Lumière (The Illumination Paradox) (12 page)

I bow my head, heavy with the grief of the day, and of the day before that, never having allowed myself a moment to deal with my mother’s death. But here, now, in the silence of a stranger’s room, the notion of her loss overwhelms me. My shoulders heave under the weight of it. My sobs turn to cries.

I touch the necklace—my last link to my mother—the only thing I have left of my family. I thought the loss of my father was too much for me to bear, but I fear the loss of my mother will be the complete end of me.

Run. Hide. Live.
I hear her say. But how do I do that without you? I turn my chin to the Heavens. What is there left for me to live for in this world? You and father were the only ones who could ever love me unconditionally. The rest of the world seeks to have me put away.

Even if I do successfully recover Father’s machine and use it to cure my affliction, underneath I’ll always bear the scars of its emotional pain. The years of exclusion, of living in fear, under the constant threat of being locked away, never able to trust that anyone could ever accept me, knowing only my parents could ever love a thing such as me.

A branch slaps the window, severing the thought. I pull the covers to my chin, shaken. The light of my necklace pulses through the bared threads of the sheets, breaking the darkness of the room. Through its dim haze I see something fluttering on the opposite side of the window, a dark shadow rapping at the bubble-speckled glass.

I hurl back the sheet, worried at first that the Vapours may be shifting, seeing their ghostly figures still dancing on the ridge.

The shadow again comes slamming into the glass, a black puppet cast aside by the force of the wind.

“Pan?” I say into the air, squinting. “Pan, was that you?”

She appears again, this time shrieking, and I fly from the bed across the room, falling to my knees on the window seat.

“Oh, Pan!”—I stroke the glass—“It’s you, you’re not dead! How on earth did you find me? Oh, Pan, you have no idea how glad I am to see you!”

She nestles in close to the glass as if trying to absorb the warmth of my hand, her head tucked close to her chest.

“I’m so sorry”—I press my cheek to the window—“I should have listened to Archie. I should have followed him home.” I drop my head in shame. “Oh, Pan, what ever are we going to do without Mother?” I look up. Tears have filled her eyes, too. “How are we supposed to go on?”

I stare through the slightly darkened window, thinking my eyes are playing tricks on me, realizing her beak shimmers crimson, the color of blood. “What’s happened? Why is your beak red? Has someone marked you, Pan?”

She turns her head as if to hide it from me.

“Who did this to you? Was it Smrt?”

She lowers her eyes.

“What is it? What’s wrong? Why won’t you speak to me?”

The wind tosses her feathers aside, revealing a fresh scar at the base of her neck. “It was Smrt, wasn’t it? Has he harmed you after I left?”

The wind sucks her down, away from the window.

“Pan!” I leap forward, seeing her descend deep into the fog-filled cavern below. Located at the back of the Compound and the only piece of the building that projects from the rock, the turret offers the only natural view of the surrounding landscape. My head swims, noting that the footing rests half on and half over the lip of the ravine. I’ve never seen a sheerer drop. There’s nothing beyond it. No forest. No valley. No trees. Just a pit.

A bottomless swell of black swirling froth.

Pan fights against the downward spiral, finally breaking free of the gust, emerging up through the darkness. She returns to the window and digs at it with her claws. I fling myself at the seal trying to open it. “It’s no use.” I shake my head. “It’s stuck! Wait!” I say, and burst across the room for the door, rattling the handle, slamming my shoulder into it. “It won’t budge!” I shout, bouncing back into the room. “I’m locked in! He’s locked me in!”

The winds pick up again, sucking Pan down into the pit.

“Pan!” I scream, flying back to the window. “Pan! Come back! Please, come back!”

I press my forehead to the window, seeing her disappear into the roiling froth below. My eyes move to the ridge. Vapours crest the escarpment.

Unlike the swirling docile clouds I’d feared when I first stepped from the carriage, these Vapours reared their venomous heads, threatening at any moment to spill down over the hillside and into the forest, devouring us in their wake. Just as Urlick warned.
It won’t be long now,
I hear him say.
A day or two, maybe a week.

Pan reappears on a gust of wind outside my window. “Go!” I shout, slamming my palms against the glass. “Get out of here, Pan! The Vapours! You must go!”

Her head twists forward and back.

“Please, Pan!” I urge her. “Don’t worry about me! Just go!”

She hesitates, then bends her head and breaks away, breaking my heart as she goes.

“Be safe,” I whisper, fearing I’ll never see her again. She wings off over the treetops, a dark blotch in an ever-darkening sky, and I dissolve, hug-kneed, to the turret floor, and sob.

T
en

Eyelet

I wake, a frazzled mess, to the stench of phosphorus being struck and the sound of the spinning chimes on the candle carousel in the corner striking six.

The Vapours did not break over the ridge, as I had feared. But the night was not peaceful. It was filled with racking, restless winds. Stronger winds than I’ve ever experienced in my life before, continuously flogging the sides of the Compound. Between the onslaught of the winds and my mounting grief, I was up most of the night.

I blink open my weary eyes to the sound of the lock on my door mysteriously giving way. The handle turns and the door falls ajar.

Lights out at nine. Breakfast at six-thirty.
What am I, his prisoner?

I’m up and dressed in seconds, racing down the stairs. How dare he lock me in my room. I am a guest, not a threat. I sprint from the bottom stair through the doorway of the kitchen prepared to confront Urlick, a barbed tongue my weapon.

Iris looks up at me from the eggs she’s preparing and quickly looks away.

I stalk past her to where Urlick stands stretched out over the pantry, failing miserably to look innocent, while he selects his morning tea.

“I demand to know why I was locked in my room last night,” I say, hands on hips.

“You do, do you?” Urlick almost laughs as he turns his back.

Iris’s whisk picks up speed.

“That’s right,” I say, scuttling around to the front of him, skirts swinging. “I have the right to know why I’m being held captive.”

“Captive.” He guffaws. “Don’t be silly.”

He turns and makes his way across the kitchen, apparently abandoning his thoughts of tea.

“I couldn’t open my window, either.” I chase after him. “Do you care to explain why?”

“Simple.” Urlick answers, matter-of-factly. “They’re sealed.”

“And why would anybody do such a thing?” I pinch my face up close to his face.

“To keep the Vapours from ravishing the house, that’s why.
All
the windows of the house are sealed.” He turns to me. “Not just yours, Princess. But I can certainly have yours
un
sealed if you’d prefer.” He leans in close, his breath beating a moist path across the hollow of my neck.

I snap back, disgusted.

Disgusted with him. Disgusted with myself for not thinking of it. Of course they’d be sealed. What’s the matter with me? What’s the matter with him staring at me like that? All googly-eyed and silly. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was enjoying this. “And the door—” I wag my head cockily in front of his. “Do the Vapours threaten to seep under
there
as well?”

Urlick purses his lips into a hard thin line.

Iris whips her eggs into a froth behind me.

He says nothing, tugs on his waistcoat and breezes past, his quick, lithe movements prickling my skin.

“All of the locks of the Compound are designed to keep things from getting
in,
not out,” he says at last, clutching the doorknob in one hand. Letting the other hover just above the keyhole, he drags it slowly down the length of the brass plate. Turbines churn beneath his palm, and the lock shifts out of place. “They operate on sensors, activated by the molecular chemistry of the human hand. You see?” he explains, applying slight pressure to the brass plate, then releasing it. Magically, the latch releases. The door falls open, creaking on its hinge. “You can escape at any time.”

I take a breath, feeling stupid. His goal again, I suspect.

“As long as you are human,” Urlick turns around slowly, “you will never be denied passage to any room in this house. Unless, of course, the deadbolt’s been tripped—”

“Yes, of course, unless that.” My arms cross over my chest. “What are you trying to keep from getting in?”

He crosses his arms as well. “The roaming criminals, the cannibalistic Infirmed, and other undesirables of the woods.”

“Human? You said human.” I breathe. “But what of the touch of the criminals, or the Infirmed? Are they not humans?”

Urlick grimaces. “Once exposed to the Vapours, a person is forever changed. Right down to their molecular core.”

I stare past him out the window at the Vapours still forming on the ridge.
Pan.
I close my eyes. Please let her be safe…

“Now if you’re through with your interrogation, perhaps we could get on with breakfast?”

He again tugs the points of his infernal waistcoat, then plops down in a chair at the opposite end of the table from me. A span of three feet of polished oak and a plume of unyielding silence grows fat between us. Iris finishes whipping the eggs.

She pours them on the griddle and I stare at him through the sizzling mist that chokes the kitchen. How can one person be so incredibly tolerant one moment and so hard-hearted the next?

A few moments later Iris serves us, then scuttles off to her apartment to eat alone. Her eyes avoid me, as they’ve done all morning, though I’m so desperate to extend her a heartfelt apology over what happened yesterday.

She leaves us with a plate of bacon piled high—a favorite of Urlick’s, apparently—two plates full of slightly overcooked eggs, some toast, two glasses of milk, and no tea.

Urlick groans at her oversight, hesitating a moment before he stands. Fetching two strange-looking mechanical teapot apparatuses, he plops them down, one in front of each of us, along with two cups and two saucers.

I long to ask about the strange teapots, but think better of it after what happened yesterday.

“I call them Teasmaids,” he says as he sits, flipping his coattails out behind him.

“Your creation?” I ask, sneaking a piece of bacon.

He nods, eyeing me hard. “They’re individual automated tea services.” His brows rise. “For when your hostess has been maimed by your guest.”

“How clever.” I gnaw the strip of bacon, imagining it’s his head.

He drops a lump of sugar into the bottom of his dry cup and my shoulders bounce at the sound. A shrill whistle sounds and the Teasmaids go off, Urlick’s features growing soft behind a flux of steam. I watch as the hinge at the side of the contraption activates, tilting the tiny copper pot up on its end.

“Push your cup beneath it.” He demonstrates. “The spout, like this. Hurry!” he barks. “Before it pours out!” Like I’m some sort of idiot.

I move just in time to collect the stream and am rewarded with a full cup of Earl Grey for my trouble, give or take a bit of sloshing. Pushing the Teasmaid back, I reach for the sugar and Urlick pounces, snatching the bowl from under my grasp.

“Sit.” He motions to me like I’m a dog.
How dare he?!

I narrow my eyes, and sink slowly into my seat, annoyed. Doubly annoyed by the thought he’d serve himself first.

He stares down the length of the table, pinching his right eye shut, working to square the handle of the sugar bowl with my cup.

What on earth?

Cocking the handle back like a medieval catapult, he lets it go, ejecting a cube of sugar skyward. End-over-end, it lopes across the table, landing in my cup with a splat. Tea spittoons upward like a geyser, soiling the tea doily, my sleeve, and a nearby chair.

“One lump or two?” He grins.

“One will do, thank you,” I say, blotting up the mess. “Dare I ask for cream?”

He punches a button on the side of the creamer and a tiny set of wheels pops out the sides. Drawing the bowl back, he releases it as I wince in fear. The dish shoots forward, scuttling noisily down the length of the tabletop, then slows and parks itself directly in front of my cup. A bell pings, and the whole system lifts up off its wheelbase, delivering the perfect spot of cream before slithering back down into its carriage again.

Urlick leans onto his elbows, all puffed up and grinning. “Impressive, don’t you think?”