The rushing water halts and shivering feet step into the ceramic tub, cautiously, one by one. Violet relaxes at the therapeutic caress of the steaming water; it touches her skin that is clenched against the cold and marred by goosebumps, and eases it to relaxation. The ceiling above her is molded and its paint is peeling. The rusting machinery that is responsible for all the thermal endowments of energy in the tavern hum and croak endlessly. If she strained her ears, she would also hear the running rodents in the vents. Slowly, she slips lower, until her dark hair splays across the water like night-kissed waves and her breathing forms bubbles that are soon abated.
Stillness. She hears stillness and it is very loud. It supplies her with clarity—the type that withdraws you from the sensory world until you can relive whatever memory you had tucked and stored in the caverns of your mind. But she doesn't choose the imageries that play against her closed eyelids like a movie; they force their way into her perception, and they are warmer than the water that engulfs her.
Sunny had set her eyes on her mother's ancestral cuckoo clock. Its placement was just by the junction that separated the library from the hallway, quite far for the limited reach of a one year old baby, but she was not to be swayed by her disadvantageous height. She implored her brother, who sat nearby in his armchair with a book placed on his lap, to fetch her the intricate object, though Klaus was rightfully hesitant. Eventually, he had caved in to his baby sister's wishes and credited her curiosity as harmless. He went to retrieve the clock, only to find that even he could not reach it. With the added height of a chair, he stretched his arm, touching it but just barely. When he finally managed to hold it, his legs caved in and he fell, bringing down the ancient clock alongside him. It broke with a painful crash.
That was the story that the youngest Baudelaires told their sister as they held the fragments of the clock. Violet bit her lip and looked at the object, then at her siblings.
"Can you fix it?" said Klaus apprehensively.
She peered left and right, gauging the quietude of the house and determining that her parents were nowhere in sight. With a smile, she said, "come along."
With Sunny tucked securely in his arms, Klaus followed his elder sister into her room. The light streamed in plentifully and the curtains danced along the breeze, throwing shadows of the patterns they adorned on the desk below them. There were devices, invented and bought readily, of all shapes and sizes. Violet's last venture lay bare in the middle, its sculpture dissected to showcase cogs and gears. A sketch of an idea was hung nearby. It took inspiration from her favorite inventor, Nikola Tesla.
She placed the clock on the desk after making room for it and extracted her ribbon from her pocket, lifting her hair swiftly and tying it. "Well, the pendulum is definitely broken. I can restore the functioning of the device, but it wouldn't be quite as efficient without the pendulum."
"Yes, I've read about it," said Klaus distantly, his eyes glazing over as he recalled the details. "It's a timekeeping element. It swings with specific intervals and regulates the speed of the clock. The clock would be completely out of synch without it," he lamented.
"Nova?" suggested Sunny, meaning 'can you make a new one?'
"Thankfully it's not hard to make a pendulum," said Violet. "All I need is a weight and a rod." She scanned her room thoughtfully, mumbling, "I can make a rod with the needed measurement…" She turned to her siblings. "Can you get me something that would serve as a weight? Anything would do. But I think it would be better if it had the general appearance and size of the original one, so that mother wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I'll begin working on the clockwork."
"Kapish!" said Sunny, and Klaus grinned. They returned after a while, with Klaus holding something rather sheepishly in his right hand. Violet was now working on the rod, but she raised her eyes to appraise them.
"Did you find something?" she said.
He held out his hand, opening it slowly. "This one looked most like the original weight." It was one of their mother's gemstones. Their father had brought it to her during one of his trips to Africa. "Mother never takes it out," he said, rather unconvincingly. "In fact I don't believe she would notice it went missing at all. It was kept in a dusted box on top of her dresser."
Violet blinked. "Well… we're getting in trouble one way or the other, right?"
They all shared a grin.
The clock was restored into impeccable working fashion. The pendulum swung back and forth steadily, and the weight glinted brilliantly when the light hit it. The three children looked at it with a sense of relief, though Sunny's interest in it was piqued again.
Klaus gave it to her with a smile. "Here you go, Sunny. But no biting!" To that, Sunny gave a four-toothed grin.
Violet sat on her knees on the ground and leaned her elbows on the desk, resting her chin atop them as she inspected the beautiful clockwork closely. "It's called a harmonic oscillator—you know, the pendulum and its swinging movement," she added upon the confused look on Klaus's face.
"How does it work?" he questioned, sitting down and mimicking his sister's pose.
Regardless of how well-read Klaus was, physics was Violet's domain, and she was delighted when she was able to share her knowledge with her brother for a change. "When you take it out of its position of equilibrium, gravity aids it by giving it a restoring force, proportional to the displacement," she explained. "It rocks back and forth between potential and kinetic energy."
Klaus hummed and touched the pendulum carefully, holding it at one end, then letting go. "It always seeks to return to equilibrium."
Violet raises her body from the depths of the water, the memory rinsing off alongside the droplets. The air is cold and needling now, and she finds her throat parched and her eyes stinging with tears, though her face is just as impassive. It always seeks to return to equilibrium. Though the force added by the winding key forbids it from ever reaching it. The tears descend. She misses Klaus. She misses Sunny. She misses Beatrice. But most of all, she misses the feeling of naive normalcy, back when her parents were alive and well, and when security was felt just upon the touch of her mother's hand or the resounding laughter of her father. She misses it all so much.
A sharp succession of knocks breaks her reverie. She starts and sucks in a breath, looking apprehensively at the door. "Yes?"
"Miss Baudelaire," Lemony's voice is shaky but brittle with haste. "I know where your brother is."
Violet's heart leaps to her throat. She swears she could even taste it. The sweetness of reunion and the bitterness of the succeeding separation. Both sensations impose themselves on her, but she doesn't contemplate them at all. Not when all her nerves are screaming and imploring her to take action. She quickly exits the tub, her muscles shaking and tingling, and puts on her clothes haphazardly, uncaring of how her wet hair clings uncomfortably and soaks the fabric. She swings the door open, and finds that Lemony's usually melancholy face mirrors her own. Wide-eyed and mouth agape. Skin pale with shock and reddened with anticipation.
"Where is he?" she finds herself asking. Her voice was alien to her ears.
"London," he says curtly and shuffles to collect his typewriter and whatever few belongings he had, stuffing them in his briefcase. "We take a steamer to Scarborough Harbor, then a train to London. We go now." He turns to her when he is finished. "Do you have anything to take with you?" But she is already rushing down the stairs.
The steamer coughs its toxic burden onto the clouded sky and begins its journey with a jerk. Lemony doesn't allow himself to breathe until then. He rests his elbows on the railing and appraises the town of Eldritch with grimness to which his face took no trouble in morphing its contours. Violet stands beside him, but she is too anxious and fidgety to be still. Her hands toy with the cuffs of her dress and she shuffles her feet too frequently.
"Mr. Snicket," she says at last, a bit nervously. "What of Sunny and Beatrice?"
Lemony swallows and looks down. "I was only notified of the whereabouts of Klaus. It's no cause for grief, however. Not yet." His last words are spoken in a whisper. Violet notes that optimism didn't come naturally to him at all.
"It's just…" she begin and hesitates. Taking in a breath, she continues, "if there was one thing that kept my mind at ease, it was that they had each other. But to know that they had separated…"
"Miss Baudelaire," he says gently. "Your siblings are strong and capable. They will survive, much as you did." Her silence hangs with the impression of skepticism, so he adds as lightheartedly as is possible for him, "if anything, for a relentlessly unfortunate group of people, you also prove to be the most fortunate. Death would have inevitably claimed a normal person from the very first disaster you were subjected to." Leave it to him to be increasingly morbid in his attempt at lightheartedness. He shuts his eyes in quiet frustration.
"You're right," she says, much to his surprise. "We've survived this long. It wouldn't make sense for us to die so suddenly."
"If you ascribe to such philosophy…" he mutters. She must think it convenient for him to be a nihilist, for she says nothing. Instead, he is answered by a non-human caw. He blinks in surprise and turns in her direction, only to find that the black raven from before is perched faithfully on her shoulder. "What is it doing here?"
"His name is Tesla," says Violet, raising a finger to stroke its feathers. "He came when he saw us leaving."
"And you saw it fit to take him along?"
"He's my friend, Mr. Snicket. You don't leave your friends behind."
"I suppose not." He blinks again and leans away from the creature that looks at him with unabashed intensity. "It's simply that ravens and their crow counterparts make me—" Tesla ruffles its feathers and pecks the air in his direction. Lemony takes a step back. "—uneasy."
Violet chuckles quietly. She remembers Uncle Monty and her own unease at the slithering reptilians. "I think you'll find that he's more afraid of you than you are of him, Mr. Snicket," she says.
Lemony glances at the creature suspiciously. He notices how its coal black eyes have a glint that endows it with a sense of vitality that does little to resemble the death that he had come to associate it with. There is no true ill-intention in its little heart. And that much cannot be said about a great number of humans.
When the two reach the Scarborough Harbor, it is already late in the night. They move with agility that is not necessarily mandated, but learned and perfected nonetheless. They are two shadows in the night; growing on stained walls and shrinking on cobbled grounds, their contents obscured and elusive. Lemony ushers Violet into a compartment in the train and is quick to close the doors, opening his coat to allow the hiding bird a level of freedom. Tesla flies across the small space and regains its place on Violet's shoulder, pecking at her cheek affectionately.
"You will have to be quiet, Tesla," she whispers, caressing the soft feathers.
Lemony's eyes, though concealed by his hat, are trained on the moving landscape outside his window. "An associate will meet us by Blackfriars Bridge. We will then be taken to a safe place—Val's Foundation of Delegates. It is there that we expect to find your brother."
"I thought that Hotel Denouement was the last safe place?"
"It was," he says gravely. "But after it's destruction, the remaining volunteers had to find a new place where it is possible to take shelter, exchange information, and play the accordion."
Violet swallows. "So the VFD saved him. I suspect it was a recent development. If it had happened early on, you would have known, right?"
"You're… half right about that," says Lemony carefully. "He was found by a volunteer in an obscure hospital whose motto is 'death seeketh every soul, and every soul is sought by death'. Putting pleonasms aside, it was very much believed that Klaus was… well, dying." He clears his throat. "He was in a coma, and his vital functions were failing. Quite unexpectedly, however, he regained consciousness. He was then tended to by my colleagues and taken into safety."
Her voice is shaky when she speaks. "And when was this?"
"Three weeks ago." At her incredulous reaction, he raises both hands to calm her and proceeds to explain, "every decision has to be calculated and risk-free. Trusting in one another has become decidedly more difficult over the last couple of years. These things rightfully take time, miss Baudelaire, and it's only to guarantee that no harm will befall any volunteer. You understand that, don't you?"
Violet takes in a deep breath and holds it until she calms. Her eyebrows are furrowed and her gaze is downturned. "I don't like this," she whispers. "I can't help thinking that there was an ulterior motive to saving him. The fact that they refused to give us any information for three weeks stretches the imagination."
He considers her wording and decides that it makes him uncomfortable. Regarding her with an air of suspicion, he says, "the imagination is stretched when lacking knowledge. You're still to be educated in the workings of VFD and its ethics. But for now, I urge you to trust them on the account of my word. Your brother would have definitely died if not for them."
"And what's the price to pay for their generosity?" she mumbles a bit crossly.
Lemony finds it difficult not to feel affronted. The VFD is his life's investment. A criticism to the organization is akin to a direct attack on him. "It's not a self-profiting organization, miss Baudelaire. We seek to salvage whatever justice that presides in a world conquered by blindness and narcissistic gain. We quell the fire where it is started."
"It's a lot easier when the fire is literal, isn't it? But when it's figurative, how do you know that the fire is not imagined? How do you know that you're not the one who started the fire?"
He flinches visibly. "That's not—" He halts. Snapping at her would do no good. Looking at her, he sees a young girl who has had to come to terms with losing all her family over and over again. She is terrified and skeptical, and it wouldn't be normal for her to be anything otherwise. "I know that you haven't had the best of experiences with many volunteers," he whispers. "But don't blame the organization as a whole. It is its true intention to do good in the world, regardless of its fallibility."
There is no word for the way she regards him now. Her expression is claimed by weary surrender and… pity? But why would she pity him?
The train comes to a halt, and whatever inquiry Lemony wishes to make is pushed aside. He encloses Tesla yet again in his coat and takes the briefcase in his hand. The train station still buzzes with life, regardless of the late hour, but when they exit it altogether, the quietude is tangible. Only a few civilians walk the streets of London, and most are men, their top hats and long coats making them easily distinguishable. Violet can't but engage her spirit of enquiry. She looks around curiously at the passing figures and the closed shops, and determines that not only is it less bleak than town they had just departed, but also a lot more advanced. There are posters announcing the experimental display of new scientific technology, and others advertising theatrical plays. A carriage passes them by quickly, and Lemony holds Violet by shoulders instinctively and moves her to the side, even though it was at least ten feet away from them. She smiles at him slightly.
Beyond the hovering mist, they make out the general inclinations and swerves of Blackfriars Bridge. There is a tall figure looking over the River Thames, his silver hair serving as a lighthouse for the two. They reach him from behind, and Violet gives Lemony an apprehensive look.
"I didn't realize this was a sad occasion," says Lemony, and the words cause her spine to tingle.
The figure turns, and she is struck to find out that his face isn't of an old man, but rather of a boy who was at most a year older than she. His eyes are just as silver, and there plays an enigmatic smile on his lips.
"The world is quiet here."