The Wrinkled Crown

by Anne Nesbet

  There was a door out of the stairwell that led into some kind of abandoned supply room, and a second door at the other side of that. She was just beginning to ease it open when light and sound stopped her. On the other side of that door, people were arguing as they wrestled with something—something that hissed and yowled and made scratching sounds.

  “Strap it down!” said one voice.

  “You think it’s so easy?” said the other, and then there were more shouts and some swearing and the slam of a wire door.

  Then a short pause.

  “Well, how are we going to plug it in and get readings?”

  “Sedate it.”

  “Readings won’t be any good. You know that. And tomorrow morning they carve it all up. There won’t be anything left.”

  “Do you know what time it is now? We should be home sleeping, not wrestling with monsters just because someone upstairs gets a sudden clever idea.”

  Another silence.

  “Oh, just wrinkle it all,” said the second man again—and that was something Linny had never heard before, “wrinkle” used as a curse! “Give me the lab book.”

  Scribbling sounds. A gasp and a smothered laugh.

  “They’ll figure out you faked it.”

  “No way. I told you, the cat’s being carved up tomorrow. How will they ever know?”

  “You’re nuts. I’m leaving. And you know what? If anyone ever asks me, I left already ten minutes ago—”

  And then there was a flurry of hurried sounds, more bickering, and the light went off (except for a faint green glow), and doors were slammed farther away, and everything was still again.

  Linny waited in her hiding place, breathing in and breathing out twenty times, to be safe, and then opened the door and pushed through a bunch of lab coats on hooks, right into a room filled with glowing machines, an ugly-looking table, and a cage with a lump’s worth of cat in it.

  “Hey there, you,” she said quietly as she sprung open that cage, and the Half-Cat stepped out with the dainty nonchalance particular to cats, even cats who have just come very close to being strapped down, plugged in, and (Linny shuddered) eventually carved into pieces.

  She pointed to the door she had crawled out of a few minutes earlier.

  “Come on, let’s go!”

  They needed to get out of there right away. They needed to scram!

  And in fact a door opened or closed, somewhere not nearly far enough away. And Linny heard footsteps.

  She didn’t wait another second. She stuffed the Half-Cat through the door into the little staircase area, and (sudden inspiration) grabbed one of those lab coats off its nail to take along.

  “Now upstairs!” she told the Half-Cat, and gave it a push in the right direction. It sprang to the side, not wanting to be shoved, but then it trotted up the stairs at a good pace.

  One . . . two . . .

  The staircase ended in another small door, just as it was supposed to, according to those maps, and this door, without even a latch to its name, led out onto the roof.

  They were supposed to sneak quietly across the roof to another, slightly larger staircase, and Linny felt a little foolish as she put on the stolen lab coat and picked up the Half-Cat, just to be cautious, but halfway across, the roof suddenly became a much louder place than she had expected. Alarm bells! Sirens! Emergency lights!

  “This way! This way!” huffed Linny as she started to run.

  And then the door into the second staircase wouldn’t open! That was a bad moment. Linny had to drop the cat to fiddle with the latch. Her hands felt suddenly as clumsy as paws, but she twisted and jiggled, and to her infinite relief, the latch popped open. Not locked, after all—just a little bit rusted, like a latch on a gate back home.

  She picked the Half-Cat back up and ran down this other staircase, which was larger and brighter and went down and down and down, all seven levels to the street. As she passed the doors, she could hear people pounding on them and generally making a racket, but she had no time to worry about anything but going down those endless stairs. At the bottom of the staircase was an actual exterior door, and when Linny poked her nose out, she saw the most wonderful thing: an empty street, and no one nearby. It was amazing. It was incredible.

  The Half-Cat jumped from Linny’s arms, and Linny followed it out into the square shadows of Angleside at night.

  19

  ESCAPING INTO THE DARK

  Linny was moving so fast at that point that she was several streets away from the Surveyors’ Court before she realized that the Half-Cat was no longer padding along at her side. It had sprinted off somewhere, she guessed. Linny felt a little pang of hurt, and then set it aside. You couldn’t expect gratitude from a cat. And at least nobody would be carving it up in the morning. That was definitely the main thing.

  While she leaned her head against the nearest wall and caught her breath, she noticed how quiet the world was on this side of the river. True, there was a faint jangle from the Surveyors’ Court alarms, already far behind her. But apart from that, stillness.

  At night in Bend there had been noises: people laughing, people singing snatches of rough music, cats or dogs or men fighting, something icky being thrown from some window into the street with a squelching squerch, shouts, whistles, rumbles. . . . But here on the Angleside, even with the quiet jangle of the alarms in the distance, it was quieter than the village of Lourka in the middle of the night, where at least there were the calls of night birds and the snuffly noises people and animals make when they rest. But these Anglesiders! They had maybe even figured out how to sleep without snoring.

  She almost laughed at that thought, but at that moment a small shadow jumped out at her and hissed.

  “Oh, now you’re back!” she said to the small shadow. “You made me worry!”

  At that very moment, a bigger shadow loomed up out of the darkness behind the small one.

  Linny was already running away when she made sense of the thing the big shadow had just whispered at her: her name.

  She whirled around, and the two shadows came up to meet her, the larger one not as silent as a person should be when sneaking around a woods or a Plain or a town at night—just like a clumsy oaf.

  “Elias!” said Linny, remembering to say it very quietly.

  “Oh, Linny, thank all goodness, I found you!” huffed Elias, and then it was as if the many words he’d been saving up since the magician dragged him away just came spilling out—a hushed flood of words, like a creek slipping past in the dark: “I heard you’d been taken! They saw something from the other side of the river! And I was crazy with worry, and they wouldn’t tell me much, but then I volunteered for something they needed doing over here so I could come rescue you. And look, now I’ve done it! I’ve done it! Linny, you wouldn’t believe how you have them all sweating nails, back on our side of the river. They said you walked into a trap, going into that Bridge House! But I’ve got you now! How’d you get that white coat thing? I almost didn’t recognize you. That cat popped out of nowhere a minute ago and was showing me how to go—”

  The smaller shadow preened a little in the dark, and the diffuse light that the moon made when filtered by the clouds glittered silver in one of its eyes and golden in the other.

  “Oh!” said Linny. “The Half-Cat is the cleverest cat I ever saw. I bet it caught your scent in the air. I didn’t even know cats could do that. But how did you escape?”

  “I told you. I’m not escaped. I’m on a mission. But first I came to rescue you. Which I guess I’ve done!”

  “No, you did not,” said Linny, in a slightly louder whisper. “You keep saying that, but if you want to know the actual truth, I rescued myself.”

  The Half-Cat gave an impatient whistle and started padding off along the street.

  “Where’s it going now?” said Elias.

  “I guess it wants to get us somewhere where we’ll be safe. It seems to know what it’s doing.”

  “Don’t know about safe,”
he said. “But we need to get you well out of here. And then across the river somehow.”

  They were moving deeper into Angleside now, the river somewhere to their left side and rows of square buildings all around them shining slightly in the misty night.

  “I can’t go back yet,” said Linny. “I don’t have the medicines. My Auntie Mina’s being kept in some research hub, deep in the Plain. I’ve got to find her so I can get the stuff for Sayra.”

  “On into the Plain? Don’t be ridiculous!” said Elias. “After I went to all this trouble to save you? Listen, it’s the start of the fair tomorrow morning. There will be all sorts of crowds here. It’s perfect. You can just blend in with everyone else, and then wander away at the end of the day, simple as simple, back to the hills.”

  “Not me,” said Linny. “For one thing, I can’t blend in anywhere. But Elias, that’s maybe what you should do. To get away from the madji. And then I’ll go on to Mina and get the medicines from her—”

  “You can’t trust Surveyors,” said Elias.

  “Right. But Auntie Mina doesn’t count. She’s my mother’s sister. Mama wouldn’t have sent me to her if she thought—”

  “They’re all evil,” said Elias. “You don’t know how things are. They’re trying to ruin the whole world. I have to do what I can to stop that. I promised. It’s bigger than just what we want. They’ll put the whole world on their grid and undo every last wrinkle. You know how bad it feels, on this side of the river.”

  Linny was taken aback. Did it really feel bad, over here? Certainly being locked in a room had felt bad, but then that had been awful on the other side of the river, too. Elias had that suffering look on his face, though—a more intense version of the suffering look he had had ever since they came down out of the hilliest parts of the hills. Unwrinkled places made Elias unhappy. But apparently Linny could travel through wrinkled and unwrinkled places, and feel just fine anywhere.

  “Nothing feels right over here, on the Plain side of the darn river,” he was saying now. “We can’t let them ruin the whole world. That’s why I went with the madji. That’s why I volunteered today. What happens to Lourka, if the Surveyors ruin everything everywhere? Don’t you see? It’s Sayra I’m thinking of, back there. And everybody.”

  Linny found herself feeling oddly embarrassed; she missed the trees and birds and so on, but the bitterness in Elias’s words right now was almost an accusation. Did he love the wrinkled country more than she did?

  No, thought Linny first.

  Maybe, thought Linny, a moment later. If hating the Plain meant you loved the wrinkled places more. He was much better than she was at hating the Plain.

  But mapmaking feels a little like making a lourka, she thought. Your whole mind and body, focused on the details of things: carving this bit just exactly so, making the map’s lines meet up just exactly there. She couldn’t settle the question, so she sidestepped herself away.

  “It’s not like you had a choice about going with the madji,” she said instead. “What do you mean by ‘volunteered’? And where the heck is that cat taking us, anyway?”

  They had been following the Half-Cat for quite a while already. The sky was beginning to gray up in the east; even this long night would eventually end. Now, however, the cat was climbing a street that went up a little hill. Just because it was the Plain side of the river didn’t mean that everything over here was flat. Linny and Elias followed the Half-Cat, and Elias huffed and puffed a little extra loud, to make the point that that he couldn’t answer difficult questions while he was working so hard.

  At the top of the hill was an area with grass and little square benches made of stone and larger rectangular shapes made of hedges that had been forced with scissors and clippers to abandon the ordinary wild shapes of growing things. This was the Angleside idea of a park, Linny guessed. But she was not wasting too much attention on the brick-like hedges, because the hill dropped off, past a geometrical balustrade, and there was one of those views of the broader world (though all in grays and shadows still, it being so early in the new day) that filled the nooks and crannies of Linny’s hungry soul.

  They had come quite a long way from the Surveyors’ Court, apparently, for there was yet another bridge across the river, a bridge that Linny had not seen before. The river ran a little narrower again here, and the bridge spanning it was very old and massive and thick—no lightness to it at all—as if a baby giant had built it thousands of years ago, using giant-size blocks. Each foot of the bridge was surrounded by a large space, cluttered with wagons and little tents and displays and fountains.

  The Half-Cat purred.

  On long days in the woods, back when they were younger, Linny and Sayra used to make little villages together out of twigs and bark and leaves and flowers. From this hill, that’s what the spaces on either side of the bridge looked like, with their wagons and tents and displays—two miniature worlds blossoming along a curve of dark water.

  The world on this side of the river had more right angles to it, and the glint of glass here and there responded to beams of bright light from hand-carried lanterns. On the far side of the river, everything was dimmer in the gray, but specks of candlelight flickered like distant stars, and the paths between the booths were so twisted as to be more or less invisible, while extravagant shapes (trees? balloons?) loomed here and there.

  Dark shapes wandered through the cluttered spaces, holding lanterns or candles or lamps, depending on what side of the river they were on, and those dark shapes were people, setting things up and testing things and even calling out to each other.

  “It’s the fairgrounds,” said Elias.

  No kidding, thought Linny.

  They had already slipped down low behind the balustrade, to keep out of sight.

  “There’s the Bend side and the Angleside of the fair,” said Elias. “The madji explained it all to me. Once every ten years it happens, and they open up the bridge there, and people come and go freely across it. See that old platform thing halfway across?”

  There was a kind of stone house or stage sticking up in the center of the bridge, but you could see the nighttime ghosts of people walking back and forth across the bridge on either side of it.

  “That’s where the Girls with Lourkas—not real ones, of course—usually do their funny puppet-maze thing. They told me about that, too. It’s all part of the fair.”

  Linny looked at him, but his face was lost in shadow.

  “What funny puppet-maze thing?”

  “It’s like a joke almost, I think. They have pretend Girls with Lourkas who pretend to do some sort of pretend test. Getting a puppet through a labyrinth? Sounds pretty dumb, right? I guess it all used to be more real long ago. But now they just do silly stuff, and everyone laughs.”

  “Not this time,” said Linny with grim satisfaction. They wouldn’t be able to say she had failed their stupid tests! No, she was gone. “Nobody for them to laugh at this year. They made it against the law to wear one of those costumes, so the girls will all have stayed in Bend. And I ran away. And I hope the fair is boring for everyone—serves them right. Hey, what’s that?”

  Out ahead of them, the river made its second great curve, this time away from the wrinkled hills and toward the Plain. Moreover, just beyond the fairgrounds and to the right, the water ran right into what looked like a great metallic wall, stretching all the way across the river.

  “Waterworks,” said Elias, and he said it with great disgust. “That’s where they ruin all our water, before it heads any deeper into the Plain.”

  “Really? They ruin water?”

  Linny was trying to think how water could be ruined. You could drop something very nasty into a well, of course. You could make it undrinkable that way. And for an icky moment, she imagined workers dropping garbage into the river, behind that sleek and daunting wall.

  “They unwrinkle it,” said Elias. “They take the magic and the flavor out.”

  “Oh,” said Linny. “So water
in the Plain hasn’t got any flavor?”

  She felt sorry for everyone living in the Plain, if so.

  “They don’t like things to have flavor. They’re hardly like real people at all. That’s just part of their awful plan, though.”

  “What awful plan?”

  “They mean to put all of the wrinkled country on their horrible grid and unwrinkle us. And we can’t let that happen. That’s why I’m—”

  The Half-Cat gave a sharp hiss. Some of the lights below them were now turning to cast their beams up the little hill, at the balustrade Linny and Elias were hiding behind.

  “Don’t move,” said Elias in a murmur that was quieter than a whisper. He didn’t have to say anything, though, because Linny had already frozen, very small, behind one of the thicker pillars of the balustrade.

  The light came spilling through the slats of the balustrade, washing back and forth, and Linny could hear the voices that belonged to those lights: “Did you see that? Something’s up there.”

  Her heart pounded.

  The Half-Cat had leaped back, away from the light, and now it was scratching away furiously at the part of the little hill closest to them. There was already more light in the air. The hill was a darker, more complicated tangle of grays against the paler gray of the sky. And where the Half-Cat was scrabbling at the hillside, there was now a patch darker even than the rest of that dark hill.

  “Nuts,” said Elias. “They’re coming up. They can’t find me. I can’t have them find me.”

  “You!” said Linny. Here she’d almost gotten used to thinking of Elias as a reformed human being and much less of a selfish lummox than he used to be back in the hills.

  “If they find me, they’ll just kill us both,” said Elias, and for a second he pulled the flaps of his jacket back, and Linny saw the magician’s disorder bombs, tucked in rows along the inside of his jacket. “I’m on a delivery run.”