The Heartreader's Secret

by Kate McinTyre

  Chris reviewed his own experiences with Miss Banks. He’d always been too in awe of her intellect and too curious about her history and her skin colour to engage with her on that sort of personal level Rosie described. But in those rare moments when he had….

  He nodded. “I think I know what you mean.”

  Slowly, Rosemary climbed to her feet, using the legs of a table to leverage herself. She crossed to the table covered in copper-glass-wood contraptions and picked one up, turning it over in her hands carefully. “I don’t fully understand most of it. But…” She shook her head, and then met his eyes. “But Em says that she couldn’t have done it without me. That I was the key. We made the first spiritcell together.” She held the item out as if offering it to him.

  “Spiritcell,” he repeated.

  She nodded.

  “And you….”

  “Em and I, together,” she said, nodding again.

  And suddenly, he was just….

  Furious.

  Gods, he shouldn’t be. She was suffering. Mother Deorwynn, she’d just seen her friend dead on the ground! But he felt as if he was possessed. He struggled back to his feet, puppeteered by his own emotions thrumming through every nerve like marionette strings. “What the hell has been going on out here?” he demanded, gaining his feet.

  Her eyes went flat. “What are you talking about?”

  “I need to explain?”

  “Yes?”

  He shook his head so hard everything blurred, and he risked falling back on his arse. “I sent you out here to get you away from all of this!” He waved his hands expansively, trying to indicate the room, the equipment, the body above, the beaten Doctor Livingstone in his room, and, especially, the lingering presence of Emilia Banks. “Everything I’ve done has been about keeping you away from this kind of madness! And here you are, sitting in the middle of it!”

  “I’m not—what do you—no, it’s not the same—ooh, just look at me!” She balled her hands into fists and punched her own thighs, stomping one foot like she was still eleven years old and being told she couldn’t have her way. “This is why I didn’t want you here, you make it—you make it so hard for me to think straight!”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means what I said! I–I could explain this all so perfectly to anyone else, but never you, Chris! I have my head all straight, and then you look at me, and all you ever see is little Rosie, and I just see her reflected back in your eyes!”

  Rachel’s voice echoed softly in his mind. Children are always children around their parents.

  He shook his head, folded his lips tightly. “I work for a Deathsniffer every day because that was the price for her opening her home to you.”

  “Why are you always such a ponce? I didn’t ask for that, and anyone can see that the two of you are fond of each other! Don’t make it into some… sacrifice!”

  He thought of Olivia handing him a small, wrapped box. Of Olivia smiling. Of Olivia wet and golden and quiet, her voice a hum in the early morning as she divulged her deepest secrets to him. It was rubbish to lie even to himself and say that she didn’t mean the absolute world to him. That he wouldn’t stay by her side, Rosemary or not.

  Rosemary, who made too much sense, who found cracks in his armour and brute-forced them open, who stood there gazing triumphantly at him, surrounded by dangerous experiments, and so damned vulnerable.

  He choked on a ball of angry, wild frustration that came up his throat like a sob. “I wanted you to be safe!”

  “You wanted to keep me away from people who could hurt me.”

  He hated the lump in his throat, hated the way his eyes and nose prickled. “But this is the same thing!” he gasped out.

  “It’s not!” She shook her head so hard her curls went flying. “Don’t you get it, Chris? Avery Combs had the most beautiful smile, and he told me I was special, just like Daddy used to, so I went with him on the day Grapevine blew. I would have done anything he told me, too. But you were right about him. About all of it! It’s because you sent me out here that I see that.”

  “Rosie….”

  “But this is different. Em doesn’t say pretty things. She doesn’t make sweet promises. She doesn’t tell me what I want to hear! I’m making a choice, Chris. I believe in her.”

  She looked so fierce, standing there. The fury and defensive posturing had left her countenance. Instead, he saw her standing tall, features set, chin up and eyes forward. He saw passion in her eyes and determination in her jaw. He saw her shoulders squared and heard dedication in her voice.

  For just a blink, he saw Rosemary as she would be, grown, strong, and fighting.

  Then she was gone, and she was once again an adolescent girl tossed between grief and passion and pig-headed stubbornness and pain. But an adolescent was not a child. Six months, Chris realized, could be a damned eternity for someone Rosie’s age. It could be the difference between being on one side of the abyss of adulthood and the other.

  He swallowed hard. It got stuck halfway down his throat.

  “Chris?” she asked, very quietly. She sounded so much like the version of her that he knew, it was tempting to embrace that. To push her back to that place.

  But he didn’t want to risk ruining a relationship with that brief glimpse of who she could be, just to hold on to one with a person she wasn’t anymore.

  “I don’t want you to grow up,” he said, and his voice ached in his throat with the weight of the words. “I don’t want you to go beyond where I can protect you.”

  And just like that, she crumpled.

  “Oh, Chris!” she cried, bursting into fresh tears. And then she was in his arms, wrapped around him like a monkey. She buried her face into his collarbone, and he threaded his fingers through her windswept hair. Gods, how was it possible that she had gotten so tall? He used to go down on one knee to embrace her. She smelled like fresh country air and apples and linens, and her mess of wild curls hadn’t seen an iron in months. When she spoke, he realized that even her voice was different.

  “You’ll always be my big brother. Always.”

  Unable to speak, Chris nodded. He kept nodding as her fingers clutched his damp layers of coat and shirt, as she sobbed against him, and until she finally stepped back, wiping at tears.

  “You are brilliant,” he said, watching her go, feeling empty and missing her warmth. But she was too old to cling to her brother forever, wasn’t she? “Miss Banks is entirely correct about that. Ever since you were a baby, you were always brilliant.”

  Rosie giggled and hiccupped at the words, nodding. “Only compared to you.”

  He managed a smile. “Brat,” he said.

  She turned away, walking to the table of Emilia’s contraptions—the spiritcells.

  “She didn’t recruit me,” Rosemary said. “I don’t want you to think it was like that. She didn’t sell me a pitch. Mabelle”—she hiccupped—“oh, Mabelle. S-she and I were in the stable, working on—on a project. We thought she’d tell Rachel and Mister Greene, or even Elouise, but she sat down with us and helped us work and never told a soul.” She shook her head and looked up at him. “What do we do about Mabelle?” she asked, her voice small and her eyes cavernous. “She’s just lying there, all alone….”

  “Don’t think about it. Tell me more about Miss Banks,” Chris said. As long as Rosie talked about that, instead of her friend, she seemed steady.

  “She’s so… she just talks. She talks about how things are back in her mother’s country. In Khari, the city where she lived. She talks about the black rock, coal, about ships running on steam, about factories without any categorized workers, about the things that are possible! If Tarland would be willing to actually talk with the countries of the Southern Continent if we’d change the way we see them… we could be weaned off proficiency usage in no more than twenty years.”

  Chris thought about the way things were back in the city. Of hospitals empty of doctors and beds, with more in need of care than e
ver. Of the long line waiting for positions in the Church, none of them with a trickle of a proficiency. He thought about the formerly prosperous banker Mister Kellystone dead from debts and drugs, about desperate, dirty faces begging for coins, about the papers declaring that it had been one hundred days since the categorization of Benji Edison, who may very well be Tarland’s last spiritbinder.

  “Twenty years is a very long time,” he murmured.

  “I know,” Rosie said. “That’s why Em has been trying to automate spiritbinding from the very start! Her alternative technologies are amazing, but they’re for the future. What about triage? What about now?” She shook her head. “She’d almost given up. She managed to unbind spirits—”

  “I’m aware of that particular project,” Chris said, lips twisting uncomfortably.

  “—but she’d ruled out being able to summon or bind them without a ‘binder.”

  His eyes went to the table full of spiritcells. “Until you.”

  She nodded eagerly. “In a way, she was right. It is impossible. She kept coming back to mirror-gnomes and chimes, but the song and the arcane language… it only acts as a guide. A lure. It can’t bind a spirit, it can’t provide instructions… and it definitely can’t open a portal to the spirit plane. That’s all human will.”

  “You solved it,” Chris said.

  “I just… helped her look at the problem from a different angle.” Rosie turned and looked over the table. She picked up some of the spiritcells, looked them over, and put them down again. Finally, she selected just one and turned, holding it aloft. It looked very much like the one he and Olivia had found hooked up to the lights at the Fairgrounds.

  “Say…” Rosemary said, turning it over in her hands. She looked up at him. Her lips quirked. “Say you’ve been invited to the most exclusive party in Darrington.”

  “If only,” Chris said ruefully.

  “I picked a scenario you would like.”

  “Yes, I see that.”

  She ran her fingers along the empty cylindrical slot at the base. “Do you recognize what this is?”

  “I can’t make sense of any of it, to be honest.”

  “It’s okay. We showed it to—to May. She didn’t get how it worked, either, which is good. That’s important.” She closed her eyes tight, swallowed hard, and then shook her hair out. “To get into the most exclusive party in Darrington, you’d need three things. The first would be an invitation.” She smiled. “Have you ever heard of a gramophone?”

  Chris flashed to evenings spent in the Cartwright flat, old-fashioned, pre-Castle swing music playing from Agnes’s collection of cylinders while she and her son danced for him and he applauded their remarkable steps. “I’ve…” He swallowed and nodded. “Yes.” And then, not half a moment later, as things slid into place: “That slot is for a cylinder!”

  “Yes!” Rosie bobbed in agreement. “Of course, people tried ages ago to reproduce a binding song with a gramophone. Em says that’s why they were first invented! But no one can do it. It’s impossible. The song is important, of course. The song is crucial! But it’s only the invitation to the party.” She frowned. “And a shoddy invitation, too. Gramophone sound… it’s not pure. It’s muted in parts, fuzzy in others. It can’t change the song to respond to the exact spirit it’s calling. It can’t get the attention of anything bigger than a frog. But… it’s a start.”

  “I thought only the best gearsetters could make gramophones.”

  “Em says you don’t need to be categorized to make anything,” Rosemary said fiercely. “They make gramophones in Khari, and no one there is categorized. No one except Em and her mother. Em makes the gramophone components herself. It’s hard, and they’re not perfect, but they don’t need to be. The song isn’t binding a spirit or opening a portal. It’s just a lure. Just an invitation.”

  Her fingers touched the glass tube at the top, filled with brown liquid and framed on both sides with copper plates. “The second thing you need is a venue,” she said. Her intonations reminded him so much of Emilia that it was surreal. “You can’t use your invitation to get to a party if there’s nowhere for it to be held!” She turned rueful all at once, looking up at him through thick black eyelashes. “I don’t understand this part as well. But something about the acid in vinegar… especially cider vinegar…” She shrugged. “It can store energy. Spirit energy. How much of a charge depends on how long a spirit stays. We don’t always know how much life the spiritcell will have. But in the most recent one we made, the one I set up to run the lights… they didn’t flicker even once, Chris. The cell had enough power to keep the whole system running constantly. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone ahead with the experiment without Em, but how else were we going to get such a perfect opportunity?”

  “So you’re… binding a spirit to the cell?” Chris asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “No,” Rosie said. “The acid just collects the energy. Stores it. Lets it be tapped into and used.”

  “Then how….”

  “The third part.” Rosie’s fingers gently stroked the glass box cradled lovingly inside the wooden cradle, above the gramophone and below the glass tubing. “The most important part. The bridge between invitation and venue.” She met his eyes. “The door.”

  She really was brilliant.

  “It’s the one thing Em could never make sense of. I don’t blame her. She won’t tell me her categorization, but I know it’s not spiritbinder. She could never separate out all the parts of a binding, of what makes a binding work. And maybe no one else can do it the way I can. Maybe it’s just… me. But I don’t sing a spirit into existence. I don’t conjure it up out of thin air. A spirit is a consciousness, Chris. A spirit is alive. A spirit dwells on the elemental plane and only comes to our side when a ‘binder tempts it with song.

  “It comes through a door.”

  She held up the spiritcell. The glass of the box was so thick and milky that Chris could barely see her through it, on the other side. Just a hint of movement. A hint of her fingers fluttering. His brows pulled down. He looked closer. Because between him and her, inside that thick glass box, he swore… he swore that if he looked closely enough, crossed his eyes, and forgot just for a moment all the rules of reality….

  “Rosie! Put that thing down! It’s—”

  “It’s a portal,” Rosie agreed, and she stroked it lovingly. “A door. A window. A peephole. A tiny, infinitesimal little pinprick between our plane and theirs. Spirits want to come to our world. They’re curious. They’re playful. They want to catch a glimpse of the way we live. Even knowing they might be bound, they still come through. All they need is an invitation”—she touched the gramophone—“and they’ll peek through the door”—the glass box—“and their abundant energy will be caught up in the cell”—the tube. She smiled up at him. “No tormented spirits bound to our world, hating us for it. No vengeful rampages, and no worry that they’ll get free. Just a tiny little window, so they can look in on us and then be on their way, leaving a little bit of themselves when they go.”

  He thought of the implications. He couldn’t take his eyes away from the glass box. “How did you possibly—”

  “I don’t think I can explain it, Chris. And I don’t think anyone else alive even could do it. Maybe not anyone else ever.” She met his eyes, and she glowed with inner light. “But I can. I can wedge open a gate so small you couldn’t even thread a needle with it, and trap it in tempered glass.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Oh, yes. Extremely.”

  “Gods, Rosemary!”

  “But not reckless! I know what I’m doing. Em knows what she’s doing, too. We worked down here, never in the attic, and I warded this room a thousand times over. And if anyone breaks the glass, the portal collapses, and the spiritcell is useless. We tested it over and over. It can’t be backwards engineered.” A shadow crossed his sister’s face. “At least… at least, not if they don’t have Em’s notes.”

  They both t
urned to look at the empty table.

  Rosie made a strangled sound. “And that’s what I was supposed to be making sure didn’t happen! She planned to burn them after we perfected the cells, so no one could ever know what we did, but—oh, Gods, Chris. Whoever trapped us in here, whoever s-shot Mabelle, they took one of the prototypes and the notes! If they find out how they’re made….”

  Chris ran a hand through his hair, turning back to the false wall, still shut firmly behind them. He pushed it experimentally and found that, of course, it still didn’t move. “You said you don’t think anyone else could do this?”

  “Someone else could try,” Rosie said, in a voice that said she deeply feared such a thing coming to pass.

  Chris swallowed. “That would be bad?”

  “That would be catastrophic, Chris. You need a scalpel to do this right. If some… some clumsy lightbinder came along and tried to wedge a door open, they’d never have the control! Their will could act like a hammer! A doorway blasted right between planes, and nothing to stop whatever curious spirit from coming through! They don’t naturally hate us, but they’re still beings of pure chaos! They would love to wreck mischief on a world of order.”

  He felt queasy. He rubbed his face. His eyes felt dry and sticky. He couldn’t tell if he was terrified, or horrified, or just utterly, completely, bone-deep exhausted. “Who do you think….”

  Rosemary wrapped her arms around her middle. “Almost… almost anyone,” she said, shaking her head. “Em knew… she knew someone was watching her. She was cautious from the start, but the more time went on… she knew it, Chris.”

  He thought of her journal, which Maris had translated. He nodded.

  “She told me from the first moment not to trust anyone. Not to confide in anyone. Not Elouise, not Rachel, not even Mabelle! She said… everyone has an agenda in this. They’ll tell you that they don’t, but they do. People who don’t know they have agendas have agendas.” She blinked, and then her eyes opened wide. “Ah! And now I–I’ve told you everything about how it works, about how—”