> “’Well met, Lorna van Asch,’ I said to the newly minted heir. ‘And you, Duff, tell me, what are the ingredients required to make the Stone?’”
“That was fast,” said Hugo the next morning when we met him at a random pier downtown. “And I normally don’t say that.”
“Didn’t we just have a talk about this?” asked Ty. “I’m in high school, remember?”
“Sure you are,” said Hugo. “When was the last time you actually attended class for more than an hour?”
“Yesterday, for two hours,” she said. “Lunch and study hall.”
“Of course,” said Hugo. “And fine, I’ll try to keep it PG from now on. It’s just weird, after spending so much time with Gilbert, that I was talking to you the whole time.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” said Ty. “And you should probably apologize to me also for like 60% of the things you said to me.”
“Fair point,” he said. “Now, let’s see the goods.”
I pulled out the vial that D.C. had given me, along with a quill that Ty had provided, and a little notepad, and Hugo nodded.
“Are you ready?” Hugo asked.
“I think so. I just need to visualize the memory and then write it down like it’s happening, right?”
“In theory,” he said. “Never actually used the stuff.”
I gingerly pulled on the tight-fitted cork, careful not to let any of the precious ink splatter out, and then dipped the tip of the quill into the neck of the vial before removing it a few seconds later. Closing my eyes, I pictured that scene from Beatrice’s downtown apartment, and the images resurfaced. She had handed an envelope to her trainee Kate and then had muttered to herself, “well, time to start over again,”
I opened my eyes, and those words were now on the page, the quill still resting against the wet ink. It didn’t seem like anything particularly magic had happened, but then I lifted my writing hand up and everything changed.
My head suddenly titled back and my eyes were forced shut and I had returned to the memory. Except this time, it was as if a gale force wind was in the apartment with me, sucking those few seconds out of my brain. For some reason, my mind was hesitant to let go, but the nemosyne was too strong for me to bear, and it claimed its prize.
“What … what happened?” I asked as I came to on the ground and saw that there was now a third person hovering over my collapsed body.
“You really shouldn’t have done that in public,” said Lucca Josephie, my Second Seat, who was wearing a bright red vest, a beanie, and horn-rimmed glasses, with a blue messenger bag slung around her neck. “This is super weird, even by New York standards.”
“My apologies,” said Hugo. “I thought this would be a quiet spot for our work.”
“Why is she … why are you here exactly?” I asked, grabbing Lucca’s extended hand and pulling myself up.
“You successfully extracted the memory, congrats,” she said, running her fingers over the sentence I had written. “But how did you think you were going to form it into something useful? With your mind?”
“I hadn’t gotten that far, to be honest,” I said, rubbing the back of my head and trying to replay the memory, but finding that it now stopped just short of that moment.
“That seems to be a theme of yours,” Lucca said. “But don’t worry, I am at your service.”
“You are? So you’re in Dalia’s camp?”
“I suppose,” she said. “If you’re able to find what she’s looking for.”
“You want what’s in the Compendium, too,” I concluded.
“Correct. As well-stocked as our library is, there is a gaping hole no amount of electrum can ever fill as long as the Guild’s oldest knowledge remains lost to us. Now come, my lab is nearby.”
The four of us walked backed into the confines of the grid until we reached a pretentious-looking SoHo gallery filled with dozens of paintings, each with a two-letter abbreviation that on closer inspection turned out to be elements from the Periodic Table.
“This is it?” asked Ty. “I thought you were out in Bushwick.”
“I was,” said Lucca, nodding to the bored salesgirl lounging on the lone piece of furniture in the spartan space, who didn’t return the gesture. “But my ‘artwork’ has seen a huge uptick in sales ever since a collector stumbled upon my Hg painting, so I upgraded my digs.”
She led us to a spiral staircase that we carefully ascended upward 30 feet into an opening in the ceiling. At the top was a small landing and a hulking metal door with no knob. Lucca rummaged in her bag for a few seconds before pulling her now glove-adorned hand out and pressing it against the slab, causing a red glow to emanate from her palm. It spread the length of the door and then contracted, taking the entire metal slab with it.
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“What just happened?” I asked, as Lucca presented a tiny version of the door to me to hold, which I turned over in my hands.
“Dynium!” she said, beckoning us through the now open threshold, behind which was a regular door with a knob. “A recent invention of mine. You can grow and shrink objects to your heart’s content. I’ll take that back, please.”
Lucca took the little rectangle from me and, with one smooth motion, threw it towards the gap with her gloved hand. It enlarged mid-flight and slid roughly against the concrete floor the last few inches until it was again blocking the doorway.
She casually opened the regular door as if the last 30 seconds hadn’t happened, behind which was a room that ran the length of the art studio below. Except instead of terrible looking paintings, the space was filled with networks of glass tubes, humming machinery, something that looked like a replica of Manhattan covered in colorful blinking dots, overstuffed cabinets, and tables upon tables cluttered with beakers, burners, and other scientific paraphernalia.
“This is quite a set-up,” I said. “You may have Beatrice beat.”
“What’s she like?” asked Lucca, a glint of curiosity in her eye that could have been a platonic science girl crush or the beginnings of a new Tesla-Edison rivalry.
“She’s … uhh … intense, driven. Probably mad at the Guild? I mean, Ty tried to kill her and-”
“I was testing her,” the teenager interjected. “And she passed. Cost me a good enforcer, but I think it was worth it.”
“Kind of a weird test,” Lucca said. “You should have put her through an unofficial Gauntlet, tested her disciplines. We’re not a Guild of murderers, Gilbert.”
“Well,” I said, “there was the whole crazy stalker-”
Ty drew her finger across her neck, and I quickly shifted course.
“-crazy stalker from her old job. He stressed out so much that she fled town, taking the Compendium and her bag of tricks with it. And so here we are.”
“I’d like to meet her when this is all over,” said Lucca, who had walked over to one of the cabinets and was busy fishing something out from inside, random things crashing to the floor as she did. “Ah, here it is!”
She held aloft a metal rod that could have passed for a magic wand if you weren’t looking too closely and flicked her wrist. A blue flame erupted from the tip and then immediately extinguished itself a second later.
“Is that…”
“Hellfire, yes!” said Lucca cheerfully, and my mind rewinded back to the last laboratory I had been in and the unnatural smell of burnt, well, everything.
“What … why do you have a varutium starter?”
“What else is going to be hot enough to liquify the nemosyne? The paper, please.”
I handed Lucca the ink-written page, and she stuffed it into a beaker, which she placed into a lab clamp, and I turned away as she re-ignited the starter. After a few seconds, she tapped me on the shoulder, and I looked back to see that the beaker now held a grayish sludge.
“This way!” Lucca exclaimed, donning thick purple gloves to carry the vessel over to yet another station, where she poured the contents into a pear-shaped piece of glass mounted on a metal arm.
“Separatory funnel,” she said, before I could ask. “We’ll separate out the paper residue and get that pure, pure memory! That reminds me, do you want it back?”
“Want what back?” I asked.
“Whatever moment you extracted from your head,” said Lucca. “Because if not, this will probably go a lot quicker.”
“Umm, I think I’m good. I never wanted her memories in the first place. If I had more ink, I would remove them all.”
The truth was, I still didn’t know how much of Beatrice’s mind had seeped into mine during our fateful encounter at the Hampton’s party all those months ago. It had only been after a sleepy subway ride that I had witnessed the entire showdown between Beatrice and Kate, and I was loath to explore what else I could now recall about her life.
“OK then! Hugo, how big is the opening?”
Hugo pulled the watch out from the inside pocket of his blazer and set it down on a relatively empty spot on the workbench. Its silver surface reflected all sorts of colors from around the lab like a kaleidoscope. He hit one of the side dials and the cover snapped open, revealing an intricate-looking clock face. Before I could take a closer look, Hugo moved his fingers to the dial at the top of the watch and began winding it, causing the face to slowly disappear somewhere within the inner recesses of the contraption. In its place was an etched illustration of a fish on a small disk.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Hugo, quickly popping the disk out of the watch and replacing it with a fishless one that had a circular groove in the center. Lucca peered at the timepiece and nodded to herself, before spinning the separator like a pinwheel for several minutes. We all awkwardly stood in silence as Lucca hummed an upbeat tune that sounded as if it could have been from an old Super Nintendo game. Finally, a ding rang from somewhere within the chaos of the lab, and our host placed what look like an ice cube tray below the contraption and excitedly loosed the stopper.
A stream of pure silver trickled down out of the separator, just enough to fill one of the circular voids in the tray, which Lucca grabbed after a few seconds and then ran off. Catching up to her, I saw she had placed it into what could charitably be described as a mini carbonite freezer. Steam rose from the sunken chamber in the base while Lucca watched, a pair of purple goggles covering her eyes.
“Don’t get too close,” she said. “Not unless you like skin grafting.”
I kept my distance and finally Lucca, now donning a different set of purple gloves (I was sensing a theme), reached down into the contraption to pull free the tray.
“Here you go. One tiny nemosyne bead!”
“Thanks,” I said as Hugo offered me his wrist. I placed the memory inside the watch, and he pushed the cover shut.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now you give me a second, please. I’m calibrating.”
Hugo twisted and pulled the various dials and then closed his eyes, as if he was trying to commune with the timepiece. Finally, he opened his eyes again, a serene look on his face, which suddenly changed into giddiness.
“It’s coming from inside the building!” he exclaimed.
“Are you fuc-”
“I am,” he said with a smirk. “It’s that way.”
He pointed toward the west-facing side of the lab and then walked as far as he could, stopping just short of a crazy machine that was emitting blue smoke.
“Hmm, I’d say it’s west by southwest. And from the strength of the signal, it’s faaarrrr. Probably not Asia, but Hawaii is not out of the question. Best bet is for-”
I screamed. It was a loud, guttural cry that rang out through the lab. The confluence of the nesting doll quests, the flood of skills and memories into my brain and body, the promises and favors to repay, the people I had hurt, the fate of the Guild, it all came down on me at once like an anvil in D.C.’s forge. I crouched to my knees and attempted to shut it all out, but, as with everything else in my life, failed miserably.
“Hey,” said Hugo, tapping me on the shoulder. I opened my eyes to see his outstretched hand, which I took, pulling myself up from the floor.
“Sorry, I…”
“It’s OK, we’ve all been there.”
Lucca nodded and even Ty gave the equivalent of an encouraging look.
“Anyway, what I was about to say was, your best bet is for me to fly you cross-country in my jet.”
I stared at Hugo wide-eyed.
“You have a jet?”
“Yeah. I mean, who doesn’t?”
“I … I don’t even have a-”
“Sorry, not the right time for that joke,” he said.
“It’s OK. When can we leave?”