This street was noisy, but the noise was drifting over from pubs on the Bankside wharves. There was no one here. A silk tendril drew her mask from a pocket, and she took it in her hands and placed it on her face, holding it there as the silk straps snaked through her hair and tied themselves behind her head.
Two tentacles rose from behind her and latched onto the top of a wall, and then she soared up and squatted on it. She gripped the crumbling edge of the bricks as dizziness swamped her.
Stella blinked a few times, then dropped into the yard. The factory was shut tight, lights out, staff all home for the evening except a lonely caretaker.
She moved to the one lit window. It was an office and the caretaker was sitting inside. He had a cup of tea and an open book on the table before him and was smoking a cigarette
She moved past the window to the door. A tendril of silk poked out of her sleeve and slid through the keyhole. Inside, it searched for the lock mechanism. She closed her eyes, concentrating hard. It was difficult, because the silk brought very limited senses with it. It lacked the ability to properly feel. She could tell when it met resistance, but not much else.
Her mother had her training to learn to pick locks this way. So far, unsuccessfully.
With a sigh, she withdrew her silk. A quick but silent patrol revealed that none of the windows had been left open. Breaking in would leave a trace of her passage, so wasn’t an option.
More tentacles disentangled from her back and reached out for purchases on the walls, and she slowly rose to the roof as they pulled her up.
The roof access door was propped open with a brick and cigarette butts lay around it. Smiling slightly, she nudged it further open. The stairs inside were metal; she avoided the noisy steps by having her tentacles lower her down. The factory was three storeys high, but these stairs had only the roof and ground floor access.
Downstairs, she made her way into the factory. She had expected it to be a huge room, but it was instead a lot of smaller areas. There was one that seemed to belong to a master carpenter and his apprentices. Here he made wooden butts, sockets, and any other parts that required carpentry.
Beside his room was an engraving workshop where the wooden pieces of custom orders had runes carved into them.
Another area held a furnace and blacksmith tools.
The men who worked here were clearly expert craftsmen, and the prosthetic limbs were masterworks of function, art, and magic. The doctor’s explanation had been in-depth. This factory didn’t produce clunker or even mech limbs, it dealt solely with the sparklies.
The prosthetics were custom-built because the runes mapped to the wearer’s nervous system, and were praediti only because the ability to sense the aetheric current feeding back was essential to their operation.
Not all praediti could have limbs that cost upwards of £250 and averaged at £500 though.
At the southern side of the factory was a small room, the walls made of a dull, grey metal. She stopped outside the windowless metal door. Lead, she guessed, because lead was the only thing that made sense. These limbs were runic powered, and runes required aetherium. Aetherium required lead-lined storage.
She left the room alone, she didn’t need to see the aetherium pellets.
At the north end of the factory, she found the offices. As efficiently as she could, she searched through files, but nothing stood out to her. Orders came in from the clinic and prosthetics were built and sent out to it. Materials were supplied from various places, but nothing seemed odd. The aetherium came from Alcheringa, shipped via Australia. The steel came from Sheffield, willow from East Anglia, and walnut from the Kanata Confederacy, via Glasgow. The copper came from Tawantinsuyu and was refined in Sheffield, though some of it went to Birmingham first, to become brass. The leather came from Bermondsey, the rubber from Malay, ceramics from Stoke-on-Trent. Mercury came from the Western Federation.
There was nothing here. No European coal shipments like the warehouse had. Everything seemed legit and had uses in the production process. She’d seen the materials themselves, in half constructed limbs.
Stella sighed. Sometimes there were no convenient clues, sometimes investigations hit dead ends. Well, she still had one more location to check tonight.
Just over an hour later, she pushed her bike into some bushes in Beaufort Street and climbed a tree to consider number eleven Chelsea Park Gardens. The street was shaped like a lowercase d, and Beaufort Street was the line it was written on. The space inside the d was a communal grass area with a sundial in the centre, and number eleven sat alone at the base of the d. The other houses on the street stretched out in parallel lines to either side of it, set at 90 degrees and separated by lawns, and straight ahead of it Beaufort Street had a row of trees. Behind it was the communal green with the sundial.
Somehow, number eleven was a lonely island in a busy London street.
She sat on a high branch and watched the house for a while. This was where the owner of the factory, clinic, and warehouse lived. This was the home of Doctor Jekyll.
It was a busy home. She watched it for three hours and saw numerous men arriving and leaving. They came on their own and stayed for just over an hour. They kept their heads down, faces obscured by high collars on their coats, and their hats. From the clothing, these were men of money. From the lightness in how they walked when they left, their pockets were no longer weighed down by coin.
All of the answers were inside that building.
It was made of bricks of various shades of brown, and the door had been painted red. She watched as a police officer entered and waited until he left forty-five minutes later. Doctor Jekyll having the police on his side was a bad sign, but not unexpected. Detective Inspector Donald was the only officer in London who could be trusted.
It was close to two in the morning by this point, and lights still burned in all the windows. It seemed the household never slept. She would need to break in whilst the occupants were awake.
She could do that.
She was fairly certain she could do that.
She dropped from the tree and stumbled on landing, one hand gripping the trunk to steady her. She was never going to that chip shop again.
After a moment, the dizziness passed, and she checked the street to make sure it was deserted, then sprinted to the side of the house. She kept her body low to avoid detection.
Her tentacles pulled her up the wall, and she stopped by a window on the first floor. Inside was a bedroom, where an old white man was in bed with a young Black woman. His expensive clothes had been tossed on the floor, and he lay on his back with his eyes closed. She moved atop him, her expression blank, her occasional moans suggesting enjoyment, but her lifeless eyes proving that a lie.
Stella moved up to the second floor. Another lit window, another bedroom, just the same as the last. Chest of drawers, dressing table with a vase of flowers, bed all in the same place. The discarded clothes were in different locations, and the people were different. A young white man and a young Asian woman. He was on top of her, sweat beading on his skin.
Frowning, Stella moved horizontally to the next window on this level and wished she hadn’t. An ancient white man with a long white beard was in bed with two Black women young enough to be his granddaughters. Bed, dressing table with vase of flowers, chest of drawers, everything was the same, even the carpets and the paint. The woman’s fake enthusiasm, the man’s disgusting delight, all of it repeated over and over.
She was starting to think this wasn’t a house.
Like a giant spider, she moved up the wall to the loft. Another bedroom, chest of drawers, dressing table with vase of flowers, identical carpet, bed in the same place. Another white man in bed with a young Asian woman. She looked bored. He’d kept his top hat on. Stella moved away.
The last window in the loft was dark. Inside, a bedroom. She slipped the window up and slid through the gap. The house was loud, moans and grunts from all directions, music from far below to drown it out. The room smelled of sex and sweat and the lavender in a vase on the dressing table.
This was definitely not a house.
She moved to the table and pulled the lavender out of the vase. It was the wrong flower for this place; it didn’t belong here. In the language of the florist-spies, lavender said purity, and this building was not pure. Someone here was using the florist-spy language to lie, and that was unacceptable. She slid the lavender into her belt, feeling better about the situation as she did so.
This wasn’t a house, but it was still connected to the clinic, factory, and warehouse, and she needed to know how. She was moving towards the door when it opened and an Indian woman walked in, followed by an older man in a long overcoat and top hat, and with a cane. The woman started shrieking, the man lifted his cane as if to strike her.
“Who the blazes are you?” he demanded.
Stella pushed past them, into the tiny hall beyond. There were only the stairs down and the door to the other bedroom. The grunting had stopped and footsteps were approaching it.
She leapt down the stairs.
Three bedrooms, a bathroom, stairs down. There was yelling and shrieking from overhead, demands to know what was going on from everywhere, and the music downstairs had stopped.
This was bad. Too many witnesses. Too much attention. She started down the stairs as he started up them, and they both paused and stared at each other.
“You,” he said, which was about the level of observation she should have expected from the mooncalf.
“Brick,” she replied. “We’ve been looking for you.” DI Donald had been looking for him everywhere since he’d disappeared from the hospital she’d put him in.
Previous Chapter: Chapter Twelve
Next Chapter: Chapter Fourteen
Author’s Note
That scene was probably hard to read. It was certainly hard to write. The difficulty is the point, really. The queerguide has a context post on why I included this scene.
As always, the queerguide is optional.
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