Hannah Augustin had never been to England. Her mother had come from there, half-broken attempting to escape Queen Albia's reign, and for years had been unable to speak except in garbled fragments. She made it to Prussia, where she met a minor Spark who helped her recover. They married, even though the poor woman still could not remember her own name, and when their daughter was born, no one was sure if "Hannah" was meant to be the child's name or the woman's. In a few days it was moot, anyway; Hannah's mother succumbed to an infection and died. Hannah was raised by her father for fifteen years, and she discovered her own abilities at fourteen when she made a self-deploying net that could target large swimmers. Her father was so pleased that he took her to the North Sea and helped her catch some of the largest fish she had ever seen. That was the first day he had truly smiled at her, and for the year afterward she thought she would live happily with her father, creating wondrous machines and terrifying the local populace.
Then the Jägermonsters came riding, and Hannah saw a village burn before her eyes. She heard her father screaming, and her device which should have summoned heavy clouds refused to bring forth so much as a drizzle. Science failed her that day, or she failed it, and she panicked and fled. For years she wandered through the German principalities, struggling through the wilderness and fighting rogue clanks. Somehow she worked her way westward and found herself in Paris.
Hannah had never seen a city before, though she had thought one of the larger villages had been one. Paris was something she could never have imagined and filled with more people than she had dreamed existed. It overwhelmed her senses, and for a full day she hid in a hotel with the window blocked and the door locked. The desire to create, to reign, screamed in her head, and it wasn't until nightfall that she was able to take a breath and remember what had happened the last time she had truly tried to create instead of simply working from others' designs. Borrowing the work of others was a hollow life, but at least she knew she would be successful.
She still had nightmares about the fire.
One of the first things she learned, even before she mastered French, was that no one in Paris trusted Sparks. It took her months to understand that no one trusted Sparks openly. Some would use Spark-created technology, and others would even hire Sparks to work for them. Hannah had drifted from job to job, always being sent away after the first week, but before the end of her first year in Paris, she met a man willing to have her as an assistant. She was good with her hands and even had a few ideas about how to improve his work, and the two got along quite well. Neither told the other their true name, but Hannah didn't care. She had enough money to buy food and pay for nice rooms in town, and she was working with science, which was all she wanted from life.
Spring had come late this year. Even though the calendar said the seasons should have changed, there was a definite chill to the air, and Hannah pulled her coat tighter around her body as she walked home. It had been a slow day. M. Charbonneau – so her master called himself – had been in a temper and nearly torn apart his small laboratory. Hannah had done her best to put it back in order and calm the neighbors, but she had left with only half a day's pay in her pocket and a stinging mark on her upper arm from when she had bumped against a beaker of acid. Sparks were like this, she reminded herself. Her father had been known for his temper among the townsfolk, and even she had railed against those fools who doubted her. Still, it hurt to think that such a temper could be directed against her.
She turned the corner to her own set of rooms and very nearly bumped into a pair of men who lounged against the wall. One of them looked her up and down with something that was nearly a leer, and she pulled back, reaching deeper into her pocket for a small golden circle. It looked like a ring, but when it hit the ground, it would send up a flash of light that would distract her attackers.
"Hello, mademoiselle," one of them said. He stood and brushed off his ragged coat, as though he could rid it of some of the dirt. "Would you have some charity for a pair of soldiers who haven't had a day's work in a month?"
"I'm running rather low on money myself, monsieur," she said, trying not to sound nervous. She had faced clanks in the German wilderness. A pair of soldiers was nothing to be frightened of. "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I can't –"
"What have you got in your pockets, dear?" the other asked. He was the one who had leered at her, and now he pushed some of his poorly-cut dark hair out of his face and stood. His friend circled around to behind her, cutting off her escape. "Let's just have a look, shall we? You look well-fed enough to miss a meal or two."
"Please, monsieur, I just – stop that!" The first man to speak had grabbed her arm and pulled it from her pocket. She was still holding the ring, and it glinted in the late afternoon sunlight.
"What's this? A pretty little toy for a girl who's 'low on money'. I'm sure your husband won't mind if it went to a worthy cause." His hand moved to hers, and she opened her fingers, letting the ring drop. Just before it hit the road, she closed her eyes.
The flash still startled her as the white exploded against her eyelids, but from the cries of the two men, it had shocked them even more. One of them had enough presence of mind to should "Spark!" and just as Hannah opened her eyes, she saw the other pull a knife and lunge for her. The blade pierced her coat and slipped easily into her skin, and she must have screamed, because the sound she heard next came from a woman's voice.
The two men were cursing and stumbling about, but she was too cold to care. All her warmth was leaking out past the knife and pooling around her fingers.
"Forgive me," Cosette whispered as her pencil sketched over the paper, drawing mechanical arms and gears. "Forgive me, Lord, for I cannot help but sin." She knew it was wrong to let herself even imagine such creations – there was some solace in the fact that she never made them – but her mind would reach out to them almost of its own accord, and she sometimes found herself smiling with pleasure at the beauty on the page she had created. For they were beautiful, her creations, even if the nuns had taught her that such things were abominations.
For most of the year, her room would be full of such papers, and even though she tried to hide them from herself, she would sometimes look over them again and trace the lines with her little finger. They would be such elegant machines if she could build them, and she knew they would be used to help people. It could hardly be bad to create if she was building to help. She had been taught that her impulses sprang from the Devil – thank Heaven the nuns had not told Father! – and that the only possible use for such things was to destroy. Her mind shied away from any thought of harming anyone, however, and her creations did the same. In the two years she had been having these ideas, she had not come up with one that could be used for harm.
It was spring, so her room was largely empty. Most of her drawings had gone into her fireplace over the winter. Her heart ached to see her work curl in upon itself and turn to ash, but knowing that she was avoiding temptation gave her at least a small satisfaction. With a sigh, she sat back and looked over the drawing. It was really no better than a rough sketch, and part of her wanted to go back over it and clean up the lines. Surely there was something to be improved.
With a regretful sigh, she set the paper on a small stack of others by her fireplace. It was getting warm enough now that her father would start to worry if she felt the need to have a fire at night, so the season of collecting would start again. The start of spring always frightened her. If something should happen and she found herself actually building something… if she let something slip in conversation… if her father found the drawings and confronted her… she didn't know what she would do.
Someone knocked on her door, and she covered the papers with bits of kindling, silently thanking any saints who were listening that Toussaint and her father were content to let her start her own fires. "Yes?" she called rising and turning to the door.
"Mademoiselle, your father has returned and is asking after you," Toussaint called through the door. Cosette couldn't tell if the old woman's stutter had eased or she had simply gotten so used to it that she barely noticed.
"Thank you, Toussaint," Cosette said. "Would you tell him I'll be downstairs in a moment?" She heard a faint noise of assent before the servant's footsteps faded. She knew she ought to run downstairs and embrace her father, and she wished to see him again and perhaps walk through the garden with him, but her response to Toussaint had bought her about a minute, perhaps a little more, and she used it to turn to her drawings again.
They really were quite good, she thought, allowing herself the sin without fear of any repercussions. There had to be a way to save them.
There were times when Paris wearied Jean Valjean. He knew it could not be a perfect city – there would be no such thing on earth – but whenever he started to feel optimistic about living there with Cosette, he found something that destroyed his hopes once more. Just today, as he went on his morning walk, he had found the body of a woman lying in the street. She had evidently been dead throughout the night and was covered in her own blood from a knife wound in her stomach. Even more distressing, if such a thing were possible, the word SPARK had been written on the wall above her, in what was possibly more of her blood. No one had bothered moving her body, and he had paid some gamins to clean off the wall and get the woman to a church so she could be buried. He would pray for her that night.
Sparks were the people of the Devil. So the church said, and so many Parisians believed. Jean Valjean could not bring himself to agree, for he had seen works of beauty crafted by Sparks, things that the Devil could not have dreamed of. There were times when the opinions of his fellow countrymen made him want to leave Paris and find a new life with Cosette somewhere else, but he could think of nowhere to go. He would be easier to find in the smaller towns, and going into the German principalities was out of the question so long as the Heterodynes and their Jägermonsters terrorized the towns and the wilderness was full of monsters nearly as bad. He would never bring Cosette to England under the reign of Albia, and going to America would be nearly impossible. He knew next to nothing about the Iberian Peninsula, but he did know it would be difficult to reach and to live in as foreigners.
His musings were cut short when Cosette appeared in the sitting room. Despite her smile, she looked rather drawn and pale. Thoughts of Sparks and moving were pushed to the back of his mind as he rose and embraced the girl.
"I'm sorry I took so long, Papa," she said before he could speak, and even her voice sounded weary. "I was finishing one of my sketches when Toussaint came to tell me you had arrived, and I couldn't bring myself to leave it."
He settled into his chair again, and Cosette sat on the ground by his knee. "You will have to show me these sketches of yours someday," he said, laying a hand on her shoulder. It was thin, but then, she had always been small and slender. Even bringing in the best food hadn't changed that. "You spend so much time on them that I can't think why you haven't shown one to me yet."
A hint of color had risen into her cheeks, but now it faded. "Yes, papa," she said, but her gaze slid from his face and drifted off into the distance.
"Why, Cosette, what's wrong? Is there something bothering you?"
"What?" She looked up and smiled. "No, not at all. I was merely thinking."
"From the looks of it, you were thinking deep thoughts." She nodded, and her cheeks turned pink. "You're too young to be distressed by life. You would tell me if there were anything bothering you, wouldn't you?"
"Yes, papa," she said again, and again her gaze slid from his face and into the distance. They sat in silence for a while, and then Cosette looked up at him. "Is it warm out yet? It must be nearly time for the sun to come out. By the calendar, it's been spring for days."
Her voice was once more the prattle he had grown accustomed to, and he smiled. "It's growing warmer, my dear. Your garden should be ready by the start of next month."
When her face fell, it was in the disappointment of an innocent child, and he wondered whether it was selfish of him to prefer that to her more adult sorrow. "Is it warm enough at least to take a turn in the garden? I do sometimes like seeing it in winter. It isn't dead, really, just waiting to return to us in the spring."
"You will want a shawl," he said, and before he had properly finished the sentence, Cosette had sprung to her feet, kissed him on the forehead, and run off to her room. Jean Valjean watched her go, feeling a strange sorrow. Whenever Cosette talked of death, he always saw Fantine's eyes behind the child's. They were the same shade of blue and both had known pain. He had planned to bring the two of them to Paris, and he wondered what would have happened had Fantine survived. The mother and daughter might be happy now, and he would have been able to save one more person.
Javert had called Fantine a Spark during what had passed for her trial. Didn't the Spark run in families?
He shook his head. He had promised himself, when he first saw Cosette kneeling by the Thernardiers' fireplace with rusty tools lying beside her, that he would not consider such thoughts. If Cosette was a Spark, then she would be reviled by society, and it was his task to protect her from that. He would not love her any less, but sometimes he had to look past his own little world and see what danger the outside might cause.
Cosette returned then, a shawl pinned around her shoulders, and took his arm. As they entered the garden, she chattered about what sorts of flowers might appear and whether she ought to clear a patch to have a proper garden rather than just the rambling wilderness of plants that had sprung up. Jean Valjean nodded in all her pauses, but he wasn't listening. He was remembering a little girl who had looked up at him, holding in her hands a hand-made attempt at a doll.
