"Doing it," Claire pointed out. Myrnin was irritated, but that didn't bother her, not anymore. She didn't take anything he said personally. "And I do have the right to ask questions, don't I?"
"Why? Because you put up with me?" He waved his hand before she could respond. "Yes, yes, all right. Amelie was in a bad way in those days - she had lost everything, you see, and it's hard for us to start over and over and over. Eternal youth doesn't mean you don't get tired of the constant struggles. So . . . by the time she wrote to me again, she had done something quite insane."
"What?"
He made a vague gesture around him. "Look around you."
Claire did. "Um . . . the lab?"
"She bought the land and began construction on the town of Morganville. It was meant to be a refuge for our people, a place we could live openly." He sighed. "Amelie is quite stubborn. By the time I arrived to tell her it was a fool's errand, she was already committed to the experiment. All I could do was mitigate the worst of it, so that she wouldn't get us all slaughtered."
Claire had forgotten all about the box (and even Bob the spider), so focused was she on Myrnin's voice, but when he paused, she remembered, and reached in again to pull out an ornate gold hand mirror. It was definitely girly, and besides, the glass was shattered in the middle, only a few silvery pieces still remaining. "Trash?" she asked, and held it up. Myrnin plucked it out of her hand and set it aside.
"Most definitely not," he said. "It was my mother's."
Claire blinked. "You had a - " Myrnin's wide stare challenged her to just try to finish that sentence, and she surrendered. "Wow, okay. What was she like? Your mother?"
"Evil," he said. "I keep this to keep her spirit away."
That made . . . about as much sense as most things Myrnin said, so Claire let it go. As she rummaged through the stuff in the box - mostly more papers, but a few interesting trinkets - she said, "So, are you looking for something in particular, or just looking?"
"Just looking," he said, but she knew that tone in his voice, and he was lying. The question was, was he lying for a reason, or just for fun? Because with Myrnin, it could go either way.
Claire's fingers closed on something small - a delicate gold chain. She pulled, and slowly, a necklace came out of the mess of paper, and spun slowly in the light. It was a locket, and inside was a small, precise portrait of a Victorian-style young woman. There was a lock of hair woven into a tiny braid around the edges, under the glass.
Claire rubbed the old glass surface with her thumb, frowning, and then recognized the face staring back at her. "Hey! That's Ada!"
Myrnin grabbed the necklace, stared for a moment at the portrait, and then closed his eyes. "I thought I'd lost this," he said. "Or perhaps I never had it in the first place. But here she is, after all."
And just like that, Ada flickered into being across the room. She wasn't alive, not anymore. Ada was a two-dimensional image, a kind of projection, from the weird steampunk computer located beneath Myrnin's lab; that computer was the actual Ada, including parts of the original girl. Ada's image still wore Victorian skirts and a high-necked blouse, and her hair was up in a complicated bun, leaving wisps around her face. She didn't look quite right - more like a really good computer generation of a person than a person. "My picture," she said. Her voice was weirdly electronic because it used whatever speakers were around; Claire's phone became part of the surround sound experience, which was so creepy that she automatically reached down and switched it off.
Ada sent her a dark look as the ghost swept through things in her way - tables, chairs, lights.
"Yes," Myrnin said, as calmly as if he spoke to electronic ghosts every day - which, in fact, he did."I thought I'd lost it. Would you like to see it?"
Ada stopped, and her image floated in the air in the middle of an open expanse of the floor without casting a shadow. "No," she said. Without Claire's phone adding to the mix, her voice came out of an ancient radio speaker in the back of the lab, faint and scratchy. "No need. I remember the day I gave it to you."
"So do I." Myrnin's voice remained quiet, and Claire couldn't honestly tell if what they were talking about was a good memory, or a bad one.
"Why were you looking for it?"
"I wasn't." That, Claire was almost sure, was another lie. "Ada, I asked you to please stop coming here, except when I call you. What if I'd had other visitors?"
Ada's delicate, not-quite-living face twisted into an expression of contempt. "Who would visit you?"
"An excellent point." His tone cooled and hardened and took on edges. "I don't want you coming here unless I call you. Are we understood, or do I have to come and alter your programming? You won't thank me for it."
She glared at him with eyes made of static and ice, and finally turned - a two-dimensional turn, like a cardboard cutout - and flashed at top speed through the solid wall.
Gone.
Myrnin let out a slow breath.
"What the heck was that?" Claire asked. Ada creeped her out, and besides, Ada really didn't like her. Claire was, in some sense, a rival for Myrnin's attention, and Ada . . .
Ada was kind of in love with him.
Myrnin looked down at the necklace and the portrait lying flat in his palm. For a moment, he didn't say anything, and Claire honestly thought he wouldn't bother. Then, without looking up, he said, "I did care for her, you know." She thought he was saying it to himself more than to her. "Ada wanted me to turn her, and I did. She was with me for almost a hundred years before . . ."