Clockwork Princess

even Charlotte as they closed themselves in with Henry and Tessa. Will turning to Jem, his expression stricken. He had reached out for his
parabatai
.
    “James,” he had said. “You can find out—what they’re doing to her—if she’ll live—”
    But Brother Enoch had stepped between them.
His name is not James Carstairs
, he had said.
It is Zachariah now
.
    Will’s look, the way he had lowered his hand. “Let him speak for himself.”
    But Jem had only turned, turned and walked away from all of them, out of the Institute, Will watching him go in disbelief, and Charlotte had remembered the first time they had ever met:
Are you really dying? I am sorry
.
    It was Will, still looking stunned and disbelieving, who had explained to them all, haltingly, Tessa’s story: the function of the clockwork angel, the tale of the ill-fated Starkweathers, and the unorthodox manner of Tessa’s conception. Aloysius had been right, Charlotte reflected. Tessa was his great-granddaughter. A descendant he would never know, for he had been slain in the Council massacre.
    Charlotte couldn’t stop herself from imagining what it must have been like when the doors of the Council room had opened and the automatons had poured in. Councils were not required to be unarmed, but they were not prepared to fight. Nor had most Shadowhunters ever faced an automaton. Even to imagine the slaughter chilled her. She was overwhelmed by the enormity of the loss to the Shadowhunter world, though it would have been much greater had Tessa not made the sacrifice she did. All the automatons had fallen with Mortmain’s death, even the ones in the Council rooms, and the majority of the Shadowhunters had survived, though there had been heavy losses—including the Consul.
    “Part demon and part Shadowhunter,” Charlotte murmured now, gazing down at Tessa. “What does that make her?”
    Nephilim blood is dominant. A new kind of Shadowhunter. New is not always a bad thing, Charlotte
.
    It was because of that Nephilim blood that they had gone so far as to try healing runes upon Tessa, but the runes had simply sunk into her skin and vanished, like words written in water. Charlotte reached out now to touch Tessa’s collarbone, where the rune had been inked. Her skin was hot to the touch.
    “Her clockwork angel,” Charlotte observed. “It has stopped its ticking.”
    The angel’s presence has left it. Ithuriel is free, and Tessa unprotected, though with the Magister dead, and as a Nephilim herself, she will likely be safe. As long as she does not attempt to transform herself into an angel a second time. It would certainly kill her
.
    “There are other dangers.”
    We all must face dangers
, said Brother Enoch. It was the same cool, unruffled mental voice he had used when he had told her that though Henry would live, he would never walk again.
    On the bed Tessa stirred, crying out in a dry voice. In her sleep, since the battle, she had called out names. She had called for Nate, and for her aunt, and for Charlotte. “Jem,” she whispered now, clutching fitfully at her coverlet.
    Charlotte turned away from Enoch as she reached for the cool cloth again and laid it across Tessa’s forehead. She knew she should not ask, and yet—
    “How is he? Our Jem? Is he—adjusting to the Brotherhood?”
    She felt Enoch’s reproach.
You know I cannot tell you that. He is no longer your Jem. He is Brother Zachariah now. You must forget him
.
    “Forget him? I cannot forget him,” Charlotte said. “He is not as your other Brothers, Enoch; you know that.”
    The rituals that make a Silent Brother are our deepest secrets
.
    “I am not asking to know of your rituals,” Charlotte said. “Yet I know that most Silent Brothers sever their ties to their mortal lives before they enter the Brotherhood. But James could not do that. He still has that which tethers him to this world.” She looked down at Tessa, her eyelids fluttering as she breathed harshly. “It is a cord that ties each of them to the other, and unless it is dissolved properly, I fear it may harm them both.”
    “‘She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead;
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.’”
    “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Henry said irritably, pushing up the ink-stained sleeves of his dressing gown. “Can’t