Chapter 24 #2
Overwhelm sabotaged Amaya’s amazement. It would take them all night to find something related to the Skystone conductor—and that was if they got lucky. If anything was even here.
Edmund hurried down to one of the first shelves, pulling out old tomes by the armful, but Amaya didn’t know where to begin.
“What are you thinking?” Sebastian asked, coming beside her and folding his arms over his broad chest.
“I just . . . I can’t believe this has been right under my feet this whole time.”
Amaya padded down the steps, running her hand along the cold, smooth rail.
The library was a time capsule, preserved so beautifully that she almost didn’t want to touch anything.
But she had to start somewhere, so she began weaving her way through the shelves, hoping something would capture her special attention.
Something eventually did, but it wasn’t a book.
Instead, Amaya’s eyes landed on a desk tucked into a corner, a single hanging lantern illuminating it from above.
A press board sat against the wall, pinned with old photos.
She recognized one of them as Ronan Pearce .
. . and the pretty, slender girl next to him was Amaya’s great-grandmother, Lucy.
The rest of the desk was littered with more faded photos, envelopes stuffed with crumbling letters, exotic mementos, fountain pens, drawings . . . and dozens of journals stacked on the desk and piled up on the floor.
Curiously, Amaya picked one up and ran a thumb along the spine, finding it engraved with the year 1797. She flipped it open. Property of Lucretia Albright was written in calligraphy on the inside.
Amaya regarded the stockpiled journals with renewed wonder. Were these all Lucretia’s? This might be it. These pages could contain all of her secrets . . . and all of Pearce’s.
The gravitas of her discovery forced her down into the desk chair, where she began sorting through her great-grandmother’s personal effects.
She examined all the drawings, all the photos, separating out the ones that contained Ronan and Lucy.
Once the desk was somewhat clear, she picked up the first journal and started reading.
Amaya had no concept of how long she sat there, but before she knew it, she’d read three of her great-grandmother’s journals from cover to cover.
Most of it was unimportant—merely the scatterbrained reflections of an introspective teenager.
But then Lucretia wrote about meeting airship inventor Ronan Pearce at a trade show, where he showcased a mechanical bird that could deliver mail, and the entire trajectory changed.
Instead of journaling about mundane daily activities, Lucy began writing about the novel gifts Ronan sent her and the stories he told about the cities he’d build in the sky.
She waxed poetic over his copper complexion and deep brown eyes.
Her adoration for Ronan deepened every time Amaya turned the page.
And Amaya kept turning the pages, sucked into the story.
Lucretia openly admired Ronan, championed every one of his accomplishments, spoke of how he’d changed the world and how, someday, she longed to join him in the sky.
She wrote of Ronan leaving on sabbatical in 1800, overwhelmed by his fame, but how he kept in touch via his mechanical bird—which he called a Postwing—and promised to be gone no longer than a year.
But he didn’t come back.
Amaya sped through the journals at increasing speed, skimming through them because she knew that wasn’t the end of their romance.
The explosion in the Marruvian Mountains in 1805, when the Aether Storm formed and Lucy became convinced Ronan was dead, wasn’t the end.
Lucretia’s wedding to Rufus Laley two years later wasn’t the end, either.
There was more, because if there wasn’t, Amaya wouldn’t exist.
Amaya’s fingers trembled as she tore through the pages, each one bringing her closer to the truth. She felt like she was engrossed in a romance novel, mapped out with all the predictable plot points she knew were coming but that captured her imagination anyway.
There wasn’t time to comb through every word, though, so Amaya skipped ahead to 1808: the year Ronan returned with a plethora of gifts for his lost lover—and blue eyes.
“Find anything?”
Amaya looked up from the journal she’d been reading to find Sebastian standing over her, leaning against the desk.
“Almost, I think. How long have we been here?”
“Hard to say.” Sebastian looked up at the ceiling as if he’d see the sky instead of stone. “Six hours?”
“Three hours!” Edmund shouted from across the library. “I have a timepiece!”
Sebastian groaned and rubbed his eyes. “I’m so sick of reading.”
“We could stay the night?”
They’d prepared for the possibility of this operation spanning a couple of days, and weren’t about to leave empty-handed until they’d combed every inch of this place.
“We might have to,” Sebastian said. “I wouldn’t mind giving your staff plenty of time to send that lieutenant, so he can do an investigation and find nothing.”
“Good point.” Victor catching them here was pretty much the worst-case scenario. Amaya glanced down at Lucretia’s journal, then back up at Sebastian. “I’m going to get back to this. Holler when you find something?”
“Find something,” Sebastian grumbled as he walked away. “Like finding a feather in a stormcloud.”
Amaya read late into the night until she wound up curled into a fluffy chair with a dusty blanket pulled over her knees, periodically nodding off. Lucy journaled more when Ronan was around, which slowed Amaya’s progress, but if she skimmed this part, she’d miss something important.
Lucy wrote about the beautiful stone inside her locket, her extraordinary lake house, the library hidden in the wardrobe, and how she would meet Ronan there in secret. She wrote about finding out she was pregnant and realizing it was Ronan’s child.
But what about the missing piece? Where was the Skystone’s conductor?
Amaya didn’t find any reference to it until she reached the end of the lengthy 1808 journal.
Amaya blinked sleepily, then read the passage again. The words seemed to blur, not making any sense. Map? What map?
She looked up from her reading, irritated. Were they going to have to go somewhere else to find where Pearce hid this thing? How long would this take?
When her eyes refocused on the library instead of Lucretia’s handwriting, the answer stared her in the face.
The map. The mural at the back of the library.
Amaya almost didn’t want to hope. Was it really that simple?
“Sebastian!” Edmund, who somehow wasn’t sleepy after nearly six hours of non-stop reading, came racing out from the stacks with a massive tome. Sebastian, who was passed out in an armchair near Amaya, jerked awake.
“What?” he asked, quickly scanning their surroundings for any threats.
“I cannot believe you’re actually sleeping. Look at this!” Edmund plopped the book down on Sebastian’s lap.
“What am I looking at, Ed?”
“Pearce’s process for crafting Class Fours. Class Fours! Look. It says he combined blood with Aether to get the relics to merge with the body. And look! The formulas are here and everything!”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means that if we can find Pearce inside the Skyvault and get him to disperse the storm, we could actually make more of these things. This could change the world!”
Edmund continued to ramble while Amaya stood, still fixated on the map. She held the journal to her chest as she approached the mural. The antiquated outline of Veridian was clear underneath the layers of paint, but the visual focal points were the sky cities and the Aether Storm.
Maybe there was another keyhole. Amaya ran her hands over the wall in search of a relief where she could insert the necklace and unlock the map’s secrets. She felt the textures of the paint—the brush strokes, the rough stone—but no indentation.
She looked back at the journal entry.
That had to mean the Skystone was the key, right? Why else connect the locket to the map at such a critical time?
As far as Amaya knew, the Skystone couldn’t be activated on land. But maybe . . .
She opened the locket and took a deep breath, pressing her finger to the stone. It flared to life, casting a soft blue glow over the map.
Amaya stared in bewilderment, hardly able to breathe.
“Amaya?” The light caught Sebastian’s attention, and he came running over with Edmund. “What are you doing?”
The map answered the question for her when a vibrant streak of blue cut across the painting, illuminating a path. It was like a secret message written in invisible ink.
Amaya’s pulse quickened. Could this really be it?
She took off the necklace and held the stone to the map like a lantern, following the painted blue trail. It led away from the sky cities and the Aether Storm, across the map to, of all places, Minerva. The Skystone illuminated the city’s outline in the map’s far corner.
“Pearce was originally from Minerva,” Edmund said in awe. “This is incredible. He must have infused the paint with Aether—strong Aether. That’s why the stone works with it.”
“Pearce was an artist, too?” Amaya asked. For some reason, she hadn’t envisioned him personally painting this.
“Pearce was everything.”
While Amaya held the stone, the artificer traced his long fingers around the city.
“There’s something here,” Edmund said, a tremor of excitement in his voice. He pressed his hand into the city expectantly.
Amaya held her breath, waiting for something to happen, but the city didn’t budge.
“Ugh, it’s stuck. Bas?” Edmund said.
Sebastian hovered behind them. “What?”
“It’s a button. You’re stronger than me—push it.” Edmund waved vaguely at Minerva’s outline. “Make yourself useful.”
“Useful? What do you call getting us in here with my relic and closing the door?”
“For goodness’ sake, push the button,” Amaya said.
Sighing, Sebastian complied and, with some effort, pushed the city of Minerva into the wall. The stone groaned, grinding against itself as it sank back, leaving an oddly shaped cavity.
For a moment, nothing happened. But then, all three of them jumped back as two mechanical hands snaked out of the hole. They were crude, significantly more so than Malcolm or Graven’s automatons, and squeaked with unoiled joints, but they held together.
One of them held a small wooden sphere in its grasp, ornamented with gold swirls and emblazoned with an eight-pointed star resembling a compass rose. A clasp below the star, secured with a pin and delicate chain, appeared to keep the two halves of the sphere together.
The other hand was empty, extended with its palm facing up.
Edmund immediately went for the orb, trying to grab it from the mechanical hand. But it held firm, refusing to relinquish its grip no matter how hard Edmund tugged.
“Careful, you’ll break it!” Amaya said. Edmund withdrew and shook his hand, huffing in frustration while Amaya peered at the sphere. “Is it a relic?”
“I can’t tell if I can’t pick it up, can I?” Edmund grumbled.
Amaya examined the other hand and noticed a groove in its palm. She traced it, recognizing the familiar shape instantly. Without hesitation, she closed the locket and rested it in the mechanical hand.
The result was instantaneous. The robotic fingers whirred, clicking open the necklace like they knew exactly what was inside, and prying the Skystone from its setting.
“Shit,” Sebastian said, stepping up. “It’s breaking the—”
“No, no, no, no!” Edmund reached for the hands as the second one opened the wooden sphere. Inside was a faceted, transparent crystal housing a set of astronomical rings.
“Stop it!” Amaya pulled Edmund back. “It’s supposed to do this!”
But even she couldn’t deny the twinge of anxiety that came with seeing the Skystone locket dismantled.
The mechanical hands continued their work, plucking the crystal out of the sphere and dropping the Skystone inside.
Amaya gasped, thinking the stone or the crystal might shatter, but the Skystone was no longer beholden to gravity.
It hung suspended in the center of the crystal, glimmering while the hands worked together to seal it inside.
When they were done, they presented the necklace and the reassembled orb in tandem.
Amaya reached for the necklace while Edmund took the orb, immediately opening it to look at the stone in its new home. He adjusted his glasses and spun it around, studying every angle.
“Well?” Amaya put the necklace back on and tucked the pendant into her dress. “Is that it?”
Edmund nodded. “Yes. It’s the conductor.”