when they were gone, and be given to other boys.
He went up street after street, ducking into alleys when he heard the leadfaces’ shouts, hurrying beneath the drooping, blackened houses. They had been the mansions of the faery silk weavers once. Now they were the houses of pickpockets and bloodletters and the poorest of the poor. Sometimes a woman leaning out of a window, or another boy in the street, would spot Pikey and shout, “Oy, pikey!” in a not-very-nice voice. Pikey always hurried faster then.
Pikey wasn’t his real name. Or Thomas, either, for that matter. “Pikeys” were what folks called foreigners, and because Pikey had a face as brown as an old penny (whether from dirt or because he actually was a foreigner not even he knew), the name had stuck. As for Thomas, it was the name on the box he had come in, twelve years ago on a doorstep in Putney: Thomas Ltd. Crackers and Biscuits. Premium quality.
People had thought that funny once, coming from a cracker box. Pikey didn’t think it was funny at all.
In the pigeon-choked space in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a gang of boys accosted him.
“Give you a ha’penny if you show us your socket,” the oldest and tallest one snarled. He wore a blue coat with brass buttons, much too big for him, and a pair of boots with popped toes. He looked like the leader.
The other boys crowded around, prodding Pikey, dirty faces pressing in. “Yeh, show us your socket! What happened, eh? Did you see something you weren’t supposed to? Did Jenny Greenteeth pluck it out and string it up for a necklace?”
If Pikey’d had a socket he would have taken the boys’ offer in an instant. A ha’penny could buy him a proper meal, let him sit in the warmth and stink of an inn and eat potatoes and gravy and gray boiled mutton until he burst. But he didn’t have a socket, and the boys wouldn’t like what they saw.
“Shove off. Leave me alone.”
“Aw, come on, piker. Just a peek? Whada you say, fellas, you think we can see his brains through it? What say I pull off the patch and we get a look-see at his brains, all yellow and squishy inside.”
The boys murmured their assent, some more readily than others. The gang leader stepped forward, reaching for Pikey’s patch. Pikey braced himself for a fight.
“I said, shove off!” His voice went hard like a proper street rat’s, but he was too short to make it count. The boy in the brass-button coat kept coming.
Pikey ducked away, ready to run, but two of the boys grabbed his arms and pinned them behind his back.
“You stay where you’re put at,” one of them whispered, close next to his ear.
“Help!” Pikey croaked. There were people everywhere. Someone would hear him. Or see. The spot in front of St. Paul’s was one of the busiest in London, even in winter, even with the sky going black overhead. Costermongers shouted from their pushcarts, offering lettuces and cabbages and suspicious-looking roots. Peddlers haggled, servants bought. A red-and-gold striped cider booth stood not ten paces away, with a whole line of people waiting in front of it. They couldn’t all be deaf.
“Help, thief!” he cried.
No one even glanced at him.
“Stop cryin’ like a little pansy. We only want a quick look. Shut up, I say. Shut up, or you’ll get us all in trouble.” The leader planted a heavy fist in Pikey’s stomach, and his next shout came out in a puff of white breath.
He hung for a second, gasping, his arms still clamped behind him. He felt the leader’s fingers undoing the string of the eye patch, pulling it off.
“We only want a quick look—”
Pikey shut his eyes hard and threw himself back with all his strength. His head thudded against the head of the boy behind him and they both went down, rolling over the cobbles. Pikey landed on the other boy’s stomach with a satisfying squelch and sprang back up, one hand covering the place where the patch had been, the other swinging wildly.
The leader struggled to his feet and spat. “You little cog splinter. I’ll beat you blue—” He came at Pikey swiftly, the hobnails in his boots snapping against the ground.
“Pound ’im!” the boys shouted, jostling, forming a ring. “Pound ’is other eye out!”
Pikey didn’t have time to think. He flung up both hands to protect himself. …
The boy in the brass-button coat stopped dead in his tracks. The other boys went silent.
Too late Pikey realized what he had done. The eye where the patch had been was bared for all to see. He felt the cold sliding against it. He knew how it looked, what they all saw—a flat, empty orb, gray as the frozen sky. No pupil. Nothing like a regular blind eye. Only endless, swirling gray.
For a moment Pikey was looking into two places at once and his brain practically screamed with the effort. London was on one side, cold and dark and swarming with people like so many shadow ants. But on the other side was a different place, a great, dead forest rising out of the snow. He couldn’t hear anything of that world. He still heard London, though. Shouts. The clatter of a gas trolley. The gang leader cursing, backing away.
“Faery-touched,” said the boy in the brass-button coat. “Faery-touched, is this one!”
Now people were paying attention. Pikey whirled, saw folks slowing their steps, staring, a veiled woman in black bombazine, one gloved hand clapped over her mouth. The whispers spread, fanning out around him. From the corner of his good eye, Pikey saw men slipping toward the spiderweb of streets that went off St. Paul’s Church Yard, to the entrance of Fleet Street where the leadfaces stood. Somewhere not far away, a bell began to ring.
Pikey pushed his fist into his clouded eye. Not again, he thought. Not twice in one day. And then he ran, smashing between the people, toward the widest street he could see. Four leadfaces marched quickly past him in the opposite direction, toward the yells and the growing panic. Pikey had lost his patch, left it behind in the hand of the boy in the brass-button coat, but he didn’t care. Not then. He put his head down and ran as fast and as hard as he could.
He ran until his breath rattled inside his rib-cage. He ran until his muscles burned and his legs felt like bags of water. And when he finally raised his eyes from the cobbles, he found himself in a part of London he had never seen before.
He had gone in entirely the wrong direction. He must be miles from Spitalfields now, miles from the chemist’s shop. Night was falling. The streets were emptying of the regular people, filling with the irregular, the debauched, the drunk, the gaudily dressed fops and hoop-skirted ladies painted up so heavily they resembled nightmarish clowns. Overhead, the streetlamps cast dim reddish halos. The flame faeries that had been inside the lamps before the Ban had been replaced by brimstone bulbs, and these produced an ugly, bloody-looking light, but at least there was no more knocking and spitting, no more glowing faery faces trying to get the attention of the people below. Pikey was glad for it.
Stupid faeries. It served them right they had been sent away. He remembered how, a long time ago, Spitalfields had been swarming with them—faeries with spines, faeries with inky eyes and onion-white skin, with heads of barnacles and thorns, and so many fingers. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing one, and Pikey had lost count of all the times he had woken in his hole under the chemist’s shop with his bootlaces knotted together,
