Filippo sighed. “I have never wanted to throttle Augusto as much as I did today.”
Alek gave his old friend a wry grin and eased himself down into an armchair, careful of his stiff hip. “If I were thirty years younger, I’d offer to hold him down for you.”
“No you wouldn’t, you insufferable pacifist,” Filippo said, amusement crinkling the corners of his eyes.
“He has you there,” Gia added.
Holding it by the stem, Alek tilted the tulip-shaped glass, watching the play of firelight through the pale liquor within. “It’s a terrible mistake,” he said. “I don’t know how we’re going to convince Righi, but convince him we must. I’ll admit Jumi never was much of an ally to the Order, but I can promise you this: Elsa will make a worse enemy.”
Gia picked up her own glass, fingering it thoughtfully. “How strong is she?”
He immediately thought of the doorbook, with all its heretical implications. Alek had half a century of experience on Elsa, and she’d still managed to create a book of which the inner workings stymied him. And that moment in Paris … Elsa in her soot-stained dress, kneeling in the rubble, holding the charred wooden box of a Pascaline with its heat-warped gears and saying, I used to play with it when I was little … how Alek’s heart had stopped when he understood what that meant.
“She’s a polymath,” he replied. “I wouldn’t know how to begin answering that question. Is there even a limit to what she’s capable of, to how powerful she can become?”
Lord help him. Alek tipped the glass and let the sweet burn of grappa slide over his tongue.
11
IF WE LET GO OF THINGS, OUR LIFE IS GOING TO CHANGE. AND THE REALITY IS THAT WE ARE ACTUALLY MORE AFRAID OF CHANGE THAN WE ARE OF DEATH.
—Caroline Herschel
Leo sat on the floor of his lab, ripping out the section of hydraulic tubing with the bullet hole in it. He couldn’t help but think about how neatly Elsa had aimed and pulled the trigger when they’d first met, and the corner of his mouth quirked up at the memory. He hadn’t known whether to be annoyed or intrigued. When he thought of Elsa now, he still felt a little of both.
Leo wiped the hydraulic fluid off his hands with an old rag. He’d worked all afternoon, and he still hadn’t decided whether he should patch the bot into Casa’s network so the house could control it, or keep it autonomous and simply modify its programming to only attack strangers. Of the two machines, Casa had the best deductive abilities by far, and it therefore would be much less likely to falsely identify a delivery boy as a hostile assailant. However, there were arguments in favor of autonomy.…
Leo’s concentration frayed under the assault of an annoying sound—thunk, thunk thunk, thunk—until he was forced to look up. The source quickly became evident: the cleaning bots had ceased to clean and were twirling in circles across the floor, bumping against one another.
“Uh, Casa?” he said. “What in the world are you doing? Or perhaps I should say, not doing. The cleaning bots have gone insane.”
Casa answered slowly, the words stretching like molasses. “I am … otherwise occupied … at the moment.”
“What do you mean? Occupied with what?” He glowered at the malfunctioning cleaning bots.
“No need to … worry. You children … should not concern yourselves…”
“Concern ourselves with what?” Leo demanded. “Casa!”
The house finally relented. “Power surge. Several sectors … knocked out.”
Leo frowned. “But Gia just ran maintenance on the power distribution system last year.”
“The … origin of the surge was … not internal.”
Leo got that cold feeling in his chest—the one that meant he could stop anxiously waiting for the next catastrophe, because it had arrived. “Are you saying someone took down your security systems so they could get inside?”
With effort Casa managed whole sentences. “I can’t see enough to be certain we’ve been infiltrated. I am fighting, but my control of the rear sector is still patchy. The library remains entirely dark.”
Leo inhaled sharply. “Elsa’s in the library.”
He yanked open the laboratory door and sprinted down the hallway, praying he could find Elsa before the intruder did.
*
Elsa was reshelving the history book Porzia had given her to read when she heard the door creak open behind her. It must be Porzia returning from her study. She turned, saying, “Did you bring any—” but the words died on her lips. It wasn’t Porzia.
The figure in the doorway was swathed in black clothing, nothing left uncovered except his eyes. Something about the man’s posture made Elsa’s pulse jump, even before the gasoliers hanging from the ceiling flickered and went out, plunging her into darkness.
Elsa’s eyes struggled to adjust to the dim twilight filtering through the windows as the intruder stalked toward her. He had something in his hand, something that flashed with reflected moonlight from the windows above. A knife, she thought, only a fraction of a second before he lunged at her. Elsa yanked the history book off the shelf again and swung the heavy volume up to block his attack. The knife blade slid off the hard leather cover and grazed her forearm, but shallowly. She barely registered the sting of steel on skin.
She swung the book again, trying to knock the weapon from her attacker’s hand, but he moved too fast, darting out of range for only a second before closing in on her once more. This time, the book connected with his elbow, making a satisfying thwack, but the strike hardly seemed to faze him.
Behind the assassin, a shape appeared in the open doorway, silhouetted against the light that spilled in from the hall. With the library still dark, it took Elsa a second before she recognized Leo. He seemed to move as silent as a snake winding through grass, or perhaps it was only that her pulse was pounding in her ears. Leo reached down to pull something from the top of his boot. When it caught the light, Elsa saw polished metal—a small, narrow-bladed dagger.
“Hey!” Leo shouted, and when the man turned, he threw the dagger through the air. It tumbled end over end and landed in the assassin’s chest with an audible thud. The assassin looked down at the protruding hilt in confusion, touched his chest where his own lifeblood was leaking out. Then his knees went weak and he collapsed. Dead.
Elsa’s lungs kept heaving like bellows, her body refusing to acknowledge the danger was past. Leo had killed the assassin. It seemed surreal, even with the gruesome proof lying at her feet.
“Well,” she said, trying to compose herself. Her frantic heart rate refused to calm, and her hands shook. Afraid she might drop the already-abused book, she set it down carefully on the nearest table. “I suppose if they’re sending agents to kill us, that means we must be looking in the right direction.”