Page 97 of Even Robots Die
Florentine looks at the both of us with a mix of dread and smugness. It’s the first crack in her facade.
I understand the smugness—she knows something no one seems to know—but the dread makes me feel like I’m going to hate whatever she’s about to say.
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” Florentine says before adding, “but first, you’ll tell me why my dad was here.”
Christina snorts, and it is so out of character that I can’t help thinking that the woman knew that was exactly why we were here. I can almost hear the words ‘at last’ floating in the air between us.
“It’s amusing that you ask,” Christina says, marking a pause for emphasis. “Because he came two days ago and tried to make me believe he was the one who invented all those beautiful weapons by providing us with the blueprints.”
Florentine’s eyes widen in surprise, but she schools her expression quickly. Christina doesn't seem to see or to pay attention as she continues explaining.
“He didn’t like the fact I recognized the blueprints as the ones you provided four years ago, and the woman with him, even less.”
“Who was she?”
As Florentine trips over the fact her father came here accompanied to try to sell her work by passing it as his own, I’m stuck on something else.
Florentine is twenty-three, and Christina just said that her father tried to sell something she created four years ago. She made it sound like it wasn’t the first time she provided those kinds of blueprints, either.
How long has Florentine been a silent actor of the revolution that has been brewing in Paris?
I knew there was unrest in the city more than anywhere else in France or in Europe, but the bat-shifters have always been cocoonedby Elhyor in Notre Dame, and I now wonder if I didn’t choose to be blind.
This is not new, at least not for the humans.
I feel like the earth is unraveling under my feet, like someone pulled the rug from under me. I’m drowning in questions I don’t have answers to.
Did we all turn a blind eye to what was happening to the humans until shifters were targeted too? Until we were targeted? Because for all I know, other shapeshifters were targeted way before us and we didn’t see it. We didn’t pay attention because until then we were safe.
I remember the small butterfly and lizard Cassiopé saved from Michaël’s cabinet of curiosities buried under Versailles. There was a whale shark there, too.
I remember because they haven't shifted yet. They’re still staying in a room in Notre Dame, but they don’t leave and they barely eat—that might be because of their shifted size.
There is no doubt that they’re both shapeshifters and not animals—shifters can smell that on each other—but seeing as they’ve refused to shift so far, it makes me wonder how long they were held in those tanks Cassiopé told me about.
“I don’t know,” Christina says, and it pulls me back to the present. “He didn’t introduce her. All I can give you is a description.”
Florentine turns on the projection system of her holo and the Interpol logo appears.
Wait? is it really what I think it is?
“Height , eye color, hair color, skin color, and age?” she asks the other woman.
“About one meter seventy, maybe more, green eyes, blonde, mid-thirties,” Christina says mechanically. “Don’t know if you’ll have that in the database, but she was skinny for her height.”
“Shifter?” Florentine asks.
“I don’t think so, but I can't be one hundred percent certain.”
I see Florentine mouth something like ‘you heard her’ to her artificial intelligence, and a list appears in front of us.
“Narrow it down to women living in Paris,” Florentine says out loud, more for us than for her AI.
There are still more than a hundred results.
She switches the research to pictures instead of names, and four of them appear in the space between her and Christina. The other woman doesn’t wait for Florentine to move or to ask, she slips from behind her desk and joins us on this side of the holo.
“No.”
