The Great Unravel, page 19
part #3 of Riddle in Ruby Series
Purpose.
Finally. She hungered like wild dog to get to the Swede.
Henry checked his vials. “What is the plan, Ruby? You know this town best.”
Her town. Well. “These stairs are the only way to UnderTown for many blocks. If we can make it to the bottom unseen, I can lead us through back alleys to the steps to the water and the yards. Once we get close, we’ll just have to see.”
Athena and Henry nodded, faces grim. It was a dangerous path, but it was the only one open to them.
“All right then,” she said, and moved to go.
“Ferret.” Cram put a hand on her forearm and a finger to her lips. He pointed down the stairway.
Four shapes walked up the stairs from below. Even in the cloudy moonlight, Ruby could pick out their muskets. But they weren’t redcoats. They wore ragged breeches and an assortment of mismatched vests and coats. Militia of some sort or volunteers. All wearing bandages around their ears.
They moved carefully up the staircase, heads swiveling.
Looking for someone.
Ruby motioned for her friends to back against the wall. A sliver of a view opened to the street between the corner of the next building and a rain barrel. Just a sliver, and if someone looked their way at just the right moment, there would be questions. Possibly a fight. And then the game would be afoot. Her breathing was way too loud.
One passed by. He was tall and fat, a big man with a tattered beard that he wore like a necklace. He carried his musket propped on one shoulder. An insipid smile played across his lips. Tendrils of black crept up the nape of his neck from underneath his threadbare coat, and they sneaked down his hands as well. Juiced. Ruby shivered in revulsion. A too-small tricorne hat perched atop the bandages that wrapped around his head, caked in place with dried chem.
Someone was talking. It was faint, difficult to pinpoint. Ruby thought it must be another member of the search party, but then the second man passed, and the third.
The last was a short man with squinty eyes and a nose so big you could barely see the rest of his face. He was pigeon-toed, too, and moving a little more slowly than the others, so she got a good earful.
The muttering was coming from inside the bandages. It had to be the alchemycal receiver Hearth had shown them. Occasionally the man nodded. Agreeably, as if someone were offering him a cup of tea. When he passed out of the mouth of the alley, Ruby and her friends deflated.
“A chemystral device could be transmitting from anywhere in the city,” said Henry.
Cram whistled. “Is it just us against all of Philadelphi?”
No one answered.
Onward.
Aside from the patrol, Fox’s Stairs were empty. Even at this time of night there were usually hawkers and wranglers ready to sell skewered rabbit (actually rat) and spiced nuts (actually, well, she didn’t want to think about it) to the starving hordes streaming back down from the swing shifts. Now there was nothing but one forlorn cart, abandoned at the foot of the stairs.
The alleys and byways were as dark and shadowed as always, with oily chem pots guttering here and there, but all oddly bereft of the usual crowds.
They made excellent, silent time. Better than Ruby expected, and before she knew it, they were in the part of UnderTown farthest to the east, near the city wall, on the edge of the water. Looming in the distance and wrapped in shadow, rising all the way to the Lid and through it, lay the massive fortress of the Benzene Yards.
The stones dug into Ruby’s knees as she knelt atop the city wall. Orange and purple lit the chem-clouded sky as the sun set behind the great forests to the west. It would be dark soon.
Ruby snuck forward on her stomach to look down at the water for the hundredth time. It was the very southeastern tip of the city. To the right, river, all the way down to the ocean. Straight ahead, more river, and the shore just barely visible on the other side. To the left was their goal. If you could survive the sheer five-story drop, you would find yourself in a no-man’s-land between the city wall and the even higher and more formidable wall of the fortress factory of the Benzene Yards, home of the Tinkers Guild. The no-man’s-land was a steaming sink of strange soil, a pudding more than ground, the results of decades of chem leaching out of the yards.
“Can we walk across that, Henry?” Ruby whispered.
The boy chewed his lip. “You could.”
“But?”
“But you might have stumps for feet by the time you got across.”
Cram whistled.
Ruby nodded. “All right, scratch that.”
On the other side of the no-man’s-land, the brick walls of the Benzene Yards rose up almost to the Lid; great smokestacks actually cut through to the other side, popping up out of UpTown like fingers, their tops connected by catwalks and stairways, belching out gouts of smoke and mist. The smoke was horribly beautiful: an array of blues, oranges, and pinks.
Where the building met the river there were a series of docks marching north. In the distance, right near the main gates, the great tinker battleship Grail lay at anchor like some iron hippopotamus.
“Say we could get across?” Ruby pointed at the south wall. “Could we bust through the wall with chemystry?”
Henry absentmindedly ran his fingers across his bandolier of reagents. “Possibly. I might be spent after doing it. That brick is thick and probably reinforced against just such an attack.” He shook his head ruefully. “But without having seen a plan of the yards, we could be walking into Swedenborg’s pantry or a tea party of those husks.”
“People,” said Cram.
Ruby turned to him. “What?”
“They ain’t automatons. They’re people. “
“’Course,” said Ruby. “But people or not, if we can’t get across the field, we’ll have to swim.”
Henry sighed and started to take off his string of reagent bottles. “Well, these would have been useful, but they won’t survive the water.” He looked about. “You realize, don’t you, that I may not survive the water? This is madness. I still can’t swim. And neither can you, Athena.”
A shape caught Ruby’s eye across the water, a shadow really, leaning on a little walkway that she had missed, jutting off the corner of the wall.
Athena clucked her tongue in thought. “Well, what about some sort of viscosity seal for our boots?”
“You mean actually walk across the water?” He blinked, shook his head, stared into the distance, then snapped his fingers. “I think I have it.” Back to Athena he said, “You know, that wasn’t a terrible idea.”
“Thank you?” said Athena.
Cram said, “Pardon? Walk on the—”
“Leave it, Cram. Trust me.”
“I’ll trust you. Just so’s I’m not towing you.” He patted Henry’s belly. “You’ve gained some weight back since the beaver lodge.”
Ruby hadn’t stopped looking at the shape. “What’s that?” she asked.
“What?” said Athena.
“That.” Ruby pointed, sighting along her arm.
They all looked for a moment.
Then Cram said, “That, Ferret, is a reeve. The blacks sort of give it away, I think.”
“Well,” said Ruby.
“This involves approaching that reeve, doesn’t it, Ferret?”
“Yes, Cram.”
“Exposed like.”
“Yes, Cram.”
“On the water.”
“Yes, Cram.”
Cram sighed. “Well, at least I ain’t going to grow old and unhappy.”
They scuttled down a set of rickety stairs to a small rusted platform just above the river. As Ruby came off the stairs, the lightly sloshing waves under the platform burned her nose with the smell of acid and chem. Cram blinked tears out of his eyes. “Best not to quench our thirsts, I’m thinkin’.”
“Indeed.” Henry hunted through the flasks and vials spread out before him on the metal grate.
Even in the deepening twilight. Ruby couldn’t keep her gaze from the figure across the water.
Henry rolled up his reagents and stowed them, then moved over to the very edge of the platform, a little tube in one hand and an unstoppered vial in the other. “Who is first?”
Ruby stepped forward. “I am.”
Athena grabbed her upper arm. “Ruby. Wait. You must tell us what you’re doing before you do it. This is—”
“I think I know that woman, and I think she might help us. Follow my lead. If I get into trouble, storm the compound. Find Swedenborg. Deal with him. Destroy the machine. Get out. What’s so difficult about that?” She stuck her foot out to Henry. “Do it.”
“When I do this, you need to step on it quickly.”
“All right.”
Henry held out the tube and sprinkled some powder onto the river. Suddenly it smelled of mud after a thunderstorm.
Ruby trusted Henry. She had to. Just as they had to trust her. She put her foot into the river. Except it didn’t go through. It slipped a little, as it might if someone had spilled ale on the deck. But it held her weight. From her shoulder Evie chittered in irritation or fear.
“Good.” Henry smiled to himself, relieved. He poured some of the liquid out of the vial, and using a flat stylus, he shaped the water into a kind of wide, curved cup, like a deeper duck foot. Some of the water sloshed over the edge, sneaking in through Ruby’s boot, but it held.
“Other foot,” said Henry. “Quickly. I’m not certain how long these will last.”
Soon Ruby was walking across the water. There was a kind of sliding motion that worked best, she found. Forward and back. You couldn’t pick your feet up or you would go into the drink. With her arms out, it was almost like walking a tightrope, a huge, watery, poisonous tightrope. Her pulse thudded in her temples. Over her shoulder, the others had made it onto the river and were following her in a slow, torturous line, like a group of crippled ducklings.
Soon there was only the quiet lapping of the waves and the heaving of her breath. A breeze came up from the opposite shore; it ruffled her hair.
It was almost dark now. The sun had dropped behind the hanging lip of the Lid to the west; the walls of the Benzene Yards loomed over their little waddling line like the mouth of a whale. The figure still stood on the small balcony jutting just out over the water. It must have been put there for workers to access the back wall. And if workers were meant to be there, that meant there would be a door to the inside.
Ruby’s thighs throbbed from the unfamiliar motion of the slippers, but she was almost there. The figure turned its head and started, catching sight of her.
It didn’t raise the alarm.
Instead, it placed its meaty elbows on the balcony and waited.
As Ruby sloshed closer, the details she had seen from the wall resolved themselves back out of the darkening shadows. A heavy body, large yet agile. The blacks of a reeve. Pale skin, almost white. A thuggish set to mouth and brow.
“Ward Dove,” Ruby called softly.
“Ruby Teach,” said the woman, stone faced. “Such a delightful surprise.”
Ruby thought to make some sort of clever remark in return. But as she moved closer, the hazy figure of Ward Dove resolved more clearly. The woman in front of her had accompanied Ruby to Fort Scoria, along with the now-dead Ismail Cole. She had raced back to Fort Scoria from the bombings in Boston to rally the reeves, to set them to the winds to empty out the fort. She had also been named on a list of Worshipful Order conspirators that had included Athena’s father and Thandie Paine. She was on their side. She was a mole deep in the Reeve, and so far she hadn’t raised the alarm. Ruby’s heart soared.
And then it fell. In the last light of the sun Dove reached out to Ruby, and the reeve blacks rode up on her forearms, revealing a twisting trail of black tendrils. Her iron hand clamped over Ruby’s forearm. A grin plastered across her face, and a strange light shone through the gray streaks twisting in her eyes.
CHAPTER 25
If thy opponent be stronger, make him the object of thy study.
Discover thou his tendencies and his loves.
—Pelham, Arts Martial and Practice
The big woman hauled Ruby up over the railing like a bundle of kindling, and Athena’s throat tightened at the sudden fear painting Ruby’s face. The two spoke to each other, Ruby intently, the woman wearing the strange, plastered grin of the Juiced, but Athena could hear nothing but murmurs.
Athena strained with all she had to speed up, but all it seemed to accomplish was to make her feet slosh more water. The woman was huge. She could flatten Ruby into quince paste before any of them even reached the platform. Sweat trickled down the back of Athena’s neck as she drove the cursed galoshes ever faster.
The woman’s face hardened at Athena’s approach. Athena scrambled to draw the sword Nasira had given her. Aksam. It hissed in the night. The pale reeve was almost within striking range.
“Lavinia Dove, at your service,” the reeve said low and quiet.
Athena did not put down her sword. “Move away from Ruby Teach, if you please.”
“Athena—”
“Ruby, step back. Are you mad? She’s juiced. I can see it from here.”
“Wait,” said Dove. “I am what you say . . . juiced.” She clenched her fist. “But I am still my own woman. You must trust me. You’re standing on a—“her blackened lips moved as she searched for the word—“a river. You don’t have many options.”
Athena cursed to herself. Dove was right. And Ruby—Ruby was just standing next to her, as if they were fast friends.
“Athen,” said Ruby.
Nothing for it but to give over. “Fine,” she said, and held out her hand.
Dove hauled Athena up over the railing with no visible effort. Providence, she was strong.
Cram and Henry soon followed, and then they all were squatting or kneeling on the little balcony, inches above the Delaware River, at the very edge of the Benzene Yards, talking to a juiced reeve. Athena’s thoughts raced ahead. Why would the Swede juice his own people? What was happening inside?
Ruby leaned forward. “So tell us.”
The big woman went still for a moment, her eyes glassy, her mouth slack. “Pardon?”
“They used the machine on you, haven’t they? Swedenborg’s engine?” said Henry.
She shook her head like a drunken mastiff, and her eyes came back into focus. “Yes. They did. Two days ago the Swede asked for loyal volunteers from the reeve ranks. Yesterday, the volunteers took more of us out of our beds.” Athena noticed smaller things she hadn’t seen at first glance: the cuts and bruises on Dove’s knuckles, the purpling above one eye. Dove turned to Ruby. “I—the Void, Teach. It helps. I held on to . . . part of myself.” She ground her teeth through the grin, lips twisted. “It feels so harmless, but something is gone. And there is a compulsion that’s taken its place. I must fight it. You are intruders, so I am supposed to sound an alarm and take you, but I won’t. I won’t. It isn’t right.” Tears sparkled on her cheeks in the half dark.
Athena’s vision wavered for a moment, and she blinked away moisture. The spectacle of this reeve—so strong, part of an elite guard, trained to endure terrible hardship—the sight of her so vulnerable and afraid shot Athena out of herself for a moment. No matter who you were, there was always someone who had suffered deeper wounds, who hurt more. She wanted to fix it, to make it right, and it made her deeply angry that she couldn’t. The sword, Aksam, quivered at her side.
Cram’s bag rustled, and there was a creak of hinges. The boy produced a small, squat bottle. He popped it, and a tangy, herbal smell swept the balcony. “Here.”
Dove took it. “What is it?”
“Well, the professor over there told me it says ‘self-reliance.’”
The big woman sniffed it, then tossed all of it down her throat. She sneezed violently.
Cram’s eyes bugged. “All of it. You took all of it. I reckoned maybe a pinch—”
The reeve’s shadow straightened. Her breathing came more evenly. “That was— Thank you. I feel clearer. How long will this last?”
“No idea,” said Cram.
“Well, we should get on with this then. Before the fog returns.” Dove grinned sideways and held up her hand, palm first. “Thought grant us grace.”
“Grace protect us all,” Athena replied with a start. The words of the Worshipful Order of Grocers. This woman, this reeve, was she an ally? In the bosom of the enemy? Behind her Ruby smiled like an idiot.
The stout little door behind Dove remained closed, and Athena’s neck itched. “I will say that it is very nice to meet you, Ward Dove, and thank you for your assistance. But we’re as exposed out here as a horsefly on a Clydesdale’s flank. Might you invite us into the parlor? Then perhaps we can talk further about why a reeve of England knows the secret words for a very select order of people?”
Dove looked over her shoulder at the door, then back at the four of them. She shrugged. “I’m a Grocer. You’re Athen Boyle, right? I know your father. I—” She blinked, then let out a long breath. “I sent the message that summoned you. To the colonies.”
Athena was glad for the railing of the little balcony. The shock might have put her straight into the river. “You?”
Dove nodded. “When the Reeve got wind of Ruby’s secret, someone had to tell the order. I—” She looked up at the yards, guilt plain on her face. “I can’t help wondering if I hadn’t what would have happened.”
The shock on Ruby’s face matched what Athena felt. Ruby put out a hand. “You saved me, Dove. Because Athen saved me. If it hadn’t had been for him, and these folk, the Reeve would have snapped me up clean, and all it would have done was get us to Juice Town much quicker.”
Pride bloomed in Athena’s chest. She had flipped Ruby’s world upside down, and she had always wondered how Ruby felt about it.
