Musichetta's rooms were a mixture of books and half-finished machines. The books were far easier to find; after all, there was nothing wrong with a girl who read often so long as she paid her rent on time. It was the machines that bothered her landlord, and she had promised to hide them as long as he wouldn't turn her out. It was a tenuous relationship, especially when the National Guard came into her neighborhood and started searching for Sparks. It wasn't as though she could not create, though, and a few of her "little wonders" (as M. Allard called them when he wasn't worried about being arrested) were useful in keeping the building warm in winter and cooking food well.

"You have a gift, Musichetta," he told her one October as she knelt among fragments of wall. "Any other Spark would have tried to conquer Paris by now."

"Who says I haven't?" She laughed at the shock on his face before turning back to the exposed pipes to find the leak.

It was true, no matter how she tried to laugh about it. By her age, and with the time she had spent in one place, she should have tried to make some sort of doomsday device and either leveled the city or challenged the king to a duel. Even knowing that he more than likely had some Sparks under his command and would be expecting something like that, she would have tried to wrestle power for herself. Instead, she lived in a small set of rooms and paid off most of her rent by making helpful little machines that could cook an egg without water and kept the rooms warm during the coldest months. Whenever M. Allard asked her seriously enough that she had to give an answer, she would respond that she buried all her passion into her books or that she had lucky ancestors.

Sometimes she thought she really was gifted, even for a Spark.

Musichetta was one of the grisettes of Paris, a working girl who took whatever job she could to keep herself fed. She was skillful enough and clever enough not to let herself become a prostitute, because she knew such a life would only lead to a slow, drawn-out death. Sometimes the death was a quick, violent one, and she couldn't decide which she wanted to avoid more. If she hadn't had her "little wonders" to sell to discreet buyers, she was afraid she would have ended up on the streets, given how quickly she changed jobs. She couldn't help it. Her mind moved too quickly for routine work, which was all women were afforded in the city, and when her mind started to wander, it started to create. Feeling that urge to build arrive in her fingers and spread up through her arms was a dangerous, intoxicating sensation, and when she started to feel that at her job, she knew she had to get out quickly.

It wasn't a bad life, and when she thought of what else she could have done – married some country boy and lived on a farm, become a nun, lived out her life as a normal girl – she knew that she would rather be a Spark than anything else. There were moments when she was creating that her mind would suddenly become clear, and everything started to fit together. It was like the world shifted before her fingers, letting her make what needed to be made.

Her life wasn't without its dangers. Being a Spark in the country meant coming under suspicion for almost anything that went wrong, and she sometimes heard whispered stories of boys and girls only just discovering their gifts being dragged from their homes and killed in horrible ways. In the city, at least, she could hide and move about. The only trick was to avoid the National Guard. Most Parisians accepted Sparks as part of everyday life. After all, if it weren't for Sparks, how would they have such wonderful tools? Some of the nobility even kept Sparks as pets, like they were artists, but in a much more careful manner. The king was the one most worried about a Spark uprising, and he regularly sent out the National Guard to find Sparks and bring them to the Bastille, which had been rebuilt specifically to house them.

Musichetta never went out alone at night, and she never spoke of her gifts to anyone she didn't know she could trust. She had been moving from place to place ever since she first created a device that could track the movements of rats. At first, it had been just a toy, but then she got the idea to mobilize the rats into a miniature army to do her bidding. The thought frightened and intrigued her, especially when she realized that the last person to make such an interesting machine, Gabriel Armistead, had been burnt as a witch. That night, she had left her home, taking with her only a worn copy of a novel and a little food. She had nearly starved on the way to Paris, but it had been worth it to live a life that was slightly less fearful.

It was no longer bitterly cold, so M. Allard had turned off the "little wonder" in the walls. He had come to trust it over the past two winters, and he wondered how soon he would reach the point where he couldn't live without it. His tenants were already there, and one of them had already come downstairs to complain about his turning it off so soon. He had sent the man back to his room with a reminder that fuel wasn't cheap and certainly wasn't free, and that there was no danger of anyone freezing to death tonight. There would be a chill, but nothing more than what most Parisians were forced to live with. The man had acquiesced, but only after Allard threatened to charge him an extra sou on his rent.

Otherwise, it had been a quiet night, for which he was glad. There weren't any riots, at least in this part of Paris, and the National Guard hadn't been sent around in weeks. Pessimists would say that he was due for some trouble, but Allard preferred to look on the bright side of things. Keeping a Spark as a tenant meant he had access to all sorts of technology. Having such good technology meant his other tenants were willing to pay a little more, which covered the costs of letting the Spark pay with her inventions. And not seeing the National Guard in weeks meant the chances were even better they wouldn't come this week. Having reminded himself of these cheerful circumstances, he went into the kitchen to make some tea with the kettle his Spark had made the previous autumn.

He hadn't even reached the stove when he heard the knock on the door.

At first, he convinced himself that he had just imagined it. After all, no one would come and ask for lodging at this time of the night. The noise must have come from a carriage outside, or perhaps someone upstairs was trying to enter another's rooms. There was nothing to worry about.

Then the knock came again, sharp and authoritarian. Almost military.

Allard nearly dropped his kettle.

When he opened the front door, a wave of chilled air rushed in, blocked only by the bodies of soldiers of the National Guard. Allard set himself in the gap of the open door, trying to block their entrance. "What do you want?"

"We're here on a raid," the leader said. "Stand aside."

"I won't have you causing trouble for my tenants." Allard crossed his arms over his chest and stood firm. "I run a reputable establishment; you can ask anyone on this street. I house no revolutionaries, and you won't find a Spark within these walls." It was what everyone insisted, and Allard didn't know if it was still believable or just part of the process of being raided. "You have no business here."

"Where we have business is not for you to decide," the leader said. He pushed the door fully open and stepped inside. "We will try not to cause too much trouble. Here." He pulled a few bank notes from his pocket and pressed them into Allard's hand. "For your trouble."

It was more than he would make from extra rent in a year. He could do nothing but stand aside and let them pass.

The walls of the building were thin, and everyone could hear what everyone else was doing. When she first arrived, Musichetta had been afraid that people would hear her tinkering and building and would call the National Guard down on her. She tried to time her work for when everyone would be too deeply asleep to notice, or when both sides around her were empty, or when she could hear her neighbors making equally loud noises, whether from arguing or making love. After a time, they got used to living next to a Spark and even started calling her "our resident industrialist". They found things to call her that didn't make her sound dangerous, and she started working during normal hours.

Old habits were difficult to break, however, and sometimes she found herself sitting up at night and listening as the people around her went to bed. She had their nightly routines and noises nearly memorized, and they hardly distracted her from her books, but whenever she looked up for even a moment, she could identify who was doing what. Only when everything was silent would she finish her chapter and go to bed herself.

Her work today had been neither inspiring nor exhausting, and even though she could feel something bright prickling at the edge of her mind, it wasn't strong enough to tempt her into creation. Instead, she settled in a worn chair and picked up the first book she found. It was engrossing enough to keep her interested and awake long after she would have normally gone to bed, which was why she was able to hear the steady tromping of booted feet on the floor below.

They were here.

She needed no warning to know that the National Guard had arrived. It was what she had expected for a year, since she first arrived and asked for lodging from M. Allard. That they had taken this long to find her was something close to miraculous, especially since she had been present for one of their previous raids. That one had been easy to avoid; her rooms had been largely empty from a combination of giving away her work and lack of further inspiration, so she was able to pass herself as nothing more than a grisette. Tonight, however, they would be searching every room, and hers was crammed with machines and tools.

There was no time to hide anything, and even if she had been given an hour's warning, she wouldn't have found enough space. Destroying her work was out of the question; it was painful enough to think of the National Guard tearing it apart. She could never have borne to do it herself. The only thing she could do was run.

She hadn't bothered to undress, so all she had to do was pull on a coat, grab what little money she had, and slip on some boots to protect her feet from the cold. Her books would have to stay. She loved each one too much to think of simply choosing one for her exile, and if she was lucky, she would be able to return with most of them undamaged. If she was unlucky… well, the dead didn't bother reading. Her best chance was to get out of the building and several streets away. If she had the chance to stay in Paris instead of fleeing for the country side – or even the principalities to the east – there would be plenty of books for her to read. There would even be books in other countries, if it came to that, and she was good enough with languages to at least understand German.

She closed and locked her door as she left, hoping that would delay them a little. She didn't want to make it too easy for them to find her work. The key went into her pocket, and she curled her fingers around it. The metal was cold, but she could feel her heat seeping into it, and it felt like a talisman.

The Guard hadn't yet reached the stairs, and she was able to hurry down and slip past most of them. They were too concerned with dealing with the other tenants, most of whom were arguing loudly against their rooms being entered and searched, and she slipped through the confusion. She was almost to the next set of stairs and nearly out when someone grabbed her arm.

"Where are you headed, mademoiselle?"

"I – I wanted to see M. Allard," she said, keeping her face turned from the Guard. "I didn't know what was happening, and I was afraid."

"You needn't be frightened," he said, sounding slightly gentler. His grip on her arm didn't loosen, and he pulled her a bit closer to him.

"Please," she said, trying to work her arm free. She had to get outside. "Please, I'm just a working girl. I don't want any trouble. I just want to see M. Allard. Won't you let me go, monsieur?"

The man pulled her even closer and was about to say something when the voice of someone who must have been his superior called him. "Tailler!" The man twitched, and Musichetta was able to pull herself free and run for the stairs.

M. Allard wasn't in the front room, and Musichetta didn't care to search for him. Instead, she ran out into the night. The noise from the search vanished as soon as the door closed behind her, and by the time she was a street away, all she heard were the sounds of Paris.

She didn't follow any specific route, because she had no destination. Where she worked was nothing special to her, and none of her old homes would take her back, especially with how little she could pay. An errant thought crossed her mind that she shouldn't have bought so many books, and that only made her think of her work being destroyed and her belongings torn apart. They wouldn't take down the whole building just for one Spark, but if they saw that her machines had entered the walls and filled it, they might be willing to do even that.

There was nowhere for her to go, but she couldn't stop safely. All she could do was run.

Musichetta spent a cold and sleepless night out. She had gotten too used to sleeping in a warm bed with thick blankets and heated walls to fall asleep in a park or a doorway until spring, no matter how tired she felt. So she had run until she could run no more, and then she walked until it was well past midnight and the cold had started to seep into her body. Until dawn, she stumbled, and at dawn, she turned around and tried to find her way home.

There was enough money in her pocket for her to buy breakfast, and she ate as she walked. The food revived her somewhat, but she was still exhausted. Her head felt heavy, and her eyelids threatened to stay closed every time she blinked. Her boots weren't good for running, and where her feet weren't numb, they ached. Her key was still clenched between her fingers, but she couldn't feel any warmth from it. Her throat was raw from the cold air, and every step was a fight to keep from dropping to the ground.

It took nearly an hour for her to reach the street, and when she was there, she paused at the corner, immobile. The building still stood, but it was surrounded by members of the National Guard. She allowed herself a small sob that caught in her throat before turning and walking away.