The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

she could just shoot the Contessa from here. Or should she simply take hold of the hatch and close it, marooning the woman outside? But this was the end, and Miss Temple found she could do neither of these things. She was transfixed, as perhaps she’d always been.
    “Contessa!” she called above the wind, and then, the word feeling strangely intimate in her mouth, “Rosamonde!”
    The Contessa turned, and upon seeing Miss Temple smiled with a grace and weariness that took Miss Temple by surprise.
    “Go back inside, Celeste.”
    Miss Temple did not move. She gripped the gun tightly. The Contessa saw the gun and waited.
    “You are an evil woman,” shouted Miss Temple. “You have done wicked things!”

    The Contessa merely nodded, her hair blowing for a moment across her face until with a toss of her head it flowed once more behind her. Miss Temple did not know what to do. More than anything she realized that her inability to speak and her inability to act were exactly how she felt when faced with her father—but also that this woman—this terrible,
terrible
woman—had been the birth of her new life, and somehow had
known
it, or at least appreciated the possibility, that finally she alone had been able to look into Miss Temple’s eyes and see the desire, the pain, the determination, and see it—see her—for what she was. There was too much to say—she wanted an answer to the woman’s brutality but would not get it, she wanted to prove her independence but knew the Contessa would not care, she wanted revenge but knew the Contessa would never admit her defeat. Nor could Miss Temple prove herself—overcome the one enemy who had always bested her effortlessly—by shooting her in the back, any more than she could have made her father care for her by burning his fields.
    “Mr. Xonck and the Comte are dead,” she shouted. “I have sent Colonel Aspiche to kill the Duke. Your plan has been ruined.”
    “I can see that. You’ve done very well.”
    “You have done things to me—changed me—”
    “Why regret pleasure, Celeste?” said the Contessa. “There’s little enough of it in life. And was it not exquisite? I enjoyed myself immensely.”
    “But I did not!”
    The Contessa reached above her, the spike on her hand, and slashed a two-foot hole across the canvas gasbag. Immediately the blue-colored gas inside began to spew out.
    “Go back inside, Celeste,” called the Contessa. She reached in the other direction and opened another seam, out of which gushed air as blue as the summer sky. The Contessa held on to the strut within this cerulean cloud, in her windblown hair and bloody dress a perilous dark angel.
    “I am not like your adherents!” Miss Temple shouted. “I have learned for myself! I have seen you!”
    The Contessa ripped a third hole in the slackening gasbag, the plume of smoke roiling directly at Miss Temple. She choked and shook her head, eyes stinging, and groped for the hatch. With one last look at the glacial face of the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza, Miss Temple pulled the hatch shut and dropped with a cry to the slippery wheelhouse floor.

    “We are sinking to the sea!” she shouted, and with an aplomb she scarcely noticed stepped past and over mangled bodies all the way down to the others, never once slipping on blood or nicking herself on the scattered broken glass. To her utter delight, Chang was on his hands and knees, coughing onto the floor. The spray around his lips was no longer red but blue.
    “It is working…,” said Svenson.
    Miss Temple could not speak, just glimpsing in the prospect of Chang alive the true depths of her grief at Chang being dead. She looked up to see the Doctor watching her face, his expression both marking her pleasure and vaguely wan.
    “The Contessa?” he asked.
    “She is bringing us down. We will hit the water at any moment!”
    “We shall help Chang—Elöise, if you could take the bottle—while you attend to
him
.” Svenson looked over his shoulder at Roger Bascombe, sitting patiently on a settee.
    “Attend to him how?” asked Miss Temple.
    “However you like,” replied the Doctor. “Wake him or put a bullet through his brain. No one will protest. Or leave him—but I suggest
choosing,
my dear. I have learned it is best to be haunted by one’s actions rather than one’s lack of them.” He re-opened the hatch in the floor and sucked his teeth with concern. Miss Temple could smell the sea. Svenson slammed the hatch shut.