The Great Unravel, page 23
part #3 of Riddle in Ruby Series
Athena smiled.
There was a yip and a tear and a chattering, and caustic chemystral air rolled down her throat so she was choking.
And then she could see again. Wisdom Rool stood before her, the twitching remains of the worm quivering in his massive hands, Evie, the ottermaton, still tearing at one side of it, the bodies of four other worms littered about the passage.
One of the Avids knelt in front of her. Athena realized she was sitting.
“Are you all right?” Ruby asked, eyes wide. It was Ruby, she knew it. And Athena wiped the stuff from her face, and she saw there, around her wrist, the faintest trace of a gray tendril. It sang to her, to just lie down. To stop. She fought it with all she had.
“Athena. I am Athena.”
“Well, of course you are.”
She had to say her name over and over again, because that thing wanted her to give it all up. The fight, the fear, the anger. Everything that made her . . . her.
And to her horror she understood what she had not, about all the folks who had been juiced. It would have been so much nicer to just let everything go, to let someone else worry about it all.
Nevertheless, she persisted.
She stood up, and her companions stepped back at the look upon her face.
“I’m all right. But first I have an idea.”
“It’s ready,” said Henry. He held out the improvised artifice to Cram and pretended he didn’t see the boy wince when he reached for it. The poultice on Cram’s back was dripping now, soaked through, with blood pooling on the floor around him, and he kept blinking, as if he were trying to stay awake. The thing itself was nothing more than a squat ceramic vial with a wax seal on the top. From the seal sprouted the tail of a long silken thread.
“Flick this seal, and the catalyzer will wander down—”
“Wander?”
“It’s a technical term. It will wander down the thread. It should take approximately three minutes to reach the igniter and the sparkstone stack.”
“And when it does?”
Henry blinked.
Foomp.
“Right,” said Cram. “When should I do it?”
Parchment rustled.
Evram pulled down the horn. Henry leaped up and pulled it gently away, covering it with his hand. Evram spoke into his fist as if nothing had happened. “All yard citizens. Forgo any previous orders. Terminate the intruders. Protect your freedom to juice.”
Henry let go of the horn and sighed. “I don’t know when, Cram. I don’t know how long it will take me to get up that ladder. If anyone comes, you should do it. If it feels like the right time, you should do it. I— Trust your gut.”
Cram tapped his temple. “Strategery.” The boy twisted to get a better seat against the leg of the desk, and his eyes lost focus. He was looking far into the distance. Henry chewed his lip. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t fair. “Cram—”
Cram smiled, but it turned into a gasping, bubbly cough. “You know it’s the right thing, Henry.”
“I know, but Evram here, and—”
“You have to go. I’ll be fine.” He looked over at Evram. “We’ll be fine. I’ll flick the switch and then get Evram here to help me scarper out. Or you know what? Send me a foomp when you all get Swedenborg’s goat and we’ll all meet for tea in the river.”
That’s when Henry realized. Cram wasn’t consoling himself. He was consoling Henry. The dice were thrown. The sparkstone trove couldn’t be allowed to exist. The juicer machines couldn’t be allowed to exist. Whoever controlled them couldn’t be trusted.
They locked eyes. Cram smiled. “All right, Professor. Get up that ladder. You got things to do.” He swallowed. “Take my pack, will ye? There’s important things in there.”
He took Cram’s pack. Because Cram didn’t think he would be needing it.
And when Henry took it, the taking somehow tore away a piece of him, too. A space, a hole he feared would never be filled again. Tears came. He couldn’t see.
What do you do?
How do you leave a friend?
Henry hugged Cram.
He said, “You are the best man I know.”
He climbed the ladder.
As he passed through the ceiling, he heard Cram say, “Now, Evram, you ever play whist? An old friend of mine, Winnie Black, taught me to play.”
Ruby followed her friends out of the dark onto a wide stone circle, like a great clearing in the middle of the metal and chem forest. It was the top of the central pillar. About fifty feet away, at the center of the clearing, squatting like a spider with walkways and twisting passages traveling up into the Lid, sat a wide platform, strewn with the worktables and glittering glass of a chemyst’s laboratory. A squad of black-clad reeves waited there. Among them a flash of fire red hair. The laboratory floor rested on a foundation of cages. Fifty at least. Each one held a comfy chair, and in each chair sat folk from all walks of life, some in the rags of the Shambles, others in finery that looked as if they had just found their way over from Van Huffridge House. This must be what Avid had called the Swede’s kennel.
They all wore masks, and the tubes from the masks wound into a braid above the cages that passed through the floor and into a clockwork chair.
In that chair sat Emmanuel Swedenborg.
He waved.
“Hellooooo!” His high, lovely voice rang out across the distance. “I do so wish we could talk, but I am so busy.”
A clear, pure rage took Ruby, as if she were waking from a dream.
“My people, please show them out! Forcibly, if you please,” drawled the Swede.
The reeves surged forward.
And so did Ruby and her friends. The four of them pounded across the stone. Evie ran with them, coursing between the two Avids.
The lord captain of the king’s Reeve leaped ahead of them with a great bound and called out, “Edwina! My companion! Reeves! You go against your oath! Your duty is to the crown, not to this man!”
None of the grinning reeves answered as they ran or even seemed to have heard. Ruby saw clouds of gas swirling about their heads. The Swede had somehow improved on his bandages.
“They are mine, Wisdom!” called Swedenborg. “And I so value your sense of honor. I will be absolutely tickled when it belongs to me as well!”
Rool slowed his approach and, smiling mirthlessly, rejoined the companions.
The reeves fanned out in a flying wedge, Ever and Levi Curtsie, Gideon Stump, Edwina Corson at their head. Any one of the newly promoted cadets was a threat, and Corson herself was a match for Wisdom Rool. Avid would hold her own. But Ruby had never been the top of her class, and Athena—
There was a ripping sound from above. Just by instinct Ruby threw herself to the side. Something slammed into the platform with a scream of tortured iron and wood. A catwalk, torn loose from its housings in the Lid, reared up again like the talon of some steel insect. Another, and then another, tore loose from the catwalks above.
On his chair the Swede moved his hands like the conductor of some orchestra from hell, slicing down, and one of the catwalk tentacles swooped in to wrap itself around Athena’s waist.
He moved his hand as if he were plucking a flower, and it lifted Ruby’s friend up like a child’s toy.
Athena stabbed it.
With a shriek of spasming gears the catwalk flew apart, and she landed heavily on the platform.
But she stood. She twirled Aksam and closed ranks with her friends. The Swede laughed, and then the true storm began. The catwalks stabbed down again and again. Balls of strange chemystry came streaming toward them. But Athena and her sword spun a web of cancelation, stopping the chemystry in its tracks over and over as slowly they moved forward.
Then the wave of reeves came down upon them.
Wisdom Rool roared like thunder and Edwina Corson growled like a hurricane and they came together so hard Ruby thought they might split the very pillar apart. They used no weapons, only their hands and feet, Rool ever questing to subdue his former lieutenant and Edwina Corson ever countering, stabbing with her jade-fingered hand over and over to tear the life from him.
For Avid, Ruby, and Evie, it came down to protecting Athena. Gideon Stump and the Curtsies were a never-ending storm of punching hands and kicking feet, flying around Athena to try to pry her sword from her grasp. But Ruby and Avid were a matchless team. They could have truly been the same person, anticipating each other’s moves and coming to each other’s aid. With Evie biting seemingly every ankle and clawing at just the right moment, they crept forward.
“Enough!” At the Swede’s call the reeves fell back.
Heaving and ready to drop, the friends stood at the foot of the Swede’s platform. The space about them echoed with menace; the next attack might come from anywhere. Ruby dug her toes into the stone of the pillar and cast her attention wide. This was no time for triumph. She braced herself against the coming storm.
Evram’s hand sat kind of limply in Cram’s, but it made Cram feel a little bit better.
It was quiet. The room was cool, and that was a blessing.
Winnie Black had been right.
Cram would have chuckled, but he didn’t want to set off another coughing fit.
The woodswoman had named it true, back in that clearing by the gorge. “People like us, Evram.” Cram gave Evram’s hand a little squeeze. “People like us. In times like these people like us get smashed up on that forge.” Saying the words opened up a kind of river in his chest. Sadness rushed out of it, so hard and fast it scared him. But he wouldn’t take back no part of what he’d done, even if he could. He hoped Miss Winnie, and Cubbins, and Peaches were safe somewhere deep in some fern grove, dappled with sun. Remembering him. Well, it kept him warm a little. And slowed the sad river down a mite, too.
He reached up with his other hand and took the horn again. He cleared his throat, and then he repeated. “All city-zens in the yards, if you have not, pretty please proceed out of the yards. All city-zens stay away from the juicing shops. Keep going. Out the door. Leave the intruders alone.” After a moment he added, “All city-zens should also take a goodly walk. And perhaps find themselves a nice piece of cheese.”
Surely that was enough time for Henry to reach the labratory?
Surely he had said it enough times to get the folks to safety?
It had been a ripping yarn, it had. He had met true pirates. He had fought wild beasts. He had tasted that vanilly spice. He had mastered the wilderness. He had seen the city of the Algonkin. He had fought evil.
He had found courage.
He had helped his friends.
Mam would be proud.
He let go of the tube and put his hand back on the vial in his lap.
Covered in sweat, Athena gripped Aksam. Her spirit burned. It had been the fight of her life, and she had mastered it. A few yards away the reeves, battered and bruised, waited in a loose oval. “Four against five, Doctor. You can’t blame them for failing.” At her sides, the twin Avids readied themselves.
Swedenborg laughed. The mesh at his throat jangled wetly.
“Oh, dear. Ohh, dear, that is amusing.” The Swede brushed his hair out of his eyes. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Athena Boyle.”
“Charmed. Masterful blade work, by the by, and that is a truly impressive weapon. I am Dr. Emmanuel Swedenborg. And I surmise that because of the changeable qualities inherent in one of my former collaborator’s blood, one of these Avid Wakes is actually the tenacious Ruby Teach.”
Neither Avid responded. Not the one on Athena’s left, swimming in Dove’s uniform, or the one on Athena’s right, taut with purpose.
“My dear friend Ruby has always suffered from a kind of disability, however. A flaw in her character.” His eyes skittered to Athena’s right. “Isn’t that correct, Avid?”
Avid’s hand struck Athena’s wrist like a hammer. Aksam fell to the ground, and Avid kicked it skittering across the platform.
Heart sinking, Athena leaped after it.
Behind her the other Avid yelled, “No!”
Athena never reached her blade. A walkway darted down from above and yanked her into the air, where she hung, motionless, iron bands crushing her chest. The Swede waved his hand, and a blast of pure chemystral energy flung Wisdom Rool up, slamming him into the Lid. With another flick of the Swede’s hands, the stone had melted and re-formed about Rool until only his head and shoulders were visible. Another walkway pulled the second Avid into the air next to Athena.
The Swede giggled. “Ruby Teach, you see, believes with the deepest of fires that who she is actually means something. That friendship actually means something.”
The trapped Avid yelled wordlessly, limbs wriggling back and forth in Dove’s baggy uniform.
“Avid, however, is loyal to a fault. She is a good reeve, aren’t you, Avid?”
Athena yelled in frustration, struggling against the merciless bonds. The girl looked blankly at Athena as she stalked away, pausing a moment to pick up Aksam and examine it. The reeves parted wordlessly as the tall girl passed through them and crossed the yards to stand next to the Swede on his throne.
The Swede patted her on the hand. “Ah, Avid, my little poison seed sent into the wilderness to bear fruit.” He looked up at the two clutched in the claws of iron. “Once we heard you had come to say hello, I thought it would be intriguing to see just how close you could get.”
Metal screamed as he pulled the trapped girls closer, to hang helplessly in front of him. He leaned forward, as if to share a particularly juicy piece of gossip. His eyes did not glint with madness. There were no flecks of spittle on his cheek. And that terrified Athena the most. “We are on the brink of a new age. The people have chosen to give me their energy. It makes them feel good. They make a good living. This”—he waved his hand at the carnage around them—“is their will. You never could have stopped it. You underestimate their power, and mine, by geometric proportions. If I wished, the fuel in the kennels below me would allow me to tear Philadephi apart stone by stone and to re-form it in the sky, it would allow me to pull fiery rock from the earth and build a tower to Science a mile high, it would allow me to—”
Thunk.
Aksam’s hilt crunched into the base of Swedenborg’s skull.
“It would never, however, have allowed you to shut up,” said Ruby Teach, back in her true form.
And then in both hands she took Aksam and buried it in the heart of the Swede’s machine. It sputtered, quivered, and went silent.
Athena grinned down at the Swede’s motionless form. “They switched uniforms. You self-satisfied gasbag.”
Ruby grinned.
“Now could someone get me down from here?” said Avid, rapping her knuckles on the catwalk claw.
Corson and the juiced reeve rushed forward, the vapor around their heads dissipating with their speed.
“Stop!” yelled Ruby.
The reeves stopped, deathly still.
“Jump on one leg!” yelled Ruby.
They jumped on one leg.
“Sweetling!” yelled Avid.
“Sorry. Stand down. Friends.”
And astonishingly they did.
A few feet away a trapdoor slammed open in the floor of the laboratory near the back wall.
Henry Collins, drenched in sweat, heaved himself out of the hole and then hauled Cram’s bag up after him.
“Henry!” cheered Athena. “You’re late! We’ve finished! I hope you don’t expect applause!”
Henry ignored them all, taking in the platform like a spooked deer. After a moment he burst into action, sprinting over to a corner of the Swede’s desk dominated by an upthrust pipe. He looked about wildly, as if their fates depended on it, and yelled, “For the love of Science, someone get me a pencil!”
Cram lodged his thumb under the wax seal at the top of the vial.
Foomp.
Rustle.
Evram’s scratchy voice read, “Don’t do it. We’re safe.”
Cram blinked. He very carefully moved his thumb away. He sighed. “Well now, cutting it a bit close, don’t you think, Professor?” He sat up. “He better not forget my bag.”
CHAPTER 30
FARNSWORTH: My lady. Look in the sack. It’s a baby.
CATHERINE: A baby? Please, Farnsworth. We are victorious. We are triumphant. But still there is the Mad Baron to deal with. And Evil Cousin Jervis. And that cursed pudding plague. Whatever shall I do with a baby?
FARNSWORTH: It is a baby tiger, my lady.
CATHERINE: Ooh, give him here at once! He is ever so cute! I shall name him Thunderfatch.
FARNSWORTH: … must you, Lady Catherine?
CATHERINE: Thunderfatch!
—Marion Coatesworth-Hay,
A Most Tenacious Flame, Act V, Sc. xiv
The sun peeked up over the horizon, bathing the Benzene Yards in the fresh light of morning.
Ruby rested her elbows on the makeshift prow, Evie curled about her shoulders, the warmth of the ottermaton’s stomach fighting off the diminishing chill. With the help of a few liberated sparkstones, Henry had crafted a chemystral skiff once the lot of them had escaped to the little dock, including the half-juiced reeves—biddable now that their chemystral ear devices had been removed. They had sculled on makeshift paddles past the city wall and out into the open water.
Cram was laid out, sleeping, in the bow of the skiff. It had been a near thing, but with the remainder of Nasira’s herb box and a mighty Work of Spirit courtesy of one Wisdom Rool, he would be all right. Next to him sprawled the unmoving form of Emmanuel Swedenborg, unconscious, drugged to the gills, and trussed up with a bag over his head.
She would not kill him. Not yet.
A heavy cat of a man with a haystack of hair made his way through the crowd of passengers to crouch down next to her.
He nodded back toward Philadelphi. Fires dotted the cityscape glowing up out of the mouth of UnderTown and shining from UpTown like birthday candles.
“That your doing?” he said.
Ruby smiled. “Lavinia Dove.”
Rool whistled in appreciation. “You know, I never would have thought it was Ward Dove.”
