The Infernal Devices 01 - Clockwork Angel Read Online Free PDF Page B

they’d passed Newfoundland, when Tessa had not been able to sleep. She had gone out on the deck to get a breath of air, and had seen the night sea ablaze with white glittering mountains—icebergs, one of the sailors had told her as he’d passed, broken loose from the ice sheets of the north by the warmer weather. They had drifted slowly on the dark water, like the towers of a drowned white city. Tessa had thought that she’d never seen such a lonely sight.
    She had only begun to imagine loneliness, she knew now. Once the Sisters left, Tessa discovered, she no longer felt like she wanted to cry. The pressure at the backs of her eyes was gone, replaced by a dull feeling of hollow despair. Mrs. Dark had been right. If Tessa could have killed them both, she would have.
    She pulled experimentally at the ropes tying her legs and arms to the bedposts. They didn’t budge. The knots were tight; tight enough to dig into her flesh and make her handsand feet tingle and shiver with pins and needles. She had a few minutes, she estimated, before her extremities went dead entirely.
    Part of her—and not a small part—wanted to stop struggling, to lie there limply until the Magister came to take her away. The sky was already darkening outside the small window; it couldn’t be much longer now. Perhaps he really did want to marry her. Perhaps he truly wanted to give her everything.
    Suddenly she heard Aunt Harriet’s voice in her head:
When you find a man you wish to marry, Tessa, remember this: You will know what kind of man he is not by the things he says, but by the things he
does.
    Aunt Harriet had been right, of course. No man she would ever want to marry would have arranged to have her treated like a prisoner and a slave, imprisoned her brother, and had her tortured in the name of her “talent.” It was a travesty and a joke. Heaven only knew what the Magister wanted to do with her once he had his hands on her. If it was something she could survive, she imagined she would soon enough wish she hadn’t.
    God, what a useless talent she had! The power to change her appearance? If only she had the power to set things on fire, or shatter metal, or cause knives to grow out of her fingers! Or if she only had the power to make herself invisible, or shrink herself to the size of a mouse—
    She went suddenly still, so still that she could hear the ticking of the clockwork angel against her chest. She didn’t have to shrink herself down to the size of a mouse, did she? All she had to do was make herself small enough that the ties around her wrists would be loose.
    It was possible for her to Change into someone a secondtime, without touching something that had belonged to them—as long as she’d done it before. The Sisters had made her memorize how to do it. For the first time, she was glad of something they’d forced her to learn.
    She pressed herself back against the hard mattress and made herself remember. The street, the kitchen, the movement of the needle, the glow of the gaslight. She willed it on, willed the Change to come.
What’s your name? Emma. Emma Bayliss …
    The Change bore down on her like a train, almost knocking the breath out of her—reshaping her skin, reforming her bones. She choked back her screams and arched her back—
    And it was done. Blinking, Tessa stared up at the ceiling, then glanced sideways, staring at her wrist, at the rope around it. There were her hands—Emma’s hands—thin and frail, the circle of the rope loose around her small wrists. Triumphantly Tessa jerked her hands free and sat up, rubbing at the red marks where the rope had burned her skin.
    Her ankles were still tied. She leaned forward, her fingers working quickly at the knots. Mrs. Black, it turned out, could tie knots like a sailor. Tessa’s fingers were bloodied and sore by the time the rope fell away and she sprang to her feet.
    Emma’s hair was so thin and fine that it had slipped free of the clips holding Tessa’s own hair