CHAPTER 34
Some demons never shut up. They keep hollering in your head till the day you die. Only way to quiet them is the grave… or a shot of whiskey, if you’re looking for something temporary.
—JACK CARROWAY
Edmund doesn’t show up for class next week.
I see his name on the attendance roll each morning, so it’s clear he’s joining online from his suite.
Curiosity spreads through the student body, teeming with questions and wild rumors, but even Tattletale has no idea why he’s absent.
People start circling Jack and Dickie—some out of concern, others out of nosiness—but the boys’ mouths stay shut like coffin lids.
Charlotte asks about Edmund every morning as we walk into the first-year Lecture Hall, glancing over her shoulder as if she half-expects him to come striding around the corner.
On the third day, when our hovercar lands in the parking lot of the first-year Lecture Hall, Jack finally answers.
“Ed’s taking a vacation.”
Charlotte slides her sunglasses down and squints at him. “A vacation in his suite?”
“That’s right.” Jack shrugs as he lights her cigarette. “It’s pretty big, darling.”
“Yeah, well, so is my toilet. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna swim in it.”
Dickie, sprawled across the back seat of the hovercar, looks up from his nail file and smirks. “If Ed didn’t tell you himself, it means it’s none of your business.”
Charlotte grumbles through a cloud of smoke, still unconvinced, still curious.
I’m not. After what I heard on the balcony and saw through those iced-over windows, I’ll never be curious again. Mom’s voice loops in my head, day and night now: Prying leads to regret, if you’re lucky, and to ruin, if you’re not.
I know I was lucky Edmund didn’t spot me through the window and that I was able to slip out of his suite unnoticed. And yet, when I remember the shreds of skin hanging from his cheek and the long, winding trails of his blood on the fencing room floor, I don’t feel lucky.
At night, when I toss and turn in my sheets, unable to sleep, it’s because of the way his hands shuddered against his back, fingers straining against the force it took to keep them there.
He could’ve stopped Phillipa. A single retaliatory strike, and he could’ve broken her in half. But instead, he let it happen.
I don’t know why.
In class and during training, I do my best to focus, though I only ever succeed halfway.
Somewhere inside me, faint as a fingernail flick at the edge of my heart, Edmund is there, too.
I think about him even when I shouldn’t, wondering if he’s healing, if he’s getting surgery, and if anyone apart from Pinkies is with him now.
I think about Rosamund, too. I recall seeing scratches on her arm during our Civilized World History lecture. Now, in the same way I know Edmund isn’t cheating on Irene, I know those wounds weren’t caused by her monkey either.
Edmund and Rosamund are both cursed. But only one of them is passing the curse on to others.
Some afternoons, I find myself drifting toward the Blue Dormitory, walking the cobbled streets with a list of excuses prepared to linger in Edmund’s doorway long enough to catch a glimpse of him and know he’s okay. But I never make it past the entrance.
I know that if it came down to it, if I had to look him in the eyes and ask how he’s doing, I wouldn’t be able to keep the truth off my face. Then he’d know I saw what happened.
I spend the next few nights alone, either in my private study, where I’ve fixed the seashells Edmund gave me to the walls like trophies, or curled on my window seat beside the box he gave me after I lied about why I quit fencing.
At first, I can’t bring myself to open it.
I tell myself I don’t deserve what’s inside after earning it under false pretenses.
But I know Edmund. He’ll ask about the gift eventually, wondering if it’s helping me, and I’ll need an answer.
So, after a few days of battling the urge to lift the lid, I carry the box to my bedroom and finally open it.
The device inside is smaller than I expected, a smooth obsidian orb about the size of a plum, with smoky tendrils curling inside like a storm trapped beneath glass. I turn it over in my hands, unsure how it works, until I get an alert on my Bond:
Device detected: Connect?
I accept, and the orb begins to pulse, gradually warming in my palm.
Then, as it awakens with a flash of light, the bedroom around me changes.
A foamy wave coalesces before my eyes, so real I instinctively duck as it rolls over my head and crashes into the closet.
From there, color blooms across the ceiling, cobalt blues blending with pearly whites, until it resembles open sky over an endless ocean.
I breathe in deeply, briefly tasting the tang of salt.
Aside from a few glitches in the whitecaps, the scene feels real.
The orb is reading my Bond, tracking tiny changes in my brain patterns and turning them into projections I can see, hear, and nearly taste.
It’s showing me what I’m feeling, every emotion from the smallest hint of anxiety to the largest swell of fury.
Tall, stormy waves break against seaweed-strewn shores, while other parts of me remain shallow and unmoving.
There are also gentle ripples, spreading aimlessly without a clear source.
But beneath it all, there’s a deeper current, as strong as a riptide, pulling everything in a single direction I can’t see the end of.
I didn’t realize I felt this much, this wildly and fractured.
I stare down at the orb and smile as I realize it’s a Florence Engine.
The same device that half the Civilized World lost its mind over when Winston Glass’s company, Cerebrum, unveiled it on a live broadcast filled with shiny smiles and grand, sweeping promises.
The Florence Engine was everywhere for a month, even on holographic street billboards near my home.
But that was years ago, so long I nearly forgot it existed.
The Florence Engine never went into production.
Only a few prototypes were handed out, and only to those with the right last names, the right blood color, or both.
The rest vanished into legal limbo. There’s still a case working its way through the courts, a fierce fight over patents and profits, but above all, legacy.
What most people don’t realize, or maybe choose to ignore, is that the inventor of the Florence Engine wasn’t Winston Glass.
It was his son.
I use the Florence Engine late into the night and again the next day, right after class. I close the door, draw the drapes, sit on the floor, and let the orb read me.
It’s incredible, almost frightening, how the device reaches into me, shaping feelings into form and translating whatever is tangled inside into light, color, and sound.
Half the time, I don’t even realize what I’m feeling until I see the images projected in front of me, from a garden blooming in the dark to a crack of lightning across the ceiling.
It’s beautiful. Hypnotic. I can’t stop using it.
And all I can think, with a dull, painful certainty, is how much the Florence Engine would’ve helped back when I was still allowed to fence.
I could’ve trained with it, mapped the terrain of my mind, and learned to recognize and redirect my anger before it overtook me.
That’s what Edmund did, and it’s what he wants for me, too.
I use the Florence Engine every night while training with my fencing stick until midway through the week, when Dickie bursts my self-made cocoon with a text:
“Highball time, broad.”
I sigh as I cling to the final flickers of sunset swirling around me, flame-orange and petal-pink, still warm with emotion. The last thing I want to do is play cards. But I promised. So I stash the Florence Engine in my pocket.
Dickie and I stay in our own suites while we play, connected through our Bonds.
Dickie lounges on his sofa like a spoiled cat, half-buried in ambiguous electronic devices and tangled wires.
He’s wearing an orange brocade robe, sipping chocolate milk through a glass straw, and working through a tiered tray of truffles and sugar-filled pastries as he explains the rules.
The game is impossible.
“Wait. How did my last four cards un-play themselves?” I snap, staring dizzily at the spinning virtual table.
“You triggered a recursion without resolving the anchor condition,” Dickie says, as if that explains anything.
“What?”
He sighs, slaps down a card, and the table resets to round three. Half my deck is missing, and the other half is made up of cards I’ve never seen before. “You’ve got to think in cycles, broad. Think recursively. It’s not a staircase; it’s a spiral.”
“That means nothing to me.”
Dickie leans back, clucking his tongue. “Blazes, you’re even worse at this than Jack. And Jack once tried to play a Highball with a void hand. Nearly broke causality. We had to reset the whole table and apologize to the AI.”
“Just calling me stupid would’ve been simpler than all that,” I mutter as Dickie throws down another card.
The virtual table flashes, reshuffling two timelines and collapsing my whole strategy. My head spins.
“This is what you do for fun?”
“This is how Oranges relax. It’s like a foot massage for the brain.”
“Right now, my foot might as well be my brain.”
I groan and slap down a wildcard. It hisses, then explodes into a cloud of smoke. The table resets, and suddenly it’s round six. Two of my cards have torn themselves in half. Dickie, meanwhile, has already played three moves ahead.
Watching him, I finally understand why Oranges scare people and why most don’t bother learning to fence. Dickie doesn’t need to throw up fists; he just throws down a card, reroutes time, and grins while your brain leaks out of your ears.
“You in, or are you going to let the recursion eat your anchor card?” he asks sweetly.
“I’m trying,” I huff.