“She’s stable,” Faraz assured her.
Elsa turned her attention back to Porzia, who was flipping the switch again. Another nascent portal aborted itself. “Elsa, what happened to the editbook? And…” She swallowed. “And to Leo?”
This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. They had to get back and fix this and make everything right again. Shock warred with anger inside her, and Elsa’s jaw worked for a moment before she managed to squeeze the words out. “He grabbed the editbook and pushed me through the portal.”
“What!” Faraz shouted, looking up from Jumi’s medical readouts. “That’s not possible!”
“Well, that’s what happened!” Elsa shouted back. She couldn’t remember ever hearing Faraz raise his voice before. She took a deep breath. Her hands were shaking, and she flexed her fingers in an attempt to steady her nerves. “We have to … we have to think, we have to get it back.” Get him back.
Porzia was staring at the portal device. She looked up, giving Elsa a stunned look. “Even if they weren’t planning to immediately move the editbook to a secure location, we have no leverage left. How would we, you know, avoid getting shot on sight?”
Faraz raised a finger in the air. He seemed to have regained his usual composure. “I, too, am somewhat concerned about the getting-shot-on-sight scenario. Also, I don’t fancy the notion of crossing swords with Leo.”
Elsa cast him a scathing glare.
“I’m sorry, are we avoiding the topic of how my closest friend decided to abandon us and join the evil side?” he said mildly, eyebrows raised. But there were cracks in his calm facade, lines of pain etched around the eyes.
Porzia stepped closer to Faraz and put an arm around his shoulders. More than anything else could have, watching them struggling to process Leo’s choice drove home for Elsa that he was gone. Something inside her—her drive, her certainty—seemed to deflate. She could still feel the imprint of Leo’s hand on her arm, and she put her own hand over it, wrapping her fingers down to cover the ghost-grip he had left behind.
No, no, no. Desperately grasping at her last shreds of hope, Elsa said, “Try it again.”
Porzia made no move to comply, so Elsa wrenched the portal device from her grasp and set the coordinates again herself. The seconds slipped away like water running through her fingers, each failed attempt distancing her from the possibility of catching them.
No, there was still a chance. She tried again. Reset. Tried again.
“Stop,” Porzia said softly. “It’s not going to—”
But on the next try the portal stayed open, widening enough to admit a person. Elsa did not hesitate to dive through, Porzia swearing behind her as she went.
The portal deposited her in the small room that had housed her mother’s stasis machine. The unconscious guards were gone from the floor. Elsa bolted down the narrow hall, barely aware of Porzia’s footsteps following her, and she burst through the door into the main room of Garibaldi’s stronghold.
It was empty. No Garibaldi, no ex-Carbonari agents; even the long table had been hastily cleared of its jumble of paperwork. No evidence that someone had been planning a revolution here, nor any indication they’d ever return to this location.
No editbook. No Leo.
Elsa sank to the floor, her legs suddenly too weak to hold her up. Leo was gone. She felt as if she were watching herself from a detached perspective, floating dreamlike above her body. Was that silence the sound of a heart breaking?
“Well, there’s no corpse,” said Porzia. “That’s good, right? That means he’s still alive, at least?”
After a moment, Elsa mustered the will to reply, though her voice sounded hollow even to her own ears. “Why would they harm him, now that he’s joined their side?”
Porzia sighed, looking around the room as if she half hoped to see him wounded and left behind rather than accept the truth. “He always did love his secrets.”
No power on Earth could stop me, he’d said. Elsa rubbed her face with one hand. “I’ve been such a fool. He told me—he told me he’d do anything to be with his family again, and still I didn’t see it coming. How could I not know?”
“None of us knew,” Porzia said, her voice turning tight with contained anger. She rested a hand on Elsa’s shoulder. “Come along. We have to see to your mother.”
Porzia helped her stand, and then they left the place where he’d left them.
20
BE HAPPY FOR THIS MOMENT. THIS MOMENT IS YOUR LIFE.
—Omar Khayyam
Elsa waded through the rubble that was all that remained of Montaigne’s house. It had rained at least once since the fire, and the runnels of ash-dirty water had dried in patterns of swirled black and gray. Another section of roof had collapsed since last she’d seen the ruins, which added to the difficulty and disorientation of trying to navigate her way back to where the study once had been.
She spun a slow circle, getting her bearings. Yes, the bookshelves had stood over there on the right, and the big windows were behind her—one broken, one warped by the heat. So this section of empty air used to be the wall where the Veldana worldbook was hidden.
Her stomach flip-flopped with anxious nausea. She lifted a shaky hand, holding it up to the air. How would she know exactly where to place her palm, with the wall gone? Slowly, she swept her hand back and forth, tracing over the nonexistent surface where she estimated the wall had once stood. Nothing.
Barely breathing, she pulled her hand back a little and tried again at a different depth. At shoulder height she felt a sort of gentle tug, as if the air had turned the consistency of honey. She leaned into the feeling.
The air shimmered and dissolved, revealing a dark compartment floating where the wall had been. The rectangular opening was visible only from the front, making the whole compartment appear two-dimensional, but when Elsa stuck her arm inside she confirmed it had depth to it. She laid her hand gently upon the cover of the worldbook inside and stood there for a moment before lifting it out.
Veldana. Untouched by flames. She could go home.
*
Elsa had worried about how she would manage to relocate her mother, but her concerns proved to be unfounded. In the end she had more help than she knew what to do with. Faraz and Porzia brought Jumi to Casa della Pazzia while Elsa retrieved the Veldana worldbook, and then they all went through—not just the three of them, but Gia and several of the children besides.