Julia Vanishes (3 page)

“I don't hear anything,” says the professor, rising. I can see his confusion at finding me in his room fading already as he accepts the more reasonable explanation: that I was coming in, not going out.

“It's stopped,” I say. “Is it something got into the cellar, do you think? Is Mr. Darius all right down there?”

Mr. Darius is the ailing, aristocratic houseguest who has a room in the cellar and, as far as I can tell, keeps a very unhappy nocturnal pet. I only hope he is not the cause of the suffering down there. Wondering about it gives me chills every time I have to pour his coffee.

“There's no need to worry, Edna,” says Professor Baranyi soothingly.

“Ella,” I correct him, then bite my tongue, wishing I hadn't.

“Quite—pardon me. There is a door down there that needs fixing, you see. The wind catches it sometimes and makes some awful echoing sounds in the passageway. We must see to it, but please don't be frightened.”

He's not a bad liar, if not near as good as I am.

I look down at my bare feet. “I shouldn't have barged in on you. I was ever so frightened. But I ought not to have bothered you. I'm so embarrassed, sir.”

“Nobody need hear about it,” he comforts me, and I hope he means it. Mrs. Och would be less inclined to credulous sympathy, I somehow think. “Now, perhaps you had better get back to bed.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” I duck out the door.

The relief of moving again is tremendous. I nearly fly up the stairs, slipping back into the housemaids' room as quietly as I can. I ease myself onto the cold sheets. The bed screams its usual protest, and Florence's eyes fly open.

“Where were you?” she says, in a cold and alarmingly awake little voice.

“Privy,” I grunt back, pulling the blankets over me. After a minute I give a snore, but I can feel her beady little eyes still watching me.

T
he following day is Temple Day, and we housemaids are given the day off. Besides Florence and Chloe, Frederick is the only member of the household to attend temple with any regularity. I am supposedly going to my hometown of Jepta, a nondescript village about an hour north of Spira City. Gregor even took me out there once in case I encountered anyone who knew the place, made me walk around memorizing alleyways and chatting with grocers and cobblers so that I would know their names. Esme, for her part, concocted an impressively dull family for me; I have endless dull details about them and their dullness to share should anybody be interested, but nobody is. After all, I'm just the new housemaid.

Except, of course, that I'm not.

Mrs. Och generously gives me the fare to Jepta, so I buy myself a hot breakfast on Lirabon Avenue, sitting shoulder to shoulder at the bar with the students and artists and poor aristocrats who live in the area. Mrs. Och's house is on Mikall Street, in a well-to-do neighborhood near the bustling center of the Scola, the university quarter, which hugs the southern bank of the river Syne. The Twist is just across the river from here, an easy walk, but a gray sleet is falling, and I am bristling with impatience, so I flag down a motor cabriolet. It is still early, and the streets are relatively quiet. There are a few miserable-looking horses pulling old-fashioned carriages over the cobblestones, and I see one silent electric hackney slipping by us down a side street, its occupants dressed all in white. As we near Cyrambel Temple, hulking darkly between the Scola and the Twist on the very edge of the river Syne, the street becomes impassable. Carriages and cabriolets are stopped, pedestrians in their temple-best clothes are milling about and talking to strangers in an avid way that can only mean one thing: a death.

“I'll get out here,” I tell the cabbie, and pay him with Mrs. Och's coins. I figure I'll be faster on foot.

I fight my way through the crowds to Anopine Bridge, where I see the blue coats and feathered hats of the soldiers, the police officers drab and glum in comparison. At the center of the fray is a blanket laid over what I assume is a body. The pavement all around it is dark with blood.

“Back off, girl,” a soldier snarls, aiming a shove my way, but I dodge his arm neatly and wink. His mouth twitches and he turns his broad back on me.

“What happened?” I ask a gossipy-looking old hen in an apron.

“Girl from Nim!” She rounds on me, delighted to have somebody new to tell the story to. “They've just identificated her! She was to be governess to Lord Snow's little ones!”

That's a shock. You don't often find wellborn girls dead on bridges. The old hen sticks her face right in mine, and I can smell her breakfast of salty broth and weak tea. “You hear about the banker in Nim they found just yesterday? The cabaret dancer the day before that?”

I shake my head. I've not left Mrs. Och's house in a week and don't pay much attention anyway to news from far-off places. Nim is a port city in the south of Frayne. My mother was born in a village not far from there. I've never seen the sea, myself.

“Tops of their heads sliced off,” she carries on gleefully. “And their
brains
'd been messed with! This one is just the same, and this girl, she
came from Nim on the train yesterday.
They found her ticket in her purse!”

“You reckon it's a copycat, or the killer came with her?” someone asks. A small crowd is forming around us now to hear the story told again.

“Oh, the killer's here in Spira City now, no doubt about that,” declares the hen authoritatively. “I saw her body meself before they covered her up. Shan't recover from that sight, I tell you!” She affects a tragic mask, though as far as I can tell this is the most exciting thing that's ever happened to her.

“Move along, all of you!” shouts one of the soldiers, but the mass of bodies keeps pressing in, gaping and gossiping, wanting a glimpse of the body. Soon the soldiers will start threatening violence, and then the crowd will disperse.

I make my way across the bridge and into my old familiar territory. Narrow streets wind their way between the cramped apartments, groceries, and tobacconists. Stray cats seek shelter from the sleet; glowering faces peer out of fogged windows. Despite the weather, the market stalls are already set up in Fitch Square and are spilling out into the surrounding alleyways. The broken statue of some kind of sea beast burbles a bit of water into the fountain at the center of the square. Esme owns several rooms on the east side of the square, including mine and Dek's. We get room and board, and sometimes a little extra, depending on the job.

Esme was born the day of old King Zey's coronation, the illegitimate daughter of a courtesan. Her mother died in childbirth, and Esme grew up in the brothel, raised by seventeen whores, if you can imagine that. Now she's got a finger in every unlawful pie but that one, having no taste for the selling of bodies, and presides over her own little empire in the Twist. Crime doesn't pay what it used to, with the Crown building more prisons north of the city and hanging folks left and right, but it still pays better than honest work. Since the big men who used to run the Twist are mostly dead or in jail, half the crooks around here work for Esme, who keeps a low profile and doesn't take risks.

I head straight up to the main parlor, technically part of Esme's apartment, but it is always open to us. Benedek, my brother, is tinkering with a flat metallic object, but he raises a distracted hand in greeting. A lock mechanism is in pieces on the table in front of him. For the past few weeks, he has been working on a magnetic lockpick that he claims will open anything. Esme is kneeling by the fire, blowing on it vigorously. She rises, clapping the ashes from her hands, and gives me a warm smile. I am of an average height, but Esme dwarfs me. She wears men's trousers because she's impossible to fit for dresses and can't be bothered to go to the expense of having them made specially. Her short hair is nearly white, but her face is only subtly lined.

“I'll get you some coffee, love,” she says, and hands me a towel to dry my hair with. “Good to see you.”

“You too,” I say, toweling off and then throwing the towel at Dek to make him look up. He catches it and laughs at me. I peel my wet coat off and throw myself down in a chair. The fire is blazing nicely now, and I shift a little so my feet are closer to it. It's such a blessed relief not to have to scrub a floor, carry water or coal up the stairs, polish a grate or another blasted candlestick. To be
home.

“Saw a dead girl over by Cyrambel,” I tell them, and repeat what the gossipy old hen told me.

“Poor thing,” says Esme, handing me a mug of steaming coffee. “This city is a dangerous place for a girl on her own. You be sensible, my Julia. I don't want to hear about you on a bridge one day.”

“Wouldn't happen to me,” I say, slapping my boot where I keep my knife tucked away.

“It won't happen to you because you'll be smart and not go wandering about on your own at night,” says Dek, giving me a hard look. “Not because you've got a six-inch knife so snug in your boot lining it would take you five minutes to get it out.”

“Nine inches,” I say, grinning at him. “And look.”

I whip the knife out at the same moment that he lunges for me, twisting my wrist back so the knife falls to the ground with a clatter and I spill my coffee.

“Flaming Kahge, Dek, relax!” I shout.

He is breathing hard, his bad leg twisted beneath him. Esme chuckles, sips her coffee.

“My point,” he says slowly, “is you be smart, Julia. You be careful.”

“I'm careful,” I say, shoving him away from me. I'm only a little bit angry, though. He worries about me, I know, and the truth is, it makes me feel safe to have him worry. Like his love can keep me safe. You'd think I'd know better; love doesn't keep anyone safe. But he's my older brother, and worrying about me is what he does.

Dek and I were born in the Twist. I was seven and he was ten when our mother was killed and our father disappeared. Dek begged, I stole, according to the fortunes the Nameless One had bestowed upon us. That was the summer after the Scourge swept across Frayne, decimating the population. It was the worst Scourge in living memory—corpses were rotting in ditches and people barely went out. In our house, it touched only Benedek. I was sent to stay with an aunt in the countryside who beat me, and I cried every day, not because of the beatings but because Dek was going to die.

Only he didn't. A child surviving the Scourge was unheard of. Dek not only survived; he survived with his
self
intact, unlike the trembling, ravaged, half-witted survivors you sometimes see begging along the river. A decade later, he wears his curling black hair long to cover the scars and the unmistakable dark blots of the Scourge that deform the right side of his face, the empty eye socket now sewn shut. His right side is blighted, the arm and leg withered and nearly useless. It is as if the Scourge raged through him but stopped halfway and turned back again. From the left, he is quite handsome, with a strong jaw and a straight nose. He gets around well enough with a crutch. Most days he counts himself lucky to be alive, but I know there are dark days too, when it doesn't feel so much like luck.

People are terrified of Scourge survivors, as if the contagion might still be present in them, but Esme never flinched at the sight of him. She'd lost her own son to the Scourge, and her husband to a failed revolution, and I don't think anything frightens Esme anymore. She took us both in, taught us how to read and a great many other things besides. They became our new family: Esme, her colleagues Gregor and Csilla, and beautiful Wyn, her adopted son, a lanky ten-year-old then. I fell in love with him on first sight, when I was barely eight years old. He winked at me, and I was lost.

Gregor and Csilla arrive midday, after temple, as I am writing up my report. They come sweeping in and have a way of making the comfortable parlor seem suddenly dingy and small. They are recently back from working a long con in Ingle—one of their classics. Csilla plays the damsel in distress, a Fraynish lady trapped in Ingle with her abusive husband, lacking funds to escape him and flee to her powerful family. Each time, several rich, besotted gallants come eagerly to her rescue and provide her full fare home, that she might be free of her monstrous husband. I'm sure Gregor has had a wonderful time playing the ogre. Needless to say, they've both been having a better time than I have.