“You’d really die for this?”
“Yes. I’d give away all that I value, Sancia, all, to ensure no one ever has to go through what you or I have ever again.”
She looked down at her wrists, at the scars there, where they’d bound her up before they’d lashed her. <You sure you want to do something big, Clef?> she asked.
<I’m sure.>
She bowed her head, nodded, and stood. “Fine then. Let’s go.”
She marched down the hillside to the drainage tunnel, then into the crypt, with Gregor behind her. They all went silent as she walked in.
She stood in the crypt before a sarcophagus, her heart hammering like mad, not moving.
<What are you going to do, kid?> asked Clef.
<I’m going to try to help. And I’m going to give away the last thing I value to make it happen.> She swallowed. <I’m sorry, Clef.>
She reached up, grabbed the string around her neck, ripped Clef off, and placed him on the sarcophagus. “This is Clef,” she said aloud. “He’s my friend. He’s been helping me. Maybe now he can help you.”
Everyone stared at her.
Orso slowly stepped forward, mouth open. “Well, bend me over and scrum me blue,” he whispered. “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”
III
THE MOUNTAIN
Every innovation—technological, sociological, or otherwise—begins as a crusade, organizes itself into a practical business, and then, over time, degrades into common exploitation. This is simply the life cycle of how human ingenuity manifests in the material world.
What goes forgotten, though, is that those who partake in this system undergo a similar transformation: people begin as comrades and fellow citizens, then become labor resources and assets, and then, as their utility shifts or degrades, transmute into liabilities, and thus must be appropriately managed.
This is a fact of nature just as much as the currents of the winds and the seas. The flow of force and matter is a system, with laws and maturation patterns. We should harbor no guilt for complying with those laws—even if they sometimes require a little inhumanity.
—TRIBUNO CANDIANO, LETTER TO THE COMPANY CANDIANO CHIEF OFFICER’S ASSEMBLY
26
“You’ve…you’ve lied to me!” Orso shouted. “You’ve been lying to me this whole time!”
“Well, yeah,” said Sancia. “I heard you telling Gregor to dump my unconscious body in a ditch. That doesn’t exactly inspire trust.”
“That’s not the point!” snapped Orso. “You’ve put everything at risk by lying to us!”
“I don’t recall your ass sneaking onto a foundry,” said Sancia, “or getting up to hop in an underwater coffin. Seems this risk hasn’t been distributed fairly.”
<Can you just, like, tell him what I do?> Clef asked. <That will distract them.>
So she did. And he was right: every fact that she’d been taking as a regular part of her life for the past few days sent Orso and Berenice careening off the walls in shock.
“He can sense scrived devices?” Orso said, boggled. “He can see what they are, what they do, at a distance?”
“And he can change them?” said Berenice. “He can change scrivings?”
“Not change,” said Sancia. “Just…make them reinterpret their instructions. Somewhat.”
“How is that any different from change!” cried Orso.
“I’m still hung up on this thing being a ‘he,’?” said Gregor. “It…it is a key, yes? The key says it’s a him? Is that right?”
“Can we not bother with the dumb shit, please?” said Sancia.
She kept answering questions as best she could, but this proved difficult since she was essentially acting as a go-between in a conversation among six people. She kept asking everyone to slow down, slow down, and everyone kept saying, “Who was that answer for?” or “What? What’s that about, again?”
<Well, kid,> sighed Clef. <I’m not sure if this was a way out of your problem after all.>
<Yeah, I didn’t expect for it to be this loud.>
<Here. Let me see if I can do something. But…I want your permission first. Asking permission before you do something is really, really important, you see? Right? Right?>
<I said I was sorry! But I had to tell them about you! If Gregor’s serious about sparking a goddamn revolution, they’re going to need all the help they can get! What do you want to do?>
<Well, you know how my thoughts were leaking into your mind? How I was…>
<Overpowering me?>
<Yeah. I think I might be able to do that but…deeper. I think I can talk with your mouth, in other words. If you let me.>
<Really?>
<Really.>
Sancia looked around. Orso was still screaming questions at her, and it seemed like she’d missed two or three of them in just the past few seconds. <If it makes this go faster, go ahead.>
<Okay. Hold on.>
There was a warmth in the side of her head, a slight ache, and then suddenly her body felt far away, like it was not something she lived in every second of every day but was rather some curious extension she didn’t fully control.
Her jaw worked, a cough burbled up from within her chest, and her voice said, “All right. Can you guys, like, hear me?”
It was her voice—but not her words.
Everyone blinked, confused. Sancia felt no less confused than they—the experience was deeply disorienting. It was like watching yourself doing things in a dream, unable to stop.
“What!” said Orso. “Of course we can hear you! Are you being ridiculous?”
“Okay,” said Sancia’s voice. “Wow. Weird.” She cleared her throat again. “So weird.”
“Why weird?” asked Claudia. “What’s weird?”
“This isn’t Sancia,” said her voice. “This is the key, Clef. Uh, talking right now.”
They stared at each other.
“The poor girl’s gone insane,” said Gio. “She’s starking mad.”
“Prove it,” said Orso.
“Uh, okay,” said her voice. “Let’s see here. Right now, Orso is carrying two scrived lights and…what I expect is some kind of lexicon tool. It’s a wand that, when touched to certain scrivings, dupes them into going in a loop, essentially pausing them, which allows him to extract the plate and reintegrate it with another command, but it has to have domain over similar metallurgical transitions, because the tool he’s got seems to be really sensitive to bronze and other alloys, and especially tin when it’s present in a ratio of twelve to o—”
“Okay, yeah,” said Claudia. “That’s not Sancia.”
“How are you doing this?” said Berenice, awed. “How are you…Clef…talking with her voice?”
“The girl’s got a plate in her head that gives her…I don’t know the word for it, something like object empathy,” said Clef. “I doubt if it’s intended. I think they scrummed up something when they installed it. Anyways, it’s a connection point between items—only, most items aren’t sentient. I am. So it’s kind of a two-way street.” Clef coughed with her body. “So…how can I help? What do you guys want to know?”
“What are you?” said Orso.
“Who made you?” asked Berenice.
“Will stealing the imperiat really stop Tomas Ziani?” asked Gregor.
“What the hell is Ziani even doing?” asked Claudia.
“Oh, boy. So—everything,” sighed Clef. “Listen, I’m going to try to have to summarize the stuff that Sancia and I have been discussing for days, so just…just sit down and be quiet for a moment, okay?”
And Clef talked.
As he spoke, Sancia began to…well, not quite doze as much as drop out of herself. It was like sitting on the back of a horse and hugging the person who held the reins and slowly falling asleep with the beast’s movements—except the beast was her, her body, her voice and her throat, moving from word to word and thought to thought.
She drifted.
* * *
Slowly, Sancia drifted back in.
Orso was pacing around the crypt like he’d drunk all the coffee in the Durazzo, and he was positively ranting: “So Marduri’s Theorem is true! Scrivings, even small ones, are violations of reality itself, like a run in a hose, all the…the fabric piling up and getting tangled, except it’s a run that accomplishes something very specific!”
“Uh, sure,” said Clef. “I guess that’s one way of putting it.”
“That’s what you perceive!” cried Orso. “That’s what you sense! These…these violations in reality! And when you alter them, you’re just…just fiddling with the tangle!”
“They’re more like errors,” Clef said. “Intentional errors, with intentional effects.”
“The question is what composes the fabric,” said Berenice. “Marduri believed there was reality and a world under it that made reality function. Could scrivings be a tangling of these tw—”
Sancia drifted back out again.
* * *
Again, she awoke.
“…guess I’m not understanding the question,” Clef was saying.
Orso was still pacing the crypt. Berenice, Claudia, and Giovanni sat around Sancia, staring at her with wide eyes like she was a village soothsayer.
“I am saying,” Orso said, “that you’re in an unusual position—you can review all of the scrivings of all of Tevanne and see how all of them work, and how well they work.”