Mina Wentworth and the Invisible City Read Online Free PDF Page B

wouldn’t see it.
    In the southeast corner, a pale cloth covered a body-sized lump. Rhys nodded toward it, but saw that Mina’s sharp eyes had already found the body. Still, she didn’t yet move in that direction, her gaze scanning the rest of the garden.
    “A giant brass wheel,” she said quietly. “Have you heard of a similar machine used in that way?”
    “No.” But four yards ahead of them, a path of crushed grass caught his attention at the same moment Mina began moving toward it. “But I don’t think Prescott was too far off.”
    Without stepping off the slate tiles, she crouched beside the three-foot-wide swath of flattened grass. She pointed to a narrow strip of grass that was not crushed as the others, then another, all evenly spaced along the wheel’s path. “It’s not completely smooth. It must be shaped like a gear, and these the uncrushed sections are from the valleys between the cogs . . . but no, the spacing isn’t right. It runs on a track, perhaps—and these flattened sections are the plates. Hopefully they will lead us on a path back to their owner.”
    The viscount lay in the corner, near the wall. Aside from removing the covering, Mina didn’t immediately touch him, but studied the body. Redditch wore a black suit similar to the one he’d worn the previous night, with a linen cravat and a bounder’s trousers instead of breeches. Blood surrounded a dark, gaping hole in his chest. Mina bent over him, eyes narrowed.
    “The entry wound is an inch and a half in diameter. This isn’t from a bullet. Or if it is, the largest bullet I’ve ever seen.”
    In the smugglers’ havens of Australia, Rhys had seen musket balls almost as big, but firing one would have made considerable noise. “No one mentioned hearing a gunshot,” he said.
    “Perhaps he was impaled on a metal rod of some sort.” She glanced around the area again, as if looking for a tool that matched the wound. “I don’t think it went all the way through his body. There’s not enough blood beneath him. But I can’t be certain without turning him over, and I’ll wait for Newberry to arrive and take photographs before I do.”
    She briefly examined his hands, his mouth, and face. Redditch’s bronze skin had turned waxy in death, his features slack and eyes open. She closed his eyelids before standing, looking down at him.
    “Damn it,” she said quietly. “He seemed a decent sort, didn’t he?”
    Rhys supposed Redditch had been. He didn’t often think of people in that way—there were simply those who were necessary to him for some reason, those he protected or were useful to him, those few he cared for—and the one woman he loved. Redditch might have been useful as a political ally, but so were many other members of society. Unlike many of the others, however, Rhys wouldn’t have minded passing more time in the man’s company.
    But he knew that to Mina, Redditch had represented something more. The first time she’d seen the viscount in person, she’d been fascinated by the darkness of his skin, his native blood. She was too familiar with the docks to be surprised by his race in general—a good portion of the sailors coming in from Manhattan City were either native, Liberé, or mixed—but it had been her first time seeing it in a member of the aristocracy.
    And it hadn’t just been the fact of his native blood, Rhys knew, but that no other New Worlder had thought a thing of it. Unlike Mina, who’d endured stares and hatred her entire life, Redditch hadn’t likely encountered the same. Centuries ago, he might have, when the first trade agreements with the native confederacies had been sealed with marriages, strengthening political ties. But now, marriages between New Worlders of native, European, or African descent took place for all the usual reasons—money, religion, progeny—and for the damn lucky ones, the same reason Rhys had married: love.
    Seeing the native viscount and learning his story had given