Ink, Iron, and Glass

by Gwendolyn Clare

  Alek could have blamed Garibaldi for planting the seed of the idea that would kill Massimo. He didn’t. He blamed himself for encouraging it to grow. Had blamed himself every day since.

  * * *

  Later, when Alek and Filippo were freed from Righi’s presence, they retreated to the Pisano apartment on the third floor to strategize. While Filippo told Gia about the meeting, Alek poured three glasses of grappa from the decanter on the sideboard. They were all going to need a stiff drink.

  “There’s still a chance,” Filippo was saying. He stood with one hand resting on the mantel above the lit fireplace and accepted a grappa glass from Alek with the other. “Perhaps we can convince the other members of the council to oppose Righi’s plan.”

  Alek cast him a look mixed with equal parts skepticism and weariness, though it was Gia who said, “I wouldn’t lay money on those odds, dear.”

  Filippo sighed. “I have never wanted to throttle Augusto as much as I did today.”

  Alek gave his old friend a wry grin and eased himself down into an armchair, careful of his stiff hip. “If I were thirty years younger, I’d offer to hold him down for you.”

  “No you wouldn’t, you insufferable pacifist,” Filippo said, amusement crinkling the corners of his eyes.

  “He has you there,” Gia added.

  Holding it by the stem, Alek tilted the tulip-shaped glass, watching the play of firelight through the pale liquor within. “It’s a terrible mistake,” he said. “I don’t know how we’re going to convince Righi, but convince him we must. I’ll admit Jumi never was much of an ally to the Order, but I can promise you this: Elsa will make a worse enemy.”

  Gia picked up her own glass, fingering it thoughtfully. “How strong is she?”

  He immediately thought of the doorbook, with all its heretical implications. Alek had half a century of experience on Elsa, and she’d still managed to create a book of which the inner workings stymied him. And that moment in Paris … Elsa in her soot-stained dress, kneeling in the rubble, holding the charred wooden box of a Pascaline with its heat-warped gears and saying, I used to play with it when I was little … how Alek’s heart had stopped when he understood what that meant.

  “She’s a polymath,” he replied. “I wouldn’t know how to begin answering that question. Is there even a limit to what she’s capable of, to how powerful she can become?”

  Lord help him. Alek tipped the glass and let the sweet burn of grappa slide over his tongue.

  11

  IF WE LET GO OF THINGS, OUR LIFE IS GOING TO CHANGE. AND THE REALITY IS THAT WE ARE ACTUALLY MORE AFRAID OF CHANGE THAN WE ARE OF DEATH.

  —Caroline Herschel

  Leo sat on the floor of his lab, ripping out the section of hydraulic tubing with the bullet hole in it. He couldn’t help but think about how neatly Elsa had aimed and pulled the trigger when they’d first met, and the corner of his mouth quirked up at the memory. He hadn’t known whether to be annoyed or intrigued. When he thought of Elsa now, he still felt a little of both.

  Leo wiped the hydraulic fluid off his hands with an old rag. He’d worked all afternoon, and he still hadn’t decided whether he should patch the bot into Casa’s network so the house could control it, or keep it autonomous and simply modify its programming to only attack strangers. Of the two machines, Casa had the best deductive abilities by far, and it therefore would be much less likely to falsely identify a delivery boy as a hostile assailant. However, there were arguments in favor of autonomy.…

  Leo’s concentration frayed under the assault of an annoying sound—thunk, thunk thunk, thunk—until he was forced to look up. The source quickly became evident: the cleaning bots had ceased to clean and were twirling in circles across the floor, bumping against one another.

  “Uh, Casa?” he said. “What in the world are you doing? Or perhaps I should say, not doing. The cleaning bots have gone insane.”

  Casa answered slowly, the words stretching like molasses. “I am … otherwise occupied … at the moment.”

  “What do you mean? Occupied with what?” He glowered at the malfunctioning cleaning bots.

  “No need to … worry. You children … should not concern yourselves…”

  “Concern ourselves with what?” Leo demanded. “Casa!”

  The house finally relented. “Power surge. Several sectors … knocked out.”

  Leo frowned. “But Gia just ran maintenance on the power distribution system last year.”

  “The … origin of the surge was … not internal.”

  Leo got that cold feeling in his chest—the one that meant he could stop anxiously waiting for the next catastrophe, because it had arrived. “Are you saying someone took down your security systems so they could get inside?”

  With effort Casa managed whole sentences. “I can’t see enough to be certain we’ve been infiltrated. I am fighting, but my control of the rear sector is still patchy. The library remains entirely dark.”

  Leo inhaled sharply. “Elsa’s in the library.”

  He yanked open the laboratory door and sprinted down the hallway, praying he could find Elsa before the intruder did.

  * * *

  Elsa was reshelving the history book Porzia had given her to read when she heard the door creak open behind her. It must be Porzia returning from her study. She turned, saying, “Did you bring any—” but the words died on her lips. It wasn’t Porzia.

  The figure in the doorway was swathed in black clothing, nothing left uncovered except his eyes. Something about the man’s posture made Elsa’s pulse jump, even before the gasoliers hanging from the ceiling flickered and went out, plunging her into darkness.

  Elsa’s eyes struggled to adjust to the dim twilight filtering through the windows as the intruder stalked toward her. He had something in his hand, something that flashed with reflected moonlight from the windows above. A knife, she thought, only a fraction of a second before he lunged at her. Elsa yanked the history book off the shelf again and swung the heavy volume up to block his attack. The knife blade slid off the hard leather cover and grazed her forearm, but shallowly. She barely registered the sting of steel on skin.

  She swung the book again, trying to knock the weapon from her attacker’s hand, but he moved too fast, darting out of range for only a second before closing in on her once more. This time, the book connected with his elbow, making a satisfying thwack, but the strike hardly seemed to faze him.

  Behind the assassin, a shape appeared in the open doorway, silhouetted against the light that spilled in from the hall. With the library still dark, it took Elsa a second before she recognized Leo. He seemed to move as silent as a snake winding through grass, or perhaps it was only that her pulse was pounding in her ears. Leo reached down to pull something from the top of his boot. When it caught the light, Elsa saw polished metal—a small, narrow-bladed dagger.

  “Hey!” Leo shouted, and when the man turned, he threw the dagger through the air. It tumbled end over end and landed in the assassin’s chest with an audible thud. The assassin looked down at the protruding hilt in confusion, touched his chest where his own lifeblood was leaking out. Then his knees went weak and he collapsed. Dead.

  Elsa’s lungs kept heaving like bellows, her body refusing to acknowledge the danger was past. Leo had killed the assassin. It seemed surreal, even with the gruesome proof lying at her feet.

  “Well,” she said, trying to compose herself. Her frantic heart rate refused to calm, and her hands shook. Afraid she might drop the already-abused book, she set it down carefully on the nearest table. “I suppose if they’re sending agents to kill us, that means we must be looking in the right direction.”

  She glanced over at Leo, expecting a witty reply, but his chin was tucked and his shadowed expression unreadable. When he finally spoke, he did not sound amused. “That was close.”

  She didn’t want to think about just how close. When the Oracle said she’d lose something precious, she hadn’t considered that it might mean her life. The
Oracle’s words seemed to settle over her like a death shroud. Elsa shook herself, trying to dislodge the sensation. “What happened with the gaslights? Casa?”

  The house didn’t answer, but Leo said, “Never mind that. Are you hurt?” He stepped toward her, hands out as if he wanted to look her over for injuries.

  She waved him off. “I’m fine. Really.”

  To keep herself from dwelling on what had almost happened, Elsa knelt down beside the body. She meant to search it for clues, but she hesitated, not wanting to touch it. Don’t be silly, it’s just organic matter, there’s nothing to be afraid of. When she laid her shaky hands upon it, the body was still warm, but limp in a way that was not at all like the limpness of a sleeping child. Elsa cringed, but she made herself rifle through the assassin’s pockets anyway. There was nothing to find. She peeled off his mask. His neatly trimmed beard spoke of someone who took care with his appearance, but there was nothing particularly distinctive about his facial structure—he could have been Italian or French or Austrian.

  Elsa sat back on her heels and sighed. “Of course he doesn’t have a calling card or anything else to hint at who hired him. Because that would be too easy.”

  Leo didn’t answer, and when she looked up, he was staring at her with a stricken expression.

  She said, “It’s over, Leo. I’m alive, he’s dead, so let’s just … leave it at that.” Her hands still shaky, Elsa brushed loose strands of hair out of her face—his stare was making her self-conscious of how disheveled she’d gotten in those few seconds of fighting for her life. She had to fight down the note of hysteria that tried to edge its way into her voice. “Would you like to help me figure out what to do, or would you like to stand there like a statue?”

  Leo snorted and shook his head, keeping his thoughts to himself, but at least he started to move. He went over to the nearest of the eight walls and pulled on a section of bookcase. The bookcase creaked as it swung inward, heavy on its hinges, and revealed a triangular closet behind. The space had plenty of dust and cobwebs, but was otherwise empty.

  “This will have to do for now,” Leo said, and he proceeded to grab the assassin beneath the arms. Then he looked up at her expectantly.

  “What?” said Elsa.

  “Give me a hand, grab the ankles,” he said as if it were obvious.

  “Sorry, I’m a bit lacking in experience when it comes to moving corpses,” she grumbled, but she bent down to help.

  Lifting the corpse made her feel flushed and queasy. Once Leo had the body positioned inside the closet, Elsa let go with no small sense of relief.

  She watched him swing the bookcase back in place. “We can’t keep the body in there forever. It’ll start to smell.”

  “I know, but this is better than leaving it out in the open. If one of the kids sees it, Gia will skin me alive.” His tone had returned to his usual level of nonchalance.

  “What do you do with your dead?” she asked, desperate to keep him talking—anything to distract herself from the reality of what had almost happened.

  Leo gave her a strange look. “I’m afraid I don’t have much experience with clandestine body disposals.”

  “No, I mean in general. Earth has been around for a long time, and there are so many of you. It seems like you’d be up to your necks in skeletons by now.”

  He scratched his head. “Well, we bury them mostly. Some cultures burn them. We certainly don’t leave them lying in the streets, if that’s what you’re envisioning. Why, what do the Veldanese do with them?”

  “We haven’t had much death so far … Veldana’s too new for it,” Elsa said. Yes, this was good, this was something to focus on besides the nauseous panic coiling in her gut. “We don’t have any old people yet. A baby died once—stopped breathing in his sleep—and we sent him into the Edgemist. But that’s hardly an option here. So the furnace, then?”

  “We can’t burn this, it’s evidence! We…” His face flushed, and he finished lamely, “Might … need it.”

  “Need it for what, precisely?” There was something he was skirting around, trying to keep from her, but Elsa was finding it hard to focus. The cut along her arm throbbed, the pain distracting her.

  Leo said, “Oh, you know. Identification purposes.”

  “I don’t know who he is. You don’t know who he is. It’s not as if we can send a wireless to Firenze for help. ‘Sorry to disturb you—stop. Dead assassin in library—stop. Please advise—stop.’ You think Signora Pisano would still let me stay here—let you and Porzia and Faraz keep helping me—if she knew I’d brought this into her home?”

  “It’s hardly your fault. And anyway, I … wasn’t thinking of Gia,” he said cagily.

  “What.” Feeling light-headed, she paused to take a deep breath. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “There’s … someone else who might know him.”

  Elsa was about to reply when a wave of dizziness washed over her, and she had to grab the closest bookshelf to keep herself on her feet. She pressed her other hand to her face, willing the sensation to pass.

  “Are you well?” Leo said, frowning with concern.

  “Dizzy, that’s all. I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said, right before her vision tunneled and the world slipped from her grasp.

  * * *

  Leo saw Elsa’s knees buckle and lunged forward to catch her before she hit the floor. He had not expected her to faint—he’d thought she was made of stronger stuff than that, even if this was her first dead body. After all, wasn’t she the one discussing immolation so casually? He patted her cheek, annoyed, trying to rouse her. This was hardly what he’d pictured when he’d thought about finally getting his arms around her. Limp and unconscious did not factor into that particular fantasy at all.

  She wasn’t responding. That was when he noticed her sleeve was torn and stained. He’d assumed it was blood from the assassin’s body, but when he pulled the fabric away, it revealed a long, shallow scratch running down her forearm, where the tip of the assassin’s dagger must have grazed her. Poison on the dagger? Icy fear filled the pit of his stomach.

  Leo put his fingers to her neck to check her pulse: it felt weak and thready, the rhythm uneven. Oh, God, there wasn’t much time. Think, think. He couldn’t afford to panic just now. Faraz would be his best chance for an antidote, so he had to get Elsa to the alchemy lab.

  Leo yanked a handkerchief from his pocket, grabbed the assassin’s dagger, and wrapped the blade, hoping to preserve some of the poison. Then he tucked the dagger through his belt and heaved Elsa into his arms. She was small, but apparently even small people were difficult to carry when entirely limp. Adjusting his grip, he staggered out into the hall.

  When he burst through the alchemy lab door and saw Faraz inside, a wave of relief flooded through him. Faraz, unlike Leo, actually kept his work space neat, so there was an empty table upon which to lay Elsa. Leo set her down gently, careful not to crack her head against the wood.

  “What in the name of God is going on? Casa reported an intruder.” Faraz rushed over to look at Elsa. “Did she faint?”

  “She’s been poisoned. With this.” Leo handed the dagger over to Faraz, then pulled back Elsa’s sleeve to show the cut. “We have to synthesize an antidote.”

  “I’m—I’m not qualified,” Faraz stammered. “I don’t work on humans.”

  “Seeing as how the only other person with alchemical talent in this house is twelve and enjoys mixing perfumes, I really do think you’re the most qualified candidate.”

  Faraz gave him a wide-eyed look of horror. “I wasn’t suggesting we consult Olivia. Maybe someone at the university…”

  “I hardly think a carriage ride across the campus will do her good. She hasn’t much time. Now, I can assist with whatever you need,” he said, rolling up his sleeves. “We know it’s an alchemical poison used by the Carbonari, which narrows down the possibilities somewhat, and we know it attacks the heart. So what do we do?”

  Faraz unwrapped
the blade, handling it with precision and care. He lifted it close to his face to give the poison an evaluative sniff, then looked at Leo. “We get to work.”

  Even with Leo’s passing knowledge of Carbonari poisons, it took Faraz several minutes to narrow down the possibilities and definitively determine which agent was, even now, killing Elsa. Faraz did not waste a moment on interrogating Leo about his familiarity with the Carbonari, though Leo could see the question lingering in his friend’s eyes.

  Leo took a damp cloth to Elsa’s flushed face while Faraz rummaged furiously through his supply cabinets, glass vials clinking together.

  “We’ll need a chelating agent to bind the toxin,” he said. A vial fell from the shelf and crashed on the floor, spreading yellow fluid and sparkling glass shards everywhere, but Faraz ignored it. “And a cardiac stimulant to counteract the symptoms, and maybe…” His voice trailed off into mutterings Leo couldn’t quite hear.

  Precious minutes ticked by while crystals were dissolved and liquids were boiled and distilled and mixed together. Leo didn’t quite follow every step, but he decided not to ask Faraz to waste time explaining anything to him.

  “Come on, come on,” Leo muttered, checking Elsa’s pulse again. “Can’t you work any faster?”

  “Of course,” Faraz snapped with uncharacteristic sarcasm. “There’s a much faster way to do it, but I decided to take the leisurely route just to drive you insane.”

  Leo winced.

  Faraz’s hands were steady as he grabbed the neck of a glass flask with metal tongs and moved it away from the burner flame, but tension pulled at the corners of his mouth and his gaze turned intense. Even Skandar seemed to pick up on his stress and crawled into the narrow space underneath a cabinet to hide.

  The seconds passed like hours. At long last, Faraz held up a glass test tube and met Leo’s gaze.

  “Is that it?” Leo said, heart in his throat.