The Last One Looking
Coming Soon. Full Release on 4 August
“My brother is missing, and no one cares enough to find him.”
When Cora’s brother goes missing, and even the city’s finest guards don’t care enough to find him, she goes it alone, following a trail that takes her into the woods.
Where the witches hide.
Witches and Monsters prowl those woods, and in trying to find her brother, Cora finds herself in terrible danger.
She must survive the night alone.
A standalone Crooked Atlas Story.
Read a taste below…
He didn’t come back.
‘I won’t be long, Cora, I promise. Just seeing a friend.’ That’s what Kit said when he tucked his little sister into bed that night.
Did he mean it? Or was he always planning to abandon her?
The hissing of steam jetting from the factory pipes called at her window every night, in a rhythm that she learned to let soothe her to sleep. She’d needed it since the night their parents disappeared
‘Don’t leave,’ Cora pleaded. On any other night, she would’ve said that she wasn’t much of a little sister anymore, and at fourteen didn’t need tucking in every night or constant monitoring every day, but that night was different. Riots had started in the streets the night before: fear of the witches in the woods was driving people to do terrible things. She didn’t want to be left alone in the darkness of the house they could barely afford to heat.
‘If it wasn’t important I wouldn’t go, but this is my only chance,’ Kit explained.
‘Your only chance to see your friend is at one in the morning?’
Kit scratched the rough beard that grew in patches around his cheeks. Cora told him to shave it, that it looked like cat hair had been glued to his face, but he kept it anyway. He thought it made him look like a man, and that the girls at the bar would jump at him for it, but with the grease and oil stains that he never washed off, Cora figured that they’d just slide right off him anyway.
She sat up, ruining Kit’s efforts to tuck her in her warmth ‘Where are you really going?’
Her brother sighed as he reached into a worn leather bag behind him. From it, he pulled a mouse, not a live one, but one made from scraps of discarded metal, with what looked like hundreds of tiny cogs and mechanisms inside trying to burst free from its mouse-shaped shell. ‘I made this for you, to look after you.’
The cold metal felt like ice against Cora’s palms as she took the little mouse. ‘This is going to look after me? It’s so small—’
‘But smart,’ Kit interrupted sharply. He took a small key from his pocket and inserted it into the side of the mouse, winding round and round, a thousand tiny clicks and metal twangs calling from inside as its cogs prepared to spin to life.
‘What will you call it?’ Kit asked as he finished turning the key.
Cora shrugged. ‘Mousey?’
‘Sersiously? The weeks of effort I put into making this, taking scraps while my master wasn’t looking, and building this instead of studying, and all you can be bothered to come up with is Mousey?’
Cora thought for a second, staring into the cold black eyes of the little copper mouse warming from the heat of her skin. ‘Yes. Mousey.’
‘Whatever,’ Kit huffed as he removed the key.
With a gentle, clean whir, the cogs began to hum as they spun, at first all out of sync, like a one-hundred-person orchestra playing different songs all at the same time, until they finally fell into rhythm, humming together in a perfect symphony.
The little mouse’s eyes began to flick left and right, and its whiskers bounced in the breeze of Cora’s cold breath. Unsure, the little mouse wound its way up her palm, edging closer as Cora brought it nearer to her face. ‘Hello, Mousey,’ she said. ‘It’s very nice to meet you.’
The mouse squeaked in response, a sharp little squeak, not like an ordinary mouse, but one where tiny pieces of brass were scratching up against each other.
Excitement overcame the copper mouse as it whizzed itself off Cora’s palm and onto the bed, where it quickly found warmth under the covers, as it sped around Cora’s legs, its fine whiskers tickling her feet as it passed. ‘Stop!’ Cora called out to the mouse as it tickled her again, but the mouse couldn’t hear through all the giggling.
Kit smiled, pleased with his tidy work, and stepped away from the bed. ‘Should keep you occupied at least.’
He was studying under one of the best engineers in the city. He had been for years now, ever since he was Cora’s age, honing his craft so that one day he could take over the workshop. His master was a rancid old grump, and Cora always hated how he treated her brother—the unexplained burns to the back of his hands that he came back with didn’t go unnoticed—but whatever the case, Kit had real talent, and the little mouse proved it.
Shouts of anger bellowed from the streets below. The now-nightly riots had started.
‘Please don’t leave,’ Cora said again. The mouse was a softening gift, but it couldn’t protect her, couldn’t come into her room in the night to comfort her when she woke up from the nightmare, couldn’t make her those blueberry pancakes that somehow made everything feel better.
Kit knelt down beside her, tucking her back in as she rested on the pillow. ‘I’ll be back before you even wake up,’ he said as the mouse wound its way onto Cora’s shoulder, snuggling its pinhead nose under Cora’s skin. ‘And you look after her, okay?’ He told the mouse, who squeaked back reassuringly.
He brushed back Cora’s brown fringe as he stood, smiling kindly, but with the unmistakable emptiness of fear behind his eyes. Cora wanted to cry, to tell him she loved him and beg him not to go. Before she got the chance, Kit flicked his middle finger against her forehead hard.
‘Ow!’ Cora squrimed. ‘What was that for?’
‘Felt like it,’ Kit said, laughing to himself as he left the room. ‘Now go to sleep. I’ll be back by morning.’ And he closed the door.
She woke up, and she was alone.