Mina Wentworth and the Invisible City by Meljean Brook Read Free Book Online

find any. Hopefully her interview with Foley would give her more to go on.
    The bridge was the usual tangle of vehicles, with urchins darting in front of the cart and forcing them to a stop, peddlers closing in from the side when they did, and the stench of the Thames perfuming it all. Newberry made it over without swearing once—that Mina heard, at any rate. Once past, they waited on the Borough until traffic to the bridge lightened enough for the cart to cross onto Tooley, where Mina had Newberry slow again so that she could study the buildings they passed. Though untouched by the slum fires of the previous year, most were in sorry shape, stone crumbling and boards rotted, almost every window broken. In the dark, the numbers were impossible to read, but a few of the structures were more recognizable than others.
    A peaked roof on the northern side of the street gave Mina her bearings. “There’s the old church! Turn right up here.”
    A rutted lane led up Church Yard Alley. A few lights flickered in the windows of the one-level rows of houses they passed. Men and women sat on doorsteps, sharing opium pipes—most of them laborers in the stockyard meat market, judging by the cleavers and bone saws attached to their arms. A wrinkled woman with a boisterous laugh and her lower legs grafted to a rolling peddler’s cart shouted an offer to exchange her tires for theirs. Mina grinned and shook her head, and as soon as they were past, reminded Newberry to double-lock the wheels when they arrived at Foley’s factory.
    Set in the yard of an old school, the spark-lighter manufactory took up one wing of the building, with a tin-roofed warehouse attached to the far end. Gray smoke rose from columned chimneys. The windows had been boarded over, with slits of light peeking through. Like most factories in the London area, Foley’s laborers worked in two ten-hour shifts, from four in the morning until midnight.
    Inside, the work floor was more brightly lit than most Mina had been in, but just as hot. Tired-eyed women and children sat on benches in front of long tables, mechanically assembling igniter heads to the wick tubes and tossing the finished lighters into crates. Most of the women had stripped down to chemises, clinging and transparent with sweat. At a nearby station, a thin-chested man with hydraulic hammers at his wrists pounded wires flat against a steel table. Sparks flew as metal sheets were cut into thin strips, and a rotten, garlicky odor hung over the room.
    “It’s the phosphorus,” Mina said when she saw Newberry’s hard swallow, and nodded to the far end of the work floor, where women wearing gloves and goggles dipped igniter wires into large vats. Open windows at the back and exhaust fans dissipated most of the fumes, preventing them from reaching combustible levels, but the smell still permeated everything in the factory.
    Though the work never stopped and most of the laborers hadn’t been chatting, a hush seemed to fall over the floor as they noticed Mina. Not just because she’d been in the newssheets, obviously—one woman turned and spit on the floor. Saving the Iron Duke didn’t overcome the taint of her Horde blood in everyone’s eyes, but as long as they weren’t spitting on her, Mina wasn’t interested in fighting that perception tonight.
    She was only interested in a brass wheel, and the reason Foley had left Redditch’s home so abruptly. She looked to the nearest station, where a quartet of women rolled strips of tin into circles. “Where might I find Mr. Foley? Is he here?”
    A young blond with scarred fingers nodded, gesturing with her chin without taking her eyes from Mina’s face. “Up that stair. He lives in the old headmaster’s quarters.”
    “Has he been up there all evening?”
    “No, Your Gracious—”
    “Grace,” one of the other women said under her breath.
    “‘Inspector’ will do,” Mina said with a faint smile.
    “He wasn’t here all evening, inspector. He left