Silverblind (Ironskin) Read Online Free PDF

the collectors proper instructions, which I’m sure he doesn’t. Honestly, I wouldn’t want to work for him even if I were a boy, unless I didn’t have any other options. But even if I could disguise myself as a boy, I wouldn’t have a degree or any recommendations, so I couldn’t go back to the places I was today. So that really would leave Malcolm, because of…”
    “The rent,” finished Jack.
    “The rent,” agreed Dorie. “Say, why don’t you sell a dozen paintings tomorrow, and then this will be academic? I can mooch off of my rich artist friend.”
    “If I sell a dozen paintings,” said Jack grandly, “you can mooch for the rest of the year.”
    Behind the saltshakers Dorie suddenly saw Stella’s fingers clutch the table. The front door flew open behind Jack. Three men all in black burst through. Their faces were covered, but their hands were bare. They held up their palms, flashing the same silver sigils that Dorie had seen on the hands of the boys at the lab. An oval with a circle inscribed inside, like an eye. The pub went silent as the men peered around for their target. Then a clatter from a table behind them as some university boy tried to run for the back exit. The men were on him in a second.
    Two of the men pressed their bare palms to his skin—one gripped his arm, one his neck. They bore the boy down to the wooden floor. The third whipped out a fine mesh net that twisted copper and silver in the dim light of the bar. Dorie could not get a fix on it. The third man spread the mesh over the boy’s face and then added his palm to a spot on the boy’s chest.
    “What is this?” whispered Dorie, but Jack put a silent hand on hers. Hush .
    The boy squirmed under their grip. Then abruptly, went limp, his head lolling at an unnatural angle. His skin grew paler and paler as a fine blue smoke coalesced between his mouth and the mesh. Working with more care now, the men gathered the mesh around the smoke, trapping it. But no, not smoke—Dorie knew all too well what must be escaping from the boy’s dying body.
    A fey.
    The boy slipped from under the men’s fingers as they concentrated on the mesh; he fell to the floor in a silent heap, bleached white. The blue fully trapped, one man packed away the mesh in a copper container; another threw the body over his shoulder.
    Noise resumed as the men pushed out into the mild summer night.
    Dorie’s hand on her ale was shaking the glass. She was not sure if it was rage or fear. She put her hands under her thighs just in case and turned to Jack. “What. Was that.”
    “The silvermen have been everywhere since that Subversive Activities Act snuck through over the winter hols,” said Jack. “You’ve been shut up inside working so hard the last half-year. And then out in the country all the weekends on your research. I’m not surprised you haven’t seen it.” Her dark eyes held meaning: I didn’t want to scare you.
    “Oh, but there’s nothing to worry about,” said Stella blithely, stealing one of Jack’s fried potatoes and gesturing with it. “That boy was as good as dead already. Those silver hand things of theirs only work on fey that have taken over bodies. Not regular people.”
    “I see,” said Dorie. “And what, exactly, are the fey doing back in the city?”
    But she was met with blank looks from her two friends.
    “I think we need another round,” Jack said at last.
    Dorie agreed that this was a good idea. Still, it was a long time before she felt comfortable enough to take her hands out from under her thighs and drink her ale.
    The conversation turned to Jack’s gallery opening on Tuesday night—Jack made the two of them cross hearts and swear to attend—then to Stella’s summer classes, gossip about mutual friends. Though they had all been at the same prep school, they had been on different paths for the last several years—Jack and Dorie had just finished their degrees at the nearby art institute and an elite women’s college,