The light was wrong.
Not the tanner's shop light — not the bookbinder's room light — the specific quality of light through expensive fabric, the kind of curtain that absorbed most of what came through it and released what remained as a diffused, even glow that was expensive to produce and exhausting to wake up to when your head felt like it had been used as a bell.
Leonardo's face appeared in the softened light.
"Good," he said. He had two fingers on Trent's wrist, counting. "You're back."
"Where is—"
"Medici palazzo. You've been here three days." He released the wrist and made a note. "You stopped breathing properly twice on the first day. I want you to know that so you understand why I'm going to recommend — strongly, and in writing — that you never touch that object again without six months of preparation and three people watching."
The ceiling above was painted. Not the tanner's vault ceiling, not the bookbinder's water-stained plaster. Plasterwork, painted blue, with a geometric border that had been applied by someone who understood that borders existed to contain things that had no other frame.
[RECOVERY COMPLETE — ISU INTERFACE: STABILIZED INTEGRATION: 94% NOTE: THRESHOLD CROSSED DURING RECOVERY NOTE: SYSTEM LEVEL 2 — FRAGMENTING TO REFORMING NOTE: REPEATED OVERLOAD RISKS PERMANENT COGNITIVE DAMAGE NOTE: THE APPLE KNOWS THIS. IT DOES NOT CARE.]
System Level 2.
Trent filed that for later and looked at the room. Federico was in the chair by the window, arm wrapped in clean linen from the shoulder to the elbow, his feet extended and his expression carrying the specific quality of someone who had been sitting in this chair for a while and had been refusing to acknowledge that he was tired.
He met Trent's eyes.
"Francesco's leg," he said.
"You caught him."
"Crossbow bolt. Leg." He shifted in the chair. "He killed two city guards before the bolt. He was on the wall of the Palazzo della Signoria when I found him — climbing it. I don't know where he thought he was going." He looked at his wrapped arm. "The knife got me on the approach. Nothing serious."
"You need to have Mario look at it."
"Leonardo already looked at it."
Leonardo, from the corner where he was writing: "The wound is clean. He needs rest, not inspection." He didn't look up. "As do you. Both of you. Excessively."
Trent tried sitting up. His body's assessment of this idea was negative — a wave of something that wasn't exactly dizziness but was adjacent to it, the specific sensation of a system that had been operating at its structural limit for four minutes and had spent three days reintegrating. He made it to sitting. The room did not move.
"Francesco," he said.
"Arrested. Trial is set for May first." Federico picked up the cup on the windowsill and drank whatever was in it. "Twelve other conspirators arrested, eight dead at or after the cathedral. The Archbishop is in a Medici cell. Lorenzo's people moved fast." A pause. "The Auditore name is already in the broadsheets as— it's being described as heroic. The word heroic is being used."
"What about Rodrigo Borgia."
The room was quiet for a moment.
Leonardo set down his pen. "He was in Rome before the Easter bells finished ringing. Whatever communication system the Templars maintain — and I don't fully understand it but I'm increasingly certain it exists — he received news fast. The Cardinal of Valencia is currently hosting a delegation from the Spanish court, which gives him diplomatic insulation for any immediate action." He paused. "He is alive. He is in Rome. He is aware that his investment failed."
"And the Apple."
"Under your mattress," Federico said. "Where you apparently put it before losing consciousness in the piazza. I found you against a wall outside the cathedral with your hand on your chest and your nose on your chin." He said it without inflection, which was Federico's method of saying something difficult. "You looked like you'd been dead for an hour."
"I wasn't."
"I'm aware. I checked." He stood, the movement of someone who had been in a chair too long and was done with the chair. "How long before you can walk properly?"
"Now."
"That's not what Leonardo would say."
"Leonardo would say two more days," Leonardo said, without looking up from his notes. "But he would also say that his recommendations have a historical success rate of approximately forty percent with this specific patient, so he's open to negotiation."
Trent swung his legs over the side of the bed.
The floor was cold through his feet. The room had the quality of genuinely expensive furnishings — not ornate, but precise, every object present because it had been selected rather than accumulated. The Medici didn't display wealth ostentatiously. They expressed it through quality of material and economy of ornament, which was the specific taste of a banking family that understood the difference between value and show.
The window was unlatched.
Florence spread beyond it in the April afternoon — the rooflines, the campaniles, the Duomo's dome visible above everything else the way it was always visible above everything else. And across the city, something different: the Pazzi banners were coming down.
Not all of them yet — the process of stripping a powerful family's symbols from their properties and the city's public spaces took time and required coordination and the specific bureaucratic courage of people willing to be visible in their compliance. But three banners were down from positions where Trent could see them, and the spaces where they'd been had already been filled with the Medici lily, which moved faster than the removal of the old.
Back in January, those banners had been part of the city's established landscape. The Pazzi banking house had been one of Florence's two dominant financial institutions, the counterweight to Medici power, the alternative that the city's elite hedged toward when Medici relationships required management.
The counterweight was gone.
He stood up. His legs held.
Leonardo made a sound that was professionally resigned.
"The window," Trent said.
Federico looked at what Trent was looking at. The banners.
"Lorenzo moved fast," he said, again, and this time the tone was not just report — it was the specific quality of someone who had grown up under the Auditore name and understood what it meant to watch a power structure shift with visible speed.
The door knocked. A Medici servant — young, careful, trained to the expression of attentive neutrality that well-run households required of their staff.
"The Signore Lorenzo will see you now," the servant said. "When you're ready."
Federico looked at Trent.
"You're not ready," he said.
"I'm standing."
"Those are not the same thing."
"They are today." Trent looked at Leonardo. "Is there anything I need to know before I walk into a meeting with the most powerful man in Florence."
Leonardo picked up his pen again. "Don't overexert yourself. Eat something first. And if Lorenzo offers you wine — accept it, drink slowly, don't let him see that standing is costing you anything." He paused. "He's a man who calculates from position. Looking unwell is a position."
"Eat something" was reasonable. There was bread on the side table — not the coarse kind, the quality that Florence's better households served, the kind that had been made this morning rather than this week. Trent ate half of it and pocketed the other half for later, which Leonardo observed without comment.
The servant waited.
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