Porzia swallowed, and then said with forced brightness, “Mamma, you’re back. How was Firenze?”
“When you wrote that Casa needed maintenance,” Signora Pisano said, “I didn’t imagine you meant the house had been sabotaged.”
Leo and Faraz piled into the room behind them. Leo looked at Gia, looked at Porzia, muttered that he’d be right back, and fled the room.
Porzia watched him leave with a withering look, as if she considered him a coward for his sudden retreat in the face of an angry Gia. Then she squared her shoulders and said to her mother, “Casa’s upkeep is a family matter. I thought it prudent to keep the details private.”
“Mm-hmm,” Gia said skeptically. “And all of this?”
Porzia blinked, the very picture of innocence. “All of what?”
“Whatever it is you’ve been cooking up on the other side of that portal,” her mother said. “You children are going after Jumi’s abductor by yourselves—I suppose that’s also a family matter?”
“That’s my fault,” Elsa offered, though she had some difficulty mustering anything like contrition.
Dryly, Gia said, “Oh, well, in that case, my daughter is absolved of all responsibility.”
“We were only going to do a little reconnaissance,” Porzia insisted. “Confirm where Elsa’s mother is being kept and by whom. Then we were going to bring the information to the Order, I swear—we wanted hard evidence first, is all.”
Just then, Leo rushed back in, his rapier now hanging from his belt. Gia took one look at him and raised an eyebrow at her daughter. “Reconnaissance only, you say?”
Porzia flushed an impressive shade of pink. “Best to be prepared, just in case?”
Leo stopped short and looked annoyed at no one in particular. “I thought this would be sorted by the time I came back. We don’t have time to stand around debating the finer points of—”
Gia stood from the settee and gave Leo a quelling look that made his jaw snap shut midsentence. Then she turned to her daughter. “I expect rash behavior from Leo. But you—I left you in charge because I thought you were mature enough to shoulder the responsibility. You were supposed to be watching the children, running the house, not hunting a dangerous pazzerellone!”
Elsa’s chest twinged with a knot of sympathetic guilt. She knew exactly what it was like to have a mother with high expectations and a legacy that required massive responsibility. She could all too easily imagine how Porzia felt facing Gia’s disappointment.
Porzia’s eyes glistened with moisture, but her voice rose to match her mother’s volume. “Responsibility! What of my responsibility to my friends? Am I supposed to refuse them help?”
Gia pointed her finger angrily at the floor. “You are supposed to prioritize the good of the house above all individual concerns.”
“And you were supposed to convince the Order to rescue Jumi!” Porzia retorted. “How exactly is that going?”
“Augusto Righi is a coward. But your father and Alek are still working to convince—”
“Leo’s right, time is of the essence,” Porzia interrupted. “We’re going, Mamma, whether you like it or not.”
Tightly, Gia said, “You’re right, I can’t stop you. I can’t leave the children here alone with Casa in such need of repair. But you must promise me not to engage with these people. Observe only. When you have more information, we will decide—together—what is to be done. Am I clear?”
“Understood,” said Porzia. Elsa got the sense she was only barely resisting the urge to snap a sarcastic salute.
Gia took one last, long look at her daughter’s face, as if trying to commit every detail to memory. Then she turned toward the door. “Casa—is Burak still working in the generator room? Tell him I’ll be there shortly.”
Her mother gone, Porzia took a deep breath, straightened her skirts, and said, “Well. Are we all set, then? We should go before the compass loses its charge.”
A little flower of guilt bloomed inside Elsa. Porzia was fighting with Gia because of her, and she didn’t know what to say to make that better.
Faraz stroked Skandar soothingly. The tension with Gia had made the poor beast anxious. “Ready as we’ll ever be,” he said.
Porzia threw him a blistering look. “You are not bringing that thing with us. We’re trying to be inconspicuous, remember?”
Faraz harrumphed, but he pried Skandar off his shoulder and set the beast down on the armrest of a chair. “One of these days we’re going to need him,” he grumbled.
“I can’t imagine for what,” Porzia replied. “Now let’s go.”
*
After a short trip through the doorbook, Elsa, Leo, Porzia, and Faraz emerged onto the narrow, curving cobbled streets of Nizza. It was a maze of a city, not so overwhelmingly large as Paris but easily the equal of Pisa, Elsa guessed.
“Here,” she said, handing the compass to Leo. “The black needle points toward magnetic north. The silver one points toward the tracking target. Garibaldi, in this case.”
Leo frowned down at the compass and swiveled left and right, testing it. “It’s a part of the targeting machine?”
Elsa nodded. “Yes—I figured we’d need an object from the tracking world to keep us on course.”
Leo led the way as they began the uncertain task of finding one woman in a city of ninety thousand. Elsa felt hyperaware of his proximity, the angle of his shoulders, the small crease of concentration between his brows. Just nerves, she told herself, and tried her best to ignore the feeling.
It was late afternoon, and the city bustled with carriages and foot traffic. Here and there, Elsa caught snatches of English and French alongside the native Nizzardo dialect. The foreigners, though numerous, were overwhelmingly white, and self-consciousness burned down her spine—even without Skandar, she and Faraz were far from inconspicuous.
Elsa couldn’t puzzle out why there were so many northern Europeans until they had to squeeze past a particularly obstructive cluster of Englishmen, and Porzia muttered, “Bloody English vacationers.”
They followed the compass needle east and left the vacationers behind in favor of sailors and dockworkers. They circled around a ship-choked port that cut inland, the air heavy with the scent of brine and rotten fish. Leo slowed to a stop and tapped at the glass face of the compass.
“This can’t be right. My father was a man of means, not a”—he waved his hand in the vague direction of a raggedly dressed man stumbling out of a tavern—“an unemployed deckhand.”
Elsa took the compass from him, ignoring the way he looked at her when their hands touched. She pivoted back and forth on one heel, watching the compass needle hold steady, pointing to a run-down tenement house across the street. “It seems to be working fine. That’s the place.”
They ducked into a narrow alleyway to strategize. The sun hung low in the west, lighting up the wisps of cloud in shades of pink and orange, and the shadows between buildings had grown comfortingly dark.