Chapter 26 Zaria
ZARIA
ZARIA DIDN’T SEE JULES UNTIL THE NEXT MORNING.
She hadn’t gone looking for him upon arriving home, instead collapsing into an exhausted heap on her bed and trying very hard not to think. And yet she’d found all she could do was think, until eventually she must have passed out with a pillow over her head and Kane’s face behind her eyelids.
Now she stood outside Jules’s bedroom door, fist poised to knock. It was still early, and the exhaustion from all she’d done yesterday made her feel vaguely hungover.
Or perhaps it was the sheer amount of self-disgust Zaria felt whenever she remembered Kane’s lips on hers.
Nothing good could come from what they’d done.
Her body, though, hadn’t wanted to listen to logic.
Despite knowing with every facet of her being that she shouldn’t be attracted to Kane Durante, she hadn’t been able to resist goading him.
She could lie to herself no longer. It wasn’t his easy charm or his con man’s grin but the tortured flash in his eyes whenever he said Fletcher’s name.
It was the way he’d shown her he was human.
Kane would give everything to protect his friend.
And for a brief, foolish moment, Zaria had wondered if he’d been trying to protect her, too.
If he’d wanted to keep her alive because he cared about her.
Not her work—her. Some small, ridiculous part of her wanted to be important to someone like that.
Someone who fought so hard to care for nothing and nobody but made an exception every so often.
It wasn’t sensible. It wasn’t healthy. Kane couldn’t fix her desperate need to feel like she mattered. In the same vein, she couldn’t mend whatever his veritable slew of issues were. They were both carrying too much.
What she needed to focus on right now was the one person to whom she did matter. The person who was forever trying to help her shoulder the weight of everything the world had thrust upon her and asked for nothing in return.
When she finally summoned the courage to knock, it took Jules a moment to respond. Zaria waited, oddly nervous, until she heard him say, “Yeah?”
It was close enough to an invitation. She opened the door, bracing herself for the anger she was sure to see written on Jules’s face.
He didn’t look angry, though. He only looked tired, his back curved against the wall where he sat on his bed with a book in hand.
Nicholas Nickleby, Zaria read. It was nothing she was familiar with.
That said, she didn’t read much. She always found herself skimming the same passages again and again, her toes twitching incessantly, her mind led astray by a thousand other things.
“Can I come in?”
“Looks as though you already have.”
Said by anyone else, it might have sounded rude, but Zaria knew Jules well enough to hear the lightness in the words.
She stepped farther into the small square room, taking in the familiar surroundings.
Peeling walls and dusty floors. A bed much too narrow for two people but that they’d slept on in the past, shoulder to shoulder, more than once.
A poorly built side table on which sat a stack of worn books and the last nub of a candle.
It was all both comforting and miserable in its familiarity.
Zaria came to sit on the edge of the bed, and Jules didn’t stop her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, because his expression made it clear he would say nothing more until she did.
He set the book down, brows drawing together as he sat up. “For what?”
Of course he wouldn’t let her get away with a vague apology.
Jules wasn’t like that. When they had a problem, he wanted to confront it head-on.
It was one of the things she liked most about him.
At the same time, though, it meant she needed to deliver the script she’d mentally prepared while lying in bed last night.
“I kept you in the dark when I shouldn’t have and when I didn’t need to. I was trying to protect you, but in doing so, I not only lied—I took away your right to make your own choices.”
“Yeah,” Jules said, swinging his legs over the side of the bed so his position mirrored hers. “You did. But that’s not why I got upset. I was upset because you took away my ability to try to protect you.”
Surprise caught Zaria’s face in a frown. “I don’t need you to—”
“Neither do I, Zaria!” Impatience edged his voice.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!
Don’t you see? We feel the same way, but for some reason, you can’t seem to understand that.
” At her pained expression, he spoke more softly.
“I know you sometimes feel you’re no good at reading people.
But you’ve always been able to read me, so you’ll know I’m telling the truth when I say this: I feel the same overwhelming drive to get us out of this place and keep you safe in the process.
” His mouth tilted up in a slight grin. “I’m just not quite as openly aggressive about it. ”
Zaria’s chest ached. She wanted him to smile for real, but wasn’t sure whether she’d earned it. She felt full of hairline fractures, each one having multiplied until she no longer trusted her strength.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth,” she whispered. “About everything, I mean. It was inconceivably foolish.”
Jules sighed. In that moment, Zaria wondered if he was fracturing a little bit, too. “Yeah, it was. But Zaria?”
“Hmm?”
“I’m sorry I compared you to your father. That wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t true. He never cared about anyone the way you do. Even when he was hunting for the primateria source, he was thinking only of himself. What he could do with it. You’ve never been like that.”
She bit the inside of her lip hard. “Thanks, Jules.”
His mouth tilted a little further. It still wasn’t a real smile, but it was closer. “Sure. Now, can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Why the hell did a scrawny little chap turn up here night before last to tell me you wouldn’t be coming home? Did Kane kidnap you?”
With a strangled laugh, Zaria began to tell him about meeting Kane and Fletcher, only to be whisked across the city to steal the pianoforte.
About her conversation with Fletcher and the workshop Kane had set up for her.
How she’d managed to create quite a bit of primateria but emerged from her stupor certain she was on the brink of death.
She didn’t tell Jules about the kiss, though. She couldn’t bring herself to say the words aloud, let alone weather the horrified reaction she knew would follow.
“Okay,” he said slowly once she had finished. “So nothing we didn’t already expect, then. But how are you going to create that key? I’ve never heard of anything like it.”
We, he said. Because it was always the two of them, always together, no matter what the circumstances were. Relief spread through Zaria. That, at least, hadn’t changed. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’m worried about that one. It might take me a few attempts.”
The problem with primateria was that you had to know what you wanted from it. If it didn’t work, you couldn’t just stuff it in a different invention. You had to reconsider your plan and start over.
Jules ran a hand through his hair. “Kane is taking advantage of you, and you know it.”
“Of course I do,” Zaria said dryly. “That’s the whole purpose of our agreement. He needs an alchemologist. We’re not exactly common.”
Jules stood, rage hardening the lines of his face.
Zaria thought it was directed at her until he said, “Why the hell would your father teach you alchemology knowing full well what it does to a person? Why would he leave you with all his commissions? What kind of father does that to their only child?”
“It was his life,” Zaria said after a brief moment of contemplation.
She’d asked herself the same thing countless times.
“I think… it was all he had to give me. To ensure I could make a living after he was gone. One that didn’t involve the streets or the factories.
Not to mention he needed my help while he was alive, especially after Cecile left.
” The walls around her heart seemed to tighten as she said the dead woman’s name.
There was a beat of silence. Jules was breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling in quick succession.
When he lifted his chin, his gaze was sharp.
“We need to get you out of London. Away from these commissions and whoever it is that wants to hurt you. And if that means working with Kane…” He shook his head, pressing his fists against his eyes. “I’m in.”
“You are?”
“Yeah. Let me help you. For real, this time.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I want to,” he said firmly. “We’re positive the necklace is the source?”
She nodded.
“Well then. Someone’s going to have to help you run from Kane when you steal that necklace out from under his nose.” Jules appeared to relish the thought, a small grin ghosting his lips.
Zaria returned it, but his words made her think. Would Kane be desperate enough to get the necklace that he would be willing to kill her for it? Willing to kill Jules if he got in the way?
She already knew the answer. Nothing would stop Kane from doing whatever it took if he thought Fletcher’s life was on the line. He’d already made that exceedingly clear. Would she be willing to kill him, though, if it came down to it? If it was her life or Kane’s?
She didn’t know. And that was both very stupid and very dangerous.
“It’s going to be tricky,” she warned Jules. “Ward threatened Fletcher’s life if Kane doesn’t bring him the necklace. Kane won’t let it go easily.”
Jules grimaced. “We’ll just have to outsmart him, then.”
Zaria spent the next two days in a blur of creation. And this time, she brought Jules with her.
She returned to Cecile’s old workshop as promised, first completing the aleuite explosives, then the nonlethal ammunition Kane had requested.
The latter was tricky: Primateria existed only in a certain form, and attempting to dilute its effects rather than exacerbate them was relatively foreign terrain to Zaria.
Next, she worked on the atomizing adhesive, which would disintegrate the window.
Jules was by her side for much of it, and although she still refused to teach him to create primateria, she did show him how she created the inventions themselves.
Soon he was handing her the tools and pieces she needed, and was even mixing chemicals with careful precision.
He was more of a watch-and-learn type of person, which was a relief, because verbal explanations weren’t Zaria’s strong suit.
It was slow work, mainly because he forced Zaria to pause whenever illness seemed to be creeping up on her, but in the end, it cut back on time spent dry heaving in the corner of the room.
Kane never showed up personally, and she didn’t stop to think about why that might be. She was too busy being relieved. The last thing she needed was him distracting her from the tasks at hand.
On the last day before the Exhibition, Zaria came to the workshop alone.
Jules had been needed at the pawnshop, and she’d told him she wanted to add the finishing touches to her inventions.
In reality, she still had one last bit of primateria to create: the one that would finally make her parautoptic key work.
She hoped. She’d made several attempts so far, and none left her with enough confidence that she felt prepared to pass the key on to Kane.
The problem, naturally, was that she had no way to test it.
She was relying on a combination of guessing and gut instinct, but there was no way to be certain the thing would work when the time came.
Zaria took an unsteady breath, staring at the materials on the table in front of her.
The past few days had left her worse off than she cared for Jules to know.
She scarcely ate, and when she did, her body rejected it.
Sleep was a hard-won thing, but once she found it, it was a struggle to rise again.
More than once she’d emerged from the fog of creation forgetting where she was.
Every so often, she would press a hand to the center of her chest, anticipating—and fearing—that she might feel the very moment when her heart decided to quit altogether.
And yet here she was, lighting a candle one last time.
Blood already beaded on her arm, the pain of the cut lost in the agony that radiated through the rest of her body.
Zaria let it drip into the flame. Her heart stuttered, off-kilter in a way that was becoming disturbingly familiar.
Sweat beaded on her brow. She added the soulsteel with shaking hands and bit down on her tongue so hard that she tasted iron and salt.
Then she let go.
With all the practice she’d had this week, it should have been getting easier.
And it was—at least in the beginning. She pictured her intentions with ease.
The rush came shortly after, but the light that usually accompanied it was dimmer.
Perhaps it was only Zaria’s imagination, but darkness seemed to be growing, expanding inside of her.
She clung to the fleeting high as she searched wildly for the hook, for the thing that would yank her back to the surface, but her mindscape was as dark and blank as a dreamless sleep.
She was drowning.
Even with her eyes closed, dizziness managed to take hold. It was the kind of dizziness that sent down lurching up and up lurching down, and there was only that horrible blankness as it spun and spun and spun around her.
Then there was nothing.