Page 16 of The City of Stardust

“Gone. The day after, there was a fire. Whole shop, gutted. They say it was so hot”—he licks his lips, his eyes suddenly distant—“the lead roof melted.”

Set a man on fire, so he’ll be warm for the rest of his life. But Penelope knows that Yury hasn’t been warm for three years. His fingers are blistered with burns, his arms twisted with scars; yet he shivers in this sweltering room. A digital alarm goes off on the watch loose around his wrist, and he quickly silences it. With one shaking hand, he retrieves an opaque packet from his coat pocket and tips its contents into his mouth. The sound is like crunching rock.

It’s not the results she’d hoped for when they started this particular experiment, but Yury has fared better than the other scholars thus far. He is alive, for one.

“So Marianne Everly has beaten me yet again,” she murmurs.

Yury looks at her desperately. “Did you bring it? Please tell me you brought it.”

“I cannot bring what I do not yet have,” she says.

“Youpromised. You said you had a cure, yousaidif I drank it, if the experiment didn’t work—”

“Have I ever broken my word?” she says sharply. When he doesn’t answer, she continues, “I will make sure you receive the cure for your… side effect. But in the meantime, you still have your end of the deal to fulfil. I don’t care how you get hold of it. If you have to pry that key out of cold, dead Everly hands, so be it.”

Yury waves his frostbitten hands at her in acknowledgement. “Fine, fine. But for the love of God, bring the cure before my xuj falls off. Three of my toes are already gone, and my hands…” He swallows. “I can’t live like this, Penelope. No one can.”

“Then find me that key,” she says, “and live a little longer.”

CHAPTER

Nine

VIOLET CAN’T BELIEVEit when Aleksander turns up the next week, half an hour before closing. Or the week after. On the fourth week, Matt digs his elbows into her ribs as Aleksander walks into the café yet again, a book tucked under his arm.

It takes her that many weeks to build up to the question she’s been desperate to ask. Not just for fear of being laughed at or dismissed, but for the sheer finality of the question itself. The metal magic—thereveurite manipulation, she has to remind herself—is irrefutably real. But there is another, larger truth that she suspects. That maybe she’s always known, and now there’s nothing else standing in her way to confirm it but this one question.

That afternoon, Aleksander is later than usual to arrive, and Violet spends most of it pacing up and down the aisle behind the counter, anxiously twisting her mother’s bracelets around her wrist. When he finally shows up, she has to hold back a sigh of relief. Today his hair is loose and curling around his shoulders, softening the angular lines of his face.

She eyes the sunburn bright across his cheekbones and he smiles ruefully. “I’m sorry I was late. I was in Bogotá on an errand this morning.”

The way he says it, so casually. Like everyone travels halfway around the world forerrands.

“How did you make it back so quickly?” she asks.

He taps his chest, and at first she thinks he means it’s a secret, but then he pulls out a long silver chain from underneath his shirt. On the end is a key, glittering with the same strange metal as the bird. Reveurite.

“This is the way home,” he says quietly, his eyes on Matt busying himself at the till point. “When you’re a scholar, you get your own and you can travel at will.” He slips it back into his shirt. “Mine is on loan.”

“A key to anywhere in the world.” Nowthisis magic she can believe in.

He gently corrects her. “A key to anywhere you’ve been before. As long as it’s made of reveurite, one is all you’ll ever need.”

A memory rises from the depths of her consciousness. Her mother sitting at the library desk on another late night, her silhouette haloed by lamplight. Marianne Everly turns a key over in her hands, a frown puckering her forehead—

Violet takes a deep breath. “It’s not just our world, is it? Because there’s also your world. Fidelis.”

She says it as casually as possible, but her heart thuds in her chest.

Aleksander leans towards her, holding her gaze, close enough to see that the beautiful grey of his eyes is shot through with dark speckles. His fingers graze her knuckles, and she realises that her hands are clenched into fists, pressed hard against the table.

“Yes,” he says.

All this time she’s wondered, but now sheknows.

The way Gabriel could arrive in the middle of pouring rain with perfectly dry clothing, or with snow clinging to his shoes even though outside was the picture of summer. The constant whisper in her head that something extraordinary was happening in the Everly house, if only she could peel back the veil of secrecy her uncles had erected. That longing for adventure, lodged like a wishbone in her throat.

“Explain it to me,” she says. “Please.”

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