“What is wrong with her?” demanded the Contessa.

“She is ill,” replied Vandaariff. “An effect of the glass. Just like poor Francis. Can you hear me, Francis? Are you alive?”

“Can you truly heal him?” asked Mrs. Trapping.

Vandaariff tied off the end of a black hose. “Do you want me to?”

“I… I do,” she whispered.

An excitement leapt to Vandaariff's eyes.

“But your brother is a wicked thing. If anyone deserves an agonizing death it is certainly Francis. No, Mrs. Trapping, I'm sure I don't believe you.”

“I want him as he was,” she insisted.

“You must convince me…”

“I want him back,” she whimpered.

“Back?” asked Vandaariff. “I see—so you can kill him yourself?”

“No,” sniffed Mrs. Trapping, but then was overtaken by sobs. “I do not know what I want at all!”

Robert Vandaariff sniggered, arch and vile. The Contessa spoke angrily. “When you open your mouth, Charlotte, it helps you not at all!”

“As if I had a choice! In anything!”

The Contessa snorted and pointed to the deathly pale little girl, huddled in an insensible ball at the feet of Mr. Phelps. “You might have remembered your daughter.”

“I might have—I might have?”

Mrs. Trapping took three quick steps toward the Contessa, like a high-strung dog, her hands raised, then staggered from an unseen blow. She wheeled to the glass woman in a tearful fury.

“Do not touch me!” she shrieked. “I will not have your filthy mind in mine! I will break you to a thousand pieces! I do not care if my daughter dies! I do not care if I die! If you touch me again, this whole building can go to the devil's hottest furnace!” Mrs. Trapping swayed with the same crazed ferocity her brother had shown on the roof of Harschmort. “This is my factory,” she gasped, “my brother, you cannot—”

“Be quiet, Charlotte!” snapped the Contessa. “Oskar, what pleasure is there in tormenting an idiotic…”

Her words fell silent. Vandaariff's smiling lips were slick with black fluid.

“Oskar?”

“You never did credit my alchemy, Rosamonde.”

“I beg your pardon? Who was it who took your learning to Vandaariff, to Henry Xonck—men of immense power of whom you had never heard.”

Vandaariff nodded dismissively, stroking his chin as if it held the Comte's beard. “Yes, for you it was ever a means to power.”

“For all of us.”

“You lack higher goals, Rosamonde. At heart you are a dog. A pretty dog, but now look at you! You dismissed the glory of my plans for Lydia… for Margaret… even—” he giggled wickedly “—my plans for you. My goodness, yes—if you'd only dreamt what truly awaited you in Macklenburg… one limb at a time, my sweet… and your womb—O that more than anything, Rosamonde, your own sweet legacy… all given over to me.”

The Contessa stared at him.

“Oskar…you—even you—would not have dared—”

Vandaariff barked with contempt. “Would not dare? Would not dare?”

He raised his arm and Fochtmann, back at the line of machines, restored them to roaring life. The Contessa's eyes went wide. She looked with alarm at Miss Temple, still unable to speak, and shouted for him to wait, shouted for the glass woman to stop him. But Robert Vandaariff seized the handle on the brass box and pulled it down.

MISS TEMPLE had stolen one glimpse of the Comte's cathedral chamber at Harschmort, with all its machines at full roar and Mrs. Marchmoor, Angelique, and Elspeth Poole laid out on tables awaiting transformation—and she had seen the sickening glamour of their grand unveiling in the Vandaariffs' ballroom later that night. But she had not witnessed the alchemical transformation itself, human flesh remade to blue glass. And so the spectacle of Francis Xonck writhing in unspeakable agony—madly shrieking as his body boiled away before them all—filled her with unprecedented horror.

The change began at the gleaming lump near his heart and then spread out in twisting ropes, wriggling fingers surging up each side of his throat, fast-growing tropical vines rippling across his sweat-slicked chest. She heard muffled cracks, like splitting ice, as his bones were over-borne, and then came the bubbling away of muscle and sinew. The hissing glass erupted upwards to pepper the skin in raw blue patches, a horrid dense scatter of virulent blistering. Then these blisters fattened, pooling, colliding into one another until the whole of Xonck's exposed flesh congealed into one gelid gleaming sheet.

At the first jolt of current, the man screamed and thrashed his arms—and it seemed he might tear free, so prodigious was his terror. But as his body incrementally stiffened, his ability to struggle was curtailed. His protests dropped at the last to a lost, vacant moan behind the rubber mask, the sound of wind against the lip of an empty bottle, and then he was silent altogether.

Fochtmann switched off the power.

No one spoke, and not one person moved, save for Robert Vandaariff, who delicately leaned to his new-made creature and whispered in its ear.

“WHAT HAVE you done?” rasped Colonel Aspiche, lifting his head from the floor. “What madness?”

Vandaariff did not answer. Gently peeling free the mask, he exposed Francis Xonck's face—an inhuman swirling blue, copper hair hanging in oily locks against his bare neck. Xonck's moustache and side whiskers were gone. He seemed so much younger—and his corruption more stinging. Vandaariff bared his teeth in a mirthless leer of satisfaction.

“Were you saying something, Rosamonde? I could not hear.”

“Oskar…” The Contessa groped for words, unable to turn from the spectacle of Xonck's body. “O Oskar…”

“Oskar indeed—I trust any questions of identity can be laid to rest. As requested, I have ended Francis' struggle with the blue glass—to everyone's profit… or at least my own.”

“Jesus…” Mr. Phelps seemed near tears. “Jesus God…”

Vandaariff smiled. He scratched his earlobe with the nail of his right thumb. Miss Temple saw with a shudder how the sensibility that had been placed into Robert Vandaariff's body was not truly that of the Comte d'Orkancz. The Comte was an esthete, a sensualist who rated the entire world only by its beauty. Yet in his despairing grapple with death, that sensuality had been spoiled—like a freshly opened egg mixed with tar, like sugar frosting spun with putrid meat, like sliced fruit writhing with maggots—leaving his mind riddled with loathing and spite for everything that remained alive. Whatever ruin he could replicate in the world would merely echo the despoilment of his once-splendid dreams.

He raised an eyebrow at Mrs. Marchmoor, who had not moved, and then addressed the Contessa. “You seem reticent, Rosamonde. Did you not want to renew our compact? Or has your recent ill fortune rendered you as tremulous as these men?”

The Contessa held Phelps' revolver—it was within her power to shoot Vandaariff down.

“Why do you hesitate?” hissed Miss Temple. “After what he was saying, what he would do to you—”

“Be quiet, Celeste!” The Contessa licked her lips, weighing greed and arrogance and hope against the man's outright insanity. For a creature as once splendid as the Contessa to even hesitate, Miss Temple was appalled. The Contessa cleared her throat and spoke in a cool, careful tone.

“I am sure the Comte was merely… exorcising his old rage.”

“I was exactly,” said Vandaariff, smiling.

“Telling stories.”

“I was indeed.”

Vandaariff turned to Miss Temple and smirked at her distressed expression. “The Contessa is my good friend, how could we not go on together? Of course, Margaret is a different story. She is imperfect, created from flawed premises, and so we see the result—beautiful enough, yet rebellious, acquisitive… stupid.” He called to Chang. “Take her head, I beseech you.”