Chapter Twenty-three: A Plan Defeated

When she was finished reporting, it seemed her mother would say something, but she kept her silence as Maria approached. “I’m sorry,” the healer said. “I must check your heridas.”

A few minutes later, after Maria said it was safe for Stella to move, her mother decided they needed air and led her outside. They walked slowly down St Anne’s Passage, and across the grass to the Cut. For a while they stood in silence, together, staring at the water.

“Tell me about these women you think God wants you to save,” her mother said.

“It may not be God,” Stella admitted. “I don’t believe God would transform Maria’s brother into a tree. That seems unholy, not divine.”

“The mysterious voice, then, that talks to my daughter in her dreams and grants her phenomenal cosmic power. Tell me about the women this voice wants you to save.”

“I control silk, mama. It’s hardly a phenomenal cosmic power. It’s an itty bitty power, really.”

“Stella Harmony Catherine Maris, tell me about the prostitutes!”

Stella gasped. “Mama, you can’t just shout about prostitutes in the open street like that. Not even in the Eastend.”

Her mother gave her a flat look.

Stella ducked her head, smiling, then saw three stones on the ground, together. She bent and picked them up, wiping the excess dirt off. “It’s hard to say,” she explained, focusing on the stones. “I was climbing that wall, looking in those windows. There was nothing in there, of the women I saw. Not in them, not in the rooms. Every room was exactly the same. The same colour walls, the same carpeted floor. The same dresser and drawers, the same vase of lavender, in the exact same place in each room.” She moved two of the stones to her left hand and tossed the other one up and down in her right. “I saw the women there, doing what they did. I could see their faces. They looked dead inside, as if they had died and now they were haunting themselves. There was nothing of them in them.” Stella tossed her stone into the Cut. It skimmed once on the water, sank on the second hit. “I stole the lavender from the room I entered. I wasn’t even sure why, at first, but it seemed wrong to me, to put something that means purity in a place like that. So, I took it, and then I met Brick, and then I was downstairs.” She handed the second stone to her mother. “There was a… woman, downstairs; older than the rest, middle-aged in a house of young beauty. She seemed to be in charge, and she was holding a shotgun. I took it off her.” Her mother skimmed the stone, making it jump seven times down the canal. She didn’t interrupt. “Another girl. She asked who I was. I said I was Nobody, because I don’t have a codename. I asked who she was, and she told me her name was Violet. I promised her I wouldn’t hurt her, and then I left. That was that. My entire interaction with her, with any of them. I just keep thinking, mama, I saved the sek tos lavender, you know? I left the actual people.”

“Do stop attempting to swear, Stella, you’re not a goblin, even if you act like one. I will consider codenames. Yours could be Tee, as Farnika suggested.”

Stella smiled at the slight rebuke and tossed her stone into the water. It sank without skimming once, stupid stone. “Yours could be Moon; it’s what Selene means, isn’t it?”

Her mother didn’t answer for a long moment. When she finally spoke, she didn’t address the question. “When I was just a little older than you are, a few years, and after… well, everything. I was all alone in the world; penniless, homeless, hungry. I made the choice a lot of women make in that situation. I’ve been where these woman you want to rescue are, Stella. There are three main reasons women turn to this kind of thing: want, need, and force. Some women want to do it; it gives them independence and freedom without the need of a husband. It can, in the right crowds, be incredibly lucrative. Some women need to do it; they are starving or, more often, their children are. Sometimes the things they hunger for aren’t food, but the cravings of an addict are still a form of need. Lastly, some women are forced into it. They are often taken far from their homes, perhaps to somewhere they don’t know much of the language, and everything they earn goes into the pockets of a man who practically owns them.”

“That third type, mama. It describes the woman I saw.”

“When you go to them, Stella, you need to understand they might choose not to follow you.”

“They will. You’ll see.”

There was a crowd outside the church when they arrived, another Romani family that had stopped, another group of eight teenagers leaving. Stella saw Madeleine Girard petting one of the horses. For once, her expression was something other than Parisian disdain.

“I’ll stay here, and handle our gentle exodus,” Selene said. “You go rescue those women. Take the aether brace; I’ll set the receiver up. Message me when you are in range with them, and I’ll come meet you. Do not bring them straight to the church.”

“Of course, mama.” Stella took a motorcab home and had it drop her a distance from the house, near the same chip shop she’d been at before. It had been the baron making her ill, but that didn’t mean she trusted the fish now.

She reached her home quickly and headed to the kitchen. Her two outfits for fighting were dirty, so she was going to have make a new one. That was fine, the jacket, mask, and boots were the only parts she couldn’t easily recreate. Her clothes shifted around her as she made toast on the stove. The inner layers dropped away, carrying any sweat with them. The outer layers changed shape and colour, and by the time she was spreading marmalade across a slice of toast, she was wearing black silk trousers and a black silk top, with her breasts bound in a bandeau and boy shorts instead of petticoats.

She took the backstairs from the kitchen to the first floor, and fetched her jacket, mask, gloves, aether brace, and boots from her room, finished her toast, shoved a slightly bruised apple in her pocket, and left the house.

Then stood in the garden, frowning. It was a long way to where the brothel was. Nine miles. A very long way. She could have done it in forty minutes on her bike, but her bike was still chained up in bushes outside the brothel she was going to.

She should have asked to borrow one of the Romani family’s horses at the church. That would have been fun.

Stella cut through her back garden, using her tentacles to pull her atop the high brick wall that surrounded the house. The properties here were well-spaced out, with trees surrounding them. Most of them were ancient English oaks, but there were some beech, sycamores, and yews interspersed with them. Across the road from her were even more trees, and a silk tentacle shot out and caught one of their branches, then pulled her up to it.

She perched there, took a deep breath, readied herself, and leapt off. Her tentacles snapped out, catching branches; she’d swing beneath them and then the tentacle would release just before another one caught a branch in front of her, and she swung beneath again. Her movements carried her deeper into the trees, away from the road, and then parallel to it, swinging her along much faster than she could walk. She kicked off trunks when they got in the way. She startled birds into flight, she shot over someone out walking their dog, leaving the dog barking and the old man shouting about eccentric artists.

There were houses along this side of the road, so she moved further back, whipping through their gardens, and then the trees ran out, and she was forced to walk the last dozen or so yards from Hampstead Lane into Highgate High Street.

It was around five in the evening by this point, and the high street was busy. It was the last hour before the shops closed, and maids were out buying essentials for the evening dinner. Motorbuses trundled past at regular intervals, and school children headed very slowly homewards. Older gentlemen took gentle evening strolls, and two women had stopped a younger one with a baby and were remarking on how cute little Christopher was, how much he looked like his father, and asking his sister, Xandra, if she was helping look after him.

Stella took it all in as she walked through the street, mask in her pocket and hood down. She’d shifted her clothing to a dark blue and was hoping it would look normalish enough to pass as artistic weird.

It was one of the main reasons they lived in Highgate, after all.

It didn’t take her much longer to reach Archway and then she joined the steadily moving queue of people descending underground. The subway tunnels were warm, and the sudden wind brought by a passing train just blasted hot air at them.

She stepped onto a crowded south-bound Northern Line train, wondering at the etiquette of underground railways. Men wore hats outdoors, but removed them inside, but wore them in underground stations and on the tube. So, being in a train counted as outside? It was confusing.

She didn’t have a hat, so it wasn’t something to be unduly concerned about, but she liked to try and puzzle out the behaviours of others, so she thought about it as she took a seat. There was a man beside her doing the London Eye crossword.

“Gin,” she told him.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Five across. Countryman’s snare for rabbits. Gin. And four down is snipe.”

He slowly closed his newspaper and pocketed his pencil.

“Just trying to help,” she said.

“Please refrain from doing so,” he replied.

She left the train at Leicester Square, changing to a westbound District Line that was almost entirely filled with men in suits. The offices had closed, and the evening commuters were heading home.

She left that train at Sloane Square and walked down King’s Road, finally turning her attention to what she was about to do. She’d have to put Brick down fast. That was going to be difficult, he wasn’t an easy target to subdue. Maybe with the chloroform? He could rip her silk apart.

The first time they’d fought, she’d had him charge into walls and pillars, dropped a tonne of wooden beams on his head from twenty feet up, covered him in creosote and set him on fire, and none of it had phased him. In the end, it seemed to be the smoke from the wood he’d set on fire by thrashing about like a sun-blinded bear that had knocked him out. That way was too long and too dangerous for anyone nearby.

The second time he’d have killed her if it wasn’t for a wayward journalist.

Step one, deal with Brick.

Okay, assuming she made it past step one, step two had to be talking to the prostitutes. What could she say to them? Introductions first, of course. Followed by an explanation of why she was there, and what would happen to them if they followed her.

What would happen to them if they followed her? What could she do with twenty former prostitutes?

She should have spent more time planning this part.

Stella turned onto Beaufort Street and realised that wasn’t the only oversight she’d made. Brick had brought down a staircase and knocked down part of the outer wall, and the garden wall, just two days ago.

The Sabinis had moved the women who worked there.

Sighing, she retrieved her bicycle from the bushes she had hidden it in. Finding a prostitute in London wouldn’t be difficult, but finding these specific prostitutes in London would take an expert.

Previous Chapter: Chapter Twenty-two

Next Chapter: Chapter Twenty-four

Author’s Note

Hi, there’s a context post over on the queerguide today about sex, politics, and the things Selene says in this chapter. I think it’s super important, but I think everything I write is super important, and you absolutely don’t need to read it.