“No. It’s… someone else’s.”
Veronica felt relief flooding through her. She glanced down at the dead man-machine and almost recoiled in horror. The flesh around his exposed face was a puckered mess of ropey scars. Beneath him, the carpet was thick with congealing blood. She looked at her sister quizzically.
“He saved me,” Amelia said softly. “Mr. Calverton saved me from Dr. Fabian.”
Veronica nodded. It was too much to process at once. Her mind was flitting from one thing to the next, trying to work out what to do. Her plan had extended only so far as getting inside the building, to finding her sister before it was too late. She hadn’t yet considered how they were going to get out again.
“Can you walk?” she said to Amelia briskly.
Amelia shook her head. “No. Not very well.”
They both looked up at the sound of splintering glass. Newbury was standing by the ruins of the French doors, holding an occasional table, which he then set down amongst a scattered heap of broken glass. She watched as he reached for an overturned lamp stand and began using it to bash away the remaining daggers of glass in the frame. There was their way out of the house.
Veronica looked out over the garden. Many of the bushes and trees were on fire, and the lawn was pockmarked with craters and heaps of scattered earth where incendiary bombs had overshot the house. Out there they risked being shot at by the mounted gunmen or blown apart by the torrent of bombs raining down from the sky, but it was still their best chance of escape. The house was creaking and groaning, and soon it would collapse. And even if the front entrance were still standing, they would be mown down the minute they emerged. At least this way they could dash for the cover of the trees and try to find a way out from there. It was a gamble, but it was one more gamble in a day already full of them. They had no choice. They were dead if they remained in the house.
Veronica caught sight of Amelia’s wicker wheelchair. They couldn’t take it-it would slow them down too much and prove too conspicuous-but it sparked an idea. She stood. “Stay here,” she said to Amelia.
Newbury turned to look at her, dropping the lamp stand to the floor with a crash. “Where are you going?”
“Trust me. I’ll be back in a minute.” She ran for the door amidst Newbury’s protests.
Out in the hallway, Veronica searched the floor for her abandoned jacket, but it had already been lost to the flames. The smoke stung her eyes and the heat was an oppressive wall that caused her to take a step back. For a moment, she considered turning back, but she steeled herself to press on. She needed to do this. She needed to protect her sister. Simply getting her away from this place was not enough. In a few days, when all of this was over, people would come picking through the wreckage of the institute, trying to ascertain what had happened. Veronica wanted them to find Amelia here in this room, dead in her wheelchair alongside Dr. Fabian. Or at least, she wanted them to find someone who they thought was Amelia. That way, they wouldn’t come looking. It was clear the Queen knew about the clones. The monarch would no doubt arrange a cover up to ensure that that news didn’t get out. But if they found a body here, with Fabian, still in situ in a wheelchair… well, Veronica hoped that would be enough to persuade them that the original version of her sister had also perished in the flames.
Wrapping her arms around her face, burying her eyes and nose in the crooks of her elbows, she bent low and ran for all she was worth. She cried out as the flames scorched and scalded her, licking at her ankles. Then she was through, out the other side and back in the main hallway, where the staircase had collapsed into nothing but a burning pile of timber.
Veronica coughed and spluttered, hacking on the airborne soot. Which way? She tried desperately to remember. It was almost impossible to get her bearings. The constant pounding was remodelling the house, collapsed walls and flames rendering entire areas of the lower floor inaccessible. Her instincts drove her left, and she ploughed on through the burning wreckage, hot ash searing her flesh where it kissed her arms and face as she ran.
Veronica threw herself around another corner, changed direction to avoid an impassable inferno, and ducked beneath a smoking beam that had fallen through the ceiling above and wedged in the passageway. Then she was outside the room where she had first found the duplicates.
The doorway had partially collapsed. The lintel and frame leaned jauntily to one side like a drunken old man, narrowing the opening. The wooden door itself had cracked under the stress and had evidently been smashed open from the inside. Splinters of it lay on the ground by her feet. What was left of it was hanging open on one hinge, swaying slowly back and forth.
Veronica approached the room and peered inside. Everything was dark. With trepidation, she crossed the threshold, sidestepping to pass through the now narrow opening. Every instinct told her to turn and run, but she knew she had no choice. She didn’t have any time to waste.
Veronica’s eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom. The lamps had been extinguished and the only illumination now came from the flames in the hallway, which cast everything in sharp relief. The dancing shadows gave everything a strange sense of movement. She heard breathing in the darkness towards the back of the room and realised some of the duplicates were still there. Perhaps they were afraid, preferring the comfort of darkness to the horror of the real world beyond the door. She couldn’t blame them for that. All they had ever known was darkness and pain and torment. They were nothing but animals, cowering in the night.
Veronica searched the shadows but couldn’t see any of them. If they remained there, they were going to die. She wondered if she should do something, try to shoo them out into the burning house, but she knew they’d die there, too, either in the flames or by the Gatling guns. There was nothing she could do. She forced herself to remember that they weren’t her sister-weren’t even people, in the truest sense-and that she couldn’t save them. Amelia-the real Amelia-was waiting with Newbury, and that was the only thing that mattered. Besides, she didn’t know if she even wanted to save the duplicates. She felt horribly conflicted about the fact that they even existed at all.
A pile of wreckage lay in the centre of the room. As Veronica walked towards it, she realised it marked what remained of the strange spinning machine she had seen during her last visit. Clearly, the duplicates had rebelled. Cogs, pistons, and metal brackets were scattered all over the floor, and the wheel itself, now devoid of its incumbent clone, had been broken in half, the two halves balanced in the top of the pile so that they jutted out like obscure totems. The weird occult runes that had been daubed around the edges of the wheel added to the impression, as if imbuing the sculpture with an eerie supernatural significance.
Nearby, the figure in the chair was still in situ, strapped, unmoving, as it had been a couple of days earlier. Now, however, it was clearly dead, slumped with its head resting awkwardly to one side. Its eyes were still open and they caught the reflected firelight. Its teeth were bared in a rictus snarl. Veronica shuddered and approached it, careful not to present her back to the murmuring shadows.
She tried not to look at its face as she set about releasing the cuffs. The flesh was icy cold to the touch. She had no idea how long the thing had been dead; she didn’t share Newbury’s ability to discern such things. Nevertheless, it would serve her purpose.
Veronica finished unbuckling the leather cuffs and slid her arms beneath the ghoulish cadaver, hefting it up into her arms. It was lighter than she’d imagined. She kept the face turned away from her, and she tried not to think about the smell.
She heard the creatures-she was still steadfastly refusing to think of them as anything else-begin shuffling about and mewling as they watched her take a few steps back with the body in her arms. “Go on, get out of here!” she shouted at them, but all she heard in response was a frightened chatter and a wail.