Read Chapter 14: Penance in Oil

Bert worked the bellows with a rhythm born of years at the forge, and the small workshop filled with the smell of hot metal and burning coal dust. Elias watched him from the corner, where he was sorting through a crate of salvaged fittings—copper valves, brass couplings, a length of iron rod that might serve as a lever arm. The heat was a comfort. It reminded him of his father's shop, of a time before the memory of his sister had become a wound he picked at nightly.

"You're staring," Bert said without looking up.

"Just thinking."

"Thinking's what got us here." Bert pumped the bellows again, sending a gust of orange light across the floor. "You want to talk about it, or you want to work?"

Elias ran a thumb over a scored brass plate. The workshop was smaller than his own had been, cramped and cluttered with Bert's half-finished projects—a clockwork bird with one wing, a pressure gauge gutted for parts, a child's tin soldier melted into a shapeless lump. But it was walls, and it was a roof, and it was not ash.

"The trap," Elias said. "We need to make it convincing."

Bert stopped pumping. "We?" He wiped his hands on his apron, leaving dark streaks. "Elias, I already told you I'd deliver the thing. But building it—" He gestured at the mess around them. "I'm not you. I fix boilers. I don't build weapons."

"Neither do I. Not anymore." Elias set the brass plate down and picked up a coil of thin copper wire. "But the decoy doesn't need to function. It needs to look like it functions. Like it's worth stealing."

Bert nodded slowly, a mechanic's understanding settling in his eyes. "So we build a pretty lie."

"We build a very pretty lie. With teeth."

They worked in silence for the better part of an hour. Elias sketched out a housing on a scrap of oilcloth—a box that resembled the extraction device's outer shell, with seams and rivets in the right places, a glass viewing port that would show a false interior of gears and filaments. Bert cut and shaped the metal, his hands steadier than Elias expected, and Elias wired a small charge of alchemical powder into a compartment behind the lock. If anyone opened it without the proper sequence—a sequence Elias would not give Sinjin—the whole thing would ignite. Not enough to kill, perhaps. But enough to burn the hands of anyone who tried to take what wasn't theirs.

"Clever," Bert said, eyeing the mechanism. "Cruel, but clever."

"She taught me that."

Bert looked up. "Lila?"

Elias nodded, and the name hung between them like fog. He had not spoken it aloud to Bert before. Not in years. He turned back to the workbench, fitting a false bottom into the housing, but his mind drifted to the photograph he'd found in the ashes of his old life—Lila, standing among a row of orphans, her face thin and proud, her hand raised in a wave she'd never gotten to finish.

"You think Sinjin has her," Bert said low.

"I think someone has her. Sinjin's the only one with reason to keep her from me." Elias tightened a screw with more force than necessary. "He used her to make me build the device. He used her to make me come back. He'll use her again if I let him."

"So don't let him."

Elias paused. Bert was watching him with a mechanic's flat honesty, no pity, no judgment.

"What do you suggest?"

"You walk in there with the box," Bert said. "You let him think he's won. He opens it, he loses a hand, and you use the confusion to ask your question."

"Not the plan I had."

"It's a better plan," Bert said. "You get proof she's alive before you swing."

Elias considered this. He traced the seam of the housing, felt the satisfying weight of the hidden charge inside. Bert was not wrong. Rushing in blind would only get him killed or captured, and then Lila's fate would be sealed along with his own. But the thought of walking into Sinjin's warehouse, of seeing that pale face and those cold calculating eyes, made his stomach churn with a heat that had nothing to do with the forge.

"I need to know if she's alive," he said, more to himself than to Bert.

"Then you need to ask someone who knows."

Elias set down the screwdriver and wiped his hands on a rag. The workshop was still a wreck of half-finished repairs and scattered tools, but the decoy sat at the center of it, gleaming with the false promise of breakthrough. It was good work. Sinjin would believe it. Sinjin would want it.

"Tonight," Elias said.

Bert straightened. "Tonight? The meet's not for two days."

"I'm not waiting for the meet." Elias pulled on his coat, checking the pocket where the extraction device's core components rested in a wrap of oilcloth. "I'll go to his warehouse now. Deliver the decoy early. Catch him off guard."

"That's suicide, Elias."

"That's leverage." Elias moved toward the door, then stopped. He looked back at Bert, at the man who had betrayed him and been forgiven in the same breath, who now stood in the dim light of his own small shop with a wrench in his hand and fear on his face. "You did what you had to. I understand that. But if I don't come back—"

"You'll come back." Bert's voice cracked. "You have to."

Elias allowed himself a thin smile. "Tell Tommy I'll be seeing him soon. In a better place, maybe."

Bert turned away, and Elias stepped out into the London night.

The fog was thick enough to chew, rolling off the river in gray waves that swallowed the gaslights and turned the streets into a maze of shadows and half-seen doorways. Elias moved quickly, keeping to the alleys, his boots echoing on wet cobblestones. The warehouse district rose around him, hulking black shapes against the sulphur sky, and he found Sinjin's building by the red lantern that hung above its loading bay—a blood-colored eye in the murk.

He had been here before. Twice. Both times under Sinjin's thumb, both times leaving with his hands empty and his pride in tatters. This time would be different. This time he carried the lie.

The back door was unlocked, as it always was. Sinjin liked his visitors to find their own way in. It was a game of power, a way of saying *you are already inside my territory and you will leave only when I allow it.* Elias stepped through and smelled the familiar mix of oil and stale tobacco and something faintly sweet, like rotting fruit.

Sinjin's office was at the top of a narrow staircase. Elias climbed it with the decoy box tucked under his arm, his heart beating a steady rhythm against his ribs. The door was ajar. A sliver of gaslight spilled into the hallway.

He pushed it open.

Sinjin sat behind a desk cluttered with papers and brass instruments, a glass of amber liquor in his hand. He looked up as Elias entered, and his thin face split into a smile that did not reach his dark eyes.

"Mr. Thorne," he said, setting down the glass. "You're early."

"I decided not to waste your time." Elias set the box on the desk between them. It landed with a satisfying thud, the false weight of it pressing into the wood. "The prototype. Functional, tested, ready for your client."

Sinjin raised an eyebrow. He did not reach for the box. He only looked at it, then at Elias, and Elias felt the weight of that gaze like pressure on his chest.

"And you came here yourself? Loyalty I didn't expect."

"I came for something in return."

Sinjin's smile widened. "Ah. The sister."

Elias forced himself to remain still. "You know where she is."

"I know many things, Mr. Thorne." Sinjin leaned back, folding his hands over his stomach. "I know you've lost your workshop to fire. I know you've been hiding with your friend Bert. I know you're desperate enough to walk into my office without an appointment, carrying a box you hope will buy me off." He paused. "And I know you haven't checked the news of the day."

Elias said nothing.

Sinjin reached into a drawer and pulled out a folded newspaper, sliding it across the desk. The headline was visible in the flickering gaslight: *WORKHOUSE FIRE IN FOUNDLING QUARTER: SEVEN DEAD.*

Elias's blood went cold.

"Fire is a terrible thing," Sinjin said softly. "It does not discriminate. It takes the old and the young, the guilty and the innocent." He tapped the newspaper with a finger. "The one they call the priest was seen there, Mr. Thorne. Near the flames. Praying over the bodies. I thought you might want to know."

Elias stared at the headline, the words swimming before him. His sister's face rose in his memory—thin, proud, waving a hand she'd never gotten to finish—and he felt something crack open inside him.

"The priest," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "Where is he?"

Sinjin spread his hands. "I don't keep tabs on holy men. But if you find him, tell him he owes me a favor."

Elias reached for the newspaper, folding it slowly, tucking it into his coat. The decoy sat on the desk between them, still unopened, still waiting. He met Sinjin's eyes.

"If she's dead," he said, "everything I've built will be turned against you. Every device, every secret, every client you've ever had." He picked up the box. "And this will be the last thing you ever see working."

Sinjin's smile flickered. It was the first crack Elias had ever seen in that pale mask.

"You're not the only one who keeps secrets, Mr. Thorne." Sinjin lifted his glass, a toast to nothing. "The fire was not my doing. But I know who lit it. And that knowledge, like everything else, has a price."

Elias turned and walked out of the office, down the narrow stairs, into the fog. The newspaper burned cold against his chest.

He did not look back.