Was Aris offering allegiance? Or attempting to goad, to manipulate? Leo searched his brother’s expression. “What are you saying?”
“Nothing, brother.” Aris shrugged, a careful show of disinterest. “But I’d keep an eye on the Veldanese girl, if I were you. Wouldn’t want to lose that one.”
*
Leaving the tenement building—and with it her mother—Elsa felt as if she’d ripped out a vital organ and left it behind. The image of her mother, lying so very still within Garibaldi’s stasis chamber, seemed emblazoned on the insides of her eyelids. She had to think about something else, anything else. If she dwelled on that image for one second longer, she would burst into tears right there in the street.
The worldbook, she would think about the worldbook. The most dangerous book ever created, which Jumi had kept hidden from her. The betrayal stung—they had always shared everything, or so Elsa had thought. What sort of weapons did it contain? Why would Jumi have created such a thing? No, the worldbook was no better, so she pushed the thought from her mind.
Instead, she focused on Garibaldi—his mocking smile, his casual dismissal of Leo’s talents. She fanned the flames of her hatred until it outshone everything else.
“Your father is horrible,” she told Leo as they hurried across a shadowy plaza. “Testing you like that, and then having the nerve to call you a failure.”
“It’s not horrible to speak the truth,” Leo said listlessly. All the fight seemed to have drained out of him, his store of righteous anger depleted after the confrontation with his family.
Elsa, on the other hand, still had plenty to spare. “First, he set preposterous standards for success. Second, he doesn’t understand that the smartest way to tackle a problem is to use the people at your disposal—something you taught me, by the way. And third, is he even a polymath himself?” The medical chamber Garibaldi had shown her was an impressive combination of alchemy and mechanics, but he’d never actually claimed credit for its construction.
“No…,” Leo said. “He has some mechanist tendencies, but he’s primarily an alchemist. His talents are unusually broad, but he’s not a full polymath like you and Aris.”
“So he expects more from you than he himself can deliver. Who the hell does he think he is, to suddenly come back into your life and judge you?”
Leo shrugged. “My father?”
She snorted. “He forfeited his claim to that title seven years ago when he abandoned his own children in a burning house.”
Leo declined to answer, and Elsa clenched her jaw and forced herself to let the subject drop. He must be processing the encounter in his own way, trying to sort through deeply conflicted emotions, Elsa knew, and she should respect that—even if her own rage and terror were threatening to overwhelm her.
It was late by the time their footfalls landed with hollow thunk, thunks on the wooden boards of the promenade. A fat gibbous moon rose in the east, and each wave crest caught and scattered the light. Elsa found she was grateful for what darkness the night could offer, obscuring just how endless the ocean was. How distant the horizon. She felt like some tiny tide-pool creature, swept away from her cloistered home into the impossible depths of the open sea. This was a vast world—a vast responsibility. Much depends on the choices you make, the Oracle had told Elsa and Faraz. Could Jumi’s worldbook truly lead to freedom for the Italian people, or enslavement for pazzerellones, or both? For the briefest of moments, she hated Jumi for laying such a weight upon her shoulders.
Leo’s gaze swept left and right, picking out two darker silhouettes amidst the gloom, and he strode straight for his friends. Elsa couldn’t recognize them in the dark, but she followed without questioning.
The moonlight glinted in Faraz’s eyes as he turned. “Ah, you see? I told you they’re still alive.”
“Oh, thank the Lord!” Porzia exclaimed, throwing an arm around each of them and pulling them into a messy embrace. “Don’t scare me like that. And you,” she said to Faraz, “don’t gloat—you were just as worried as I.”
Faraz managed a casual poise, as if he had no idea what she was talking about. “I tried to tell her you’d be fine.”
Porzia looked from one of them to the other, taking in Leo’s dazed expression and Elsa’s grim determination. Her jubilant relief settled into concern. “What went wrong? Didn’t you find anything?”
“We found something, all right,” Elsa said. “In a way, we found too much.”
Together they all ported back to Casa della Pazzia, and Elsa and Leo related the events of their confrontation with Garibaldi.
Everyone agreed to reconvene in the morning to plan this new search for the book. As she trudged up the stairs, Elsa wondered if they were all thinking along the same lines as she. They would retrieve this dangerous worldbook … and then what? Trade it for her mother’s life, and in so doing give Garibaldi exactly what he wanted? When she’d first fled to Amsterdam, all she cared about was rescuing Jumi and salvaging Veldana, but now the thought of helping Garibaldi left a bitter taste in her mouth.
Sleep refused to come. Elsa played through her encounter with Garibaldi, sifting through each memory as if to glean some overlooked grains of insight. Jumi lying so still inside the chamber that both sustained her and held her prisoner. Garibaldi’s confidence that he would get what he wanted, one way or another. But Elsa’s mind kept catching on one thought in particular, like a linen shirtsleeve snagging and tearing on a rough metal edge: there existed a worldbook that Jumi had deliberately hidden from her own daughter.
After a while she gave up the attempt to sleep, threw on her dressing gown, and wandered out of her room. She had no particular goal, other than to clear her head.
A little bot appeared at her heels, holding up a candlestick. In a hushed voice, Casa said, “Some light, signorina?”
“Thank you, Casa,” Elsa replied. “How are you feeling?”
“Better, signorina. It is kind of you to ask.”
Elsa tugged her robe tighter. “At least one thing is going well. We are overdue for some good luck.”
“If you will excuse my forwardness, signorina: you are a pazzerellona. You make your own luck.”
In her wanderings, Elsa came upon the door to the cloister garden, and on a whim she let herself outside. She left the little candlebot waiting on the veranda and stepped out under the stars. There was a stone bench toward the middle, which seemed a reasonable place to sit and think.
The garden was lovely at night. Crickets chirped, and the pale glow of the moon transformed the fruit trees into a surreal landscape of light and shadow.