Ink, Iron, and Glass (Ink, Iron, and Glass #1)
Gwendolyn Clare
FOR ATHENA, WHO UNDERSTANDS THAT REALITY IS HIGHLY OVERRATED
1
NO GREAT MIND HAS EVER EXISTED WITHOUT A TOUCH OF MADNESS.
—Aristotle
1891, THE SCRIBED WORLD OF VELDANA
Elsa crouched beside the tide pool, the hem of her skirt gathered over her arm to keep it off the algae-slick rocks. A new species of starfish had emerged, but whether it would persist in the world or not was an open question. Elsa pulled on her clockwork glove and activated the stability sensors in the fingertips, then gently lifted the starfish out of the water with her other hand.
The creature was quite lovely, orange and long-limbed and prickly against her skin, though Elsa tried not to get too attached just yet. New species sometimes destabilized and ceased to exist. She waved her hand over the starfish, and the mechanical innards of the glove buzzed against her palm, tiny gears whirring. After a minute, the indicator light on the back of the glove flicked on: green, for stable. Elsa let out the breath she’d been holding, relieved.
Then the starfish imploded in her hand, folding in on itself and disappearing with a soft pop.
Belatedly, the indicator light switched from green to red. Unstable.
“You don’t say,” she muttered to the glove. “Useless bit of scrap.”
Elsa’s mother would not be pleased—Jumi took special pride in the emergence of new species. She scowled at the glove as she pulled her hand out. It had never given her a false positive like this before, but a stable species should not cease to exist that quickly. She hoped it was a malfunction. The alternative would be much worse—if the problem wasn’t the glove, then something had gone seriously wrong with the most recent expansions to their world.
The brass finger-joints of the glove had leaked lubricant onto her hand. She hung the glove from her belt and wiped her fingers on her apron, smudging greasy streaks down the pale cloth. Then she stood and hastily picked her way around the tide pools, the rocks rough against the bare soles of her feet, and she trudged up the narrow strip of sand between the sea and the shore cliffs.
After she retrieved her flat-soled leather shoes from where she’d left them at the trailhead, Elsa decided she should do a quick walk-through of the whole expansion before returning to the village to report to Jumi. She turned back to walk the length of the beach, which was longer than it used to be. Jumi had added a new section during her latest revisions to the world.
Perhaps a kilometer out to sea, the Edgemist hung like a gray curtain, running parallel to the shore. The Edgemist defined the boundaries of existence, and Elsa took comfort in the familiarity of its presence, even if it was farther away thanks to the most recent expansion. Veldana was a fabricated world, but it was Elsa’s home, and she preferred the Edgemist to the endless horizons of Earth.
Up ahead, the cliffs curved outward and the Edgemist angled toward the shore. Though she couldn’t see it from her vantage point on the beach, Elsa knew the two would meet somewhere, pinching off the sea. Along with the new cliffs there was a new trail, snaking up the side in a series of tight switchbacks. She was almost at the trailhead when the Edgemist, hanging close on her left, began to shift, and the movement caught her attention. She stopped short and whirled around to stare at it, a cold fear seeding in her stomach.
The mottled purple-gray patterns of the Edgemist, usually calm, now churned like angry storm clouds. Veldana only had mild rains, but Elsa had seen a real thunderstorm once in Paris, when she’d accompanied her mother on a trip to Earth. She remembered how the clouds hunkered low and menacing over the city, darkening the gaslit streets, and rain lashed the windowpanes until they rattled in their casings. She’d been eight and terrified, and this was the feeling that welled up in her now, seeing the Edgemist writhe before her.
A breeze picked up, tossing strands of black hair across Elsa’s face and carrying with it the salt-and-decay scent of low tide.
Could this be an aftereffect of the most recent changes? Had Jumi expanded Veldana too quickly and somehow destabilized the boundaries of the world?
The breeze shifted direction, carrying the muffled sound of shouts from somewhere above. Could a person somehow be causing the disturbance? Elsa turned and ran to the trailhead, stopping only to shove her feet into her shoes before rushing up the switchbacks. The path wove between the narrow, twisted trunks of Aleppo pines and squat, thick holly oaks. She followed as it bent to the left, eventually spitting her out onto a long, grassy meadow bounded on one side by forest and on the other by the gray wall of the Edgemist.
The shouts belonged to a gaggle of boys from the village. They were throwing pebbles at the Edgemist, trying to see if they could penetrate the invisible force that held matter inside the world. Some of the pebbles rebounded off the Edgemist as if off a wall, landing in the grass, while others passed silently through and disappeared forever. Here, too, the Edgemist swirled like eddies in a fast-flowing river.
Elsa heaved an irritated sigh. Surely, this must be the cause. As Jumi always said, coincidence was the assumption of a lazy mind.
“Jumi just made those rocks,” she said loudly in Veldanese.
The boys whirled around. One of the younger ones let out a frightened yelp, and another clapped a hand over his friend’s mouth.
The eldest was her once-friend Revan, now too broad at the shoulders to really be called a boy. “What’s the big deal? They’re just pebbles.”