by P. G. Bell
This answer did absolutely nothing to help Suzy’s mood. “How?” she said. “I thought you lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere.”
“No, I said I grew up there. But I’m a genius, remember? I’ve gone up in the world.”
Suzy balled her fists in frustration. “Then why don’t we just go to these friends of yours and ask them to help us?” she said. The question must have struck a nerve, because Frederick’s voice became clipped and terse.
“Maybe friends wasn’t quite the right word to use,” he said. “They’re more like acquaintances.”
“Friendly acquaintances?”
Frederick paused. “Not really,” he said quietly. “I don’t really get along with many people.”
“There’s a surprise,” said Suzy.
“I can’t help it if people find my intellect intimidating,” Frederick said. “Anyway, you don’t have to worry about them. You just have to trust me. Right now, you and I are the only ones who can save the Union, and we’re running out of time. If Crepuscula catches up with us, it’s all over—there’ll be no one to stop her.”
The thought sent a cold tingle of worry down Suzy’s back. “I think I can get us to the Ivory Tower,” she said, “but I want something from you in return.”
“What’s that?”
“I need you to help me find a way home.”
“Can’t the Express do it?” he said.
She opened her mouth, but the words suddenly became very difficult to say. “If my plan works, I don’t think they’ll want to,” she said. Because she had already broken her promise to Wilmot, and she was about to do something even worse. And if they reached the Ivory Tower, she wouldn’t be able to hide it from him anymore.
“I can do that,” said Frederick. “The Ivory Tower has information on everything. I’m sure I can help you find what you need to know once we get there.”
“Great.” She would have breathed a sigh of relief, except she wasn’t relieved at all—she was well and truly in league with Frederick now. She still wasn’t sure just how much she could trust him, but what choice did she have? He was annoying, but he was also alone and helpless. The fate of the Union depended on him, and he was depending on her. She hoped she was making the right choice.
* * *
“How did it go? Were they surprised to see you? What did the captain say?” Wilmot started asking questions the second he had hauled the inner hatch open, and he didn’t wait for Suzy to reply as he helped her unscrew the bolts holding the helmet in place. She gave a silent prayer of thanks that she had already tipped Frederick’s snow globe back into the nose sock, where it wouldn’t be seen.
“I hope they didn’t bore you,” Wilmot went on. “They’re terribly nice, really, and they’ve got some fantastic stories to share. Although they do tend to go on a bit.” He heaved the helmet clear of Suzy’s head and set it down on the floor. “So?”
“It was fine,” she replied, enjoying the touch of fresher air against her face. “I liked them.”
“You did? Oh, I am glad. I like what you’ve done with your hair, by the way.”
“With my what?” She pulled a strand of it down in front of her face and gasped. “It’s gone blond!”
“Only a little,” he said.
Suzy inspected her reflection in the polished visor of the nearby space helmet. The tips of her hair had turned bright yellow. She stared at them in fascination. “How did this happen?” she asked.
“It’s a side effect of contact with the fusion bananas,” said Wilmot.
“So that’s why Ursel is yellow?”
“That’s right,” he said. “The effects wear off after a day or two.”
Good, she thought as she wriggled her way out of the suit, casting an eye around the chamber in search of Wilmot’s delivery schedule. She soon spotted it, balanced precariously on top of the air pump. Now all she had to do was get to it. “Does everyone in the Impossible Places become a ghost when they die?” she said, pulling her bathrobe on.
“Goodness no. You wouldn’t be able to put a pin between them if they did. It’s usually just those with unfinished business who hang around like that.” He shook a few drops of water from his hands. “Did you deliver the bottle?”
“Yes,” she said. “Although I think the suit has sprung a leak.” She handed him the suit and prayed that her guilt wouldn’t make her blush too badly. She hated the idea of tricking Wilmot, but it was the only thing that would work.
“Oh dear,” he said, holding it up and prodding at it with a finger. “Is it a bad leak?”
“Uh, yes,” she said. “Quite bad. Somewhere on the front, I think.”
He put his head in through the neck of the suit, groping around the outside with both hands. “I can’t see anything,” he said.
“Keep looking,” she said, stealing across the chamber to the pump. “It’s definitely there.”
She picked up the delivery schedule and looked it over. It was an orderly table of destinations, recipients, and items, filled out in pencil in neat, blocky handwriting. As she had expected, there was no sign of the Ivory Tower on it anywhere; their next delivery consisted of a package number (the package itself, she assumed, was sitting on a shelf in the sorting car), the name Calvus Rayleigh, and a destination: Cloud Forge.
She glanced back at Wilmot, who now appeared to be in a certain amount of distress—he wore the suit upside down over the top half of his body, and she wasn’t sure he was able to get out again. He seemed to be trying to brazen it out, though, by making very knowledgeable noises and occasionally muttering things like “I see” and “Very interesting.”
She was running out of time. She took up the stubby pencil that was attached to the clipboard by a length of string. It had a bright yellow eraser on the end, and she used it to scrub out the entry for Cloud Forge, before hastily writing in a new one: the Ivory Tower. She matched Wilmot’s handwriting as best she could, but there was little she could do about the faint smudge of pencil lead left behind by her rubbing-out. And she had to trust that Wilmot hadn’t had the chance to consult the chart while she’d been out on the seabed. As plans went, it was far from ideal, but it was all she had time for. She was barely able to replace the clipboard on the pump and dart back to Wilmot’s side before he finally wrestled the suit off his head.
“I can’t see anything wrong with it,” he gasped, red-faced. “And it seems dry in there.”
Suzy pressed her lips together and blushed, not knowing what to say.
“There’s no time to worry about it now, though,” he went on, slipping the suit back onto its hanger. “We’ve got work to do.” He grinned at her and dashed to a small control panel against one wall. He threw a lever, and the H. E. C. lurched around them, before slowly rising off the sea floor. Suzy took the opportunity to return the diving helmet to the rack, making sure to retrieve Frederick from the depths of the nose sock as she did so.
“What’s going on?” he whispered.
“Ssssh!” she hissed, and slipped him into her bathrobe pocket.
“That’s two successful deliveries under your belt already,” said Wilmot, turning back from the controls. “Let’s make it three, shall we?”
“Sounds great,” she said through a smile that felt too false and tight. “Where are we going?”
“Good question,” he said, and made for the clipboard. Suzy’s momentary flutter of relief—he hadn’t already checked the chart!—was immediately overcome by fresh anxiety as she watched his eyes work their way down the table and then widen in shock.
“That can’t be right,” he said in a choked little voice. “That can’t be right at all.”
Suzy looked on, wishing she could be anywhere else, but unable to look away as the color slowly drained from Wilmot’s face. She clenched her fists so hard that her fingernails bit into her palms, but it didn’t lessen her discomfort. She was lying to someone who trusted her, just as Frederick had lied to her, which made her every bit as bad.
&nbs
p; But what other way was there?
“What’s wrong?” she said, feeling like a fraud for asking the question. He turned a look of vacant panic on her.
“How can I have missed it? I thought I’d checked.” His finger stabbed at the clipboard. “This is serious.”
As he said it, the H. E. C. broke the surface and reconnected to the rest of the train with a metallic clunk. No sooner had the sound died away than a phone on the instrument panel began to ring. Wilmot blinked at it, as though he’d never seen it before. “Oh dear,” he said, and picked it up.
Steeling herself, Suzy moved to stand beside him as he stammered into the receiver. “Yes, Mr. Stonker, I was just about to do it, but I’ve been busy with the pump and…” A moment’s silence. “Well, I’m afraid there’s been a bit of an oversight. You see … Yes, yes, I will. Right away.”
Taking the phone from his ear, he picked up the stub of pencil attached to the clipboard and tapped the tip three times against the entry for the Ivory Tower. Suzy watched, fascinated, as the handwritten letters glowed a brilliant gold. Then they shifted, tumbling over themselves in a blur. She had seen this before, on the tiny destination board in the cab, and knew instinctively that this was how the board was updated; it was linked to Wilmot’s clipboard with magic.
After just a few seconds, the letters settled down into their former order and their glow faded. The phone emitted Stonker’s bark of shock as loudly as if he had been standing in the H. E. C. with them.
“I’m so sorry,” said Wilmot into the mouthpiece. “I must have been so preoccupied with our delivery to the Obsidian Tower that I completely overlooked this one.”
Suzy couldn’t quite make out what Stonker was saying in reply, but it didn’t sound happy.
“No, I know that’s not an excuse,” said Wilmot, who was sounding increasingly miserable. “I take full responsibility. Yes, I know how much time it’s going to add to our route. No, you’re right, it’s not acceptable.”
Suzy was horrified to see the early sign of tears in Wilmot’s eyes, and placed a supportive hand on his shoulder. He must have forgotten she was there, because he flinched. But he didn’t protest when she took the phone from him and replaced it in its cradle.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I’ve made a huge mistake, and now we’re going to be even further behind schedule.”
The words dug into Suzy’s heart like hot needles. “I’m sure it isn’t your fault,” she said.
“But it is!” His agitation wouldn’t let him keep still, and he pulled free of her touch and started pacing in frantic circles around the center of the chamber. “The Ivory Tower! Of all places! Do you know how often the Express visits it?”
“How often?” she said.
“Never! At least, almost never. My dad had to make a delivery there once, years ago. And now it’s my turn, and I didn’t even notice. Oh, my mom’s right, this job’s too much for one troll alone to handle. I’m letting things slip.”
“Don’t say that,” she pleaded. “You’re a great Postmaster, you really are.” The train bucked into motion. “Are we going there now?”
He shook his head, still pacing. “No, we can’t just turn up. Lord Meridian never lets anyone in for free.”
“Who’s Lord Meridian?”
“The keeper of the tower. The curator of all its knowledge. That’s his job, you see—gathering information. So if you want to learn something from him, you have to be able to offer him something he doesn’t already know. That nobody else knows.”
“And you can do that?” Suzy asked hopefully.
“Not without making a detour first.” He hurried to the nearest porthole. Suzy joined him. The afternoon had drawn on, and the sun was growing fat as it dipped toward the horizon, staining the tips of the waves gold and crimson.
“Where are we going?” she said, wishing she could feel better in the face of such a view.
“Home,” he said.
Then the darkness of the tunnel swallowed the train with one snap of its jaws, and the Topaz Narrows was gone.
14
A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW
Captain Neoma paused in front of Frederick’s empty desk. She had passed it three times on her latest patrol of the Observatory floor, her nagging sense of disquiet urging her to stop each time she approached it, but she had always lost her nerve at the last second and hurried past it on another lap of the room.
Now her disquiet was too great to ignore, even as she cast a nervous glance toward the center of the room, where Lord Meridian was still engrossed in whatever the Great Spyglass was showing him. She wet her lips—her mouth had gone dry—and leaned down to address the observer at the neighboring desk.
“Has anyone touched this spyglass since the boy disappeared?” she whispered.
The observer—a young boy with the face and fur of a dog, whose name, according to his badge, was Jim-Jim—flinched in surprise. “No, Captain,” he said, his voice tight with worry. “We’re not allowed to touch each other’s desks. It’s the rules.”
“And none of the guards have touched it?” she asked, before dropping her voice to an even lower whisper. “Not even … His Lordship?”
Jim-Jim flattened his ears and gave an almost-imperceptible shake of his head. “No one,” he said.
“Thank you,” said Neoma, who briefly considered adding “Good boy” before deciding against it. Jim-Jim turned hurriedly back to his work and made a very obvious effort to pretend she wasn’t there. She shot another quick look in Lord Meridian’s direction, then eased Frederick’s chair out from the desk and sat down in it.
She hated sneaking around like this. It felt dishonest. But she hated her feeling of uncertainty more, and she knew the only way to banish it was to get to the bottom of whatever had gone on here. Something had made Frederick leave the Observatory—something so dangerous that he had almost ended up in Lady Crepuscula’s clutches as a result. That wasn’t the sort of thing that happened when you sat around watching farms all day. He had to have been watching something else. And if nobody had touched his spyglass, then it would still be trained on the last thing he had seen with it …
Repressing a reflexive shiver of revulsion at the thing, Captain Neoma leaned forward and pressed her eye to the spyglass, gazing out across the reaches of reality for the very first time.
She saw a cow.
In fact, she saw several cows milling around in a small, muddy yard between a sagging barn and a tiny, ramshackle old shed of a house. She was looking down on the scene from above, and as she adjusted the eyepiece her view zoomed out, revealing a patchwork of dull green fields, all of them full of cows. Their chorus of snorting and lowing reached her as if from underwater.
“Looking for something, Captain?”
Neoma leaped to her feet so quickly her knees struck the underside of the desk with a bang that echoed around the whole room. She winced at the sudden pain, but snapped off a salute. Lord Meridian was standing beside the desk. He raised one eyebrow in polite inquiry. “Well?”
“My lord!” she stammered. “I was just … just…”
“Just checking up on me?” He grimaced. “I’m a little hurt by your lack of trust, Captain, although I suppose I should commend you for it. No one should be above suspicion. Not even me.” His grimace melted into a smile. “What have you discovered?”
Captain Neoma fought to keep her own grimace in check. “Nothing, sir. Just farmland, exactly as you said. Whatever made him leave, it wasn’t this.” Her cheeks burned with embarrassment, but Lord Meridian just gave a nod of satisfaction.
“I’m glad that’s settled. If you had only waited, I could have explained his motives to you myself.”
“You know something, sir?”
“I do now,” he said, and beckoned her to follow him back to the Great Spyglass. Out of earshot of the observers, he spoke again. “I tracked him and the human girl, Suzy, to the sea floor, where he imparted a few worrying truths.
It seems that Crepuscula’s ambitions are greater than I ever suspected.” His expression hardened. “I believe she plans to seize control of this observatory, Captain. That’s why she needs Frederick—he knows where to find it, how to get in, and how it all works.”
Anger and dread began mixing in the pit of Neoma’s stomach. “You mean he’s sold us out?”
“That’s my current theory, yes.” Lord Meridian gave a sad smile. “It’s hard to stomach, after all we’ve done for him. He must have had second thoughts and tried to escape from her, though, which explains the curse she put on him. Poetic justice, wouldn’t you say?”
“You have to let me take a squad out, sir,” Neoma said, flexing her hands. She imagined Frederick’s neck between them and felt a little better. “I’ll make that curse look like a joke when I catch up with him.”
“There’ll be no need for that, Captain,” said Lord Meridian. “You’ll have plenty of opportunity to show the boy the error of his ways once he arrives.”
It took Captain Neoma a few seconds to realize what he meant. “You mean he’s coming back?” she exclaimed. “He only just left!”
“It seems that having Crepuscula on his tail has prompted a change of heart,” said Lord Meridian. Then, to Neoma’s surprise, he reached out and caught her forearm. His grip was surprisingly strong. “This is vital, Captain,” he hissed. “Frederick is the key to all this, and my guess is that Crepuscula will come here to intercept him. We can’t afford to let that happen. Double the perimeter guard. Triple it.”
Slowly but deliberately, Captain Neoma pulled her arm free of his grip. “Sir, are you sure about this? The Obsidian Tower has never moved against the Ivory Tower, not in all the history of the Union.”
“History is one thing, Captain,” he said. “The future is another. And if we’re not prepared for it, the Union of Impossible Places itself is at risk.”
His eyes blazed with a cold fire. Neoma was about to answer him, when the radio clipped to her belt suddenly squawked to life.
“Secure the Observatory!” came a panicked voice from the speaker. “Hostile approaching. Hostile approaching!” Before Captain Neoma could respond, she felt the floor tremble as something huge and heavy approached the outer door at a run. The observers all leaped to their feet, and the guards scrambled to take up defensive positions.