A Heart Made of Glass and Lies

POV: Felix

By the second morning, Ma Tilly's kitchen no longer smelled of onion soup.

It smelled of hot brass and lamp spirit and the thin sweet tang of something Felix refused to name aloud. The big iron stove, which had fed the Row for thirty years, now held a crucible. The scrubbed pine table was covered in oilcloth, then in pins, then in calipers, three bell jars, a row of tiny lenses laid out like surgical instruments, and a hand-lettered sign Hollis had tacked to the door: DO NOT ASK FELIX ANYTHING BEFORE NOON.

Felix ignored the sign. He was too busy being afraid.

He stood at the table with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a jeweler's loupe screwed into his right eye, looking at a ball of glass the size of a grapefruit. It was clear as water. It was cold in his hands. It was empty, and an empty thing could not fool anyone.

"It's dead," he said.

"It's glass," said Hollis, from the window seat, without looking up from the strip of brass he was filing.

"It's dead glass. Any Assayer in the city will hear that. Father's man is trained to listen to the note a sphere gives when you ring it, and a true piece of memory-glass sings. This thing thuds." He turned it over. "I need something real in it."

"Real how?"

Felix pulled the loupe from his eye and reached into the inner pocket of his coat, the one that had been wet through on Pier Nine and had dried stiff and salt-white. He took out a small twist of oilcloth. It was no bigger than a lozenge. He laid it on the table and unfolded it with his fingertips.

Inside lay a pinch of pale gray powder. It shone faintly, even in the daylight, like frost on a window.

"Is that what I think it is?" said Hollis.

"Lumenglass dust." Felix's voice was very quiet. "From the floor of the Undervault. After we cracked the vault, there was a drift of it where the second seal had broken. I swept it up with my cuff. I don't know why. I think I just wanted something to hold." He touched the edge of the cloth. "It's maybe a thimbleful. It's all the real glass I'll ever have. And it's the only thing that'll make the Assayer sing the right note."

Hollis looked at it, and then at him.

"You kept it for two weeks."

"I keep everything. It's an affliction."

"Remind me to call it something else," said Hollis, and went back to his filing.

…

They worked all that day and into the night.

Felix fused the dust into the heart of the sphere, a gram at a time, in a way he had no intention of ever writing down. Hollis shaped the valve: a tiny brass mechanism no larger than a shirt button, so fine that he had to wear Felix's lens and breathe out through his nose to keep his hand steady. Twice his fingers went numb in the middle of a cut and the metal bent wrong. Twice he swore, set the piece aside, and started again. The third time it held.

"Three days of feeling," he said, flexing his hand. "For a button."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It's a good button."

Roz came in at dusk. She had said little to anyone in two days, and she moved around the kitchen as if every floorboard might wake someone. She sat at the end of the table without being asked, with her hands on her knees. Felix saw her look at the sphere, then away.

"Show me what you need," she said.

He explained. A true Heart beat once an hour, with a pulse as slow and steady as a clock. For his, he needed a seed of rhythm: a single thread of heartbeat, woven into the core, that would tick over in the dark while the valve did the rest. Nobody else in Merrick Bay could do it. He did not say that. He did not have to.

"It'll cost you," he said. "I'm sorry. There's always a price."

"I know." She almost smiled. "I've been paying it all month."

She took the sphere in both hands and bent over it, as she might have over a woman in labor. For a long minute she did nothing. Then she began to hum, so quietly that he felt it more than heard it, and the dust in the glass turned over and began to glow.

It was a lovely thing to watch. A small pink light, deep in the clear, the exact shade of a candle through a closed hand. It pulsed once, slow and wondering. And then, very faintly, it went out.

Roz let go and sat back, gray around the mouth.

"What was it?" said Felix.

She was quiet a moment. "There was a hymn," she said. "The one the sisters sang at Gray Willow, at Vespers. I used to hum it when I was frightened. I've sung it since I was six." She laughed, a small unsteady sound. "I can feel the shape of it. Where it used to be. But I couldn't tell you a word."

"Roz, I'm sorry—"

"Don't. Please." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "It's a good heart. Ask it to beat."

…

Dex found him on the roof at dawn.

The sun was a ragged red line behind the cranes. The harbor was iron-colored and very still, and the air smelled of low tide and wet slate. Felix had come up with the sphere in a wad of flannel and a pocketful of small tools, because the test needed daylight, and because he had been awake for thirty hours and was past thinking.

Dex lowered himself onto the slates beside him, with his bad leg stuck out and his cane across his knees. He looked as if he had not slept either.

"You asked me for a word," he said. "Last night. Through the door."

"I did."

"I'm here."

Felix took a breath.

"I'll build it," he said. "I'll build the best fake the city has ever seen. But I've conditions."

"Name them."

"The flash. Whatever the sphere does, in the sun, I design it. I won't have it hurt anyone. Not a scorch, not a blister. It blinds for a minute and no more. If I find out you've changed it, even by a grain, I'll walk." His voice shook, and he made it stop. "And rule three. You've said it a hundred times and I want you to say it to me. Nobody dies in this, unless he's the one holding the gun."

"Nobody dies," said Dex, "unless he's the one holding the gun."

"Not even him."

Dex looked at the harbor.

"Your father."

"Not even him. I want to be able to look at myself, afterward. I can't do that and be someone who planned it." He swallowed. "I burned a man in a coat, Dex. I'll carry that. I won't carry another."

A long silence. A gull cried somewhere over the water.

"Agreed," said Dex. "Rule three. On my ledger."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. You're the one who's making me better at this."

Felix unwrapped the flannel.

He had built a tiny mechanism into the base of the sphere, a thing of three small lenses and a shutter, no bigger than a thimble. He did not explain it. He set the globe on the slates, on its stand, facing east, and stepped back with Dex's hand on his sleeve.

The sun came over the cranes.

For a moment, nothing. Then a thin red thread of light touched the glass, slid across the lenses, and bent. A white point appeared inside the sphere, brighter than a candle, brighter than a lamp. It bloomed. It flared out through the clear walls in a soundless flash, and every gull on the roof, and every pigeon in the belfry, rose at once with a roar of wings.

Felix clapped a hand over his eyes. When he took it away the sphere sat there, whole and innocent, with a faint white wisp of smoke curling off it into the morning.

"Well," said Dex, blinking. "That's not subtle."

"It isn't supposed to be."

"Does it hurt?"

"No." Felix let out a shaky breath. "It just makes you not able to see for a while. It's like looking at the sun. It's meant to."

Dex laughed. It was a short startled sound, like a hiccup.

"Mr. Whitcomb," he said, "you are the most frightening man I have ever met."

…

That evening, with the kitchen empty and the lamp turned low, Roz came back and sat down at the table and watched him polish the sphere with a cloth.

"Can I tell you something?"

"Of course."

"I listened to your father." She spoke carefully. "At the pier. I couldn't help it. I was across the water and the wind was right. I've never heard a heart like that."

Felix put down the cloth.

"What was it like?"

"Slow," said Roz. "Perfect. Like a metronome. When he gave the order, when he said what he said to you, it didn't change. Not one beat." She hesitated. "A heart never lies, Felix. Even when the mouth does. It tells you everything: the fear, the hurry, the grief. And his told me nothing. As if someone had shown it how."

"My father's heart never speeded up," said Felix. "I used to listen. When I was small. I used to climb into his lap in the study and put my ear against his waistcoat. I thought it was because he was brave."

"No," said Roz gently. "He learned not to let it say anything. That's a different thing. That's a man who's afraid of what it would say."

Felix looked down at the globe.

He had never thought of it like that. It had never once occurred to him that Augustus Whitcomb might be afraid. He thought of a man in a gray silk coat on a wet pier, with a smile that did not change. He thought of the watch that ticked half a beat late. And a strange, unwelcome ache rose in his throat, not forgiveness, nothing like forgiveness, but the faint outline of something that sat beside it.

"Thank you," he said.

"For what?"

"For telling me the truth."

"It's the only thing I've got," said Roz.

…

He worked on alone after she left.

The kitchen was dark except for the one lamp. The stove ticked as it cooled. The sphere sat on its stand in front of him, flawless, as clear as a drop of water, with a faint pink light turning slowly in its heart.

He took up the finest of Hollis's gravers and bent over the base.

He did not think. He did not plan. His hand moved of its own accord, steady and small, cutting a line into the glass on the underside of the stand where no Assayer would look and no one would ever see. One vertical. Two short horizontals, the top one longer.

An F.

It was the same F he had carved into the underside of every model he'd made as a boy. Into the little brass steamship. Into the clockwork bird. Into the scale model of the Meridian Dome that he'd made for his father's fortieth birthday, and given him with both hands, and watched him set on a high shelf in the study without a word. He had carved that letter every time, in the hope that someone would turn the thing over and find it.

I made this, it said. I made this for you.

He blew the shavings away.

Con la mia mano, he thought, absurdly. It was the only Italian he knew. His mother's, from a lullaby. With my own hand.

On the stand, the sphere gave a soft pulse, pink and slow. It was the first time he had seen it beat in the dark. It was beautiful. It was alive. It was perfect, and it was a lie, and he had made it.

I have just built, thought Felix, the most perfect heart of the most perfect liar in the world.

He did not say it aloud. He put out the lamp.