The Dickens Mirror by Ilsa J. Bick

noseful every day from every corpse: old blood and rotting purge.
    Odd sound trickling from the fog, though. Something
fizzy
, like bicarbonate. Despite her fear, she felt herself leaning forward, trying to parse it. Were those
voices
?
    With no warning, the Peculiar dimpled, drawing in on itself as if a giant mouth were on the other side and had decided to inhale. Before she had time to react, something
shot
out.
    Throwing up her arms, she floundered back a step and nearly came down on her rear, but then she got a good look and her mouth fell open.
    “My
God
,” she said, dropping to her haunches. Purring, the large orange cat nuzzled her hands and began to weave back and forth across her knees. “Where did you come from?” She hadn’t seen a cat in
ages
. Other than London’s endless supply of rats (the eating kind, not Rima and Tony and their ilk) and assorted vermin (cockroaches, principally), there were no animals. Everything else had been eaten.
But now here’s a cat, come from the fog
. She ruffled the animal’s ears, felt its rumble deepen. Could she keep it? Hide it somehow? Considering the cat’s sudden appearance, it felt wrong to eat the animal. On the other hand, the cat would need food, and they weren’t catching enough rats to keep themselves going as it was.
    Or have
you
sent this cat as a sign?
She eyed the Peculiar. Maybe the cat’s from north London, the other side of the Thames?
Are you trying to show me there’s something worth trying for?
    Beneath her hands, the cat suddenly spat and arched. Flinching, Rima quickly clambered to her feet, worried the animal would bite, but it was prancing, its gaze riveted to the fog.
Another animal? A person?
Really, she was hoping for an animal, preferably one she wouldn’t feel bad about eating. Though she’d skin this cat, if she had to.
2
    Imagine her surprise.

PART TWO
    UNDER MY SKIN

ELIZABETH
    London Falling
    no not that way cut like this
    God, couldn’t that nasty little voice
shut
it? “Under my skin, under my skin …” The words, those insane lyrics, skated on a breathy undertone, the tune tangling in her mind like a ball of yarn mauled by a lunatic kitten. Her mouth was foul as a sewer from that gutter swill Kramer called morning tea. Her head throbbed, the pounding worse than before. The voices were much louder, too, like squirmers teeming in her brain:
    so never digging around a Goodwill ghost-bin
    black echoes kill you nine ways to Sunday
    you ever stop to think that maybe God’s just a kid
    that’s not your father
    a whisper, like blood, leaves a stain
    can’t you see how sick she is
    and we’re the dolls
    Ever since that morning’s session, she’d felt this anvil of doom on her skull that matched the pressure in her chest. The voices were worse, even her mother’s popping up from memory,something overheard from a long-ago argument,
    that’s not your father
    which she never had understood. Why her mother
    can’t you see how sick she is
    should torment her—so odd.
    Kramer’s mesmeric passes weren’t helping at all, though of course he blamed
her
:
If you’d only take your medicine, Elizabeth
. Kramer was a slithery spider with a ruined face and serpent’s hiss, who wanted nothing more than to scuttle through her brain and its dark, secret clefts, picking, probing,
pickpickpick …
    Well, not just yet
. Squatting cross-legged on her filthy mattress, she grit her teeth and tried coring through a dull pink grin of scar tissue on her left forearm.
Get out of this accursed asylum and find the Mirror, determine which symbols will build me the
Now
I need, and leave this wretched London behind
. Yet no matter how hard she dug, there was no sparkle of pain, no
    B LOOD OF M Y B LOOD
    blood. They kept her nails trimmed so short, she’d have better luck peeling a lemon with a thimble. She’d once considered using her teeth to gnaw through skin and down into muscle and through the stubborn fibrous tubes of arteries and veins, but she