I kill my first man on a Tuesday.

  Marcus Webb doesn't see me coming—he's walking home from his club with his umbrella tucked under his arm, humming a hymn under his breath. He was there when they drowned me, held a candle while they held me under, smiled while I died. He stops smiling when my blade finds his kidney.

  Three months of training brought me here, ninety days of learning to be what my mother would never recognize. My hands have forgotten how to be gentle and know only the blade now, the grip, the quick efficient movements that end lives. My eyes have learned to see threats everywhere, to calculate angles and distances, to watch for that tension before violence. My body has become a weapon, and my heart has become something different entirely—cold, patient, capable of looking at a man and seeing only the task he represents.

  Mei says I'm ready, and the list burns in my mind with eighteen names demanding attention. I can't wait any longer. Then I start hunting.

  Kill #1: Marcus Webb — London

  London in June smells of coal smoke and horse manure and the desperation of a city that never stops moving, the streets thick with bodies rushing past in their thousands, all of them trapped in their own small dramas, none of them aware of the monster walking among them.

  I arrive by train, third class, just another scholar's daughter traveling to meet her father, and no one looks twice because I am exactly what they expect to see—young, modest, unremarkable. The perfect disguise, because it isn't a disguise at all. I am a scholar's daughter who happens to also be a killer now.

  Marcus Webb works in an office off Leadenhall Street, a respectable address with a brass nameplate by the door reading Webb & Associates, Financial Services, a place where money changes hands and no one asks too many questions about where it comes from or what it's buying.

  I watch him for three days, learning his patterns. He arrives at half past eight each morning with his umbrella in hand and The Times tucked under his arm, takes lunch at a pub called The Crown and Anchor where he sits in the same booth every day, always alone, always with papers spread across the table that he studies with the concentration of a man who believes numbers are more real than people. He leaves promptly at six unless he's working late, which he does often. The accountant who processes payments for "special acquisitions"—children reduced to line items in a ledger.

  On the fourth night he works late, and I watch the clerks leave at six and the cleaning woman come at seven, stay for an hour. By nine he's alone in the building, bent over his desk, scratching figures into a ledger by gaslight. I climb through a window he forgot to lock.

  His office is tidy, ordered to the inch, with ledgers arranged by date and correspondence filed alphabetically and everything in its proper place. This is a man who believes in order, in systems, in the comfortable lie that paperwork makes murder respectable.

  He looks up when I enter, confused at first—a young woman in scholar's clothes with ink on her fingers, no threat at all.

  "Can I help you, miss? The office is closed."

  "Yes." I step closer. "You can tell me where you keep the records."

  His confusion deepens. "I'm sorry, I don't—"

  "The children, Mr. Webb. The ones you bought, the ones you sold. Where are the records?"

  His face goes pale and I see him reaching for the drawer, for a weapon probably, a pistol kept for emergencies. He's not stupid—a man who deals in human trafficking knows to keep protection close.

  But I'm faster.

  The blade finds his wrist before his hand finds the gun, and he screams, brief and startled, cut off when I press the knife against his throat.

  "The records," I repeat.

  "Safe," he gasps. "Behind the painting. Combination is—"

  "I don't care about the combination."

  I find the space beneath his ribs, the gap between the bones, the angle Mei drilled into me through endless practice.

  "I was kind once," I tell him as the light fades from his eyes. "You helped take that from me."

  The records are exactly where he said—ledgers going back fifteen years, names and dates and payments, children bought for twelve pounds and sold for twenty, profit margins calculated to the penny. The records burn, all of them.

  Kill #2: Helena Cross — Bristol

  She recruits families, tells them their children are chosen for a special purpose, a holy calling.

  I find her at a charity event, because of course it's a charity event. The Foundlings' Relief Society, dedicated to helping orphaned children find good homes, and Helena Cross is the organization's most generous benefactor—charming, gracious, a woman everyone trusts.

  I attend as a potential donor with a plain dress and modest manner, presenting myself as the daughter of a wealthy merchant looking to give back to those less fortunate, and Helena takes to me immediately.

  "So young to be thinking of charity," she says, pressing a glass of champagne into my hand. "Most girls your age are too busy with dresses and dances."

  "My father believes in responsibility to those who have less," I murmur.

  "A man after my own heart." Her smile is warm and well-rehearsed. "Perhaps you'd like to visit one of our homes? See the good work we do?"

  I would.

  The home is clean and well-staffed, and the children look healthy, fed, cared for—on the surface, everything seems right.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  But I notice things, the way certain children flinch when Helena touches them, small movements barely perceptible, the recoil of creatures who have learned that hands bring pain. I notice the stillness in their eyes, the quiet of animals who have learned not to attract attention, and I notice the locked doors in the east wing where "special cases" are kept until they're "ready for placement."

  I ask Helena about the locked wing.

  "Children with difficulties," she says smoothly. "Behavioral issues. They require more intensive care before they can be placed with families."

  But I can feel them—the marks have made water part of me, and these children are frightened, their hearts racing, sweat beading on palms pressed against doors they can't open. I feel their fear like a current through the walls, and I don't need to ask what they're being readied for because I already know.

  The kill happens three days later.

  I follow Helena home from another charity event, a gala celebrating the society's twentieth anniversary, and she's flushed with wine and self-congratulation, surrounded by admirers who praise her good works and generous heart. She accepts their compliments with false modesty.

  She doesn't notice me in the crowd, doesn't notice me following her carriage through the rain-slicked streets, doesn't notice me slipping through the servants' entrance of her townhouse while she's still removing her gloves in the front hall.

  I wait in the parlor in the dark, listening to the rain against the windows, feeling my own heart beat slow and steady, a heart that has changed since the drowning.

  She enters twenty minutes later, still flushed with wine, still satisfied.

  "Good evening, Mrs. Cross."

  She screams and spins, her hand going to her chest with theatrical shock on her face.

  "Who— how did you get in here? I'll call for the servants—"

  "They're sleeping," I say. "Something in the tea. They'll wake up tomorrow with headaches, nothing more."

  Her eyes adjust to the dark and she can see me now—a young woman in a plain dress sitting in her favorite chair like I belong there.

  "What do you want? Money? I have jewelry upstairs—"

  "I want to know about the children in the locked wing."

  Her face changes, the mask slipping to reveal what's underneath—cold calculation, the quick assessment of a predator deciding whether to fight or flee.

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "The children you select for the Congregation of the Deep, the ones you tell their parents are being chosen for a sacred purpose." I stand and step toward her. "The ones who never come back."

  She runs, but I don't need to chase her because the marks tell me exactly where she is—the water in her veins, the sweat on her skin, the tears starting to form in her eyes. I feel her hit the locked front door, feel her fumble with the bolt, feel her give up and run for the servants' stairs.

  I'm waiting at the top.

  She doesn't beg, which surprises me. Instead she straightens and smooths her dress with trembling hands and looks me in the eye.

  "Get on with it, then."

  I hesitate because they never just accept it.

  "Nothing to say?"

  "Would it matter?" She gestures at the fine furnishings. "I know what I did. I've known for years." Her voice doesn't waver. "I just didn't have the courage to stop."

  The honesty is worse than begging would have been, but the blade finds its mark all the same. Sic semper tyrannis. She dies without begging—that makes one.

  Kill #3: Jonathan Blackwood — Edinburgh

  The surgeon who examined children before the ritual, made sure they were "suitable"—healthy enough to survive the carving, young enough to interest the Deep One.

  Edinburgh in June is beautiful, the stone buildings glowing in the long summer light while the castle watches over everything like a sleeping giant. I arrive by coach, tired from traveling, my bag full of books and a blade strapped beneath my dress.

  Blackwood is harder to reach than the others because he's a respected physician, consultant to wealthy families, and his practice occupies the ground floor of a Georgian townhouse in New Town—all brass fixtures and polished wood and the sharp smell of carbolic acid and old money.

  I watch him for two weeks, learning his routines, finding his weakness. Vanity, as it turns out—pride in his medical expertise, his reputation, his status.

  I present myself as a patient, a young woman suffering from mysterious ailments, fainting spells and strange pains beneath the ribs. The local doctors are baffled, I tell him, but I've heard Dr. Blackwood is the best.

  He agrees to see me.

  The examination room is clinical and cold, and the table in the center makes my stomach clench because it's too similar to the one where Celeste carved me open.

  "Interesting," he murmurs, studying the marks beneath my ribs, his fingers tracing the symbols with professional curiosity. "These scars— when did you acquire them?"

  "Six months ago." I touch my ribs. "They were carved into me while I drowned."

  His hands stop moving.

  "You're the survivor," he whispers. "The Winchester girl. They said you died. They said—"

  "They were wrong."

  The blade is in my hand before he can move, in his throat before he can scream.

  "Thirty-eight children," I tell him as he dies. "You examined thirty-eight children and told Marsh which ones would make the best offerings. Now you're thirty-nine."

  Three down, fifteen to go.

  Mei meets me in Edinburgh in a safe house that smells of woodsmoke and rain.

  "Clean kills," she says, her eyes on my reports. "No witnesses, no evidence. They'll know someone is hunting them, but they won't know who."

  "Good."

  "But." She looks up at me with those dark eyes that see everything. "You're enjoying it."

  I can't deny it. A darkness has woken in me, a part that thrills at the terror in their eyes, the moment when they realize what's about to happen, a hunger that wants them to know who's killing them and why.

  "Is that wrong?"

  "It's dangerous. Enjoyment leads to mistakes, to prolonging kills when you should be efficient, to taking risks for the pleasure of seeing them suffer."

  "They deserve to suffer."

  "They deserve to die. Suffering is optional." She meets my eyes steadily. "I've killed seventeen of them, Eleanor. I felt nothing—no pleasure, no satisfaction, no relief. Just duty. That's how you survive this. That's how you stay human."

  "I'm not sure I am human anymore."

  "You are. The marks don't change that, the connection doesn't change that. What changes it is what you choose to become." She reaches out and touches my shoulder. "You can be a weapon, or you can be a person who uses weapons. The difference matters."

  I consider what she's asking, consider the cold inside me, the darkness that's been growing since the ritual.

  "How do you stay a person?"

  "By remembering why you started—protection over revenge, never pleasure." She squeezes my shoulder. "Somewhere, right now, there's a girl in a cellar, a child being prepared for ritual, an offering who might survive if we thin the herd enough. That's why we do this. For them, not ourselves."

  For them. The children who haven't been taken yet. The offerings who might be saved.

  The void stays cold and empty inside me, but something else moves beneath it now—purpose, something beyond revenge.

  "I understand," I tell her.

  Mei inclines her head. "Good. Now rest. Tomorrow, we start on the fourth."

  She turns back to her papers, shuffles through them, stops.

  "What is it?"

  "A message." Her voice has gone flat and careful. "From one of my contacts in London."

  "And?"

  She looks up at me, and in the firelight her face is carved from shadow.

  "Someone is asking questions about the Winchester girl—a woman, making inquiries at the docks and the coaching inns, at the places where a survivor might have washed up." Mei's eyes are hard. "She's not cult, my contact is certain of that. But she's looking for you specifically, by name."

  The fire crackles while outside the rain continues to fall.

  "Who?"

  "I don't know." Mei slides a second paper across the table, a sketch rougher than the ones she makes of targets—a woman's face with sharp features and dark hair and eyes that seem to look right through the page.

  "But she was in Dover three days ago asking about a girl who washed up on the beach six months back." Mei folds the message with care. "She's getting closer, Eleanor, and we don't know what she wants."

  I stare at the sketch, and the woman's face means nothing to me. But somewhere out there, she knows mine.

  "We may not be the only ones hunting."