Lumière (The Illumination Paradox)

by Garlick, Jacqueline E.

  Shoulders crash against the door.

  “Ready?” I crawl in on the shelf and cross my legs. “One—” I pull on the rope.

  “Two—” I launch myself up inside the brick-lined chimney inside the wall.

  “Steamrifles ready!”

  “Three…”

  “Come out or we’re coming in!”

  “Four…”

  The boy throws open the door.

  “Don’t shoot!” one of the guards shouts as I ascend the chimney as quickly as I can.

  “What do you have in your hand, boy?”

  “A peeler,” he says.

  “Where did you get it?”

  The boy hesitates. “From the nice monster, getting away in the closet,” he says.

  I spill from the dumbwaiter on the third floor, literally tumbling out of it. Dashing over the turquoise tiles in the room, I sail out into the hallway, clambering up the hardwood to the balcony at its end. Throwing open the garrison windows, I step out onto the ledge, greeted by a massive tree. I can barely see through it to the ground, its leaves are so thick. Perfect. Likewise, the guardsmen patrolling the grounds won’t be able to see me.

  Just beyond the tree the mechanical ravens lurk, presiding over the gates through which we entered. Just a few meters separate me from the end of the nearest branch. Though flimsy, it’ll have to do.

  My head cranks around at the sound of voices barreling up the stairs. The snouts of steamrifles flash. “I’ll check the second floor, you head up to the third!”

  I swallow. Here’s hoping the branch holds me. I turn back, sink my hand into my pack, and search for my rod, pulling it out by the telescope end. Steadying the wheel on the side, I hurl the rod up and over my shoulder, then fling it forward out the window like a fishing pole toward the tree, just as I did out over the table that day with the bacon, in the biggest cast I’ve ever attempted.

  The fingers at the other end clamp down around a branch, and I jump, hanging off the end of the rod. My knees pulled tight to my chest, I swing ape-like out over the yard, skimming the heads of the guards, and disappear into the leaves.

  Thirty nine

  Eyelet

  I weave through the city, lost, my mind consumed with Urlick. Did he get out of the Academy safely, or have Smrt’s men captured him?

  Will they capture me?

  I struggle to remember the way back to the quarry, Brigsmen following close behind. I’ve no idea which way to go, what roads to take. Nothing looks familiar. The first time Urlick lead the way.

  Reaching up, I touch my face, startled by the feel of skin. The mask of Ida lies on the floor at the Academy. No time to retrieve it. Only time to run. My eyes fix on the wanted poster nailed to a pole on the opposite side of the street. My stomach curls. The face on the poster is mine. I suck in a sharp breath, realizing they’ll be others posted all over town. If I’m discovered I’ll be jailed, or worse, locked up in the asylum. I cannot risk being seen.

  I flip my hood up over my head and duck off the main street into an alley. “Pan!” I call to the sky when I think it’s safe. “Pan, where are you! I need your help! Pan! Where are you, please!”

  A steamplough whistle shrieks in the distance, jerking my spine to its full length. I clutch my chest. A steamplough. I must be close. There was a steam yard right next to the quarry. Urlick stashed the cycle among the boulders. The whistle sounds again.

  I pick up my skirts and dash toward it, hurdling a hedge, landing stiff-legged in a farmer’s garden. I trip through a tangle of carrot tops and shabbily-kept peas, clear a goat, and springboard over the arse of a mule before I’m through, darting in and out of fruit trees and around the corner of the barn, only to end up where I’ve already been.

  “Blast!” I swear, for the first time ever. A filthy habit I’ve picked up from Urlick. “Oh, Urlick, where are you?” I spin in circles, pinching the stitch from my side. “Pan! Urlick! Someone! Please…”

  A steamrifle shot rings through the trees. I scramble for cover behind a hedge, crouching low and silent, cupping my pendant in my hand to hide its pulsing light, terrified it’ll give me away.

  “Over there,” I hear a voice say. Boots rush forward, then off in the opposite direction. I breathe a sigh of relief. After a count of ten I step out from the hedge, only to be sent scuttling back as a streak of black clips the back of my bustle, then rises up into the clouds. It descends again moments later, cawing.

  “Pan?” I squint at the blur in the sky.

  She wings back around, appearing through the cloud cover, her red beak shining like a beacon of hope through the grey. “Oh, thank God it’s you! The quarry, Pan, I have to get to the quarry.”

  She caws, signaling for me to follow. I bolt after her, eyes fixed on the sky. “Lower!” I shout, following glimpses of her black feathers through the cloud-choked sky. “You have to fly lower! I’m losing you!”

  She lowers herself, twisting through the streets. I burst after her, my heart thundering, my boots crashing against the cobblestones. Before I know it, we’ve reached the dancing mechanical fence line that separates Gears from Brethren. The one I passed through the first time, when I entered Gears alone.

  “The hole!” I shout to Pan in the sky. “You’ve got to help me find the hole!” I gulp as she dives, winging her way through it, soaring into the sky on the other side.

  “Well done!” I shout, racing after her, stopping to toss Father’s journals through the hole ahead of me. I lunge headfirst, my chin scraping the dirt, collect the books on the other side and run, following Pan’s lead through the backstreets of Gears, as Brigsmen pour through the formal gates.

  “This way,” Pan calls, her voice strained and gravelly.

  “You spoke!” I gasp, stumbling forward. “Your voice! It’s returned!”

  “So it has,” Pan nods her head. The surprise in her eyes is as big as in mine.

  Another steam whistle sounds, this time very close.

  Pan’s wings catch on a stream and tip her to the side. She almost falls from the sky. Regaining her balance, she veers sharply left, swooping low between two buildings. I follow. She wings out over the city’s square and I panic. “What are you doing?” I slow. “You’re going the wrong way!”

  Pan loops around and swoops down in front of my face. “Follow me,” she orders, staring at me firmly, like she’s my mother, her eyes flecked blue and green.

  “I can’t!” I shake my head. “There are too many people. If I enter the market someone will recognize me.”

  Pan hovers in place, holding her gaze. “How much do you trust me?” she says, then wings away.

  I gasp, hearing my father’s words, my mother’s voice in hers. Perhaps Urlick was right. Perhaps she is nothing but a common household parrot, picking up on words and phrases my parents have said. No. I shake my head. Pan is much more than that. Look at all the things she’s done for me. Her loyalty alone proves she’s more than a dimwitted mimicking parrot.

  I stumble on, following Pan through the low rolling fog around a corner, into the center the bustling Market Square of Gears. My likeness hangs on every signpost, at every corner. The terror of that reality worms through my head. A flash of me dangling from the gallows haunts me, followed by another of me caged in an asylum with Smrt holding the key.

  I’ll die before I let that happen. I swear I will. I shake off the images and push forward, flipping my hood up over my head.

  “Posies?” I slam into an old peasant woman, not looking where I’m going. She stuffs a half-dead bouquet under my nose.

  “No thank you,” I say, pushing them away.

  “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” Her pupil's dance. Her prying eyes linger dangerously on my face.

  “No,” I breathe, rushing past her, my knees knocking beneath me.

  Her eyes dart to a poster and back. She sprouts a toothless gin. “I have seen you. You’re the girl!” she calls after me. “The one on the poster!”

  Heads twist in my d
irection.

  Pan shrieks, diving down from the sky at the woman. “You nasty lot, get outta ‘ere!” The woman shoos her off. People scatter on the street.

  I run ahead, blind to where I’m going, veering off the main street, into a corridor. Pan joins me and I breathe a heavy sigh of relief.

  “I told you that wasn’t a good idea.”

  We weave through the back streets. Four tight turns later the fog lifts just enough for me to make out the skeleton of a station. Loading docks loom to the left; steamploughs rest on the tracks to the right. The quarry falls over the edge behind.

  “We’ve made it!” I cry, smiling up at Pan. “Now to get to the cycle!”

  I race forward—under the disguise of the cloud cover—falling back up against the side of the steamplough engine, hiding myself inside its waft of steam.

  “Brigsmen,” I breathe.

  Men in black leather boots and steely suits patrol not only the sleamplough yard, but the rim and the basin of the quarry as well. They swarm like flies over a withering corpse, steamrifles at the ready. Every inch of the quadrant has been staked out, not a rock left unturned.

  “How did they know we’d be coming here?” I whisper to Pan as she lands on my shoulder.

  “I don’t know,” she shrugs.

  “What are we going to do now?”

  I lean out around the front of the engine, searching the premises for signs of Urlick. “Do you see him?” I whisper to Pan. “I don’t see Urlick anywhere.”

  The steamplough sounds its horn, giving my heart a start. Steam chugs from between the boxcar’s wheels. My eyes catch on a Brigsman standing next to the boulders where Urlick stashed the cycle earlier. My heart thrashes wildly inside my chest. He jams his billy club in and out of the rock crevice, peering between the boulders.

  “Don’t move, Bertie,” I whisper to the air. “We need you. Don’t reveal yourself.”

  At last the Brigsman gives up and I let out my breath, relieved as I watch him stalk away.

  “Pan,” I say. “Will you take a look?”

  She nods, lifting off of my shoulder. I hold my breath as she slowly circles the entire yard, scanning the ground from left to right. She dips into the basin, flying in low lines up and down the belly of the quarry before returning to me, a look of despair on her face.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  She shakes her head.

  “Do you suppose he’s been caught?”

  “Could be.”

  I twist my hands together. If I’m not there within the half hour, leave without me, I hear Urlick say. I check my chrono-cuff. It’s been over three quarters of an hour. Something must be wrong. I wasted time, lost. But Urlick knows the way.

  “I’m going back for him.” I turn to Pan. “Will you help me?”

  I slip on a puddle of street grease and slide past the corner out into the middle of the market. Mouths fall open, staring. My arms paddlewheel backward in a furious attempt to regain my balance, drawing even more unwanted attention.

  Pan panics, circling around, swooping low, creating the diversion I need. I dash from the street, falling in behind a makeshift wall at the back of the market, next to a balloon-maker’s shop.

  I peer through a knot in the wood at the shrouds of sackcloth lining the mud floor of his stall, cut into slices a hundred times the length of an arm. The vendor sits in the middle of the stall, a deflated balloon at his feet. He threads the needle on his sewing machine, pumps the throttle, and begins stitching on a patch. It’s nearly as big as he is—though he’s not very big—but only half his width.

  Mounds of varnished taffeta lay billowed in the opposite corner, sky blue in color, adorned with painted planets and constellations, as big as frescoes on a wall. He finishes stitching the canvas, and lays the balloon in a perfect flat circle on the road. Attaching its ropes to a basket, the vendor lights a fire in the basket’s canister. Slowly the balloon swells to life. The bluest of blue taffeta creeps to the sky, drifting up from the earth. On its side is a whimsical drawing of our long-lost sun.

  A scuffle breaks out on the other side of the wall. My heart jumps to my throat. An angry voice pours through a crack in the mortar. I throw my ear to the knot in the wall and listen.

  “ I saw you take it. Now, ’and it over, you grimy little thief, you!”

  “I ain’t got it, ’onest I ain’t.”

  The second voice sounds small.

  I press my face to the bricks and peer through a hole into the vendors’ lot beyond it. A brute of a man with a bristly beard holds a small boy up by the scruff of his neck. The boy’s spindly legs are kicking. He’s trying to connect with the man’s shin. Something metal glistens from the boy’s pocket.

  “I din’t take anything from yu, I swear, I din’t.”

  “Yu lying little sod, you!” The man shouts. “That’s the third time this week you’ve pillaged from me! And I tell yu, it’ll be the last!” He drops the boy to the ground and grabs him by the ear. “Maybe some time in the orphanage will keep yu from robbin’ me blind!”

  “Ooooow!” the boy yowls as the man tugs him forward. “You can’t do this!”

  “The ’ell I can’t!” The man yells.

  “Pleeeeeease,” the boy fights. “Me mum, she’s not far. She’ll be looking for me.” He wrinkles his face. “You can’t put me in a ’nage wiff parents—”

  “Oh, can’t, can I?” The man stoops to get a better grip, dragging the boy up the alley. My heart burns listening to the boy holler. I swallow as they draw near. My eyes move again onto the balloon in the alley, nearly half filled.

  All at once, I have an idea.

  “There you are, Roderick.” I step boldly from my hiding place, praying my plan is going to work.

  My knees tremble as the man comes to a halt in front of me.

  The boy looks up, sniffs.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” I say, trying to sound convincing. My gaze shifts from the ear pinching man to the boy and back again. “I see you’ve found my little brother.” The boy goes to open his mouth and I flash my eyes at him, signaling for him to keep silent. “Muvver’s been lookin’ everywhere for yu. What’s ’e done this time?” I return my eyes to the man. “Pinched something again?” I put my hands on my hips and try to look cross. “How many times has Muvver told you not to steal! You’ll have to excuse ’im, ’e takes after our no-good father. ’E left us, ’e did, a long ways back.”

  The man clears the choke from his throat, releasing his grip on the boy’s ear just slightly.

  The boy looks up at me, and smiles.

  “’E’s got real sticky fingers, this one,” the man says. “Made off with a ’ole lot o’ me best tinkers, he did. And it’s not the first time ’e’s done it, neither.”

  “Roderick!” I say, turning to the boy. “Return this man his tinkers.” The boy looks at me, shocked, confused. “You ’eard me.” I shoo him with my fingers. “Go on, empty your pockets.”

  Slowly, the boy dips his hand into his trouser pocket and pulls out the shiny object I saw before. “Now the other,” I say. Reluctantly, he turns his second pocket inside out and several more trinkets fall to the ground. “There you are,” I say.

  The man snatches them up in his palm, using a dirty, fat finger to sort through the lot.

  “He won’t do it again. I promise,” I step up and rest my hands on the boy’s shoulders. “I’ll see to that myself—”

  “You’d better. Or you’ll both be finding yourselves in the orphanage.” He wags his filthy finger in front of my face. Slowly he narrows his eyes. “Say,”—he leers at me—“don’t I know you from somewheres?” His lip grows a curious stitch.

  My heart stiffens in my chest. “We’d better get going,” I say to Roderick, dropping my gaze to the pavement to avert the man’s. “Muvver’ll be worried sick.” I push the boy ahead of me up the alley, shuffling as quickly as I can behind.

  “Wait a minute…” The man shouts after us. “You’re that gi
rl! The one from the posters!” I break out into a run. “Get back ’ere!” the man shouts, sprinting.

  The boy reaches back, grabs me by the hand and wheels me around a sharp corner. The two of us fly up the alley into another. “Hurry!” The boy flits up the cobblestone. “Over here!” He ducks in behind a trash bin and signals for me to join him.

  I race the last few steps, fall in behind him and crouch down.

  The man thunders past the opening to the alley and out into the market square, hollering.

  “Guess I owe you one,” I gasp, looking at the boy, once it’s safe.

  “I’d say we’re even.” He smiles at me.

  “Sebastian.” He sticks out a grimy hand for me to shake.

  I hesitate. “Please to meet you, Sebastian.” I shake it, begrudgingly.

  “You’re Eyelet, right?” The boy grins.

  “How did you know?” I snap.

  The boy laughs. “Your face is all over them posters.”

  “Saw them, did you?”

  “Who could miss ’em? They’s everywhere.”

  I lower my head.

  “Don’t worry, Miss. I ain’t gonna tells no one I see’d y’u. You ’ave me word.” He crosses his chest.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  I look up, checking the skies for Pan. I seem to have lost her. “Don’t suppose you know a safe way for me to get back to Brethren.”

  “Not for the likes of you, Miss.” The boy sucks his lip. “No offense, but your mug's all over the poles, you’d ’ave to travel by rooftop not to get arrested.”

  “Wait a minute.” I stand. “That’s it!”

  I grab the boy by the sleeve and drag him up the alley.

  “Where are we goin’ Miss?”

  “How do you feel about helping me steal something?”

  The boy grins.

  I haul him around the corner of the balloon maker’s stall. “What is it?” he asks, as I hold him up to peek through the knothole.