Page 119 of The Space Between Stars

Pinto rubbed his chin. “You are not a woman prone to superstition. But you have endured much, and you are going through more. I think what you are feeling could be a trick of your mind to reaffirm your purpose, your path, your impact.” He gave her a look that pinned her in place. “And I also think you should listen to what you are feeling, because it might be sounder evidence than logic can supply.”

How entirely unhelpful. “Pinto.” She looked up from Toronoff’s mottled fur and into his kind eyes. “Should anything happen to me, I want someone to know what I have…” ‘Accomplished’ sounded conceited. “Made.”

“Is that all?”

“No.” She chewed at the inside of her cheek. “We’ll get to that. But there is an order to these things and I—oh, I’ll just show you.” She rose from her seat—Toronoff protesting with an indignant mewl—and pulled the rug away from the floor of her kitchen.

Pinto’s eyes grew wide. The trap door sat there, obvious and awkward, as if it had been eavesdropping. She’d added a combination lock to it in recent weeks, as her paranoia rose. She stooped to unlock it, fumbling with it twice before remembering she’d changed the combination the night before.

“Did I just witness you… make a mistake?” Pinto asked.

“Well of course I’m not going to get it right with you just sitting around, watching!” she snapped, correcting the combination. With a yank, the door yawned open. “Come on, then.”

Pinto gave his tea a forlorn look and set it on the table.

They descended the wooden ladder into the laboratory, and Attilatia pressed an activator on the wall. One by one, a dozen sets of red distortion lamps flickered to life, illuminating the subterranean space.

Pinto stepped through the basement, green robes trailing on the stone floor, mouth agape at her oasis: dozens of projects and inventions, pushed into the room’s corners and forgotten; hundreds of schematics, organized into shelves along the wall; countless bulbs, stripped of their ruxechorin cores. “How did you—”

“With serious engineering, five years of off-days, a handful of broken building codes, and probably twice as many broken laws.”

“Atti…”

She expected a scolding—or for him to turn around and alert the authorities, perhaps.

“This is exceptional.”

Attilatia’s chest swelled to such an extent, she thought her heart might burst clean through it and splatter over Pinto’s spectacles. “This technology—I’ve been waiting to bring it home. It could bring back the economy. Help us to regrow. And I’ve transcribed instructions so that someone else might be able to analyze my blueprints and replicate my work. So if anything happens to me, you can—”

“Atti,” Pinto shook his head, “as much as I would be honored, this is not mine to share. Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“Yes. But still. I need you to know, and to promise you will bring it home, with Thedexemore, should I disappear.”

Pinto watched her in quiet contemplation before tilting his chin.

“And there is something else.” More than ‘else’: the real reason she had brought him down here. Attilatia removed her bracelet and held it out. Pinto lifted a hand, and she set it into his palm. She nodded at the pea-sized ball of glass affixed to it. “That is not a bead.”

“Of course not.”

“That is a remote activator. It controls every distortion product ever produced by Aethertech Mechanics.”

“You are joking.”

“I… I am not.” It was information she had sworn she would take with her to the final cavern. “It is fairly sturdy. But should you crush it, it will render all of Aetech’s devices useless. The lights. The aqueducts. The filtration. The guiderails. All of it.”

“Would people die if this were to happen?”

She answered slowly. “Possibly. Unlikely. Depends on how steeped their lives were in distortion technology.”

Pinto’s wrinkles compounded. “The more I learn, the less I wish I knew.”

She wished she could feel that way. Maybe that was the difference between them: why Pinto was so insouciant and she so…

“What is the failsafe?”

At least he had some faith in her. “There are four beads in total. Any one of them can rectify the situation with three turns. One is in safekeeping. One I will wear. That one is yours. The last is with Thedexemore.”

Attilatia had sworn that she would never weaponize distortion technology. But she’d instructed her brother to use the bead as such—as leverage for his safe return—should anyone threaten his life. “You see now, I am not presenting you with an honor. I am saddling you with a burden. Should anything happen to me, I want you to use it, to see if there is a way to bring me back.”