They found me standing over her with a knife in my hand, and the way the constables looked at me—like I was some kind of creature that had crawled out of the Liffey and decided to wear a human skin—I understood then that facts would not matter. I had not killed her. But the knife was mine, the alley was mine, and her body was exactly where I had left her when the fog rolled down from the hills at half-past eleven.

Sister Mary Agnes took me in because the orphanage had a cellar and the constables had not bothered to search it. She was fifty-five, thin as a rail, with hands cracked from lye soap and a face that had forgotten what laughter felt like but remembered what sorrow tasted like.

"Did you do it?" she asked me on the second night, sitting by the candle in her small room above the kitchen.

"No," I said.

She nodded, not because she believed me, but because she had decided to. There was a difference.

My name is Thomas Byrne. I am twenty-eight years old. I was born in the workhouse on Moore Street, which is to say I was born into the kind of poverty that makes criminals of boys before they learn to read. I can read. That is how I survived, not the knife—though I have used it, in alleys and doorways, for things that were not quite stealing and not quite anything else.

The woman in the alley was named Bridget. I had seen her before, in the church on Grafton Street, collecting coins from people who dropped them into the tin cup with the hollow sound of indifference. She was thirty, perhaps thirty-five. Hard eyes, red hair that had gone the color of rust, a mouth that looked like it had been cut open once and stitched back together badly.

I had walked past her at half-past ten, heading for the under tunnels—the old drainage passages beneath the city, black and smelling of the river. I heard her footsteps behind me. I stopped and turned. She said my name.

I do not know how she knew my name.

"Thomas Byrne," she said. "You don\'t remember me, do you?"

I didn\'t.

"My father was Patrick Byrne," she said. "You knew my father."

I didn\'t. But I knew the name. Patrick Byrne had died in the workhouse ten years ago, of the consumption that took half the poor in Dublin that winter. His daughter would have been a child then. Not a woman collecting coins in the street.

"You look like him," Bridget said. "That\'s why I stopped you."

We walked together through the fog. She led me to a doorway on Fleet Street where the gaslight did not reach, and she put her hands on my face and said, "You must help me. There is a man—

I don\'t remember what happened next. The last thing I knew was the knife coming from behind me, and then I was running through the tunnels with the sound of the constables\' boots above me and the smell of river mud filling my lungs.

On the fourth night, I found her. Whispering Maggie. She lived in the widest of the under tunnels, a place where the ceiling arched so high that a man could stand without bowing his head. She was thirty, gaunt, with eyes that had seen too much of the city\'s underside—literally and figuratively.

"They framed you," she said without preamble. She was sitting on a crate, sharpening a piece of wood with a knife that looked older than the tunnel.

"I didn\'t kill her," I said.

Maggie laughed, a dry sound like leaves on stone. "Bridget is dead, Thomas. Killed her own self three nights ago. Jumped from the bridge at Ballybough. Threw herself into the Liffey with her boots and her hair and her rust-red dress still on. No one saw her. No one looked."

"Then why me?"

"Because," Maggie said, and set the wood down, "your father was one of the Seven. And the Seven needed a face for what the City has been doing for fifty years."

I sat down on the damp stone. The tunnel smelled of water and old things—bones and paper and the sweet-rotty smell of things that have been buried and forgotten.

"The Seven," Maggie said, "are men who sit in the upper rooms of the city and decide who lives and who dies. Not officially. Not on paper. But in the alleys and the tunnels and the places the constables never go. They have been doing it since the famine. Every year, seven names. Seven souls to keep the City in its proper order. Last year it was your father, Patrick Byrne. And now—"

"Now they need another Byrne."

Maggie nodded. "Bridget was going to stop. She was going to leave the City and go to England or America. So they made sure she couldn\'t. And they needed someone to take the blame when she was done. You, Thomas. Because you look like your father, and because you are poor, and because no one in this city would miss a Byrne."

I thought about the knife in my hand. The weight of it. The certainty with which the constables had looked at me.

"What do I do?" I asked.

Maggie picked up her piece of wood again. "You have three choices. You can run, and they will find you in three days. You can surrender, and they will hang you in three weeks. Or you can go deeper."

"Deeper?"

Into the tunnel. The deepest tunnel. The one that connects to the river and the river connects to the sea and the sea connects to everything. Go into the dark, Thomas. Let them think you are dead. Live in the tunnels like the city\'s conscience—because that is what you are now, whether you wanted to be or not. The one person who knows what the Seven have done."

I sat in the dark for a long time, listening to the water dripping and the distant sound of boots on the streets above. Then I stood up.

"Show me the way," I said.

And Whispering Maggie showed me.