by Anne Nesbet
“There’s got to be a way out,” said Maya, keeping a firm grasp on James.
Well, at least there were doors on either side of the hall, and a larger one at the end. The exit, maybe? She pulled James down the hall very fast (all those carved and jeweled eyes were unsettling, somehow), and poked her nose through, just to see.
No, no exit here. Just a round room. Round? Yes, round. And steps led down into it, through concentric circles of wooden railings. Pews, almost, she thought. A little amphitheater. A very strange place.
“Wow,” said James, and he slipped right under her arm and in through the door.
“Have you licked that glass clean yet?” said Maya, looking up at the carved branches winding their way across the ceiling.
She hadn’t noticed the door closing behind them; she was already halfway down the steps, her eyes on the pillar that grew up like a trunk in the middle of the room.
“It’s sticky,” said James.
She flicked her eyes toward the glass in his hands.
“Well, if it’s sticky, then there’s something left in it to lick,” she said. But the room was distracting her.
She was noticing things. The air, for instance, was very still. It was a different class of air than they had been breathing, even out there in the hall. This air felt suspended in place. It was holding its breath.
And the pillar in the center of the room rose up from a small platform of burnished wood. A place for a person to stand. And on the top of the pillar—at about the height of Maya’s shoulders, maybe—was an hourglass. Elegant French words ran around its rim: “Who Gives Me His Earth,” they said, “Rules Time.” Above her (she tipped back her head to look) the pillar began again, nearer the ceiling, becoming the great trunk of that great, outspreading tree.
And curled over the top of the hourglass and staring at her with amber, curious eyes, was a salamander.
You could see where your hands were supposed to go, on the sides of the empty hourglass. It was warm to the touch, and inviting. It pulled at something in you.
The room grew brighter.
There were birds hiding in the branches of the tree, she could see now. The birds were silvery and bright, and their wings shimmered as they peeked out from behind the leaves.
Leaning against one of the wooden railings, James sat licking his glass and watching her. He seemed far away, shadowy and small. Not as bright as the birds in their magnificent tree.
The salamander flicked its bronze tail and smiled at her, and there was a very small sound from the heart of that room, from the hourglass between her hands—a tiny, sweet chime of a ping. And then another. She looked down at the hourglass and saw—two grains of sand. No, not sand, of course. Earth.
“Maya,” said the little boy on his bench far away. “I thought we were in a hurry.”
Ping. A third grain of earth. How long does it take to become immortal? Not so long, maybe, when time itself no longer really even matters.
The little boy stood up from his bench and came down the stairs.
“Look, Maya,” he said, giving her arm a tug. “It’s clean now. Let’s go.”
The touch of his hand broke her concentration entirely. Her hand slipped free from the hourglass, and the air came back into her lungs and made her gasp. The sweetness of the light was gone, and the silver birds faded back into their branches and froze still.
“Maya!” said the little boy, all in focus again.
She stepped back and looked at him. James, her brother. What had she been doing? How long had they been in this place?
“My glass is super clean,” he said.
Three grains of her earth in the hourglass—what had she done? She still couldn’t quite breathe properly; she just took her brother’s hand and pulled him up the steps, back into the corridor, and out of that motionless air, through a different door, and into another sort of space entirely.
Vast, noisy, dark, cluttered. Bright lights far ahead, voices, and glimpses of curtains.
“I know where we are now,” said Maya. “We’re backstage.”
They were in the wings of the Alchemical Theater.
“Be really, really quiet,” said Maya into her brother’s ear.
Because a few feet away from them, on the other side of that rippling gray curtain, someone was clearing his throat and beginning to speak.
Chapter 16
In the Alchemical Theater
Esteemed colleagues, scientists, philosophers, friends!” said the voice, a voice Maya knew all too well.
Maya pulled James down into the most hidden place she saw: behind some old rolls of scenery and a pile of boxes. From here she found she could actually see a sliver of the stage through the slats of the crate in front of her. On the stage a handsome young man was standing at a little podium; behind him Maya could see rows of dim ovals that must be faces, and bright dots in scattered pairs: eyeglasses.
Not just any young man, of course. Their beautiful, terrible cousin-uncle, Henri de Fourcroy. Oh, he looked very pleased with himself as he stood waiting for the audience to hush. Probably thinking of his beaker of raw anbar waiting for him upstairs. Maya clenched her teeth so hard they squeaked.
A moment later the house had already fallen completely still, everyone leaning forward to hear what the purple-eyed Fourcroy might have to say.
“On this most happy occasion, welcome!” he said. “We are honored today by your company. A very auspicious hour for our Society! For it is on this day each year that we gather to remember our history, our achievements, and our Founders—”
James tugged on Maya’s sleeve.
“He was going to give me hot cocoa,” he whispered.
“Shh”said Maya, but she was mad all over again, just thinking about it.
“—under the benevolent shadow of the very Tour Eiffel whose construction brought so many of our Founders together, now more than a century ago. There were those among the chemists and engineers whose minds soared higher than the tower, is it not so?”
A sigh of approval came from the dim shapes of the audience. James shifted with impatience, and Maya put a heavy hand on his shoulder to keep him still.
“For there are substances rarer than iron,” said the young Fourcroy, lowering his voice for the sake of drama. “And there are places that science alone cannot go. It is not enough to weigh rocks and track the stars: Our Founders knew this. Science alone watches, observes, and measures; science alone is weak.”
More murmurs from the crowd, and many nodding heads.
“Weak! And magic alone isn’t much better. Silly superstition and old ladies listening to the dreams of trees! What, we might want to ask, is the practical use of that?”
A faint ripple of laughter.
“But our Society was founded by a Fourcroy, and the Fourcroys have always understood that power lies not in science alone or magic alone, but in the careful harnessing of both. Our Founder was the inheritor of the greatest of chemists. And he married magic. And here we are!”
Cheers from the hall.
(James was tugging on Maya’s sleeve.
“Do trees really have dreams?”
She clamped a hand over his mouth.)
“Over the course of one short century, our Society has done what no Darwin, no Newton, no brilliant but old-fashioned Lavoisier could ever hope to do—”
At this moment two things happened almost at once:
James gave another impatient wriggle, in the course of which the toe of his shoe kicked Maya so sharply in the shins that she yelped aloud.
And then, second, just as the purple-eyed Fourcroy was turning his head to see what, in the wings, could possibly be emitting yelps, a commotion erupted in the audience, and his head swiveled in the other direction again, away from the rolls of scenery and piles of crates and Maya’s swiftly thumping heart.
The commotion turned out to be an elderly man waving his fist and shouting. He came into Maya’s view as he pushed his way down the aisle, shoulderi
ng past people larger and better dressed than himself.
“I object!” he was saying, as he dodged arms outstretched to stop him, to quell him, to escort him out. “I do most strenuously and vigorously object!”
Maya’s heart gave another wobble. It was the Old Man himself, looking even dustier and paler than usual, in this place so far from his tools and worktables.
The younger Fourcroy leaned forward and made a languid, stilling gesture with his hands, a sign to the audience that they should not be alarmed by this ruckus.
“What troubles you, old man?” he said, as if he had never seen the person before him in all his life.
The old Fourcroy stood at the edge of the stage now, the light falling so clearly on him that Maya could see how indignation was pulling at the skin of his face, making his eyes very wide and wild.
“You, speaking of Lavoisier!” he spluttered. “You, calling yourself his heir! But he was a man of science! He established the existence of elements! He explained to us combustion and respiration! He wrote treatises on fossils, white soap, mineralogy, prison reform, wheat flour—”
A disbelieving titter was beginning to rise from the audience.
Maya couldn’t help gritting her teeth: Oh, Lord, Lavoisier! Now how was he ever going to get himself back to the point?
The younger Fourcroy seemed to have come to a similar conclusion: His back relaxed; he leaned forward, listening to the old man’s ravings with an easy expression.
“—No, mon oncle, you are no scientist! Poor science! Poor magic! In you, they are corrupted. In you, my uncle, they become treachery and betrayal. It is the curse of the Fourcroys—”
But here the titter became outright laughter.
To hear this elderly man call the vibrant and dashing young Fourcroy his “uncle”! Well! That was too much for them, plainly.
The purple-eyed Fourcroy leaned forward and said something over the old man’s head to the beautiful people in the front row (still beautiful! but Maya thought of the grains of earth already wriggling their way through Paris back to these smooth, unwrinkled faces and gave a satisfied shudder). In all the din Maya couldn’t hear what the younger Fourcroy had to say, but two of the beautiful people stood up and reached out to take hold of the old Fourcroy’s arms. The old man jumped when the strange hands touched him, and for a moment he seemed about to pitch right over.
“Hey,” said James. “You’re standing on my foot!”
Maya was cold with indignation and fury; there was nothing else she could have done at that moment but rise up and move forward. But first she leaned down to James and put a stern finger in front of his face.
“You stay right here,” she hissed. “And I mean it. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. No matter what.”
“What are you doing? I thought we were hiding.”
“We are. You are, anyway. I just have to go yell at them all for a moment. Now be quiet.”
And with one last warning glare, she scooted out from behind the crates and, keeping to the shadows, made her way right up to the edge of the gray curtain, up to the border between shade and brightness, hiding and not-hiding.
The old Fourcroy was flinging himself back and forth in the arms of his captors. Maya could catch only snatches of his angry, helpless words: “kidnapped,” she thought she heard, and “Fourcroy,” and even, perhaps, “anbar,” but by this point, nobody was listening to him. The beautiful people in the audience were standing, peering forward, laughing, exclaiming. And the beautiful young Fourcroy stood very still, his dark hair very bright under the stage lights, his head bent slightly forward. Waiting for the disturbance to end.
Now, thought Maya. And then she stopped thinking at all for a second, and walked out from behind the curtain into the light.
It was like falling into a very bright sea. For a moment she could not really see anything at all but the light, and even all the noise in the theater seemed to change its quality as she stepped out onto that stage: She was encased in a bubble of light and very far away from everything else in the world. And then the bubble was gone, and there was noise and commotion all around. A few of those distant faces—and some pointing arms—were beginning to turn her way.
“Let go of that man!” she said, as loudly as she could.
Not too many people heard her at first, but the young Fourcroy turned slowly around and looked at her, an unreadable expression clouding his beautiful, purple eyes, and Maya could feel the shift in the audience, as people began to follow his gaze.
“I mean it: Let go of him!” she said again.
“And who might you be?” asked one of the beautiful people holding the poor old Fourcroy’s arms twisted behind his back. The Old Man, at that same instant, looked up in his distress, and when he saw Maya standing there in the light above him, his angry face relaxed.
“Ah,” he said. “It’s Maya! My brave girl!”
But she was careful not to look too closely at him, not to let anything get in the way of her cold, hard rage.
“You let him go,” she said to those beautiful people in as fierce a voice as she could muster. “He was the Keeper of the Cabinet of Earths. Don’t you dare touch him.”
There was a patchwork gasp from the audience: Some of the most beautiful people had heard of the Cabinet. They craned their necks to see better.
“Look at her, look at her,” said the Old Man, twisting around to beam at the people nearest him. “A real Lavirotte! Finally a real Lavirotte!”
And that whisper began to spread through the crowd: Lavirotte, Lavirotte!
The young Fourcroy gave a quick signal with his head, and the beautiful people let go of the Old Man’s arms.
“Perhaps he will go along with you, the poor old man,” said the purple-eyed Fourcroy to Maya, his voice the very spirit of mildness. “Or you may stay, if you like, of course.”
“To tell the truth, he came here because—I sent him,” said Maya, and at that the hall fell completely silent.
“You, mademoiselle?” said the younger Fourcroy, with a thin-lipped smile. “You sent him to us? How unkind of you. He has been uncomfortable here, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, I have!” shouted the Old Man from beyond the edge of the stage. “Because of your goons, my uncle, you fraudulent bag of pestilence!”
“I had to send him away from the Cabinet, you see,” said Maya, pressing her arms against her sides to keep them from shaking. “So I could do what I had to do. I sent him here with a warning. Did you get it, I hope? To give my brother back. Or else!”
The purple-eyed Fourcroy laughed out loud, not a very nice laugh.
“You are a child from where? From America, I believe? Is this how children behave, then, in America?”
A couple of people in the audience followed his lead and laughed, but then the hush spread back over everything.
“The thing is, you don’t really know who I am,” said Maya. “I am a Lavirotte; it’s true what he was saying. As well as being Maya Davidson. And one other thing—”
She pulled the green bottle out of her coat pocket and held it up so that the bright lights scattered greenly all around and the earth inside it seemed to writhe about.
“—I am also the new Keeper of the Cabinet of Earths,” she said.
His face changed then: The color faded to something much paler. But when his hand whipped out to grab the bottle, she had already scooted to the left, just out of reach, and plucked the woolen sheep out of the neck of the bottle.
“And if you touch me, you see, I will throw this earth right into your face. Tell us all, Monsieur Fourcroy, what have you done to my brother?”
The purple-eyed Fourcroy froze, his eyes as fixed on Maya and that bottle as if he were a snake trying to hypnotize its prey.
“I’m afraid you’ve lost your senses, mademoiselle,” he said.
“Not me. I am here to rescue my brother,” she said. “But you killed your brother during the war. The Old Man’s father. You handed him over to the Nazis. A
nd the people he was hiding in this building, you handed them over, too.”
“If they had no business here,” said the purple-eyed Fourcroy, “then why wouldn’t I report them?”
“Well, that’s disgusting,” said Maya. “They were your cousins, too. That should count for something.”
“Ah, now, but you’re speaking of the war,” he said. “That was very long ago, wasn’t it? Just how old do you think I am?”
“I know exactly how old you are,” said Maya. “You were born the year they built the Salamander House. Nineteen-oh-one.”
The purple-eyed Fourcroy raised an eyebrow, and many of the people in the audience laughed a little. But the most beautiful, most perfect people sat silent.
“Listen,” said Maya. “I’ve thought about this a lot, and it all has to stop. It’s wrong. You take children who are happy and lucky, and you eat up their charm and their luck. You took my Cousin Louise, you took my brother, you took that old lady who sits outside on the bench—but oh, now I forget her name—”
“Amandine!” said a quavery old voice from the audience, but Maya was thinking of the right words to say and hardly noticed.
“I think I know what has done this to you. You locked up time in a Cabinet, and it made you cold. And careless. You just went on and on, living, until you forgot that other people aren’t just your toys, aren’t just creatures for you to use up to make your awful, addictive anbar. Perhaps if immortality wasn’t—if it weren’t—”
One of the most splendid women in the audience stood up at that moment, an elegant column rising right up out of the second row.
“Maya!” she said sternly. “Enough!”
Maya blinked. It was—it was—could it be?—
The woman made her way into the aisle and came striding toward the steps at the side of the stage.
“Your verbs are abominable. And worse: You have entirely lost control of your pronouns.”
It was! An utterly transfigured Cousin Louise! Not younger, no—but so glowing, alluring, enchanting! What had she done to herself? Then Maya remembered the honey jar and felt her stomach turn to ice.
But she had only a moment to gape at the newly splendid Louise before she had to hop to the side again as the man before her made another swipe at the bottle.