Smoke and Iron (The Great Library #4)(64)

“I don’t know, but I think it’s more that he built them with a personal key that only she possessed. She was the one person Eskander trusted fully, and she was the one person who could have done it with or without his permission, given time. But she always asked before she went to him. And he usually allowed it.”

“Were they in love?”

Annis thought about that. She spooned up her soup quietly for a while, then put the utensil down and reached for a glass of water. Annis was careful about the water, and they knew it, at least, was safe to drink. “Oh yes, desperately,” she finally said. “But love is never as simple as you’d think, is it? Or as easy. At least it isn’t in here; no idea how it is out there. They understood that love was a trap, a weapon to be used against them. Eskander never wanted to be here, not a single day. And he fought it, over and over. Then, when their son was born, he stopped fighting . . . but when Wolfe was taken away from the Tower, put into the orphanage, that was the breaking point, I think. Love can’t heal all. It can’t repair broken hearts. And I think in the end they were both shattered by it.”

It seemed a breathtakingly sad story, and it made Morgan shiver a little; she loved Jess, or at least, she thought she did. Or was it only that he seemed so taken with her that she’d accepted it as fate? She did care for him, and deeply. But the more time away, the more she saw herself clearly . . . the less sure she was that she was what Jess needed, or wanted. Or that he was right for her, either.

Maybe they would end up like Eskander and Keria. Or maybe this would turn out differently. She closed her eyes and imagined Jess, and his image came vividly; ink stains on his fingers, that quiet, odd smile of his, the sharp intelligence of how he analyzed things. The sudden bursts of precisely calculated speed and violence when he needed them. She’d never met someone with so little fear, and she wondered if he knew how afraid she was, every day. There was something both reassuring and intimidating about being with him.

And she did want him. Thinking of him made her remember the way his hands felt against her skin, his lips on hers.

Love is never as simple as you think. Annis was right about that. And in this moment, she couldn’t properly sort her feelings, except that she wanted Jess more than she’d ever wanted anyone else. Was that love? The kind of love that lasted? She didn’t know. And for now, it didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered except contacting Eskander, and in a way that didn’t alert Gregory to her intentions.

“Did you get the plans?” Morgan asked, and Annis nodded and reached beneath her robe into a hidden pocket—one she’d sewn herself—to retrieve a thin, folded sheet of paper.

“Had to do it small,” she said. “But it’s accurate enough. He’s warded every way in, though, as you can see; I’ve marked them down. The only one that—as far as I know—isn’t warded is the window, and it doesn’t open. Won’t break, either.”

“What about this?” Morgan put the empty plate back on the tray and pointed to a tiny square high in the wall of Eskander’s rooms. He had three rooms, as large as the chambers that Gregory now occupied and likely just as opulent: a bedroom, a bath, and a sitting room. The square was on the wall of the room Annis’s tiny script had designated as the bedroom.

“Too small for any human to pass,” Annis said. “And screens on both ends welded in place. It’s the air venting. There’s another here . . .” She pointed to one located in the sitting room on an opposite wall. “But I don’t see what possible good they could do.”

“What’s the nearest access point to this vent? One we can reach?”

“There isn’t one. They connect directly back to the central air-processing hub; for him, that would be on the twelfth level.”

“So theoretically, if we get into the air-processing hub, we could talk to him,” Morgan said. “Directly. With no one overhearing.”

Annis blinked and looked at the paper, then frowned in thought. “That’s two floors away,” she said. “And I can’t be certain no one else would hear, if you’re shouting loud enough to be heard that far away.”

“Who said anything about shouting?” Morgan smiled. “I’m talking about sending down a resonant crystal, with the matched component on our end.”

Annis looked blank. “I took a fancy to mesmerism, not engineering,” she said. “Explain.”

“Sympathetic vibration,” Morgan said. “There is an entire department of Obscurists on Level Four who are working on crystals that are sympathetically linked, and you may speak into one and listen from the other.”

“Long-distance talking?”

“You didn’t know?”

“I don’t pay much attention,” Annis admitted. “The engineers from Artifex are always sending over blueprints for some nonsensical invention or other, and few of them prove to work. It’s not my area. It all sounds crackbrained to me.”

“Oh, it should work,” Morgan said. “All we have to do is obtain a raw pair; the script to link them together should be simple enough, once I know what the frequency is to vibrate them.”

“And how do you propose we steal such a thing?”

“We don’t. We find an Obscurist working there who wants out of this iron trap we’re in, and we work together.”