Kane reached out and grasped her shoulder firmly, the way he’d seen Jules do more than once. It might have been his imagination,but for a moment, he could have sworn she relaxed into his touch, her head canting to the side. Their eyes met. Locked. Kane was frozen, unsure, untethered.
There was a terrible squeal of hinges as Fletcher shouldered the door open farther. Kane wrenched his gaze away from Zaria’s, letting his arm fall.
“Sorry,” Fletcher said awkwardly. “But—ah, something isn’t right.”
He stood aside to let them enter the apartment. Zaria went first, Kane on her heels. She gave a sharp intake of breath, and as Kane’s eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw why: The place was amess. Books lay face open on the floor, surrounded by loose sheets of paper and bits of metal. A bottle of ink had toppled onto the carpet and since dried, leaving a tar-like stain. Shards of glass lay scattered beside a half-empty shelf of dishes and stoppered vials—it looked as if someone had swept them onto the ground in a fit of rage and not bothered to tidy the mess.
What really gave Kane pause, though, was the sofa. Both the seat and the back had been sliced open in obvious haste, leaving slashes just large enough to insert one’s arm into. Ice threaded along his bones. “What the hell happened here?”
“I guess that explains the unlocked door,” Fletcher said darkly.
Zaria bent to pick up a ruined book, the misery in her face shifting to rage. “Cecile’s been gone less than a fortnight, and already thieves have ransacked her home?”
“I don’t think they were thieves” was Kane’s grim reply. “Not in the sense you’re thinking, anyway.”
Fletcher, partway through a slow lap of the room’s perimeter, nodded. “They were looking for something.”
“Cecile wouldn’t have had anything of value,” Zaria argued. “She hadn’t practiced alchemology in years.”
“Maybe it wasn’t related to alchemology,” Fletcher said.
Kane scanned the array of items. “Look at what the intruder went through: books, documents, and vials that you’d use to store supplies. I think it’s pretty obvious what they were looking for.” He kicked a bit of metal, causing it to roll across the wooden floorboard with a hollowclink.
Zaria dully watched it approach her feet. “And what’s that?”
“The primateria source. Obviously Cecile had information about it, and I suspect you aren’t the only person who figured that out.”
“Having information is one thing. Why would anyone think she had the source itself??”
“I suppose that’s the question.” Kane wondered fleetingly if Cecile could have had any connection to the Curator, then dismissed the notion. The Curator clearly didn’t want anyone to know the necklace in the Waterhouse display was a forgery. Cecile, on the other hand, had been trying to convey that fact to Zaria upon her death.
“Well, whoever it was, we can assume they didn’t find what they were looking for,” Fletcher said. He held up a slashed pillow with two fingers, grimacing as feathers fluttered to the floor around him. “Nobody slices open a sofa unless they’re growing desperate.”
Zaria knit her brow. “Who would know to come here, though? I mean,Ididn’t even know where Cecile lived.”
“Ward knew,” Kane reminded her.
“Maybe he told someone, or else let it slip,” suggested Fletcher.
“He’d never give away information by accident.”
Zaria waved a hand to silence them. Impatience settled in the shape of her full mouth as she crouched in the center of the room, grabbing the nearest sheets of paper. “It doesn’t matter. It happened, and hopefully whoever was here didn’t take anything important. Now, I suppose if we want to find out what else Cecile knew, we’d better start reading.”
Kane settled himself on the arm of the ruined couch with a sigh, using the toe of his boot to pull a torn bit of parchment closer. He picked it up and turned it over. It appeared to be a page from a book, with several notes in what he assumed was Cecile’s hand scrawled in the margins. It made little sense to him, and he wasn’t a fast reader, but ultimately he was able to glean its irrelevance and tossed it aside.
Fletcher hovered in one corner of the room, his arms crossed. His cheeks pinked when Zaria glanced up at him.
“By all means, just stand there,” she said crisply, rearranging a handful of pages.
Kane replied on Fletcher’s behalf. “He can’t read.”
“Oh.” Now it was Zaria’s turn to be embarrassed. Although periodicals were increasingly accessible to people of all classes, it wasn’t uncommon for those in the slums to be illiterate. Fletcher didn’t technically live in a slum, but he hailed from a poor farming community in Ireland where learning to read simply hadn’t been a priority. Kane had attempted to teach his friend a few times, but being a poor reader himself, he wasn’t a very good instructor.
He was tense as he waited for Zaria’s response, prepared to defend Fletcher from her derision, but she only said, “Okay. Never mind, then.”
Fletcher visibly relaxed. “I’ll search the other rooms while you two do that.”
There couldn’t have been much more to the apartment, but Kane nodded. Once Fletcher was gone, he addressed Zaria in a whisper. “Thanks.”
