Ink, Iron, and Glass (Ink, Iron, and Glass #1)(34)
She looked askance at Leo. “My confidence in the efficacy of this plan is not feeling especially bolstered at the moment.”
“We’ll see what we can do about that,” he replied.
Leo led her down a corridor, Simo walking ahead of them to light the kerosene wall sconces.
“Ah, here we are,” Leo said, and unlatched a wooden door on his right. Elsa followed him in.
They were in a very old, very dusty mechanist’s laboratory. The narrow windows were smudged with soot, as if the former occupant or occupants had been in the habit of lighting things on fire, but not so much in the habit of cleaning up afterward.
“Which is the book restorer?” Elsa asked.
“All of that,” Leo said with a sweeping gesture.
The giant machine covered the back wall of the laboratory, taking up the entire width of the room. Several sheets of canvas were draped over it to keep off the dust, and they obscured its true shape in a way that turned it vaguely sinister to Elsa’s eye.
Leo said, “So, I suppose you understand now why no one ever tried to move the restoration machine.”
“Yes,” said Elsa. “Quite.”
He began removing the canvas covers, each one pulling free with a visible puff of dust. “It works as a sort of assembly-line process—scanning, trimming, scribing. You set the book in here,” he said, giving the leftmost hub of the machine a pat, “where it removes the pages from the binding—”
“Removes the pages!” Elsa said, aghast.
“Yes.” Leo shot her an apologetic look. “I’m afraid the machine will have to disassemble the book and rebind it when the restoration is complete.”
Elsa did not look upon this development with great enthusiasm. “It’s bad enough the poor books were lit on fire. We’re trying to preserve whatever subtextual content they still contain, not erase it. Won’t taking them apart effectively make them new books when they’re reassembled?”
“Mm, right. I’d wondered about that, too. According to Porzia, ‘theoretically, no.’”
Elsa pursed her lips. “You and your qualifications again.”
“Hey! This time it’s Porzia’s qualification. I wash my hands of responsibility.”
Elsa was not amused. “I do hope you understand that the books will be useless without the subtext.” If the worldbooks were effectively reset back to the condition they were in when they were brand-new, any content Montaigne had added—such as objects he’d carried in from Paris, or notes he’d written down while inside—would be lost.
“Only one way to find out for certain if it’ll work,” Leo said, folding up the last of the canvas and stacking it in a pile. “Shall we fire it up?”
She reluctantly set down the carpetbag near the first machine hub. “Very well.”
“Simo!” Leo called, and when the man appeared in the doorway, he asked, “Is there coal in the power room?”
“Simo!” said Simo enthusiastically.
“Get the boilers going, then,” said Leo, and Simo hurried off.
A few minutes later there came a rumbling from beneath their feet, the sound pitched so low it neared the boundary of human hearing and was felt more as a vibration behind the sternum. Leo, who had been fiddling with the controls impatiently, grinned and immediately reached for a large electrical switch on the far side.
“We’ve got power. Here we go.” He gripped the wooden handle of the switch in one hand and gave it a firm yank, then snapped it into place in the opposite position. The switch cast a rain of yellow sparks, forcing Leo to jump out of the way, and the restoration machine hummed to life.
He said, “Ready to start?”
Elsa reached into the carpetbag and selected the worldbook she thought least likely to be important—an older volume she hoped Montaigne wouldn’t have used recently. Unimportant as this first worldbook was, if it came through with the subtext intact, that meant they could repair all the others. She took a deep breath, let it out, and handed the book to Leo. “Let’s do this.”
Leo set the book inside the first machine hub, which neatly unstitched the binding and spat out a stack of loose sheets. He carefully carried the stack to the next hub. Elsa stood right beside him, their shoulders almost touching, so she could watch as he carefully fed the pages in one at a time.
She was suddenly aware of just how close he was standing, close enough that she could feel the heat of his skin warming the cool air. He turned to face her. There was nothing guarded about the way he looked at her now.
“Elsa, I…”
He’s going to kiss me, she thought.
But before she could decide how she felt about that, he mumbled, “Never mind,” and turned back to the work at hand.
Now Elsa felt as if the last ripe plum of the season had been dangled in front of her and then snatched away. Had she misread his intention? Was she merely projecting her own desires onto him?
Her mother had warned her how denial could enhance desire. Notice your desire, acknowledge it, then let it go, Jumi had instructed her that day when they sat together by the creek and watched the water, long before there was a sea to watch instead. If you want something from someone, that gives them power over you, her mother had said.
She had never really believed she would need her mother’s lessons on the subject of men. Elsa, who loved solitude and independence. How could it be that such feelings had taken seed in her heart? It must be the loss of her mother, the chaos of her abrupt departure from Veldana, leaving her unmoored and defenseless. She would have to be more careful, and squash this weakness.