“Mae Casper?” came a woman’s voice from the door. “Are you Mae Casper?”
She looked to be about twenty and was dressed in a rumpled gray dress, her long brown hair hanging loose around her head. Her hands were dusted with gray sooty residue and her eyeswere wild and impatient. “I’m looking for Roland Reed,” she said. “Is he here?”
Mae blinked, startled. “He isn’t,” she said, stepping toward the girl. “He was injured and had to take some time away.”
She shook her head, clicking her tongue. “No, I know that,” she said, waving one of her dirty hands in the air. “He’s been about London since, but he was supposed to come by my workshop today. He never showed up. I checked the Vixen and they said he would be here. But he isn’t here either?”
“Your workshop?” Mae repeated, feeling a little lost in this conversation.
The girl twisted her lips, looking irritated by the pace of the conversation. “Perhaps he’s with Aristotle.”
Mae could only give a helpless kind of shrug. “I don’t know who that is.”
The girl scoffed. “You don’t? You, Mae Casper, don’t know Roland’s father? Listen, it’s unusual that he wouldn’t show, and the kits haven’t seen him either. I’m going to keep looking for him. Do you want to come with me?”
“Miss,” said Mae, managing another scuffing step toward the girl. “Who are you?”
The girl raised her thick, straight brows, her dry lips twisting in a kind of amusement. “He hasn’t mentioned me either, then?” she said. “Typical. I’m his sister. Sort of. Name’s Sybil Lutch. Are you coming?”
Mae nodded, already untying her apron and moving to hang it on the hook by the door. “Ravi,” she called over her shoulder, thewordsisterstill clanging in her ears, intriguing her far beyond good sense. “I need to step out.”
“Godspeed,” he called back with his typical cheery air, spinning the globe again to show Winston some other corner of Creation.
At least it was a slow day.
Fewer patients by the hour, it seemed like. No one wanted to risk being spattered with a rogue horse patty, she supposed.
The truth was, she would have followed this girl even during an influenza outbreak or another tenement collapse, just at the tendril of intrigue that was the concept of asort of sistercompounded with the promise of meeting Roland Reed’s actual, literal father, and perhaps getting some answers about his many, many, veiled private doings. Sybil herself was worth following regardless of her destination, just for the questions she could likely answer.
“You suspect he is in some sort of trouble?” Mae asked, hurrying after the other woman, whose pace was already very brisk as she took the rear path around the clinic and headed directly into an alley, her boot crashing into a grayish puddle without any obvious concern for the liquid splashing up along her stockinged calf. “How concerned should I be?”
“For Roland?” Sybil asked, turning her head slightly with a smirk. “Depends on the reason for concern. He’s probably fine, but I’ve been left in the lurch by him for the final time this summer and I’m going to go find his errant arse before he can do it again. I figure you’re of the same mind and want him back at work too. We can join forces.”
“He works for you?” Mae pressed, lifting her own skirts as high as they would go and attempting to dodge city muck as best as she could while she attempted to keep the pace. “Doing what?”
Sybil shrugged. “Few things,” she said. “Today he was supposed to introduce me to a coroner. He’s been sitting for me this week, since he can’t do much else. He doesn’t workforme so much as we do things for each other. Don’t tell him I said he worksforme.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Mae managed.
Sybil shook her head, leaping over a pile of broken wooden boards, nails jutting out of several at odd angles. “Heneversits for me after what happened with that stupid sculpture. That wasn’t me, you know.”
“You’re a sculptor?” Mae asked, panting through the jog and taking the long way around the threat of rusted lockjaw in that discarded bevy of wood.
“Me? God, no,” Sybil answered airily, clearly not winded at all. She slapped the brick wall of a building as they curved around it. “Turn up here. Aristotle’s got a townhouse on the corner. You’ll love him. He’s a right creampuff. Hopefully we don’t interrupt him with a gentleman caller. Or maybe hopefully we do. I suppose that could be fun. Oh! Watch your step.”
Mae grimaced, stumbling against the brick wall and gripping a morning glory vine for support, just sort of losing her entire ankle into a pothole in the cobbles. The poor flower vine tore in her hand, smearing her fingers with the remains of its purple petals. “I’m fine,” she said.
She wasn’t.
They tumbled out of a canal runoff path and into the street in front of a pale blue townhouse.
Sybil looked refreshed and energetic, while Mae was half certain she had partially melted on the way here, her lungs rattling as she gasped for breath.
“This the place?” she managed, attempting to sound as hale as possible.
“Ayup,” said Sybil, skipping up the stairs and knocking the bell with her fingers. “He’s probably here. Aristotle dotes on him when he’s in a strop.”
“He’s in a strop?” Mae asked between breaths, clinging to the bannister as she climbed up after the other girl.
