Lucia Senza's Arc

Chapter 10 of 4

For three nights Valeria filled the record book with what she had seen inside the shop. The tin. The cracked plate. The stitched air. But every page ended the same way. Nothing they wrote could be shown to a constable. Words were not proof. On the fourth night Lucia closed the book. "We keep circling her door," she said. "The answers are not there. They are where the moths come from." Valeria looked up. "The forest," she said. Lucia nodded. "We go tonight." They left after the lamps went dark. A weathered sign marked the path with hand-painted letters. Lucia carried a shovel. Valeria walked ahead, quiet, watching the trees. The willows here wound like wrung cloth. Their black foliage hung low and shimmered purple where the moonlight touched it. A wide carpet of dark grass covered the ground, black and violet, glinting as they stepped through it. "This is where she gets them," Lucia said. "The moths. She uses them to find the tears." She had written about the moths for six years. Now she stood in their home ground. Valeria stopped. "Look." She pointed past a leaning willow. A glow came from the roots of the grass. They crossed to it. A shard of amethyst rose from the black earth, taller than Lucia's hand. Its upper corner caught the moonlight and threw it back sharp. The stone hummed faintly, a sound Lucia felt in her teeth. "It fell here," Valeria said. She crouched and touched the dark grains around its base. "From the sky. Like me." She said it plainly, but her hand did not leave the stone. Then the moths came. Not one, but a dozen. They rose from the willows on black-velvet wings and gathered over the shard, circling, their long antennae trembling. Lucia had only ever seen one at a time, at a window. Here they swarmed the stone the way flies swarm meat. The air went thick with the sweet chemical smell she knew from the shared wall. The same smell. Here, at the source. "This is it," Lucia whispered. "This is where her scent begins. The moths, the smell, the tears. It all comes from this." She lifted the shovel and pried the shard from the earth. It came loose heavy and warm. The moths scattered, then settled back over the hole she had made. Valeria stood. "If we carry it out, she will know," she said. "She feels the tears. She will feel this one move." Lucia held the glowing stone against her chest. She had wanted proof for six years. Now she held a thing that hummed and drew the moths and smelled of Artemisia's wall. It was better than any photograph. But Valeria was right. Moving it would send a signal straight to the seamstress. Lucia looked back toward the town. "Let her feel it," Lucia said. "This time I have the thing she hides. Not a picture of it." She wrapped the shard in her shawl and turned for home, the moths rising behind them like smoke.