Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,14

false floor, and looked at the key. Then she gritted her teeth, stiletto still in her left hand, and picked it up with her right.

Silence. Perhaps she’d dreamed it, or imagined it.

Then the voice spoke up in her mind:

Sancia flinched. “I don’t think so,” she said. “If my chair starts talking to me, it’s going out the goddamn window. What the hell are you?”

“I don’t need to tell a damn object my name!” said Sancia angrily. “I’m also not going to introduce myself to the doorknob!”

“What merchant house made you?” she demanded.

“What merchant house made you? Dandolo? Candiano? Morsini, Michiel? Which one of them made this…this thing you are, whatever it is?”

“A scrived device!” she said, exasperated. “Altered, augmented, elevated, whatever damn term the campo people use! You’re a rig, aren’t you?”

Clef was silent for a long while. Then he said,

“You don’t know what scriving is? It’s the…it’s the symbols that are drawn on you, these things that make you who you are, what you are!” She looked closer at his tooth. She didn’t know much about scriving—as far as she was aware, it took about a thousand certifications and degrees to do it—but she hadn’t ever seen sigils like these. “Where did you come from?”

said Clef.

“Okay. Then tell me.”

He said the word with palpable contempt.

Sancia hesitated. She wasn’t sure why she was so reluctant to tell Clef her name—perhaps it felt like something out of a children’s story, the foolish girl who gives her name away to the wicked demon. But finally she relented, and said, “Sancia.”

He said the word like it was the name of a grotesque dish.

“Yes. My name is Sancia.”

said Clef.

“And where did you come from, Clef?” she said, frustrated.

said Clef.

“You…what? The dark? You’re from the dark?”

“Where is this dark place?”

“So they shipped you over the ocean. Yeah. I figured that. Who shipped you over here?”

“Where were you before the dark?”

There was a note of anxiety in his voice at that.

“What was with you in the dark?” asked Sancia.

He paused.

“For how long?”

Clef laughed miserably.

Sancia was silent. That sounded like something akin to hell to her—and it sounded like Clef was still shaken by it.

said Clef.

“This is my apartment.”

Sancia decided to cut to it. “Clef…You know I stole you—right?”

“I don’t know. From a safe.”

“I’m panicked,” said Sancia, “because to get you, I had to do a ton of things that could get me harpered in a blink.”

Sighing, Sancia quickly tried to tell Clef that