Page 29 of A Slipper in the Smoke
He shook that thought away. Not through any sense of vanity or pride, but because of how pale she’d looked, how shaken.
Almost afraid.
His stomach churned at such a thought. What if she wasn’t ill, but frightened? What if something had happened to her?
All disappointment quickly vanished, replaced with a palpable concern. What could have happened to her down there? He still had no idea where Nero had got to. If she’d come across him—
No, Nero was a rake, but he didn’t seem the type to foster those kinds of ill intentions. And Elena, muscled from her work and quick with her words, did not seem like she couldn’t defend herself.
Although she could still be shaken even if she was strong enough to…
Pip smothered his thoughts again. What would he even do if some man did try to hurt her? Challenge them to a duel? He wasn’t exactly good with fisticuffs.
Still, thoughts of Elena plagued him for the rest of the day, and he prayed she’d be back again, and all right.
Even though he should probably just be praying he could stop thinking about her.
Elena dreamt of limbless torsos, blank eyes, and wires pulsing blood. She dreamt she saw her father’s face among the dead, and that her mother was a marionette with a painted face, skipping down the halls, singing discordantly. Her mouth dripped oil on the palace carpets, and the trail led back to Elena's workshop. Inside were dozens of iced cakes, but when she reached out to touch one, blood oozed out in place of cream.
A clock chimed in the distance. Grandfather clocks spouted out of the walls, but their insides surged with body parts rather than gears. Cuckoos spat out mechanical eyes.
Snowdrop sat perched on one of the workbenches, drinking tea with Pip. Elena ran towards them, but stopped in her tracks when they both started to laugh, slowly, mechanically, like their voices were stitched together with bits of metal.
“You’re not one of us,” Snowdrop crooned.
Pip’s smile twisted. “You’ll never be one of us.”
Bars slammed around her, and Elena woke to find her sheets soaked with sweat and tangled around her. A sob caught in her throat. She’d had dreams like that after the assassination attempt, too, where real horrors birthed fictional nightmares.
She scrubbed herself raw in the bath long before the rest of the apartment woke. It was several hours still until she was due at the palace, and yet returning to sleep was unthinkable. Instead, she headed off to her workshop, with only the low hum of the gears to keep her company as she walked. Upon arrival, she cleaned the entire place, sorted through all her equipment, oiled her tools, reorganised. She finished almost all of her remaining jobs.
And when she found herself close to breaking, exhausted from work, from powering through without eating, she crawled under the bench, traced the lines of the star-cross, and repeated the holy prayer.
She was home in Navarra, at the borough chapel, kneeling at the altar. Mother was beside her, calm, quiet, serene. The whole place hummed with silence, and the words buzzed through her.
Warm. Sheltered. Safe.
“I am not alone,” she whispered, hands clenched over her heart. “I am not alone.”
But you are. You are and always will be. No one cares for you.
“Someone watches over me,” she told herself, because the alternative was unthinkable.
She crawled out, made herself something to eat, and headed off to the palace.
Elena followed Snowdrop’s advice, working diligently and efficiently, although whether or not that was because she wanted to be noticed or because she just didn’t want to think, she wasn’t sure. Whenever her mind wandered down the hall, she thought of all the other things she could be doing.
Actually, if she finished early, she could try and look around the rest of the palace. She didn’t want to go downthereagain, but there must be other places of interest. The barracks, perhaps. The political offices. That first lock hadn’t been hard to break. If she could do that, if she’d braved the bunker…
She could do more.
Shewoulddo more.
Shehadto do more.
The rest of the mechanics finished their quota and shuffled off, but Elena stayed, devising new schemes in her head as she fiddled with the gears. There was no way she could just waltz into the palace. She’d need a plan, a disguise, a costume—
“I come bearing cake!”
