by Devon Monk
“If you care for your well-being,” Quinten said, “you’ll allow us to find a safe place for you so you can recover fully.”
“There’s a price on my head,” Abraham said. “There is no safe place for me.”
“Then if you care at all about my sister’s life,” Quinten said, “you will put her safety before yours and leave this group.”
“Hey, now,” I said. “Stop it. Both of you. Fighting isn’t going to help anything.”
I may as well have been scolding shadows.
Abraham advanced on Quinten and glowered down on him. “I care very much about your sister’s life. Do you understand me, Quinten Case? I know what you’ve done to make her. I know what you’ve done to keep her. I know what you’ve done to hide her. But she is no longer your secret to own. The Houses know about her; the world knows about her. And they know about you. If you think you can outrun those who rule this world, you are an idiot.”
“She was safe until you put her in danger,” Quinten snapped. “She would have stayed safe if you hadn’t stepped into our lives. I blame you, Abraham Seventh, for all the damage done to her. All the damage done to my family.”
“Hey,” I warned again. “We’ve done plenty on our own to damage our family.”
“I will tell you this only once, Mr. Case,” Abraham said in a low growl. “You will regret choosing me as your enemy.”
What? No one was choosing enemies here.
“Enough!” I pushed my way between them, grabbed the sleeves of their jackets, and physically pulled them apart.
Yes, I’m strong enough to do that. “We are all going to get along—do you both understand that? I do not care one bit about who thinks they have or haven’t done enough to keep me safe. For one thing, keeping me safe is my job. I will not be argued over like I’m a fragile knickknack someone dropped and chipped.
“Right this second, I could wrestle you both to the ground and make you cry uncle, so do not even think of testing how serious I am about this. We travel together. Period. We keep the hate, the blame, and the anger where it should be kept: against the Houses who have apparently sent an assassin to kill us. Our enemies are not in this tunnel. Not yet.
“We’re all in, all the way together. Are we gold on that?”
Neither of them said anything, their gazes locked, hands in fists.
“Do not make me knock you both out and drag you through this tunnel. Are we gold?” I shoved back my sleeves so I’d have better reach to wrestle them.
“We’re gold,” Abraham said, still staring at Quinten.
“Fine,” Quinten said. “We travel together. If Abraham falls, we all fall. That should be a familiar refrain to you, Abraham Seventh, now that all the galvanized are falling because of your actions.”
Abraham lifted his head and it was a massive, obvious effort to force himself to take a couple steps away. I noted it put him out of strangling range, which was pretty much what it looked like he wanted to do to my brother.
“Uncalled-for,” I said to Quinten, stepping up and placing my hand over his racing heart. “Look at me.”
He finally did, and some of the caged-animal wildness left his eyes. Quinten had been out of captivity for just over a day. It was no wonder he was running a little close to the other side of sanity.
“Slater Orange is the one who started this,” I said. “And Helen Eleventh. You know that. You do. We’re going to fix it. All of it. The entire world. But right now the only thing we can do is get through this tunnel and get back to the property.”
Quinten swallowed and nodded, lifting his hand to touch my arm. “I know.” Then, quieter, “I’m sorry.”
I smiled, hoping he could see it in the low light. “We’re gold.”
“Property? Your property?” Abraham asked. Abraham wasn’t stupid. He knew Quinten had been held by Slater. I supposed he even has some ideas of what Slater may have done to him.
“Yes, our property,” Quinten said.
“Why?” Abraham asked me.
Quinten answered him. “Because if we don’t, the time anomaly that has given the galvanized such a long life will end, killing all galvanized instantly.”
Abraham was silent for a moment. Just a few hours ago, I’d told him his friend Oscar Gray was dead. Just a few hours ago, he’d found out my brother had killed his friend Robert Twelfth. And now he was being told his own death was days away.
The bad news just kept coming.
“What time anomaly?” he asked with far more calm than I was feeling. I kept glancing back in the shadows behind us, expecting Domek to be there with a gun.
So far the shadows were just shadows.
“Wings of Mercury experiment,” Quinten said. “It was our great-great-and-greater-grandfather’s experiment. And, according to the notes I’ve compiled, the break in time he triggered is going to mend. In just over two days. I think I can stop it.”
“How?”
But there was no time for an answer. A blast ricocheted through the tunnel. A bomb?
“Go.” Left Ned grabbed Abraham’s arm, pushing him to move past us down the tunnel. “Domek must have blown the hatch. He’ll be on us.”
I jogged after them, caught up, and took Abraham’s other side.
Abraham was supporting more of his own weight and his breathing was steady. He’d gotten enough water and rest back there that we could sprint for it.
So we ran.
Down to the end of the tunnel. Hard right following where Gloria had gone.
Could be a dead end.
Could be a trap.
Could be Gloria had been captured and we were running to our doom.
Could be none of that mattered because Domek was behind us, and he would kill us deader than dead if he caught us.
A light ahead of us descend in a single dull-yellow beam from the ceiling. That light showed a shaft leading upward at the end of the tunnel.
“Hurry!” Gloria pulled a cage door to one side and waved us in behind it. “Where’s Quinten?”
I ducked out from under Abraham’s arm, leaving him to lean against the back of the cage—maybe an elevator—and peered through the darkness and dust behind us for Quinten.
I couldn’t see him, but the light he carried arced and then hit the ground. He’d thrown it away. I didn’t know why.
“Quinten!” I got three steps into the dust toward him when a hand shot out and grabbed my wrist.
“Run, run, run!” Quinten said.
We hauled it into the elevator. Gloria worked the controls. It was an old freight lift, mechanics and gears, pulleys and chain. It clattered and rumbled, starting up.
“Did you see him?” I asked Quinten.
“Cover your ears,” he said.
Which was a weird answer, but then it all clicked. He had a lot of different medical compounds and chemicals in that bag he’d packed. If he didn’t have something that was already a bomb, he was sure to have packed something that could pretty quickly become a bomb.
I covered my ears.
The blast hit, sound and impact simultaneously pounding over us. Dust and rock smothered out the air, stung my eyes, and covered us in grit. I prayed the mechanics on the lift would withstand it. I prayed that Domek wouldn’t withstand it.
The elevator shuddered like an animal that had just had its jugular cut.
It slowed but kept rising, grinding and shrieking as it cranked up and up.
Quinten was saying something, but I couldn’t hear him after that blast. Gloria shook her head, pointed at her ear, then pressed her fingers over her lips. Quinten shut up.
Neds and Abraham were covered in a thick layer of dust. I supposed we all were. They had seen Gloria’s signal and weren’t talking either.
The elevator hopped to a stop. I hoped we were at the top and not dangling somewhere between.
Gloria pulled the cage door open and stepped through it. We were in a concrete enclosure lit by a dull bulb on the wall, a single steel door directly opposite us.
“This is it,” she said. I didn’t know how loud she was talking, but I wouldn’t have understood her if I hadn’t been watching her lips.
She took a second to bat the dust off her shoulders, head, face, and hands while we all stepped out of the elevator, Abraham under his own power.
“Which wire do I cut?” I asked.
Quinten flicked a look at me, then at the elevator gears that were exposed. He pointed. “That should work.”
I reached over, wrapped my hand around the cable chain, and pulled.
Not as easy as it looked, but I am an uncommonly strong woman. It finally gave under my insistence.
“It won’t stop him,” Left Ned said. “He’ll keep coming until we’re dead.”
“Just trying to buy us some time,” I said as we hurried over to where Gloria was picking the lock on the steel door.
“No key?” I asked.
“Never had one,” she said.
“Let me.” Right Ned flicked a ready-all out of one pocket and a slim knife out of the other.
Gloria moved aside, and Neds got busy with the lock. Right Ned gave a little “Aha,” and had it sprung in less than three seconds.
“Three seconds? You’re getting rusty, Harris,” I said.
“Want me to reset it so you can give it a try?”
“There’s no time for squabbling, children,” Quinten said.
Neds stepped back and pulled his jacket hood up, so that at the casual glance you wouldn’t suppose he had two heads.
I adjusted my scarf and took a look at Abraham. He had his hands in his pockets, and with the dust and scruff, even the stitches on his face were difficult to see unless a person got close enough.
Quinten and Gloria left their heads bare, which was a good move. Five people all hooded up might be more than a little suspicious.
Gloria opened the door and we all stepped through.
The light wind and clear, sunny day made me want to gulp down big lungfuls of the cleanness of it. I’m not claustrophobic, but that run through the tunnels had my shoulders creeping up.
The elevator had deposited us in an alley between two buildings, one that must be a restaurant, from the smell of hot oil and fish that was coming from it. The other looked shut down for renovations.
Right or left? Left was darker, leading to a narrow cross street and another jag of alleys. Safer in shadows. Right was light, a busy street, maybe a park beyond it. Vulnerable and exposed.
Abraham strode off to the right, to the light.
“Where are you going?” I asked, jogging after him and catching his sleeve.
He paused and shifted a little woodenly to look down at me. Those wounds of his were giving him zero flexibility. He still radiated heat from that fever and was sweating hard. “I know who can throw him off our trail.”
“Not that way,” Quinten said. “Every camera in the city and sky will see us out in the open.”
“Domek will expect us to hide,” Abraham answered. “He’ll chase us down the darkest alley he can find, and it will become our graves.”
“The cameras will give us away,” Gloria said. “To the Houses. More assassins.”
“I know someone who will help us with that,” he said. “Cameras shouldn’t be a problem for him. Hurry. Domek will find a way out of that tunnel, even if he has to climb the elevator shaft to do it.”
I let go of Abraham’s sleeve. “Who?” I asked following him. “Who do you know who can help with the cameras?”
But by then he was at the end of the alley and striding out into full and open daylight.
12
Quinten is leaving for the summer, but no one will tell me where he’s going. I don’t know if he’s coming back.
—from the diary of E. N. D.
We couldn’t stand here waiting for Domek to storm out of the tunnel, guns a-blazing. But walking into the sunlight—the open, public world—felt a lot like painting CATCH ME across my back while standing naked in the middle of the road.
I didn’t want to follow Abraham out into that sunlight. But I didn’t want to lose him either.
“Matilda,” Quinten said. “Don’t.”
Too late. I pulled back my shoulders and stepped, as casually as I could, from between the buildings.
To my surprise, there were no gunshots. No automatic armed forces out there ready to cuff me and throw me in jail. No one even looked my way.
It was a nice day on a nice-enough street in the middle of the city. A patch of green beneath scant tree cover created a small park across the street. People in vehicles and on foot went about their business as people always did: getting where they were going in the world without ever really looking around at it.
But no matter how nice the day or city was, the street and sidewalk and buildings all had some kind of surveillance built into them.
We were, right this moment, being recorded.
I spotted Abraham striding down the sidewalk to my right. He stopped in front of an advertising screen that scrolled across a narrow section of the building jutting out onto the sidewalk.
I heard the others exit the alley behind me.
“Stupid, stupid,” one of the Neds, Left Ned, I thought, was muttering.
“Take it easy and stroll,” I suggested, not looking back at him. He came up and matched my pace.
The sidewalk wasn’t all that crowded at this time of day, and the few people who passed us wove by without even slowing. I did my best not to stare at each of them, wondering if they were gunmen hired by the Houses or if they were signaling our location to people who were.
“What the hell is he doing?” Right Ned asked.
“Something smart, I hope.”
“Doesn’t look smart from here,” Left Ned said. “Looks like he’s . . . ah, shee-it. He’s calling out.”
He was right. Abraham held his left hand in the center of his chest, palm outward and said, “Whiskey echo lima tango Oscar November, 1880 Vail. Link.”
We stopped about ten feet away from him. It sounded like a nonsense string of words, but something seemed familiar about it too.
Then it came to me: he was using old—very old—military alphabet phonetic. And I realized what he’d just spelled out.
“Crap,” I whispered.
“What?” Right Ned asked.
I shook my head and I chewed on my bottom lip, waiting for the sirens, waiting for Domek to round the corner behind us or for someone to open fire from one of the never-ending streams of cars moving past us.
I waited for the answer to Abraham’s message.
The screen filled with bright yellow, and a location just down the block and across the street flashed across it. It happened so quickly, I would have missed it if I’d blinked.
Abraham turned toward me. “Follow at a distance.” He started down the block.
I glanced at Quinten. He was stock-still, his hand in Gloria’s, as if they were two people in love out for a stroll. Which might actually be true.
But they were also two people who were on the run from the law.
“Did you get that?” I asked him.
“I did. Thoughts?”
He was asking me if we were going to follow Abraham and put our lives in the hands of the man he’d just contacted. “Better than going back the way we came.”
“Go,” Quinten said.
So we went, following Abraham, Quinten and Gloria walking far enough behind us, it didn’t look like we were all traveling together.
My heart revved too high, pounded too hard. Every loud sound made me want to duck; every second we were out in the open, I expected bullets to start firing.
I hated this. Hated being exposed.
Abraham crossed the street through a narrow gap in traffic. Neds and I stopped on the corner, waiting for traffic to clear.
“Really would like to know what the hell we’re doing,” Right Ned said. “Who did he contact?”
“Welton,” I said.
“Damn,” Right Ned said.
“Do you think bringing a head of House into this is a good idea?” Left Ned asked.
“No. But this wasn’t my idea. If any of the heads of Houses can be trusted, it might be Welton.”
“None of the heads of Houses can be trusted,” Right Ned said.
Yeah, I was worried about that too.
“I don’t mind putting my money where my mouth is,” Left Ned said. “And I promised I’d see this through with you to the end. But that man of yours just gambled with my life. With all our lives.”
“With whatever we have left of them,” I said. “We’re all gambling. Time isn’t really something we have to spare, you know. We have to take some risks.”
“Do you believe Quinten about the time thing?” Right Ned asked. “That he can fix it so you don’t die?”
“You know my brother,” I said.
He snorted. Right. He didn’t know my brother. They hadn’t met before yesterday.
“Yes,” I said. “He thinks he can make it so that I won’t die when time heals.”
“Do you think he can?”
I shook my head and wished the traffic would open up so we could get across the damn street. “I don’t know. If we don’t get caught. If Domek doesn’t shoot us down. If we can get home with the intel we need? Maybe.”
“Intel?” Left Ned asked.
“What I was looking for earlier this morning. We need to confirm the calculation of the experiment. Quinten thinks Grandma had it written in her journal, which was taken when our parents died. I’m trying to track down a copy of it.”
“Your drifty-minded grandmother? He thinks something in her lost journal is going to be a fix-all? That is . . . shit. Finding it in time . . . that’s impossible,” Right Ned said.
“I know. But if there really is only one last place the calculation was written down, I can only assume someone would have wanted to make a copy of it somewhere.”
He reached out and took my hand. I was standing on his left, and so it was his left hand that took mine. Right Ned controlled that side of the body, while Left Ned controlled the other side.