling friend, crying freely.
You’d probably want me to die on my feet.
Aaron slung one arm over the bent railing and hauled himself up. He turned to the monstrous shapes
silhouetted in the doorway’s glow. The gaze of those cold glass eyes made him feel shriveled and small,
and he found he could not stop shaking.
He wished he’d chosen a different walkway. He wished he hadn’t lost the matches. He wished he’d
done a thousand things differently.
The Boiler Men reached for him with iron hands and he wished most of all that he wasn’t about to die.

The First Day
A horrible black labyrinth, think many people, reeking from end to end with the vilest exhalations; its
streets, mere kennels of horrent putrefaction; its every wall, its every object, slimy with the indigenous
ooze of the place; swarming with human vermin, whose trade is robbery and whose recreation is murder;
the catacombs of London darker, more tortuous and more dangerous than those of Rome, and saturated
with foul life.
—Arthur G. Morrison, 1889