The Great Unravel, page 20
part #3 of Riddle in Ruby Series
Dove looked at Ruby for a moment, and some deeper tension, some shadow, melted away. “That was a gift you just gave me. More than you know.” She shook her head, as if to rid it of cobwebs. “So I will give you as much a gift as I can. You need to know what you’re getting into.” She pointed back over her shoulder at the door. “It’s madness in there.”
“Fair enough,” Athena said, “but we cannot deal with whatever madness you speak of from this little veranda. Perhaps you should let us judge what—”
Ruby interrupted. “I think what Ward Dove here means is that we ought to get the lay of the land before we go off half-cocked.”
Dove raised an eyebrow. “What I mean, Sweetling, is that you should get your chemyst here to summon you up another pair of river galoshes, and you should quick march right back across that water and down to Virginia or even to England if you can. When I say it is madness in there, I mean that if you go through that door into that fortress, I have no idea how you might find a way back out.”
Cram licked his lips in the silence. “I think we should listen further to this fine young lady.”
Dove grinned pleasantly. “Shut it, boy.”
“Shutting it.”
“Can you help us, Dove?” said Ruby.
“Help you do what?”
“Stop the Swede.”
“You’re mad. How?”
“You let us worry about that.”
Dove took a deep breath. “I won’t go back in there.”
“Can you tell us what to expect at least?” Athena said as gently as she could.
Dove frowned and nodded. “The door behind me leads to the building we call South Wall.” She sketched out a rectangle in the muck in front of her. “The whole of the yards is a square. Each of the four buildings, or walls, is built in a rectangle around the main chemystry floor, like the biggest box you’ve ever seen. Right below the Lid, like the top of the box, there is a latticework of pipes and walkways.” She made a circle in the center of the box. The walkways all join at the central tower.” She tapped the circle. “That’s where Swedenborg’s lab is. Stay off the main floor. Crowds of Juiced, and many of them soldiers and reeves. They won’t listen to reason, only to those cursed talkers sealed inside their bandages.” She ran her hand over her face, a few flecks of her own bandage still stuck there. Dove must have ripped the thing right off her own head.
Athena shuddered and forced a smile. “So, a frontal assault is right out.”
“If you want my advice, find a way up through the buildings to the catwalks above. That way you’ll see less folk. With all the Juiced working on the floor, most of the laboratories and offices are empty.”
Ruby had a queer look. “Ward Dove, will you answer me a question?”
Dove snorted. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Was it you who started the fires in Boston?”
Dove looked at Ruby for a long time.
“You came to Fort Scoria to report that fires had been set by revolutionaries, and the fires drew all the reeves away, distracting them. You were that revolutionary, weren’t you?” Ruby swallowed. “Were you trying to smooth the way for me to escape?”
Dove nodded, face drawn with pain. “Don’t flatter yourself. You were a part of the picture, not all of it. The fires were meant to stir the unrest, to stoke fear, to drive folk to the idea of independence.”
Athena looked at Ruby. Why would she ask that now . . . ah. She turned to the reeve. “Dove, would you do it again? For the order?
“Set Boston on fire? Why would I—”
“Not Boston. Do you know where the juicing shops are in the city?”
The woman went still again, as if someone had snuffed the wick of a lamp. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
Ruby hesitated.
“Say no more,” said Dove. “It will be done. But I need some things.”
Henry opened his coat wide. Dove cocked her head in surprise. She knelt in front of the outstretched folds and ran her finger over the mass of hanging vials and bottles, then made an impressed grunt, much as a fishwife might at a particularly well-stocked stall. She plucked a handful of containers from the selection. “My thanks. The juice they take from folks is stored right there in sparkstones for transfer to the stockpile here. I can use the stones as fuel, but these will work as a starter.”
“One moment,” said Henry. “Sparkstone stockpile?”
Dove nodded. “In the vault below the chemystry floor.”
Henry got a faraway look in his eye. “Stockpile,” he muttered.
“Henry?” said Ruby. “Ward Dove’s water shoes?”
“Sorry. A moment,” he said, knelt at the edge of the platform, and began to craft a pair of water boots for the reeve.
Ruby stepped forward. “Ward Dove, there’s one more thing we need from you.”
“What is it?”
“Your uniform.”
Athena was surprised at how quick and unquestioning the woman was, but in moments she was stripped down to her undergarments, a muslin undershirt and a set of surprisingly frilly bloomers. Henry, eyes averted, offered her one of his belts. She slung it jauntily over her shoulder and hung the containers from its hooks.
“Take care,” was all she said, and then she turned and walked onto the river and out of sight.
The waste pipes thundered somewhere in the darkness.
“Time to go,” said a voice.
Athena whirled, and Ruby was nowhere to be seen. In her place, under the flickering light of the doorway, in a reeve uniform that looked three sizes too big for her, stood a tall, fierce girl with a cloud of chestnut curls. The one from the bridge. The one from the balcony in Van Huffridge House.
Avid Wake bowed to Athena. “After you.”
CHAPTER 26
These tools and chem belong only to Malachi Watson.
DO NOT TOUCH.
This goes Especially for Delilah Toots.
Especially.
—Sign, Benzene Yards, smelting shop #3
Athena didn’t move when Ruby bowed. Instead, she said, “Ruby, you know what happened back at Van Huffridge House. Is this safe?”
Safe. She had no idea. A seething, pained rage coursed through Ruby. It was her way into Avid’s shape, the part of Avid she knew the best. It shocked Ruby, though, how easy it was for her to unfurl its sails, like an untapped chemystral engine, suddenly blazing to life. She wanted to hit something. She wanted to hit something until it stopped moving. Ruby straightened Avid’s shoulders and flexed her fingers into fists. The network of burn scars on her back prickled, puckered skin rubbing against Dove’s too-large tunic. “No, it’s not safe, Athena. We are infiltrating a nest of reeves, soldiers, gearbeasts, tinkers, most of them juiced.” She looked down at the dusky sword at Athena’s hip and twisted her lips into Avid’s feral smile. “Use your tactical mind. We can’t fight all the Benzene Yards. Our only hope is what my friend Ruby might call a sharp.”
Henry cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, but it worries me when you refer to you yourself as someone else.”
On her shoulder Evie growled low in her throat.
Henry and Cram exchanged a glance, and the tall boy held up his hands in surrender.
Athena shook her head. “This is of what I am speaking. Your control is flawed, and it affects—”
The rage fed her. “You do not get to decide, Athena. I will do as I do, and you can choose to follow or not. You’re right, of course. This whole venture is the definition of unsafe. We could die. That is the wager, for all of us.” Memories clattered through her head: Avid’s knuckles smashing into her cheek; Ruby tipping Avid onto the rocks; wrestling to keep each other alive in the hot springs; Ruby crumpled on the earth of the orchard, Avid and the other cadets fighting, to defend her, for her life. Avid was a reeve, but in this she and Ruby agreed. She had pledged her life to the protection of the people. “But better to die for an idea than to live for nothing.”
Fear and doubt raced across Athena’s face, but she nodded. “Very well.”
“Then, as your people say, tally-ho.” Ruby pulled the heavy little door open, and a blast of sulfur-hot air smacked her in the face. She ducked into the corridor beyond, her team behind her. A low arched brick passageway proceeded into the murk. Small, dim tinker’s lamps hung from sconces in the wall, far from one another, creating islands of half-light in the dark. The walls themselves glowed with a slick, opaque sheen.
“Don’t touch that,” Henry said from behind her.
She looked over her shoulder just in time to see Cram pulling his hand back from the wall. She gave him a Look. He put his hand in his pocket.
Ruby turned back and glided forward. The clatter and hum of distant machinery, so faint outside, filled the passageway. She could feel it in her feet, in her chest. A kind of constant, very low roar. And above it, just on the edge of hearing—
“What is that?” said Henry.
“Whispers.” Athena pressed her lips together. “I think. Many whispers.”
They inched forward down the dripping hallway, and every foot they moved forward, Ruby’s dread grew. The pit in her stomach twisted tighter and tighter. The passage opened into a deserted laboratory, tools and artifices lying about carelessly where, Ruby assumed, the Juiced had left them. It was a long, high room, the ceiling thirty feet above. A wide, twisting metal stairway sat in its center, rising all the way up through a hole in the ceiling. To the right, two massive doors dominated the wall, each as wide as an oxcart. A smaller door with a leaded glass window was set into one of them. The four of them gathered about the window and looked out into a much larger space beyond.
Dove had been right. They were at the bottom of the biggest box Ruby had ever seen. The main chemystral floor was a vast open hall, hundreds of feet long and at least one hundred wide. The broad, scarred stone floor marched into the distance, scattered with the humps and curves of shuddering engines, pulsing with chemystral purpose. The sides of the box were two long buildings, windows looking down onto the main floor. On the ground level huge archways ran along the bases of both buildings, offering glimpses of a never-ending supply of workshops and smithies and casting shops. A massive brick tower shot up out of the center of the floor, into the “top” of the box, a madly intricate network of metal walks, pipes, and stairways.
The main floor was a hive of activity. Hundreds of people labored along long benches and around cages of scaffolding, hammering and twisting at all manner of metal and chem. In one enclosure, nestled between two clanking engines, a smiling crowd of workers stitched bandages and dipped them into tanks filled with chems, laying them out in shallow baths to keep them ready to wrap the next Juiced, nodding as their own headgear whispered them on.
Every one of them wore the chem-hardened bandages, and they all sported the twisting marks of the Juiced. Clusters of juiced redcoats stood randomly about the hall, grinning and watchful, and reeve blacks lurked in the distance, clustered around the base of the tower.
“How could this happen so quickly?” whispered Henry.
“You ever work in a salt metal mine?” asked Cram.
The chemyst shook his head.
“Well, juicing may rob you of your will and make you look funny, but it makes you feel nice, and at least you ain’t get the black lung. Or get your childrens working beside you. Or get your hands cut off.”
“But it takes away your life force, possibly your life. Don’t they know that? Why would anyone just throw that away?”
Cram said, not unkindly, “You ain’t hearing me, Professor. The feels nice part, I reckon, is just a portion of it. It’s the money. If the choice is get juiced or get fired, or get juiced or lose your house, or get juiced or your wee ones go hungry, tell me: are you thinking too deep about what might happen when you might get sucked dry?”
Henry shook his head, jaw tense. “He’s stealing their lives, and they’re begging him for the privilege. How— Wait, look over there.” Henry pointed farther back along the main floor to a collection of humps and hoses half obscured by scaffolding.
“Juicers,” said Athena. “They’re building more of them.”
Ruby ground her teeth. All of the Juiced, every last one of them, was there because of her. Because of her cursed blood. Because she had left the Swede and his machine in Fort Scoria. She could have stopped it then. She had been scared, she had been blind, but she should have tried. Instead, she had run. Her heart raced, pumping the blood that was the cause of all of this. “This has to stop.”
It came out so hard and heartfelt that the other three of them stopped moving for a moment.
Ruby stared for a moment longer into the yards. “Well, all right then. Dove was right. As Avid I might make it aways, but if we all even step onto the floor, we’re lost.”
“Upstairs it is,” said Athena. “If anyone asks—”
“You are my prisoners. Cram, do you have some rope?”
“I do, Ferret, right here. What do you want with—” She looped it about his wrists. “Ah, I see.”
Ruby used an old trick of Gwath’s to tie them all. The bonds looked tight, but they were easy to loose if need be. The others followed her to the carved filigreed base of the circular stair. “I’ll scout ahead. Athena, with me.”
The two companions padded up the stairwell. It opened into a huge workshop. Row upon row of tables covered with intricate tools sat upon the scarred wooden floor.
At each table sat a bandaged juiced worker, weaving wire and little chem devices into the chem-soaked cloths prepared on the main floor.
Ruby froze, her shoulders just clearing the floor.
Several of the workers looked up.
She waved.
They went back to their work.
The room was completely quiet, save for the tick and whir and clack of tools and the ever-present distant hum of the yards.
Was it her disguise, even with her swimming in Dove’s uniform? Or did they just simply not care? Could she pass through the yards with other people who didn’t look like reeves? Ruby looked back down the stairwell.
Below her Athena mouthed, “What?”
Ruby hoped the look on Avid’s face asked for caution. She motioned for Athena to follow and slowly moved into the room. The noise from the main floor thudded dully through a set of wide leaded glass windows. At either end of the workshop stood a closed large door. A brief thrilling image struck her: a picture of her simply asking one of the workers, “Excuse me, but could you direct me to Dr. Swedenborg?”
But it felt as if a spell had been cast upon the workers, like in Bastionado, when the evil chemyst has taken the hearts of the whole village. She blinked. It felt exactly like that. She, however, absolutely did not want to wake the villagers from their work-filled slumber.
Slowly, ever so slowly Ruby moved toward the door on the left. Athena, head swiveling and doing her best to show off her prisoner’s bonds, followed her.
Henry was the next up through the hole in the floor, reagents clinking and rattling faintly despite his best efforts.
When he was halfway through, waist level with the floor, a cry of surprise and pain rose up from below.
Cram.
Henry whirled to look back, and then his eyes widened in fear. He cast Athena and Ruby a desperate look before he launched himself back down through the hole in the floor.
Cram yelled again, this time a scream.
The staccato pop of clocklocks filtered up the stairs.
Athena drew her sword, and they ran forward. Down in the lab Henry faced off a group of juiced soldiers, standing over Cram, who lay prone on the floor. That quick glance was all Ruby could get, however, because one of the Juiced—a tinker—chucked a glass bulb at Henry. He dodged it, but it shattered on the stairwell with a flash and a whoosh, and then something was rolling up the stairs and consuming them at the same time.
They scrambled back.
The something rose up through the hole in the floor.
It was a shoulder-high cloud of pulsing, molten red. It paused, quivering, at the top of the stairs, as if searching for someone, the edges of the opening blackening and sizzling wider. It quivered, as if it were alive, and then it hurtled toward the two girls, fast as a runaway horse. Ruby barely had time to blink before Athena stepped forward, right into the onrushing cloud of molten chem, raised her sword, and cut downward in a mighty stroke.
The cloud stopped where it hung, bisected by a line of emptiness. The sword had cut it cleanly in half. Through the gap Ruby saw a worker look up, vacantly puzzled. Then the whole monstrosity shivered once, flashed gray, and crumbled to nothing.
They rushed forward to the stairs, but the cloud of chemystry had eaten them up whole. Only sparkling dust remained.
Thirty feet below, Henry Collins faced the juiced tinker and two redcoats while Cram wrestled on the floor with a gearbeast. Red splashed the stones. Henry looked up once, quickly, and their eyes met. “We’ll find you,” he called, and then turned back to face the oncoming foes.
Ruby grabbed Athena just before she launched herself through the hole. “It’s too far. You’ll be killed. Or break your leg at the very least,” she whispered.
Athena whirled on her, struggling against Avid’s granite grip. “What are you talking about? We must! We can’t leave them!”
Ruby tried to let Avid’s rage burn away the guilt. “We have to keep going. We have to think of the mission.” Then Ruby looked behind Athena, and what she saw chilled her to her toes. “Besides, I think we have our own pickle to manage.” Several of the juiced workers had cocked their heads. One had her hand to her ear. As one they rose from their tables, grabbed something sharp or heavy, and, still smiling pleasantly, began walking toward Athena and Ruby.
CHAPTER 27
Treat them feet like your beloved childrens. You never know when you might need to ask ’em to help you out of a tight spot, and you want them dogs to still like you when you do.
—Jimmy Two Hands, hunter extraordinaire
Somewhere an alarm bell was clanging. That was the least of Athena Boyle’s worries, however, as she faced down an ambling, amiable, juiced crowd, each waving the sharpest or heaviest thing from the worktable.
