Batuo’s laboratory seems sad and quiet without the jovial little man. Gruesome remnants of the fight are spread over the marble floor: broken limbs, pieces of the destroyed nurse robot, and ragged smears of liquefied metal.
Thankfully, the bodies of Batuo and Talus are gone. Peter carried them to the mausoleum wall, sliding open the rectangular crypts and laying them inside. Dozens of other avtomat must occupy the rest of the slots in that marble facade. All of them are sleeping, waiting for a new dawn.
Sitting on Batuo’s broad desk, I am considering my own relic, dangling it from the necklace chain and letting my eyes skim over its symbol—a teardrop with a circle trapped inside. Across the room, Peter methodically rifles through drawers, pawing through shelves and running his fingers over carved wood panels.
“You said you served a different master than your brother. Who?”
“An avtomat called Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor.”
“Where is he?”
“You wear his relic around your neck.”
And yet without his true body, this relic is just an oddly heavy necklace.
“And where is his vessel?” I ask, using the avtomat word.
Peter looks up. “I hoped the monk would know.”
He returns to working his way through the room. Hopping off the desk, I join in, yanking open drawers and examining their contents, searching for anything that has to do with Huangdi or the relic.
“Batuo called you Man-eater. Was that some kind of a joke?” I ask.
Peter plants his hands flat on the table and lowers his head. For a moment, I think he might be praying. His face is clipped by shadow, but in his shoulders I can see a faint quaking. Abruptly, I feel sorry for bringing it up.
How does it feel to lose a friend you’ve had for centuries? Or a brother?
“Look,” I say. “They aren’t gone forever.”
“Perhaps not,” says Peter, facing away from me and speaking in a low, quick voice. “But Leizu is coming and we are not prepared. She has been hunting this anima for five thousand years. Batuo was our last best hope to reunite Huangdi with his soul. Without his knowledge, we are—”
I put a hand high on Peter’s shoulder and pull him around to face me.
“Batuo chose to do what he did,” I say. “He chose us to solve this.”
Peter moves away from my touch, continues his search.
I spot a rolltop desk pushed against the wall. Lifting the lid, I find a stack of letters resting inside. The languages on each page vary, but I can read the names and make out the general meanings. Laying the bundle of papers on the broad desk in the middle of the room, I start making piles for each correspondent.
“And why have you agreed to that?” Peter asks. “To help me?”
I’m scanning a crumbling letter, relishing the antique flourish of a quill pen on rough parchment. But the intensity of his question makes me pause.
“Aside from trying not to get killed…I’m interested.”
Peter shakes his head in disbelief.
“What? That’s a perfectly good reason,” I say. “Most people are too caught up in the present to care about the past. But when I look at something old, when I touch it, I feel like I’m reaching into another world. A place with secrets. So, yes, part of the reason I’m helping you is because I’m curious.”
“Perhaps curiosity would be your Word, if you had one,” he says.
“Yeah, it probably would.”
Peter stalks farther into the alcove, boots thudding over thick rugs.
I move on to the final stack of letters. The first is an e-mail from less than a year ago, printed on crisp paper. Thumbing through, I see the pages farther down the stack were typed on an old typewriter. The ones beneath that are handwritten in ink, and even deeper, scratched with a quill pen on parchment.
The oldest letter is dated 1858.
“And what about you?” I ask. “What’s your Word?”
Deep in the alcove, Peter is a tall figure, moving his hands over book spines.
“You protected me while I slept, June,” he says. “And you brought me back. Though you are of the short-lived race, you have seen under my skin.”
Peter pauses, considering me from across the dim room.
“My purpose is to make justice,” he finally says, voice quiet. “It has been called pravda. It has been called other things.”
“Justice? Is that what your brother was about, too?” I ask.
“We served different masters, with different ideas of justice. Both of us haunted the battlefields of men for centuries, lending our vengeance to one side or another. Unlike my brother, one day I stopped. I learned to separate justice from vengeance, and began to devote my efforts to strategy rather than battle.”
His words remind me of the identification card I found in his wallet. Black credit cards and crisp bills and the credentials of a secret agent.
“Is that why you joined the CIA?” I ask.
“CIA, SIS, GRU, MSS,” says Peter, shrugging as he continues to rummage through a drawer. “When you have been around as long as I have, these things tend to accumulate.”
Scanning the oldest letter, I spot Peter’s name, spelled Pyotr.
On the thin parchment, tiny blocks of words are scrawled in faded Latin. The page is laid out like a technical paper, filled with detailed notes. A beautiful drawing depicts a Chinese emperor, dressed in a flat hat with tassels, sitting on a throne. Both man and throne are diagrammed, each piece briefly described. Both seem to be filled with complicated mechanisms.
A name is scratched beside the figure: Huangdi. And beside a disk embedded in the throne, the words “sun disk” followed by “spiritus vitae”—the breath of life.
Holding up the page, I step back.
This author has clearly studied the emperor and the technology he used. Checking the signature, I see the letters were sent to Batuo from a woman. And judging from the time span across all the letters, she must be an avtomat.
I’m thinking she could be important.
“Peter?” I ask, looking over the top of the letter. “Who is Elena?”
40
LONDON, 1758
The masts of tall ships rise like church steeples from the Pool of London. Perched birds speckle the swaying masts, framed by a hodgepodge of edifices sprouting from London Bridge. In the distance, I can make out Hypatia and Elena, walking side by side onto a pier. I wave my arms over my head, legs buzzing from a long sprint, shouting and startling the passengers and dockworkers who crowd the wharves.
“Elena!” I’m shouting. “Please!”
Her face flashes as she glances back. Hypatia’s arm closes around her shoulder, pulling her closer. A ship is waiting for them at the end of the pier, a sharp cutter, its sails lowered, sailors preparing her for a trip to the Plymouth port for the larger voyage across the Atlantic.
It took me too long to realize.