The grease on the windowpane of Pimm’s Secondhand Books tasted of coal dust when Myrtle leaned her forehead against it.
She did not intend to taste it. Her spectacles had simply slid down the bridge of her nose again, slick with Islington humidity, and her forehead took the brunt of the collision. Behind the counter, old Mr. Pimm was paring an apple with a bone-handled knife, turning the peel into one unbroken green coil. He did not look up. Myrtle reached into her skirt pocket, found the brass plumb-bob she had filched from her father’s tool chest three summers ago, and ran her thumb across its tapered point. The lead-weighted brass was cool. Her father used it to determine whether the brickwork of municipal pumping stations stood perpendicular to the earth, but Myrtle carried it because the world was perpetually off-kilter by three or four degrees, and the brass remained stubborn. Tables sloped. Floors sagged. People walked as though one leg were shorter than the other, though she refused to say *as though* even in her own thoughts—they simply walked crookedly, and it made the molars in the back of her jaw ache.
Another failure of the world was municipal wartime ink. It had too much gum arabic in it. It clogged the split of a steel nib after three sentences, drying into a scab that had to be scraped off with a thumbnail.
Myrtle let go of the plumb-bob and pushed her glasses up.
A boy was standing across the street, motionless in the shadow of a bombed-out tea merchant’s facade.
The brick shell of the tea shop had collapsed during the autumn raids of forty-one, leaving only three jagged courses of masonry and an iron cellar grating filled with nettles. The boy stood just beyond the nettles, where the sun could not reach his hair. His coat was wool, thin and shrunken at the wrists, the sleeves ending two inches before his knobby wrists. It was the standard gray cast-off issued by the parish unions or the charitable boards of London.
Myrtle blinked until her eyelashes brushed the inside of her lenses.
Tom Riddle did not wear parish wool. Tom Riddle wore tailored black serge with silver fasteners, pressed so sharply along the creases that the hem whispered when he passed through the double doors of the Great Hall. Professor Merrythought called him *my dear boy*. Professor Dippet offered him tea from the Lowestoft service in the headmaster’s parlor. When Riddle spoke to the prefects on the third-floor landing, his voice carried the flat, terrifying smoothness of freshly rolled lead.
Here, under the dry heat of Bloomsbury, his shoes were scuffed white at the toes.
He did not look like a prince. He looked like an underfed clerk’s son whose father had forgotten to leave an allowance.
Myrtle felt a sharp, uninvited jolt in the pit of her diaphragm. It was not pity. Pity was what Olive Hornby offered in the corridor outside Charms, her mouth pursed until her cheeks went white, telling Myrtle that some girls simply weren't built for robes with shoulder tucks. This was something far narrower and uglier. It was the sudden realization that the idol had dirty cuffs.
Riddle turned his head toward the rubble. He was watching a cellar door that had survived the collapse—a low slab of oak banded with iron, half-buried under chimney soot and loose mortar. He reached into his coat.
He did not produce a wand. To draw a wand on Bury Place at two o'clock on a July afternoon was to invite thirty Ministry owls before tea. Instead, he produced a heavy brass key, five inches long and black with verdigris around the ward.
Myrtle’s boots made a dull, rubbery scrape on the entryway flagstones as she shoved through Pimm’s door. The shop bell gave a miserable *tink*.
She crossed the street before she could talk herself out of it. Her skirt was cotton, printed with faded brown clover leaves, and her knees knocked together beneath the hem, but she walked with her chin tilted up so her glasses caught the midday glare. She wanted him to see the light bouncing off the glass. She wanted him to know she had caught him.
"You're not allowed down there," she said.
The silence that followed was thick with the reek of horse manure from the dray carts on Museum Street.
Riddle did not jump. His spine straightened by fractions of an inch, each vertebra clicking into place beneath the cheap gray twill of his coat. When he turned, his face was already arranged into the pleasant, neutral mask he wore for Slughorn’s supper parties.
"Warren," he said.
His voice was lower than she remembered from June. The humidity had dampened his dark hair, causing two small curls to stick to his temple like wet feathers.
"The Borough surveyor condemned that whole row in May," Myrtle said, stopping three paces away. She kept one hand inside her pocket, her thumb digging hard into the sharp apex of the plumb-bob. "The timbers are dry-rotted. If you break your neck, my dad’s office has to write the inquest report. He hates writing inquest reports. They require three carbon copies."
Riddle looked at her glasses, then at the crooked collar of her blouse, and finally at her shoes. His gaze was methodical. It felt like being measured for an oblong wooden box.
"Your father works for the Borough?" he asked.
"Water Board," she corrected sharply. "He checks the pressure mains. Which is how I know that cellar connects to the old Fleet sewer overflow, and the brick vaulting is cracked all the way to St. George’s."
Riddle tucked the heavy key into his palm. His fingers closed over it entirely, long and pale and devoid of ink-stains. He must have scrubbed them with pumice before coming out; no student survived fifth-year Potions without nitric acid stains on their knuckles, yet Riddle’s skin looked bleached.
"A thorough family," he said. The compliment was entirely hollow. "You should be in Islington, Warren. The sirens went three times yesterday evening. Shoreditch took two high-explosive canisters."
"Islington is boring," she said. "Olive Hornby sent me a letter on Monday to say she’s staying with her cousins in Somerset. She included a pressed buttercup. It had greenfly on it."
Riddle did not blink. "How tragic for you."
"She said you spent the final week of term assisting Professor Dippet with the library archives." Myrtle took half a step forward, deliberately placing her left boot into a patch of dried lime mortar. It crunched under her weight. "She told everyone at the Ravenclaw table that you were practically a junior master already. She said Dippet had arranged for you to stay at a private lodge in Berkshire for the summer."
A shadow moved across Riddle’s mouth. It lasted no longer than the flick of a gnat’s wing, but Myrtle saw it. She had spent three years watching people’s faces to anticipate when they were about to laugh at her teeth or her nose; she knew the preparatory tightening of the jaw muscles better than she knew the declensions of Latin verbs.
"Miss Hornby speaks with the authority common to people who possess very little information," Riddle said softly.
"You live in an orphanage," she said.
She did not know why she said it. The words felt huge and sharp in her mouth, like hard boiled sweets swallowed whole. Once they were out, the street grew horribly loud: the clatter of an omnibus turning toward New Oxford Street, the dry whistle of a sparrow in the ruins, the scrape of her own quick breath.
Riddle’s pupils contracted.
He stepped out of the shadow of the broken masonry. In the full, flat light of London, the patch on his left elbow was obvious: coarse brown thread stitched in an uneven cross, clearly done by an indifferent matron who had not bothered to match the gray fabric. His jaw was set so hard that the muscle bunched against his ear.
"Say that again," he whispered.
"I won't," Myrtle retorted, her heart thumping against her ribs like a trapped pigeon. "I’m not deaf, and neither are you. And you don't have permission to use that key. The Ministry doesn't permit third-year or fifth-year students to tamper with non-cleared Muggle structures during recess. Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery, paragraph twelve."
"I am not using magic," Riddle said.
He held up his right hand. The brass key dangled from his index finger by an iron wire loop.
"This is iron and copper," he said. "Manufactured in Birmingham seventy years ago. A purely mechanical device, Warren. Even your father’s clerks could understand it."
"Then what are you doing with it?"
"Looking for something that was left behind."
"What?"
"Old paper." Riddle tilted his head, his eyes hooded. He was taller than her by nearly a foot now; he had grown during the spring term on castle mutton and potatoes, while she had remained squat and thick-waisted. "A parish ledger from eighteen-eighty. St. John the Baptist on the Wall. It was demolished when the underground railway cut through the crypts."
Myrtle frowned. "Why do you care about a parish ledger?"
"I don't," he said smoothly. "A gentleman in Knockturn Alley cares. He pays ten shillings for every baptismal registry predating the Great War. Two pounds if the covers are calfskin."
He lied.
She knew he lied because he spoke too quickly, the explanation sliding out with the pre-packaged perfection of a railway timetable. Tom Riddle did not run errands for Knockturn curio-dealers for ten shillings. He would rather have starved in that gray coat than fetch books for a pawnbroker.
"Show me," she demanded.
Riddle’s eyes narrowed into slits. "Go home, Myrtle."
It was the first time he had ever spoken her Christian name. In the corridors of Hogwarts, she was merely *Warren*, or more frequently, nothing at all—a shape to be bypassed between the staircase and the library doors. Hearing her name in his voice, dropped with that quiet, lethal weight, made the hair on the back of her neck prickle.
She did not retreat. Instead, she took her hands from her pockets, stepped past him, and seized the iron ring of the cellar door.
The iron was blistered with rust. When she heaved upward, nothing gave; the lock held fast, and a shower of red grit flaked off against her palms, smelling of dried blood and old rain.
"It is locked," Riddle said from behind her shoulder. His tone had gone icy, stripped of even the imitation of politeness. "And you are being remarkably stupid."
"You don't have the right to be here either," she panted, letting go of the ring. Her palms were scored with red stripes. "If you go down there, I'll tell Dippet in September. I will. I'll go straight to his office before the Welcoming Feast. I'll tell him you were lurking around the ruins with a stolen key."
Riddle looked down at her.
He did not reach for his pocket. He simply stared at her through the thick lenses of her glasses, his dark eyes wide and unblinking, until the street around them seemed to drain of its color. The heat between them was different from the summer air; it was dry, sour, and heavy with static.
"You won't," he said.
"Why wouldn't I?"
"Because nobody listens to you," he murmured.
The sentence was delivered without spite. It had the terrible, calm certainty of an arithmetic sum.
"Olive Hornby laughs at you," he continued, taking a single, measured step closer until the frayed twill of his sleeve brushed her shoulder. "The Ravenclaw prefects assign you the desk closest to the drafty window because you sniffle. If you went to Dippet, he would nod, he would give you a lemon drop, and the moment you shut the door, he would write a note to the matron suggesting a tonic for your nerves."
Myrtle’s throat closed. The truth of it struck her with the force of an open palm.
She looked down at his shoes—the scuffed toes, the mismatched laces tied with clumsy double knots. She saw the fraying threads at his cuffs.
"You're poor," she said, her voice shaking with an anger that felt hot and liquid behind her eyes. "You act like a duke in the Great Hall, but you're just poor. You eat their gruel. You sleep in an attic with twenty other boys who don't have mothers."
Riddle did not strike her. For a second, she thought he might; his right hand closed into a fist so tight that the knuckles showed white through the gray skin.
Then his mouth twitched.
It was not a smile. It was an acknowledgment of war.
He reached out and deliberately caught her wrist. His fingers were shockingly cold, despite the noon sun, their pressure unyielding as an iron band. He did not pull her toward the cellar; he simply held her still, forcing her to look at the rust stains smeared across her own fingers.
"We have two months until the express leaves King's Cross, Warren," he whispered. "You may spend them telling your father about dry rot. Or you may hold your tongue, and I might forget to tell Professor Slughorn who tipped the jar of powdered bicorn into the sink during the third-year practical."
Myrtle gasped. "That was Hornby! Hornby knocked my elbow!"
"I saw what I saw," Riddle said. His grip tightened by a fraction, just enough to leave five white depressions in her skin, before he released her. "I have an exceptional memory. Everyone knows that."
He slipped the brass key back into his pocket, turned on his heel, and walked away toward the junction of Museum Street. He did not run. He did not look back. He walked with his chin level, his gray wool jacket flapping against his lean thighs, perfectly upright in the crooked street.
Myrtle stood in the dust.
She reached into her pocket, took out the plumb-bob, and squeezed it until the brass bit into the heel of her hand. Her wrist throbbed where his fingers had rested, cold long after he had turned the corner.
He was lying about the bicorn horn. He had not been in the dungeon when it fell.
Which meant, she realized with a strange, hollow tightening in her chest, that he had already been watching her before she ever saw him in the ruins.
***