“Me?” Sam said.
“You hear the hidden script of the world, too, don’t you?” Professor Moriarty said. “What they want you to say?—their secret desires, their fears. You see it all written on their faces. It’s what you use to get your way, where my daughter resorts to violence. But then, they say daughters always fall for someone just like their father.”
It was true?—the shadow side of what Hel had said about how not all fighting need look the same. Had she found it comforting? The thought turned Sam’s stomach. She pressed her fingers into her corset.
“She is nothing like you,” Hel and her father said at the same time.
Her father chuckled. “See? In her need to act contrary to my every instruction, she has become predictable.”
Hel was done with this conversation, with this man, with whom she’d always been on her back foot. Sam could see it in every line of her body, in the white-knuckled grip she had on her revolver. Hel wanted to shoot him in the head and be done with it. But that was another thing Professor Moriarty had gotten right about Hel: He was unarmed, aside from his tongue, which in Sam’s opinion was sharp enough it ought to be considered, and Hel wouldn’t kill an unarmed man.
“Why am I here?” Hel said, a slight tremble beneath the steel in her voice. Professor Moriarty smiled; he heard it, too, and he wanted them to know it. Sam had never hated a man more, for making Hel doubt herself, for making her believe that everything she ever did in her life was by his plan?—that even her rebellion served his needs.
“Why, so you can arrest me,” Professor Moriarty said. “Wasn’t that what you’ve wanted all these years? Consider it an early birthday present.”
“You could have turned yourself in,” Hel said, her voice hard.
“Would you believe I simply wished to give you the credit?” Professor Moriarty said. “To get the man even the Scotland Yard failed to catch?”
“No.”
“No?” Professor Moriarty hummed quietly to himself. “Perhaps, then, you might believe that I’m overcome with guilt about my many sins and wish to pay my dues to society. Or, I could be exhausted, tired of this paranoid nonexistence, running from the law. Take your pick, only take me in. Or someone else will. But then, I imagine, there will be questions.”
Sam could see the frustration running through Hel like a live wire.If he offers you anything, deny it.But how could she deny this? Not only because she wanted him in jail, but because Professor Moriarty was right: If she didn’t capture him, with Jakob and the Special Branch waiting, there would be questions. It was a double-bind, a problem to which there was no good solution. Either way, Hel lost?—if she accepted that she was playing his game.
“Well?” Professor Moriarty said, as if they were simply discussing which variety of tea to order and not the arrest of the most wanted man in the world.
Hel and Sam waited on the train platform at Amiens Street Station. The platform was bristling with Special Branch. The real Special Branch this time; Jakob had, at last, gone to Dublin Castle. Snipers aimed at every possible egress from the solitary train car circled with portable steel walls with slits in them, like some sort of medieval fortification.
“Set shields,” Hel murmured. “They’re expecting explosions.”
“What do you think?” Sam said.
Hel shook her head. “Too expected.”
A lone raven cackled from where it perched in the branching steel above them. Hel eyed it but didn’t shoot, which Sam took for a victory. It wouldn’t go over well?—not here amidst the Special Branch, with her their scapegoat, absent Professor Moriarty in that car.
He’d be there, Sam told herself. He had to be. There’d been no opportunity for him to escape. The Special Branch had come, and they’d sealed up the compartment, armored cars escorting it back to the train station. Guards at every entrance.
There was a shout, and a young man in uniform hustled forward. Sam could see the sweat beaded on his brow, the way his lips pulled downward in a grimace. He pressed his back to the train car and beat the side of his fist on the door. “Professor Moriarty, we have you surrounded!” It appeared even a criminal still retained the accolades of higher education. “Come out slowly, with your hands up.”
No one so much as breathed in the silence that followed. The only sound was the raven plucking roughly at its feathers and chuckling to itself, as if at a secret. The sweaty young man looked at the forces arrayed before him. She could see the whites of his eyes even from all the way in the back lines.
“Professor Moriarty.” The man who spoke had a presence that Sam had seen in soldiers before?—like he was looking out at her from somewhere deep inside himself. He had a heavy brow and a generous moustache, his dark brown hair slicked down and parted in the middle. She knew without asking that this was the man in charge, Detective Thompson.
He stood stiff-backed, his arms folded behind him, as if he weren’t at all afraid of bombs?—as if he suspected no one was there at all. “If you mean to turn yourself in, open the door slowly and remove yourself from the train car, keeping your hands where we can see them.”
Detective Thompson slid Hel a sidelong glance, his meaning clear. If no one was in that compartment?—if Professor Moriarty had escaped? Well. There were two uses for those soldiers.
“Did we get it?” Hel murmured, an edge to her voice. If her father wasn’t there, it would be the difference between Hel being lauded as a hero... or condemned as a criminal. And then she would have a choice to make: to escape and go into hiding, or to allow those she’d fought to protect to put her in irons. Both choices let her father win.
And Sam?—she would have to choose, too. Except it wasn’t a choice at all, was it?
“I think so,” Sam whispered back.
“You’d better get it ready,” Hel said.
“Here?” Sam said. “Inpublic?” She hadn’t thought this part through when she’d made the modifications. Only where she might best conceal it.
