Porzia shook her head, a wry grin pulling at the corners of her mouth. “I can see why you’ve awoken in Leo such a sense of inferiority.”
Elsa felt heat rise in her cheeks. Porzia’s eyebrow twitched at her too-transparent reaction to Leo’s name, but she let it pass unremarked upon. Quickly, Elsa said, “So where did you get with the Garibaldi research?”
“Well, as I see it, we have three problems: locating your mother, reaching her as soon as possible, and escaping with her.”
Porzia’s hand rested on the open page of the atlas, her gaze focused on her notes as if determined to rake through them for undiscovered information. Elsa felt a pang in her chest as she watched the other girl. She’d stayed up all night doing research alone so Elsa could sleep and recover; she’d agreed to conceal Leo’s parentage from the Order, whatever the consequences might be for her own family. It was past time to trust Porzia.
Elsa took a deep breath and said, “Well, I don’t know how we’re going to locate Jumi, but getting to her won’t be a problem once we have.” Before she could change her mind, she pulled out the doorbook. “We’ll use a portal.”
Porzia shook her head. “That’s not possible. A portal device by itself, without a worldbook nearby, is useless here on Earth. Without a worldbook, there’s no way to specify a destination.”
“The book assigns numerical coordinates to a particular place, and the device opens a portal to that location, right? So all you need is a book that can assign coordinates.” She held out the doorbook, offering it to Porzia. “This is how I make portals on Earth. I keep it with me, so I always have access.”
Porzia gingerly accepted the doorbook and lifted the cover to look inside. The core text was scribed in Veldanese, taking up the first dozen pages, so Elsa had to walk her through the structure and syntax. “This is the trickiest part, here: since Earth isn’t a scribed world, you can’t simply reference its worldbook. It took me quite some time to figure out the necessary parameters to link the book to Earth.”
Porzia flipped through to the most recent page—the description of Pisa, scribed in Dutch for de Vries’s benefit. She frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t know whether to call this brilliant, or heretical, or both.”
Elsa let the corner of her mouth quirk with amusement. “There’s nothing sacred about your so-called ‘real’ world.”
“It is the original world, you know. The only natural one,” Porzia argued.
There was a time when those words would have filled her with resentment. Now Elsa was beginning to understand that this belief served to hinder Porzia’s scriptological ambitions. Porzia was brilliant, but she still thought of her world as the One True World, and her own perceptions were hobbling her.
“The fundamental architecture of all scribed worlds is rooted in the architecture of this universe, which renders the real and the artificial functionally indistinguishable from each other. If an alchemist were to take my blood and yours and compare them side by side under a microscope, he would detect no differences. What is scribed is real.”
Porzia nodded, frowning, struggling to absorb this idea.
“Finding Jumi will be another matter, though.” Elsa tucked the book away again. “In a world the size of Veldana, we could design some kind of device to detect her proximity, but Europe is much too large for that.”
A grin slowly formed on Porzia’s lips, brightening her expression like a rising sun. “We’ve got a pair of excellent scriptologists here. Isn’t the solution obvious? We write a world designed to locate your mother.”
Elsa grinned back at her—Porzia was really starting to get it now, starting to think like a Veldanese. “That’s the best idea you’ve had all day.”
“It’s only, what, nine in the morning?” Porzia pointed out.
“We’ve got time, then,” said Elsa. “Let’s see what else we can come up with.”
*
Leo holed up in his laboratory with his tools and a live bug that Burak had saved for him to examine. He flipped it upside down, clamped its legs to hold it stationary, and adjusted his magnifying glass stand. Then he carefully unscrewed the brass casing on the bug’s underside, grateful he owned a spare set of clockmaker’s tools—he couldn’t bear facing Elsa to ask for the kit she had borrowed. It was so much easier to hide in the familiar mess of his lab than to face the impossible mess his life had become.
Machines were pure and objective. He could poke around in the gears and learn what they were made to do, and why, and even by whom. Machines could be fully, completely understood. People were a different story. After the depth of his father’s deception, how could he ever trust himself to know another person? Mere days ago, he’d possessed such confidence in his ability to read a person the way Porzia might read a book, handpicking all the little revealing details of their behavior and appearance, and now that version of himself seemed like a stranger. In light of his utter failure to comprehend his own family, the life of a hermit had begun to sound awfully appealing.
With this clockwork device, at least, he was equal to the task. Observe, disassemble, analyze. He selected a pair of fine-tipped pliers and yanked out the half-wound mainspring with a metallic twang. With the power source removed, the still flailing tips of the legs slowed down, as if stuck in molasses, and then stopped altogether. Leo carefully pulled out the tiny gears one by one, lining them up in order on his worktable.
As he explored what should have been familiar territory, a hollow feeling settled in his gut. The electromagnetic inductor was much too small, and over here—were those miniature components designed for wireless transmission? The Order’s network of Hertzian machines had been designed by a master of wireless telegraphy out of Bologna, but no one could make such a function fit inside this tiny compartment. It simply wasn’t possible—not with mechanics alone.
Leo’s first thought was that this looked like something Elsa would build, like how her freeze ray combined mechanics and alchemy. But no, that wasn’t precisely correct. Every pazzerellone developed unique quirks in their designs, and these quirks did not remind him of Elsa’s. Yes, the bug had been designed by a polymath, but this signature belonged to a different one—an uncomfortably familiar signature, though Leo had not seen its like in years. The closer he looked, the more certain he became.
His brother Aris had designed the bugs.
*