Isabelle and her family, the people in the world she loved most, quick-marched into the woods along the beaten path. The canopy closed in above them and the sound of insects grew loud. This place was entirely strange enough without flickering out of existence. After confirming he could still shift shape, she sent Bitterlich ahead to scout and Rebecca with him under strict orders to follow his lead.

Jean-Claude kept tapping his clockwork eye. “I wish this thing would work. I could see through half the forest.”

“What happened to it?” Isabelle said.

“After I saw you face down Czensos, it went dark.”

Marie said, “Probably when Ivar died.”

Isabelle tossed sparks from her fingers and said, “Do you mind if I have a look at it?”

“I didn’t think we had time.”

“I’ll do it while we’re walking.”

“I thought you could only be in once place at a time,” Jean-Claude said.

“That was before I had help.”

Isabelle summoned up Falconé and gave her the helm of her body. Just keep walking. No shenanigans.

What do you think I’d get up to? Falconé asked.

You know better than I do what your worst impulses used to be. I leave it to you not to surrender to them. In fact, Falconé the spy was as close to being a woman after Isabelle’s own heart as any of her ancestors, at least once she got over her infatuation with Primus. She liked being trusted.

Isabelle touched Jean-Claude’s clockwork eye with her spark-hand and made the leap into the quondam metal.

The eye was slick and smooth and much bigger than it seemed on the outside. All sorcery was created by the Builder and she had for some time entertained the hypothesis that before the Breaking of the World, sorcerers of her kind had been his helpers, the forge masters and the engineers who labored on the ineffable machine. Alas, even if this were true, her ability to meld with the Builder’s artifacts had not been handed down with any instructions as to how to make use of that talent.

Jean-Claude’s eye was filled with gears and mechanisms to operate the iris and deform the lens. She spun these wheels and felt the eye focus blindly on nothing. As far as she could tell, the mechanism was still intact.

She made a circuit of the whole eye, following each subcontraption to whatever threadlike fiber or glimmering plate it attached to. The deeper into the eye she went, the denser the mechanism became, but the space it involved expanded for her and gave her ample room to maneuver.

Eventually all of the clockworks, springs, silver threads, subassemblies, and whatnots arrived at a single dark and unresponsive node. She hovered around the node and peeked inside it. There could be no doubt that all the information the eye gathered was funneled through here.