Ksenia pursed her lips. “I’ve found a framework, and it’s familiar.”
“How so?”
“Petra, I need to borrow Tock.”
Petra settled her hand on the dull brass metal between the clockwork cat’s ears. “Why?”
“I won’t harm its making.”
“Let her have access,” Delani said.
Petra appeared annoyed at that, but she still urged the clockwork cat forward. It went to sit by Ksenia, obedient in a way an automaton might be, but Blaine didn’t trust it. It wasn’t like Fred, left behind back in Amari, or any of the small clockwork devices he’d handled while teaching at the university.
Tock acted alive in a way that was highly unusual.
Caris ducked around Blaine and moved closer to the lab table. He missed grabbing her by mere inches, swearing softly under his breath. When the wardens didn’t order her back to the wall, he and Honovi joined her. Beneath the lights, Nathaniel looked washed-out pale, the vivisection scars standing out starkly against his chest. The burns were wrapped, hopefully healing, but there was no magic or medicine that could heal what had been done to his heart.
Blaine watched out of the corner of his eyes as Caris reached for Nathaniel’s limp hand, curling her fingers around his, unable to lift his arm, seeing as how it was strapped down by thick leather straps reinforced with metal. Her attention wasn’t on the wardens but on Nathaniel’s slack face.
“You know we couldn’t figure out the spell structure of the broken hearts we’ve received before. The one in his chest beats just fine, and it resonates in a way I have only seen in one other device,” Ksenia said.
She tapped her wand against Nathaniel’s chest, and magic flowed from the tip, spreading down the length of his scars. It flickered in time to a heartbeat that Blaine couldn’t hear, peeling up out of skin and scar tissue to latch together in a fine knot, forming in the air over where Nathaniel’s heart used to be. He watched as Ksenia’s magic shaped itself into a glittering image of a clockwork metal heart that pulsed like a real one. He wasn’t a magician and didn’t know what kind of spell she was casting.
Ksenia looked down at the clockwork cat that waited beside her. “Up on the table.”
It vaulted onto the lab table, metal paws clattering loudly when it landed. It picked its way to seat itself between Nathaniel’s strapped-down legs, strange, gear-made face tilted in Ksenia’s direction. Its bottle-green eyes looked right at her, spring-tipped tail moving from side to side.
When Ksenia pointed her wand at it, Tock’s plated ears flicked backward like a real cat’s would, but it didn’t move. The glow in its center—what magic animated it—filtered out over screws and plates and gears, rising out of its body like a fog edged in light.
Petra made a sound, reaching toward Tock. “Ksenia.”
“Stand down. We need to know if the spells are similar. Let Ksenia cast the comparison one,” Delani ordered.
Petra dropped her arm back to her side, face a wooden mask as they all watched the shape of a heart form over the clockwork cat in magical lines, eerily similar in design to the one that shimmered above Nathaniel’s chest.
Ksenia looked across the table at Delani, expression grim. “This is warden’s work.”
Tock hissed, the sound like metal shearing, and the clockwork cat suddenly launched itself at Ksenia. Half the people around the lab table were wardens, used to reacting quickly and decisively to a sudden threat, but Ksenia was fastest. Magic snapped from her wand and slammed into the cat. It writhed in midair, gears grinding, before going limp, like a puppet with its strings cut. Then it fell to the lab table, half hanging off the edge between Nathaniel’s feet, the weight of its design pulling it all the way over seconds later.
It clattered to the ground, nothing but gears, the glow of the aether that powered it fading in guttering flickers that eventually burned out.
The one in Nathaniel’s chest kept beating, the image of its making that Ksenia had summoned for them to see keeping time in a steady rhythm.
Three
CARIS
“Should you be down here?”
The warden who asked didn’t move from their position guarding the heavy steel door to the laboratory Nathaniel was held in. Caris squared her shoulders and lifted her chin, looking the warden in the eye. “I was summoned by the master alchemist.”
It’d been a surprise to receive the missive from a tithe, the young girl panting from her run across the island. Caris had just finished breakfast when the note had been delivered, Blaine and Honovi gone off on their own for the day as they had since their arrival.
The warden blinked at her before turning to rap his knuckles against the door, the sound ringing in the air around them. “The Ashionen is here for you.”
Caris resisted the urge to shift on her feet as she waited. Less than a minute later, the door to the laboratory was pushed open, Ksenia peering at her through the crack. “Good. You came.”
Caris stepped forward. “You said I could see Nathaniel.”
