Tina Connolly - Copperhead

A bid for Tam would be as bad as a bid for her own freedom. It would all be so messy, so public. So futile.

Yet her day with Tam had been surprisingly nice, hadn’t it? Studying at the museum, spying on fashionable young ladies attempting to resist chocolate sundaes.… She had never liked children, but Tam seemed to be cut from a different cloth than the rest of them. Yet Alistair would never agree to foster Tam, even if charges could be brought against Mr. Grimsby. And the courts would take her even less seriously as a divorcée.

And there she was, thinking about Rook again. He was from a different world, and there was no possibility for the two of them. Besides, Nolle had said: All the dwarvven were going home. All of them.

She needed to put Rook from her mind just as she had told him to do for her.

Despite that kiss.

Helen’s hands tightened on the small boy as she staggered up the walk to Frye’s narrow row house. She hated to always be running from things, but maybe that was her only course left to her. She could just take Tam and run away, far far away.…

The door burst open before she could figure out how to ring the doorbell and still hold Tam.

“Helen!” said Frye, and her gap-toothed smile was wide. “Get in here right now.” She took Tam from Helen’s tired arms and ushered them down the hallway toward the biggish room where the dancing had been. Deftly she divested Helen of her disgusting overcoat, patted a stray copper curl in place. “You, and you, Jane, just go right in here. I have some folks for you to meet.”

Frye opened the door to a wave of expensive scent; rose and lilac and geranium billowed out in a fine cloud. An entire room of beautiful women turned to see Helen as she made her tired way through the door. The room lit with the glamour of their smiles.

Helen moved among them, clasping hands and kissing cheeks. It was like some sort of twisted reunion, and they were all so pleased to see her. Some had been dozing, many were wide awake, but they all greeted Helen happily, with gay chatter or with calm fire. “We’re going to do this. We are,” she heard over and over. There was Calendula Smith. There was that dancing girl. There was Desirée. Helen could not find Alberta or Betty in the crowd, but there was Frye, presiding over it all in her billowy dragon-embroidered caftan, looking like the cat who swallowed the proverbial canary.

“They’re not all here,” Frye said, “as I was only one person with one day. But I made a big dent.” She gestured at the sea of dazzling beauty.

“Thank you,” said Helen. She felt like collapsing, but she straightened her spine, for it was her cue now. She moved into the center of the room, meeting their eyes and giving encouraging nods. There was a little carved bench and she stepped up, her apple green voile falling gracefully around her. She stood, feeling the slick wood under her heels, bracing herself. Her moment onstage.

“Frye brought you all here so we can reverse the damage done to us,” Helen said. “So we can all be safe. Safe without iron masks. Safe without being locked in our rooms.”

Nods of assent.

“But what we thought a simple procedure that my sister Jane could manage has blossomed into something more,” Helen continued. “Mr. Grimsby, the leader of Copperhead and the instigator of this curfew, is playing a dangerous game. Three nights ago he had one of the men of Copperhead kidnap my sister, leaving his wife caught in the fey sleep. We have found Jane, but … well. Let’s say the experience may have cost her.” She pointed to Jane, who was sitting on the floor in her torn and dirty grey dress, tracing the patterns in the carpet.

“ Helen found her,” put in Frye from the sidelines. “She’s been putting the clues together. Risking herself.”

“Jane said we needed to all gather and change back now,” Helen said. “Which seemed reasonable enough, when she first said it. Except changing back now involves Mr. Grimsby, and this warehouse, and his invention that some of you saw a couple nights ago, the one that surged all the power in the house and zapped Jane. And I don’t know exactly what his plan is,” she said, and took a deep breath. “But he has all of our original faces. All at the warehouse with him.”

Gasps, denial. “No!” and “How do you know?”

Through the din, Helen pointed a finger at Calendula. “Because I saw one of them, plain as day,” she said.

Calendula went white and red all at once as shock warred with embarrassment. “Me, there,” she said. “The original.”

“All of us,” said Helen, cutting over the voices. “We’re all in this together.”

“But what’s he planning to do?”

Helen swallowed. “Something involving hooking us up to the machine. It drains us through the bit of fey in our faces, feeds some sort of power to the machine. I don’t know what he plans to do with the machine. But I saw him drain one of us. His wife.” One woman let out a sharp cry of sorrow at that, and Helen felt deep regret that she could not have told Millicent’s friend in a more measured fashion.

“So he has our faces as what, bait?”

“Perhaps,” said Helen. “Regardless, Jane said that all of us are supposed to gather there—tomorrow at noon.”

“You trust that?” someone said, pointing at carpet-tracing Jane.

“Clearly not,” Helen said, to both gasps and laughter. “No, it’s a trap,” she said. “And we have to spring it.”

Another wave of riot. “That actress didn’t say anything about danger,” said someone.

Another: “Thought this was making us safer .”

“We have to,” Helen shouted through the crowd, and the hold she had on them started to slip. “He’s got ten of us lined up for tomorrow. I heard him. They may be bait, but we have to rescue them.”

“And you think they’d do the same for us?”

“I came through curfew for this?”

The voices swelled, rose up loud and ugly. Underneath, another sound from the hall—thumps, bangs, and the loud clack of heels as Alberta burst into the room, disheveled and splattered with mud. “They got Betty,” she said. Silence fell as heads turned to look. “We were leaving her flat—and I had my eyes peeled for cops, you know—but this joe nobody on the street corner said, ‘Don’t you birds know not to break curfew,’ and then he turned and he had the copperhead pin on, and suddenly there was a black car pulling up and they grabbed Betty. And they got my scarf, but I twisted out and dodged them. I had to lose one of them on the way here.” She glanced behind her as if to double-check that they were still alone.

A low voice said into the shocked silence: “The first to fall.”

Across the room Helen caught Alberta’s eye. The one woman with more reason to keep her new face than anyone, and here they were at the moment of truth, and Helen didn’t know how Alberta would decide. Alberta nodded at Helen and came forward into the room, straightening out torn fabric and brushing off mud under everyone’s gaze. Helen said calmly to the room, “I want you to hear a little story first. Then you can decide if you want to stay or go home.”

In simple, plain language, Alberta told them of the husband she had fled. How her new face that made her vulnerable to the fey was the only thing that kept her safe from him. “But I’m tired of letting him win,” Alberta said. “And you’re all tired, too. Every day we go around with these new faces we’re in danger of our lives, and those lives aren’t even our own. They’re borrowed. Well, I’ve had it. I want my own life. I want my own face, my own city, and my own freedom. I want to walk around after dark whenever the hell I want. And I don’t want the fey, or Copperhead, or some damn husband telling me what I can and can’t do. I’m going to get my own face back and then I’m going to see my husband divorced and put behind bars. And then I’m going to go out after midnight and paint the town red. That’s what I’m going to do.”