Crier's War - Nina Varela Page 0,65

of everyone around her speaking in half-truths and riddles and cryptic puzzles.

“Your curiosity pleases me, Lady Crier,” he said, smiling. “Let me show you something.”

He led her down the hallway the same way they’d come, toward his quarters in the west wing. Crier hung back when he unlocked the door to his room and looked over his shoulder, waiting for her to follow him inside.

“What are you going to show me?” she asked, increasingly suspicious.

“Just come inside,” he said. “I promise, this is something you want to see.”

She trailed after him into the room. She’d never been inside his sleeping quarters before, which were on a whole other floor from the private study he kept on the lower levels, and she felt a moment of caution as she entered. It was a large but relatively barren space, the quarters of a temporary guest, with a bed and a desk and some trunks of clothing and a massive tapestry against the side wall. Crier couldn’t imagine what he would possibly want to show her, unless it was some sort of bauble from his many travels. She waited for him to retrieve something from one of the trunks, but instead Kinok went straight for the far wall of the room.

He pressed his hand to one of the stones on the wall, and a section of the wall shifted under his touch—a hidden passageway. Crier knew there were a few of them in the palace, most intended as escape routes in case of attack, some leading to private rooms like this one.

The door opened with the sound of stone scraping against stone, and Kinok looked back at Crier again, eyes glittering. “Coming, my lady?”

She followed him into the hidden room and stopped.

Unlike the bedchamber behind them, this room was anything but barren. It was small, barely bigger than a closet, but it looked like one of the alchemical laboratories Crier had seen illustrated in scientific texts: there were vials everywhere, ranging in size from the length of her little finger to large-bellied glass decanters that could have held half a barrel of wine. Some of the vials were connected with thin glass tubes; some were pouring smoke; some seemed to be empty and others were filled with a deep purplish-black liquid. The walls of the room were plastered with diagrams of human and Automa bodies, cross sections showing the veins, the muscles, the intricate spider web of the nervous system. When Crier breathed in, the air tasted acrid and metallic.

“What is this?” she asked, stunned. Does my father know about this?

“My little experiment,” said Kinok. He stooped down, inspecting one of the vials filled with dark liquid. “Lady Crier, have you heard of Tourmaline?”

“Vaguely,” she said. “It’s a type of stone, right?”

“Yes and no. Tourmaline is also the name of a compound I have dedicated my life to discovering. There are people—Makers, Midwives, Scyres—who believe that it is possible to create a compound that could fuel Automae indefinitely.”

Crier stared at the vials with new interest. “You mean, better than heartstone?”

“Tourmaline would make heartstone look about as effective for our Kind as human wine.” He glanced at her just in time to see her eyes widen, and a thin smile spread across his lips. “Imagine it—you wouldn’t have to imbibe something every day in order to keep surviving. You wouldn’t be dependent on the Iron Heart, on the shipments of heartstone, on those all-too-vulnerable trade routes. This is a substance that could be manufactured anywhere. You would just . . . live. Free of fear. Free of threat. And you would be so much stronger than you are now.”

“You . . . think we should not rely on the Iron Heart?”

“Of course we shouldn’t,” he said. “It is, and has always been, a finite resource. It’s no different from a diamond mine, Lady Crier. Eventually you run out of diamonds.”

Her eyes widened. “How long before we run out of heartstone?”

“No one knows. Not even the Watchers. But—I prefer to prepare for the worst. That way, I am never taken off guard.”

Crier absorbed this, reeling, but didn’t let herself forget why she was here in the first place. “But what does any of this have to do with ‘Yora’s heart’?”

“Ah. That, my lady, is simply another name for Tourmaline. I believe it originated from a human rumor, an old wives’ tale, about the history of Tourmaline. That is all.”

He turned away, effectively ending that line of questioning. Everything about his face and body language read