Free Dark Metropolis by Jaclyn Dolamore Page A

good liar—she’d give him that. He spoke as if he believed all he said, and he never lost his cool. “Maybe you should let them die, then,” she said. “What kind of life is this? Who are you to decide they should live?”
    “Would you like to die, Miss Davies?” For a moment, his eyes came alive with threat. “I could arrange it, if it’s what you truly wish.”
    “No,” she snapped.
    “Get dressed, if you would, and I’ll tell you what to say when you see Freddy.”
    I made my own dresses, and they were better than this one.
    She remembered the satisfaction of putting on a new creation. Of following a pattern. She liked patterns. Everything laid out so clearly, and yet it felt like art at the end. Nan had such trouble with art most of the time—her world was colorless, and music jarred her ears—but the symmetry of sleeves and seams made sense.
    Even though she hadn’t made this dress, wearing silk again was nice. Not that she had much time to enjoy it.
    The guard tied a cloth around her eyes so that she couldn’t see and led her down more corridors and up some stairs. When he removed it, she was in a house with sunshine streaming through glass windows. The outside world, just steps away from where she’d been.
    But it wasn’t really the world she had known. The house felt quiet and insular; she didn’t hear the voices of passersby or the rumbling of motorcars. She imagined this gilt-and-brocade interior must belong to one of the wealthy houses in the city’s finest districts, set back from the street and surrounded by a gate. No one had to tell her that if she cried for help, she wouldn’t get any.
    She heard murmuring male voices in a different room, and after Valkenrath delivered his instructions, the guard led her there.
    “There she is!” A thin old man with a mustache sat at a table with a cup of coffee and a slice of pastry. The smell of the coffee was sharp and familiar and made Nan feel suddenly very homesick for a place she couldn’t quite remember. “Looking very well indeed.”
    The younger man must be Freddy. He looked at her rather gravely. She didn’t want to say any of the things Valkenrath had told her to say.
    “Nan?” Freddy said.
    “Yes,” she said, glancing around. Dark oil portraits gazed upon her from the walls. The wealth and well-kept age of everything felt unfamiliar and uncomfortable.
    “Are you feeling better?”
    “It will take time for her to recover from the suicide, but she’s happy at her new job, aren’t you, Miss Davies?” Valkenrath said.
    She held herself stiffly. “It’s all right.”
    “Where are you working?” Freddy asked, leaning forward in his chair, clutching his cup of coffee.
    “I pull levers all day,” she said. Valkenrath had told her to smile, but she was not smiling. She could feel his cold gaze on her.
    Freddy looked like a question was blazing on his lips. One he couldn’t ask.
    “Not much of a party girl, are you?” the mustached man said with a chuckle. She didn’t quite understand the situation, but it almost felt as if the mustached man was making fun of her. As though she would think the job fun if she were a different kind of girl. But no one would find that job fun, or anything about that sunless world.
    “There isn’t much opportunity to party when you have nothing of your own,” Nan snapped back. “Not even good food. What would we party with?”
    “Thea’s worried about you,” Freddy said. The mustached man frowned at him.
    Thea! Before she could ask him how he knew Thea—or for that matter, how she knew Thea—Valkenrath turned her shoulder to the door. “She’s ill-tempered, Freddy, but otherwise well,” he called as he forced her out. The guard was waiting just outside and grabbed her arms behind her back, holding them secure with one hand while roughly pulling the blindfold back around her face with the other. She stayed half limp, not trying to fight. There didn’t seem to be any point right now,