Tina Connolly - Copperhead

“What else?” Rook said.

“You,” Helen said, and it came out all strangled-sounding. Was she worried that he would leave her? Well then. She could make it so he never could. And she looked at his dear bright hazel eyes in the light of the flashlight, dimmed now with worry, with concern, with trying to let her go and failing and trying to understand what she was saying. “I could change you,” she said. “I could make it so you thought I was the most wonderful woman in the world.”

“I do,” he murmured, and she gasped, and laughed, and steamrollered over that:

“The most sensible woman, then. I could change you and you would not know you had been changed. I could fix you.”

He shook his head at her. “But you wouldn’t.”

“No,” she said wildly, and clutched his shoulders, startling them both. “You don’t understand. I could have already done it. You wouldn’t know. What if I made you follow me. What if I made you protect me that night on the trolley. What if I spotted you at the Grimsbys’ the night this all started and said, you, you will do this thing for me and turned you then.”

“But you wouldn’t,” Rook said. “You didn’t.”

She looked at him. “Help me,” she said, echoing what she had said to him three nights ago when she had thought he was Alistair in the confusion after the lights went out. And he had .

His hazel eyes looked lost.

“You can’t be sure,” she said. “You never will be sure. That would poison us even if there could be an us.”

“I wouldn’t let it,” he said.

She laughed at him—a dry, brittle sounding thing—and drew back. “Go, find your dwarvven warrior and stand at her side,” she said. “I must take Jane to safety before your people turn on her.”

“Helen,” he said and one hand, two, seized her shoulders, so lightly.

“I fixed him,” she said, raising her hands as if to escape. They landed on his chest; she tried to make them obey her, and push him away, but they only lay there. “Don’t you see, I fixed Alistair. Everything will be all right.” Her voice rose in hysteria, drowning Rook out. “He will be all right, forever and ever, for he can be fixed, he can be like you, I can make him be whatever I want—”

In pure disbelief he said, “Be like me ?”

She stumbled over her rising hysteria, incoherent babble, “I didn’t mean, really—”

Rook pulled her close and kissed her.

It felt like flying, like falling. Like being taken over by the fey. Like dissolving from her own self, which she knew she shouldn’t want but oh she did.

And then there were shrieks and shouts, and everything went pure white, white with intense light. Floodlights shrieked through the tunnels. Their moment was torn away.

Rook grabbed her fiercely and quick and intense he said in her ear, “Listen, you don’t know. I was supposed to—they wanted me to kill—”

“Who, Grimsby? You’d be doing everyone a favor, almost—”

“Listen, Helen. No. All of them. They wanted me to kill all of them. All the men of Copperhead. That was what I was doing as a double agent. Not just spying.”

She stared at him in disbelief, her lips forming the single word “Alistair” to his silent, unreadable expression. The floodlights swept over them as humans in black stormed down the stairs, through the halls. Shouting, running, chaos. The barricade had fallen.

Rook shoved her behind him and shouted in her ear, “Behind the quilt!” and then she was through the entrance into his bedroom and the door was closed behind her, and he was gone. Jane and Tam stood there, blinking at her. Tam was bleary-eyed but awake. Jane was vacant.

“Come on,” Helen said, and, grabbing their things, flung aside the brown quilt to reveal the hole in the wall. It was very short, and she could see lights just beyond it—a drop-off. “Hopefully not too far down,” she muttered, but she was sure Rook wouldn’t have sent them through it if they were all going to break legs.

She lifted Tam up, and he slithered through and called back, “It’s fine; come on!” and so shortly they were all through and then pounding down an escape tunnel marked by red sigils, splashing down tunnels and ducking under grates. They were met by other dwarvven children and elderly at various intervals, caught up in a sea of them running to safety, until at last they reached the point where the old sewer tunnels had poured into the river. The thin water trickled past the grate, out into the cold of the rushing river. There were narrow steps there leading them up to safety, and they scrambled up and tumbled out into the snowy dark at the waterfront, by the statue of Queen Maud.

The freezing air was bracing after the tumble through the tunnels. Helen kept a tight grip on Jane and Tam, searching through the confusion for a way out, a way somewhere.

Helen saw Nolle in the midst of chaos, calmly directing refugees to a line of barges. A small smile warmed her face as she saw Helen. “We’d been planning for this eventuality,” Nolle said. “The dwarvven are going home. Every last one. Leaving the city for good. But I wanted to thank you.”

“I hardly did anything,” protested Helen.

“You stood with us,” Nolle said, “and I think you will in the future. I will not forget my debt.” A short nod and she turned back to her work. “Goodbye.”

Helen pulled Jane and Tam through the crowd, out of the way. If everyone was going to insist on believing the best of her, she might have to actually live up to it.

“Where are we going?” said Jane absently.

“Frye’s,” Helen replied, and they tramped through the snow.

It was only during that cold black walk back to safety that she finally let herself think about the moment that had just happened, ever so briefly before everything ended. Not the moment itself. She couldn’t quite think about that; it was too fine, too vivid. But the moment before, the moment when she rattled everything off hysterically, when she had said she could make Alistair be like Rook. Helen closed her eyes against her mouth’s foolishness. For then there was the moment after to deal with, too, when Rook said what he had been sent to do.

Rook was supposed to bring them all down. Alistair included.

But he hadn’t, had he? Was that for his conscience’s sake? Or was it for her, all for her? And what did that mean, what could that mean—that he cared for her? Or that he didn’t? Helen did not want Rook to kill, nor did she want Alistair, despite all his faults, to be killed. But she couldn’t make it work out in her head. Rook had come to the meeting planning to bring Alistair down, and then, having met Helen, decided Alistair should live, and thus Helen and Alistair stay happily married for all time.…

Her eyes were dry against the black and snow-falling night when they reached Frye’s street. Her wet coat smelled like a battle and weighed a ton. Tam was so tired that Helen had resorted to carrying him, and he sagged trustingly in her arms, asleep. She stumbled down the street, half-asleep herself. What was going to happen to Tam after all this was over? She hadn’t tried to break the news to him about his stepmamma yet. She couldn’t let him go back to his father. His stepmamma had risked her life— given her life to try to get him away. And yet his father had all the claim. The courts would never see it any other way, no matter what vague, lunatic-sounding charges Helen could bring to bear.