Star-Touched Stories

by Roshani Chokshi

  Enrique lingered to give Séverin a head start.

  In the dark, he felt the presence of the Order’s treasure like the eyes of the dead. Hate shivered through him. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the looming, “salvaged” piles. He might help Séverin steal, but the greatest thief of all was the Order of Babel, for they stole more than just objects … they stole histories, swallowed cultures whole, smuggled evidence of illustrious antiquity onto large ships and spirited them into indifferent lands.

  “Indifferent lands,” mused Enrique. “That’s a good line for later.”

  He could use it in the next article he submitted to the Spanish newspaper dedicated to Filipino nationalism and reform from 300 years of Spanish rule. This room, thought Enrique, was where the fight for reform … not in political arenas or the thresholds of churches, but surrounded by the objects of history. As a historian, maybe he could fight against injustice too. So far he didn’t have the connections that made anyone think his thoughts were worth listening to. This acquisition could change that.

  But first he had to finish the job.

  Enrique counted down the thirty seconds. Then, he straightened the borrowed servant’s outfit, adjusted his mask, and stepped into the darkened hall. Between the gaps of the marble pillars, he could just make out the flutter of fans stabbing into the air.

  Right on time for his meeting, the Vietnamese diplomat Vũ Văn Đinh rounded the corner. A falsified letter poked out of his sleeve. Though he had hated doing it, Tristan was exceptionally good at faking people’s handwriting. The diplomat’s mistress was no exception.

  Just last week, Enrique and the diplomat had shared a drink at L’Eden. While the diplomat was distracted, Laila had fished out the mistress’s letter from Đinh’s jacket and Tristan had copied her penmanship to orchestrate this very meeting.

  Enrique eyed Đinh’s clothes. Like so many diplomats from colonized countries, he had outwardly allied with the Order. Once, there had been versions of the Order all over the world, each dedicated to their country’s source of Forging power—although not all of them called the artistry Forging and not all of them credited its power to the Babel Fragments. Not anymore. Now, their treasures had been taken to different lands; their artistry changed; and their ancient guilds given two choices: ally or die.

  Enrique straightened his false suit, and bowed. “May I assist you with anything, Sir?”

  He extended his hand. Fresh panic reared inside him. Surely Đinh would look. Surely he would know that it was him. The very tips of his fingers brushed Đinh’s sleeves.

  “Indeed you may not,” said Đinh coldly, drawing away his arm.

  Not once did he look him in the eye.

  “Very well, sir.”

  He bowed. With Đinh still waiting on a meeting that would never take place, Enrique walked to the back of the ballroom. He dragged his fingers down his face and neck. A slight prickling sensation rolled down his face, neck and arms, and a thin film of color floated above his skin and clothes, swirling to match the appearance and apparel of ambassador Vũ Văn Đinh.

  Provided no one looked too closely, he now looked identical to the ambassador.

  The powder on his fingertips, made from the pale crystals of Japan’s Kishu region, was Mirror Powder. The substance itself had been banned and confiscated and so the Order had not bothered to ward their meetings against it. They hadn’t counted on Séverin being friendly with the officer of customs and immigrations.

  “Ambassador Đinh,” said a servant, bowing.

  In true diplomat fashion, Enrique did not acknowledge the man. He moved quickly through the crowd. The Mirror Powder would only hold for a minute longer.

  Enrique jogged down the main staircase. At the base was a Tezcat Door that seemed to date back to a time when the Fallen House had not yet been ousted from the French faction of the Order of Babel, for its borders held the symbols of the original four Houses of France. A crescent moon for House Nyx. Thorns for House Kore. A snake biting its own tail for House Vanth. A six-pointed star for the Fallen House. Of them, only Nyx and Kore still existed. Vanth’s bloodline had legally been declared dead. And the Fallen House had … fallen. It was said that its leaders found the West’s Babel Fragment and tried to use it to rebuild the Biblical Tower of Babel, thinking it might give them more than just a sliver of God’s power … but the actual power of God. Had they succeeded in removing the West’s Babel Fragment, they might have destroyed the known civilization. Séverin thought it was a rubbish rumor and believed the Order had destroyed the Fallen House as a power grab. But Enrique wasn’t so sure. Of the four Houses, the Fallen House was said to be the most advanced. Even the Tezcat doors Forged by the Fallen House did more than just camouflage an entrance. Rumor went that they were capable of bridging actual distances. Like a portal. For years, the Order had tried to discover what had become of the Fallen House’s Ring and massive treasure, but none had been able to find it.

  Today, thought Enrique, that might change.

  Through the Tezcat, Enrique could see glittering corridors, a handsomely dressed crowd and the glint of far off chandeliers. It always unnerved him that though he could see the people on the other side, all they would see was a slim, polished mirror. He felt strangely like a god in exile, filled with a kind of hollow omniscience. As much as he could see the world, it would not see him.

  Enrique stepped through the Tezcat and emerged in one of the opulent halls of the Palais Garnier, the most famous opera house in all of Europe.

  One man looked up, stunned. He stared at the mirror, then Enrique, before scrutinizing his champagne flute.

  Around Enrique, the crowd milled about obliviously. They had no idea about the Forged ballroom the Order kept secret. Then again, everything about the Order was kept secret. Even their invitations only opened at the drop of an approved guest’s blood. Anyone else who accidentally received one would see nothing but blank paper. To the public, the Order of Babel was nothing more than France’s research arm tasked with historical preservation. The public knew nothing of the auctions, the coffers full of treasures that stretched for kilometers deep beneath the ground. Half the public didn’t even believe the Babel Fragment was a physical thing, but rather a dressed-up Biblical metaphor.

  With the glamour of the Mirror Powder gone, Enrique was left in his servant costume. He strode through the crowd, tugging his lapel as he walked. The servant costume shifted, the threads unraveling and embroidering simultaneously until he was dressed in a fashionable evening jacket. He flicked his watch, and the slim band of Forged leather burst into a silk top hat that he promptly spun onto his head.

  Just before he stepped outside, he blew a kiss to the Verit stone bust of Clio, the muse of history from Greek mythology. Verit stone was more expensive than a kilo of diamonds. Only palaces or banks could afford to build thresholds of Verit, which always revealed the presence of weapons or hidden objects.

  Outside, Paris was a touch humid for April. Night had sweated off its stars, and across the street, a black hansom glinted dully. Enrique got inside, and Séverin flashed him a wry grin.

  The second Séverin rapped his knuckles against the hansom’s ceiling, the horses lurched into the night. Reaching into his coat pocket, Séverin pulled out his ever-present tin of cloves. Enrique wrinkled his nose. On its own, the clove smell was pleasant. A bit woodsy and spicy. But over the past two years that he’d been working for Séverin, cloves had stopped being a scent and become more of a signal. It was the fragrance of Séverin’s decision making, and it could be delightful or dangerous. Or both.

  “Voila,” said Séverin, handing him the compass.

  Enrique ran his fingers over the cold metal, gently tracing the divots in the silver. Ancient Chinese compasses did not look like Western ones. They were more like magnetized bowls, with a depression in the center where a spoon-shaped dial would have spun back and forth. A thrill of wonder zipped through his veins. It was thousands of years old and here he was, holding it
—

  “No need to seduce the thing,” cut in Séverin.

  “I’m appreciating it.”

  “You’re fondling it.”

  Enrique rolled his eyes. “It’s an authentic piece of history and should be savored.”

  “You might at least buy it dinner first,” said Séverin, before pointing at the metal edges. “So? Is it like what we thought it’d be?”

  Enrique weighed the half of the compass in his hand, studying the contours. As he felt the ridges, he noticed a slight deformation in the metal. He tapped on the surface and then looked up.

  “It’s hollow,” he said, breathless.

  He didn’t know why he even felt surprised. He knew the compass would be hollow, and yet the possibilities of the map reared up fast and sharp and dazzling in his head. Enrique didn’t know what, specifically, the map led to … only that it was rare enough to send the Order of Babel into a furtive clamoring. His bet, though, was that it was a map to the lost treasures of the Fallen House.

  “Break it,” said Séverin.

  “What?” Enrique clutched the object to his chest. “The compass is a thousands of years old! There’s another way to prize it, gently, apart—”

  Séverin made a grab. Enrique tried to snatch it away, but he wasn’t as fast. In one swift motion, Séverin grabbed both sides of the compass. Enrique heard it before he saw it. A brief, merciless—

  Snap.

  Something dropped from the compass, thudding on the hansom’s floor. Séverin got to it first, and the minute he held it up to the light, Enrique felt as if a cold hand had pushed down on his lungs and squeezed the breath out of him. The object hidden within the compass looked like a map. All that was left was one question:

  Where did it lead?

  4

  ZOFIA

  Zofia liked Paris best in the evening.

  During the day, Paris was too much. It was all noise and smell, crammed with stained streets and threaded with hectic crowds. Dusk tamed the city. Made it manageable.

  As she walked back to L’Eden, Zofia clutched her sister’s newest letter tight to her chest. Hela would find Paris beautiful. She would like the linden trees of Rue Bonaparte. There were fourteen of them. She would find the horse chestnuts comely. There were nine. She would not like the smells. There were too many to count.

  Right now, Paris did not seem beautiful. Horse shat marred the cobbled roads. People urinated on the street lanterns. And yet, there was something about the city that spoke vibrantly of life. Nothing felt still. Even the stone gargoyles leaned off the edges of buildings like they were on the verge of flight. And nothing looked lonely. Terraces had the company of wicker-chairs, and bright purple bougainvillea hugged stone walls. Not even the Seine River, which cut through Paris like a trail of ink, looked abandoned. By day, boats zipped across it. By night, lamplight danced upon the surface.

  Zofia peeked at Hela’s newest letter, sneaking lines beneath every shining lantern. She read one sentence, then found that she could not stop. Every word brought back the sound of Hela’s voice.

  Zosia, please tell me you are going to the Exposition Universelle! If you do not, I will know. Trust me, dear sister, the laboratory can spare you for a day. Learn something outside the classroom for once. Besides, I heard that the Exposition will have a cursed diamond, and princes from exotic lands! Perhaps you might bring one home, then I will not have to play governess to our stingy stryk. How he can be father’s brother is a mystery for only God to ponder. Please go. You are sending back so much money lately that I worry you are not keeping enough for yourself. Are you hale and happy? Write to me soon, little light.

  Hela was half-wrong. Zofia was not in school. But she was learning plenty outside of a classroom. In the past year and a half, she had learned how to invent things the École des Beaux Arts never imagined for her. She had learned how to open a savings account, which might—assuming the map Séverin acquired was all they’d hoped it to be—soon hold money to support Hela through medical school when she finally enrolled. But the worst lesson was learning how to lie to her sister. The first time she had lied in a letter, she’d thrown up. Guilt left her sobbing for hours until Laila had found and comforted her. She didn’t know how Laila knew what bothered her. She just did. And Zofia, who never quite grasped how to find her way through a conversation, simply felt grateful that someone could do the work for her.

  Zofia was still thinking about Hela when the marble entrance of École des Beaux-Arts manifested before her. Zofia staggered back, nearly dropping the letters.

  The marble entrance did not move.

  It was a testament to the quality of Forging taught in École des Beaux-Arts. Not only was the entrance Forged to appear before any matriculated students two blocks from the school, but it was also an exquisite example of solid matter and mind affinity working in tandem. A feat only those trained at the École could perform.

  Once, Zofia would have trained with them too.

  “You don’t want me,” she said softly.

  Tears stung her eyes. When she blinked, she saw the path to her expulsion. One year into schooling, her classmates had changed. Once, her skill awed them. Now it offended them. Then the rumors started. No one seemed to care at first that she was Jewish. But that changed. Rumors sprang up that Jews could steal anything.

  Even someone else’s Forging affinity.

  She should have been more careful, but that was the problem with happiness. It blinds.

  For a while, Zofia was happy. And then, one afternoon, the other students’ whispers got the better of her. That day, she broke down in the laboratory. There were too many sounds. Too much laughing. Too much brightness escaping through the curtain. She’d forgotten her parents’ lesson to count backwards until she found that kernel of calm. Whispers grew from that episode. Crazy Jew. A month later, ten students locked themselves in the lab with her. Again came the sounds, smells, laughing. The other students didn’t grab her. They knew just the barest touch—like a feather trailed on bare skin—hurt her more. Calm slipped out of reach no matter how many times she counted backwards; or begged to be let go; or asked what she had done wrong.

  In the end, it was such a small movement.

  Someone kicked her to the ground. Another person’s elbow clashed into a vial on a table, which splattered into a puddle, which pooled out and touched the tips of her outstretched fingers. She had been holding a piece of flint in her hand when fury flickered in her mind. Fire. That little thought—that snippet of will, just as the professors had taught her—traveled from her fingertips to the puddle, igniting the broken vial until it bloomed into a towering inferno.

  Seven students were injured in the explosion.

  For her crime, she was arrested on grounds of arson and insanity, and taken to prison. She would have died there if not for Séverin. Séverin found her, freed her, and did the unthinkable:

  He gave her a job. A way to earn back what she’d lost. A way out.

  Zofia rubbed her finger across the oath tattoo on her right knuckle. Oath tattoos were signs of contractual promises between equals, ink-Forged so that when one sought to break the terms of an agreement, nightmares would plague that person until the agreement was dissolved. Most employer-employee relationships used a different, cruder binding where the parties involved were not equally weighed. That Séverin had used this … a sign of equals … was something she would never forget.

  Zofia turned on her heel and left Rue Bonaparte behind. Perhaps the marble entrance could not recognize when a student had been expelled, for it did not move, but stayed in its place until she disappeared around a corner.

  * * *

  In L’Eden, Zofia made her way to the star-gazing room. Séverin had called for a meeting once he and Enrique got back from their latest acquisition, which she knew was just a fancy word for “theft.”

  Zofia never took the grand lobby’s main staircase. She didn’t want to see all the fancy people dressed up and laughing and dancing. It
was too noisy. Instead, she took the servants’ entryway, which was how she ran into Séverin. He grinned despite appearing thoroughly disheveled. Zofia noticed how tenderly he held his wrist.

  “You’re covered in blood.”

  Séverin glanced down at his clothes. “Surprisingly, it hasn’t escaped my attention.”

  “Are you dying?”

  “Incrementally. But no more than usual or expected.”

  Zofia frowned.

  “I’m well enough. Don’t worry.”

  She reached for the door handle. “I’m glad you’re not dead.”

  “Thank you, Zofia,” said Séverin with a small smile. “I will join you momentarily. There’s something I’d like to show everyone through a Mnemo bug.”

  On Séverin’s shoulder, a Forged silver beetle scuttled under his lapel. Mnemo bugs recorded images and sound, allowing projections like holograms should the wearer choose. Which meant that she had to be prepared for an unexpected burst of light. Séverin knew she didn’t like those. They jolted her thoughts. Nodding, Zofia left him in the hall, and walked into the room.

  The star-gazing room calmed Zofia. It was wide and spacious, with a glass-domed vault that let in the starlight. All along the walls were orreries and telescopes, cabinets full of polished crystal and shelves lined with fading books and manuscripts. In the middle of the room was the low coffee table that bore the scuff marks and dents of a hundred schemes that came to life on its wooden surface. A semicircle of chairs surrounded it. Zofia made her way to her seat. It was a tall metal stool with a ragged pillow case. Zofia didn’t like things touching her back. In a green velvet chaise across from her sprawled Laila, who absentmindedly traced the rim of her teacup with one finger. In a plushy armchair crowded with pillows sat Enrique, who was balancing a large book on his lap and reading intently. Of the two chairs left, one was Tristan’s—which was less of a chair and more of a cushion because he didn’t like heights—and one was Séverin’s, whose black cherry armchair Zofia had custom-Forged so that an unfamiliar touch caused it to sprout blades.