Page 102 of The City of Stardust

Forty-Eight

EVER EVERLY, VIOLETquickly discovers, is impossible to talk to. But not because he doesn’t talk.

He mutters to himself as he moves about his workshop. Sometimes he bursts into song, startling them both, only to break off a few bars later—before repeating the same snatch of melody over and over again. Then there are the moments where, over seemingly nothing—a moved piece of lint, a vanishing sunbeam—he starts to sob, in frightening gasps that wrack his whole body. Most of the time he doesn’t seem to notice that anyone else is there. At other times, he holds entire conversations as though there is a crowd of people in the workshop with him. But even in his lucid moments, he seems reluctant to answer any of her increasingly pressing questions.

The questions Violet does receive answers to are ones that need little explanation. The reveurite pane, for one. One morning, she tracks Ever to the edge of what must have once been the neighbourhood, hoping to glean more about just how dire their circumstances are. She doesn’t hide herself, but Ever never acknowledges her; instead, he lugs a sack full of assorted objects behind him, his eyes fixed on the road. Soon enough, the wall of reveurite rises above them, vibrant.

He dumps the sack out on to the dirt and Violet immediately notices its contents all contain reveurite. She hardly has time to admire the variety: a cup with the lip dipped in reveurite; glasses withseveral foldable lenses; half a dozen pieces of metal that might once have been daggers or knives. Ever’s golden-ringed eyes gleam in the sunlight as he picks up one object after another. His fingers pluck reveurite straight from the cup, the glasses, the metal—as though they’re all made of putty. Violet can’t help but watch with a mixture of fascination and horror at the treatment of what are surely important artefacts.

The sliver of reveurite in his hands quickly grows to a sphere, a hard rock that seems to quiver with unnatural light every time Violet looks at it directly. A sheen of sweat breaks out on Ever’s forehead, but his hands manipulate the metal like butter, working with quick efficiency. When there are no more objects in the bag for him to plunder, he breathes out heavily.

Quickly, he pulls out a knife and slashes it across his palm. Violet flinches, but Ever shows absolutely no emotion, as though he’s done this a thousand times before. He squeezes his fist, and blood coats the reveurite, slick and glistening.

Ever’s muscles strain as he plunges his fists into the pane. The light ripples; the pane shudders. Then it moves. Mere millimetres, hardly enough to make a difference. But mere millimetres over a hundred years, over a thousand…

That’s what it takes to keep Penelope out, it seems. Blood and intention and reveurite, to further expand an already expansive cage.

Violet trails him back to the workshop, her thoughts spinning through her head. This is how he has spent his time. A thousand years of building his own cage. She tries to ask him about it on their way back, but he sings loudly, drowning out her questions.

When he starts shouting at his reflection in the workshop, Violet decides to get some air. She finds Aleksander in the dusty rooms below, sorting through a pile of books and loose pages. The sight of him so in his element does something complicated to her heart, which she immediately shoves under several weighty layers of common sense.

He may have come back for her, but that doesn’t mean that Penelope isn’t somewhere underneath his skin, working her clawsthrough him. Violet remembers the sword in his hands, the hesitation. Prague. So she thinks about that, very firmly, and not the curve of his shoulder blades drawing lines down his shirt.

She sits down next to him and gingerly picks up one of the books. The cover leaves a tacky imprint of red dust on her fingers.

“Couldn’t take it anymore?” Aleksander asks.

Violet shrugs miserably. Her mad ancestor, ranting at ghosts and reflections, would test anyone’s patience after two days.

“How long do you think he’s been by himself?”

“Too long. He seems to spend most of his time in the past.”

Violet can’t comprehend what his life must have been like, trapped in the corpse of a city for so long by himself. The unbearable loneliness, the smothering darkness of the night sky—for that, at least, is another truth ripped from the pages of the legend. It would take a very specific kind of mind to survive. If you could call it survival.

“I keep thinking about the crossing,” she says. “I don’t understand why Penelope waited for me to open the door.” She bites her lip. “I shouldn’t have been able to open it at all.”

Aleksander looks at her for a moment. “A few years ago, there were proposals for an experiment, where the highly talented would be injected with reveurite, turned into living keys. The Hands of Illios, the first true scholars, remade anew. It might have worked; reveurite’s still the metal of the gods, after all. But it was deemed too dangerous, so the experiment stopped.” He pauses. “Mostly.”

“Yury,” Violet says, and he nods.

“But there are other ways to integrate the bloodlines.” He hesitates, and she can see him struggling for words. “I know I have no right to say this, but… maybe your mother was trying to ensure you would have a way out. Or whoever you’d become.”

Violet stares at her hands, scratched and calloused after the frenetic fighting of the last days. They’re Everly hands, the same shape as Gabriel’s, only slightly smaller than Ambrose’s. They’re as familiar to her as the rest of her body. But the blood that runs through her veins underneath is that of a stranger’s.

“More likely Marianne was looking out for herself,” she says bitterly.

Another Everly trait, it seems.

Aleksander stands up and dusts off his trousers. “I could do with a break. And there’s still plenty of the city to explore. What do you say?”

Violet hesitates. She should be thinking about ways to divine the truth from Ever, or how to break the curse now that they’re where it all started. After all, that’s what her mother’s plan must have been, before she gave up. And time is still running through the hourglass.

But she ishere, in another world. And she wants to go with Aleksander. She wants it like a fire craves oxygen, like she’s been drowning all this time, and has just been offered that first delicious sip of air. She is tired of saying no.

Aleksander offers his hand to Violet.

She takes it.

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