by Anne Nesbet
Elias!
Something had gone wrong with the river. Linny’s first impression was that the twilit water there beyond the bend had suddenly tilted off the usual axis, as if the river were a board someone had kicked aslant. Then she noticed the sickening clots of smoke, thick, greasy, and greenish gray, rising up from one end of the waterworks. Oh, no. Oh, no.
Elias!
“What have your insane madji done now?” The regent was gasping behind her, but Linny was already pushing her way down the bridge toward the Angleside fair, because it was on that side of the river that the smoke was rising. “Take her! Take her! Hold her, you people there!”
“Don’t you touch me,” said Linny when she felt a hand on her shoulder. “You let me by.”
A pair of rough-dressed madji had popped up on the other side of her, with the magician looming behind them. Their shirts were torn, and they glowered at the gray Surveyors behind the regent.
“Stop,” said the madji. “The Girl with the Lourka is ours. She’ll come with us.”
One of them took Linny’s sleeve. So now there were two hands on her, claiming her as theirs.
“Let go,” she said. “I don’t want to go with you, either.”
“She’s ours,” said the regent to the madji. “Take your filthy wrinkled hands off her.”
They were pulling at her now, the Surveyors on one side and the madji on the other. And as the quarrel heated up, both sides got angrier with each other and, for a moment, remembered Linny that much less.
The Surveyors and the madji frowned and shouted and pulled, while the regent and the magician followed along on the edges. They were surging down to the Angleside end of the bridge, the little knot of madji and Surveyors pulling at Linny and yelling at each other. Linny, fighting to keep her balance, kept grabbing swift looks out over the bridge and the river, trying to take the measure of where she was.
“She comes with us! That crown is ours!”
“You fools! They’re ours! Ours!”
And so on and so forth. Meanwhile, all around them was another knot of people, watching and not knowing quite what to make of what they were seeing. But Linny saw that the frowns on those faces were deepening as the men shouted more loudly at each other and pulled Linny back and forth. The people watching shouted warnings at the men who had Linny in their grip—at all of them, the Surveyors and the madji.
“Stop it!” said Linny.
The ones pushing and pulling ignored her, though.
“Murderers!” shouted the madji.
“Barbarians!” shouted the Surveyors.
“Let me go,” said Linny, but they were too preoccupied with their quarrels to pay any attention to her. “Let me go, so I can go home!”
The regent turned to look at her, and the madji turned, too.
Linny had grabbed the crown from her head already, not wanting any of these fighting men to have it. And then there was a moment when she was pressed against the balcony of the bridge, so near its Angleside foot that the bridge was already arching over land, not river, and looking down through the twilight into a hundred or a thousand shocked and frightened faces, not that far below her.
“Here!” she said suddenly, loudly enough that the nearest dozen could hear her, even without a Plainish tin can to help. “All you people! Keep this safe for me—keep it out of their hands. Pass it on!”
And she threw the crown itself right down into the crowd, where it vanished. There were roars of anger and surprise from behind her—the regent shouting orders, the magician howling in rage—but she could hear a rising murmur from the crowds below. Her words were being passed back and back, spreading like a ripple across the sea of faces. And somewhere below the surface of that sea, a crown was being handed from person to person. On and on and on.
That was when one of the madji actually took a swing at a Surveyor, and the Surveyor swung back.
Everything changed in that fraction of a second, because some of the hands on Linny fell away for a moment, and with a shrug and a twist, she was free.
In another half moment, the crowd had opened, just the tiniest amount, to let her fling herself through, and then closed itself up again behind her. Linny could hear the shouts of the madji and the Surveyors change, as they realized they had lost now both the crown and her. People were pulling her through the crowd, handing her back, from person to person, and some of the hands moving her along were in the gray sleeves of Anglesiders, and some of them were dressed in the bright colors of Bend.
“Run fast, Lourka Girl,” said voices around her. “They mustn’t harm you. You’ll come back when it’s safe and set things right. Promise us you’ll come back.”
“Promise!”
Promise.
“I will, I promise, I will,” said Linny as she pushed forward out of the crowds. They shifted in turn to make a vast wall of themselves in front of the men who must be chasing her. She kept moving and moving, past the displays with their little robot toys and their lights, and nobody could catch her, because there were crowds in the way, and there was smoke, more and more smoke.
All she wanted to do was get to the place where the smoke was rising up, to find Elias.
The smoke got thicker and thicker as she ran toward the river. And it was getting dark.
No Elias anywhere.
She kept wiping the tears and smoke out of her eyes, and running on a few steps, and then pausing to cough and blink, and then she was standing on the edge of the broken river, looking out toward the wall of the waterworks, which now had a ragged bite taken out of it on the far right side. It made Linny feel ill, looking at that gap in the waterworks wall. Where was Elias? Some of those bombs had gone off here.
But there was no Elias to be seen anywhere. This was where Linny chose one of two responses possible, under the circumstances. She could either sink to the ground and cry miserable tears until the Surveyors or the madji finally caught up with her, or she could keep going. Keep going forever, perhaps.
Because she thought maybe there was too much pain everywhere for her to stop. She had an idea, now, of what her mother had been thinking when she left the city behind and went way up into the wrinkled hills. She had had it with this place, where only horrible things seemed to happen.
It was because of Linny that Elias had come down to the Plain, where he had suffered so much. And it was because of Linny that Sayra had been lost, up there in the hills. It was fatal, really, to be a friend of Linnet’s.
When she looked back she saw (through the darkness and the haze) those enormous crowds, still holding steady, still being as strong as stubborn people can be, so that the madji and the Surveyors were slowed down too much and could not come right after her. That stubborn crowd was the only tiny bit of hope she had left in her, but it was enough to keep her going, to make her turn and slip away from all the commotion, the pleading and crying and shouting, the smoke and the chaos.
She went around corners and down streets and kept running, and at some point she looked down and saw the Half-Cat keeping pace with her, with the nonchalant step of a cat not even in a hurry. Even when she had to lean against a wall in the dark and gasp for breath, the Half-Cat sat calmly, licked its paw, and then walked a few steps farther and jumped into the front basket on one of those power-driven carts they liked to ride around in on this side of the river.
It flicked its tail against the rim of the cart’s basket, and that clearly meant “Come quick!”
Linny hesitated. It hadn’t looked too complicated when the Surveyors had been driving the cart. Push the button and off you go. Something like that. There were definitely buttons here. There was a red one, too. Right there.
Presumably you could go farther in something like this than you could running on your own two legs.
When the sound of the tumult behind her changed and began to come closer, she stopped all that extra thinking. She jumped onto the seat, pushed the button, and held on tight to the handle that turned the wheels—as the cart started moving, fast
er than a girl could move, faster than a cat, down the Angleside street.
She had announced she was going home, and maybe she was. But there was something she had to do first, and that something meant going farther away from everything she knew, and deeper into the Plain.
26
INTO THE PLAIN
Even though everything had gone wrong since Linny’s birthday—no, not just since her terrible birthday, but pretty much since she had talked her way out of the tether and started making that lourka of hers, or maybe since the first time she had ever heard the sweetness of music teased out of sheep-gut strings, or maybe since the day she was born. Even so, even faced with disaster all around, Linny found herself feeling a sense of relief as she left the Broken City behind and struck out into the Plain. She was swooping along a long, straight road, with the Half-Cat tucked up comfortably in her basket and her lourka bouncing on her back. It was dark, so she couldn’t see much beyond the lights of the cart itself, but there were streetlamps along the road, even out here beyond the edge of the city. The dots of light ran ahead of her, on and on and on, and if she turned her head to either side, she could see more dots of light marking out other roads far away. All in all, it gave the impression of being a galaxy of extraordinarily well-behaved stars.
And the world grew very quiet, except for the rumble-whoosh of the engine and the wheels speeding along the smooth surface of the road.
At first she had been just running away from the turmoil of the fairs, and away from the magician fighting the regent, and the terrible sound of the disorder bombs going off in the river, and away from thinking about Elias and what might have happened to him when the corner of the waterworks became unmade, but after a while, moving along the long road in the dark, she began to feel her thoughts detangling themselves and becoming simpler.
Sayra needed her. That was still the truth at the bottom of all truths.
And she could not—she would not—fail at this, too.
She could not. She had not hung on to Elias hard enough, and the river and bitterness had swept him away. She had let the crown go, at least for now. But she was determined not to go back to Lourka with her hands empty.
When the burst of energy that comes whenever you run away had begun to wear off, Linny began to feel tired, and just a little cold. She had found that if she pulled the guide lever back, the cart slowed down to almost walking speed. Up ahead and to the right, a clot of lights might mean a building of some kind. She wanted to get off the road and more or less out of sight, in case those gray Surveyors came zipping along this way, looking for her.
She turned down the side road and trundled past lines of low glass houses. Too small for people to be living in them, but when she stopped the cart (which involved running off the side of the path into a ditch, but fortunately the ditch was shallow, and the cart had been going very slowly when she started trying to figure out how to make it stop) . . . anyway, when she had climbed out of the cart, she saw they were greenhouses, with plants growing in them. And there was a door that was not locked!
Inside the greenhouse, the air was warm and heavy and sweet-tangy, because this one housed tomato plants. Even in the dark, it was an easy thing to let her fingers find a tomato ripe enough that it came off the vine with only the slightest of tugs. She wiped it on her skirt and took a bite. She was so hungry! It tasted sweet and dense, as a good tomato will. Full of life. And all that without the slightest wrinkle in it, that she could taste.
She offered a tomato to the Half-Cat, but it declined.
Things did not have to be wrinkled to be astonishing. She had learned that a few times over since coming down from the hills.
She went back outside and hauled the Angleside cart right into the greenhouse, so that it wouldn’t be too visible for anybody passing by. She pushed it in between those tomato plants, and then stopped to catch her breath. She was tired.
There were some sacks piled up in a corner of the greenhouse. Linny made a little heap of them and fell down on top to sleep for a while. She could feel the sleep coming for her almost as she let her head sink down. She was so tired her bones hardly knew how to hold themselves together anymore.
When she opened her eyes, which was just at the point where the gray morning was beginning to chase the night away, she remembered immediately the horrible feeling of Elias falling out of her grasp, and the whoompf of the awful thing that had happened to the waterworks, the explosion taking Elias out of the world. The night before, she had been too numb from fatigue to know what that meant, but now she opened her eyes, remembered everything that had happened the day before, and began to cry. Linny didn’t cry often, but when she did, she made a thorough job of it. She cried now right until the rising sun splashed itself, sparkling, against the glass panes of the greenhouse. Then she wiped her eyes on her sleeves and gobbled a couple more tomatoes as breakfast.
Enough moaning. Elias would want her to save Sayra. That much Linny knew for sure. He would have wanted Sayra saved almost as much as Linny wanted to save her. And Sayra was fading away, every hour a little more. How much time had Linny wasted in these greenhouses, just because she was tired?
She ventured out into the morning brilliance, blinking her eyes and wrapping her arms around her body to ward off the chill. The cluster of lights she had seen the night before must have belonged to the buildings just a little farther down the road. The farmhouse, Linny guessed, if you could call these rows of glass structures a farm. Nothing here smelled enough of sheep dung to count as a real farm, to Linny’s way of thinking.
Out that way, past the “farm,” the world got flatter. And if she squinted a little, she could see the morning sun flaring up as it hit something large out there in the flatter parts of the world.
“I wonder where the hub thing is,” said Linny to the Half-Cat. “With the medicines hiding in it somewhere. But also with Surveyors.”
She didn’t trust Surveyors.
It seemed safer to leave the cart behind. The cart was faster than walking, but it was hard to hide in something like that.
Anyway, it was peaceful, walking down the road. The Plain felt large and unhurried and quiet. There was a thin mist hanging over the fields, and it glowed in the new sun while the surface of the road whispered under her feet.
In half an hour’s time, she saw another clump of buildings off to the right, larger and more imposing than the greenhouse farm where she had spent the night.
Far, far to the left, the horizon was rippling in a way that Linny had never seen before. A trick of the mist? It was all very flat, and that in itself was something new, for a girl who came from the wrinkled hills. The world had unfolded itself, all around.
It made her feel a little strange inside.
Not bad strange.
A little clearer and emptier. Like she used to feel long ago when she was little, and her mother would empty buckets of water over her head and scrub her hair perfectly clean.
The building was very large and very square and surrounded by a low wall: a Plain building.
“This is it,” said Linny to the Half-Cat, after squinting to help her eyes read the words on the sign by the gate. “Okay. Let’s see what we can find.”
She crouched down behind the wall, out of view of anyone watching from those smoky-glassed windows, and started around the building, looking for weaknesses in its defense. In Lourka, every building could be counted on to have a weakness of some kind, a loose window frame or a place where a thatched roof left a gap between itself and the wall.
Here it would be harder to sneak in, no doubt about that. But of all the people in the world, Linny was pretty sure she was one of the sneakiest.
And the Half-Cat padded along silently beside her. (Cats don’t have to work at it—they are by nature sneaky.)
As she rounded a corner of the building behind the fence, she heard a faint metallic clapping sound that made her ears sit up and take notice. She peeked over the fence to see what it might be, and smiled
: a back door, not quite latched, banging gently against the sill in the breeze. That was lucky!
“Wait for me,” she said to the Half-Cat.
She ran forward along the wall until she reached the dark edge of the building’s shadow, because fences should not be jumped in bright sunlight, and then, before anyone could have counted to five, she was over the fence, across the gap, and easing herself, soft as a ghost, silently in through the door.
Where she stood very still for a moment, sorting out the sounds (murmurs of people, hums of machines) and the gray outlines of that place.
She must be in a workshop of some kind, she thought. It felt familiar, that way. There were tables and machines around her, and shelves lining the long back wall.
When she had taken the measure of this room, and satisfied herself that the human sounds were still some distance away, she slipped closer to the shelves.
What would medicines look like?
Here she saw tubes and spoons and cubes of metal and complicated twisty things that might be tools but were nothing you’d ever see in the hills.
At home, her mother kept dried leaves and roots in jars, to make tisanes when the twins had sore throats. But there were no dried leaves here. It wasn’t that sort of room. Pause for a heartbeat; steady yourself; move on.
She crept to the door at the end of the room and held her breath while she turned the knob, as if that would make the hinges think twice before squeaking.
She could tell by listening, before she even looked with her eyes, that this next room must be large. But when she put her head around the edge of the door to look, her heart got dizzy. She had to look at the ground again for a while, just to reclaim some sense of balance.
All the windows were narrow and high, and the artificial lights were off. Linny’s first impression was of a twilit cave. The room went on and on and on, vanishing ahead of her into the gloom. And up and up. And all of it, as far as Linny could see, was rows of shelves, and on those shelves, everything. Bottles and boxes and vials and orderly white sacks.