The Great Unravel, page 21
part #3 of Riddle in Ruby Series
Without taking her eyes off the crowd, she said “Ruby—”
Behind her a door creaked open. “This way.”
Athena lashed out with her blade at the lead worker, whose gray skin seemed even paler under her black-as-night hair. The woman blinked and took a step back, as if a cat had just batted at her. She paused, puzzled.
Athena spun.
Ruby stood in the open doorway. “Run.”
They tore down a dilapidated hallway; it was only moments before a hundred feet hammered the floor behind them. Athena cast a look over her shoulder; the juiced workers were pursuing them as one. And they were not stopping. Door after door sped by, and Ruby led them seemingly at random. A left, a right, two lefts, skip four hallways, ever deeper into the structure. Every time they came to a gasping, heaving halt, finally having lost their pursuers, a juiced worker would stick a bandaged head out of a doorway, mumble a call that the others somehow heard, and off they went again.
Up and in, in and up they went. Dove had said the Swede’s lab was in the walkways connected to the Lid, and Ruby took every staircase they came across.
As they ran, the surroundings got richer. The floors began to acquire rugs. The paint stopped chipping. The furniture grew upholstery. Athena hoped desperately that they were on the right path. Ruby pulled up for breath in a smoking salon. “I—” She started to speak. But Athena never found out what she might have said because her eyes widened at something above them. Athena looked up.
There, peering out of a hole in the ceiling, was another Avid Wake.
The real Avid.
In a blur the girl above leaped at Athena. The air next to her ear whispered as Ruby launched herself at her twin. The real Avid twisted, almost too quick to see, and Ruby slammed into the wall.
The reeve girl’s blows suddenly rained down on Athena. A knee to the stomach, folding her over; doubled fists smashing her back, driving her down to the rug. Mold and pipe smoke warred in her nose. She slammed her elbow into Avid’s chest, driving her back. Athena reached for Aksam’s hilt, but a foot slammed it back into place before it cleared an inch. Then an iron hook of an arm was around her throat, and a knee in her back, and Athena was bent back and helpless, staring at Ruby just getting to her feet, shaking the cobwebs from her head.
“Who are you?” said the voice at Athena’s ear.
“Just . . . passing through,” Athena managed to say.
“Shut up. I’m talking to—to me. Who are you?” The arm tightened, and the edges of Athena’s vision began to darken.
Ruby rolled her eyes. “Let her go. It’s me, Avid. I— It’s Ruby.”
The arm flexed. All went dark.
Athena woke with a sharp pain in her head and seeing double. In an otherwise dark, close space a line of light shining up through the floor painted the faces of two Avids crouched on their knees, staring downward. One of them looked up, noticed Athena, and put her finger to her lips. The other one eased the panel closed.
Darkness.
One of the Avids whispered into her ear, “We’re safe for now.”
“What happened?” murmured Athena.
A voice on her other side said, “You tried to fight a reeve.”
“Oh, Brilliant. I adore reeve humor.”
“Avid agreed to parley.”
Athena straightened and then immediately regretted it. Lances of pain shot through her head. “How long have I been out?”
“Only a few moments. Juiced were coming down the hall, and we got you up here.”
“Ah. Well, then.”
“Enough chatter. What are you doing here, Sweetling?”
Ruby blew out her breath. “We came to stop the Swede. You let us go at Van Huffridge House. You’re hiding in the walls. I think you might want to stop him, too.”
Avid hesitated. “The doctor . . . he—he forced Levi and Ever, Gideon to take the treatment.”
A grim curse came from Athena’s other side. “Ward Corson, too?”
“She . . . volunteered. They—Corson and the others—guard Swedenborg now, night and day. I escaped. I found these crawlways. I—” Her voice dripped with shame. “I have been up here for two days. I sneak down for food and water.”
Athena cut in. “Do you know where the Swede is?”
“His laboratory, on the top of the central spire. Where he keeps his kennel.”
Kennel. Of what? Athena shuddered to think.
“Can you show us where it is?” said Ruby.
“Do you have a death wish, Sweetling? Did I not just tell you—”
“Avid. I know you. You—” Ruby cut off her whisper as the thump of feet trotted by below. Athena’s heart was in her mouth. When the footsteps finally receded, Ruby began again. “Look at you. You’ve been hiding in this place for days. Days when you might have sneaked out.”
“I can’t leave! This is my only family!”
“Exactly. You are here because you are too brave.” The voice smiled in the dark. “And too stubborn. Help us.”
Athena’s hand drifted to her hilt. This girl was ferocious. If she refused . . .
“Help you to do what?”
“Stop him. Shut it all down.”
Avid’s hair rustled as she nodded. “But first, you need to follow me.”
Athena moved her fingers away from her sword. “Where?”
“I think I know someone who can help.”
CHAPTER 28
When we tap the Source, we employ the energy of our souls. But it is the Will that directs it, that allows us to break the very bonds of the world. I shudder to think what might happen if that will was somehow stolen.
—Robert Boyle, Principia Chymia
Henry kept his eyes glued on the three men in front of him.
“Flasks down. Now,” the tinker said. His yellow buckteeth poked out of his gray, black-webbed smile. He had a crystal vial aimed straight at Henry, a small hammer poised above the neck, ready to strike. A curly mop of hair peeked up out of his bandages. The two soldiers beside him leisurely reloaded their muskets. The screaming pain in Henry’s shoulder told him that at least one had hit his mark. At Henry’s feet the clanging and the frenzied, sobbing breathing had slowed. Cram had finally done in the gearbeast that had turned his back into a cascade of red ribbons.
“Flasks down, I say.” The man’s eyes flicked between Henry’s hands, where the two flasks—one glass, one clay—were held. The muskets came up.
Henry chewed his lip. Battles were not his strong suit. Of the last two he had been part of, one had resulted in Alaia Calderon’s almost choking him to death with her knees, and the other? Well, the other had burned down the greater portion of the forests west of the Susquehanna River.
The tinker’s snaggle-toothed smile widened. “Kill them.”
CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG.
The alarm sounded from just above their heads. The men’s eyes clocked upward, only for a moment.
Henry threw himself to the side. The shots tore the air where he had been. The tinker’s hammer hurtled down and smashed open the neck of the vial. Jets of emerald foam twisted through the air at Henry and washed over him, in his ears, in his mouth, in his nose. He fell to the ground encased in a cake of green.
But not before he had indeed put his flasks down. Right at the feet of their opponents.
His throws were true. The last thing he saw before the acidic foam surged over his eyes was both the clay flask and the glass exploding into shards at the tinker’s feet. He fired his Source as the green acid began to tingle and then to burn. His face lit up with pain.
But even through the swirling foam the gaseous phaaaah of the stone floor vaporizing under their feet rang in his ears, followed by the yells of the three men falling through the superheated vapor of what used to be floor. Far away Cram cried out.
The acid hurt. Oh, it hurt. He hoped they had given Ruby and Athena enough time.
The green crust burst away, and light poured in: light and Cram’s face. “Professor!” he said.
Base. He needed a base. “M-m-milk?” He forced the word through his sizzling lips.
Cram disappeared.
And then white, a blinding amount of white.
A fountain of cool, cool whiteness poured down onto his face, down his back, across his skin. More and more of the stuff, a never-ending rain that covered him and washed away the chunks of solid acid, even down to his toes.
Henry levered himself up onto his aching shoulder. He blinked. He could still see. He looked down at his hands and arms. Terrible scars crept down his forearms just below the burned and pocked remains of his jacket.
They didn’t hurt, though. He flexed his hands, felt at his neck and face. Nothing hurt. Somehow he had been saved.
Where the three men had stood, there was only a wide, oval hole. He pulled himself over and looked down. Twenty feet below, in some kind of cellar, three shapes lay crumpled and still.
“Nice work, Professor.” Cram knelt next to him. The spice box lay thrown open on the ground behind him. He held a tiny white pitcher, a broken wax seal around its lip. The edge of some lettering peeked from the side.
“Cram, could you turn that about?”
The boy did. The letters were written very clearly, in a precise hand.
Henry chuckled.
“What’s it say, Professor?”
“Cram, old son, it says ‘heavy cream.’”
Cram grinned. He tipped the pitcher up for a moment, and still more threatened to spill out. “Good old Nasira. What I want to know is how she got that much cream into that wee pitcher.”
But he couldn’t have read the label. He couldn’t read. “How did you know?”
Cram’s eyes were wide. “Didn’t.” He held up the little pitcher. “Didn’t have time to dither, with you sizzling and such. I guessed this was the closest to milk. Had to take a chance and hope it was what you needed.”
The alarms kept ringing. They were exposed here. Beyond the doors on the main floor someone would eventually go looking for those three guards. Henry tentatively got to his feet. His clothes were in tatters, and there were a few holes burned in his boots; but otherwise, he seemed whole. A careful probe at the musket wound revealed it tender but healed. The ball had gone straight through. He silently thanked Nasira and her box of goodies.
Cram tried to push himself up from his knees but gave a small moan and flopped back down to the floor like a newborn foal. He looked up at Henry. For the first time Henry got a good look at the boy’s back. It was a ruin of red.
“Oh, Science.”
“It—it hurts, Professor. Bad, is it?”
Henry’s heart was in his throat. He told the truth. “I—I think it is.”
He rushed over to Nasira’s box, cursing himself that he hadn’t taken the time to fully look through it earlier. Next to the compartment labeled “Heavy cream. For chem burns,” he found a little pot of salve labeled “Stanchweed paste. Superconcentrated yarrow. Clotting, pain. NOT TOO MUCH.” Right next to it lay a sealed paper envelope with “Napkins. Also for bandaging. Keep clean.” He tore it open and popped the seal on the yarrow pot. Something spicy filled the air, like rosemary and oregano mixed together. How much was not too much? Cram’s shirt was oozing red, and he lay on his side, grunting rhythmically. Henry wrapped a napkin around three fingers, scooped the whole patch out, and coated it thick on another bandage.
He knelt behind his friend and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He was shaking. “I need to do this quickly. There will be some pain.”
“Do it.”
He lifted the shirt. Henry tried not to think about what he saw. As carefully as he could he placed the poultice over the deep wounds running down the boy’s back. Cram twisted and whimpered. Another torn bandage tied it in place. And then it was done.
“Cram, do you think you can stand?”
The boy shifted up to his knees and grimaced. “Less pain now. If you help me, I can.”
“I don’t think we can take your bag.”
Cram looked at him owlishly and held out his hand.
Henry swallowed and nodded. He stowed the box in the pack and then pulled it over. Cram fastened his hand onto it with a death grip.
“You saved my life, you know,” said Henry. “With the cream.”
Cram forced a smile. “Nah. Just offering a cool beverage.” He made a show of smelling the herbs. “Someone making dinner?” He looked up at the hole in the ceiling where the stairs had been. “Following them is right out. Where to?”
Henry looked about. Cram was right. No way they could make it up the stairs. And the main floor was suicide. But they couldn’t stay here. With the alarms the Juiced would be on them at any moment. “We can’t go up. Or forward.”
“What about down?” Cram had hobbled over to the hole Henry had torn in the floor.
Henry followed him over, and his heart leapt in hope. Just past the three men—the bodies—lay the unmistakable outline of a passage. “Down it is.”
They moved as fast as they could. As Henry lay flat on the floor, it took all of his strength and all of his length, using the pack as a kind of harness, to lower Cram down to the top of a stout bookcase in the cellar, and then he followed. From there they moved to the floor. Cram leaned against the door, breathing shallowly, sweat glistening on his face. His pack lay on the floor, its strap clutched in his hand.
“One moment,” said Henry. He pulled a brick of sandstone from the remains of his coat, unwrapped it, and tapped into his Source. He crumpled the stone into powder and blew on it. The dust whirled upward and bonded to the sides of the hole. As it bonded, he fired his Source, and quite quickly he had filled in the opening.
In the dark Cram said, “That was quite the trick, Professor. Do you think you could have lit a lamp before you did it, though?”
The tunnel led into a long series of corridors in the bowels of the great building. They twisted and turned at random, shuffling as fast as they could, brine and crumbling mortar warring for pride of place in the brick passages. Eventually dust lay deep and untouched beneath their feet.
They were lost.
“Alas, alack, alay.”
“Cram?”
“Yes, Professor?”
“How are you feeling?”
“Well, scrabbling fire beetles are not trying to eat their way out my back, so.”
“All right.”
They stood for a moment at a crossroads. The passages ahead and to the sides seemed utterly identical. The distant ringing of the alarums had faded, as loud only as the constant dripping of water. Henry racked his brain. Cram’s breathing had gotten more shallow, and he was holding less of his weight on his own feet. Ruby and Athena were up above somewhere, running or fighting for their lives. He tried to stay cool, like Athena, confident that the world would provide the answer to his troubles if he just pushed on far enough. But the friend on his arm was fading. It was a simple mathematical equation. Time in the yards was equal to an ever-diminishing chance of survival. It was—
Foomp.
“Did you hear that, Cram?”
“What?”
“Listen.”
They stood there in the dim, both leaning forward, straining to hear the slightest something, anything.
Silence.
Henry sighed. Now he was hallucinating. Like seeing a mirage in the desert or—
Foomp.
“That, Professor, was a foomp.”
A tiny flame flickered in Henry’s breast. “Indeed, it was Cram. From the forward passage?”
“That was my thought, too.”
“Onward!”
They crept forward as slowly as they might. There was no consistent interval. They were irregular, but the foomps just kept on coming. Two more turns, and they were at a partially open wooden door, with just a sliver of light coming through.
Foomp.
It was a little bit louder now.
They eased through the doorway, the corner of a storeroom of sorts. The soft blue glow of older tinker’s lamps kept it half lit. The ceiling rose twenty feet or more, and tightly packed, segmented rows of black stones stacked twice as high as their heads marched off into the distance, filling the whole chamber.
“Cram, do you know what these are?” Henry whispered.
“No, Professor.”
“They’re sparkstones.”
“What, all of them?”
Henry nodded. A wave of dizziness passed over him. It was too big. It was too much. This much Source—it could power a city. Or a god. “I think this is where the Swede keeps his energy.”
Foomp.
They moved as quickly and as quietly as they could down the aisle between the outside sparkstone towers and the wall. The room seemed empty, except that as they approached the other end, a few other sounds emerged. One was the crackling of parchment. Another was the scratching of a pen.
A third sound was a voice.
“Elfreth’s Alley, UpTown: broken wheel on sparkstone wagon. Group twenty-two to the smithy.” It was like a whisper, but as if you had freeze-dried a whisper and then cracked it with a hammer. Dry. Like desert soil. “All citizens in the yard report to the upper floors. Intruders likely headed to the Apex Laboratory. Subdue intruders, citizens. Subdue, if possible. If not, terminate. No cost is too high for your freedom.”
Scratching followed, then another foomp.
“That’s Ferret and Lady Athena!” Cram whispered. “They’re still free!”
Henry and Cram craned their heads around the corner of a column of stones.
At the far end of the room a circular brick wall bulged out. On it hung a riot of pipes, like a church organ mated with a school of squids. The pipes ran into the room through the walls from all sides, even out of the ceiling, twenty of them at least, and they all twisted about one another to come to rest in a bank of circular slots, arrayed above the desk.
Foomp.
The person at the desk, all in reeve blacks, reached to open a slot and pulled out a capsule, from which they removed a piece of parchment. They read it, then turned to grab a horn hanging from a long tube that passed up through the ceiling. Into the horn they said, “Cancel shipment of cochlear apparatus. West doors. Focus on location of targets.” They scratched another note and then put it into a different slot, which closed with a hiss and another foomp.
