"Lili? Lili, are you down here?" Elisabeth Voclain blinked sleepily and sat up. She had fallen asleep in the basement of her family's home, though she was still a bit shaky on how she had gotten there. It was dark despite the slant of sunlight coming through the window, and she was tempted to fall back asleep, but her stomach growled. She felt as though she hadn't eaten in days, and her arms shook as she pushed herself up from the pile of old, moth-eaten drapes. "Lili, this isn't funny." Her brother sounded worried. "You've been gone for two days." "I'm here," she called, sitting up and pushing some of her red hair out of her face. It caught on one of her ears, and she wondered why she hadn't thought to do something about them. It would be so easy to stimulate skin growth to cover the wounds from slicing away the excess, and she could even find a way to reshape the cartilage. Her mind started to turn with equations and facts, but then her stomach growled again. "Give me a moment. I'm not awake yet." But she was awake. Everything seemed so much clearer, as though parts of her eyes had been blurred but now were healed. They were healed, she realized, remembering what she had been doing down here. It had been dangerous to work like that, in the dark and with eyes that wouldn't see without blurring, but her thoughts had guided her hands, and she had known what she had to do. Now, she could see individual dust motes floating in the sunlight and the tiny moth holes in the drapes. A smile spread over her face, and she sprang to her feet. "Eloi!" she called, running to the stairs and peering up to her brother's silhouette. "Eloi, you need to come down here now!" Her brother came down the stairs, and as he drew closer, she relished how much of him she could see now. She had always been told that even though they were twins they barely resembled each other, and even though she still wasn't clear on what she looked like, it was wonderful to see his face. His hair was more brown than hers, and his eyes were bright green. Freckles crossed his nose and scattered up onto his forehead, and he had little wrinkles around his eyes, no doubt from squinting so often. Their parents couldn't afford to buy them spectacles. "What is it, Lili?" he asked. "Would you like to see?" He frowned, and she saw the way his eyebrows drew closer together and his nose wrinkled. "What do you mean?" "I mean I can see. I can see you like anyone else can, like we could when we were little." His entire face seemed to light up. "How? How did you do that?" "You trust me, right?" she asked, grabbing his hands and pulling him to her workbench. The events of the past days were coming back to her now, and she wondered how she could have forgotten them. She had been sitting with her family when suddenly an idea had struck her and she had rushed off. She had thought how wonderful it would be if she could see like anyone else, and suddenly it was as though she understood the universe. She had come to the basement and created a machine that could adjust her eyes so they would work like anyone else's. "Of course I do, Lili," he said. "You're my sister. You are acting awfully strangely, though." She pulled him up to the machine and set his face in front of it so two little holes lined up with his eyes. "Don't worry about a thing," she said, flipping a switch on the side. There was a brief flash of light, and Eloi stumbled back, his hands over his eyes. "What have you done?" he cried. "You blinded me!" "No, no!" Elisabeth grabbed her brother's hands and pulled them down. "It was the same for me when I tried it. I would never do anything to you unless I had tested it on myself first." He looked hesitant. "Give it a few minutes." "How did you do this?" he asked, eyes closed tightly. She remembered how sharp the light had been on her retinas and how she had feared that she was blinded forever, even worse than having blurred vision. "How did you make something so incredible?" "I don't know," she said, smiling. "It just came to me, and I knew how to fix my sight." Eloi opened his eyes cautiously, and a smile spread over his face. "I don't believe it. Lili… I can see!" "I know!" She flung her arms around him, and he wrapped his around her. "We'll have to tell Mother and Father. Won't they be so happy?" Eloi released her, looking stricken. "Wait," he said. "You came up with an impossible invention and spent all your time down here, working on it. Now you're excited, ecstatic even." He turned pale, even paler than normal. "Lili, I think you're a Spark." That was the one thing that could dampen her spirits. Being a Spark meant she was brilliant, but it also meant she was in danger of dying. "What are we going to do?" she asked. If anyone tried to hurt her, she supposed she could take care of herself, but it might be difficult. Then there was the danger that someone might try to hurt Eloi. Rage rose up inside her, and she decided right then that if anyone tried to hurt her brother she would kill them. "I think I've got an idea," Eloi said. "I'll tell Mother and Father. They should agree to help you escape Paris, and maybe we can get out of the country." He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight. "Don't worry, Lili. I won't let anyone hurt you. You're my sister, and I'm going to protect you." *** Lesgle's home wasn't anything special. It wasn't nearly as nice as Musichetta's old rooms had been, but it was homey, and he treated it as though he were a castle. It was filled with books and various odds and ends that he had collected, and during her first days there, Musichetta had been too nervous to do much more than pick her way around the mess. Now that she was more comfortable in his rooms, she had started tidying up. Lesgle would say things like "our home" and insist that she make herself comfortable, so she supposed she might as well make Sparky things. The first day he had come home to a clean room, he had looked around and laughed in surprise. "Mademoiselle, what have you done?" "I thought I might make some room so I can work," she said, straightening a stack of books against one wall. "I'm surprised you could walk around at all with how cramped everything was. Besides, I figured that since I was going to live here, I might as well do my fair share of the work. I can't offer you any money, so I thought I would at least keep things clean." She got to her feet and tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear. She had put it up in a braid to keep it out of her way, but now it was escaping. "You shouldn't feel like you need to," Lesgle said. He reached forward as though to take her hand but stopped himself. "I didn't save you so you could be my servant." "I don't like to owe people," Musichetta said. There was something so sweetly earnest about Lesgle, and she knew that he was being completely honest with her. If ever she had doubted her decision to live with him, now she knew it had been the best choice for her. "Like I said, I want a chance to work. I haven't done anything for days, and it doesn't feel right." She had been dreaming about metal and gears, and if there wasn't anything he needed her to fix, then she would work on her own projects. Lesgle's eyes seemed to light up, and he grinned. "Could I watch you work?" Musichetta was taken aback, and it took her a moment to think of how she ought to react. No one had ever wanted to watch her work before. "Of course," she said. "Great!" Lesgle nearly bounced, and she laughed. "I've never had a chance to see a Spark work. That friend I told you about never really does anything, at least not while the rest of us are around. Do you really go mad? What does that feel like? Can you really break the laws of physics?" No one had ever asked her those questions and sounded genuinely curious about the answers, and she was more flustered than if he had asked her to undress. "I don't think it's really madness," she said, "but it feels more wonderful than anything else. I feel like I can do anything, and most of the time I can. I don't know if I can really break the laws of physics, but I can probably convince them to look the other way." She hadn't thought it possible, but Lesgle's grin got even wider. "Mademoiselle, will you stay with me?" "I'm already staying with you," she said, laughing a little to hide her confusion. "I thought that's what 'house guest' meant." Not that he had a house for her to be a guest in, but neither of them brought that up. She was happy enough to have a place to stay. "I meant as more than just a guest. I'd like you here as… as a friend." He sounded so eager and earnest that Musichetta was sure any suspicions of him she'd had were founded only in her experience with other men. While experience tended to be a good teacher, right now she suspected she was dealing with someone completely unique. "I suppose I would like to be your friend, M. Lesgle," she said. "Or ought I call you Félix?" "Félix would be more suiting, I think," he said. "May I call you Musichetta?" "Of course." Félix helped her with the rest of the stacking – though more often than not she had to keep volumes from landing on his feet – and she helped him with dinner. He was a fair cook, but she had to continually swoop in and keep him from somehow singeing his eyebrows off or setting the building on fire. She asked over dinner whether he, too, was able to break the laws of physics, and he laughed and assured her he was merely painfully unlucky. In truth, not much changed about their lives. They called each other by their first names rather than formally, and if Félix walked in on Musichetta half-dressed, he didn't scurry off but rather helped her find clothes that weren't torn or stained. He still blushed, and she mocked him for it, asking why he was so bashful when he had surely had his share of mistresses. He admitted that he had, but she was a friend rather than a mistress, so he thought blushing might be polite. She laughed at him, and he accepted it with good grace. They laughed at each other easily, though he learned to keep from laughing at her failed experiments until well after she was out of the madness place. Now that she could be a proper Spark again, Musichetta found herself with nearly no time to herself. There always seemed to be something to do – a stove that wouldn't light properly, pipes that kept the rooms too warm or not warm enough, an attempt at a clank that only walked in small circles and sighed sadly – and that was without going to a job that actually paid. She was able to find one of those quickly, and soon she brought home a small but steady amount of money. She had clothes to mend and clean, and the rooms to keep decently tidy. Sometimes she thought she didn't have time to breathe, but about half the time she found herself either in or nearly in the madness place, and breathing hardly seemed necessary there. Félix tried to help. He kept a job bookkeeping for a shopkeeper and so was able to bring home a good amount of money. Between themselves they lived quite happily, and sometimes they joked that they were very nearly a happily married couple, even though the "wife" was a grisette. At first, Félix had insisted on helping around their rooms, but something would almost always manage to go wrong. The food would be undercooked or burnt, even though he insisted he had followed her instructions exactly. The mending he did would pucker the dress or tear as soon as she tried to put it on. Whenever he tried to clear up the room, he would somehow make the mess worse or – if he did make it better – he would find that he couldn't find anything in the new cleanliness. In the end, Musichetta had him buy her supplies. He might come home from his trips muddy or late because he got lost or stuck behind a carriage crash, but he was clever enough to understand what she asked for and bring her back exactly what she needed. "I suppose we balance each other out," he said one day as she struggled to rewire a clank that simply wouldn't shut down. Her fingers were scraped and burnt from its struggles to not be taken apart, and smoking lock of her hair lay on the floor where Félix had thrown it to keep it from setting her head on fire after it had fallen too close to a loose wire. "What do you mean?" she asked. Her words were a bit muffled by the wrench between her teeth, but she held tools in her mouth often enough that Félix could understand her almost perfectly. "You're lucky," he said, "and I'm not. Together, we just about make someone normal." "Together we make a law school drop-out who's also a Spark." The clank twitched and fell still, but she couldn't tell whether it had really shut down or was just pretending. Sometimes she thought her clanks – especially the ones that didn't do what they were supposed to – had some sort of personality and liked tricking her. "That hardly sounds normal." "The thing I meant is, I'm lucky to have met you." Félix's voice became softer, more sincere, and Musichetta pulled back from her clank to look at him. He watched her not with the avid eagerness of someone trying to discover what it was like to be a Spark but with something that was nearly love. "I'm never lucky, but when it comes to you, I feel like the world's lined everything up for me." She reached out to take his hand, but as soon as she released the clank, it sprang to its feet and raced off to hide in a pile of laundry. "Damn," she muttered. "I hope it doesn't set that on fire. I haven't closed it up yet." "It won't," he said, taking her other hand. "You're lucky." His hands were larger than hers, and less callused. There were a few odd scrapes and small scars from accidents, but for the most part they were the hands of a student. "I want you be careful. People are afraid of Sparks, of what they can do, and I don't want anything to happen to you." "I'll be all right," she said, smiling. "You be careful too, though. You've been the best host and the best friend I've ever had, and I don't want to lose you." "I'm sure things will work out." He darted forward and kissed her forehead. "Oh, and you might want to stay inside for a while." He released her hands and got to his feet. "What? Why?" Musichetta sprang up and followed him to the pile of laundry, where he was digging for the clank. "Oh, something about a plague in part of the city. It's probably nothing, but be careful anyway."
