Elsa frowned. “Potentially. Leo, do you ever think of it as yours?”
“No … it’s my father’s, always my father’s. That’s the point of wearing it, after all.” Leo swallowed, his throat tight. The pocket watch felt odd in the palm of his hand—a suddenly foreign object, the old meaning stripped away. How could he keep carrying around a remembrance of the dead when no one had died?
“Then we’ve got what we need to test this world,” Elsa said. She held the book open to the first page for Porzia to input the coordinates. As the portal irised open, she added, “Oh, and … I suggest everyone remove their shoes.”
*
They stepped through into cool, ankle-deep water that let off the salty scent of the ocean. A few meters away, a narrow strip of land stretched to their left and right, more blue water visible beyond. Elsa stepped closer for a better look, eager to make sure it had manifested properly, and there it was: a scale model of the Italian peninsula, fifty meters long and ten meters wide, with the rest of Europe laid out beyond.
“Oh dear Lord,” Porzia swore behind her. “I’m standing in the middle of the Adriatic.”
Skandar had one tentacle wrapped around Faraz’s neck and was leaning precariously off his shoulder to get a look at the miniature ocean below. Faraz put a hand up and steadied the over-curious beast.
“You can move around,” Elsa told everyone. “Just be careful not to wander off the edge of the map.”
The hem of Porzia’s skirts was drenched, and she struggled to hold it up above her ankles without dropping the portal device. Elsa had tucked her own skirts over her arm before crossing through the portal, and was secretly amused at how uncomfortable the sight of her bare brown calves made the boys. That thought recalled the memory of Leo’s bedroom, though, and the mirth drained out of her. There seemed to be an unspoken agreement between them to pretend nothing had happened, so she squared her shoulders and stepped up onto land.
The topographical contours felt rough on the soles of her bare feet—she’d scribed the model to withstand the weight of giants like herself tramping all over Europe, but hadn’t considered that the extra-firm structural integrity might be rather uncomfortable from the giants’ perspective. Elsa picked her way cautiously through the jagged peaks of the Alps, which were just tall enough to bang her shins against if she wasn’t careful. She crossed through Switzerland and over Paris, and waded out through the English Channel to the Atlantic.
Rising from the water was a shiny brass podium with a glass front like a grandfather clock, displaying a complex interplay of gears within. At the moment, the inner workings were still and silent. Elsa slid open a small drawer on the side, checking the contents: a silver-backed pocket compass with not one but two needles, nestled in a bed of red velveteen cloth.
Satisfied, she closed the drawer and held out her empty palm to Leo. “I do believe we’re ready to begin.”
His amber gaze locked on her. There was tension around his eyes, but otherwise his features were schooled to appear calm. Resolute. He dropped the watch into her outstretched hand.
Elsa placed the watch atop the podium, pressed a series of buttons, and yanked down on a lever. The innards whirred to life, gears singing against one another. Soon, she could hear the ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk of the target settling into place. Then the mainspring let out a soft twang, and the machine fell silent again.
She picked up the watch and handed it back to Leo while Porzia waded to shore, staring down at the map. Elsa followed, calling, “Do we have a location?”
A beacon of light pulsed in southeast France along the coast. “The city of Nizza,” Porzia said. “That makes sense, I suppose.”
Faraz said, “How so?”
“Leo’s grandfather, Giuseppe Garibaldi, was a native Nizzardo. Ricciotti has returned to his family roots.”
With sudden savagery, Leo declared, “That man cares nothing for family.”
“Still,” Faraz said in a soothing tone, “perhaps he inherited property there. French-occupied Nizza is as close as you can get to Italian soil without actually crossing into Sardinia. It’s an ideal location for a man in hiding—just outside the reach of anyone who might be looking.”
For a moment Leo seemed to wrestle with his temper before tamping it down, and even then, his words came out clipped. “Yes. Well. Let’s go, then.” His fist, tense around his father’s watch, loosened one finger at a time, and he tucked it away in the pocket of his waistcoat.
“Not so fast—we still need to confirm our destination,” Elsa said, her palm resting on the carved-wood grip of her mother’s revolver, holstered at her right hip. She took a deep breath, drew the gun, and gently laid it upon the pedestal. “Moment of truth.”
The whole tracking world seemed to hold its breath as the machine chugged away. Or perhaps that impression simply came from the way the molecules of air rang in her ears. Elsa waited for the finishing twang of the mainspring, but it did not come—instead the machine fell prematurely silent, as if too tired to complete its task.
Porzia glowered at the revolver. “It’s not working.”
“What does that mean?” said Faraz.
She’s dead, thought Elsa, and pressed the back of her hand against her lips to hold in the cry of grief that threatened to erupt from her lungs. But then she remembered Jumi’s old lecture: We are stewards and caretakers—do you understand, darling? None of this is ours, it belongs to all Veldanese. She’d thought her mother meant Veldana—the trees and stones and water—but what if Jumi did not believe in the individual ownership of possessions in a general sense? Their world had so many shared resources that private property was not a terribly Veldanese concept. Even young Elsa had needed the idea of not yours explained to her when she’d disassembled Montaigne’s Pascaline.
She said, “I don’t think we Veldanese have a very strong sense of ownership. Even a few days of carrying around Jumi’s revolver is enough to confuse the targeting machine about who owns it.” She didn’t say, Either that or Jumi’s dead.
Porzia said, “Do you have anything else of your mother’s?”
“Nothing I haven’t been carrying or wearing or otherwise using.” Elsa jammed the revolver back into its holster, frustrated. There was no way to confirm that Garibaldi had Jumi with him, or even that she still lived.
Leo held out the pocket watch again. “Then we rely on what we do have.”
Elsa took the watch and retargeted Garibaldi, then grabbed the two-needled compass from the drawer on the side of the machine as Porzia turned the dials on her portal device. Porzia went first into the portal to return to her sitting room. Elsa stepped through next and collided with Porzia on the other side.
“What are you—oh.”
On the settee sat Gia Pisano, arms crossed, aiming a none-too-pleased glare at her daughter.