special . . . ,” she pushed on. Keep it together, Ayla. Don’t give up now.
The smile grew. There was nothing warm in it. “I have no answers for you, Handmaiden Ayla.”
“Why?” she challenged him. “Were you thrown out?”
“Of course not,” he said. “I can return anytime I wish.”
Ayla felt another rush of satisfaction. Automa or not, Kinok was not so different from a human man. His pride was his weakest spot.
“But I thought it was impossible to get back once you leave,” she said, pretending to frown in confusion. “I thought it was impossible to retrace the route through the mountains.”
His eyes flickered sideways for a split second.
A split second that she watched carefully. Automae weren’t the only ones who knew how to spot what they were looking for. “There are ways,” he said, and then stood up. “We’re done for now. Stay here.”
Then, moving with just a little more speed and grace than a human could have, he left the room. The door clicked shut behind him before Ayla could really even process the fact that right before he’d left, he had grabbed the necklace from the bookshelf.
It was gone again.
And she was alone.
She forced herself to wait an entire five minutes, counting the seconds, before she felt certain Kinok wouldn’t be returning immediately. Then she leaped out of the chair and headed straight for the corner of the study—the spot where Kinok’s eyes had flickered just for a moment.
Even leeches had their tells.
At first glance, there was nothing interesting at all about the corner: there was the edge of a bookshelf and then nothing else, just solid stone wall, solid stone floor. Ayla ran her hands over the wall, checking for a give, a hinge, anything. She knocked quietly against the wall and the floor, but there weren’t any parts that sounded like they might be hollow.
But she was sure the safe would be somewhere around here.
She ran her hands over the bookshelf next. It was a sturdy piece of furniture, made of the same dark cherry wood as Kinok’s desk. Quickly, more and more paranoid about Kinok’s return as the minutes dragged on, Ayla began checking each book on the shelf—lifting each one carefully so as not to disturb the dust on the shelves, flipping through the pages, searching for anything remotely off. She found nothing on the first shelf or the second. She knelt down to search the third and final shelf, the bottommost one, trying to be as careful as possible while still moving quickly. Surely Kinok would be back any moment now. . . .
There.
Hidden behind one of the books from the middle of the shelf, only visible because Ayla was kneeling, there was a tiny, nearly invisible seam in the wooden back of the bookshelf.
Heart pounding, Ayla set the book aside and reached out, running her fingers along the seam. It made a rectangular shape, barely larger than her palm. Like a tiny door. She pressed at the edges, trying to figure out how to open it—and there, yes yes yes, a tiny give when she pressed at one side of the seam. She pressed harder and the tiny door sprung open, revealing—
Metal.
The edge of what looked like a thin metal box. A safe. It was similar to the one Crier kept her finest necklaces in.
This one must have been barely an inch thick to fit so perfectly in the back of the bookshelf, painstakingly hidden by the tiny wooden door. Ayla leaned forward, wondering if she could maybe pry it out with her fingernails . . . but no, it was still half embedded in the wood, she’d need to remove all the books and then replace them afterward in the exact right order, which would take time she definitely didn’t have, and even then she could see part of a lock on the front of the safe, a series of little clockwork gears, all labeled with strange alchemical symbols. Some she recognized: the eight-point star, the symbols for salt, mercury, and sulfur; body, mind, and spirit.
The language of the Makers. She didn’t know it, but Benjy did. He’d learned that at the temple, as a child.
Breathless with her discovery, Ayla returned the book to the shelf and went back to sit in her chair, mind racing. So she wouldn’t be able to open the safe alone. But she knew it had to be opened. She knew, with near absolute certainty—the kind that only came when you were so close to