Orso shrugged. “Because we’re stupid, and lazy. After the first stage of the Enlightenment Wars—which was what, twenty or thirty years ago?—Tevanne had expanded and exhausted itself. It needed cheap grain, cheap resources, and it had a lot of captives on hand. It was to be a short-term fix—but then we got dependent on it. And it just keeps getting worse and worse.”
Sancia shook her head. “Scriving the human body…those horrors are nothing, nothing, compared to all the other horrors that make the islands run. And if I had the chance, I’d…I’d do it all over again.”
Gregor looked at her. “Sancia…How did Silicio burn?”
She was silent for a long while. “It…it burned,” she said, “because I set it alight.”
* * *
She started speaking.
They’d brought her to the big house behind the plantation, then down to the basement, down to where that…place was. She hadn’t even known the word for it. Mortuary? Laboratory? Some cross in between? Sancia hadn’t understood. She’d just smelled the alcohol, looked at the drawings and illustrations on the wall, and all those plates with the strange signs written on them; and she’d remembered the wagon that left the house every morning, reeking and followed by flies; and she’d known in an instant that she wasn’t getting out of there alive.
They’d forced her to drink a sedative—a powerful brandy of some kind, awful and putrid. It’d made her brain muddy and slow, but it didn’t kill the pain that would come later. Not really.
They’d cut off all her hair and shaved her pate with a razor. She remembered blinking blood out of her eyes. Then they’d dropped her down on the table, tied her down, and the one-eyed scriver had wiped her skull with alcohol—how it burned, how it burned—and then…
“Desperate times,” the one-eyed scriver had sighed, picking up a knife, “do call for desperate measures. But don’t we have the right to be unorthodox, my dear?” He’d smiled at her, a simpering expression. “Don’t we?”
And then he’d cut her head open.
Sancia had no words for the sensation. No words for the feeling of having your scalp slashed open and peeled back like the skin of an orange. No words for feeling him measure the bend of your skull, and listening to him tap-tap the plate into shape. No words for suddenly feeling those screws, those horrid screws biting into you, the gritty, grinding feeling as they bored into your skull, and then, and then…
Things had gone black.
She’d died. She’d been sure of it, at the time. There’d been just nothing. But then she’d felt someone…
Someone lying on top of her. Felt their warmth. Felt them bleeding.
It’d taken her a long time to realize she was feeling herself.
She’d been feeling her own body, lying on a dark stone floor. Only she’d been feeling herself from the perspective of the floor. She’d become the floor, just by touching it.
In the dark, alone, young Sancia had awoken and done her best to re-collect her sanity. Her skull had screamed and shrieked with pain—one whole side was swollen and sticky and bristly with stitches—but she’d realized then, alone, blind, that she was perhaps becoming something else, like a moth struggling to fight its way out of its pupa.
There had been chains around her wrists. A lock. And because of what she’d become, she’d felt she was the chains, she was the lock—and so she’d known how to pick it, of course, using a shred of wood she’d pulled off the wall.
They hadn’t intended this, surely. They hadn’t planned for her to become this thing. If they had, they would have tied her up better. And they wouldn’t have sent the one-eyed scriver alone to check on her in the night.
The creak of the door, the spear of light stabbing into the shadows.
“Are you awake, poppet?” he’d called sweetly. “I doubt it…”
He’d probably thought she’d be dead. He certainly hadn’t expected her to be hiding in the corner, lock and chain in hand.
She’d waited until he’d stepped inside. Then she’d sprung.
Oh…Oh, to hear the sound of the thick, heavy lock striking his skull. Oh, to hear him crumple to the ground, gagging, shocked. Then she was on him, wrapping the chain around his throat and pulling it taut, tighter, and tighter, and tighter.
Wild, agonized, and covered in blood, she’d slipped out and roved through the darkened house, feeling the boards beneath her, the walls on either side of her, feeling all these things, feeling everyone in the house all at once…
The house had become her weapon. And she’d used it against them.
She’d locked their bedroom doors, one by one. Locked everything as they slept, except one way out. And then she’d gone downstairs to where they’d kept the alcohol, and the kerosene, and all those reeking fluids, and found a match…
A struck match sounds like a kiss in the dark, sometimes. She remembered thinking that, watching the flame crack to life and then flutter down to the pools of alcohol running across the floor.
No one had made it out. And as she’d sat and watched, she’d realized—master or slave, all screams sounded alike.
* * *
Silence filled the library. Nobody moved.
“How did you come to Tevanne?” asked Gregor.
“Snuck aboard a ship,” Sancia said softly. “Easy to stow away when you have the floorboards and the walls to tell you who’s coming and going. When I got off, I stole the name ‘Grado’ from a winery sign I saw, since everyone just expected me to have a last name. Hardest thing was figuring out the limits of what I could do. Touching everything, being everything…it nearly killed me.”
“What’s the nature of your augmentation?” asked Orso.
She tried to describe it—knowing what objects were feeling, what they’d felt, the sheer avalanche of sensation that she constantly fought to keep at bay. “I try to…to touch as few things as possible,” she said. “I can’t touch people. That’s too much. And if the scrivings in my skull get overtaxed, they burn, just burn, like hot lead in my bones. When I first came to Tevanne, I had to wrap myself in rags like a leper. It didn’t take me long to realize that what had been done to me was some kind of scriving. So I tried to find out how to get fixed. How to make me human again. But nothing in Tevanne is cheap.”
“That was why you stole the key?” asked Berenice. “To pay for a physiquere?”
“A physiquere who wouldn’t turn and sell me out to a merchant house,” said Sancia. “Yeah.”
“What?” said Orso, startled. “A what?”
“A…a physiquere,” she said. “One that can fix me.”
“A physiquere…who can fix you?” he said faintly. “Sancia…My God. You are aware that you are probably the only one of your kind alive, yes? I know I’ve never seen a scrumming scrived human in my life, and I’ve seen boatloads of mad shit! The idea of a physiquere who can just, I don’t know, patch you up—it’s preposterous!”
She stared at him. “But…but I’d been told that…that they’d found a physiquere who knew what to do.”
“Then either they were lying,” said Orso, “or being lied to. No one knows how to do what was done to you, let alone reverse it! They were probably going to either take your money and cut your throat, or take your money and sell you to the closest house!”
<Shit,> said Clef, dismayed.
Sancia was trembling. “So…so what are you saying? Are you saying I’m stuck like this…forever?”
“How should I know?” said Orso. “I told you, I’ve never even seen this before.”
“Sir,” hissed Berenice. “Some…tact? Please?”
Orso looked at her, and then Sancia, who was now white and quivering. “Oh, hell…Listen. After all this, you can stay here. With me, and Berenice. And maaaybe I try to figure out how in the hell they made you, and how to reverse it.”
“Really?” said Gregor. “That’s charitable of you, Orso.”
“It damned well isn’t!” he said. “The girl’s a goddamn marvel, who knows what kind of secrets she’s literally carrying around in her head!”
Gregor rolled his eyes. “Of course.”
“Do you think you could actually figure it out?” said Sancia.
“I think I have a better chance than every other dumb bastard in this city,” said Orso.
Sancia considered it. <What do you think, Clef?>
<I think this nutter doesn’t care about money—and someone who doesn’t care about money is less likely to sell you out.>
“I’ll consider it,” she said.
“Terrific,” said Orso. “But let’s not get too tickled over the idea yet. There’s some devilish asshole out there who wants us all dead. Let’s make sure we’re going to have a future before we start planning for one.”
“Right,” said Sancia. “Do you think you can rig up another tailing scriving?” she asked Berenice. “Like the one you used on Gregor?”
“Of course,” she said. “Those aren’t tricky at all.”
“Good.” She looked at Gregor. “And you—are you able to come with me to follow this bastard?”
To her surprise, Gregor looked uncertain. “Uh…Well. That is…unlikely.”
“Why?”
“Probably for the same reason Orso can’t assist either.” Gregor cleared his throat. “Because I am moderately recognizable.”
“He means he’s famous,” said Orso, “because he’s Ofelia Dandolo’s scrumming son.”