The bed was too soft. After an hour or two of tossing around trying to get comfortable, Elsa yanked the heavy blankets off the bed and made a cocoon for herself on the floor instead.
The clear spring sunlight woke her early, and though the exhaustion of the past two days’ events had not entirely left her, Elsa resisted the urge to roll over, cover her face with the blankets, and go back to sleep. There was work to be done.
She needed to figure out who had taken her mother. The salvaged books were her only lead, and they weren’t going to repair themselves. While Jumi might very well rescue herself, or become a beneficiary of the Order’s assistance, Elsa couldn’t rely on either of those possibilities.
She untangled herself from the blankets and stood, stretching. “Um … Casa? Are you there?”
“Yes, signorina,” Casa replied. “I am always here.”
“Would it be possible to have some food brought here, to my rooms? I’m eager to get to work,” she said, which was true, of course, though part of her was also eager to avoid Porzia’s prying questions and Leo’s overcompensating self-assurance.
By the time Elsa finished washing up at the washbasin and dressed herself, her breakfast had arrived at the door, carried by a waist-high brass bot with an arm that ended in a serving tray instead of a hand. It rolled quietly inside and used its other arm—the one with digits—to transfer the food onto the low table in front of the sofa. Then the bot turned around and made a silent, dignified exit. Elsa nibbled at the soft cheese and white bread—still warm from the oven—while considering the dilemma of the damaged worldbooks.
There was no way around it: she would have to repair the books by hand before she could look for clues about Montaigne’s involvement. If he had hidden notes or plans or letters inside one of the worldbooks, she wouldn’t be able to tell just from reading the text—she would have to go inside the worlds to retrieve his papers. And for that, the worldbooks needed to be fully functional. Elsa rinsed her breakfast from her fingertips and began straightaway.
First she opened the cover of each book in turn and pressed her fingertips to the paper, concentrating. None of them felt dead; they all had a bit of the tactile vibration that indicated a live worldbook, but the buzz swelled and receded as if the books were struggling for breath. It was not the steady, strong hum of a complete worldbook, a world that would be safe to enter.
Then Elsa flipped through the books page by page, noting the extent of the damage and trying not to despair. When possible, she wrote down her guesses about what the singed sections might have contained. Often, only the top line or two of a page were too badly blackened to read, sometimes only one word in the corner. Other pages were worse, and lost sentences would be difficult to reproduce with perfect accuracy.
Evaluating the condition of the books was slow work, and to patch up all the ruined sections would be even slower. She’d never tried to repair a burned worldbook before—the sheer number of pages that needed work was much greater than anything she’d attempted. To finish even one book would take her days.
Her mother could be dead in a week, for all she knew. There wasn’t time for this, but what other option did she have? Montaigne had known the abductors, but with him dead, the only way to get that knowledge was to go through his papers, which were stuck inside the damaged worlds.
An unexpected knock at the door made Elsa jump and smear the ink where she was taking notes. She sighed, sheathed the pen in its holder beside the inkwell, and got up to see who had caused the disturbance.
Elsa opened the door. Porzia strode in past her, as if she’d been invited, and asked in a casual tone, “How are you finding your stay here on Earth? Have everything you need?”
Porzia regarded her with perfect innocence, lips forming a small, polite smile. But Elsa suspected the other girl was burning with curiosity. “I’m quite fine, thank you,” she replied.
“Well, if there’s anything … particular you require, as a non-Terran, please don’t hesitate to ask.” Porzia wandered through the sitting room into the study. “Settling in already, I see.”
Elsa followed her, wary of having the other girl snooping around. She quickly closed the covers of all the books lying open on the writing desk.
“Can I help you with something?” Elsa asked, her tone a little stiff.
“You weren’t at breakfast,” Porzia said, as if this were sufficient explanation for her intrusion.
“No, I wasn’t,” Elsa agreed, watching as Porzia wandered over to the side table where Elsa had set down the Pascaline last night. She reached out to fiddle with the damaged dials, and Elsa snapped, “Don’t touch that!”
Porzia turned, giving her a raised-eyebrow look. “I hardly think my touch could ruin it any further.”
“It’s not ruined. It can be fixed,” Elsa said tightly. Her omission of who, exactly, would be doing the fixing was deliberate. No need for Porzia to know that.
Porzia sighed, turning away from the table to face Elsa. “About last night…”
Elsa raised an eyebrow of her own. “You’re here to apologize for your friends being presumptuous cads?”
“Actually, I was going to say it wasn’t entirely diplomatic of you, either. Everyone likes Leo—you won’t win any friends by humiliating him.”
Elsa pulled herself up to her full height and dropped her tone from chilly to downright arctic. “I don’t need anyone to like me, I just need them to understand I’m not to be toyed with.”
Porzia shrugged. “Just offering a bit of advice.”
“I have work to do.”
“I’ll leave you to it, then.” Porzia swept out of the room with the same unflappable grace as always, leaving Elsa to wonder what exactly the other girl was trying to accomplish.
Porzia’s warning irked her, and even more irksome was the small twinge of worry she felt. No, she did not care to make friends with these people—they were at best a distraction, and at worst a danger to her and her mission to find Jumi. She pushed the worry aside and made herself focus.
Midday came and went, Elsa hardly noticing except to nibble at the rest of the bread and cheese when her stomach growled.
She’d started with the book she thought had the highest probability of containing relevant information—a small world scribed to serve as an office, the worldtext written in Montaigne’s own hand. Perhaps Montaigne had corresponded with the abductors ahead of time, in which case there could be letters or telegrams with identifying details.