by Marissa Burt
“Everyone should be worried about that star,” Vulcan said.
Wren wandered slowly around the room as if the shopkeeper would suddenly pop up from behind the counter, offer them a pastry, and explain where to find the Outsiders.
Instead, she found something a little better. Near one wall, she heard the sound of voices. A whole chorus of them, cheering and chanting. Then the sound quieted down, and she heard the muffled tones of a woman speaking. Loudly.
“You guys.” Wren pointed at a vent in the wall. “There are people here.” She pressed her ear up against the elaborate grate. “Do you think they’re above us or below?”
“Definitely below,” Simon said without much consideration.
“How do you know?” Wren asked. To her, the direction of the sound was unclear.
“Because of the stairs I found,” Simon said with the tiniest suggestion of a grin playing around his mouth. “They go down. Not up.”
“Now is when you’re going to start joking around?” Wren said, but she secretly was pleased. This felt a bit like old times, when she and Simon were sneaking around the Crooked House looking for answers. She hoped that this time the answers might be more welcome ones.
The stairs looked ancient. They reminded her of the catacombs, and she kept waiting to see statues and silhouettes carved into the stairwell’s earthen walls. Instead, she soon found herself in a neatly stocked storeroom. Casks and barrels were stacked tidily against one wall, and shelves of crockery and baking supplies were piled on another. But it was the room beyond that held her interest.
She sidled forward to the doorway, and poked her head around just enough to see without being seen. A group of about fifty people was gathered there. The ones in the back stood, pressed in shoulder to shoulder, and those in front were crammed onto benches. Everyone was leaning forward, eagerly listening to the woman who stood up front.
“And it’s not right to have different castes of people,” she was saying, her voice strident. “Are certain people worth more than others? The divisions among us need to stop.”
“But some division is good. Different neighborhoods for different work. Differences don’t have to be a bad thing,” a woman near the front argued. “The caste system has given us efficiency and progress.”
The woman’s face turned hard. “What exactly do you know about progress? I guarantee you everything Boggen has told you is a lie.” She looked toward the back of the room, and for a heart-stopping moment, Wren thought they had been discovered, but she was only nodding at a man who stood next to a device. The next moment the device began whirring and projecting flickering images across the wall.
Grainy black-and-white photographs clicked past. All of them seemed to be taken from a distance, as though the photographer had been trying not to be seen. There were images of what appeared to be laboratories, with people of all ages being clinically evaluated. Whole factory floors of men and women, working with steaming vials at long tables. Wren recognized the scene from her long-ago dream, the one where she had discovered Boggen and his blackbirds. Had she seen him, then, in one of his research laboratories?
Another image caught her attention. This one showed a group of children standing in front of what could have been a large cut-out quarry. Wren nearly took a step forward and then stopped herself. She knew this place as well. More images followed, and Wren became certain. She had seen that group of children before in another of her dreams, long ago when she was on Earth. There had been children staring into the sky, children who had seen the candle that lit the path to the gateway. Children who had cheered, and—
She grabbed Simon’s hand and pulled him a little farther back into the storeroom. “Robin was there.”
“Where?” he whispered, his head popping up from behind his notebook. “She’s here?”
“No. That place. In the images.” She explained about the dream. “I never got a chance to ask her what it meant.”
“They seem to be secret photos of Boggen’s research projects,” Simon said, consulting his notes. “Maybe those were children taken from the lowest caste on Nod? Or orphans from the plague?”
Wren crept forward into the doorway. Pictures were still streaming by. Some had older people in them, sitting in cages under the observation of Boggen’s soldiers. And then the images stopped, landing on one where children no older than Wren and Simon were all crowded together in one room, waiting silent and hollow-eyed in line to receive an injection of some kind.
“What further evidence do you need?” The woman turned to face the audience. “Boggen has been free to indulge his terrible experiments for years, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.” She put her hands on her hips and stared at them. “Now is the time to act. Now. While Boggen is weak.”
A rumble of discontent passed through the crowd.
“She’s suggesting that Boggen is harming innocent citizens! That’s treason!” a skinny man in the back row said in an angry voice. “There is no new information here. Boggen is doing nothing illegal. His administration has said over and over that research trials are only conducted on criminals or the insane.” He coughed softly. “Those people aren’t real Fiddlers.”
“You make me sick,” the woman next to him said in a broken voice. “Those children can’t be criminals. Or insane. Boggen’s been lying to us.”
The skinny man gave her a pitying glance. “If you can believe those images.” He pointed an accusing finger at the woman in front. “What proof do we have that those are authentic? She could edit them to show you whatever she wanted! Her kind doesn’t care about progress. Those fanatics don’t care about how Boggen’s research could help all the citizens on Nod. They would have us go back to our Earth days, when we lived like ordinary humans.”
The old woman in front of them guffawed. “And you think we’re living better than that now? No public education. Barely any food in the poorest districts. Half of the city lost after the plague. That’s no way to run things.” The volume of the crowd rose as others began to air their grievances.
“Listen!” The woman in front raised her hands to quiet them down. “We must set our differences aside. We may not see eye to eye on everything. But our best hope for changing the system is by working together.”
“And what if you’re wrong?” It was the skinny man again. “Boggen’s researchers say they’re close to finding a way to purify the taint on stardust. Don’t you see what that means? We could restore the city! Expand beyond the walls! Ensure that there would be no more plagues of any kind.” He turned to face the crowd. “Don’t you see Boggen’s wisdom? He has to deal with the criminals and the insane anyway. We can’t have them running loose on Nod, not when they might spread the plague to others. Why not contain them and work for the good of all Magicians at the same time?”
Murmurs rippled through the audience, and a few people nodded their heads.
“But it isn’t for the good of all Magicians. There are no limits to how far Boggen will go in the name of research,” the woman up front said in a stony voice. “Just ask those outside the city walls. They’ve seen it with their own eyes.”
“Oh, and you have ventured outside the city walls, have you? Or are you just taking the word of the Outsiders?” The man spit the name out with a guffaw. “They would make up anything just to get us to stop using stardust. Reliable, factual evidence, that’s the only thing that will convince me. You’d be a fool to believe this kind of Outsider rabble-rousing. Maybe it’s not Boggen we should be investigating. Maybe it’s fanatics like Winter and her Outsider friends.” He pointed an accusing finger at the woman, and Wren could almost palpably feel the opinion of the room shift against her.
The woman looked determined. “Wait just a minute.” She retrieved a carpetbag from the floor and began pawing through papers. “I have lists! Dozens of Magicians who have simply disappeared. Children left as orphans.” She waved the papers above her head. “People who’ve gone missing all the way back to the days of Mother Goos
e.”
“Missing persons? Or plague-tainted criminals?” the skinny man said, and stood up as though he was now making the speech. “Or perhaps they were foolish enough to wander outside the city walls.” He shook his head and clucked his tongue disapprovingly. “It’s tragic when a political group begins to make up lies to gain popularity.”
Wren was riveted to the spot. She didn’t know the whole story of what was going on, but she knew one thing: she detested that skinny man with the orange hat. His words were like a poison that manipulated the crowd before her very eyes. The tactic seemed familiar to her somehow, and it made her angry. The woman was protesting, but the hand holding the papers had fallen useless by her side.
The man was talking now about the good Boggen had done, the way he had helped Nod recover from the plague and how his initiatives kept the city safe. “Or perhaps you’d rather we were still dealing with the plague? It might be returning, you know, and how will we manage it without Boggen in charge?” Buoyed by approving smiles from faces in the audience, the man continued. “For all we know, the Outsiders have patched together these photographs to manipulate us. Perhaps this is a test! Perhaps Butcher’s spies are among us now to see who will be guilty of treason.”
Wren could see worried frowns bloom on the faces nearest her, and the whispers grew louder. A few people even stood to leave, making their way to a side exit near the front. Wren could hardly believe what she was seeing. Were these people going to pretend not to have heard that there were abducted children in Nod? Were they going to ignore it altogether?
The woman did not look angry anymore. She looked desperate. “Please, stay!” she said. “Together we can change things! Don’t be afraid!”
The skinny man strode to the front, making a show of putting on his overcoat and adjusting the bright orange top hat on his head. “Nice try, Winter. But until you have some eyewitnesses who have actually seen these research projects . . . until you show us definitive proof . . .” He turned toward the audience, giving them a rueful shrug.
More were beginning to leave. Winter’s expression changed from determination to desperation, as though through sheer willpower she could stop the people from leaving. Wren didn’t allow herself to think. She knew if she did, she would second-guess herself. So she was sure her face must look as surprised as Simon’s and Vulcan’s did when she strode out into the room and announced in a loud voice, “I’ve seen them. I’ve seen the children.”
Every eye in the room was on Wren. Winter pulled her up to the stage, leaning close to whisper a threatening “You’d better be telling the truth” before thrusting her in front of the audience.
Wren swallowed hard. Public speaking usually didn’t bother her, but public speaking on another planet in front of a bunch of unknown Magicians, including one furious-looking man in an orange top hat, was another thing altogether.
She took a few deep breaths. Her impulse to speak out to help the prisoners had rushed ahead of her brain. How exactly was she supposed to explain what she had seen without revealing too much?
Simon must have been thinking the same thing, because he was silently shaking his head from the back of the room. “Don’t tell them about us,” he mouthed at her. Like she needed the reminder.
“It was the day Boggen fell ill,” Wren began, settling on a partial version of the truth. “My friend Robin took me to one of Boggen’s projects”—Winter tensed at her side at the mention of Robin’s name, but Wren plowed on—“and it was just as the photograph showed.” She raised a hand to the man operating the device. “Could you go back a few?” The man, startled, pushed his eyeglasses up the bridge of his nose and bent over the machine, sending the pictures whirring in reverse.
“A little more,” Wren said. “Now, stop.” The picture stood frozen behind her, the faces of the children even younger than she had remembered.
“They were digging.” She pointed to a spot on the cliffside. “I was standing about here. Then the gateway opened, and the children began to cheer.” She looked back to the audience. The man in the orange hat was glaring at her. He opened his mouth to speak, but Wren knew nothing good would come of letting him do that. “You think Boggen has been a good ruler?” she shot at him. “You think he’s nice?” Wren realized what the man in the orange hat’s words reminded her of now: the way Boggen had talked to Jack that day at the gateway, the way he had lied to Jack and promised him a home, when all the while he was just using him. “Did you know Boggen was planning to return to Earth?”
There were audible gasps and cries of outrage.
“That he made contact with an Alchemist apprentice? That even now he’s recruiting Alchemists to conduct research on human subjects? I’d bet anything that the children I saw are only a small portion of his research pool.”
The man in the orange hat’s face went ashen. “How do you know—” he began, and then he caught himself. But it was too late. The crowd was in an uproar. The people around him were peppering him with questions, and others looked about ready to go to war.
Winter grabbed Wren harshly by the elbow. “Time to go,” she said.
“But Simon’s still in there!” She turned around, but the gathering had turned into more of a brawl. One man punched another, and someone else was throwing a chair.
“It’s okay,” Simon said, appearing at her other side with Vulcan behind him. “We’re here.”
“Anyone else?” Winter said with one eyebrow raised. When Wren shook her head, Winter gave her a grim smile. “Good. Then the three of you are coming with me.”
Winter hustled them out a side door and down a gloomy alley cloaked in shadows. It was nighttime outside, and rain was falling hard.
“Hurry,” she said, but Wren needed no coaxing. The shouts from the room they had left were pouring out into the streets, and Wren had no desire to meet angry orange-hat man in a dark alley. In front of them loomed a shiny carriage, slick with rain, with two horses hitched to the front of it. A man in a heavy black overcoat sat atop it, illuminated faintly by the lantern that swung next to him.
“Inside,” Winter said, nearly shoving Wren up the small steps.
“Grovesnor Street,” Winter shouted at the driver. “And fast.” The little door slammed shut, and the horses began to move, leaving Wren, Simon, and Vulcan jostling about the carriage across from a very stern-looking Winter.
Wren was running through the options of what she could say, but Winter spoke first.
“Where’s Robin? Do you have her?”
“Have her?” Wren repeated stupidly. “What are you talking about?”
“What about you?” Winter looked angry as she turned to Vulcan, and then Simon. “You haven’t said much. Have you taken Robin?”
“Never heard of her.” Vulcan shrugged.
Simon wiped drops of rainfall off his forehead. “No. But we’ve been keeping an eye out for her ever since we arrived.”
Wren cringed. Simon was usually much more savvy than that. She tried to cover up his misstep.
“What about you? How do we know you don’t have Robin?” she asked Winter.
But Winter wasn’t distracted. “Since you arrived?” She glanced back and forth between Wren and Simon, and her eyes grew wide as she began to put things together. “You’re the ones from Earth!” Her gaze lit on Wren. “And you are the Weather Changer!”
Wren and Simon exchanged glances. “What do you mean?”
Winter’s stiff form relaxed back onto the carriage seat, and she gave them a real smile for the first time that Wren remembered. “You’re the Weather Changer!” she repeated, as though she could hardly believe it. “Robin’s told me about you. And here I thought you might be more of Boggen’s nitwits come to disrupt the rally.”
As the cart rumbled its way down twisted alleys and over bumpy cobblestones, Winter revealed that she had met Robin when she began leading the rallies. “Robin was the first Outsider I met.”
“Robin is an Outsider.” Wren realized why Auspex’s Out
sider symbol had looked so familiar to her. Robin had been wearing the same token when Wren had seen her in the dream.
“Robin is a great many things. She was one of the first to discover Boggen’s research projects and was passionate about freeing his prisoners. So are the Outsiders. We’re all concerned about Robin’s disappearance,” Winter said with a frown. “It was dangerous work she was doing, trying to secretly gather information from the House of Never to prove what was going on. If Boggen found out . . .” She trailed off, her expression transforming into one of worried concern. “Well, you saw what he’s done to his ‘subjects.’” She reached for a rope that must have somehow been connected to the driver, because the carriage rolled to a stop outside an imposing townhouse. Its brick walls glistened in the gaslighted rain as Wren clambered out after Winter. The four of them entered the house.
Winter led them through dark, musty-smelling halls until they came to a large shadowed room, the corner of which was lit by a warm hearth fire. Several high-backed armchairs had been arranged there, and someone was sitting in one, drinking tea from the tray on the table next to him.
“Captain,” Winter began, and the man before the fire set down his tea and turned to look at them. It didn’t take long for Wren to recognize him.
“Auspex! You made it out!”
“Courage and Honor, Wren.” Auspex’s teeth shone white in the shadows of his face. “I am glad to see you are well.”
After introductions and brief explanations were made, they settled in around the crackling fire. Auspex rang a bell, and a boy entered, returning a short while later with another tray full of food. Though Wren had difficulty recognizing the different vegetables on Nod, the meat in the stew tasted familiar, and she was sure there were potatoes in there. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was until the boy set the tray down next to her, the rich aroma sending her mouth watering.
“Eat. Please,” Auspex encouraged them. While they ate, he explained that he had escaped from Boggen’s henchmen only to find that he could not locate Wren or Jack. “I knew I couldn’t return to the House of Never,” he said. “I’m so pleased that you found me, for I’m leaving tomorrow for the Outsiders’ camp.”