“I was working when Malcontent’s men grabbed me. When I work I look down a lot, tinkering with parts. Eyeglasses in frames tend to fall off, and to break. The lenses that I require to see are quite heavy.” He pushed his hair back, but it just flopped into the same place, partially covering his magnified eyes.
“They look it,” she said. They were also surprisingly good at making him appear homely. What if he was actually handsome underneath? It was much more exciting to be imprisoned with a secretly handsome boy.
“The strap messes up your hair,” she observed. But it was nice hair. Slightly curly. He shook his head from side to side, his lips twisting in amusement. The movement made the distortion of his eyes even worse, and suddenly it was impossible for her to imagine him as devilishly handsome underneath a disguise. What if he was scarred, or if his eyes were terribly squinty? What if he was cross-eyed? At least his teeth looked normal. April had a horror of boys with bad teeth.
She put one hand to her aching head. Why on earth would someone dedicate themselves to inventing things, anyway? If she hadn’t found lipstick and the Debauchery Club, would she have taken up invention as a hobby?
“Are there any girl inventors?” she asked.
“If you’re looking for a pastime,” he said, “then you should probably take up something a little simpler.”
Did he think that was the sort of thing that would hurt her feelings?
“I wasn’t looking for a hobby.” April turned her back to him, settling on the sofa. But the silence was unpleasant, so she added, “I just wondered if there were girls who invented things. A clever girl could be good at it.”
“As if I would tell you. Every inventor I know is already in hiding. A female would be even more at risk.”
“Ah yes, more at risk than you or me? We’ve been captured by a crazy man, if you haven’t noticed.”
“I noticed. And I saw the damage that he did, the other night. I was out with Elliott, surveying it. He may be your father, but he’s not a nice person.”
“Many of my relatives aren’t.” Prospero was at the top of that list. “I’m not likely to trust him.”
“That’s the most intelligent thing I’ve heard you say.”
As if their relationship had been long enough for him to hear her say anything of consequence.
“Well then, I don’t think your inventor girlfriend’s hypothetical peril is nearly as great as ours.”
April peered over the back of the sofa. The wall behind him was made of bricks that had been plastered over. Would they hold some clue to their location? Perhaps they could pry some bricks from the wall and discover . . . something.
“I don’t have an inventor girlfriend.”
“So you say.”
He shook his head angrily.
But she’d finally captured his attention, so she pushed on. “I’m not interested in stealing her inventions.”
She could hear something rhythmic. Maybe they were close to the sea, or beneath a factory.
“Good, because she’s fictitious.”
April edged herself around to the side of the couch. He was still staring at her, his expression suggesting that she was extremely stupid.
“I could unlock that manacle on your arm,” she said. “If I wanted. For your information, my education is every bit as good as Elliot’s.”
“Except that Elliott doesn’t know how to apply fake eyelashes,” he said.
Exhaustion made her clumsy, so she didn’t sweep across the room as elegantly as she would have liked. But still, she felt sure that she had been more graceful than some girl inventor would have been.
“Listen,” she said, “and tell me what you hear.” She pulled two pins from her hair. “I’m sure your inventor girlfriend has many interesting ways to use hairpins,” she said as she worked to angle the pin just right. “They probably hold all of her inventions together.”
“Undoubtedly.” He met her gaze squarely. What had Elliott been thinking when he said that she would intimidate him? Being so close to him made her feel suddenly uncomfortable. And that in itself was strange. Hadn’t she just been kissing a boy earlier tonight? A cuter boy than this . . . .
The lock snapped open.
“I think the sound is water,” he said. “The harbor?” His wrist dropped to his lap. He massaged it but made no other move.
The silence between them stretched. She stood and smoothed her dress.
“Good luck escaping. And staying free once you’ve escaped. Inventors are very high in demand, I’ve heard. Male or female.”
“In demand?” His tone was incredulous.
“From Malcontent, obviously. And Prospero, always.”
“Oh, I know all about Prospero.”
April whirled on him, recognition flashing through her mind.
“You were the boy Elliott dropped the hammer on!”
“That isn’t important. Malcontent’s men are diseased. They’ve been scraping out an existence in the swamp, like animals. He sees the city—and you—and probably all of your pretty friends as some sort of prize for them.”
There was no use telling him that she’d already worked that out. Or that she only had one friend, who was pretty but not as pretty as April herself.
“And you’re regaling him with the difficulties of adhering sparkles to your fake eyelashes.” He didn’t try to hide his disgust.
April went very still. “Would you rather I told him how easily I can pick a lock with a hairpin? And that once I escape, I’m going to send my brother, who is trained in the art of torture, back down here, and that Elliott will kill him very slowly? That I’m counting the hours until the two of us can stand together and watch him die a second time?”
DOOM
KENT ALMOST COULDN’T BELIEVE HOW HE’D gotten stuck in the center of so many different webs. Keeper of secrets, inventor of marvels. Prisoner of a mad man. And now with a beautiful girl before him, coldly furious.
When he was a child all he had were sounds and impressions. The ticking of the clock above his bed. The voices that proclaimed him practically blind. And his mother, who smelled of softness and tea cakes with sugary icing.
The gears of the clock, the same one that had kept him company for years, were the first thing he saw clearly. His father strapped the corrective lenses around his face, and for the first time he could make sense of the shapes around him. Looking up he saw the copper gears, the cogs endlessly turning.
His mother was already gone, an early victim of the plague, and he passed her portrait every day when he descended the stairway of their home. His father may as well have died of the plague or have been a still portrait on the wall. He gave Kent the glasses and then disappeared into a workshop behind the house. It had been a kitchen once, large enough to serve their mansion in a time when people entertained lavishly.
He tried to join his father, curious what he was doing that required such complete secrecy, but the door was bolted shut. Whenever he tried the handle his father’s eyes appeared at the window and he gestured for Kent to move on.
They still had servants, an elderly manservant and a woman who had once been a housekeeper. They hadn’t been paid since before the plague, but they still lived in the house. They had been asked to keep track of him during the day while his father toiled in the workshop. But they mostly disappeared into various unused rooms of the house, while Kent roamed the streets.
Eventually he had wandered into a clockmaker’s shop on a hot afternoon, intrigued by the sounds. When he entered the dark storefront, he grew even more fascinated by the tiny tools and clock parts that lay haphazardly on the counter.
The clockmaker took Kent for an orphan, and offered to take him as an apprentice.
In the clockmaker’s service Kent continued to comb the streets, searching the pockets of the living or the dead, taking watches for their parts. Looking for metal objects that could be melted down.
In the evenings the clockmaker taught Kent his craft. With something to occupy him, often he didn’t even go home, just slept in the back of the shop. Perhaps his father missed him, but since the old man hadn’t spoken more than a few words to him in the past year, he doubted it.
The clockmaker was constantly drawing plans. Something big. Something secret. It didn’t seem like a clock. Kent had a bad feeling about whatever it was, even as it consumed his thoughts. He was eleven years old and uncommonly clever.
And his fears were confirmed on the day the soldiers burst into the shop, breaking a precious grandfather clock, spilling gears that Kent had worked months to collect across the floor like so much refuse. Prospero’s soldiers were brutal and efficient.
They took Kent and the clockmaker to the palace, at the edge of the swamp. Kent had trembled the whole carriage ride and the entire endless walk down the aisle between Prospero’s courtiers and the stage. But then Prospero had smiled, and given him a treat, and Kent had relaxed. Perhaps Prospero’s cruelty was just a story told on the streets. That was the last time Kent had ever let himself think something so stupid.
Yet somehow they had survived. Prospero had let the clockmaker live, though he’d never be the same.
When they returned to the city, he didn’t go home immediately. He’d stayed with the clockmaker. Fever raged through the man. Kent sat beside him, giving him sips of cool water. Helping, but also memorizing every detail that he muttered in his fever-induced dreams. The secrets that he hadn’t divulged while he was being tortured poured out of him.
Two weeks later, the clockmaker finally on the path to recovery, Kent stumbled home. A candle lit the front window, but the housekeeper met him at the door, her expression grim.
His father was dead. Whether of a heart attack, or grief because he’d heard his son had been taken by Prospero, no one could say.
Kent staggered to his father’s workshop, dazed. Finally, he would see what was inside.
No clockwork. No explosives. No obvious weapons. But on the table in the center of the room he found a trunk. Inside, wrapped in velvet, were lenses. Dozens of lenses. For spectacles. Goggles. All of them for him.
At the bottom of the trunk was a letter.
It read simply, It is bad enough, bringing a child into the world that has become riddled with plague. I won’t have my boy saddled with blindness as well. Be careful of these. Do not keep them all in the same place, for our city is prone to disaster and fire.
Searching the workshop, and then the house, Kent found dozens more lenses. All wrapped in velvet. His father’s lifework had been dedicated to improving Kent’s future, though he had never shown Kent affection. The boy vowed not to become that cold and disconnected from life.
And yet, inventing allowed him to forget his grief and loneliness. Eventually it consumed all of his waking hours.
The workshop where his father had spent his days became his sanctuary. And as the years passed, his inventions veered away from clockwork into steam engines and airships. He reconnected with the blond-haired boy who had spared him that day in the palace, the prince’s nephew.
It had taken Kent some months to trust him. Even though Elliott had helped in getting them out of the palace, Kent feared he could still have some loyalty to Prospero, and would steal his inventions or turn him over. But Elliott had given him money, supplied parts, and wanted nothing to do with Prospero. He seemed to genuinely care about the city. Lately he had begun making inquiries about how to build the masks for the poor.