Ticker by Lisa Mantchev Read Free Book Online Page A

the year since she’d died. There were times in the quiet, dark hours when I thought I could sense my sister moving across the floor with hercareful footsteps, winding up the Cylindrella machine and playing her favorite recordings.
    Try as I might to keep the door closed on the memories, they crept toward me with strains of remembered music. Though Dimitria played no instrument herself, she was always humming something under her breath, half the time not even realizing she did so. She also loved gardens and studied floriography.
    “There’s a hidden meaning in every flower, Penny,” she’d told me once, touching her fingertips to a newly arrived bouquet of tulips. “The pink ones are for caring, and yellow is for good cheer.”
    “And the red?” I’d asked. Missives had been arriving with alarming regularity: messages via the Calliope, paper-wrapped parcels in the mail. Gifts, I had realized with a start, from my sister’s as-yet-unnamed boyfriend. “Red flowers are for love, aren’t they?”
    Her answer had been a blush that put the tulips to shame, but any hope that her romance would bloom died with her, and along with it the hope that any Farthing girl could survive the condition that plagued us. She’d been the healthiest of us, while I’d been the invalid, and Cygna given no chance at all by fate. Warwick checked my older sister every month but only caught a vague, irregular heartbeat on occasion—certainly nothing that indicated her time left upon this earth should have been measured in minutes rather than years.
    Sebastian nudged me out of the past with a gentle elbow as he headed into my brother’s room. “Tend to your ablutions, Miss Farthing. You strongly resemble a chimney sweep.”
    Turning back to my own door, I lined up the letters for my password on a rotating copper permutation lock.
    M-E-T-A-L-M-A-R-K
    It was the common name for the
Voltinia dramba
Butterfly and the newest addition to my collection. Letters properly aligned, I pulled the activation lever. Gears behind wood and plaster whirred and clanked, then granted us permission to enter.
    I stepped into the room, turning up the lamps and taking a mental inventory of the contents, starting with the chocolate-brown velvet eiderdown and the Bhaskarian rug in shades of coffee and cream. A warm glow danced over walls that shimmered with the movement of dozens of mechanical Butterflies. I’d dusted their shadow boxes that very morning, all the better to see the diamanté stickpins that held each specimen against black velvet. The constant tick-tick-tick of infinitesimal inner workings caused their wings to flutter up and down, and I automatically sought out my favorites: the Silver-studded Blue (
Plebeius argus
) winking next to the Geranium Bronze (
Cacyreus marshalli
).
    Heeding Sebastian’s suggestion, I also checked the nearest mirror. The morning had certainly taken its toll. There was dirt and worse on my face. Escaping its pins, my hair straggled over my shoulders in unruly copper curls. Wide hazel eyes stared back at me.
    “Ever-changing Twindicators,” Dimitria had teased, because the color of our eyes shifted from brown to amber to green depending on the light, the fabrics Nic and I wore, and whatever mood we might be in.
    Knowing the wash water would take time to heat, I turned the spigot over the corner basin to “Scalding.” The radiator hissed and clanked in protest, so I gave its cast-iron ribs a swift kick with my boot.
    “I know just how you feel,” Violet said, but I didn’t know if she was speaking to me or the radiator.
    “You go first,” I told her when the copper water pipes rattled against the wall behind me, “while the towels are still relatively clean.”
    She obliged, stripping down to her underthings. I detached the RiPA from my garter, but hesitated to set it down on the desk, which was in its perpetual state of chaos. At the moment, the shiny innards of a pocket watch littered the scarred surface of the