Page 55 of Even Robots Die (Even Ever After #3)

Brice

L ooking at Florentine in a business situation is like looking at a whole new person.

With her family, she’s soft and sweet—probably too much for her own sake.

With me, she is taunting, focused, and easy to anger. She isn’t scared of speaking her mind, she’s bold, she’s vibrant.

But here and now?

Her demeanor completely changes and it’s as if I’m seeing another person.

She’s still bold and focused, but it’s like frost developed over her features as she crosses the door. It looks like she’s about to go into battle.

“Quite the entrance, Miss F.,” Christina says by way of greeting.

She’s a beautiful woman in her early forties with strawberry blond hair that reaches the small of her back. Her dark brown eyes look deceptively golden with the ambient light, and her lips are drawn in a tight line. She doesn’t like that we came here unannounced.

“You made me wait,” Florentine answers with what looks like boredom.

“Not everyone can clear their schedule for impromptu visits,” Christina says with poise.

“Not everyone can design your weapons,” Florentine answers.

“We could manage with the ones we already have,” the older woman says.

“And fight birds from the ground?”

Florentine looks less and less impressed. I’ve never seen her like that. She almost looks like … me, without a trace of emotion.

I stay at the back of the room, studying her, studying her interaction with Christina.

The woman is supposed to be the leader of Libération, she’s supposed to have charisma and a strong hold on people and yet, right this moment, all I can see is Florentine.

Some—Charles most likely—would say I’ve barely seen anything other than her lately though, so I’m not sure if it’s more a testament of her aura today or a testament of my obsession.

“We’ve done it before,” Christina says without any inflection, and I have to wonder if they’re trying to make it a contest to see who will be the first one to crack from that emotionless facade that they both give off.

Because, yes, I can tell, they’re both facades.

Florentine still has her arms crossed under her breasts in an assessing way, but I can see her hands clenching and unclenching under her armpits as if it’s all she can do to control her own body.

Christina hides it better, but I can still see it, too.

It’s in the way she keeps arranging her documents in front of her and in the slight twitch of her left eye, as if her nerve is showcasing all the annoyance or urgency at being interrupted in the middle of whatever she was doing before we arrived.

“They’ve built electrical nets,” Florentine says, and I have no idea what she means.

Christina looks to be in the same situation as I am.

“What do you mean?”

I don’t know who says it first between Christina or me, but she snaps her eyes in my direction, the question reminding her of my presence.

Florentine looks at the both of us with a mix of dread and smugness. It’s the first crack in her facade.

I understand the smugness—she knows something no one seems to know—but the dread makes me feel like I’m going to hate whatever she’s about to say.

“I’ll tell you in a minute,” Florentine says before adding, “but first, you’ll tell me why my dad was here.”

Christina snorts, and it is so out of character that I can’t help thinking that the woman knew that was exactly why we were here. I can almost hear the words ‘at last’ floating in the air between us.

“It’s amusing that you ask,” Christina says, marking a pause for emphasis. “Because he came two days ago and tried to make me believe he was the one who invented all those beautiful weapons by providing us with the blueprints.”

Florentine’s eyes widen in surprise, but she schools her expression quickly. Christina doesn't seem to see or to pay attention as she continues explaining.

“He didn’t like the fact I recognized the blueprints as the ones you provided four years ago, and the woman with him, even less.”

“Who was she?”

As Florentine trips over the fact her father came here accompanied to try to sell her work by passing it as his own, I’m stuck on something else.

Florentine is twenty-three, and Christina just said that her father tried to sell something she created four years ago. She made it sound like it wasn’t the first time she provided those kinds of blueprints, either.

How long has Florentine been a silent actor of the revolution that has been brewing in Paris?

I knew there was unrest in the city more than anywhere else in France or in Europe, but the bat-shifters have always been cocooned by Elhyor in Notre Dame, and I now wonder if I didn’t choose to be blind.

This is not new, at least not for the humans.

I feel like the earth is unraveling under my feet, like someone pulled the rug from under me. I’m drowning in questions I don’t have answers to.

Did we all turn a blind eye to what was happening to the humans until shifters were targeted too? Until we were targeted? Because for all I know, other shapeshifters were targeted way before us and we didn’t see it. We didn’t pay attention because until then we were safe.

I remember the small butterfly and lizard Cassiopé saved from Michael’s cabinet of curiosities buried under Versailles. There was a whale shark there, too.

I remember because they haven't shifted yet. They’re still staying in a room in Notre Dame, but they don’t leave and they barely eat—that might be because of their shifted size.

There is no doubt that they’re both shapeshifters and not animals—shifters can smell that on each other—but seeing as they’ve refused to shift so far, it makes me wonder how long they were held in those tanks Cassiopé told me about.

“I don’t know,” Christina says, and it pulls me back to the present. “He didn’t introduce her. All I can give you is a description.”

Florentine turns on the projection system of her holo and the Interpol logo appears.

Wait? is it really what I think it is?

“Height , eye color, hair color, skin color, and age?” she asks the other woman.

“About one meter seventy, maybe more, green eyes, blonde, mid-thirties,” Christina says mechanically. “Don’t know if you’ll have that in the database, but she was skinny for her height.”

“Shifter?” Florentine asks.

“I don’t think so, but I can't be one hundred percent certain. ”

I see Florentine mouth something like ‘you heard her’ to her artificial intelligence, and a list appears in front of us.

“Narrow it down to women living in Paris,” Florentine says out loud, more for us than for her AI.

There are still more than a hundred results.

She switches the research to pictures instead of names, and four of them appear in the space between her and Christina. The other woman doesn’t wait for Florentine to move or to ask, she slips from behind her desk and joins us on this side of the holo.

“No.”

“Tell me when you recognize one,” Florentine says as she starts switching the pictures on the holo faster.

Christina stops her a few times to double check, but it doesn’t seem to be the same woman each time. When we reach the end and Christina still hasn’t found the right woman, I feel Florentine deflate.

“If she’s a shapeshifter, she might look in her mid-thirties and be a lot older,” I tell her to soften the blow of not finding the right woman.

“We don’t have time to look over half of the population of Paris,” Christina says, exasperated.

It’s a stark reminder that she wasn’t expecting us, and that maybe she has other things to do.

I have a feeling the only thing that makes her wait patiently is the fact she wants to know about that new weapon Florentine spoke of.