The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

Doctor. “I know he is dead without it.”
    “It does not
appear
to be working,” said Miss Temple.
    “Where is the Contessa?” asked Elöise.
    Miss Temple looked down at Cardinal Chang. The Doctor’s cloth had partially dislodged his spectacles, and she could see his scars, wounds of a piece with the blood that dripped down his face and neck. And yet beneath this history of violence—though she did not doubt it was integral to his soul—Miss Temple also saw a softness, an impression of what his eyes had been like before, ofthat underpinning and those margins where Chang located care and comfort and peace—if he ever did at all, of course. Miss Temple was no expert on the peace of others. What would it mean if Chang was to die? What would it have meant to him if their positions were reversed? She imagined he would disappear into an opium den. What would she do, lacking even that avenue into depravity? She looked down at Elöise and the Doctor working together, and walked back to Roger. She took the pistol from his hand and made her way to the iron steps.
    “Celeste?” asked Svenson.
    “Francis Xonck has your silver cigarette case—do not forget to collect it.”
    “What are you doing?” asked Elöise.
    “Collecting the Contessa,” said Miss Temple.
    The wheelhouse was silent, and Miss Temple climbed past the dead crewman and onto the bloody deck, looking down at Caroline’s body. The woman’s eyes were open in dismay, her beautiful pale throat torn open as if a wolf had been at it. The Contessa was nowhere to be seen, but in the ceiling above another metal hatch had been pushed open. Before she climbed up, Miss Temple stepped to the windows. The cloud and fog had finally broken apart. Whatever its course had once been, the dirigible’s path had become hopelessly skewed. She could see only grey cold water below them—not far below either, they were perhaps at the height of Harschmort’s roof—and the pale flickers of white on top of the dark waves. Would they drown in the icy sea after all? After all of this? Chang was perhaps already dead. She’d left the room in part so as not to watch, preferring even at this extremity to avoid what she knew she would find painful. She sighed. Like a persistent little ape, Miss Temple clambered onto the shelf of levers and reached up to the hatch, pulling herself into the cold.
    The Contessa stood on the roof of the cabin, holding on to a metal strut beneath the gasbag, wind whipping at her dress andher hair, which had become undone and flowed behind her head like the black pennant of a pirate. Miss Temple looked around her at the clouds, head and shoulders out of the hatch, her elbows splayed on the freezing metal roof. She wondered if 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 bestedher effortlessly—by shooting her in the back, any more than she could