Sancia listened with a sense of mounting outrage. <What the hell do you mean, think I’m an item?>
Click. <Was I unclear?>
<You think I’m just some object?>
<Untrue. I think you think this of yourself.>
<I’m…I’m not some goddamn item! I’m not a thing! I’m not…> She struggled to find the words. <I’m not something to be scrumming owned!>
<Untrue. You believe yourself a thing. A…slave.>
<Shut up!> screamed Sancia at her. She shut her eyes. <Shut up, shut up, shut up! I’m…I’m not a goddamn thing! I’m a scrumming person, I’m a free person.>
<Do you feel free?> asked Valeria. <Or do you feel, perhaps, like you have stolen yourself?>
Tears streamed down her face. The guards looked at her curiously. <Stop it,> said Sancia. <Stop talking!>
Valeria was silent. Sancia lay there, weeping.
<To steal a thing is not the same as freeing a thing,> said Valeria. Then, in a soft, slightly darker tone: <This I know full well. This I know more than anything else.>
Sancia swallowed and tried to blink the tears away. <Enough of this. Enough!>
Valeria said nothing.
<So,> said Sancia. <You edit the plate in my head. It…it will let me turn my scrivings off and on? And it’ll give me a way to…to open my shackles?>
Click. <True. You will be editor. Of a kind. You touch the shackles — with direct contact, you will have influence.>
<What will it be like, to make me an editor myself?>
<The editing will not be…painless,> said Valeria. <To edit the scrivings will be to edit reality — to convince the plate within you that, when it was wrought, it was wrought this way, and not that way. This is no simple thing. Reality is a stubborn thing.>
Sancia wasn’t sure if she wanted to hear more — the more she learned about what Valeria could do, the more she terrified her. <So it’s going to hurt like hell. Is that it?>
<How did it feel when it was first done to you?>
Her stomach fluttered. <Shit…That bad?>
<Yes. But they did a crude thing to you. I will do something much more…elegant.>
Sancia was breathing hard. She knew she needed every advantage she could get. But she wanted to ask more: to ask exactly what Valeria could do, what they’d made her to do, and how the Makers had made her to begin with.
Yet Valeria said, <We must proceed. Will take time. And your enemies could return at any moment.>
Sancia gritted her teeth. <Just…just do it, then. And hurry.>
<You will feel something. Must let me in. Then I will edit. Confirmed?>
<Confirmed.>
<And when completed — the key. You must unlock my casings — confirmed?>
<Yeah, yeah! Confirmed!>
<Good.>
For a second, there was nothing. But then she heard it.
It was almost exactly like that time in Orso’s house, with Clef: there was a quiet, rhythmic tap-tap, tap, tap—a soft pulse, echoing through her mind.
Again, she listened to it, reached out, grasped it, and then…
The beats unfolded, expanded, and enveloped her, filling her thoughts.
And then Sancia was filled with pain.
She felt herself screaming. Felt her skull burn hot with fire, felt every tissue in her skull sizzling, and then the guards were beside her, shouting, trying to hold her down, but then…
She fell.
Sancia was falling, falling into a darkness, an endless, rippling black.
She heard a whispering, and she slowly realized: the darkness was filled with thoughts, with impulses, with desires.
She was not passing into emptiness. It was a mind—she was falling into a mind. But the mind of something huge, something incomprehensibly vast and alien…yet fragmented. Broken.
Valeria, she thought. You lied to me. You were no clerk, were you?
Darkness took her.
30
As midnight passed, a small, white boat slipped through the misty canals of the Commons. Seated within the boat were three people: two boatmen, wearing dark, unmarked clothes, and a tall woman, wearing a thick black cloak.
They passed a barge, quiet and dark, and rounded a bend in the canal. The two men slowed the boat and looked to the woman.
“Farther,” said Ofelia Dandolo.
The prow sloshed through the foul, dark waters as the boat beat on. The canals of the Commons were unspeakably filthy, scummed over with waste and rot and slurry. Yet Ofelia Dandolo peered through these waters like a fortune-teller parsing the leaves at the bottom of a teacup.
“Farther still,” she whispered.
The boat beat on, until they finally came to a sharp bend at the corner of the canal. A tiny flock of pale, white moths danced and circled over a patch in the bend — directly over something floating in the water.
She pointed. “There.” The boat sped over to the floating thing, and the two men took out wooden hooks and pulled it close.
It was a man, floating facedown in the water, stiff and still. The two men hauled the body into the boat and laid it in the bottom.
Ofelia Dandolo surveyed the body, her face pinched in an expression that could have been grief, or frustration, or dismay. “Oh dear,” she sighed. Then she glanced at the flock of moths, and she seemed to nod at them. “You were right,” she said.
The moths dispersed, flitting away into the city.
She sat back and gestured to the two men. “Let’s go.”
The boat turned around.
31
Alone, in the dark, for the second time in her life, Sancia slowly remade herself.
It was an agonizing, thoughtless experience, as endless and painful as a chick struggling against the confines of its egg. Slowly, bit by bit, Sancia felt the world around her. She felt the world as the operating table saw it, felt herself lying upon herself…And then, somehow, she felt more.
Or, rather, heard more.
She heard a voice: <Oh, to be bound, to be whole, to embrace, to join ourselves, the joy of being joined, of being one, of being together, or being loved…>
Sancia, her eyes shut and her head pounding, furrowed her brow. What the hell? Who’s saying that?
The voice in her ear continued, a warbling, neurotic chant: <Oh, how I rejoice to reach out and grasp you, a circle unbroken, a heart complete…How lovely, how lovely, how lovely. I shall never part with you, not ever…>