“Ah,” Spider said, running a fingernail up my arm. Her touch was like fire. “But what do you have to offer me in return?”
“Whatever your price,” I said. “I’m willing to negotiate.” I decided to just plunge ahead and let it all out in one breath. “I’m trying to find a soul trapped here in the Catacombs. His name is Dean Harrison. He wasn’t supposed to die, and I need to find him.”
Spider tapped her chin, as if she were doing sums in her head. “To find one of the new dead among the clamoring horde … if he’s even still in one piece after the Faceless are done with him—”
“Don’t say you can’t do it,” I interrupted. “I know you can. Ian said if anyone could, it was you.”
“Ian always was a flatterer,” she said. “And you’re right, Aoife. I can do it. But I won’t. You don’t have anything that’s worth leading someone into the Catacombs. You don’t have anything that will make me go head-to-head with the Faceless.” She flounced her skirts and looked away. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“That’s crap,” I said loudly, standing up. “You can do it. You just don’t want to.”
“I’m a businesswoman.” Spider stretched out on the cushions, dislodging a cluster of roaches that skittered into the darkness. “And you’re just a sad little scrap with nothing I want.”
I had sworn I wouldn’t reveal what I was to anyone except Ian, but if this was the only way to Dean, I had no choice. “I’m not dead,” I told Spider.
Her black drowning-pool eyes grew by halves. “What did you say?” she demanded.
“I’m alive,” I said. “Back in the Iron Land. I’m using a machine to detach my soul from my body and venture here. But I’m alive, so that has to be worth something.”
Spider stared at me, and I knew I had her. The pure hunger in her eyes was unnerving, the expression of a desperately starving girl suddenly within reach of sustenance.
“I suppose,” she said carefully, “that we might work something out.”
“You want memories?” I said. “My soul? What?”
“You’re eager.” Spider regained some of her composure, managed to rein in the starved expression in her eyes. “What’s this Dean boy to you?”
“Everything,” I said honestly. “That’s why I’m willing to do whatever it takes.”
“Very well,” Spider said. “Your best memory. Your happiest moment. You want happiness back, I want what you hold most dear.”
I couldn’t remember a time I’d been truly happy or content. The joke was on Spider with this one.
“Done,” I said, and held out my hand. “Take it.”
“In time,” Spider said, rising from the pillows with surprising alacrity for a woman wearing such a heavy dress. “I always deliver on my promises before I take payment.” She came close, so close I could smell the heavy scent of dirt and decay wrapped around her as tightly as her clothing. “But I always get paid, Aoife. Make no mistake, and don’t try to cheat me.”
“I’m honest,” I said. “You give me what I want and you can pry whatever happy moments you like free from my brain.”
Spider gave me a bright smile and a pat on the shoulder. “That’s what I like to hear. Come now, let’s go meet Ian and find your boy before the Faceless chew him up and spit him out.”
Ian was pacing the dirt outside the jitney, and his face pulled tighter than a slamming door when he saw Spider.
“Look at you,” she cooed. “Poor Ian. Those months and years of being a Walker have been so unkind.”
She crossed the space between them and touched his cheek, sparing me a look as I stood by uncomfortably. “He used to have such a handsome face.”
Ian recoiled from her touch. “Don’t start with me, Spider. What’s between you and the girl has nothing to do with me.”
“She’s your blood,” Spider drawled. “And you have nothing to do with her?”
“Don’t listen,” Ian told me. “Spider will twist your ear as long as you let her, and twist your head in the bargain.”
“Oh, Ian,” she laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant laugh. It was the sound a person would make as something sharp jabbed into her flesh. “You always were such a sweet-talker.”
Spider led us down another long tunnel, part of the sewers that were apparently a piece of what was inside my head. I wondered at what memory the Deadlands had drawn on, what kind of darkness inside me that it fed on. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know.
As we walked deeper, the muddy ground sloping beneath our feet, the sewers gave way to something older. The walls were studded with alcoves that held skulls, and the eyes lit up with a faint green glow as we passed.
“Just remnants of souls,” said Spider. “What’s left when the Faceless are done with them.”
I felt a plummeting sensation in my gut. “Dean’s not …”
“Oh no, dear,” Spider said. “He’s far too new. And if he was taken before his time, he’s got fight in him. They could use him for centuries before they drain him dry.”
“Thank you for being so reassuring to the girl,” Ian said from behind me.
“I consider it part of the service,” Spider said dryly. She stopped at a fork in the tunnel and took the left-hand path.
I followed, listening to water drip and things skitter in the darkness beyond the glowing eyes of the skulls. Just as I was beginning to think Spider had betrayed us, she stopped at a figure standing in the shadows.
“Ian,” she snapped, “be a dear and give a lady some light.”
Ian sighed, but drew out his lighter and flicked the lid open. A flame blossomed and illuminated the figure of a girl. Her dress was lush and purple, the sort of thing worn to the type of party a girl like me could only read about in old storybooks. Her hair was immaculate, but dry and weak as a spiderweb, so thin and pale that Ian’s light penetrated it, turning it molten gold.
The waist of her dress had been cut away, and resting where her guts should have been sat the face of a clock, all brass and gear and ticking urgency. The girl’s clockwork eyes rolled open, and camera irises regarded us with the dispassionate glare of a machine.
Spider bent to examine the face of the clock. “Counters,” she said. “The Faceless use them to keep track of all the souls in any given quadrant of the city. We think they were alive, once—the lost and the forgotten sorts.”
“They look human,” I said.
“A lot of things in this place look human,” Spider told me with a wink. “But rest assured, this pretty face was never anything but a predator stalking the red-light district and making herself sick on human souls.”
She jabbed at the clock, causing the gears to seize. “Isn’t that right, dearie?”
The girl’s jaw was clockwork, but it worked a bit, and even though her eyes weren’t human, I saw something in them—pain, and sadness. The same sort of look I saw on caged animals, ones who knew they had no hope of escape.
“Tell her who you’re looking for,” Spider said.
“Dean Harrison,” I told the counter. “I need to find Dean Harrison.”
Something inside her skull whirred, the spiderweb hair vibrating slightly, and then her torso rotated, the clockwork ticking, counting something off. Souls? Seconds? Last breaths?
I didn’t know, but she pointed down one of the many tunnels around us. “Number sixty-three,” she said in an echoey voice piped through some sort of aethervox.
“And there you have it,” Spider said. She looked over her shoulder as a cry echoed through the tunnel. “And we better get moving, if we don’t want to become just another pet for the Faceless to amuse themselves with.”
We hurried down the tunnel. This place was completely different from the skull-lined corridors. Those had been like something out of a bad dream or a horror story. This place was all iron, like a prison back in the living world, each door marked with a clumsily painted number.