swift, and utterly deadly when he needs her to be, striking like the scalpel her creator used in piecing her together. But Leigh is inside, deep in the lab, securing the experiments these men must not see, locking the doors they must not be allowed to open. They were never intended to come here. They were never meant to find this place.)
“Is it, James?” Master Daniels’s voice is gentle, and weary. He dislikes being here, in this Ohio cornfield, surrounded by the emerald of the harvest, beneath the sapphire sky. He is a creature of sepia-toned rooms weighed down with the import of the things that have been done within them. “It seems to me you’ve been keeping secrets, out here in the hinterlands. It seems to me that we should have been keeping a closer eye. We have allowed you to do yourself harm, and for that, you have my sincere apologies. It was our responsibility to do better by you. We owed it to you, and to Asphodel.”
“Master Baker.”
For the first time, Master Daniels looks confused. “I’m sorry?”
“On your lips, in your mouth, her name was Master Baker. She was the greatest alchemist of her age. There has been no greater since.”
The alchemists who have accompanied Master Daniels—Reed doesn’t know their names, doesn’t care to know them; they serve no purpose in his grand design—look first amused, and then offended. One of them steps forward.
“Remember your place,” the man snaps. “We have allowed you back within our number, but that does not give you the right to lie.”
“I tell no lies. I only speak the golden truth, which you have struggled for so long to transmute into basest lead.” Reed looks at Daniels with murder in his eyes. “If you must speak of her, speak of her with the respect she deserves.”
“She was never a master of our order, James,” says Daniels gently.
“Because you forbade her that position. Because you, and the men like you, dismantled as much of her design as you could, all before you’d admit that a woman had bested you at your own ambition! Because you—”
“You killed her,” says Daniels.
Reed stops.
“If we have any culpability in this matter, if we bear any blame for her death, it’s that when she created you, we allowed it. Transmutation of the dead into the living has always come more easily to the female of the species. She proved nothing with your assembly, save that she was, in the end, exactly what we had always assumed her to be. Talented, yes. Gifted, there can be no doubt. But she was a dabbler. She never swam far enough from shore to understand the dangers of the depths.” Daniels smiles. Perhaps he thinks he’s being kind. Perhaps he considers this a form of absolution. You killed your maker and your master, but see, you were always her superior. She could only have held you back.
Reed grinds his teeth until his molars ache, and wonders what it will sound like when Daniels dies.
“You were the knife. She honed you with her own hand. A strangely elaborate form of suicide, but suicide all the same. A failing of her kind.”
“And what kind would that be?” asks Reed, in a voice like a rusty saw being drawn across bone.
“The weak. The wanting.” Master Daniels’s eyes flash. “But we’re not here to discuss Miss Baker, however much you try to bait us. We’re here to talk about you. Have you been keeping secrets, Reed?”
“I told you I had embodied the Doctrine. We’re merely waiting for it to mature.”
“Yet you won’t allow us to examine it. Why is that?”
“The conditions for proper maturation—”
“We understand delicate work. We’re men of science, in our own way. We can be trusted around your experiment.”
Master Daniels takes a step forward, the other two flanking him.
“Let us in, Reed. We are all on the same path to enlightenment.”
But they’re not, they’re not. Reed left the path to enlightenment behind long ago. The improbable road is different. The Impossible City is not enlightenment, but something more, for the enlightened have no need for power, and the City is power incarnate. Whoever holds the City will hold the world.
“I did not invite you to my sanctum,” he says. “Leave, and I will forgive this trespass.”
“I cannot, child,” says Master Daniels.
“Then I am sorry,” says Reed, and raises his hand in a beckoning gesture. A boy steps out of the corn.
He is slim, skinny even, with dark hair and mistrustful eyes. His arms