Hypatia has brought over some of her ferns during her stay—great leafy things spiraling towards the floor. She trims a dead frond here and there with her small silver-alloy scissors, plucking samples to study. Jindosh watches her set up the microscope.
"Want to look?" she offers. "I always find the microscopic world fascinating."
He takes it as an order and dutifully looks through the lens. He startles at the glass-like bubbles of green, little baubles previously hidden from the eye. And inside each perfect secret, movement: shifting organelles, bustling about.
"Aren't they beautiful?" she asks gently, and with the slightest of hesitation, a tug between her fear and her good nature, she touches his shoulder softly—half-reassurance, half communication.
It's all a dim dream to him; he's done this before, but he can't say when. Unconsciously, his hand falls to the fine adjustment knob, and then he stops, unsure of what he means to do. He tears himself away from this dazzling world to look at her, questioningly.
She smiles, and he doesn't understand why.
"Very good," she says. She cups the back of his hand and guides him to the knobs again. "This one will make large adjustments, and this one smaller."
He tries to hold them in his mind, but it's like trying to hold a bubble. Just before the thought snaps, he can see something vaguely moving beyond it, some natural outcome of this idea, crawling along the sand, half-formed and unborn.
He stares at the microscope with horror, with a vague sense of loss and wrongness.
"You did well," she says, turning off the whale oil and steering him away from it and onto the nearby chaise longue. And he finds himself whisked away to another place, not able to grasp the transition. She looks at the distress in his body and mistakes it for sadness.
"Here," she says, clipping off a small frond as a souvenir and placing it in his hand. "It's nice to touch."
Something inside him gives in. He stares placidly at the wall, his mind dreaming of ferns that twist and curl, dark seaweed that bends under the undulating ocean currents, thin glass slides with a tiny world on them, green bubbles that burst under the strain of life, thin copper wires curving through the machines.
He's so lost in his own associations, that he doesn't hear Lucia Pastor come in and take a sharp intake of breath, as though she had just spotted a snake. She gives Hypatia a warning look, gesturing towards him with a slight turn of her head.
"It's alright," Hypatia says, pulling out her notes on the miners.
"I'm not sure I would have come if I knew whose home this was."
"We're keeping it a secret," Hypatia replies. "The public can look at the Clockwork Mansion anytime they'd like now, but I think it'd be best if we didn't expose Kirin to that kind of scrutiny. He's… a little fragile right now."
"That's one word for it," Lucia replies warily.
Jindosh stirs a little at the sound of his name, and glances towards Hypatia. And in some regard, it registers with him that he's different now in some way, and it'd be best to hide that. How, he cannot say, or even what gives him away as different, and the thought pains him that he doesn't have the upper hand now in this strange, shifting world.
Hypatia notices his discomfort. "Sorry," she says in her gentle way. "I've been a physician for too long. Want to greet our guest? This is Lucia Pastor. She and I help the miners."
"I'm sure he knows who I am," Lucia says disagreeably.
He watches Lucia out of uncertainty, pulling at the fern in his hand, trying to figure out what to say. He's trying to hold all the important context about her—Lucia, miners, Hypatia's friend—and use that to come to a decision about her, but with every passing second, it's harder to remember them.
"Hypatia showed me how to collect plant samples today," he says, childlike, settling on the only thing he remembers at that moment. "If you look at them under the lens, they're all different."
He is only dimly aware of Lucia's bewilderment and the way Hypatia quickly masks her disappointment into mild gentleness.
"Did you know that there are little rooms inside the plants?" he continues. "You can only see them under the lens."
"I didn't," Lucia says at last, slowly, as if his words are a trap.
Jindosh senses that he's failed another test somehow: this new world is full of tests he can't pass, apparently. He glances down at the torn fern, as if it might tell him the answer.
"We saw a lot today," Hypatia says, intervening. "Lucia came over to tell me about the miners. Do you want to stay, or go to a different room?"
He thinks of the shifting rooms, and a cold pit forms in his stomach. He's not so convinced that these new rooms don't also shift. Maybe all the rooms in the world shift as well. He'll never find his way out at this rate.
"I want to stay," he says. "I'm very afraid."
Hypatia nods. "It'll be alright. Lucia is a good woman." She gives his shoulder a slight squeeze before rejoining Lucia at the table.
"Afraid of what?" Lucia whispers. "Don't tell me he's got worse than the clockworks here."
Hypatia shakes her head.
The breeze settles in the room: the dust storms have lessened considerably, and now it's a pleasure to feel the ever-present sun and soft salt breeze. It lulls Jindosh to sleep, and Hypatia tucks one of the nearby blankets over him
"You have a kind heart, Alex," Lucia says when she returns to their table with papers spread all over it, never taking her eyes off him, "but it'll get you into trouble one day. Do you think he'd care for you if the tables were turned? You'd be on the dissection table in less than an hour. Maybe he'd pull out your organs and put them in formaldehyde. I hear there's tons of horrible jars like that pulled out of the mansion."
"But that's not the case, is it?" Hypatia pauses. "Aren't we trying for a better future, Lucy? What do we have if we can't try?"
"I don't think there's anything left in him worth saving," Lucia says. "He fried his brain doing one of his cruel experiments, and what's fair is fair. I guess that's what happens when you fly too close to the sun." She pulls her coat closer around her. "Watching him is like watching something that got pulled out of the ocean. It doesn't understand what it's doing outside of the water, and all it can do is struggle uselessly. It's horrible."
"Lucy," Hypatia begins, a tangle in her heart.
"He'll be like this for decades," Lucia continues, lost in her own thoughts. "And no one can do anything for him. You should have sent him to Addermire. Do you honestly think he'd know the difference?"
"I can't," Hypatia confesses. "I can't bear it."
Lucia stares at her, dumbstuck. "But why? Now that the Duke isn't keeping you under his thumb anymore, we can do the most good for the people of Serkonos."
"We still can," Hypatia says, clasping Lucia's hands pleadingly. "I believe in impossible causes; you must know that by now."
Lucia looks away from her. "I believe in you, Alex. Why wait so long to send for me? If I had known your fainting spells were getting worse... I'd have dragged you out of Addermire, Grand Guards or no."
"I was foolish," Hypatia says at last. "I did things." She fumbles for words to name this horror in her heart. "I don't remember them. I don't want to remember them."
Lucia watches her carefully, pain on her face. "I believe in you," she repeats. "I know you. You wouldn't hurt anyone."
And all Hypatia can do is gaze at her helplessly, like a creature trapped under the ice. Then, she folds her hurt and her fear away, turning to the plight of the miners instead of her own heart. It's better this way, she thinks. Not everything is meant to be said.
When he awakes, the room is dark and he is more afraid than ever. Shadows crawl on the walls, and he's terrified of going forward into the darkness, lest it start moving too. He tightly shuts his eyes against this new obstacle, hoping beyond hope to see anyone—Billie, Anton, Hypatia—there instead to help him navigate this and tell him what to do.
But no one comes.
"I'm afraid," he says to the empty air. He's afraid of staying by himself, he's afraid of leaving.
He struggles forward, terrified that at at moment, the floors will break apart and reconfigure themselves. He stumbles into the door, and pulling it open, exhales when the candlelight spills past him. He nearly collapses from relief.
"You're awake," comes Sokolov's voice from a nearby room, and Jindosh heads towards the familiar voice. "It's good that you're sleeping so much lately. Might even be good for your brain, help it heal and all that."
Sokolov sets down his cards. "I wanted to tell you that I'm leaving for a few days. There are some spots in Karnaca I'd like to paint before my voyage up north. Now, I've set up your finances so that you don't need me here to manage everything. Nothing will change for you, so you don't have to worry."
"I'm afraid," Jindosh replies, even as his reasoning for that thought slips from him. "I'm very afraid of this."
"There's nothing to be afraid of," Sokolov replies. "You'll be taken care of, as you already are, and nothing will change."
And Jindosh only watches Sokolov, lost again in his mind, thinking of fern fronds and the dripping of candle wax.
Anton leaves for bed eventually, and Jindosh stays up, afraid that when he wakes up again, the world will be different, but he doesn't remember why it'll be that way.
The older maid comes in with a tray—a small array from the dinner he missed earlier. Some Morley figs, some fresh bread, a cheese spread. Some warm chamomile tea.
He shakes his head. "I'm afraid," he says at last, unable to explain why.
"Afraid of what?" she asks, her patience wearing thin.
"I'm very afraid," he repeats, as if that will be enough to convey the nameless, reasonless dread in his heart. If he could remember, he'd tell her that he's afraid Sokolov will never come back, that no one will be interested in showing him new things, even if he can't remember them later, that the world will continue to be strange and unknowable to him. But he can't, and so he doesn't.
"Why are you like this?" she says, frustrated. "Just tell me what you mean, instead of playing these games with me."
It's surprisingly easy to hit him; she had always thought it would be harder somehow. And it's so disturbingly pleasant to finally get him back for all those times her service wasn't enough, all the times she mopped and cooked and polished the floors of the forsaken little mansion.
He draws back in pain, and she loves it.
His wide-eyed hurt is a pleasant change from every snide insult, all the long hours on her feet, the goddamned smug loudspeaker commentary on every single intruder in the mansion. But then her fleeting superiority fades, and all she sees is her own regret and the reddened skin that will raise questions. She remembers her mother's advice from her own childhood, when her father hit her in a visible place.
"Here," she says, rubbing the skin so that it won't form a bruise. "Rub the area, or it'll bruise." And she is both mother and child in that moment, carrying on her own legacy of pain.
He pulls back from her touch, even as he can't remember why, just a nameless, reasonless, instinctual terror in his stomach. And in return, she roughly pulls him towards her.
"Why are you being so difficult today? Don't you have enough brains left to figure out what will happen to you if you don't shape up? If they see that, they'll send you to stay permanently at Addermire, where you'll never get to go on walks or see anyone. They'll laugh at you, and you'll be too stupid to know it. Do you want that?"
He doesn't understand what's going on, only that he doesn't want any of this. His head hurts, and he wants to lie down, somewhere far away from all of this. Instead, he watches her, wide-eyed, for what she'll do next.
She takes his silence for an answer. "Good. I knew you couldn't have been all that brain-dead. Now finish your plate, and then you can go to bed."
He decides to do whatever will make her happy. He doesn't want any more of this, doesn't remember how it started, or why his shoulder hurts, or why he feels sick in a way he can't name anymore. The ocean that he's shipwrecked on has unexpectedly turned hostile again, and the only thing to do is to appease it somehow.
He finishes his tray under her watchful eye, periodically glancing at her to gauge if this is the correct reaction to whatever she wants, if this is the right answer to this new test.
"Very good," she says, gathering up the tray. "I knew you could behave." She ruffles his hair affectionately.
A little while later, he's violently ill again, and when it's all over, he curls up in his bed and wills himself to die.
