by India Arden
It wasn’t just the houses that were neglected, but the landscaping. The grass was patchy and yellowed, and yet, it wasn’t dry. There was enough moisture to cultivate the mildew and moss creeping up the buildings’ foundations, and weeds flourished between the cracks in the sidewalks.
Even the sky looked different here. It would seem like it should be more vivid in contrast with the drabness of the poor neighborhood’s homes, but it was washed out and hazy, as if looking down on the blanched scene had caused the brightness to leach away.
The guys didn’t seem to notice how discouraging everything looked. They must’ve been used to it.
“Keep an eye out for a car with its passenger visor flipped down,” Zephyr told me as we cleared the parking lot and started up the street. The cars were just as dilapidated as the houses. Dented. Rusted. Cracked windshields and duct tape fender repairs. It was hard to focus on the visors when I was so busy being appalled by the staggering poverty.
Once we’d walked a few blocks, Rain called out softly, “Red K-car,” and nodded with his chin.
“Act natural,” Zephyr said. “Be cool.”
The car in question was easily older than me, big and ungainly, with a squared off roof and a cringeworthy maroon paint job. Zephyr strolled around to the driver side—the door was unlocked—opened it up, then popped the rest of the locks. Rain opened the back door for me. At least he had some semblance of manners. That’s what I thought as I climbed in…but then I realized his startlingly blue eyes were dancing with amusement as he closed the door behind me.
I was about to ask him what was so funny, but before I could give him the satisfaction of seeing I’d noticed, I was distracted by Zephyr starting the car. “Don’t you need a key?”
He met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Plenty of folks don’t have cash to spare for the cause, but they still want to contribute. Not every unlocked car with its passenger visor down has a key under the floor mat. But enough of them do.”
“Emergencies only,” Rain warned me, “and don’t borrow the same car twice. We don’t want to take advantage. And if you can, leave it with a full gas tank or a few bucks in the glovebox.”
I could hardly imagine what the police would do with this information. Or my brother. People could end up in jail. Or worse, if Blaze had his way. It was a big deal for the Rebels to share the information with me.
I glanced at the back of Zephyr’s hipster fedora as he pulled onto a main thoroughfare. Was this a show of trust? Or some kind of test?
I’d show them. I’d never met a test I couldn’t ace.
“Take a right,” Rain said, and Zephyr turned. “Another right. Just up ahead. Stop.”
Zephyr slipped a twenty in the glovebox, tucked the key under the floor mat and flipped up both visors. We locked the car behind us.
The block of buildings had been businesses once. A barber shop. A dry cleaner’s. A daycare. Now they were all empty and covered in graffiti. But we weren’t there for the buildings. We were heading toward the alleyway snaking between them. More specifically, the manhole cover at the end of the alley.
The two guys threw smirking little glimpses my way as we approached, no doubt waiting for a good reason to call me “Princess.” I wasn’t about to give them any ammunition.
While Rain re-secured his sloppy man-bun, Zephyr pulled a flashlight from his backpack and handed it to me, then dug out a tire iron and set it into a notch on the manhole cover.
“Can’t you just blow it off with the Arcana?” Rain asked him, only half-joking.
Zephyr heaved on the tire iron until the muscles in his neck corded with the effort. “Best not shoot my load out here on the street.”
Rain checked to see if their locker room talk offended my delicate sensibilities. I did my best to look bored. It was easy enough, until he popped the seal of age and filth holding on the manhole cover. Then the smell hit me, and I turned away and retched.
Even the two guys backed away a few paces. “Okay,” Rain said, straining to talk without breathing, “maybe dislodging heavy metallic objects is a little too spendy. But could ya help it breathe a little?”
Back at the compound, I’d seen the Air Master billow a hundred ceremonial silk flags. I’d seen him sculpt smoke into elaborate arcane patterns. I’d even seen him snuff a bonfire. But never had I imagined him sucking a column of reeking gases out of a sewer.
Strike, the reigning Air Master, was a patrician middle-aged guy. His hair had been a dusty brown, back when he Transfigured, but now it was prematurely white. He wore it long, in a sleek ponytail, with designer suits and Italian loafers. In other words, he looked like a complete douchebag. Zephyr was nothing like him—he looked like a Rebel. Eccentric in his penned jeans and mis-matched boots, long hair and fedora. But also young, and hot, and fierce. He placed one hand over his solar plexus, then raised the other, palm out. I couldn’t quite see the mini air funnel he summoned. Only glimpses of the debris that got sucked up in its path.
I felt it, though. Not just the sting of grit pelting my shapeless raincoat, but the barometric shift of Arcane force being manipulated.
Zephyr held the air funnel for several long seconds, then let it drop. Concrete crumbs and dead leaves pattered around us as they fell from the air. His head sagged, and he took a moment to catch his breath. When he looked up, his eyes glowed silver, but just for a few seconds, before dulling back to gray. He shook his head in frustration. “Sorry.”
“What do you mean?” Rain said. “That was savage.”
“As if. I didn’t make a dent. There’s so much methane down there, I could suck it out all day and it would still reek like a dead dog’s fart.”
“Yeah, well…take credit where credit’s due, man. You still made a mini-tornado.”
“Huh—I did, didn’t I?”
I cut in on their mutual admiration bro-fest with, “Whenever you guys are done congratulating each other, let’s get that extractor before anyone else ends up drained.”
18
Whatever you’d expect in an old sewer—garbage, rats, a river of human excrement—it’s actually worse down there.
Far worse.
The brick-walled passage was about twelve feet tall, but being round, it felt smaller. Claustrophobic and lightless. And though we did have elbow room, because of the walls’ curvature, there was actually only a narrow path down the center in which we could walk. Since most of the infrastructure had been abandoned for a newer system several generations ago, the river of filth I’d been dreading was only a sluggish trickle. The creepy part?
The sound.
Something was dripping. But the brick tunnel took the sound and amplified it, multiplied it, until it formed a sonic cage of plinks and plunks. The gut-heaving smell? Sure, it draped over me like a wet towel. By the time I reached the last rung cemented into the wall, my nose had overloaded with the stink and started growing numb to it. The dripping, irregular and not constant, never seemed to level out or start blending with the background. It was an erratic reminder that we’d voluntarily diverted from the world we knew and were now on a path we had no business treading.
“Hey,” Rain said, and jostled me companionably by the elbow. “You okay, Princess?”
“I’m fine,” I said stiffly.
“Well, I don’t like it,” Zephyr declared anxiously, bouncing a flashlight beam this way and that. “Too dark. Too stagnant. I had those old blueprints memorized, but now I’m all turned around—and we’re still within sight of the manhole.”
Rain placed a finger to his lips. “Shh, both of you chill. ’Kay? I got this.”
He strode out into the tunnel, no flashlight, no nothing, with his arms spread wide, palms up. A few easy paces away from where Zephyr and I huddled at the base of the ladder, he paused, then slowly, easily began to turn in a circle. When he was facing us, I saw his eyes were closed. And that he was smiling softly to himself.
“Hear that?” he asked. “It’s like a symphony.”
&nb
sp; I chafed away a shudder. Zephyr slipped an arm around me. Not in a gropey way, but a protective one, a natural reaction to my shivering. Just as naturally, I almost leaned in to his touch—almost—but then the memory rushed back of him joking about “keeping me quiet,” all smug and blasé.
I stiffened. He realized he’d just attempted to sneak an arm around me and pulled away. We both stood there trying to pretend nothing whatsoever had happened. And meanwhile, a few yards away, Rain continued his slow pirouette, hands out like he was catching raindrops, and not the disgusting sewer seepage that dripped from the tunnel ceiling.
When he opened his eyes, they flickered gently with a tidal blue glow. But just for a fraction of a heartbeat. “It’s closer than you think,” he said with a lazy smile, and gestured down a tunnel with a long-fingered hand as elegant as a poet’s. “This way.”
I cut my eyes to Zephyr to see if he had any wisecracks to make about our water-whisperer’s pronouncement, but not only did he look totally serious…I’d say he was slightly spooked.
Maybe I couldn’t deal with having his arm around me…but that didn’t stop me from clutching the sleeve of his denim jacket. He shifted his flashlight to the other hand and let me steady myself on him without comment.
Rain splashed off ahead like he was walking through nothing more threatening than a mud puddle. Then again, under that flowy silk shirt of his, the Arcane sigil for Water glowed on his middle. For all we knew, sewage muck would slide right off him.
Me? Not so much.
“It’s probably not feces,” Zephyr whispered to me.
“What?”
“I mean, the tunnels aren’t in use anymore, right? Most homes are diverted through the new system. So that rotten smell could be any number of things. Storm overflow, rotting vegetation, agricultural runoff…although, in that case, it probably would be feces. Animal feces.”
“Stop saying feces,” I hissed.
“But probably not here, so close to downtown.”
We slogged through calf-deep muck for what seemed like forever. If the compound truly was closer than I thought, it was only because I feared I’d be stuck in the defunct sewers until I died of starvation, or maybe old age. “I hate it down here,” Zephyr muttered. “Totally freaks me out.”
I would’ve felt bad for him, if he hadn’t mockingly suggested killing me.
Up ahead, Rain paused, listened, then turned back to us with a smile. He pointed down a mucky branch with stalactites drooping from the ceiling, and said, “We’re here.”
The branch that connected to the estate looked just as disused as all the rest. It was no mean feat to pop up the sewer cover from below without alerting the whole place to our break-in. The ladder rungs were curved bars of metal cemented into the brick. Sturdy enough. But difficult to get leverage on them. Each of the guys tried using their Arcane powers to nudge the cover off. Rain encouraged any muck sealing the edges of the cover to migrate away, and Zephyr did something to the air pressure that made my eardrums flex painfully. But in the end, it was mundane teamwork and muscle that finally forced the hatch open.
“Okay, Princess,” Rain whispered to me. “It’s showtime. Tell us where we are—then figure out where they’re keeping the extractor.”
While I’d lived on the estate my entire life, it was a massive place, nearly five acres, and as I squeezed up the ladder beside Rain while he held up the weighty hatch, there was a moment of panic in which I worried I might not be able to tell him exactly where we were. And then I’d look like I was leading them into some kind of clever trap.
And then Zephyr would suck the air out of my lungs and shut me up for good.
I glanced down at him. He grinned and gave me an encouraging thumbs-up. I shuddered, pushed my head through the hatch…and immediately recognized which courtyard we’d breached.
The swimming pool was a dead giveaway.
I couldn’t see the tile murals from where we were, but I remembered them just the same. Savage mermaids. Giant crabs. And an octopus dragging a ship to a watery death.
I very nearly expected to see my mother sunning herself poolside, while Dorothea sipped a Tom Collins. But the lavish pool was deserted.
Poor Dorothea.
A scattering of brick outbuildings surrounded the area—changing rooms, showers, a fully stocked bar, and more. We’d emerged behind the mechanical building, which housed the great pumps and filters, and the chemicals they’d started using when Fathom got too sick to make his way down to the pool and purify the water himself. How many years had that been?
More worrying still, how many years since he’d purified the waters of Corona? And hadn’t his main function as Water Master been to serve the city?
“I know exactly where we are,” I murmured, overwhelmed by the things I’d seen out in the city, and all the implications I’d never really considered. “And it’s not far to my brother’s chambers.”
The filters behind us chugged gently. The surface of the pool rippled as jets circulated the water. A single feather floated in a lazy circle, caught midway between two competing currents. It was so peaceful. It saddened me, the way we’d never taken the time to actually enjoy the things we had. Why? I didn’t even know anymore.
It had been so long since the pool had seen any use at all that the loungers at the far end were covered with tarps. It would be a calculated risk by whichever servant had thought to do it. Get caught, and there’d be hell to pay—the Masters liked their playthings ready and waiting. But it would be way more efficient than trying to keep all the outdoor furniture clean on the off-chance anyone would visit.
I was almost at the building entrance when the whole thing struck me as odd. Covering the furniture did make sense if it wasn’t being used. But would you leave it that way for a Transfiguration Ceremony, with a score of visiting dignitaries and every guest room full? The rest of the compound had been spit-polished till it gleamed. Why leave the gorgeous swimming pool in such a state?
Zephyr darted ahead of us, thrilled, no doubt, to be aboveground again, where the air was plentiful and fresh. “Is it…?” He tried the sliding glass door. “No lock.”
“We’re smack in the middle of the compound,” Rain said. “No need to lock anything out. Not here.”
There was that word again: compound. I wished it didn’t feel so fitting.
I took a few steps toward them, already calculating the least obtrusive way to my brother’s quarters, when I paused and looked back. The tarps nagged at me. Something about them felt disproportionately wrong.
Zephyr called softly, “Aurora, come on.”
“Just a sec,” I said, more to myself than him, as I crept toward the nearest tarp with a growing sense of dread I couldn’t quite articulate.
As I lifted the corner, I realized exactly why the tarps were so disturbing. A heartbeat too late, given that I was already peeling it back as the realization struck. The bundles weren’t shaped like loungers. Not really.
They were shaped like bodies.
The man—if you could still call him that—was twisted in agony. What remained of his clothing hung in charred strips, clinging in the weirdest places. His shirt collar. His shoes and socks. His watch. His limbs were scorched and blackened, like chicken left too long on the barbecue. His middle was gone, blown out, framed by a ribcage turned ashy and gray, like spent charcoal. His face wasn’t exactly intact. His eyebrows and eyelashes were burned off, and one of his eyelids too. His lips were furled back tight, cooked to a crisp. His teeth still showed big and white, though, like he was giving me his toothiest smile.
There was nothing in my stomach, but it heaved anyway. I turned aside and spat out a mouthful of bile.
The guys turned away from the door and came jogging back. Zephyr reached me first, no big shock, given that his caffeine levels seemed even higher now that he bore the sigil of Air. He took a look at the remains on the tarp and fell back half a step. When he put his arms around me this time, I didn’t even flinch. “Don�
�t look,” he murmured, “don’t look.”
But I’d already seen plenty. “Do I know that guy?” I whispered urgently. “Or is he one of the visitors? He’s so burned, I can’t even tell.”
Zephyr hugged my face to his chest and stroked my hair, and I allowed it. Meanwhile, Rain checked out the other bundled forms. “They’re all different,” he said, puzzled. “That guy’s singed, this guy looks mummified, and that other one is all bloated…” he trailed off with a gasp. “Guys…I’m guessing they fixed the extractor.”
“Don’t look,” Zephyr murmured into my hair.
But Rain saw enough for all of us. “And these unlucky guys on the lawn? You never know when your time is up—this could’ve easily been us.”
“That’s a pretty big leap,” Zephyr said weakly.
“Is it? Is it really? The damage is worst in the solar plexus—right where our sigils showed up. These guys tried to Transfigure, but they weren’t strong enough to hold the Arcana—and it backfired on them.”
When an Arcane Master died, he’d be interred in a stately mausoleum. But apparently failed Aspirants got stacked on the ground like kindling.
Zephyr considered the tarp-covered bodies. “Okay, well, maybe this is for the best. There’s how many guys out here? Five? So, they tried to form another tetrad and failed.”
“Are you so sure?” Rain said. “How much Arcanum can be sucked out of a single Master? It’s not a simple one-in, one-out ratio—otherwise, the batch we ended up with wouldn’t have been so damn full. Maybe they were working with a dozen doses. Maybe more. And maybe for each one who couldn’t hack it, there were two more who could.”
Regretfully, I pushed away from Zephyr. “If that’s the case, then it’s even more crucial we destroy the extractor for good.”
“Ember won’t like it,” he said.
But it wasn’t Ember’s fault the damn thing existed, was it?