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

Chapter Seven

CHAPTER SEVEN

For the lunch hour, we remained cooped up in our little bunk. I folded up her uniform as she hummed the melody to a song she had been composing. My chalk crate had appeared in my meal compartment after my first month, and I had tied it to a sprain I'd gotten from blocking a wedge of earth with my forearm.

Eliza's own gift, she couldn't tell me how or when she'd received it, or for what reason. She didn't remember anymore. The weathered and frayed cord-bound notebook and a stick of lead she used to jot down lyrics had an origin now as mysterious as her own.

But her voice took my fury from the morning and buffed it away, a breath of cool air against the fever lingering in my chest.

She had a voice unlike anything I'd ever heard before, sweet and textured with an edge of power. As she sang to me, softly, she worked out the rhythm of her words as she went, scratching and scribbling on wrinkled, water-stained paper. Her words painted a picture of Mother Earth, the land beneath us, in emeralds and earthy tones, in the blue of rain like tears and white like clouds in dance.

When the melody ceased, as she tapped the stick of lead against her lips in thought, she said, "I think I might have to finish this song another time."

Sprawled across my wad of sheets on my cot, I peered up at her. "Why?"

"I have a new inspiration clogging up my brain."

"Inspiration about what?"

"The temperamental promise of freedom, I think it is." Our eyes met and a smile worked its way to her face as my fingers toyed nervously with the bristle at my chin.

Once the lunch hour had ended, we stole into the bathrooms for some much needed relief, and then into the dining hall where we recovered hunks of bread with goat cheese. We left a mess of crumbs all over my cot. During dinner, a period where everyone indulged and unwound for the day, we snuck into the weight-training room and performed a few quick sets.

Between each set, I sat with the twenty pound weight in my lap, closed my hands around either end, and focused. When I pried my stiff fingers from the seething metal, I found the slightest shadow of my handprints.

Small victories.

But when I attempted to smooth the prints away, I only succeeded in making it worse.

Through the evening, back in our room, she wondered why all the bunker walls were built of something so flimsy as wood when the rest of the Chambers were concrete, and I said, "They don't have to worry about keeping us in, do they?"

"Then what about the Playground? The rumor of three walls?"

I shrugged. "Perhaps it's to keep others out."

"Hmm...how ominous-sounding. I highly doubt anyone would ever come for us." She rolled onto her back on her cot. "What about the Doors? Why steel?"

I rolled the question around in my mind. "I suppose it's symbolic. We can get out, but we can't get in."

"Mmm, I don't like this discussion anymore. Tell me in painful detail about Princess Anastasya's features. The length of her neck, the way her lips move, and—yes, how her body moves. I would very much like to obsess over her, if you please."

I indulged her and described everything that my eyes had committed to memory, down to the beauty mark on the tendon of her neck as white as magnolia blossoms, and the shape of her ghostly pale eyebrows, and the fullness of her heart-shaped lips and the glass mold of her cheekbones. She was otherworldly. My fingers itched with the desire to draw her, perhaps if only to see whether or not I could do her any justice.