C is for cheeky, coquettish, and coy, such as the girl who treats hearts as a toy.
—The Unlikable Alphabet, a Primer for Children by Anon.
Voleta owed her freedom to the intrepid Squit, though it took a little coaxing to remind the creature of her bravery.
In the early days of their time with the Sphinx, when they were still anesthetized by the shock of their captain’s abrupt detention and trying to decide whether they themselves were prisoners or guests, the poor squirrel had been so traumatized she wouldn’t come out of Voleta’s bedclothes. She cowered anew at every strange sound, which were regularly supplied by unseen machines buried in the Sphinx’s cavernous and apparently unpopulated hotel. Squit seemed to dislike both the fusty smell of the rugs and the unwinking glare of the electric lamps. Voleta could hardly blame the poor dear: The accommodations were a queasy mixture of luxury and decay.
Determined to cure her pet, Voleta undertook a campaign of pampering. She nursed Squit with treats from the kitchen. She piled her bedding into a nest and played with her under the quilts. Voleta stroked her fat cheeks and rubbed the bridge of her nose until the wide-eyed squirrel at last emerged from her hiding place.
The moment she recovered her spirits, Squit hopped down from the lofty four-post bed and bolted through a low vent in the wall.
Groaning at the ingratitude of her patient, Voleta prized the grate from the mouth of the duct, got onto her knees and then her stomach, and elbowed her way into the duct.
She was pressed on all sides and so had to squirm through the darkness that was only intermittently rayed with light from vents in other rooms. When she came to a branch in the duct, she listened until she heard the distant scratch of fugitive paws and then contorted herself around the mercilessly sharp bend. The seams in the metal shielding nicked her elbows and knees, and, not for the first time, she was glad to be free of her long hair, which would doubtless have snagged on every rivet in the chute.
She caught a whiff of wood smoke. A light wobbled in the dark ahead of her. She reached for it, and in the same instant, realized the glimmer was a reflection of light shining up from a sudden drop in the floor. But it was too late to catch herself; she had already begun to fall. Not fall, exactly, but slide down a precipitous angle.
She got her hands up just in time to keep from dashing her teeth out on the iron grate and popped from the vent like a cork from a bottle.
She landed in a heap on a soft verge of soil.
The great lens over the ash tree skinned everything in moonlight; the scattered, half-buried piano keys seemed to glow by it. The fire in the fireplace had burned down to an angry, orange core. The musicians inside the tapestries seemed to have stopped playing their instruments so that they could better and more fixedly stare at this clumsy intruder.
The Sphinx towered by the mantel, a thin and solemn mast. Voleta wondered what he had been looking at before she had shot out of the wall. Now, he was very obviously gazing at her.
“There’s a squirrel in my tree,” the Sphinx said, his metallic caw amplified by the quiet of the room.
Voleta got to her feet. Her long nightdress, now tattered about the hem, hung off one shoulder. She collected it. She knew she really should try to restrain herself. The Sphinx was dangerous. But she felt overcharged with a teeming, gleeful energy that would not be constrained and expressed itself in the form of a chuckle.
“You’re in luck!” she said. “I’m a squirrel catcher.”
The Sphinx closed upon her, the concave mirror of his face as black as pitch. As he approached, the Sphinx shrank nearly a foot, though he still loomed over Voleta.
Squit, no larger than a pear, sat on a low branch, looking very pleased with herself. Voleta held open the sleeve of her nightshirt and called Squit to her. The squirrel leapt from the tree, flattened her body into a wing, and glided through the air.
She landed snugly inside Voleta’s sleeve.
The Sphinx clapped, the sound softened by his gloves. He seemed to grow a little taller. “Bravo, bravo,” he said admiringly. “What a wonderful creature. You’ll have to let me play with her sometime.”
She thought the statement sinister but played it off lightly. “You must be joking. An untrained squirrel handler like you would be eaten alive by a squirrel like this.”
“I like you, Voleta,” the Sphinx said.
“Well, I’m not sure about you yet,” she said. “Everyone says you’re bad luck.”
“Bad luck? Everyone says? Do you mean the trollops of the Steam Pipe?”
“Them most of all. Terrible gossips.” She spoke quickly to hide her surprise.
“I saw your show once.”
“I very much doubt that. I think you would’ve made an impression sitting in the crowd.”
“I said that I saw it, not that I was in attendance. I have eyes in many places.”
“Good for you.”
“Your performance was quite pleasant.”
“Oh, don’t do that. That’s so transparent. Rodion used to do that. He’d pay you a tepid compliment that was supposed to make you want to please him.” Voleta didn’t add that the girls who tried never lasted long.
“No, I’m absolutely sincere. Your act was pleasant, almost artful, but not particularly daring.”
Now Voleta was offended. “If you really did see the show, then you know the tricks weren’t the main draw. I had to waste half my effort mugging for the crowd: tossing my hair and kicking my legs. The brutes didn’t come to see daring; they came to ogle a girl in a leotard. Like you, I suppose.”
The laugh—Voleta assumed it was a laugh—that emerged from the Sphinx’s curtained middle sounded like crackling static. “Well, you haven’t any hair to distract you now, nor onlookers to please, nor a leotard to slink inside. Or do you have other excuses for being such an unremarkable acrobat?”
“You want a demonstration? Fine. I’ll show you daring, you mean old spoon.”
“Please,” the Sphinx said, waving a small, satin hand at the crooked-armed tree.
Some friendships develop like flowers in a garden: They are conscientiously planted and nurtured. The ground about them is kept clear of competition. Then, after some weeks and months of incremental growth and laborious pruning, a flower blooms. Such cultivated friendships are agreeable and convenient, if not enduring.
Other friendships seem to arise spontaneously, like an egg in a nest or a freckle upon an arm, and these are often mystifying, as both parties are left to wonder how exactly this unexpected affection took hold.
So it was with Voleta and the Sphinx.
After that first evening, which Voleta spent traipsing in the treetop while the Sphinx applauded and goaded her ever higher, ever farther out on winnowing branches, the two were fast friends.
Theirs was a combative, often prickly amity, but it resembled a traditional friendship in one aspect: They were ever eager to be in each other’s company. Every evening after pretending to retire for the night, Voleta slithered from her bedroom, through the walls, and into the Sphinx’s music room.
Why Voleta liked the Sphinx was plain enough: He was determined to entertain her. The Sphinx’s appetite for novelty appeared to almost outpace her own. Together, they explored his maze of suites and chambers, filled with a thus-far inexhaustible assortment of decorations, experiments, and wonders. They talked freely but exhibited a resolute disinterest in pleasantries. Mostly, they bickered.
The Sphinx was both a peerless tour guide and an acerbic wit. If Voleta played dumb or coy, the Sphinx pounced upon the pretense with merciless mockery. And yet, he allowed, even encouraged, Voleta’s curiosity and her insatiable appetite for play.
Why the Sphinx liked her was a more difficult question.
On this particular night, the fourth since their arrival, the Sphinx led her on a roundabout trek through the rooms that had been staged to resemble the ringdoms below, if the Sphinx was to be believed. None were familiar to her. One ringdom-room was built entirely of glass. The houses all resembled overturned punch bowls. Not a single opaque door or curtain hung anywhere inside these crystal igloos. The only untransparent things were the people: painted figures, caught in various states of repose and repast.
Not a one wore a stitch of clothing. Voleta giggled the whole walk through.
The adjoining model was floored with loose, white sand that formed small dunes and valleys. All the structures therein were made of sand cemented with nothing more than water, according to the Sphinx. When Voleta brushed the frame of a standing arch, half of it collapsed and rained down upon her shoulders.
She shook herself off and told the amused Sphinx that she would like to speak to the builders about their shoddy work.
The next chamber was nearly stuffed, floor to ceiling, with a single engine that threw out pistons and flywheels in an endless frenzy of motion and drooling oil. It resembled a brass beetle turned on its back, with a tank for a thorax and plumbing for legs. Instrument dials, clustered like the eyes of an arachnid, shook their needles over a foggy porthole, which would not give up its secrets no matter how Voleta craned and peered at it.
The purpose of the machine, the Sphinx explained, was to hold an individual in a sort of permanent state of dreaming. Voleta proclaimed this an obscene way to while one’s life away. The Sphinx did not disagree.
Voleta would’ve been happy to build sandcastles or crack open the dream engine and have a peek inside at its terrible industry, but the Sphinx promised he had something of greater interest to show her and said they would have to hurry if she wanted to be back in bed before breakfast.
They had never expressly agreed to keep their outings secret, and yet it seemed the thing to do. If her nocturnal explorations ever came out, she was sure a stern scolding would shortly follow, delivered either by Edith or her brother, though he had grown more distant of late. Voleta wondered if she hadn’t something to do with that.
Though perhaps Adam was just upset by the revelation of the captain’s habit. Her brother’s veneration of the captain seemed to invite disappointment, if not hurry it along. Voleta liked the captain, but she also understood that the urge to escape sometimes takes asocial forms. Who was she to say her escapades were superior to his narcotic retreats? Yes, it was tragic and chancy, but so was sitting on your hands and wishing for a long life.
Still, so long as Mister Winters and Adam didn’t know about her excursions, they would have no reason to fret, and she would have no reason to die of boredom.
The Sphinx stood before a white-paneled door, indistinguishable from all the other ordinary doors inside his impossible hotel. His black robes parted just enough for him to produce a little golden key. “You are about to see something no one else has seen in a hundred years.”
“I don’t like presents.”
“No, of course not. Presents are just bait, aren’t they? They’re the cheese in the trap,” he said in his now familiar, tinny rumble. “I’d never insult you with a gift.”
“Wait,” Voleta said, raising her hands. “I want to make sure we understand each other.”
“I understand you completely.”
“Then you know I am going to disappoint you.” Voleta tried to confess it blithely so it wouldn’t come off as a threat.
“How is that?”
Squit wriggled out of Voleta’s nightgown collar and settled on her shoulder. The squirrel received her petting with closed-eyed satisfaction. “You have something in mind for me, some role to play or some thing for me to do.”
“Perhaps,” the Sphinx said.
“And you think because we are friends, I’ll do what you ask.”
“Perhaps.”
“But my affection has little to do with my loyalty, and my loyalty has less to do with my behavior. Just ask my brother. Or Mister Winters. Or anyone. Whether I mean to or not, I’m bound to disappoint you.”
The Sphinx said nothing to this but gave a small, permissive bow that allowed Voleta to hope, if not believe, she had been understood.
The Sphinx unlocked the door to his centurial secret.
The room was dramatically dim and theatrically vaulted. Other than a wooden scaffold isolated in the center of the room, the chamber was bare. The walls, ceiling, and floor had all been painted black. It reminded her of a backstage.
Inside the scaffolding stood a glass tank of admittedly impressive size. As far as it went, it was absolutely the biggest pickle jar Voleta had ever seen.
“It’s great,” she said with suspicious enthusiasm.
The Sphinx was undeceived. “What is it?”
Voleta laughed. “It’s your jar. You should know. It looks like it’s full of mud.”
“Mud?” the Sphinx said, voice cracking with disgust. “That, my dear, is a distillation of more than two hundred ingredients, all painstakingly gathered and measured—”
“You mean, it’s a soup?” Voleta interjected. She crossed the room, and the cistern seemed to swell in size. The glass wall of the reservoir towered over her, but even on narrow inspection, the liquid that filled it was a bland and colorless murk.
“No, it’s not a soup, or a pudding, or a gravy. Don’t pretend to be so stupid. I know you had to pretend while you were pinned up in the Steam Pipe, but you don’t have to pretend anymore. Believe me, I’m not going to be intimidated by the intellect of an eighteen-year-old. Now look at it! That is a chemically engineered medium that is able to hold an electric charge.”
“Is that what Mister Winters needs for her arm?”
“Yes, it is.” From under his robes, the Sphinx produced the same silver tuning fork he had used to transform the swarm of butterflies into a rain of ashes. He touched the fork to the hardy spigot at the base of the vat; a bright spark cracked the air. The medium lit up where the current had crossed into it, the red light undulating and flowing outward like an agitated cloud. The glow weakened the further it spread until it paled into nothing at all. “Obviously this is only a reservoir. The medium still must be charged in the electric crèche.”
“The electric crèche? What is that?”
“That’s where lightning is born.”
“Have you ever been struck?”
“By lightning? Of course! How do you wake up in the morning? Shocks are good for the heart.”
“I would very much like to see that,” she said.
Voleta turned to find the Sphinx had taken off her mask.