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

Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE

I stared at it in awe, waiting for it to come together right in front of me, to latch onto the other pieces like ribbons of muscle and sinew and tendon uniting, forming the monster.

Anastasya shoved me from behind. "Sev, take a look at this."

She hobbled over to the desk at the head of the room and rounded it to see the spread of sketches. Unlike the various other tables in this part of the study, with sketches of the pieces and wiring for construction, these drawings were innocuously simple. I stepped beside her, leaning in to peer around the unmarked bottles. My eyes followed the series of paralleled wavy penciled lines. Looked a lot like individual strands of my hair on a bad day, really.

But beside those lines, erased and rewritten many times, was some sort of complex formula not meant to be interpreted by mankind, a convoluted mess of knots and symbols I couldn't attempt to understand, much like Eliza's hair on a good day.

My hand hovered over the sloping lines, but I was careful not to touch anything. "What does this all mean?"

She hovered over the table, her nose moving lower and lower. "These are wavelengths of light. See this wavelength here, this frequency is what the color blue looks like. When the sun's rays pass through our atmosphere, these are the rays you're seeing. But if it's sunset, you're seeing these rays here." She gestured to a crimped wave at the bottom, much more agitated than the blue wave. "This is red."

"I never realized sunset was so angry." She passed me a face of question marks and I wiggled my hand dismissively. "Never mind. Continue."

"Well, I can't. I don't know...what these waves are." She pointed to a series of waves beneath red. "These can't be visible. What could invisible waves do?" Her finger traced over to the equation, which consisted mostly of letters I didn't recognize. Then her gaze lifted to the machine in front of us. "Blast it all, I'm not smart enough."

"I highly doubt that. I look at this very scientific language and I pick out faces in the equations. Does that make me any less smart?"

"Perhaps."

We exchanged grins, and then she sifted her hands carefully beneath the giant paper, groping around until she fished out a folder. She flipped it open. Atop a small stash of papers was a single sheet of tracing paper, folded into fours. She unveiled it, smoothed it out to its proper full size, and there in front of us was the machine in its entirety, all the components sketched together. The face of it looked like something sinister, riddled with knobs and dials and insect antenna, complete with a tall spear right up the center.

Anastasya pointed to some barely legible scribbles at the bottom corner. "This says it's the first model. So, this..."

Simultaneously our attention lifted to the half-built machine in front of us. My mouth formed a terse line. "This one here is the new, improved version."

This was Isidora's attempt to reach her goal.

Anastasya's slender nose nearly grazed the paper as she studied the details. I turned my attention instead to the sheets peeking out beneath the flap of translucent sketch paper. Scribbled in the corner of one of the pages was something I thought out of place: a spider web. My brow furrowed as my fingers twitched and I lifted my hand—until the door clicked open in the other room.