‘The what?’
‘The sitstatrep. Situational status report. Where are we? What’s going on? C’mon, buddy.’ Steve clicked his fingers in Danyl’s face. ‘Quick.’
‘I’ve never heard anyone say “sitstatrep” before. Please stop clicking your fingers at me.’
‘Give me your sitstatrep stat and I’ll stop.’
Danyl felt his affection for Steve ebbing away. ‘Our sitstatrep is that we’re in a room that is filling with water,’ he explained. ‘That’s actually a good thing because that door is locked, but up there’—he pointed at the ceiling—‘is a skylight. So my plan is that we just wait for the room to flood and float to the ceiling and escape.’
‘You really think Gorgon will let us get away that easily?’ Steve gave a bitter laugh. ‘No, we’re locked inside a room filling with water for a reason. A diabolical reason.’
‘I don’t think—’
‘I know what it is.’ Steve clicked his fingers in Danyl’s face again. ‘Water torture.’
‘No—’
‘Let me explain. Last night I stole a suitcase filled with DoorWay from Gorgon’s Cartographers. Because of that she doesn’t have enough DoorWay to keep all of her captives imprisoned in the Real City. She needs the compound in the stolen briefcase back, so she’s trapped us in this room and flooded it to get us to talk. Classic Gorgon. She’s watching us right now.’
Danyl shook his head. ‘No. Firstly, water torture is where they tie you down and drip water on your face.’
‘That’s one type. This is another.’ Steve looked around the room. ‘Hello, Gorgon!’ he called out, addressing the featureless walls. ‘We know you’re there. Why don’t you show yourself?’
‘She’s not watching.’
‘Of course she is. Why else am I chained to this bath?’ Steve pointed at his foot. Danyl peered into the surging water. A handcuff, identical to the one still attached to Danyl’s wrist, connected Steve’s leg to a handrail inside the tub. ‘If Gorgon wasn’t watching, waiting for me to talk, then the water would keep rising until I drowned,’ he said patiently. ‘And what would be the point of subjecting me to such a horrible death? No, she’s there all right.’
Danyl stared at the handcuff in horror. What had he done? The water was up to their chests now, and rising quickly. He looked up at Steve’s smiling, confident face. Should he tell him the truth? No. Why confuse him? ‘I can stop the water,’ he explained. ‘There’s a broken pipe.’ He decided not to waste time explaining that it was his fault the room was flooding. Danyl would just reattach the pipe to the mixer beneath the sink and everything would be fine. He turned and headed for the wash-basin, which was now fully submerged, but Steve grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
‘You can’t stop the water,’ he insisted. ‘Only Gorgon can do that.’ He called out, ‘This isn’t working, Gorgon! You can’t break us. We stand together. United. Indivisible. Hey!’ Steve stumbled as Danyl wrenched free of his grasp and half ran, half swam across the room. He took a deep breath and dived.
The pipe was hard to manoeuvre back into place. The water pouring out of it at high pressure made it difficult to thread it back through the hole in the side of the wash-basin; it required concentration, and the burning in Danyl’s lungs, the maddening pounding of his heart and the buzzing in his brain as he flailed about underwater were all very distracting. Eventually he resurfaced to breathe.
The water was now up to his chin. Steve was splashing about, screaming at the walls. Danyl doggy-paddled for a moment, gasping in lungfuls of air, then he dived again.
He seized the pipe and pressed it to the mixer under the sink. He remembered he needed the bolt to fix it in place. Where was it? It must have fallen someplace. He ran his hand over the dark, drowned bottom of the basin, found the bolt and slid it onto the pipe, gave a victory pump with his fist and then hit his head on the top of the basin. He cried out in pain, coughing and choking as he swallowed water. He rose to the surface for air.
Steve’s arms were waving but his head was almost entirely underwater. Only his chin and the tip of his nose was visible.
Danyl gasped for a few seconds then dived again. He swam to the basin and gripped the pipe. He jammed the pipe back into the inlet on the mixer and spun the bolt into place.
The room exploded.
A wave slammed Danyl into the cabinet and dragged him backwards. A series of cracks louder than gunshots boomed through the churning water. He scrabbled at the floor tiles, trying to get a grip on something. A giant bubble of air rose and burst open. Danyl bobbed to the surface and looked about in utter confusion.
A sucking, gurgling sound bubbled up from below. The water was draining away. Danyl’s feet found the floor. The water was at his chest; seconds later it was down to his waist.
The lower half of the room came into view. The toilet at the far end of the room had pitched over. Beyond the toilet loomed a jagged gap between the wall and the floor. Water drained through it. The tiles around the gap were shattered. Danyl inched towards it and looked down, and realised what had happened.
Beneath the tiles lay the skeleton of the building: massive wooden beams that had been twisted and split apart by the weight of the water, which had dragged the entire floor down on an angle as it burst through. The gap opened onto another room directly below. It looked like a kitchen—or, rather, it was supposed to be a kitchen before construction was abandoned, long ago; before the unfinished fittings decayed and it was filled with drugged prisoners splayed out on mattresses, then flooded.
The space was long and narrow with a concrete bench running along the centre and stacks of discarded construction materials piled against the walls. Bobbing amidst them were dozens of bodies, all blindfolded with their lips stained blue. A row of windows bracketed by aluminium strips looked out over the desolate waste of Threshold. A door in the far wall led deeper into the house.
Steve coughed. ‘Sitstatrep,’ he croaked. ‘Sitstatrep!’
‘In a minute, dammit.’ Danyl squeezed himself through the gap and dropped down. He landed on a decaying pile of concrete blocks and sheets of Perspex. He splashed his way through the bodies and floating mattresses and called out, ‘We’re in one of the Threshold townhouses.’
‘What?’ Steve was still chained to the bath. Danyl returned to the spot beneath the hole in the ceiling, trying not to look at the people he was stepping over.
‘We’re in this abandoned housing development,’ he hissed up at Steve. ‘Threshold. It’s a hideout for the Cartographers.’
‘Please, Danyl,’ Steve hissed back. ‘I know all about Threshold.’
‘Oh? That’s great. What happened here?’
A short silence. ‘That’s classified. What’s important is that you get me out of this bath. Fast. We’ll need tools. Bolt-cutters or an acetylene torch. They won’t just be lying around. You’ll have to search the entire complex for them. It will be incredibly dangerous. If Gorgon’s agents see you, try to lead them away from me. Now, quickly, buddy. Go!’
Danyl waded towards a wall, keeping a lookout for any acetylene torches. The door opened onto a foyer with a rough concrete floor. There were no bodies in here. An archway in the opposite wall led to a large unfinished room with plaster walls. A concrete stairway climbed to a landing on the second floor. A door to Danyl’s right led outside.
He inched it open and peered through the gap. Dozens of Cartographers were running back and forth in the medium distance. They were moving along the road that wound across the hillside. Some of them carried bulky laboratory equipment; others moved in pairs carrying stretchers bearing bodies.
Danyl shut the door and backed away. He hurried through the archway, moving with a new sense of urgency. There was some sort of crisis happening out there. Perhaps that was why no one had come for Danyl and Steve, or even to investigate the sound of the bathroom floor collapsing. Perhaps they could use the chaos to escape? But how could they evade all those Cartographers?
The ne
xt room was empty except for a pair of wooden planks leaning at an angle against the wall, forming a ramp that led to the window. The planks were spattered with dry muddy footprints. The window itself was boarded up, but one of the boards had been removed and the light flooding through gave the room a hushed cathedral quality.
Danyl stepped onto the planks and looked outside.
Now this was an escape route. The bank sloped away from this end of the house, but someone had stacked broken chunks of concrete in a pile below the window. Beyond this lay a field of weeds hidden from view of the rest of the Threshold development. And across the field, just a short sprint away, was a thick cluster of trees. Danyl could climb out, run and be free of Threshold in a matter of minutes.
But what to do about Steve? He was chained to the tub, which they couldn’t even move from the bathroom let alone fit through this window or lift over the fence. His situation seemed hopeless. If escaping with Steve was impossible, did that mean Danyl should just leave without him? Steve would see it as a betrayal, but if doing the right thing was impossible, didn’t that mean that doing the wrong thing was the right thing to do?
Danyl put his hands on the window, ready to pull himself up; he stopped when something fluttered at the edge of his vision. Taped to the wall was a piece of yellowed paper with curled edges. It read:
Simon—
We’ve gone to get some food. Back tonight.
E & V
A cold wind blew through the room.
Danyl knew that handwriting. Verity had left him countless messages written in that same elegant hand, on their kitchen table or stuck to his forehead while he slept.
He ripped the note from the wall. The ink was faded. It had been here a long time.
E & V. Eleanor and Verity. And Simon, the chemist.
This was where they’d come when Verity left Danyl and vanished from the world. They came to Threshold to do … what? Take DoorWay? Cross to the Real City? Seek the Spiral? What had happened? What went wrong? Where did Gorgon come into it?
Danyl didn’t understand any of it. He stood in the centre of the room, staring at the page as light flooded through the broken window. Then he folded the letter in half and slipped it into his pocket and went back to help Steve.
36
Teamwork
Steve woke from his light doze when Danyl poked his head through the gap in the bathroom floor and said, ‘The sitstatrep is that we’re getting out of here.’
Steve was still in the bath. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘How?’
‘With this.’ He held up his hand. A band of steel gleamed in the sunlight.
Steve grasped. ‘Lightbringer! Where was it?’
‘On the floor downstairs, by the main door.’
Steve reached for his crowbar, then caught himself. ‘But no crowbar can cut through a handcuff,’ he protested. ‘Not even Lightbringer.’
‘We don’t need to cut through the handcuff. The bath you’re chained to is fixed to the tiles beneath it. So we’ll use this’—he swung Lightbringer like a golf club; it made a whooshing sound as it cut through the air—‘to smash those tiles, then we slide the bath across the floor and drop it through the gap. Once we’re downstairs we’ll have to carry the bath out the front door, but if we run we might make it to the side of the building without being seen. Once we’re there we can dash into the trees and make it to the road, somehow. Once we’re away from Threshold we’ll find a way to cut you free.’
Steve scratched at the stubble on his head. He contemplated the collapsed bathroom floor. ‘You want to drop the bath through there? Won’t that be dangerous?’
‘Not really. Oh, wait. You mean dangerous for you?’
Steve nodded.
‘I guess so, yeah. Very. But we can pad the bath with blankets and lay mattresses on the floor where you’ll land. That might reduce the risk of death or serious injury.’
‘What about the bathroom door? Why don’t we just force it open with the crowbar?’
‘The bath is too wide. It’ll never fit through.’
Steve drummed his fingers on the rim of the bath, trying to think of a way to improve the escape plan by somehow transferring the risk of injury away from himself and onto Danyl. Getting hold of a blowtorch or some bolt-cutters was still the best option. He’d have to manipulate Danyl into going out and searching the rest of Threshold.
But then Steve looked at his poor, unfortunate friend and felt a sense of—not shame, exactly, because Steve didn’t believe in the evolutionary utility of shame or guilt; no, what he felt was pity. Danyl had nothing. He’d lost his girlfriend, his book. Even his sanity. All he had left was Steve’s friendship—and Steve, who had everything, was plotting to send him into great danger. Gorgon was a monster. She’d deliberately chained Steve to the bathtub and flooded the room, trying to drown him. Danyl was no match for her. What was he thinking?
All of these thoughts flashed through Steve’s mind, and he smiled at Danyl and said, ‘It’s an excellent plan. Proceed.’
Things went well. At first. Danyl smashed the tiles fixing the bath in place then Steve lay inside it as he slid the tub down the sloping floor. It picked up speed, but midway to the gap Steve lost confidence in the finer details of the plan.
‘This is madness,’ he screamed. ‘We have to find another way.’ But the tiles were slick and the bath was heavy. It sped onwards while Danyl tried to grab it and Steve tugged at his handcuffed leg, howling. The bath hurtled towards the jagged gap in the floor and came to a shuddering halt when the rim slammed into the base of the wall. Steve fell back and Danyl breathed a sigh of relief just as the buckled and waterlogged floor gave way with a series of sickeningly loud cracks, collapsing under the weight of the bath, which see-sawed for a few seconds then pitched forward and fell.
The impact on the floor below made a sound like a church bell: a deep, pure, solemn note that hung in the air. Danyl peered through the gap, coughing and waving away the clouds of plaster and dust, to see the bath intact and a spiderweb of cracks radiating out from it. Steve lay in the bath, his arms crossed over his chest. When he saw Danyl he smiled and gave a thumbs up.
The best way to carry the bath, Steve explained, once Danyl climbed down and joined him, was to set it on its side. That way Steve’s handcuffed leg could reach the ground and he could stand and walk. Then they could just slide the bath along the floor to the front door. ‘Old-school style.’
They chatted as they worked. Steve told Danyl about Gorgon’s operation, and he smiled patiently as Danyl recounted his own feeble efforts to understand what was happening in the valley. They slid from the kitchen to the entrance hall, opened the front door a crack and peered through it.
Outside was a muddy slope dotted with weeds. To their left was a brief, slippery dash along the side of the house. Their escape route lay around the corner. Directly ahead of them was the driveway zigzagging back and forth across the incline, and beyond that lay a cluster of townhouses. There were at least thirty Cartographers moving about, some of them singly, most in groups.
But they still had a chance. A group of a dozen people were carrying boxes past their house, heading downhill. They’d have their backs to Danyl and Steve, and they’d block anyone else on the hillside from seeing them. Hopefully. ‘We’ll have to lift the bath off the ground,’ Danyl said. ‘If we drag it we’ll make too much noise, and take too long.’
‘Affirmative,’ Steve whispered back. ‘Get ready.’
They squatted down and gripped the bath, waiting for the perfect moment. The Cartographers shuffled down the driveway; when they were in position Steve hissed, ‘Go!’
They hurried through the door, carrying the bath between them, gritting their teeth under its awkward weight. They turned left and slipped their way across the slope. Steve expected to hear a shout ring out at any second. All it would take was one person to glimpse them and get suspicious about a bathtub floating across the hill and they’d be caught.
But the shout n
ever came. They reached the corner and steered the bath around it, then they were out of sight behind the house. They sank to their knees, grinning and gasping for breath.
‘We made it.’ Steve gripped Danyl’s shoulder. ‘You did well back there buddy. Much better than the shock troops I’ve been working with. Amateurs. Imbeciles.’
‘Thanks. We’re still not free though. We should—’
‘Oh, we’re as good as free. We did it. Mostly me, but you helped and I won’t forget that. Nothing can stop us. We’re a team.’ Steve held out his hand and Danyl shook it, and that’s when the dog attacked them.
37
Danyl and Steve match wits against a dog
She came at them from downwind, with the afternoon sun behind her. She ran with an easy loping gait. She did not bark.
There were two males. They’d emerged from one of the houses which Dog was Not Allowed Inside. They carried a large bath and one of them was chained to it. They hobbled towards the trees, stopping and resting every few steps. They stank of sweat and weakness and shame.
The male chained to the bath was being punished for something, Dog decided, and the other one must be his master: his pack leader. She would take the master first. She would sink her teeth into the soft, weak flesh of his leg, laming him, and then do the same to his underling, and then she would leap around them, shouting and snarling while they cowered and cried and submitted to her strength, and then Dog’s own pack leader would come and see her works and praise her and know that Dog was loyal and brave, and kept the pack leader safe. Dog’s heart filled with joy, and she ran faster, head down and ears flat.
Now the males saw her. They picked up the bath and ran, but made it only a few steps before they dropped the bath and fell over. They yelled at each other and the enemy pack leader leaped to his feet and tried to run for the trees, abandoning his inferior, but the other male grabbed his feet and brought his master crashing to the ground. Now they howled at each other and the stink of their terror reached her, carried on the breeze, and intensified Dog’s joy. As she sprinted across the last stretch of open ground, she vowed: I will make you proud of me, pack leader. She opened her mouth and locked her eyes on the enemy pack leader’s thick, flabby calves.
Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley Page 20