Opal watched the spirits of the factory. She spent most of her time here, assisting, overseeing the production of packet spells and cheap linen nightgowns and motor car wheels, and anything inexpensive and swift to produce.
She had a bedroom, of course, and once she had left the tea shop at last she finally began using it. It was a cramped space behind the bistro at the very top of Hemmington’s department store. There was a cold labyrinth of worker dorms tucked back there, with a library and a billiards table. Hers was a sparse enclosure, save for the trinkets and sketches and clothes she had taken from the attic.
She thought of the girl with whom she had once swum in the lilypond, and the ache of misery and regret was so much that Opal began to pick at the charmed tattoos upon her chest. When the conduence took over, the shrieking of her thoughts would disappear. Magic, pure and intoxicating, coursed through her veins and with it came a sense of calm, and away from her seeped the memory of the bread knife buried into her back and the betrayal of her beloved friend. As if Opal were sleepwalking, Salamander’s power would take over her. It was so different from the magic of the forest. This was a chemical, unearthly magic that left her feeling slimy, cold and used. Still, she felt powerful and that was all she cared about now.
After Salamander used her, Opal often woke in strange places, her body sore. She would climb out of the pond at Penn Park or peel herself off the lobby floor of this or that hotel. The waking was the worst. It made her feel thin, breakable, and with vague flashes of memories of what the daemon had made her do.
Sometimes, she felt regret.
At her darkest, she missed the forest. She missed sweet, stupid Lio and her once beloved friend and even her stern mother. She did not miss the people they were now; no, she missed the people she hadthoughtthey were.
What choice had Opal but to turn into this creature?
With dark and hateful eyes, she watched the spirits of the factory.
Most of them had not seen sunlight since the day Salamander cut the conduence into their skin. Five years, for some. Much longer for others. The papers, the protesters, the lobbyists had whined for years about the Mass Exodus: the spirits who fled Calléum in droves after the insult of Article 13. Opal scoffed. Little did the do-gooders know how many of those ‘lost spirits’ were here, in factories across the Apexes, the Enclaves, the Armourers’ District and beyond, slaving away for Salamander, producing faux packet spells filled with sodium bicarbonate, with powdered sugar, with opium. Every now and then Salamander instructed them to throw in a real one – a good luck charm, a ward for influenza, a good night’s sleep. It was to keep the punters guessing, Opal supposed. To keep them hooked.
‘It will not take long,’ came the voice of Marcidus. The spirit appeared on the balcony beside her. ‘The witch’s empire falters. Casimir is one of the few friends she has left.’
‘Salamander trusts him too much,’ said Opal.
‘Salamander trusts himself,’ said the pink, amorphous spirit. ‘Casimir is weak. I have taken his contract. I used those prettypapers to remind him what will happen if Salamander falls. Casimir knows who his master will be, should he do anything silly.’
‘You know, Marcidus,’ said Opal, ‘I would never do anything silly.’ She looked sideways at the spirit. Marcidus was known for flirting with beautiful human women. Her fingers trailed through her hair.
Marcidus laughed at her.
‘The conduence has addled more than just your mind, Miss Weyer. You are as appealing to me as Casimir.’
Opal glanced back at the office windows and caught her reflection. She startled at it. When had her face become so angular? Her hair so matted?
‘Why come to me, Miss Weyer?’ Salamander had asked her, that very first time she had visited his lair. ‘Why scheme and plot and turn against a woman you have loved as family?’
‘I do notwantto plot against her,’ Opal had said. ‘She took my mother’s attention from me. She used that to supersede me in magic. She is the one who turned. It isn’t fair that I was born without a talent.’
Salamander, whose long, slimy body perched on the brim of the tank, had smiled at that.
‘What do you want, Opal Weyer?’
‘Everything,’ Opal had said hungrily. ‘I want to be better at magic than her. I want to build something better than she did. I want to be the opposite of bored for the first time in my life.’
Salamander handed her a short contract.
‘You want a talent, Miss Weyer? Work for me and I will give you one.’
In her arrogance, she did not read it. She did not know to ask what a conduence charm was. With each passing year, her dysfunction and anger and dependence on the conduence deepened. Some faraway part of her knew this. Some closer part ignored it.
Once Opal superseded Casimir, she would find a way to reverse it.
It would not be difficult now, with Casimir’s recent failures. Once Salamander amended the Prohibition, he would make her the Prime Minister, or the Queen, or place her in some vibrant and interesting station, and the girl from the forest who had betrayed her, the girl now called Theodora, whose love of her was shallow and self-serving, would be reduced to nothing. Her tea shop, gone. Her talent, gone.
Yet, a tiny voice in Opal’s head hissed,Do you truly want that?
Opal shook the thought away, and the itchy, vile magic of the conduence applauded her. All she needed, now, was to abduct Dorothy Walcott and hand her over to the daemon.
There came a tapping on the glass behind her. Opal turned and saw Eliot at the window. Opal yanked it open, and he landed on her hand just as the chemical glow of the conduence began pulsing at the edge of her vision.
‘Miss Weyer,’ hissed Salamander’s voice. ‘It’s time.’
