POURING FORTH ITS SEAS EVERYWHERE, THEN, THE OCEAN ENVELOPS THE EARTH AND FILLS ITS DEEPER CHASMS.
—Nicolaus Copernicus
Leo found he couldn’t look Elsa in the eye for long—there was something disconcerting about her gaze. Maybe it was the chiaroscuro effect of her dark skin turning those green eyes startlingly clear and bright, like spotlights in an opera house. Or maybe it was the way she seemed to look right through him, as if she could read his thoughts as easily as she could the words on a page. Certainly, she had demonstrated an uncomfortable tendency to skewer the truth no matter how carefully he concealed it beneath layers of lies.
Leo did not want to examine why he felt the need to hide it in the first place. He did not want to admit to the disservice he did his friends, even if it was out of self-preservation. To share the truth would be to make it more real, and it already felt too real to bear.
It seemed safest to stare out the window, only acknowledging Elsa with the occasional sideways glance. She had a sharp beauty, and he fancied it might cut him if he gazed upon it too long. Exotic was the word he wanted to use, though Faraz abhorred it (Exotic, meaning “from the outside,” Faraz would say, someone who can never, no matter what they do, count as “one of us.”). But in truth, Elsa was exotic, she was as exotic as it was possible for any human to be: she was not from Earth. And if he read her properly, she intended to return from whence she had come as soon as physically possible. Yet another reason to keep her at arm’s length.
In the end everyone left, one way or another. Aris, who had seemed an unstoppable force of nature right up until the moment he was stopped. Little Pasca, brilliant and sensitive. Father, who had never fully been there in the first place, his mind always on matters larger than his sons. All of them gone.
Even Rosalinda—who had dragged Leo kicking and screaming from the house fire in Venezia, who for weeks afterward had sat up with him when the nightmares made sleep impossible. Even she let him go when the Order demanded custody, as they did for all mad orphans. Not that Casa della Pazzia turned out so bad for him, but as a frightened, traumatized ten-year-old, the last thing he’d wanted was to be dragged away from a familiar face and thrust in amongst strangers.
In any case, Elsa was not here to stay. So Leo knew very well he ought to keep his distance.
* * *
They changed trains at the station in La Spezia, and by the time they were pulling out to follow the Cinque Terre line, it seemed to Elsa that Leo had regained some of his usual spirit.
The terrain outside the window had transitioned from rolling hills to sharp little mountains. They passed through a series of tunnels and emerged quite suddenly into the glare of sunlight scattering off waves. The enormity of the ocean made Elsa’s breath catch. Her mind struggled to accept that any world could contain such a vastness of water; Veldana’s little sea seemed nothing but a puddle by comparison. The distant horizon filled her with an awe bordering on dread.
They pulled up at a train stop, and while other passengers were busy disembarking, Leo grabbed her hand and led her across the train to an empty compartment on the other side. Elsa was too shocked at the sudden physical contact to protest; his touch felt almost electric against her palm, like the buzz of a finished worldbook.
“We don’t have time for sightseeing, but you should at least get a glimpse of Riomaggiore,” he said.
Bright-painted buildings rose up on two sides of a narrow valley, blocks of red and orange, salmon-pink and white. The train tracks bridged over a narrow, sea-green inlet lined with colorful rowboats. The surrounding landscape was a jumble of exposed gray cliffs and greenery, with a mountain rising up behind the town as if to shield it from the rest of the world.
The whistle blew, and Leo and Elsa returned to their compartment. The train followed the coast from there—sometimes passing through tunnels, sometimes clinging precariously to the cliffside, the blue-green ocean lapping at the rocks below.
Soon the train was pulling into Corniglia station, and Leo was standing to retrieve the carpetbag from the luggage rack. They stepped out onto the open-air platform. It was the lone construct down near the sea, at the foot of the steep slope leading up to the town. Unlike the first two fishing towns they’d passed through, Corniglia was built atop a towering cliff.
“I’m afraid we have to proceed on foot,” Leo said. “The locals don’t have much use for hansoms in a village this size. Will you be all right?”
Elsa looked up. A broad set of brick stairs switchbacked up the cliff side. It was, admittedly, a climb of perhaps a hundred meters, but it wasn’t as if he were asking her to scale the bare rock. “It’s not a problem.”
“Are you sure?” He gave her a worried look.
His skepticism irked her; she was Veldanese, not some soft highborn lady. “There are stairs. I doubt they were built for their aesthetic appeal.”
So they climbed. Despite her confidence, the corset was more of a hindrance than she’d expected, and Elsa felt quite winded by the time they reached the village at the top. The brightly painted houses clung together in tight, precarious clusters on either side of a main road that ran the length of the town. It took them only a minute or two to cross the width of the narrow village.
Terraced vineyards dominated the valley on the other side, and so they descended into a landscape of stone walls, rough-hewn steps, and verdant grapevines displaying clusters of tiny young grapes. It all looked startlingly overengineered to Elsa’s eye. Corniglia itself couldn’t have held more than two or three hundred people—close to the population of her own village in Veldana—but they had practically rebuilt the entire landscape by hand in order to grow sufficient crops.
“Why would anyone put a town here? Seems unaccountably foolish, to build on such unforgiving terrain.”
“This isn’t Veldana, we can’t just create more arable land when we run out of space. We have to work with what we have,” Leo said. “Besides, most of these families have probably lived here for centuries. A thousand years ago, somebody decided the remote location would be a good defense against, I don’t know, Ostrogoth raiding parties or something, and ever since then, they’ve kept living here because this is their home.”
Elsa tried to digest this idea, tried to think of cities like Paris and Amsterdam and Pisa as accumulations of their history, the strata of historical events layering atop one another over the long years. Pivotal moments with lasting consequences that no one could predict. It made her head hurt.
“Earth is weird,” she concluded.
As they crested the ridge on the far side of the valley and passed into the shade of trees, Elsa snuck a sidelong glance at Leo. He looked fresh and bright-eyed, as if their journey on foot hadn’t taxed him in the slightest. A trickle of sweat down the back of his neck was his only concession to the midday heat, his brown-and-gold-brocade waistcoat still buttoned. The climb hadn’t been too much of a challenge for her either, despite the corset, but Elsa often spent her days surveying Veldana and was well accustomed to getting places under her own steam.
They walked until Elsa could see the blue sea sparkling with sunlight between the tree trunks. Leo stopped at a small outcrop of sedimentary rock, its layers of deposition still obvious when viewed from the side, and set down the carpetbag. He hooked his fingers beneath the top layer of stone, and after a moment of flexing his biceps, it hinged up like the top of a storage chest.
“What—” Elsa said, coming over to look under the layer. There was a brass control panel with a keyhole fitted horizontally inside the hollowed-out rock. “Hidden controls?”
“Ah, yes…” There was a note of strain in Leo’s voice. “And I’d forgotten how heavy this thing is. Would you mind getting the key? In my left side pocket.”
Elsa reached into the pocket of his waistcoat; the key ring was stuffed in there beside his father’s pocket watch, and there was hardly room for her fingers. Through the fabric, she could feel the tense washboard muscles and the heat of his skin. She pulled her hand away quickly and felt her face flush as she fumbled with the key ring, looking for one that seemed a likely fit for the keyhole in the control panel.
“This one?” she said, holding up a key for Leo to see. Her voice came out a little unsteady.
“That looks right.” A bead of sweat was crawling down the side of his face. “Turn the key, then flip all the switches in order, top to bottom.”
The key fitted snugly and turned with a satisfying ka-chunk. The brass switches were stiff beneath her fingers, but she managed them all, then quickly removed the key.
“Done,” she said, and stepped away to give Leo space to close it. He let the lid down heavily and shook out his arms to release the tension.
Elsa looked up. Where before she’d seen nothing but a rocky outcrop dropping away into a seaward cliff face, now she saw a castle built into the steep slope above the cliffs. It looked ancient, the dark stone weathered and speckled with lichens. One of its towers had collapsed into debris that spilled over the sidewall and across the ground.
“An illusion?” she guessed.
“Yes,” he said, “the best cloaking projection I’ve ever seen. Designed by Fresnel himself, or so Gia likes to boast.”
Elsa had no idea who Fresnel was, but she was still impressed with the optical finesse it would take to hide an entire building in plain sight. The castle itself was impressive, too. Leo strode off toward the doors, but Elsa followed more slowly, craning her neck up to look at it.
“It’s so old,” she said in a hushed voice, too awed to want to break the silence.
“Nine hundred years or so. And the Roman ruins it was built on top of easily double that figure.”
Elsa gently placed her hand upon the weathered stone. “We don’t have anything old in Veldana. Our whole world is new.”
“Well, in this world, we’ve had to endure plenty of history. The castle’s believed to be the origin of the Order of Archimedes. The Pisano family made it the first official sanctuary for pazzerellones in Europe, dating back to the Dark Ages, when the Church liked to behead pazzerellones for heresy. It’s been more or less unoccupied since the Renaissance, when the Pisanos deemed it safe to relocate to Pisa and built Casa della Pazzia.”
“So, being old—does that make them important?” Elsa said, thinking of Porzia’s father in Firenze. “The Pisano family, I mean.”
Leo shrugged. “It certainly doesn’t hurt, but political influence is a complex matter.”
Elsa rubbed her forehead, frustrated at how much she didn’t understand about the real world. With Veldana, she’d walked every square meter of land, knew every person by name, and read every word of the worldtext—she was the master of her world. But the real world was impossibly large and complex. No matter how hard she studied and how much she learned, she would never fully understand Earth, because no one ever could.
And that thought filled her with a sort of existential terror she worried might never go away.
She felt a sudden, intense longing to go home to her finite, comprehensible world, or even simply to be sure Veldana still existed. What would she do if the fire had destroyed everything she knew?
Leo used another key on the key ring to unlock the bronze front doors. They stepped into a broad entry hall with a cavernous ceiling and a wide, once-majestic stairway that ended in midair, a pile of rubble scattered on the floor below. The air inside was cool and musty. Sunlight filtered in through the distorted glass of four tall windows, and each footstep Elsa took called up swirls of dust to dance in the light. Leo shut the doors behind them with a clang that echoed, and then an eerie silence followed.
Several archways led away from the entry hall, dark and sinister as gaping maws. Through one of them came the sound of uneven footfalls, loud against the stifling silence, and Elsa tensed. A pool of lantern light bobbed and jounced into view, followed by the man holding the lantern.
The man paused in the archway and declared, “Simo!” then hung the kerosene lantern from a wall peg and came toward them. He looked to be in his fifties or sixties, with graying hair and veiny hands clasped together in front of him like an overeager servant. His once-fine clothes were worn to rags. His face seemed stuck in a wide caricature of a smile, and there was something odd about his gait, too, as he loped over to them.
Elsa leaned toward Leo and said in a low voice, “I thought you said it was unoccupied.”
“I said ‘more or less.’ Simo is the castle’s caretaker. He’s simple, and more than a bit insane, but mostly harmless.”
“Now you have me worried about your qualifiers. Define ‘mostly harmless.’”
“He used to be a scriptologist, but he accidentally rendered himself textual, and now it’s hard to guess whether there’s anybody left at home in the old noggin. Isn’t that right, Simo?”
“Simo!” said Simo.
Elsa had never before met anyone whose mind had been damaged by scriptology, and the sight of Simo made her a bit queasy. Of course Jumi had warned her of the dangers of scribing names into the worldtext—putting someone in the text would irrevocably link them to the worldbook in a way that eliminated their free will. The worldbook would control them. Jumi’s explanation, so technical and logical, had not frightened young Elsa, but it was a different matter entirely to view the results herself.
“He lives here all alone? It seems … I don’t know, irresponsible to leave him on his own like this.”
Leo shrugged. “I assume he manages well enough. The Pisanos saw fit to give him the caretaker job, anyway.”
She looked askance at Leo. “My confidence in the efficacy of this plan is not feeling especially bolstered at the moment.”
“We’ll see what we can do about that,” he replied.
Leo led her down a corridor, Simo walking ahead of them to light the kerosene wall sconces.
“Ah, here we are,” Leo said, and unlatched a wooden door on his right. Elsa followed him in.
They were in a very old, very dusty mechanist’s laboratory. The narrow windows were smudged with soot, as if the former occupant or occupants had been in the habit of lighting things on fire, but not so much in the habit of cleaning up afterward.
“Which is the book restorer?” Elsa asked.
“All of that,” Leo said with a sweeping gesture.
The giant machine covered the back wall of the laboratory, taking up the entire width of the room. Several sheets of canvas were draped over it to keep off the dust, and they obscured its true shape in a way that turned it vaguely sinister to Elsa’s eye.
Leo said, “So, I suppose you understand now why no one ever tried to move the restoration machine.”
“Yes,” said Elsa. “Quite.”
He began removing the canvas covers, each one pulling free with a visible puff of dust. “It works as a sort of assembly-line process—scanning, trimming, scribing. You set the book in here,” he said, giving the leftmost hub of the machine a pat, “where it removes the pages from the binding—”
“Removes the pages!” Elsa said, aghast.
“Yes.” Leo shot her an apologetic look. “I’m afraid the machine will have to disassemble the book and rebind it when the restoration is complete.”
Elsa did not look upon this development with great enthusiasm. “It’s bad enough the poor books were lit on fire. We’re trying to preserve whatever subtextual content they still contain, not erase it. Won’t taking them apart effectively make them new books when they’re reassembled?”
“Mm, right. I’d wondered about that, too. According to Porzia, ‘theoretically, no.’”
Elsa pursed her lips. “You and your qualifications again.”
“Hey! This time it’s Porzia’s qualification. I wash my hands of responsibility.”
Elsa was not amused. “I do hope you understand that the books will be useless without the subtext.” If the worldbooks were effectively reset back to the condition they were in when they were brand-new, any content Montaigne had added—such as objects he’d carried in from Paris, or notes he’d written down while inside—would be lost.
“Only one way to find out for certain if it’ll work,” Leo said, folding up the last of the canvas and stacking it in a pile. “Shall we fire it up?”
She reluctantly set down the carpetbag near the first machine hub. “Very well.”
“Simo!” Leo called, and when the man appeared in the doorway, he asked, “Is there coal in the power room?”
“Simo!” said Simo enthusiastically.
“Get the boilers going, then,” said Leo, and Simo hurried off.
A few minutes later there came a rumbling from beneath their feet, the sound pitched so low it neared the boundary of human hearing and was felt more as a vibration behind the sternum. Leo, who had been fiddling with the controls impatiently, grinned and immediately reached for a large electrical switch on the far side.
“We’ve got power. Here we go.” He gripped the wooden handle of the switch in one hand and gave it a firm yank, then snapped it into place in the opposite position. The switch cast a rain of yellow sparks, forcing Leo to jump out of the way, and the restoration machine hummed to life.
He said, “Ready to start?”
Elsa reached into the carpetbag and selected the worldbook she thought least likely to be important—an older volume she hoped Montaigne wouldn’t have used recently. Unimportant as this first worldbook was, if it came through with the subtext intact, that meant they could repair all the others. She took a deep breath, let it out, and handed the book to Leo. “Let’s do this.”
Leo set the book inside the first machine hub, which neatly unstitched the binding and spat out a stack of loose sheets. He carefully carried the stack to the next hub. Elsa stood right beside him, their shoulders almost touching, so she could watch as he carefully fed the pages in one at a time.
She was suddenly aware of just how close he was standing, close enough that she could feel the heat of his skin warming the cool air. He turned to face her. There was nothing guarded about the way he looked at her now.
“Elsa, I…”
He’s going to kiss me, she thought.
But before she could decide how she felt about that, he mumbled, “Never mind,” and turned back to the work at hand.
Now Elsa felt as if the last ripe plum of the season had been dangled in front of her and then snatched away. Had she misread his intention? Was she merely projecting her own desires onto him?
Her mother had warned her how denial could enhance desire. Notice your desire, acknowledge it, then let it go, Jumi had instructed her that day when they sat together by the creek and watched the water, long before there was a sea to watch instead. If you want something from someone, that gives them power over you, her mother had said.
She had never really believed she would need her mother’s lessons on the subject of men. Elsa, who loved solitude and independence. How could it be that such feelings had taken seed in her heart? It must be the loss of her mother, the chaos of her abrupt departure from Veldana, leaving her unmoored and defenseless. She would have to be more careful, and squash this weakness.
After that, Leo kept his attention focused on the machine. When all the pages had been fed through, he took the stack of repaired paper to the final hub for rebinding. Elsa hovered anxiously, her confusion over Leo forgotten in the face of more pressing concerns.
The machine finished with a soft hum, and Leo lifted the newly bound worldbook. He held it out to her, his amber eyes alight with hope. “Moment of truth.”
Elsa sucked in a nervous breath. The activity of the machine had warmed the book, so it felt almost like a living creature in her arms. She lifted the cover and handled the paper to test for that distinctive new-book feeling, but the pages hummed low and dull with age beneath her fingertips—steady, but not eager and frenetic like the buzz of a new book. Relief flooded through her, and despite herself, Elsa broke into a smile.
“It worked! The subtext should be intact.”
Leo returned her smile, his expression like the clouds parting to unveil the full brightness of the sun. “The machine’s hungry. Shall we feed it another?”
Elsa pressed the warm leather cover to her cheek, allowing herself a luxurious moment of hope. “Yes,” she said. “We shall.”