He made a vague gesture around him. “Look around you.”

Claire did. “Um . . . the lab?”

“She bought the land and began construction on the town of Morganville. It was meant to be a refuge for our people, a place we could live openly.” He sighed. “Amelie is quite stubborn. By the time I arrived to tell her it was a fool’s errand, she was already committed to the experiment. All I could do was mitigate the worst of it, so that she wouldn’t get us all slaughtered.”

Claire had forgotten all about the box (and even Bob the spider), so focused was she on Myrnin’s voice, but when he paused, she remembered, and reached in again to pull out an ornate gold hand mirror. It was definitely girly, and besides, the glass was shattered in the middle, only a few silvery pieces still remaining. “Trash?” she asked, and held it up. Myrnin plucked it out of her hand and set it aside.

“Most definitely not,” he said. “It was my mother’s.”

Claire blinked. “You had a—” Myrnin’s wide stare challenged her to just try to finish that sentence, and she surrendered. “Wow, okay. What was she like? Your mother?”

“Evil,” he said. “I keep this to keep her spirit away.”

That made . . . about as much sense as most things Myrnin said, so Claire let it go. As she rummaged through the stuff in the box—mostly more papers, but a few interesting trinkets—she said, “So, are you looking for something in particular, or just looking?”

“Just looking,” he said, but she knew that tone in his voice, and he was lying. The question was, was he lying for a reason, or just for fun? Because with Myrnin, it could go either way.

Claire’s fingers closed on something small—a delicate gold chain. She pulled, and slowly, a necklace came out of the mess of paper, and spun slowly in the light. It was a locket, and inside was a small, precise portrait of a Victorian-style young woman. There was a lock of hair woven into a tiny braid around the edges, under the glass.

Claire rubbed the old glass surface with her thumb, frowning, and then recognized the face staring back at her. “Hey! That’s Ada!”

Myrnin grabbed the necklace, stared for a moment at the portrait, and then closed his eyes. “I thought I’d lost this,” he said. “Or perhaps I never had it in the first place. But here she is, after all.”