The gas lamp above Grim's workbench hissed and sputtered, scratching on Beatrice's nerves as she stubbornly shook her head, pushed the stack of paper away and placed the pen next to it with deliberate force.

Grim kicked at her stool. 'Kleeman's signature. Copy it.' His voice carried that familiar growl of impatience she'd come to expect.

He'd seen what she'd scribbled in the margins the previous night: perfect copies of the customs officer's hand, each loop and flourish rendered with precision. She should have been more careful. To her, it had only been a silliness, something to take her mind off...well, her mind. And now, Grim was insisting she forge a letter from Kleeman to some Lord without even giving her the Lord’s full name, let alone what Grim’s plans were. The whole situation reeked of danger and vast overreach.

Beatrice would not be a mere scribe this locksmith could push around as he saw fit. 'You presume he wrote this himself. The man could have dictated this to a secretary. Or hired a translator. Or—'

'Or you're stalling. I need leverage. Just do it.'

She rotated the manifest towards Grim. The German cursive rolled crisp over the document. Eisenbahnkomponenten. Verschiffungskosten. Railway parts. Shipping fees. 'Even if I replicate the hand perfectly, the syntax could betray us.' Her finger stabbed a line. 'Passive voice here. Subjunctive mood there. We don't know how Kleeman writes when he's not just adding a few footnotes to a shipping document.'

The pen jumped as Grim slammed his palm on the desk. 'Christ, woman. Write the damn letter in Swahili for all I care. His men won't know the difference.'

'Precisely the problem. If they do have a German speaker, inconsistencies in syntax and word choice will lead to questions, perhaps too many questions. And if they don't have a German speaker, why mimic Kleeman at all? Maybe he's fluent in English or not? If he speaks English, so why would he write the letter in German? This isn't some stupid lock you can pick apart. Language has rules!'

Grim's eyelid twitched. She didn't know what it meant, but it was probably not a good sign.

'Rules. Right,' he muttered, pacing the workshop, back and forth until her neck ached from tracking his movement. 'Like how they were “following rules” when they sold faulty rifles to my regiment and to the Afghan side?'

Beatrice's spine snapped straight. 'What does this have to do with the Afghan war?'

He waved a hand at her, his damaged arm held stiff at his side. 'Nothing. You want truth. I want truth. Truth's a crowbar. Wedge it in and twist till the world cracks open and spills its guts.' His scarred face twisted into…possibly a smile, but Beatrice wasn’t sure.

She had no idea what he was going on about. The gas lamp burped and sputtered louder, its flame trembling like a drunken moth. Shadows leapt across a collection of skeleton keys hanging from rusted nails, their silhouettes stretching and contracting on the brick wall.

Beatrice stood abruptly. 'You don't even know if this Kleeman person is real. For all we know, a man or a group of men may be using “Kleeman” as an alias.'

The locksmith muttered under his breath, a string of curses she pretended not to hear.

'I have more documents,' he finally conceded, and went to a crate by his palette. 'Translate as many as you can tonight.' A stack of papers was slammed on the desk, sending dust motes swirling in the lamplight. ‘I need to know more. Make a detailed analysis of each one.’

'These are…rather many,' she said as she flattened her palm on the stack of shipping manifests. The paper Whispered faintly of sea spray and the rough hands of dock workers.

‘Are you saying you can’t finish them tonight?'

He was trying to get the most out of her, she knew, then toss her aside before paying for the work she did. Just like everyone else who thought they could take advantage of her weaknesses.

‘Thirty-seven documents,’ she said. The numbers unspooled across her retinae. Thirty-seven times five shillings. More than three months' wages at the pawn shop, where she’d spent her days cataloguing other people's discarded treasures. 'Nine pounds, five shillings. You don't have that much money. If you did, I'm sure you would have got it for doing something illicit.'

He snorted. 'Since when d'you care where coins come from? Toss me that rag.'

Without looking, she flicked the greasy cloth he was pointing to at his face. 'I want to see if you’ve got the money before I start translating. That's my rule.'

He slammed the rag down next to the clockwork mechanism he'd been oiling and pulled a few coins from his pocket. 'Here. Five shillings for the one you finished, and another five for the next one. Cease your yapping and get started.'

Grumbling, Beatrice slammed a fist on the desk but gave no reply to his rudeness. The wood Whispered of countless other angry fists that had struck there over the years. Instead, she asked, 'What do you intend to do with all this?'

He chuffed and kept polishing the strange clockwork piece. 'You won't like the answer.'

'You tell me things I don't like all day.'

She waited, but he gave no reply. Before turning her attention back to the manifests, she said, 'How do you intend to pay for the rest of my analyses? With insults and empty promises?'

He flung the oily cloth back at her. It fluttered over the desk and landed silently on the floor. 'I'll pay the mortician a little visit tonight. Happy?'

She wasn't sure if the prospect of Grim threatening a mortician would make anyone but Grim happy. The thought of him prowling the night with his scarred face and crippled arm, terrorizing those already terrified by the darkness, made her shiver.

The brazier hissed, spitting orange sparks through the gloom. Somewhere beyond the warehouse walls, a constable's whistle shrilled. Grim's shadow loomed across the manifests as he leaned forward and flashed his teeth. 'Time for me to leave if I want to catch the fellow before his bedtime.'

He wiped his oil-stained hands on his already filthy trousers, selected a crowbar from his collection of tools and made his way to the door, swinging the tool as a gentleman would a walking stick.

When Beatrice heard the gunshot noise of three locks snapping shut, a wild creature began clawing up her spine, each vertebra a stepping stone for rising panic.

Locked in.

Shadows yawned across walls, touching lockpicks, skeleton keys, a bayonet with a gleaming edge. She pressed a palm to her chest and tried to breathe, but the air felt as thick as molasses.

Locked in.

Twelve floorboards between herself and the door.

Beams groaned overhead, old wood protesting its burden. Copper bloomed on her tongue. Her gaze twitched to the desk where a stack of documents waited for her, their presence reassuring. Yes, she should focus on language, not on being…

Locked in.

The shipping manifest crackled softly under her trembling fingers.

The ink-blackened nib hovered over parchment. The lamp's flame pulsed in time with the pounding behind her ribs.

Breathe. Work. Don't think about being…

Locked in.

The scritch of pen against paper sounded like fingernails on glass. She tried to focus on the German words that swam before her eyes, seeking refuge in precise translation. The manifest listed machinery parts from Bremen. Gears, pistons, valves. Simple enough to translate, yet the letters kept blurring, shifting, refusing to stay still.

Like faces.

A creaking noise overhead. Her head snapped up, heart fluttering like a trapped bird. Just the building settling. Just the wind. Normal sounds of an old structure at night. Yet every shadow seemed to hold malice, every corner a threat.

The pen Whispered to her fingers: ink-blood-secrets-lies. She dropped it, watched it roll across the desk, leaving droplets of black in its wake. The paper rustled with its own voice: hidden-false-deception.

Beatrice squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her palms to her ears, her fingernails digging into her scalp. But the Whispers only grew louder, more insistent, a chorus of dead voices clamouring for attention. The desk beneath her elbows groaned tales of blackmail, of desperate men signing away their souls. The walls of the warehouse sighed with memories of midnight deliveries, of crates and sweaty dockworkers, their faceless forms merging to a blurry tide in her mind.

'Stop,' she whispered. 'Please stop.'

A vice tightened around her chest, squeezing the air from her lungs. The room grew smaller, the ceiling lower, pressing down on her like a coffin lid. She stumbled away from the desk, landed on her hindquarters and crab-walked backwards until her back hit the workbench.

Her scalp prickled. Her fingers knotted in her skirts. 'Eight hours in the dark will set my mind right,' she muttered, without knowing where the words came from nor how to stop them from coming.

The room tilted sideways, shadows resolving into barred windows.

Scratch-scratch-scratch.

She wrenched her gaze back to the desk. 'Codes. Weight discrepancies. Look for the patterns,’ she told herself. Her throat closed around the phantom taste of chloral hydrate, bitter and metallic on her tongue, but she forced herself to rise and return to her work.

'Bremer Handelsgesellschaft,' she read aloud to hear herself speak, to know she was real. Her voice sounded thin and shaky in this prison, echoing off walls like a stranger's whisper.

A rat skittered somewhere in the walls, claws clicking against wood and plaster. Beatrice's hand twitched, spilling ink across the desk and white parchment. The darkness pressed closer, thick as syrup, filling her lungs with its suffocating weight. She couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. The paper began to scream, lies-secrets-trapped-trapped-TRAPPED, each word eating into her mind like acid.

Her fingers found the edge of a manifest, crumpled the paper. Numbers danced before her eyes — weights, dates, ship coordinates — blurring and shifting. All wrong. All lies. Like the doctors' promises. Like her parents' love. Like—

'No!' She slammed both hands against the desk, as hard as she could. The impact jarred her bones. Pain shot through her palms, momentarily drowning out the Whispers. But they returned, stronger, more insistent. The whole building seemed to vibrate with them now, every nail and board and shadow screaming its secrets into her mind, an orchestra of horror. Whispers bloomed behind her teeth, tasting of rust and fear. Coal chute slamming shut, deadbolts thrown, rhythmic sobs through cold walls.

'Mr Cobble?' she whispered. Only silence answered. And the single-note hum of iron doors sealing shut, relentless.

Beatrice slid to the floor, scooted under the desk, clapped her hands over her ears, pressing until it hurt. 'Not real,' she muttered. 'Not real.' But the Whispers knew. The Whispers never lied, not like people, not like flesh and blood and false smiles. And not like that awful man who locked her in here, trapped her, abandoned her just like—