The Lost Property Office

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The Lost Property Office Page 6

by James R. Hannibal


  “And the key to getting my father back, right?”

  “Right. Of course.” Her eyes drifted away and she chewed her lower lip.

  Jack folded his arms. “What aren’t you telling me? What was it you wouldn’t say back there in the courtyard?”

  She took a deep breath and met his eyes again. “All right, Jack. You were right before.”

  “About what?”

  “About your dad—what you told Sadie, I mean. Your suspicions were correct. As far as the ministry is concerned, John Buckles died three days ago. His quartermaster was found at the Tower of London in a bad state, cuts and burns all over his body. The ministry has him in the medical ward at headquarters, but he hasn’t woken up yet.”

  Jack tried to absorb what she was saying, but her words didn’t fit together. Pieces of the puzzle were still missing. “Quartermaster?”

  “Right. Sorry. Each tracker is assigned a quartermaster, a Watson to his Holmes. Your dad’s man was found brutalized and alone at the Tower, but there were ashes all around him. They found . . .” She swallowed. “They found the charred remains of a bowler hat.”

  “But the Clockmaker—”

  “The Clockmaker never gave us proof of life, did he? What if this hunt for the Ember is all for naught?”

  “No.” Jack turned and wrapped his hands around the bars of the iron gate. “You’re wrong. The ministry is wrong.”

  “I know this is hard to hear, but—”

  He shook the gate hard. “I said no! You really want me to give up based on a half-burned hat? My dad is alive. We’re going to find the Ember and we’re going to get him back.”

  “You’re right. Of course. It was a silly thought.”

  Her agreement came too easily. It was not enough for Jack. “How do you know what happened to my dad, anyway? You’re only a clerk, right?”

  Gwen lowered her head, settling back against the limestone wall. “Apprentice clerk. That’s right.”

  “Then how?”

  “Remember your father’s quartermaster, the one who hasn’t regained consciousness?”

  “Yeah, what about him?”

  Gwen refused to look at him, studying the sidewalk instead. “His name is Percy Kincaid. He’s the one who taught me all about trackers—he’s been preparing me for the ministry ever since I can remember. He’s my uncle.”

  “Oh.” It hadn’t occurred to Jack that other families besides his were suffering at the hands of the Clockmaker, especially not Gwen’s. The suppressed sadness, the worry on her face, somehow reminded him of his mother. He softened his voice. “We’re going to find the Ember, Gwen. We’re going to free my dad and we’re going to make the Clockmaker pay for everything he’s done.”

  She nodded silently and pushed off the wall. “Right. Come on, then.”

  The clerk led Jack across the street to a fenced stairwell in the middle of the opposite sidewalk, and the mellow ribbon of jazz grew louder, twisting around him. They descended into a long, sloped tunnel, with walls covered in glossy green tiles, reminding Jack of a hotel swimming pool. Letters among the tiles read REGENT’S PARK STATION.

  “We’re taking the Tube?” he asked, a little frustrated. “Couldn’t we have found a station closer to the Lost Property Office?”

  Gwen didn’t answer, not at first. Halfway down the tunnel, a man in dark glasses leaned against the ivory handrail that ran along the wall, pouring a syncopated tune from a tarnished saxophone. The clerk glanced up and down the empty passage and tossed four coins into the black case at his feet, making them land in the rhythm of “Rule, Britannia.”

  At the plink. . .plink, plink, plink of the coins, the musician straightened. With one hand, he played an answering bar of the song. With the other, he pulled on the ivory rail behind him. A wide section of tiles swung outward.

  Gwen nudged Jack toward the hidden portal. “Not the Tube, Jack. We’re taking the Ministry Express.”

  Chapter 17

  THE FIRST THING Jack noticed about the Ministry Express station was the black decor. Glossy, six-inch tiles lined the walls, like in the tunnel outside but jet-black—changing the feel from hotel swimming pool to mausoleum. The next thing he noticed was the silence. Other than a constant, low hum and the nearly imperceptible flip of newspaper pages periodically turning, his ears did not pick up a sound.

  A Plexiglas box stood to one side of a bronze, old-school turnstile. Inside, an attendant flipped lazily through a newspaper, wearing a three-piece suit instead of a high-visibility jacket. A wide band on his right biceps bore the circular London Transportation symbol, all black, with the words Ministry Express stitched in silver thread across the middle.

  “My friend needs a new card,” said Gwen, almost in a whisper.

  The man raised one eye from his paper, staring at the girl for a half second before thrusting his chin toward a thumb pad on the wall. It looked exactly like the pad next to the vault door in the Lost Property Office. Jack cringed. No good had come from his last encounter with one of those pads.

  When he didn’t move, Gwen whispered in his ear, “Do I really have to hold your hand again?”

  He frowned at her, hesitated another second, then placed his thumb on the pad, receiving the expected shock. A green light illuminated above a little slot and a platinum card shot halfway out with a light ping.

  Gwen took the card and pressed it into his palm, flashing a quick smile of thanks at the attendant, who only shrugged and returned to his paper. “Good,” she whispered, pulling Jack away from the turnstile. “Now, there’s one more thing you need to know before we go in. Joint regulations, volume one, section seven, rule five: ‘No agent, guest, or otherwise of any one of the four Elder Ministries shall, at any time except in an emergency, cause any sound—by utterance, instrument, body part, or any combination thereof—on or about a Ministry Express platform.’ ”

  “Wait . . . what?” Jack’s voice echoed off the black tile walls.

  The attendant let out a pointed cough.

  Gwen gave Jack the same look that his mom always gave him when he accidentally burped in church. “These trains run exclusively between stations that belong to the four most secretive agencies in Britain. We do not speak on the platforms. The risk of crosstalk and leaks is too great.”

  Again, Jack gave her a blank stare.

  The clerk widened her eyes. “It means be quiet, you wally. Now come on.”

  Without further explanation, Gwen led him to the turnstiles, producing a small card much like his own, except hers was dark green. She held it up to a circular pad on the turnstile and a green arrow flashed. A moment later, she was through.

  Jack stepped up to follow, holding his card up to the pad and getting a good look at it for the first time. It was not simply platinum in color. It was platinum, weighty and cold. As he stepped through the turnstile, he flipped it over and saw that one side was engraved with his given name, John Buckles. There were no other markings.

  Ahead lay the most incredible subway platform Jack had ever seen. There were no tracks. Instead, great bronze rings lined the tunnel like ribs. The interior of each one glowed with bright, purple light, and this was the source of the low, electric hum.

  He and Gwen were not the only patrons. Two men in long black coats and top hats shifted position as the teens entered the platform, making a point of turning their faces away. As they turned, Jack noted a hint of color from their coats, reflecting when the light hit them just right.

  Farther down, he saw a striking woman in an opulent burgundy dress and tiny matching hat, seated on a bench next to a man in a black suit and bowler. These two each held a palm up in their laps, fingers moving rapidly in a sort of sign language. Jack opened his mouth to ask Gwen if that was cheating—given the big rule about no communication—but the clerk gave him a sharp look that shut him up.

  The low hum increased in volume. All the patrons moved closer to the edge, toeing up to a line of silver tiles that kept them clear of the glowing bronze ring
s. Jack leaned forward to look down the tunnel and Gwen yanked him back by the collar as a completely cylindrical train—all black steel and bronze trim—whipped into the station, so fast it could have taken his head off. It made no sound other than a light whump as it jerked to a stop, followed by a long hiss as four doors rose up and outward. Red words flashed silently in the line of silver tiles at their feet. MIND THE GAP.

  Each pair of patrons had their own car, and Jack and Gwen entered theirs, taking a seat on a long couch of plum-colored leather. Quilted blue padding covered the walls, and large, half-globe lamps were centered on the round walls at either end, filling the car with yellow light. MIND THE DOORS flashed in the line of silver tiles, and all the doors slowly lowered into place. Jack felt his ears fill with pressure.

  Through the small rectangular window in the door, he saw a late-coming patron enter the platform. This one wore a gray overcoat and trilby hat, with a bright red scarf snugly tucked into his lapels. Jack drew in a sharp breath at the sight of his face. The man’s right eye had no white or pupil to speak of. The whole of it was red, with a thick burn scar above and below, running from his forehead to his chin. The one good eye shifted and locked on Jack, making his blood run cold.

  “You can speak now,” said Gwen, her shoulder bumping into Jack’s as the car lurched into motion.

  Jack’s eyes remained fixed on the man in the red scarf until the purple lights of the maglev rings obscured him from view. “Who was that?” he breathed.

  “You mean the guy on the platform?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s best to keep clear of his kind. Death tends to follow them.”

  The worst part of the clerk’s habit of not answering questions was raising new ones and then leaving them hanging in the air. Jack turned in his seat to face her. “And why would death follow his kind?”

  “Hmm? Oh. The red scarf is the symbol of the eldest of the four Elder Ministries. The man you saw was a drago, Jack—an agent of the Ministry of Dragons.”

  Chapter 18

  “DRAGONS?” JACK STARED at Gwen. “As in, fire-breathing, flying serpents?”

  She rolled her eyes and settled back into her seat. “Not all of them fly.”

  “But dragons? If dragons are real, how come I’ve never seen one?”

  “Because the dragos are exceptional at what they do.”

  The cylindrical car picked up speed, so that the glowing purple ribs flashing by the window slowly merged into one faint light.

  “Dragons.”

  “Don’t repeat yourself, Jack. It’s juvenile.” Gwen bent at the waist, leaning down between their legs to pull a drawer out from the bench. Inside there was a rack of green bottles and a porcelain bowl of food bars in gold wrappings. “The dragos have managed to stay hidden for more than a thousand years. And the other ministries have done just as well for centuries, although the younger three each have public fronts that help. MI6, for instance”—she lifted a green glass bottle from the drawer and pressed it into Jack’s hands—“is the tip of the iceberg for the Ministry of Secrets, the way the Lost Property Office is the tip of the iceberg for the Ministry of Trackers . . . sort of.”

  Jack eyed the bottle suspiciously.

  “It’s water, genius. You look dehydrated. You look hungry, too. Here, take one of these.” She tossed one of the bars at him, and he fumbled it back and forth between his hands before finally getting a solid grip. He tore open the wrapper and found a plain brown bar that smelled vaguely like chocolate and a few other things, not all of them pleasant. “Is it safe?”

  “Are you allergic to chestnuts, ginseng, or shellfish?”

  He shook his head.

  Gwen took a bite of her own bar and ground it down, one freckled cheek puffing out. “Then you’ll be all right.”

  “What about the couple doing that weird sign language on the platform?”

  “Ministry of Secrets.” Gwen frowned with disgust as she chewed. “Spooks, we call them. Always cheating, that lot. The snobbish men in the black hats were toppers from the Ministry of Guilds, and you got a good look at the drago. Or, rather, he got a good look at you. None of the other agencies likes us very much. Sometimes tracker investigations have crossed paths with operations of theirs that fell into”—she paused to swallow, bobbling her head back and forth—“gray areas. They consider us a nuisance, a bunch of nosy commoners.”

  Jack nodded, as if what she said made perfect sense. He watched her eat in silence for a while, still not ready to try his own bar. Too much new information ripped through his mind to deal with the potential of chocolate, chestnuts, and shellfish combined.

  “Gwen?” he asked presently.

  “Mm-hmm?”

  “What am I?”

  “You’re a tracker.” She took a swig of water and wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “All the firstborn men in your family are.”

  “Yeah, I get that, I can track things because I see everything, even if I don’t want to. But why do I see so much? What am I? Some kind of psychic?”

  The clerk giggled. “You mean, are you magic?” She waved her hands from side to side. “Are you a wizard, Jack? Not likely. Magic is for mystic runes and men in funny hats, card games and con men in Piccadilly. What you experienced in that alley was pure neuroscience.”

  “Brain science?”

  Gwen swallowed the last bite of her choco-nutty-shellfish bar. “You’re wired differently from 99.9 percent of humanity, Jack Buckles. That doesn’t make you magic, but it does make you special.” She tossed her wrapper into a brass can in the drawer and set her empty bottle back in the rack. Then she pushed the drawer closed and faced him, sitting cross-legged on the bench. “Short answer: You’re hyper-observant. Your brain processes sensory information in a sort of matrix, instead of in single channels like the rest of us.”

  Jack did his best not to show his confusion, but he failed.

  Gwen raised her eyebrows. “Short answer not good enough? Okay. Try this: When you smell herring, what happens in your head?”

  “Ugh. The Tube car was full of it this morning, like reddish-gray slime running down the windows. Made me want to gag.”

  “Yeah, well, the rest of us just smell fish. In our heads we might see a drawing of a fish or a square can with the top rolled back. That’s called association. What you experience is more real than that. The signal from your nose goes straight to a portion of the brain that most people don’t use—a synaptic juncture where all your senses meet. Sights and sounds have color and texture for you. Smells and temperatures can be bright or loud, gold or gray.”

  Jack nodded slowly. What she said made sense, but none of it explained the hand he had seen when he touched the vault door, or the accuracy of his vision of the abandoned house before he had gone inside. Then again, had the vision really been so accurate, or did he just remember it that way?

  The train bumped to a stop. When the door hissed open, Jack started to get up, but Gwen threw out a hand, knocking him back into his seat. “No,” she whispered. “Not this one.”

  The door rose to reveal a half-dozen men and women in gray coats and red scarves, some in trilbies, others in newsboy caps. Five of them had burns on their faces, none so severe as the burn on the man in the last station, but disturbing nonetheless. All six fixated on Jack as they walked to the car next door.

  Their stares made his skin crawl, as if he might get burns of his own from the exposure. With so many to watch, however, he noticed something new. When one of their coats flared, Jack caught a glimpse of shimmering red, as if the liner were bedazzled with jewels. Shiny fashion seemed out of place with the rest of the austere drago persona.

  Once the door closed again, Jack realized he’d been holding the same breath since the moment the door opened. He let it all out in one great huff. “What was that place?”

  “The ministry side of Temple Station,” said Gwen, leaning forward to watch the platform disappear behind them. “HQ for the dragos.”

  Jack se
ttled back into his seat. “So, are we going to tracker headquarters? I mean, the Ministry of Trackers?”

  Something flashed in the clerk’s eyes—another unanswered question. “We call it the Keep. But no. That won’t be necessary. If we’re tracking something from the history of the Great Fire, we should start where it all began. We’re heading for Pudding Lane.”

  Chapter 19

  THE NEXT STOP came up quickly, and Jack peered through the window to see a station much different from the previous two. Instead of a single line of glowing bronze rings, there were several, some intersecting others. Instead of concrete structures laid with glossy tile, the platforms appeared to have been cut straight into a cave of heavy black granite. Dozens of people waited on them, rather than the few he had seen before. Jack was able to identify pairs of spooks with their telltale sign language, huddles of toppers from the Ministry of Guilds, and a few isolated dragos with their red scarves. “Where are our people?” he asked. “You know, from the Ministry of Trackers?”

  “Crumbs, you mean. That’s what the other ministries call us.” Gwen’s freckles flattened. “According to them, we’re the ministry of lowborn commoners. Anyway, there’re not many of us around. The trackers are in a bit of a slowdown—minimum manning and all.”

  “But why—?”

  Gwen put a hand over his mouth as the door hissed open.

  Once they were out on the platform, the oddity of the place hit Jack full force. Here was a hub of sorts, a station with maybe a dozen lines. Yet the only noises were the hiss of the doors and the shuffling of feet. There were no echoing announcements of delays and track changes, no murmur of the masses. Jack felt like someone had pressed the mute button. He liked it.

  Granite stairs throughout the station led up to two more platform levels, with the second supported by thick, octagonal pillars, and the third suspended from the ceiling. A train had just pulled in to one of the third-level platforms and hung there, suspended in its rings directly above Jack’s head.

 

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