The Broken Sky
At four seventeen on Tuesday morning, somebody broke the sky above Ada Solis’s workbench.
The sound came in two stages: a metallic shriek from the east lantern, then the terrible, almost musical fall of glass. Ada put down her soldering iron, switched it off, and stepped clear of the bench. Pieces pattered beyond the conservatory’s locked inner doors. The palms shook as if a large bird had landed among them.
“Stay where you are,” a man said.
Ada fetched her safety glasses. “You’re standing under the broken part.”
Lucan Marr looked up. She knew him from the brass donor plaque and three evening inspections: dark coat, beautiful hands, the manner of someone who could wait while a craftsman finished a sentence. He held a folded drawing against his chest. Above him, one whole section of the roof had tilted open. Its counterweight dangled from a severed cable.
“I noticed,” he said.
His composure would have been reassuring if he had not been watching the pale line of the eastern windows with such naked terror.
“Are you hurt?”
“Not yet.”
The emergency exit beyond the palms opened into the east courtyard. The way west, to the main entrance and covered street, passed beneath the damaged lantern. For Ada, it was a nuisance requiring boots and a broom. Lucan seemed to be calculating a much larger price.
“Sunrise is at five eleven,” he said. “I need an interior room before then. No windows. A door that closes completely.”
He glanced toward the courtyard exit. “My daylight rooms are across the estuary. I should have left for the last night ferry at four. By road, even a car needs ninety minutes. An ordinary taxi won’t keep the sunlight out.”
She stared at him. At thirty, Ada had survived one collapsing ceiling and enough patrons who confused their money with expertise. This was a new request.
“If this is an elaborate way of asking to see the collection—”
“It is an embarrassing way of asking for help.”
He pulled off one glove. On the back of his hand lay an old scar shaped like a narrow flame. He did not come closer.
“Direct sunlight burns me. Glass doesn’t stop it. Clouds don’t make it safe. Please don’t test that statement.”
Ada thought of every evening appointment, his refusal of the sunroom at the last trustees’ reception. Coincidence could carry a surprising weight before it broke.
“Vampire,” she said, because making him supply the word seemed crueler.
“Yes.”
The practical part of her mind arrived before the frightened part could organize itself. “Can you walk?”
“Very quickly.”
“Then you can wait while I check the route. No heroics under suspended glass.”
She rang the overnight maintenance number, left a warning about the roof, and sent the building alarm to the monitoring desk. Then she took the workshop’s inspection lamp. The western service passage was dry and clear; its low ceiling led to the stone archive beneath her workshop. She checked the archive’s shutter, the vent’s double bend, the solid door. No light entered when she turned out the lamp.
Returning, she found Lucan exactly where she had left him.
“You believed me?” he asked.
“I believed you were frightened. The rest can wait.”
She led him west. At the archive stairs he offered his hand for her balance, then caught himself and lowered it. Ada took the banister instead. She was still deciding how near she wanted a vampire to stand.
Inside, he sagged against a catalog cabinet. His drawing slipped. Ada caught it before it touched the floor: a blue heron, its wings spread across a sunburst of amber glass.
She had signed a condition report for that panel yesterday. According to the report, it was safely in storage.
A Room Without Morning
Ada placed the drawing on an empty table, away from the archive boxes. The fluorescent tube above them hummed. Lucan watched it, then her face.
“Artificial light is harmless,” he said. “And moonlight. It’s the sun itself I can’t survive.”
“That’s useful. This room would be rather difficult to search by candle.”
She could hear the sea through the building’s old pipes, a distant sucking sound as the tide turned. Somewhere above them a motor stopped. No one would arrive until Fran’s shift at eight unless maintenance answered early.
“Does the door have to stay locked?” Ada asked.
“Only shut. You must be able to leave.”
He put the archive key on the table between them. The gesture eased something behind her ribs, though she kept her phone within reach.
“You should know I don’t hunt people,” he added. “A private service supplies donor blood. I won’t ask anything of you.”
“Except indoor accommodation.”
“An unreasonable amount of it.”
His mouth moved, almost a smile. Ada noticed it with unwelcome precision.
She texted Fran: Roof emergency. Mr Marr sheltered in archive, uninjured. Please call before opening. Then she sent a second message asking Fran to bring Ruth Ansel, the trust’s chair, into the incident report. Lucan saw the names on the screen.
“Ruth knows,” he said. “About me. Fran doesn’t.”
“I’ll explain the roof to Fran. You can explain yourself, if you choose.”
He nodded. He was becoming slower, each movement deliberate. Daytime wakefulness exhausted him, he explained, though he could stay awake if needed. He was a hundred and sixty years old. No, he could not become a bat. No, he could not make her forget.
“That last one is a considerable relief.”
“To me as well. I would rather be believed voluntarily.”
Ada sat across from him. The stranger of half an hour ago had become a person trying not to ask whether she would stay.
“Why were you here so late?” she asked.
He glanced at the drawing. “I came to compare this with the heron. Ruth gave me permission. Simon Vey told me the panel was a modern replica when he was curator. Yesterday a dealer sent me a catalog photograph that made me doubt him.”
Vey had retired in March. Ada remembered his polished shoes beside her dusty boots, his insistence that restorers need not trouble themselves with ownership records.
“He signed its storage transfer,” she said. “I saw the crate yesterday.”
“Did you see the panel inside?”
She had not. That failure of distinction lodged like a splinter. Her signature had certified the crate’s exterior condition, nothing more, but she had let herself assume the rest.
“Stay here,” she said. “I’ll photograph the label. I’m not opening anything alone.”
In the locked loading bay, the crate stood where she remembered. Under its internal inventory slip, a corner of another label showed. Ada photographed both without disturbing the tape. She also photographed the crate’s seal and the empty trolley beside it.
Back downstairs she enlarged the image. The buried label named Harrow Auction Rooms, bonded warehouse, lot forty-one. Viewing Friday, sale Saturday. The heron in the catalog photograph had a tiny white feather at its throat.
So did Lucan’s drawing.
Above their stone ceiling, the first gull of the morning screamed.
