Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) Read Online Free Page A

service, Madame Zenobia Sienna.”
    I didn’t know what to answer, so I didn’t. I dropped the sheet. He locked the door, then stood by it, with a burner in his hand, and his ear set against the dimatough panel.
    “Just making sure no one followed us,” he said. Though he’d ensured that the camera over the door was broken—not unusual in this type of lodgings, of course—he didn’t trust that someone might not be looking for us or might not have caught a glimpse of us by other means.
    While he went over the room, looking for hidden cameras and disabling a couple of gadgets that might or might not have visual-pickup capacity, I stood in front of the mirror that took up an entire wall—and I tried not to think exactly what it was meant to reflect, fully turned towards the bed as it was. But even thinking about that was better than thinking that I was in an enclosed space with no help anywhere near.
    I must go out. I didn’t want to hide in this ratty room forever, with or without Brisbois, and I thought his idea of getting me out of the seacity was cowardly as well as futile.
    Fortunately, he had no authority over me. No one did. First I had to get out of this room. Unfortunately, it seemed whatever was happening out there was definitely a revolt against the ruling classes. That meant that being known as the Patrician’s special friend told against me. I had to figure out how to make myself less remarkable-looking, less memorable, if I was going to move unremarked through Liberte seacity.
    In my mind, I had only the vaguest idea of what I could do once I got out of here. Rescue Simon, of course, both because I owed him for his hospitality and to pay him back for trying to protect me, as though I were helpless without him. Pay him back in more than one sense.
    I hated to admit that Alexis Brisbois had a point, though. When going against one enemy, force and intelligence sufficed. When going against a multitude, one must manage anonymity and surprise. And anonymity was going to be a problem.
    It’s not that I think I’m beautiful, or that I know I am. I do, both. And it’s not personal opinion. Like everything else about me, it’s a certainty—what I was designed to be. No choice or opinion involved.
    The men who created me had thought themselves if not gods, something very close. And though I’d been created to be the female version of one of them—built in a lab, protein by protein, gene by gene—they’d made me both beautiful and memorable. I looked as close as anyone living could look to the central figure of Sandro Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” My eyes were a little less innocent, I suppose, and I kept my hair long enough to hit the middle of my back, not falling in a red-blond mass almost to my knees, as the hair of the painted Venus did. But I did look like her. I knew.
    Simon had taken me to where the painting was kept, in a vault to which it had been moved after the destruction of Florence. I think he believed the resemblance would flatter me. Instead, it had made me shake my head at the folly of the man from whose genes I was created and his old friend who’d helped him to make me. I’d known his friend. He’d been a sort of an uncle to me growing up. Until I saw that painting, I’d never realized he was insane. Broken, divided, lost, yes, but not mad.
    So in that cheap hotel room, looking at my all too memorable reflection, I thought I must dye my hair brown. I must have said it aloud, because Alexis made a sound from the door. When I looked at him, I found him glaring back at me, over his shoulder. “You’re going about it all wrong,” he said. He looked disgusted or perhaps pitying. His face was hard to read.
    I lifted my eyebrows at him, in an enquiry I didn’t know how to phrase, then said, “But I can’t stay here,” I said. “You must understand, I wasn’t made to sit and watch. I was told—”
    He sighed. He sighed as though he were faced with all the stupidity of the