The buildings were crude, not so much squares as square-ish. The edges of the buildings tended to flare at the top and tapered to a neat, geometric edge at the base. A few charcoal lines revealed the original guide that blocked out the underpinning of the skyline design. The bases also featured “EW” in an elaborate, well-practiced script. Atop the building nearest the door, Laura’s initials were incorporated into a tall stick figure that held a smaller figure in its arms.
Olivier made a mental note of this macabre portent before looking to the north wall. Archaic and extinct animals frolicked in a field. They were bight, colorful, and soft. The sabretooth tigers were fluffy, their teeth rounded. The archosaurs lie on their backs kicking their legs into the sky and smiling. Alongside each the “EW” initials were gracefully incorporated into the stalks of a flower or sun beams. The mural was reasoned in its layout. The further edges covered in trilobites and mega fauna, the inner ring dinosaurs and the center focus the ice-age mammals and Allotheria. The apex of the mural was a shining sun, casting a cheerful glow across the landscape and stretching into the ceiling.
The west wall featured more modern animals. Colorful birds covered the sky. Cats from great to small made their way up a jungle path from the door toward a clearing at the center. On the left side, wolves stalked through a forest gradually shrinking into joyful, happy dogs that cavorted with kittens in the clearing.
The south wall was more subdued in the color if its sky. Horses, flowers threaded through their manes and tails, galloped across a background of wildflowers and short trees. Butterflies and bees flitted among the flowers with playful, cartoonish smiles.
On the right side of the wall, a Dutch door was open across the top. Beyond it, a playroom complete with dollhouses, an easel, and a child-sized table ringed with stuffed animals in chairs.
Judging by the depressions in the carpet, the bed had been returned to its original location. The bed was another example of the Wilk’s taste for solid wood furniture. It was squat but wide, fitted with a queen-sized mattress. Not a traditional four poster bed, it was nested in a cocoon of curtains fitted into rails on the ceiling. Only one curtain, toward the south wall, remained hanging. A tattered array of fabric scraps and bent hooks filled the rest of the space.
Olivier took notice of all these details in a simple, deliberate counterclockwise turn. A total of five cuts scarred the walls. Two on the north, two on the west, and one on the south. The north wall cuts were deeper, more pronounced, cutting not just the wall but through to the beams and wiring beyond, exactly as Elizabeth had noted.
He inhaled again: slowly and deeply. Latex, ammonia, graphene, more of that gaudy, stringent aftershave. Rising above it all, faint but discernable, a haze of burnt ozone. He frowned. It wasn’t surprising but it was disappointing. A thread of brimstone or the awkward warmth of honeysuckle and vanilla would go a long way to figuring out who was involved.
He paused on the threshold to the fire escape and inspected the broken French doors. The glass was completely missing from the upper panes while the lower were melted out. The door itself was a thick wood like the internal doors. Bright white on the outside and black inside to match the skyline mural.
He knelt down, pulling a papyrus swab from an outer pocket of his satchel. He wiped it around the bottom edge of the molten glass. It sparked, a thin hissing sound escaping as the energy woven into the ancient paper mingled with the sample. Then, finally, it burst into a golden plume that faded in an instant.
Olivier smiled. A guardian had been involved.
He stepped out onto the fire escape. As he did so, he dropped his aura. It was a calculated risk. The girl drew significant attention and being seen, even in the faintest vestiges of his Office, would cause unnecessary complications. However, if the same energies that lingered in the room were present, he would be assaulted, possibly forced to jump from the fire escape itself.