Mist, Metal, and Ash

by Gwendolyn Clare

  “Right.” Elsa tore her gaze away from the death-cloud and focused on the control panel. She flipped a switch and gradually moved a lever. “Powering up the coils now. How are we looking?”

  Leo checked the gauges. “Levels holding steady.”

  The fine hairs on her arms stood on end as the electromagnetic charge built up. “Here’s hoping we don’t blow ourselves up,” she said, and flipped the switch to initiate the gravity field.

  The machine gave off a massive, subsonic whomp, and Elsa could feel the pressure change inside her ears—an unfamiliar and bizarre sensation.

  The easterly wind flagged as the atmosphere high above them began to blow directly downward upon the city, the air spreading out in all directions as it met the ground. Elsa traded grins with Leo and Faraz; their weather machine was working, and she felt high as birds. They could protect this city from Aris, editbook be damned.

  Faraz borrow Leo’s spyglass to examine the ash cloud. “I think it’s starting to work—looks like the wind is redirecting the ash away from the city now.”

  “Whew!” Vincenzo bent over, hands braced above his knees as if relief might knock him down. “Damn, that was a close one.”

  But then the weather machine seemed to waver, as if Elsa were looking at it through distorted glass. The power flagged and the air pressure dropped. Leo moved to check the gauges.

  “No, don’t touch it!” Elsa yelled at him, gut instinct telling her something was very wrong. “Everyone get back!”

  The wavering intensified until the machine’s metal siding seemed to be rolling like the ocean, and the air around it vibrated in a way that sent an involuntary shiver through Elsa’s body. Leo quickly backed away, and just in time: the machine folded in on itself and vanished from existence with a resonant pop.

  “Mingia!” Vincenzo swore. “What—what the—”

  “He erased it.” Elsa had seen this sort of vanishing before, but always in a worldbook and never done intentionally. “Aris edited our weather machine right off the Earth.”

  Leo threw his hands in the air, infuriated. “How did he even know about it?!”

  “He must be observing the progress of the eruption and deduced what we were doing,” she said.

  Faraz stared, eyes wide. “We’re out of time. The machine bought us a few minutes more, but not nearly enough to build a replacement.”

  Vincenzo recovered quickly from his shock, his lips pressing together with grim determination. “We can still save some people. Use that—that ‘doorbook’ to get them through a portal.”

  Elsa threw up her hands in defeat. “Some people, maybe, but not a whole city’s worth. That would take hours.”

  “Please, Elsa.” He swallowed like the next words threatened to choke him. “I have friends here. I know it’s selfish, but—”

  “Yes, of course we’ll help,” Elsa agreed. After everything Vincenzo had done for her, the least she could do was save his compatriots from being buried alive and suffocated in ash.

  They rushed from the Archimedes tower, following Vincenzo’s lead. It felt like a retreat.

  22

  EVERY DAY WE ARE CHANGING, EVERY DAY WE ARE DYING, AND YET WE FANCY OURSELVES ETERNAL.

  —St. Jerome

  Standing on the grass beside the cathedral and the Leaning Tower, Elsa surveyed the refugees from Napoli: hundreds of them crowded together, easily more than the entire population of Veldana, and yet a tiny fraction of the city’s people. There were Carbonari and friends of Carbonari, but also a wide selection of random citizens off the streets—whoever was close by and could be convinced to jump through a hole in existence, with nothing but the word of some strange pazzerellones to guarantee safety on the other side.

  “Goddamn it, Elsa, just open the portal again for me,” Vincenzo was arguing.

  “Fine, if you insist.” Elsa’s muscles were jittery with adrenaline. “But we should test the other side, somehow; this is cutting it very close.”

  As the portal irised open, a blast of sulfurous air and ash particles came wafting through. Vincenzo lunged for it anyway, and Leo had to step in front of him and block his way, shoulder jammed against Vincenzo’s chest and arm grabbing his waist.

  “Let go of me!” Vincenzo shouted.

  Elsa quickly shut down the portal. “It’s over—the ashfall has hit the city.”

  Vincenzo slumped against Leo, the fight going out of him as defeat sank in. Then he shoved Leo away harshly and shouted a guttural, wordless cry, as if nothing from his plethora of multilingual curses was sufficient.

  Elsa leaned closer to Faraz and quietly asked, “How bad is it, do you think?” Scribed worlds were typically too small to require active tectonics, so she had only passing knowledge of volcanoes.

  “A mild ashfall would be mostly an inconvenience,” said Faraz. “But with a heavy ashfall like this, we’re looking at collapsed roofs, deaths by suffocation, and if there’s ash flow, too…” His voice trailed off and he winced.

  “You’re saying … total destruction.”

  Faraz nodded.

  Elsa struggled to fathom the enormity of what Aris had done. With the editbook her mother created. All those innocent lives—like burning the Veldana worldbook a thousand times over. “I can’t … I can’t believe anyone would do something like that. Decimate a city? It’s too … big.”

  “Maybe Aris didn’t know,” Vincenzo muttered, more to himself than the others. “Maybe he didn’t know I’d spent time stationed in Napoli.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered either way,” Leo replied, his voice stripped raw with defeat. “Aris is Ricciotti’s loyal soldier to the core; nothing matters more to him.”

  “No one had to die,” Vincenzo snapped. “If pazzerellones didn’t hoard their inventions for themselves, we could have had emergency evacuation portals set up all over the city.”

  “If someone had built evacuation portals, then Aris would know about them,” Leo said, “and he’d just plan a different attack that took the portals into account. It’s called an arms race, Vico.”

  “An arms race that we’re already in, whether the Order likes it or not, and guess what: we’re losing.”

  Faraz rubbed his temples. “We don’t have time for a political debate. We need to … we need to prepare.”

  Leo said, “Prepare for what? We don’t know what my mad brother is going to do next.”

  Elsa exchanged a weighted glance with Faraz. She said, “The thing is … that’s not completely true.”

  Faraz continued for her. “You remember when we explored the Jabir ibn Hayyan worldbook? Well, the Oracle spoke to Elsa and me—prophesied to us, really—and it saw this coming.”

  “Not the specifics,” said Elsa. “Oracles don’t exactly trade in specifics, but it said, ‘A plume of ash ten thousand meters high blocks out the sun.’ That was one of two predictions.”

  A muscle in Leo’s jaw jumped, and he had to unclench his teeth to speak. “And the other prediction?”

  Faraz recited, “‘The waters writhe with eldritch horrors.’ So, sea monsters. Presumably.”

  “Which,” Elsa said, “as far as we know, hasn’t happened yet. We don’t know where they’ll strike, but we know how.”

  Leo said, “The Italian peninsula has thousands of kilometers of coastline.”

  Vincenzo planted his hands on his hips, grappling to get control of his anger. “If the goal is to cripple the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, the next most strategically significant target after Napoli would be Palermo.”

  “You don’t bury a city in ash because it’s good strategy.” Leo laughed bitterly. “What we saw back there was my father’s rage. And rage could mean Marsala, or Nizza, or Venezia. Or hell, even Cagliari, if he blames the king for my grandfather’s death.”

  Elsa scrubbed gritty ash off her face with her sleeve. “So we regroup and figure out where they’ll hit next.”

  “Back to the ruins?” Faraz said. “Olivia knows to monitor for a fever, but I’d like
to check on Sante anyway.”

  Elsa adjusted the settings on the portal device, but Vincenzo said, “I can’t leave.” His neutral expression seemed like a struggle. “Someone has to stay behind and figure out what to do with all these refugees. And I have to contact the Carbonari—we’ll need to organize some kind of rescue effort to search the rubble for survivors.”

  Elsa had come to rely on Vincenzo’s brash confidence, and it shook her to see the cracks in his facade where the grief showed through. She gave him a quick embrace. “Stay strong, my friend,” she said, because it seemed like the sort of thing he’d want to hear.

  He nodded. “You too, little pazzerellona. Now go.”

  * * *

  When they arrived back at the Corniglia ruins, Leo checked in on his brother first. He found Pasca upstairs with the other children, though sitting off in the corner apart from them. Colette sat with him in companionable silence, a kitchen bowl in her lap, snapping the ends off snow peas.

  Pasca clambered to his feet, eyes lighting up with questions. Leo couldn’t bear to tell him what Aris had done, but the boy probably sensed something was wrong from the desperation in Leo’s embrace.

  Colette also sprang to her feet, hands clasped behind her back like she was expecting orders. Leo just said, “Thank you for all your help.”

  Colette shrugged, as if his attention made her uncomfortable. “I’m not much for swashbuckling, but I can keep a gaggle of children fed and out of trouble.”

  “Fed, certainly. Out of trouble … good luck with that one,” Leo said, but he flashed her a grin to let her know he was joking.

  He turned his focus back to his little brother. Part of him was tempted to ask Elsa for assistance, with that preternatural Veldanese talent for languages, but Leo had to figure out how to communicate with Pasca for himself. He should be the one to deliver this news.

  Leo pointed to himself, to Pasca, and to the empty air beside them, and he held up a hand as if to measure Aris’s height. Pasca understood and showed him the sign for Aris.

  With his vocabulary of thirty-some-odd words he’d learned just yesterday, Leo began to fumble his way through an explanation—that Aris had done something terrible, that a lot of people were dead. That their brother had gone too far and was not coming back to them.

  Pasca replied, but his hands moved too fast for Leo to understand; even when he repeated himself, slower this time, Leo caught only one word in four. Not enough to figure out his brother’s meaning.

  Pasca rolled his eyes. Then he placed his left hand on his throat and spoke aloud, using the vibrations as a guide. “Aris was only ever concerned with if we could—it was always you who thought, if we should.”

  Leo blinked at him, taken aback. Was that how little Pasca had seen him—the conscience balancing Aris’s impulse? Young Leo had always felt his hesitation as a weakness holding him back from Aris-like greatness. How strange to discover that the smallest of the Garibaldi boys had a different understanding. A clearer one, perhaps.

  Pasca said, “Do what is right. That is how I remember you.”

  Thank you, Leo signed. Then he added, The clockwork creature, we will find her, bring her back. And I will learn.

  I know you will, Pasca replied.

  Next, Leo went in search of Elsa. He found her tucked away in a dusty room down the hall; by the look of the supplies on the desk and the pages of notes arranged on the floor, Porzia had been working here. But now it was Elsa bent over a worldbook with a pen in her hand, scribing furiously. Her brow, already furrowed in concentration, deepened into a scowl as he walked in.

  “What are you working on?” he asked.

  “A stopgap I sincerely hope we won’t have to use,” she answered without looking up.

  “How are you?” Leo tried. “What we saw in Napoli…”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Can you please just stop for a second and take a breath and … look at me.”

  The pen stopped moving, but Elsa squeezed her eyes shut, as if the sight of anything else might pain her. “I have to keep working; it’s the only thing that stops me from thinking.”

  Leo leaned against the windowsill beside the writing desk. “It doesn’t have to be me, but please talk to someone. You’re not alone in this.”

  For a moment he thought she would stay silent, but then she said, “I bargained their lives away. If only I had turned over the editbook to the Order, those people wouldn’t be dead. But no—I wanted to rescue my mother, I wanted to get you back, and I wanted to save the world. I wanted to have it all my way, but instead I ended up buying Jumi’s life by sacrificing an entire city.”

  “Elsa, listen to me: never in my worst nightmares did I suspect they would use the editbook to level entire cities. No one saw this coming. It is not your fault.” He took a deep breath, steeling himself. “If the blame has to lie somewhere, it lies with me.”

  Elsa snorted. “What, you’re going to fight me for it?”

  “Yes,” he insisted. “I am so sorry for not trusting you to make your own decisions. And I’m sorry I was jealous of Aris when it was my fault you were there to begin with, and I’m sorry for sometimes wishing you were a little less amazing—because I don’t really want that, I don’t want you to be less than what you are just so I can feel like more.

  “But mostly I’m sorry that I put you in this situation, where you feel responsible for my father’s war crimes. It’s on me to stop him, not you.”

  Elsa shook her head. “The editbook is still a Veldanese invention. Let’s just agree to handle this together, okay?”

  “I can do that.” He caught his hand fiddling with the chain of his father’s pocket watch and made his fingers stop.

  Elsa was running her thumb over the edges of the worldbook. “I should finish this.”

  “Yeah, I’ll let you get back to it.” Leo pushed off the windowsill and made to leave, but there was a feeling like a fishhook beneath his ribs holding him back—unsaid words refusing to release him. “Look, Elsa … the only part of my life that makes any sense is how I feel about you. So if it’s all right, I’d like to keep loving you for a while, even though you don’t feel the same.”

  He didn’t dare look for her reaction; once the words were out he just wanted to flee. But then Elsa was out of her seat and she grabbed his hand, pulling him back like a rebounding spring. Her ink-damp fingertips found his cheek, and when he looked into those clear green eyes Leo felt as though he might happily drown in her gaze.

  “It’s not past tense,” she breathed.

  Their lips met, soft and tentative at first. He buried his hands in Elsa’s soft black hair, and she pressed closer against him, as if she wanted to banish the molecules of air between them. The kiss deepened, and the small, terrible tightness in Leo’s chest gradually relaxed. He wondered if this was what coming home felt like to everyone else—like he could step inside this moment and shut the door, and it would be strong enough to keep out the horrors of the world.

  * * *

  Porzia watched Sante breathe.

  She watched him through the night as the candle burned low, and then watched him in the dark when it finally went out. When Faraz’s sleeping potion wore off and he woke in pain, she fed him a small and exact dose of morphine. She watched Sante breathe as the sky paled and the birds sang outside the shattered window; she watched as Olivia checked his temperature and his pulse and changed his bandage.

  When Faraz came back sweaty and defeated and flecked with gray ash to tell her the fate of Napoli, she stayed silent and simply watched. She didn’t have room in her heart to grieve for a whole city right now—she doubted it was ever possible to truly have room for that, anyway.

  When Revan visited she tried to ignore him as she had Faraz, but he came around her chair and perched on the edge of the bed, where there was no avoiding his gaze.

  “You can’t go on like this,” Revan said.

  Porzia held up a hand. “Don’t. Please.” Her voice felt drained o
f emotion, the usual edge gone from her words. “I think it’s best if we don’t see each other anymore.”

  “What?” His eyebrows drew together in confusion.

  “My life is not my own. I have obligations, and I…” She struggled to spit out the words. “I can’t afford a distraction, however pleasant it may be.”

  Revan rubbed his hand across his mouth. “Look, Porzia—there is nothing you could’ve done differently to prevent this. Sante’s a daredevil of a kid who idolizes that Leo guy, and he was itching for some heroics of his own.”

  Porzia said nothing. Maybe he would leave her alone if she pressed her lips together tightly enough.

  “I get it, I really do. Elsa and I were the firstborn of the Veldanese, and she was always occupied with her scriptology lessons, so I’ve done more than my share of looking after the younger children.” He took her hand in his own. “If you allow the weight of your responsibility to crush you, you won’t be any use to them. Or to yourself.”

  His fingers felt warm and calloused against her palm, and the fog she’d been mired in started to lift from her mind. “Huh. How did you get so smart?”

  “Many years of inventing games with sticks and pebbles,” he answered sagely. “So does that mean you’ll stop trying to get rid of me?”

  Her lips twisted as she tried not to smile. “We’ll see.”

  “And the small matter of stopping Aris and saving the Earth…?”

  She squeezed his hand once and then let go, because the touch was starting to feel distracting. “Yes, I suppose we’d better see to that, too.”

  Porzia took a deep breath and stood from the chair that had been her private, self-imposed prison. Revan came with her.

  “Elsa? Faraz?” she called, moving down the hall to look for them. “Where are you?”

  She found Elsa in her makeshift writing room with Leo. They were standing apart from each other in a manner that strongly indicated the space between them was only a few seconds old. Apparently they were holding up just fine—or perhaps holding each other up would be more accurate.