POV: marasi
Summary
Marasi stares at the moving image thrown across the dark room's wall — a city in full colour, but a palette of muted greys and blacks against a brilliant red sky, ash drifting across smouldering ruins, the whole thing accompanied by the clattering mechanical sound of the device throwing the light from behind them. TwinSoul steadies himself on the back of a chair and asks, in awe, if they are looking at a window into the future. Moonlight crosses to the far wall and lifts her hand into the stream of light, casting a shadow of her fingers on the wall — confirming that the image is light, not a presence.
Marasi has seen something like this once before. VenDell had once shown her and Wax a way to project evanotype images onto a wall using light — static, black and white. He had told her, then, that Harmony expected colour and movement to come next and that the result would *really burn their metals*. The Set appears to have got there first. The room itself — chairs in rows, a wall-mounted projector, a wall-sized screen — has the feel of a small playhouse with no stage. The question is whether the ruined city they are watching is a vision of the future or a record of the past. The skyline looks unmistakably like Elendel under all that rubble; she cannot tell which.
Moonlight calls them through a door at the far side. The next room has the answer. It is dominated by an enormous table, and on it sits a model city in painted wood and plaster — small enough to be a toy, detailed enough that Marasi recognises Elendel's street grid at a glance — buildings collapsed, motorcars wrecked, miniature horses dead in the streets, miniature corpses laid out where they fell. Moonlight tips a handful of fine ash from a box and lets it sift through her fingers. The shelves are full of props: red-painted sheets for cloud and sun, broken roof tiles, ruined façades. And, set up low at the table's edge, evanotype cameras pointed across the diorama at exactly the angle of the colour photograph Maraga Dulcet had shown her.
The whole thing snaps together. *It's a fake*, Marasi whispers, half in relief. The Set has not photographed the future or excavated the past; they have built a model and shot it from low angles to manufacture an image of a ruined Elendel that does not exist. The photograph Tobal Copper died for is a still snapped of this table; the moving picture next door is the same model in motion. Moonlight sharpens the read: not a hoax meant to convince anyone the world is *about* to end — a hoax meant to convince someone it *already has.* Who is being shown the lie, and to what end, is the next question. The answers, Marasi decides, will be downstairs.
They slip back through the theatre and out into a corridor under caged industrial lights, eerily quiet given the earlier truck-bay bustle. At the end of the hallway windowed doors look onto the loading dock and the patrol there. TwinSoul sends a near-invisible thread of crystal under the door, lets Silajana feel the layout, and picks out the wall that hides the freight elevator — facing the wrong direction for them to walk to it through the dock. So they don't. They double back to a blank stretch of corridor and Moonlight cuts a fresh door straight into the elevator shaft. The car is below, having presumably carried Gave and his bodyguards into the depths.
TwinSoul insists on going first. He steps onto a narrow ledge above the void, the door behind him vanishes before Marasi can stop him — and when Moonlight stamps the wall open again he is calmly hanging from a roseite ladder he has just grown himself, drinking from his backpack of water. Moonlight reassures Marasi that an industrial lift moves slowly and the shaft is tall enough to ride on top of the car if it comes back up. They descend in single file, the Dor-jar glow leaking from Moonlight's cracked rucksack to paint the shaft a pale white. Toward, Marasi hopes, the answers.