Winter, Faerstice

by Kevin Lawler

“Poison! Poison!” the crowd shouted. The crowd of festival-goers near the entrance to the building had massed and come through the door in search of succor. Meadow was near the door and tried to close it, but there was no hope of it. Some of the crowd spilled in through the open doorway.

  The security guard was out from behind her desk, trying to move the crowd back. “I’m sorry, you can’t...” she trailed off under the objections of the people.

  The people were not being reasonable. No one would move. The crowd was still trying to come in. The security guard shoved her way through the doorfront in an attempt to hold the crowd back.

  Winter could see the young girl who had stopped Topple. She was on top of a food truck, pan-Asian tacos, waving an invisible knife around.

  An elevator door chimed and Winter saw Topple step out into the still mostly-empty area in front of the elevators. The guard on duty was outside the door and not looking. Louisa and Meadow filed through the metal detector ahead of Winter, each of them beep beeping as they went through. This was it, Winter was breaking into a building. Beep beep. Ipsy followed behind with the oversized bag, grumbling. Beep beep.

  Topple punched in something at the guard’s desk and one of the elevators lit up. Then she clumsily ripped out the wires and tossed the tablet on the ground before jumping over the desk.

  They packed themselves into the elevator. A man tried to come onto their elevator car with them, but Louisa had her knife out and he backed off. The door closed and they were on their way.

  “Do we know what the issue is yet with the gas system?” Agnes asked.

  “Malfunction maybe?” Isobel said, “We just. Tested. This.”

  “Another? I thought we had that sorted with the inactive test version?”

  “I went over it with the mechanics twice. I think we we need to find new consultants. Pneumatics isn’t my specialty.”

  “It’s going to be expensive putting this one to bed. We may have to relocate, and that’s going to be more expensive. These production systems aren’t supposed to fail.”

  Violet’s heart quickened. She didn’t say what she was thinking. She was breathing heavy. They didn’t know. But she knew. She knew it inside. The big gulps of air helped her visualize it clearly. She turned away so as to not be seen. I want to kill them, she thought, the carrot-head and the witchling, both of them, all of them. She tried to adopt a calm demeanor and walked out of the room. In the hall she bit into the fold of flesh separating her thumb and forefinger, still making some noise into the palm of her hand. She tried not to cry out. Oh. Ohhh. The anticipation of it. She could feel it in her lower back, as if triggered from an errant tickle on her neck. She was going to kill them. Which floor, which floor? She went off in search.

  Chapter 22

  “Guys...I think I’m seeing things,” Meadow said. She swatted at the air in front of her.

  “Must’ve gotten a whiff from outside,” said Ipsy.

  Meadow looked concerned. Her eyes darted around the room. “This is not the time for this,” she said.

  Meadow’s situation was not helping Winter. Winter was in a place she wasn’t supposed to be. She was in way over her head. They stood in a brightly lit office hallway. Everything looked like office. It was the kind of place where someone was going to come and ask Winter if she needed any help, that is, what are you doing here, and shouldn’t you get out of here before I have to call security.

  Topple ran past them towards the end of the hall where there was a useless black table with a jar of imitation flowers on top. She reached under the table to grab the clear and crinkly plastic lined black wastebasket and vomited into it. That was weird.

  “You inhale something unexpected too?” asked Ipsy.

  “No,” said Topple, “Stomach acting up.”

  It wasn’t like Topple to be nervous. Winter hoped that Topple hadn’t been exposed to the same substance as Cal.

  “Too much magic maybe. The woad?” said Topple. She held her stomach.

  Winter found it hard to keep it together when her friends were losing it. She was doing it though, not that she could say how.

  “Here, take these because I’m not carrying them around,” Ipsy said. She started handing out the crossbows. It looked like they folded up. Winter had wondered how they fit in the bag so nicely.

  Slung under their arms the folding crossbows were only “pretty” conspicuous. Ipsy had insisted on bringing her handbag and hers looked even less conspicuous under the bag, like a piece of camera equipment or something.

  They turned left at the tee in the hallway and walked past an open-plan room where all the employees were gathered along the windows staring out at the havoc which was now audible in the street below. A woman in a pantsuit walked past. She took notice of Topple and Winter’s painted faces.

  “It’s crazy out there, isn’t it?” Topple asked.

  The woman nodded politely, “I know!” she said, surprised at it all, and turned to carry on with some business in mind. Winter stopped her.

  “Do you know a place where we can get ready? ...For our show.” Winter asked.

  “Sure!” the woman in the pantsuit said helpfully. She ushered them along the carpeted hall.

  “Is this for a birthday? I bet it’s for a birthday.” she said.

  “Yes, for an important celebration,” Topple said with a French accent.

  They reached an unoccupied meeting room with an opaque door. “This ought to do,” the woman in the pantsuit said, “Good luck!” When she had gone they locked the door from the inside.

  “The tree is above us. Way up high. I can sense it,” Winter said.

  “Who has the map?” Louisa asked.

  Nobody had brought the map.

  “Nobody brought the map?” Ipsy said.

  “Nobody was assigned,” said Winter.

  “Hey,” Meadow said, staring into the distance, “Look, it’s OK. I took a picture on my tablet. Just in case!” Meadow pulled out her tablet and set it on the conference table. It spun slowly after she set it down. Then Meadow remembered to open it. She swiped away the Harvest Moon game notifications and an entire screenful of texts and then pulled up the backup photo of the map. They huddled around to see. The photo was blurry. Zooming and panning on the tiny screen helped. The brown food stain on the map was the most clearly visible feature. The rest they could hardly make out. Louisa was angry.

  Winter went over to the meeting room window to look out at the noise below. Ten floors down maybe, which floor were they on again?, she could see the commotion, the commotion they had caused. The crowd was going ape.

  Back to the map.

  From her position at the table Winter was looking at the map upside-down, she thought, but she tried her best to orient where they might be based on what she had seen so far. It was hard. Winter was not especially good at reading maps and this map was not easy to read. Trying to read the meaningless map stressed Winter out.

  Reveille’s map had notes scrawled on it. Only a few of the markings seemed to be from when she was still lucid. Some were pure nonsense. Doodles. Smiley faces. Bad caricatures of spotted cats.

  “Well, where are we?” Meadow asked.

  “I don’t see it,” Ipsy said, “It’s not in this photo.”

  “It must be, keep looking,” said Louisa.

  They kept looking, but they still couldn’t tell. Nobody was good at reading maps. Hackles were rising. Winter looked at the map again but still nothing registered.

  “Fine, then we’ll just keep moving up until we see something on here,” Topple said.

  “Fine,” Louisa snarled.

  They snuck through the halls. At the end of the hallway was a pair of large swinging doors, like the kind they had recently seen at the hospital. There was the sound of stomping and then the doors swung open and a troop of men dressed in black ran through. They had gas masks on, and vests, riot gear, and they moved through the hall with big plastic shields and rifles.

  The next thing Winter sa
w was Meadow gesturing with her hand in a claw at a weapon, and then a canister fired, crisscrossing the length of the hallway spewing smoke and catching Ipsy in the side. Ipsy started cursing and kept cursing. She cried. Two or three of the troops stopped to look for a second but the majority of them ran on.

  The man who had “fired” the shot ran over to Ipsy and took his gas mask off. “I’m so sorry!” he said sheepishly, “Are you OK?”

  His troop ran on beside him. “Trigger discipline, bro,” one of them said, shaking his head. He kicked the smoking canister down the hall away from the civilians. “Is this for a children’s party?” one asked, apparently seeing the makeup. “Leave her, she’ll be fine,” said another, “We need you at the crowd.”

  The man tried in vain to fix the situation but saw there was nothing he could do. “Look, I have to go,” he said, backing away and leaving his business unfinished. He flipped his mask back on and carried on down the hall.

  Smoke filled the hall. It made Winter cough. Most of it was blowing out the exit where the men had gone. Still, it was getting cloudier and cloudier in the room the longer they waited.

  “Gaaaaahhhhhhhhhh,” said Ipsy, “I think one of my ribs is broken.” She poked it with a finger and exclaimed again. She rolled around on the ground before sitting up. “I knew this was a bad idea,” she said. She used the wall to steady herself and stood up. “I think I’m going to go,” she said, “I don’t know about this.”

  “You can’t,” said Louisa, “Don’t go yet. We need you.”

  Ipsy grumbled but she stayed.

  As they rounded a corner, Winter saw a young man in jeans and Vans drinking thirstily from a water fountain in the hall. He wore a cheap polo. Waiting to his side was some kind of two-legged robot, crude in construction but kind of ingenious looking in a way. His face was mechanical but vaguely human. Winter hesitated for a moment. The group kept moving. They had already come fully around the turn, and so she guessed the best thing to do was to act like nothing happened and walk past them.

  The young man looked up at them and wiped his face. He stared at them for a moment.

  “Are you Agnes’s new recruits? What’s going on with the riot alarms? Why were the exterior defenses tripped?”

  Meadow walked up to him, eyes dilated and staring off past him, clearly hallucinating. “Your aura,” she said, “All around you I see lights, the blinking lights, and the drapes shut against the world. There are people...” She reached down to his waist and pulled the washed-out ID card from its reel up to her dilated eyes so she could see it. “Is this the same outfit?” she asked. She let the card go and it retracted forcibly to the waist of his jeans.

  “What?” the young man asked, “Where are your cards? Are you from outside? Were you outside? How did you get in here? This is not... You need to be outside getting ramen at the fair.”

  “Jeff,” said the robot, poking him in the side with his entire extended hand, “I see three portable folding 150 pound Daisy hunting crossbows, available from multiple sellers for 257.07 and arriving in two days.”

  “Crossbows,” said Jeff. His eyes went wide and he broke into a run, all the while watching for crossbow bolts that weren’t coming. “Let’s go, robot!”

  The robot started after him with an unbalanced gait. As he was ran away his torso swiveled back around his waist so that he faced them again. He forced the exposed mechanical parts of his face into a sneer and then raised both his arms in a clunky “up yours.” With his arms still in position he swiveled back around.

  “We need the drones,” Jeff said in the distance.

  A panel in the ceiling pulled back and a drone slipped into the room from what looked like an air-conditioning vent. Winter heard the same noise behind her and there were two drones, one on each side of them, with more coming.

  The drones filled the hallway. Topple and Ipsy were already trying to magic them out of the air, Ipsy looking very wounded, but it was not working. “It must be the stones,” Ipsy said. The drones seemed to be some kind of half-robot, half-beetle mix. They looked like the strange creatures from the mine, corrupted by the stones, except they were equipped to fly, tiny quadcopters with a large bug in the center.

  Winter knew not to mess with them. But she had to, because there was no way they were going to leave her alone..

  One of them hit a wall chasing after Ipsy and exploded at her foot. Her shoe was a little scorched but other than that she was unharmed.

  Two of the drones hovered in the hallway, only halfway up this time, splitting the distance from the floor to the ceiling and blocking them in.

  Topple ran at the formation and leapt over it, doing a delayed front flip in mid air. Winter had never seen her demonstrate her acrobatics before and it was spectacular to watch. Topple was on the other side of the drones.

  “I’m going to lead them away,” she said, and she ran down the hall, but there wasn’t much distance for her to go, and the drones were gaining on her. They had gotten close enough to do real damage. She dodged them but wouldn’t be able to for long.

  “Close your eyes!” Louisa shouted. Meadow closed her eyes immediately. “Close your eyes!” Louisa shouted again, louder. Winter closed her eyes, having no idea what to expect. There was a sound of a gem discharging and a flash Winter could see through her closed eyes. When Winter opened her eyes and the light in the room was still dying down, centered on the position of Louisa’s bracelet. The drones had clearly been blinded and bounced off the walls, exploding into each other. Topple stumbled about blindly with her fingertips to her eyesockets. She had obviously not closed her eyes when told.

  Louisa unclasped the smoking bracelet and let it drop to the ground.

  “Hey!” said Meadow, coming behind for the bracelet, “Just because the stones are cooked doesn’t mean I can’t use—” she grabbed the bracelet and her complaining was interrupted by her own yelping. She bobbled the sizzling hot bracelet and let it drop to the ground.

  Some of the drones were still in flight, bouncing off of the walls. One of them bumped into a still half blind Topple. She smacked it out of the air and continued stomping it on the ground into pieces. The way was open.

  “We should go,” Winter said.

  “You guys go, I’m leaving,” said Ipsy.

  “You were just grazed,” Louisa said, “You’re fine.”

  “No, this is it, I’m going,” Ipsy said. She started walking back the way they came.

  “Hey, wait,” Louisa said.

  Ipsy raised her hand to brush them off. Louisa went up to her and tried to slow her down to talk her into staying.

  “They’re going to kill you anyway, if we fail. You might as well help us,” Topple said at them.

  Ipsy pulled away from Louisa. “Maybe they will. You don’t know. Better than dying for sure up here. Good luck in this death trap.” Ipsy walked on.

  “Are you kidding me,” Louisa said. She stood there defeated.

  “What about your jewelry?” Meadow shouted from the floor.

  The drones kept bouncing, but they were bouncing less. Meadow was on her hands on the ground in front of the bracelet, blowing on it to cool it.

  “Meadow, leave it, we have to go,” Winter said.

  Meadow grabbed at the bracelet gingerly and juggled it into her pocket. She brushed herself off in a huff and started walking quickly past the drones.

  “Next time I’m shooting that nerd before he can run away,” Louisa said.

  There was a security door at the end of the hallway. Next to it was a keypad.

  Topple went up to it and looked back at them. Her makeup was a mess, largely gone from around her eyes where she had rubbed them. “This is it,” she said, “The last bit of help from Reveille.” She entered the code. There was a long pause. Then the light flashed green and the keypad emitted a shower of sparks. The door unlocked. Behind the door was an elevator.

  They were in the loading dock on the back side of the building. Shipments in various stages of u
npacking were left around the large hangar-like room. Winter tugged on the giant plastic wrapper falling off an opened box. On her tip-toes she could see over the side: package after package, brown, labeled “Meal, Ready-to-Eat.” The meals had names like “Spaghetti w/ Meat Sauce” and “Chili and Franks.” She thought about taking one.

  They made their way out of the loading dock and followed the hallway around to the right.

  Over a door was a sign “Corrections & Detentions.” The door was crudely painted and secured with an enormous steel latch. This must have been where Reveille was kept? Winter wondered what brutal conditions thrived behind the door.

  The next room was marked “Morgue.” They heard someone coming and so filed in to hide. Inside of the morgue they were relatively alone. They compromised by turning on only half the lights.

  It was cold and the wall was stacked floor to ceiling with sliding drawers, presumably with bodies inside. Or empty maybe.

  “They can’t really have bodies in here,” said Ipsy.

  “Ipsy, don’t,” said Winter.

  Ipsy pulled open two of the drawers. It took all of her weight to do so. She looked in, taken aback, but Winter could not see yet. Then she opened another, and another.

  “It’s all little girls,” Ipsy said, “Why is a morgue filled with little girls and not old people? Gross.”

  Winter went up to look at the bodies. Across the bellies were long incisions. None of them were healed at all. It looked properly demonic. Winter grabbed the part of her belly where she had nearly been cut in the ambulance. She wasn’t a child. Winter pulled open the rest of the drawers in the row. All little girls. None of them could have been more than ten. Some as young as four. Winter started pulling open the drawers in the rows above.

  Far down the hall, Winter saw a man talking to someone and backing out of a doorway. She thought she recognized him by his frame and she had to know. She motioned to her companions to stay back, and she snuck forward until she was partially hidden by the cleaning cart in the hall. She ducked down behind the cart to watch, then intentional made noise with the roll of brown paper towels and the bottles of blue window cleaner. The man was pulling on a woman’s hands, urging her into the hallway, but she resisted equally as playfully. He let go and Winter could see him now, it was Will, except in a business suit, which had thrown her off. Winter looked down from the scene at the carpet. She felt the negative emotions pouring through her face. She couldn’t see anything this way. She looked back up. The girl who had stepped into the hallway was Elodie. Too short for him, a complete mismatch. Winter wanted to ram the cart into her.