Calm down! What are you talking about?
Astrophil took a deep breath and explained how he hadn’t been able to slip under the door as planned, and so tricked the prince into locking him up in the Cabinet of Wonders.
He said that I was lucky he was too busy today to arrange for tests to be done on me. He said it as if he knew I could understand!
“Got it,” Neel said. He pushed open the door.
Petra kneeled and held out the spoon. Astrophil eagerly sucked at the green oil.
“Better?” Petra asked.
“Much!”
“You were very brave, Astro.”
“Oh”—he tried to speak with nonchalance —“I did what any self-respecting spider would do.”
Petra smiled. “Now, where are they?”
She followed Astrophil deeper into the Cabinet of Wonders. Odd and beautiful objects lined their path, such as a small potted tree whose leaves were curled-up paper scrolls. Petra glanced at a paper leaf that had unfurled and saw a three-line poem written in sappy ink. Some things in the Cabinet were magnificent without being unusual, such as a blue and green life-sized statue of a peacock. Others were bizarre and unsettling, like a six-foot-tall skeleton of a mermaid strung from a pole and hanger.
Neel pulled down a box, looked inside, and made a face. Petra glanced at the box’s label. “It says ‘Dragon’s Teeth.’”
“What am I going to do with dragon’s teeth?”
“If you plant them in the earth, they sprout soldiers,” Astrophil said. “Or so I have read.”
“Well, maybe they’ll come in handy,” Neel said doubtfully. He pulled his purse from his waist and poured in the teeth.
“Try this.” Petra opened a box labeled “Phoenician Coins.”
Neel’s eyes lit up when he saw the heap of gold. But then he noticed the designs marking the coins. His face fell. “Those aren’t Bohemian. Or Spanish. Or anything. I can’t use those.”
“You can if you melt them down.”
“Oh. Yeah. Right.” He began stuffing his purse.
Meanwhile, Astrophil had scrambled on top of a small box. Burned into its wood was one word: “Kronos.”
With trembling fingers, Petra opened the lid. There were her father’s eyes, silver and familiar.
She hesitated to touch them. When she finally picked them up, she was surprised to find that they were smooth and hard like round pebbles. She carefully put them in her pocket.
She heard Neel make a delighted noise. She turned around. He had discovered a hoard of jewels carved into the shapes of various animals. There was a ruby pelican, an emerald turtle, a sapphire wolf, and a diamond dove. “Shame I’ll have to bust these into pieces.” He put them in his purse. “But I can live with that.”
Petra made a quick tour of the Cabinet, looking for something, anything, that might help her fulfill her promise to John Dee. She found powdered unicorn horn, yes. She saw a cocoon the size of her arm. But she came across nothing that resembled a piece of an enormous clock. Or a heart.
She decided that she would have to let Dee solve his own problems. He could make whatever threats he wanted. Her family would deal with him when they had to. Her father might know somebody who could sever the connection Dee had made with her mind, or perhaps Drabardi could do it. In any event, she knew that she, Neel, and Astrophil couldn’t linger in the Cabinet much longer. She had what she had come for: the only thing that really mattered. “I’m ready to go,” she told Neel. “Are you?”
He patted his purse. “Yeah.”
Petra strode toward the door but then halted. She thought of Susana. She remembered her father’s words: “The clock is no longer our concern.” But it did concern other people. Her shoulders sagged, as if in defeat, as if weighed down, and she said reluctantly, “Neel. Let’s look one more time for the clock’s heart.”
They paced up and down, inspecting the stacks of objects. Precious time slipped by and Petra grew nervous in the silence. She was about to give up yet again when Neel stopped and raised a hand. “Wait.” He stared over Petra’s shoulder. “That thing …”
Petra looked behind her. “What thing? There are thousands of things.”
Neel pushed past her and pointed at a small table holding several scraps of metal. “That. It looks like something from your da’s book. I studied it a bit after you told me what the clock could do. Of course, I couldn’t read any of it, but I looked at the pictures. And those metal pieces remind me of something.”
Petra stared at the table. At first it seemed as if the curved metal pieces were carelessly arranged. But as she looked more closely, she realized the pieces that were roughly of the same size and shape lay next to one another. It looked like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle someone couldn’t quite put together. Petra tried to imagine what the bronze-colored metal scraps would make if they fit together. Then she suddenly understood. “It’s the clock’s heart,” she whispered. She remembered the sketch in her father’s notebook of something that looked like a human heart cut into fragments.
Neel reached out to touch a piece of the heart, but Petra grabbed his hand. She had seen a red glitter in the bronze-colored metal. “The pieces are made of banium,” she warned. “Human skin can’t touch it. It will kill you. It will send shock waves into your body. You’ll die slowly, and very painfully. Banium pulses … like a heartbeat …”
Neel shook off Petra’s grip and picked up a piece of banium with his ghostly fingers. “So this one’s supposed to fit with another? But it’s not easy to tell which goes with which.”
“Try that one.” She pointed.
A second curve of banium lifted in the air. Neel clinked the two pieces against each other. He tried a few different combinations of fitting them together, but they did not match up.
“Neel, you’re doing it wrong.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Can’t you see? Look at the jagged teeth along the edges of each piece. Each piece is a cog, and if you fit them together, the cogs will turn.” She tried to imagine the sort of energy the clock’s heart would produce when fully assembled, how each cog of the heart would turn, how the banium would make the heart pulse.
“What’re you talking about? There are no teeth.”