Thomas turned sideways and slammed his shoulder into the door. It promptly collapsed. The Shadowhunters piled through and found themselves standing in a tiny yard filled with a tangle of weeds and rubble, looking at the back of a building. It might have been painted white, once. Now its bricks were green with mildew, its windows cracked and blind with dust. A set of rotting wooden steps led up to a gaping doorway into darkness.

“If I were writing a novel in which someone set up a headquarters for their criminal enterprises,” Lucie said, “I would describe a place just like this.”

“Wishing you had your notebook?” said Cordelia, checking to make sure Cortana was firmly strapped to her back. Her fingers brushed the new scabbard her father had given her, and she sighed inwardly. She was not sure she could quite love it, just as she was no longer quite sure how she felt about her father.

Lucie winked. “You know me too well.”

The steps, surprisingly, held their weight as they climbed carefully and lightly up one by one. James led the way, laying a finger to his lips, and the other five followed through the doorway and down a low-ceilinged, pitch-black, spidery corridor. Webs brushed unpleasantly against Cordelia’s face as they moved silently along, and she could hear the scrabbling of rats inside the walls.

Suddenly they were in a wide-open space, no doubt the main factory floor, with iron pillars all around it like a cloister in a cathedral. A peaked glass roof with iron ribs arched high above, and a gallery circled the room halfway up. Large metal hooks dangled from iron chains attached to gantries overhead. ILMAKERS, the sign outside had said. It must have been a sailmaker’s factory, where swaths of canvas would have been hung up to dry. Now, the empty hooks spun lazily in the dusty air; beneath them, dimly lit by the roof-light, lay the ruins of an enormous, splintered loom.

Lucie looked around, her face tight. “She’s here,” she said.

James shot her a curious, sideways look. “Filomena? Where?”

Lucie didn’t answer. She was already scrambling past a number of rusting iron machines whose purpose was unclear, picking her way over the cluttered floorboards. “Filomena?” she called. She kicked aside a chunk of rotting plaster. “Filomena!”

The others exchanged glances. Anna took out a witchlight rune-stone, sending up a flare of light; the others fell into step, following Lucie. She seemed to be making her way toward the center of the room, where debris lay in dark heaps. She made a strangled sound. “Come here!”

Cordelia leaped over a piece of broken floorboard, finding Lucie standing white-faced and ill-looking over a pile of what looked like discarded rags. The floor was stained with a dark sludge. “Luce?”