Ink, Iron, and Glass (Ink, Iron, and Glass #1)(72)

Sleep refused to come. Elsa played through her encounter with Garibaldi, sifting through each memory as if to glean some overlooked grains of insight. Jumi lying so still inside the chamber that both sustained her and held her prisoner. Garibaldi’s confidence that he would get what he wanted, one way or another. But Elsa’s mind kept catching on one thought in particular, like a linen shirtsleeve snagging and tearing on a rough metal edge: there existed a worldbook that Jumi had deliberately hidden from her own daughter.

After a while she gave up the attempt to sleep, threw on her dressing gown, and wandered out of her room. She had no particular goal, other than to clear her head.

A little bot appeared at her heels, holding up a candlestick. In a hushed voice, Casa said, “Some light, signorina?”

“Thank you, Casa,” Elsa replied. “How are you feeling?”

“Better, signorina. It is kind of you to ask.”

Elsa tugged her robe tighter. “At least one thing is going well. We are overdue for some good luck.”

“If you will excuse my forwardness, signorina: you are a pazzerellona. You make your own luck.”

In her wanderings, Elsa came upon the door to the cloister garden, and on a whim she let herself outside. She left the little candlebot waiting on the veranda and stepped out under the stars. There was a stone bench toward the middle, which seemed a reasonable place to sit and think.

The garden was lovely at night. Crickets chirped, and the pale glow of the moon transformed the fruit trees into a surreal landscape of light and shadow.

Movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention, and Elsa looked up to see Leo leaning against his balcony railing, one hand wrapped around the neck of a wine bottle. His hair was mussed, his shirt rumpled, the unbuttoned cuffs hanging loose about his wrists. Though his face was shadowed and his posture gave away nothing, Elsa could feel the precise moment when his gaze fixed upon her.

If he’d meant to be alone with his wine, he didn’t seem at all put out to discover he had company—instead, quite the opposite. He vaulted over the balcony railing, picked his way down the sloped tiles of the veranda roof, and swung off the edge. Some of the wine splashed from the bottle when he landed, staining his white shirtsleeve. “Damn,” he said absently, switching the bottle to his left hand and shaking wine droplets from his right.

“Can’t sleep?” she called.

He strolled over to her, more or less in a straight line, and sat beside her on the bench. “How ever did you guess?”

Her instinct was to bristle at his sarcasm, but she managed to let it go instead. By now she could recognize his bravado for the defense mechanism it was. “Neither can I. I can’t seem to switch off all the unsolved questions.”

“Mm,” he said, then held the bottle out to her. “Would you care for some liquid off-switch?”

Elsa raised an eyebrow and declined to take the bottle. “And how’s that working for you?”

“Ask me again when it’s empty,” he said, and took a generous gulp.

Elsa stayed quiet, waiting for him to work his way around to what he really wanted to say. After a minute of silence, he spoke again.

“Don’t you agree the nightmares ought to go away, now that I know my father’s alive? But they’re still up here”—he tapped his temple—“worming away at my brain. Everyone else makes it look so easy. Such a simple matter, sleep. But not for me, never for me.”

“I’m so sorry, Leo,” Elsa said awkwardly. She found herself wishing she’d spent less of her childhood sketching sea creatures and more time learning how to be a good friend. She didn’t know what to do with this raw, exposed version of Leo. She didn’t know what to do for him.

Leo took another swig straight from the bottle. “And you? What are you doing wandering the garden at this hour?”

“Can’t get my own parent out of my head,” Elsa confessed. “I thought I was the one person Jumi trusted completely. I thought she shared everything with me, but she was hiding things from me, too. If Alek is a fool for believing he knew her, then how much more foolish am I, who lived with her every day of my life and still didn’t know?”

“Not sure it’s possible to ever really know someone else. Know their mind.” Leo was watching her with an oddly intense expression, as if the wine made it difficult to focus. Then he added, “Your hair is like shadows.”

Elsa blinked at him. “Uh … what?”

“Shadows,” he said again, as if repetition would make his point clear. He reached out for a strand of her hair and ran his fingers down its length. Elsa stiffened, but he didn’t seem to notice, too intent on the strand. “Is like you could melt into darkness, dissipate like smoke. Poof. You’re a phantom, Elsa.”

“And you’re a drunken idiot,” she said, batting away his hand.

“You’re not going to disappear on me, are you? Oh, Elsa, I don’t think I could stand losing you too.…”

Elsa flushed with a sudden awareness of how close he was, how he leaned in toward her like a plant reaching for the sun. She could smell the wine on his breath; she wondered if she would taste of it too, tannic and sweet at once, if she pressed her lips to his. For a weak moment she wanted nothing more than to kiss him, to be drowning in him the way he was drowning in the wine bottle.