Yvette jolted awake, her pulse drumming like a trapped bird. She lit a candle with an ember from the dying fire, its honeyed glow spilling across the chamber. Mechanically, she warmed the bedside milk—an estate-bred luxury in this age of chalk-diluted swill—and drank deep. Sugar-sweet cream coated her tongue, steadying frayed nerves.

  The nightmare clung like cobwebs. That foolhardy redhead, guzzling forbidden knowledge straight from the Kin’s poisoned cup! Madness—yet the elder-headed oracle’s prophecy held. No mutations marred the zealot’s frame as he groveled before his... patron? Teacher? The monstrosity’s ghastly form—putrid stillborn limbs beneath a wizened human face—should’ve repelled. Yet logic seeped through revulsion, a paradox she’d only felt once before...

  Spindle.

  Yvette banished the heresy. Comparing that courtly gentleman to this abomination? Preposterous. Still—Fate versus Chronos. Spindle saw branching paths; the oracle claimed certainty. Were the redhead’s faction harnessing Time itself?

  Apples rolled across the kitchen below—the estate’s weekly delivery. She thought of baby Mary, plump from untainted milk while gutter-raised infants withered. Of Alison’s waning lactation. A note to the steward: double the dairy ration.

  Three dawns later, hobnails clacked in the foyer. Alastor stood dripping, grin too wide for propriety.

  "Breakfast, sir?" Her maid’s scandalized glare could curdle cream.

  "Business, Ives." He dismissed Alison with a nod. When Yvette praised Ulysses’ healing arts, the Hound shuddered like a wet terrier.

  "The Tower wants silence." His graveled whisper carried dread. "Same as Shire’s curse-case. Stitched lips all around."

  Rewards, though—oh, the spoils! That captive Kin would birth artifacts to make kings weep. Alastor’s sacrifice—gifting her the lion’s share—reeked of honor-bound Hound logic.

  "Dead Kin make safest relics," he growled at her queasy protest. Alive, specialist butchers might flay stranger powers from the thing’s twitching carcass. Either way—prizes incoming.

  She watched him limp into hazy sunlight, a question gnawing: What terrors bind the Tower’s tongue twice over?

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  The Hound’s shadow stretched long—a blackened sundial counting secrets.

  Following Alto's departure, Yvette welcomed another veiled visitor by midday—a masked interior operative resembling the prior agent who'd questioned Ulysses' affairs on Rat Island. Though the voice differed, disguise methods left identities uncertain.

  This interrogator's scattered questions—some echoing Alto's report, others trivial—concealed surgical probes about the crimson-haired man's associates. To Yvette's sharpened perception, their pattern betrayed institutional awareness of an underlying cabal behind recent events, including Miss Shar's curse. Yet the Organization apparently hoarded this knowledge like misers guarding coins.

  Her musings yielded no epiphanies. By afternoon, academic obligations summoned her to a gathering honoring Julie—their professor's daughter home from telegraphic labors. In an era when campus hierarchies remained fluid, Julie's tales of workplace tribulations and triumphs drew eager audiences. Yvette also sought Gary's promised research on serpent myths—a hunter ever gathering threads for the loom of truth.

  En route, newspapers filled carriage hours—this world's sensory tendrils where wireless waves couldn't reach. Faulkner's latest detective serial thrived in Ulysses-controlled rags, while bootleg sheets scraped crumbs from analytical parodies. Yvette tracked literary currents; she knew Faulkner's clique had scattered when Ulysses scuttled their Mind Labyrinth journal, some washing ashore at rival presses.

  Her own editors, sniffing opportunity in Faulkner's friendship with young Ives, had badgered Yvette to leverage their bond—a request she'd refused, knowing the author's compulsive gallantry would override his will. Their eventual success in poaching him stirred professional admiration laced with unease.

  But today's anomaly lay in the classifieds—that alphabetic car wreck of jumbled letters between matrimonial pleas:

  [Gxntlqzn, 30 qrx...]

  Editors detested these cipher ads requiring Talmudic scrutiny. Lately they'd metastasized in tabloids like inkblot rashes—malignant or meaningless?

  At the restaurant, Julie's embrace carried platonic warmth where once romantic embers glowed. Months prior, Yvette had gently parried the girl's affections with tales of unrequited love for some icy noble matron—chivalric pretense preserving her secrets behind courtly metaphor.

  Now steel showed in Julie's bearing—the telegraph clerk's taffeta armor declaring workplace conquests. "Those bullies?" She laughed, recounting her savior colleague's elegant vengeance: mirroring her tormentors' speed until their fingers tangled, then skewering them with Morse-code mockery about "using the other foot."

  As they chatted, Julie's eye caught the cipher ad's telltale chaos.

  "My handiwork!" She decrypted it swiftly—vowels anchored, consonants marching +1 down the alphabet. "Lovers use these for penny-pinching telegrams, but this viper cozens a maid into becoming his mistress. My rebuttal lifts the veil."

  Yvette marveled at the scheme—clandestine sweethearts conversing through newspaper cryptograms, their dalliance hidden behind society's blind eye toward female literacy. Even now, Eve's daughters wore their wit like forbidden fruit, sweetness laced with peril.