Outside, at the top of the stairwell, Charlie nearly runs into Swinburne, lurking in the darkness of the landing and breathing heavily, as though he’s been running. Charlie passes him quickly, telling himself that it is merely a coincidence. No dust dances in the gaslit stairwell beneath: it’s only when the boy passes that it rises and hovers, like inverted snow.

ф

“So are you coming along as my nurse or as Trout’s spy?”

They are sitting on the bathroom floor again, making themselves small amongst the row of tubs. Above them, where copper pipes crisscross underneath the ceiling, a spider is sitting in a wedge of web. It may be dead, trapped in its own design. Then again, it mayn’t.

Charlie ignores the question. If Thomas is angry, so is he. They have both taken off their shirts, in case they Smoke. They mustn’t stain.

“You should’ve told me, Thomas,” he says. “I’m your friend.”

Thomas responds without looking at Charlie.

“Yes, Charlie, you are. But will you still be my friend when I end up killing someone? When I turn into that woman underneath her noose, and you feel your own heart blacken with my filth?” He spits, angry, the spit steaming with white Smoke. “I’m rotting. Inside. Like a cancer, growing in here.” He rubs his chest, his guts, his hand a fist that he forgets to unclench. “Renfrew says there’s a machine, on the Continent somewhere. You step behind a sort of mirror and then they can see inside your rib cage. The bones show snow white. And your Smoke shows like fog. The blacker it is, the lighter it shows.” He spits again, watches it steam. “Another year and I’ll glow like an angel with my darkness.”

Charlie does not know what to say. He has rehearsed his conversation with Trout for Thomas. There is a cure, he wants to say, but the words get stuck in his throat.

There may be a cure.

It isn’t the same thing at all.

“Do you know him?” he asks instead. “This uncle who has invited you?”

“I met him as a child. Him and his wife. I only saw them from across the room: a bald man and a woman in a fancy frock. I was too young to be introduced. You know—the childhood years of sin.”

Charlie watches Thomas spit once again, hears his own voice drop to a whisper.

“Why can’t you go home for Christmas, Thomas?”

A snort, tinged with dark. “Nobody there. Mother’s dead.”

“And your father?”

“Dead.” Smoking now, breath and skin: “Disgraced.”

“What did he do, Thomas? Tell me.”

“What did he do? He beat a man to death.”

The words are hard, curt, devoid of pity. Here I am, Thomas seems to be saying, exposed. But also: Don’t push me, not now. I might break.

Charlie hears it, fights a shiver.