When Thomas opened his eyes, he whispered, “Thank you,” and Morgan bent to gently kiss his forehead.

“I still have the little automaton bird you gave me,” she told him. “It still sings. It kept me singing, too, Thomas. You helped me. Let me help you.”

He managed a smile for her, and Jess avoided looking at him too closely as he knelt down next to the huge Roman lion. There was some similarity, he suddenly realized, between this machine and his friend. Both had damage.

Both needed to be healed.

Maybe by helping to repair one, he could fix the other.

Jess had mechanical aptitude, but next to Thomas, he was a rank beginner; he had to work slowly, laying out parts according to the book’s instructions, and just over an hour into the work, he caught a glimpse of a closed bronze sphere where the heart of a normal beast would have been. It was the size of Thomas’s fist and looked seamless, held in place by a complex series of clamps and a net of something that looked like gold. By that time, when he looked back to ask Thomas how to proceed, Morgan had succeeded in clipping back the hedge of Thomas’s unruly blond hair, and with it trimmed closer, his face looked leaner and older than Jess remembered. She trimmed his bushy beard, too, which helped make him less of a Viking from the old stories. From some closet she retrieved a pair of workman’s oversized pants and a shirt that was too large even for him. He undressed beneath the blanket—shy with the girls, even now—and once he was out of his prison rags, he seemed . . . better. Not himself, exactly. It was possible he wouldn’t be the Thomas Jess remembered, but any Thomas at all would be better than none.

“I think I’ve found the container for the script,” Jess said. He reached in, and Thomas’s hand flashed out to grab his arm and hold it back.

“Don’t. It would kill you,” he said. “Glaudino would never touch it himself. Only Obscurists can open those containers. Work around it for now, and loosen the clamps. Be careful.”

Jess nodded. He didn’t like the idea of working near something that might kill him with a touch, but he liked the idea of Thomas’s unsteady hands in there even less. He worked the clamps loose until he heard the ball shift inside the flexible mesh net, and then sat back. “Morgan? I think this is your job now.”

She squeezed in beside him, and he showed her how to unfasten the clamps before moving back. She loosened the fastenings and the ball dropped into her hands, wrapped in its mesh net, which she peeled away and put aside. It looked harmless in her hands, like a shiny toy, but there was a shimmer to it that made him move well back. Morgan turned it in her fingers curiously, but she wasn’t looking for a seam—wasn’t looking at it at all, he realized—and the heat-wave shimmer on the ball suddenly leaped off the surface and into a haze around it, with shadowy shapes forming. Not letters he recognized in any language he knew, or even numbers; these were alchemical symbols and figures that only Obscurists knew. She stared at the swirling orb of symbols and slowly reached out to pluck out a few.