Sera kept her eyes trained on Leo, waiting for a moment when she could speak to him, swallowing down all the questions she had.
“I hear you refused Xavier’s offer to travel with young Mr. McLellan and myself around Kaolin,” Kiernan said to James.
Leo’s scissors froze in the act of cutting a flower, and Sera listened closely.
“I’m no salesman,” James said, flashing Kiernan a charming grin. “The stage is the place for me, and if Xavier is no longer in the theater business, well then, I think our work together is at an end.”
Kiernan gave him a pitying look. “My dear boy, your work with Xavier will be at an end when he says it is at an end. Surely you have taken the measure of him by now. He is not one to be trifled with or refused.” Kiernan’s normally cheerful face grew somber. “Trust me on this.”
James shifted from foot to foot. “I’ve been in worse scrapes with worse men.”
“No,” Kiernan said, and something about his tone made Sera shiver. “You have not.”
James smoothed back his hair, a casual movement that she thought was an attempt to hide his unease. “Well, I’ve got an appointment with the owner of the Lugsworth Theater. See you later.”
“So James isn’t going on the train, then?” Leo said after he left.
“He is. He just does not realize it yet.” Kiernan sighed. “A shame. He is so young and talented, but I fear he did not know what he was getting into when he signed on to work with your father.”
“Not many people do,” Leo said.
Kiernan smiled at that. “He is an expert businessman. Makes it a point to know everything about everyone.”
“What does he have on you?” Leo asked, and Kiernan’s smile faded.
“He helped me out of a spot of family trouble, that’s all.”
Leo let the subject drop, but Sera got the sense he did not quite believe the man. The two of them moved over to Errol’s pond, and from what Sera could hear it sounded like Kiernan was giving advice or instructions on how to re-create the pond somewhere else, detailing the type of moss and the temperature of the water and such.
“And we must never touch Errol with our bare hands,” he was saying, “or with anything metal. He’s got quite a strong voltage. We use wooden hooks and nets.”
She waited impatiently as Kiernan ran through more instructions, hoping Leo would not leave without speaking to her. The chance came at last when Kiernan was packing up his things, putting jars of flower cuttings into his square black bag.
“Excuse me just a moment, dear boy, nature is calling,” he said. “I must use the facilities before we leave.”
“No problem, Mr. Kiernan,” Leo said. “I can finish putting these away.”
He knelt by the bag, carefully placing each jar inside, until Kiernan was gone. Then he hurried over to the crate.
“I have the necklace,” he said, fumbling in his pocket. “Agnes and I are working together to get you out. She’s got passage for you on a ship, if you can believe it. But we still need to get you out of here. I thought I’d be coming around the theater more, since I’m working with Kiernan now, but you wouldn’t believe the way that man can go on and on about a leaf or a water sample. I’ve been stuck in his lab for almost a week.”
At last, he produced the necklace, and Sera let out a wild sound, half sob, half laugh, as she reached through the slats and took the moonstone in her hand. Such a small thing yet of unnameable value—a piece of her home, a connection to her friend.
“I would give it back to you now, but if anyone found it, they’d take it away,” Leo said.
Sera could not take her eyes off it, blurred as they were with tears. “I understand,” she said. “This is enough. For now.” She stroked the moonstone gently. Holding it in her hands made her miss her City more than ever.
“The problem is the Pembertons,” Leo said, almost to himself, and Sera got the feeling this wasn’t the first time he’d mulled over this issue. “There are so many of them, day and night, guarding all the exits. Even if I could distract a few of them, it wouldn’t be enough.” He sighed. “Besides the fact that I still don’t have the key to this damn chain.”
“There are no windows in this place?” she asked. “No . . . no spaces I could crawl through?”
“That’s the only window,” he said, pointing up to the glass ceiling. “So unless you can fly across the rooftops of Old Port, I don’t think—”
“Yes,” Sera said, ashamed she had not thought of it before. The glass ceiling, the one place where she could see the sky. Mother Sun had been calling her from there all along. “That is how I get out.”
“I don’t think that will work,” Leo said. “First you’ve got to get up there, then you’ve got to break the glass, then you’ve got to get to the Seaport. And like I said, unless you can fly—”
“These rooftops,” she said. “They have spires? They are like dwellings?”
“Um, yeah, I guess there are spires, and apartment buildings and churches and factories—”
“And are they close together or far apart?”
“Close together,” he said. “Most buildings in this city are right on top of each other.”
Sera smiled triumphantly. “Then I can fly,” she said. The moonstone glowed, as if applauding her words.
Leo looked about to protest, then stopped himself. “That still doesn’t get you out of the crate.”
“They put me in the story as a performer,” she mused. “I am brought down from the ceiling on a swing.”
She studied the theater. If she could get some momentum, she should be able to jump to the top balcony. And the walls were covered in painted wood carved into various shapes, providing excellent hand- and footholds. The ceiling itself was separated into panes by thick lengths of iron, a lip of iron ringing the entire circle.
She sighed. “But the swing has metal bracelets for my wrists. I do not know how to get out of them.”
“Plus, you’d still have to break through that glass,” Leo said.
Sera bit her lip.
“I think we need to find another way,” he said. “Besides, you’ll only be on the swing for the . . . for the . . .” He sat back hard and slapped his hand to his forehead. “For the show. The show. My god, could it be that easy? Well, not easy, no, not in the slightest, Agnes will have a heart attack when I tell her, but . . .”
“Leo, you aren’t making any sense.”
“What if you broke out during the play?” he said. “There will be so many people . . . a distraction could work then. There’s no way Father would be able to control the situation. It will be dangerous, and certainly the timing would have to be . . . but this whole thing is dangerous, isn’t it? Now, what sort of distraction, that’s the question. . . .”
“Well,” Sera said, thinking it was high time she took some control over her predicament. Mother Sun had been watching her, trying to guide her, to show her the way out, and all this time she’d been sitting around feeling hopeless. “We have a Cerulean, an Arboreal, and a mertag in this theater. I’m sure Boris and Errol and I can come up with something.”