London, 1888, and a girl is about to die.

See London: See the labyrinth of her spires and domes, of her smokestacks and steeples. Heart of her own gray empire, iron tendrils reaching every corner of the map. A city racing toward a new century, teetering on the tracks, unable to bear its own weight. Monster of metal. Mecca of smoke and flame.

See the girl: nineteen, silver- haired, her skin like milk, her eyes like shadowed violets. Hidden in her carriage, as a sapling in a seed, protected—for now—from the waiting world. Her eye lingers on the streets around her, on the workmen and the whores who call after them, on the little ’prentice boy with fingers shaking from the cold, on the old woman coughing blood into her hand. She is so very far from home, from the palaces and the ballrooms, from the lords and ladies with flowers in their hair.

See her death: lurking behind her, watching as she descends into the city, down into the roots of the world, where darkness waits.

Persephone Elderwood watched the alleys close around her: Brick buildings rose to gabled roofs, their piped chimneys spewing smoke toward permanent clouds. She kept herself well within the carriage, behind the curtained window, where none could see her. She was no fool: She knew this was a very different place from where she lived with her uncle in the West End. Her neighborhood was all flower gardens and sprawling palaces; here, in the Rows, the streets were cramped with factories and opium dens, with fallen women and leering men. Mud stuck to everything: the cobbled streets and twisting alleys, the time- worn carriages, the people who trudged through the narrow pathways, jostling past one another, cursing, slipping on soaked cobblestones. Tattered umbrellas paused the constant rain of November, but there was nothing to be done about the fog: It drifted from the nearby river, carrying the scent of filth. Little tendrils of it searched through the gaps in the coach’s walls, chilling her tender skin.