I didn’t like the turn of this conversation. If he thought he wasn’t getting a good value, he might decide not to help me. Yes, he’d originally offered to help me for no other reason than just to help, but I still didn’t trust that intent.
Then again, I knew how Les felt. Rafeo had been an amazing clipper. Everything came easily to him. Matteo and I struggled to even come close to his skills. Matteo especially took Rafeo’s skill as a personal insult, as if Mother and Father had somehow contrived to make him look bad. But not even Matteo could stay angry at Rafeo for long.
“Let’s work on the firebomb,” I said. “That’s more important than poisons.”
Les grabbed a satchel he’d brought with him and set it between us. I sat down across from him. He laid out a blanket and set down different spheres, some ceramic, others metal. Beside the spheres he placed small jars filled with different-colored powders, and a few more with liquids.
The materials looked similar to the ones used to make smoke bombs, but when I picked up one of the ceramic spheres, it wasn’t divided in the middle.
Les pointed at my chest. I looked down and found my key loose from my leathers. I tucked it back in.
“What is it for?” he asked.
“My house.”
“I thought your house burned down.”
I nodded. “It did. I just . . . couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it. It’s all I have left.”
And it served as a reminder, so I’d never forget that my secret had destroyed everything. I glanced at Les. He was so eager to assist me, a stranger he barely knew. A girl who had invaded his home and stolen from him, and yet here he was, back to helping me again.
Would he be so eager if he knew the truth about me? That the murder of my Family was on my hands?
Les smoothed the blanket. “Okay. Well, timed smoke bombs are similar to the throwing kind. The ceramic shatters and the chemicals combine and smoke appears.”
His flashed his hands before me, mimicking an explosion. “For the timed ones, though, we have to use some different chemicals and different layers.”
He picked up a jar with a clear liquid and placed it in front of me. “This will eat through metal. Not immediately—and how fast depends on the type of metal, the amount of solvent, and so on. It takes a lot of trial and error, and even then sometimes it doesn’t turn out right.”
He glanced up at me, and I nodded to show I was following.
“Besides metal, it will also eat through flesh and fibers. Wood. Fabric. But it can’t go through glass.” He flicked the jar with his finger, and it pinged quietly.
Ate through flesh. I immediately thought of different ways to use it. Perhaps a thrown vial at an enemy as a deterrent. “Where did you get this?”
“It’s a traveler recipe. It’s something we’ve—they’ve—kept secret for hundreds of years.” He pushed the jar aside. “So, how the timed smoke bomb works is, I fill one of these small metal spheres with the powdered smoke agents. Then I place it inside one of the ceramic spheres.”
He showed me how the ceramic sphere was actually two pieces, tightly fitted together like a puzzle. The metal sphere fit inside the ceramic halves, and he closed it up. “I fill the ceramic with the liquid smoke agent and the acid. They don’t like each other, so they stay unmixed, and the acid picks and pocks at the metal until it’s breached. The acid and the powder also don’t like each other. That’s where the flash comes from. When they mix, the acid is burned up, exploding the ceramic casing, and then the remaining powder and liquid combine to make the smoke.”
“Okay.” I nodded. I’d made smoke bombs before, and with all my poison and antidote experience I understood how chemicals mixed in different ways reacted to different things. “What’s all this for, then?” I pointed at the remaining powders and liquids he’d placed on the blanket.
“These are the combinations we’re going to try, to see which ones will make the biggest fire that will burn the longest.”
Les grinned and I did too, though my grin came from picturing the Da Vias, trapped behind the flames of their burning home.
twenty-two
WE SPENT HOURS TRYING DIFFERENT COMBINATIONS, our hopes high. But after a few hours of frustration and frayed tempers, we decided to try again later and went home for some much-needed sleep.
In the morning I headed to a different market to look for clothes. The old one had good prices, but I didn’t want to face the women of Acacius again.
It didn’t take me long to find a shop. I bought two dresses and changed immediately. I was almost tempted to throw out the stained one, but even if I didn’t wash it or ever wear it again, I could use it as a blanket or a pillow on my saddle-blanket bed. There was no point in being wasteful.
I used some of my coins to buy a filling lunch, one that would hopefully last me the rest of the day. Then I headed to the mail office. Faraday had said he was going to send me another letter, so I wanted to keep checking.
It was the same postman as before, and he bobbed his head as I entered. “Oleander, right?”
I nodded and he flipped through the envelopes in the bin. He pulled one out, then glanced at me over his shoulder before returning to the letter.