The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

you say,
deduce
. The Prince was taken mere hours after I had rescued him from the Institute. You—and others—were not told. Obviously she wanted the Prince for her own ends. What is the Prince to your plans? A dupe, a pawn, a void in the seat of power—”
    “Why, you damned ungrateful rogue!” cried the Prince. “The
audacity
!”
    “To some this might seem obvious,” said the Comte, impatiently.
    “Then I should think the answer obvious as well,” scoffed Svenson. “Everyone undergoing the Process is instilled with a control-phrase, are they not? Quite by accident the Prince was taken by me before any particular commands could be given to him—the Contessa, knowing that, and knowing the Prince’s character would predispose everyone to think of him as an imbecile, seized the opportunity to instill within his mind commands of her own, to be invoked at the proper time against her putative allies—something unexpected, such as, let us say, pushing you out of an airship. Of course, when asked, the Prince will remember none of it.”
    The Comte was silent. Miss Temple was amazed at the Doctor’s presence of mind.
    “As I say … fairly obvious,” sniffed Svenson.
    “Perhaps … it is your own fabrication … yet credible enough that I must waste time scouring the memory of the Prince. But before that, Doctor—for I think you are lying—I will first scour you. Angelique?”
    Svenson leapt to his feet with a cry, but the cry was cut to a savage choking bark as Angelique’s mind penetrated his. Chang burstforth from the stairwell, running forward, Miss Temple right behind him. Svenson was on his knees holding his face, the Prince above him, raising a boot to kick the Doctor’s head. To the side stood Angelique. The Prince looked up at them with a confused resentment at being interrupted. The Comte wrenched his attention from Svenson’s mind with a roar. Angelique turned, a little too slowly, and Miss Temple raised the revolver. She was perhaps ten feet distant when she pulled the trigger.
    The shot smashed into the glass woman’s outstretched arm at the elbow, shearing through with a spray of bright shards and dropping the forearm and hand to the floor, where they shattered in a plume of indigo smoke. Miss Temple saw Angelique’s mouth open wide but heard the scream within her mind, indiscriminately flaying the thoughts of every person in the room. Miss Temple fell to her knees, tears in her eyes, and fired again. The bullet pierced the cuirass of Angelique’s torso, starring the surface. Miss Temple kept squeezing the trigger, each hole driving the cracks deeper, lancing into each other to form fissures—the scream redoubled and Miss Temple could not move, could barely see, flooded with random memories stabbing her mind like daggers—Angelique as a child at sea, the rank perfume of the brothel, silks and champagne, tears, beatings, bruises, distant embraces, and a piercingly tender hope, more than anything, that her desperate dreams had come true. Before Miss Temple’s eyes the torso split wide below the ribs and gave, the upper body breaking against the lower in a cloud of indigo smoke and glimmering deadly dust, the pieces smashing apart as they struck the stone.
    Miss Temple could not tell whether the silence was due to a shared inability to speak, or if the scream had made her deaf. Her head swam with the fumes in the air and she put a hand before her mouth, wondering if she’d already inhaled blue glass dust. The steaming ruins of Angelique lay scattered across the floor, blue shards in an indigo pool. She looked up and blinked. Chang laywith his back against the wall, staring. Svenson was on his hands and knees, groping to crawl free. Lydia was on the bed, whimpering and pulling at her ropes. The Prince lay on the ground near Svenson, hissing with pain and swatting feebly at his hand, where a splinter of glass cut open a patch of skin that had since turned blue. The Comte alone still stood, his face pale as ash.
    Miss Temple turned the pistol toward him and pulled the trigger. The bullet shattered the chemical works on his table, spraying more glass and spattering his apron with steaming liquid. The sound woke the room. The Comte surged forward and swept up his metal implement from the bed, raising it up like a mace. Miss Temple aimed another shot at his head, but before she could fire felt Chang seize her arm. She grunted with surprise—his grip was painful—and saw that with his