A Web of Steam & Puppet Strings (Sevastyan #1)

Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

I was exhausted, so I risked changing into my much more comfortable tunic, without the umbilical cord connecting my arm to Eliza's. I figured we'd been bullied enough over the past couple days.

I slept deep enough not to dream.

Seemed as if only a measly handful of minutes passed before I jolted awake to light in the room. Morning. I grunted and tossed onto my other side, but no amount of incoherent curses switched off the single bulb in the ceiling.

My tunic was damp. My hair as well. Even my socks. I must have sweated a real storm last night. Distantly I remembered Eliza trying to shake me awake. Something about getting dinner or she'd eat it for me. I'd chosen sleep.

With my blanket pulled up over my head, I grumbled, "Eliza."

No answer.

She was a late sleeper, and a heavy sleeper.

"Eliza."

Still no answer.

I muttered another string of profanities before my hand reached up and flopped across the stiff cot, searching through the mound of blanket. "Eliza. Eliza. Elizaveta."

Nothing.

In fact, the cot was cold.

Adrenaline spiked my blood. I swung upright, prying my eyelids apart. I didn't see her. She wasn't in her bed.

Excellent.

I did spot her uniform tossed to the foot of her cot, which meant she had changed into her tunic, and also meant she and the others hadn't been called out again. Still, Eliza up and about before me was cause for concern.

I spotted my crate stowed beneath her cot and I dragged it into my lap, ready to start my day with another dose of drawing—wait.

Something looked wrong.

I reached in and lifted the box of midnight tones to scrutinize. I tried to remember what it had looked like yesterday, and this wasn't it. Many of the sticks had been reduced to stubs. My box of black and dark grays were the same. I dipped my face nearly inside the crate. Close to every piece of chalk had been tainted with smudges and traces of darker colors.

Fingerprints. Those were fingerprints. I plucked a piece of white and lifted it to my eye, memorizing the hooking threads of dark chalk that compromised a fingerprint.

Someone had used my chalk.

There wasn't much dressing up I needed to do. I simply pulled on my boots and was ready to go, my blood hot with a new fever. The corridors were unusually quiet. The smell of hot porridge lingered faintly in the air, but as soon as I stepped into the sunlight of the Playground, I found a crowd gathered in the farthest corner to the left, around the wall of my earliest drawings.

Acid poured into my stomach. The others spotted me, one by one, an avalanche effect. The crowd split so that I could pass through.

"Sev!" Eliza rushed up behind me. "Sev, what were you thinking?"

The last of the crowd parted. I stopped.

I was left to gaze upon what should have been my portraits of my earliest memories, of my old house and my parents, when it was still crisp and real. But now, in the fading patchwork of my memory, my old house had devolved into incomprehensible shapes and blurs, and my parents' faces had deteriorated into obscurity. All I'd had to remind me were the drawings I'd done, over half a year ago. Snow and rain had caused the images to run and fade, but a month ago, I'd dutifully returned to redo their features.