A sign above a shuttered counter to their left read LUGGAGE PICKUP. Just past it, an open door led to what looked like a waiting room. Just past that, a very bored-looking security guard sat inside a theater-box-office-like glass booth labelled RECEPTION, reading a tattered copy of Sports Illustrated. He glanced up when they came in, but then went back to the magazine.
From around the corner at the end of the hall came a snatch of conversation, “...dormitories can house more than six hundred workers...”
Major must be getting the grand tour, Ariane thought. At least that will keep him from looking for the shard right away.
Not that that helped, as long as she was...
Her gaze fell on two doors at the end of the hallway, doors with metal push plates instead of door handles, one with the outline of a man on it, the other with the outline of a woman...
“I need to go to the washroom,” she said. Wally gave her a sharp look, but she ignored him. “I really need to go.”
Drezner sighed. “All right. But be quick.” He turned to the other guards. “Vasili, you wait outside the door for her. Bring her to HQ when she’s done. Tom, you can go back to your regular rounds. You,” he said to Wally, “come with me.”
Poitras nodded and went back outside. As the door opened and closed, Ariane heard a helicopter chop-chop-chop overhead, presumably heading out to find their fictitious parents’ camp.
Drezner, Maragos, Wally and Ariane walked down the hall, past doors leading to a lunchroom on their right and something called the Visitor Orientation Centre on their left. Ariane ducked into the ladies’ washroom, avoiding Wally’s gaze. She was afraid the men would figure out she was up to something if she and Wally even looked at each other.
She went into a stall to take care of urgent business, collecting her wits and her breath in the process. She had to get away from Drezner. Wally...
Wally will just have to look after himself. She tried not to feel guilty about it. It’s not as if they’re going to hurt him.
The toilet flushed automatically as she left the stall. They’ll hear that, she thought. It won’t take them long to get suspicious...
She went to the sink and turned on the water, immediately hearing its siren call. Glad she’d eaten the granola bar, she took a deep breath, plunged her hands into it, and let it take her.
She didn’t want to go far this time, just far enough to escape the security guards and get as close as possible to the shard of Excalibur. But at first she had no choice at all: the water flowed into the sewer pipe, and from there to the sewage treatment plant. She rushed in her disembodied form through its settlement tanks and filters and evaporators, and hurried along with the treated water down a long pipeline to a lake, but she was getting farther from the shard of Excalibur, not closer to it.
On she hurried, down to the bottom of the lake, down to where water seeped through stone, down to caverns and cavities filled with icy black water that never saw the light of day. That didn’t matter though – she was travelling not by light but by feel, reaching out for tendrils of water that would lead her where she needed to go.
It didn’t seem to matter how tiny the opening – if water could find its way through, it would, and so could she. But it took energy, so much energy, and if she ran out of energy before she fought her way to the surface...
Would she be crushed? Entombed? Blown apart? She didn’t know, but she instinctively felt it would be bad.
Very bad.
The shard of Excalibur sang in her mind, urgent, insistent, and closer than it had ever been before. She wanted it with all her heart. But her strength was failing. She needed to find a large body of water...
There. Like a dolphin leaping above the waves to seize a breath of air, she burst into the pool she had found and let herself materialize.
She found herself lying flat on her back in the icy embrace of three feet of dirty water. Shivering, she sat up and looked around.
The terraced, cliff-like walls of an enormous open-pit mine rose all around her, the nearest only four or five metres away. A tendril of water dribbled down it into the pool in which she sat. It amazed and terrified her to think that a moment before she had been part of that tiny stream, had somehow brought her material body in immaterial form through a crack in the wall barely wide enough to slip a dime into. Living in a world where magic was real was bad enough. Living in a world in which magic was not only real, but at her command, was definitely going to take some getting used to.
She put a hand to her head, wincing. The shard of Excalibur sang in her mind with painful intensity. But where was it?
The floor of the mine was a jumbled mess of ice-and-water-filled pits and man-high, snow-shrouded piles of rock. Rutted tracks wound among them. In various places, bulldozers scraped at the ground, shoving rocks and dirt into heaps, apparently at random, though there must have been some pattern to their work that she didn’t grasp. At the pit’s centre, a giant mechanical shovel methodically dug, taking huge bites of gravel that it then dumped into a waiting truck at the head of a line of similar trucks. As one truck filled, it drove up and out of the pit. At the same time, an empty truck, descending into the pit, joined the back of the line.
For a dizzying moment Ariane couldn’t make sense of the scale of things – the machinery looked like toys playing in the sand a dozen metres off. Then she saw someone walking past one of the truck’s wheels, which rose well over his head, and everything snapped into place. The shovel was at least two hundred metres away, and the far side of the pit two hundred metres or more beyond that.
She scrambled out of the pool and hid behind a nearby pile of rocks. No one seemed to have noticed her yet, but they would if she sat around like a lump. She ordered the water away from her body and immediately felt warmer.
Now what? she asked herself.
Find the shard, she answered, less than helpfully.
In a pit almost a kilometre wide and a hundred metres deep, crawling with men and machinery? Without getting caught?
Yeah, that’s about it.
Great.
She risked a look over the top of the pile of rocks, then ducked down, swearing.
A yellow pickup truck was heading her way.
~ • ~
Rex Major had just endured a tour of the water treatment facilities and was trudging dutifully back down a long, dull corridor toward the entry hall when shouts and the sound of slamming doors broke out somewhere ahead of them.
“What’s going on?” he asked Ursu, grateful for anything to interrupt the extremely detailed guided tour his host seemed determined to inflict on him. Even worse, for the sake of appearances – and because it just might help him find the shard of Excalibur – he had to pretend to find it all interesting.
Ursu frowned. “I don’t know.” He hurried ahead.
Just outside the grandly named Visitor Orientation Centre – a smallish room containing a table, some chairs, a TV, a lot of brochures and DVDs – a security guard the size of a small building held a scrawny red-haired teenage boy with one ham-sized hand while yelling into a walkie-talkie with the other. “I don’t know how she did it, but she’s gone! Vanished from a windowless washroom! Search the camp! And get that helicopter back! Over!”
The listening boy had a wide, cocky grin on his homely freckled face, but that grin vanished when he saw Ursu and Major.
Major had never seen the kid before, but he had a bad feeling he knew who “she” was. Vanished from a windowless washroom?
“The Lady of the Lake!” he growled. Ursu gave him a puzzled glance, but he no longer cared about appearances. He strode forward and grabbed the boy’s free arm. “How did you get here?”
The security guard put down the still squawking walkie-talkie. “You know him?”
“Never saw him before in my life. But I know why he’s here.” Major shook the boy’s arm. The kid winced. “Well?”
“Like I told Drez here, we were camping with our parents –”
; “Don’t give me that bull,” the guard snapped. “The helicopter pilot has reported back. No one is camped west of here within fifty klicks.”
The boy’s eyes widened. “Then what happened to our parents? You’d better start a search –”
“Enough!” roared Major. He tightened his grip on the boy’s arm. Reaching inside for the pitiful trickle of power that still flowed to him from Faerie, he spoke with the Voice of Command that had once set whole armies marching to his will. “Tell me.”
The boy’s grin went out like a light. “The Lady of the Lake spoke to us,” he said in a voice turned dull and strained. “She gave Ariane her power. She warned us that you had awakened and were trying to find the shards of Excalibur. We came here through rivers and lakes to stop you.”
“Where is the girl now?” Major ignored the bewildered stares of the security guards and Ursu.
“I don’t know. She must have gone down the drain. She’s probably picking up the shard of Excalibur right now.” The flicker of defiance in the boy’s voice astonished Major: the Voice of Command should have extinguished it.
Major released the boy and turned to the others. “Forget what this boy and I have just said!” he Commanded them all. “I’d like to see your security headquarters, please,” he then said to Ursu in his usual business tone.
Ursu opened his mouth as though intending to ask a question, then blinked, bewildered, as if he’d forgotten what he’d been about to say. “Um...of course. This way.”
“She’ll find it first!” the boy called after Major, and that astonished him all over again: the boy had not responded to his final Command.
“Shut up,” the guard said. “You and I will wait in here.” He shoved the boy into the Visitor Orientation Centre.
Who is that boy? Major knew he would have to find out – but not now. The girl could be anywhere. She may already have the shard...
No. I would feel it. There’s still time.
Ursu led him to the end of the long corridor they’d been following earlier, then into the utilidor he had pointed out from the airplane. The prefabricated, lightly insulated tunnel must have been ice-cold in the winter, but at least it blocked the wind. Security cameras watched it at ten-metre intervals. It ended in a locked door that Ursu opened with a swipe of a keycard. On the other side of the door another corridor ran left and right – west and east, if Major could still trust his sense of direction. A few metres away, both corridors turned north again. Ursu led Major to the right. When they turned north, he saw two more doors: one on the left, about ten metres down, the other farther down on the right, near the end of the corridor.
Ursu took him to the door on the left. Instead of using his keycard, he looked up at a camera above the door. “Ursu here with Rex Major. Mr. Major would like to inspect our security.”
“Come on in, Mr. Ursu, Mr. Major,” an intercom-distorted woman’s voice said. The door hummed and clicked, then swung outward. Ursu stepped aside and gestured for Major to enter first, then followed him in. The door closed behind them.
Inside, another short corridor led to another door. They went through it (it, too, closed behind them automatically) into a large square room lined with TV monitors, computer screens, communications equipment and, somewhat incongruously, a bright red Coke machine and a vending machine full of chips and candy bars. Empty paper coffee cups and old magazines littered a glass-topped coffee table in front of a greasy-looking black leather couch. A short, solid woman with close-cropped red hair slouched in a swivel chair in front of a control panel. “Hello, Verone,” Ursu said. “This is Rex Major.”
Verone barely glanced at him before turning back to her console. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Can you see every part of the compound from here?” Major asked Ursu.
“Pretty much,” Ursu said. “There are a few blind spots, but they’re not near anything crucial and the approaches to them are well-covered. There are also motion sensors, infrared sensors and cameras for nighttime use. We can track anything that moves.”
“And there’s no sign of the girl?”
Ursu glanced at the woman. “Verone?”
“She’s not in the compound,” Verone said. “And the helicopter pilot hasn’t spotted her, either.”
“Have you checked the pit?” Major asked.
Verone gave him a scornful look. “There’s no way she could get to the pit without us seeing her...sir.”
Major quelled a surge of anger. In the old days, such insolence would not have gone unpunished! “Do you have cameras in the pit?” He kept his annoyance out of his voice.
“Yes, but –”
“Show me,” Major Commanded.
Verone’s mouth fell open. She blinked hard a couple of times, then spun in her chair and punched a few buttons. Four screens flickered and switched to images of the huge open pit to the east. Major leaned in close. In the far distance of one camera shot, a pickup truck rolled to a stop beside a pile of rock. Two men got out.
As they did so, a third figure leaped up from behind the rock pile and ran for the truck. “Zoom in!”
Verone grabbed the joystick poking up from the centre of her console and shoved it forward. The pickup truck seemed to leap toward the camera, filling the screen just in time for Major to see a teenage girl scramble into the driver’s seat and slam the door shut.
“There she is!” he cried. “Tell your men to stop her!”
Verone jabbed a button and shouted into a microphone: “All security personnel! Intruder in the pit – she’s just grabbed Pickup 27. Stop her!” Then she turned to Major. “There aren’t any security people in the pit, sir. It will be a few minutes before anyone can get there.” Her tone was properly respectful, this time – a pleasant side effect of the Voice of Command.
“How can I get there?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Ursu protested.
“Tell me!” Major Commanded Verone, and winced as an icepick of pain stabbed him above his left eye. He was using the Voice too much, but this was an emergency.
“You can use my vehicle. It’s just outside.” Verone handed him the keys. “The exit is at the end of the corridor.”
Major grabbed the keys and was out the door before Ursu could splutter another objection.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Intruder in the Pit
Ariane didn’t know she was going to steal the pickup until she did it. But as she knelt in the mud behind the rock pile, hoping against hope the men in the approaching truck wouldn’t find her, the song of the shard sharpened yet again, calling out to her.
It knows I’m near!
She closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to home in on that song with her mind the way she would home in on a sound in the ordinary world...and then, as though yet another unsuspected aspect of the Lady’s power had suddenly sprung to life inside her, she had it. In her own backyard, listening with her eyes closed, she could get some sense of which of the trees a bird was chirping from. This was something like that, but far more accurate, as if she could tell not only which tree the bird was in, but on which twig it perched. She knew, without a doubt, that the shard was...there, not quite in the centre of the pit, and not on the surface, but not too deeply buried, either.
Then the pickup pulled up on the opposite side of the pile, and the two men got out of it and walked toward the pond in which she’d materialized, leaving the truck running. Almost without thinking, she leaped up and ran. The men shouted as she darted past, but they were slow, way too slow, and before they had closed half the distance back to the truck she was in the driver’s seat. Grateful for the Driver’s Ed she’d had in her last semester at her previous school, she jammed the transmission into drive and shoved her foot down hard. In the rearview mirror she saw the men duck as the spinning tires hurled gravel in their faces, then she fishtailed the truck around and headed for the centre of the pit...and the shard of Excalibur.
“All security personnel!” the radio squawked. “I
ntruder in the pit – she’s just grabbed Pickup 27. Stop her!”
She ignored the voice. All that mattered was the shard, calling her, pulling her to it. Its song filled her mind, flooding out all fear. In minutes it would be hers. She floored the accelerator. There were pits and piles of rock to maneuver around, and she attacked the winding path like a rally driver, spewing gravel and dusty snow at every turn. A bulldozer backed into her path, and she spun the wheel savagely to the left, then to the right, catching a glimpse of the driver’s wide eyes as the pickup’s right-side mirror snapped off against the bulldozer’s rear end. She skidded and roared on.
In the centre of the pit, the giant mining shovel continued to dig and roar, like some prehistoric monster.
She was heading straight for it.
~ • ~
Drezner and Wally’s staring contest in the Visitor Orientation Centre was interrupted by the crackle of Drezner’s walkie-talkie. “All security personnel! Intruder in the pit – she’s just grabbed Pickup 27. Stop her!”
Drezner swore and jumped to his feet. He grabbed Wally’s arm and hustled him back outside to the pickup truck they’d arrived in, shoving him through the passenger door so hard he sprawled across the seat. “Hey, not so rough!” Wally protested. Drezner slammed the door on him, then dashed around the front of the pickup. As Wally pulled himself upright, Drezner threw open the door on the driver’s side and clambered in.
“She escaped from me,” Drezner snarled, twisting the ignition key as though he’d like to break it off. “If anyone’s going to get her back, it’s going to be me.”
Wally grinned. “Good luck. She’s pretty slippery.” Drezner shot him a fierce glare, then slammed the pickup into drive and stomped down hard on the gas pedal.
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