in her hand. The attack had happened while she was trapped in his manor. He had lied to reporters while she lay in bed.
She was running out of time to stop him.
Yet the letter’s response had left her unmoored. Weeks ago she wouldn’t have bothered with the letter; she would have charged straight to the Collegium and pounded on the front doors until someone answered. Now she knew that if she did that, she would be turned away, or worse. She had counted on arming herself with Master Hargrove’s good word to prove that she was someone worth listening to. The anticipation of holding his response—of being vindicated at last—was what had kept her going through the long, cold nights and the gnawing ache of hunger. Now she had nothing.
No . . . not nothing. She still had Nathaniel. But days of searching hadn’t led her any closer to Hemlock Park. The city was huge; she felt as though she could remain lost within it forever, growing ever more invisible to the people passing by, until she faded away to a shadow. No one had proven willing to help her. Few were even willing to look at her.
She didn’t know if Nathaniel would be any different. But of everyone in Brassbridge, he was the only person she could trust.
A glimpse of a short, slim boy passing through the crowd yanked Elisabeth to a halt. She stood frozen on the sidewalk as people flowed around her. It didn’t seem possible. Either her fever was causing her to hallucinate, or Silas had appeared as though she had summoned him out of thin air by thinking his master’s name. Could she be mistaken?
She whirled around, searching for another sign of him across the street. Her gaze latched onto a slight figure stepping neatly through the afternoon bustle. The young man wasn’t wearing Silas’s green livery, but instead a finely tailored suit, a cravat tied impeccably around his pale neck. But his hair—pure white, held back with a ribbon—could belong to no one else. He was not a hallucination. He was real.
She hesitated, wavering, and then rushed across the street, the dismayed shout of a carriage driver chasing in her wake. She scanned the crowd once she reached the sidewalk, but Silas was no longer in sight. She hurried along in the direction he had been heading, peering into the windows of shops as she passed. Her own dirty reflection stared back at her, pinched and desperate, her blue eyes bright with fever. She broke into a jog, trying to ignore the fire that roared in her lungs as she urged her body to move faster.
There. A flash of white hair ahead, turning onto a side street. She hastened after him, barely noticing that the buildings around her had grown dilapidated, the traffic thinner, its carriages replaced by carts filled with junk and wilted produce. Crooked eaves hung over the narrow avenue, strung with unused laundry lines. The damp, dark corners stank of urine. Silas stuck out like a sore thumb in his expensive suit, but no one spared him a second glance. The same wasn’t true for Elisabeth.
“Where are you going in such a hurry, little miss?”
Her heart tripped. She kept her gaze fixed straight ahead, as though she hadn’t noticed the man’s leering face in the periphery of her vision. But he didn’t give up, as she’d hoped. A boot crunched broken glass behind her, and multiple shapes detached from the shade of a nearby building.
“I said, where are you going? Maybe we can help.”
“Give us a smile for our trouble, eh?” another man suggested.
Silas was too far ahead, a shape glimpsed behind a passing cart. Elisabeth tried to call out. Though she only made a hoarse, pathetic sound, he paused and began to turn, a yellow eye flashing in the light.
She couldn’t tell whether he had truly heard her, or whether the reaction was a coincidence. She didn’t have time to find out. “Silas,” she whispered. And then she ran.
Pavement scuffed beneath her heels. When the men moved to cut her off, she dodged from the main street and into an alley, stumbling over crates and sodden drifts of newspapers. Rats fled squealing toward a branching alleyway, and she followed them, hoping they knew the best place to hide. As the deep shadows enveloped her, her boots skidded on something slippery. A putrid stench hung in the air, and puddles of fluid shone on the cobblestones, covered in floating scum. She