Read Chapter 6: The Debt Collector's Call

The warehouse reeked of coal dust and stale gin, the kind of place where the fog outside seemed to seep through the boards and settle in the lungs. Elias had been there before, twice, and both times he'd left lighter in the pocket and heavier in the soul. He stood at the far end of a long, scarred table, a leather satchel at his feet.

Sinjin was already seated when Elias arrived, a smear of pale flesh and darker velvet in the lamplight. The crime lord's fingers, ringed and immaculate, drummed a slow rhythm on the table. Two of his men—the ones with the flat, dead eyes that Elias tried not to meet—flanked the only door.

"You're early, Mr. Thorne." Sinjin's voice was a low, wet purr. "I appreciate punctuality in a man who owes me."

Elias swallowed the dryness in his throat. "I didn't come here to discuss the debt. I came to settle it."

He reached down, unlatched the satchel, and set it on the table. Inside, a neat stack of banknotes—the better part of his savings, every job he'd taken for the last year, coin scrounged from fixes and repairs that had left his knuckles raw. He pushed the satchel across the wood.

Sinjin didn't touch it. He looked at the satchel the way a man looks at a dead rat in his cellar. Then he laughed, a sound like gravel grinding under a boot heel.

"A hundred and forty pounds, give or take. That's what you've scraped together? To buy off a debt that's older than your apprenticeship?"

"It's every penny I have."

"I don't want your pennies, Thorne." Sinjin leaned forward, and the lamplight caught the scar that ran from his eyebrow to his jaw, a pale river through the grey of his stubble. "I want your talent. Your very specific, very rare talent."

Elias kept his face still. "I'm a mechanic. I fix engines. I mend gears. That's the talent you know about."

Sinjin tilted his head. The drumming stopped. "Is it? Because I hear differently. I hear that you've been making things. Little panels. Etched metal that catches a man's last breath and plays it back like a phonograph record for the soul."

The words hit Elias like a fist in the gut. He'd been careful. He'd only ever worked in the dead of night, in the workshop he'd filled with mundane repairs to hide the rest. But Sinjin had eyes everywhere, and a man who ran the docks and the rookeries and half the pawnshops in London didn't stay ignorant for long.

"I don't know what you've heard," Elias said, "but it's exaggerated. A party trick. A parlour game for rich men who want to feel the dead breathe again. It's barely functional."

Sinjin stood. He was taller than Elias remembered, or maybe the room was smaller. He walked around the table slowly, his boots echoing on the grimy floorboards, until he was close enough that Elias could smell the bay rum on his collar.

"You know what I do with party tricks, Mr. Thorne? I find out who wants them badly enough to pay. And there are men in this city who would pay a fortune for the ability to make a man relive his worst moment over and over, like a knife that never stops turning."

Elias's blood went cold. He thought of the pumping station. Of the letter from his mother, warning of children turned into mechanical things. Of the crude etching in the locket that had shown him his own mind, cut and rearranged by hands that wanted him to forget.

"If you want a torture device, buy a vice. They're cheaper."

"I don't want a vice. I want what you make." Sinjin reached into his coat and pulled out a small brass gear, worn and oil-dark, and set it on the table between them. It was the same piece he'd shown Elias before—a key to the design of a machine Elias had never seen, but whose purpose he could guess all too well. "One week, Thorne. You deliver a working extraction panel, calibrated for interrogation, and we call the debt settled. And I give you your sister's locket, and the address where you'll find Lila."

Elias's throat tightened at the name. "You said she was alive."

"I said I knew where she was. Alive is a matter of definition. But if you want to see her before that definition gets any narrower, you'll build me my machine."

"And if I refuse?"

Sinjin smiled. It was not a kind expression. "Then I take the money on the table for my trouble, and I sell the girl to a buyer in the East who collects rare things. He won't be gentle with her—he never is. And you'll spend the rest of your life knowing you could have saved her with a week's work."

Elias's hands hung at his sides, knuckles white. He wanted to grab Sinjin by the throat, to shake the smugness out of him. But the two men by the door had shifted, their hands moving toward their coats.

"I need more time. A week isn't—"

"A week is what you get." Sinjin picked up the satchel of notes and tossed it back to Elias, who caught it reflexively. "Keep your pennies. You'll need them for the journey. You'll want to leave the city after you do this job, Mr. Thorne. The Bureau of Inventions has been sniffing around my operation, and I don't need their attention on you—or on me."

Elias blinked. "The Bureau?"

"Lady Cordelia Vane. Pretty little thing with a pretty little badge. She's been asking questions about a mechanic who makes memory-machines. I assume that's not a coincidence." Sinjin's eyes narrowed. "You've been a busy man. Two masters want the same trick from you. I suggest you remember which one has your sister."

He turned and walked back to his chair, settling into it with a heavy sigh. "One week, Thorne. This time next Tuesday, I expect to see a working prototype on this table. If I don't, then I'll take your workshop apart piece by piece, and then I'll take you apart. The girl goes to the East either way."

Elias stood there, the satchel heavy in his hands. The gears of his plan—the decoy, the escape, the secret route to the pumping station—all spun in his head, but they were grinding now, stuck on a flaw he couldn't see.

Sinjin knew about the panels. Sinjin knew about Cordelia. And if Sinjin knew, then who else did?

He turned and walked to the door. The two men parted just enough to let him through, their expressions unchanged. He didn't look back.

Outside, the fog had thickened, turning the streetlamps into pale blurs. Elias stood on the cobblestones, the cold seeping through his boots, and did the math in his head. One week to build a device that could ruin lives. One week before Sinjin came for Lila. One week before Cordelia's patience ran out.

He couldn't build Sinjin's machine. That was a line he wouldn't cross, not even to save his sister. But he couldn't run, either—not with Lila's location unknown, hidden behind Sinjin's ledger of threats.

He needed a way out that wasn't running. A way to sever the rope before the noose tightened.

He thought of his mother's letter, of the facility beneath the pumping station. Whatever was down there, it was connected to the men who had taken Lila. And if Sinjin knew about the panels, then Sinjin might know about the facility too. The crime lord was a broker of secrets—what if he was also a buyer?

Elias started walking, his mind already spinning ahead to the workshop, to the schematics hidden beneath the floorboards. He would build Sinjin something, yes. But it wouldn't be a machine. It would be a mirror, angled to show the crime lord the face of the man who had been pulling his strings all along.

The clock in St. Giles' tower struck midnight. Five days until the Bureau's deadline. Six days until Sinjin's. And somewhere beneath the city, in the dark beneath the pumping station, something was waiting.