White Space

“Shhh. You know the rules.” Nodding at Doyle, who thrust her right arm into a sleeve of the strong dress, Bode tipped her a wink. “Not that I blame you,” he said, as Doyle shoved her left arm to. “Got a good one off. Wouldn’t mind taking Weber down a notch …” He grunted as she bucked, arching her back and thrashing. “Now, Miss Elizabeth,” he said, expertly rolling her onto one side before straddling and then holding her clamped between his legs as he secured the strong dress with leather straps. She heard the chink of metal chain and the snick of hasps. “None of that. You’ll make it worse for yourself.”

“All right, that’s enough.” It was Kramer, somewhere over her head, out of sight. “I’ll finish dressing her wounds. Bode, if you would, make sure the others stay back while I tend to her? And for God’s sake, someone find that surgeon.”

“N-no,” she said, and choked on thick blood. She tried to spit it out but was so weak her tongue only managed to shove a gob of foamy spit past her lips. She could feel it worm down her jaw like a slug. “Puh-please, Bode, d-don’t leave …”

“I can stay.” Bode sounded both sympathetic and, she thought, pretty freaked out. “I don’t mind. She knows me, sir. She’ll listen to me. Please, sir, I want to help her.”

“No. Thank you for your assistance, Bode, but if you and the constable would now withdraw?” There was a pause, followed by the fading clop of boots. Through a haze of pain and blood, she saw Kramer suddenly float into her field of vision like a bad dream.

“Well,” Kramer said, reaching into an inner pocket of his waistcoat and withdrawing a pair of brassy spectacles, “let’s take a look at the damage, shall we?”

Her breath thinned to a wheeze as he unfolded the earpieces. Yet only when she caught a flash of purple and saw him carefully unhinge the third and fourth lenses was she certain. I was right. He knows …

“Ah,” Kramer said, and used the tip of his pinky to push his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. As he did so, she heard an anomalous sound, something that didn’t belong: the faint tick of metal … against metal. “That’s better,” he said, sinking to the floor and gathering her onto his lap. “All the better to see you with, my dear.”

Balanced on Kramer’s nose was a pair of panops.

6

“YOU … you’re wearing …” Trussed and chained in the strong dress, she couldn’t fight him, and the pain was so intense, she could see it, raw and white and too bright. “You called me Emma. You know I’m telling the truth.”

The magenta lenses seemed to smolder. “I know what you are, yes. Here.” He pressed a bottle to her lips. “Drink this.”

“No, I don’t w-want …” A sickly, cloying scent curled into her nose, and she gagged, tried turning away, but Kramer clamped her aching head to his chest with one arm and pinched her nostrils shut until she couldn’t hold her breath any longer and opened her mouth. Gagging against the too-sweet syrup flooding her throat, she thrashed and spat out a rust-red spume of a tonic of laudanum and passionflower. “N-no!”

“Yes.” Kramer slapped her cheek, twice, hard enough to make her gasp, and then the drug was streaming down her choking throat. “Drink it.”

She had no choice. He was killing her. This was prison; this was poison. Emma felt the swoon beginning to overtake her as a remorseless, inexorable tide, and it would have her, it would carry her away, and she was lost, and Eric, the others—

“You … you know the truth. I’m n-not Elizabeth. Puh-please,” she moaned, and the higher, lighter register of her voice—this stranger’s—frightened her even more. “Let me go. You know I don’t belong here.”

“But you do. In this world, you are the mad daughter of a lunatic genius who is, unfortunately …” Kramer held up a hand, turning it back and forth in an echo of McDermott for Meredith: See? Not a scratch. “A killer. A murderer. A host to a black evil from the Dark Passages … just as this body is for you. I wondered when you would return, be drawn back.”

Return? Drawn back? She’d been here before? Maybe so. The whisper-man had stolen her in blinks. And Lizzie said a different London … But the Lizzie she’d known was a little girl. Yet this Now was new—and so was Lizzie? Wouldn’t Lizzie have remembered being older? Maybe not, if whatever had happened to her mother to cause those odd gaps in her memory had affected Lizzie, too. But what? “Wh-what do you want? Why are you d-doing this?”

“You have knowledge I need. I will help you, Emma, and in return, you will help me,” Kramer said in his sibilant, snaky whisper. They were on the floor together, her body pressed to his, and his mouth so close to her ear that she heard the sigh and felt the hot steam of his

—Breath of My Breath—

breath.