by Aria Noble
But she couldn’t deactivate him here, behind the levers of a trolley, not without risking the lives of everyone on the vehicle, including her own.
“What was that?” the man asked. “You take us back to the Queen’s Line right now, or I’ll report you.”
The driver’s eyes, what Ember could see of them, were fixed on the wall. The trolley was accelerating now, picking up speed and heedless of the intersections it blew through.
“The wall is cracking,” said the doll. “It’s time to go.”
Ember stood up. The trolley veered around another exchanging passengers at a stop, and a couple of people screamed as it jerked violently to the left and then right.
Ember put her arms out, bracing against the backs of the chairs as she stumbled her way forward toward the driver. “Hey,” she said, lower and quieter than the other passengers had tried. “Hey, listen. You have to be careful.”
The driver’s eyes didn’t come off the wall, which was approaching now at a terrifying speed. His smile was just as wide as it had been when she got on, but there was a manic edge to it now.
The wall was directly in front of them, and the driver wasn’t slowing down. In fact, he seemed to be speeding up as if he was going to—
Ember lurched back away from the driver. “Get down!” she screamed at the other passengers, then dropped to the floor herself and curled her arms around her head.
A second later, the trolley rammed into the wall.
Chapter Twenty-Two
For a long moment, Ember sat still, taking stock of herself. She’d smacked into something hard, perhaps a seat, at the impact, and she could feel a bruise starting to form on her left shoulder, but otherwise, she thought she was okay.
Slowly, mindful of the possibility of further injuries she couldn’t feel yet, she lifted her head. She was facing the right side of the trolley now, and the passengers there were stirring. “Natalya?” a man whispered to the woman beside him who was bleeding a little from a cut on her cheek. “Are you all right?”
Ember looked toward the front of the trolley and gasped.
The entire front of the vehicle had been smashed flat against the giant ice wall, the driver pinned between his seat and the metal that made up the trolley’s front. Even as he struggled to push himself free of the crash, he was muttering to himself, but his words, what Ember could make out, weren’t words anymore, just a disconnected series of sounds without meaning.
But it wasn’t just the trolley that had taken damage in the crash.
She hadn’t noticed it at first, fixated as she was for a moment on the flailing, babbling trolley driver, but when she focused on the wall itself, she saw it: a crack.
Not just a crack, but nearly a hole.
And from that crack-that-was-almost-a-hole came blowing air.
Warm air.
It took a moment to register that, that the air coming from the other side of the wall was warm — Ember was having a hard time identifying the difference between the sensations touching her skin from the outside from the fear and confusion prickling her skin from the inside, but once she felt it, there was no mistaking it.
The air was warm. Warmer than the air inside any of the Frost buildings. Nearly warm like the air directly in front of a fire.
As the passengers on the trolley began, like her, to move from thinking about themselves and those immediately around them and look at what had happened, the tones of their voices began to change — from shaky and high from that initial adrenaline to something darker and much more afraid.
Ember stood, still slowly, still concerned about other injuries. She felt sore in several places, but nothing hurt sharply like something was broken, and her head mostly felt clear as understanding settled on her.
She stepped toward the driver doll. “Hey. You okay?”
His answer came out as a string of meaningless consonants.
Had something gotten jumbled in his speech programming? Ember wished she knew more about dolls than she did, wished she could do something other than deactivate them. She reached toward one of his hands, hoping to help him get free of the rubble around him, but even as she extended the gesture, the doll found the purchase on the trolley front he was apparently searching for. With a noise almost as loud and frightening as the crash itself, he shoved the mangled metal off his front and wormed his way out of his seat.
More noises came from his mouth, and while they still weren’t stringing together into words, they had the tone all dolls adopted for their “the wall is cracking” refrain. The driver scrambled on torn hands and knees over the jagged bits of trolley and slid his fingers into the crack in the ice directly above the point of impact. His fingers seemed to sink almost through to the other side, and when he pulled, a chunk of ice came away with him.
“Get him down from there!” screamed another of the passengers from behind.
Footsteps shuffled forward, but Ember was too fixated on what was beyond the wall to notice.
Sand. From what she could tell, it seemed to be sand as far as the horizon, unbroken in every direction. The air wasn’t just warm, but sweltering, and the wall around the hole made by the doll immediately began to drip with fresh melt.
Hands reached out past Ember, scrambling for any part of the doll, but he’d already squirmed his way through the hole and disappeared.
“Someone get the queen!” screamed that same voice from before, but no one else seemed especially inclined to move. Like Ember, most of them were staring, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, at the sand and heat on the other side of the wall.
The wall is cracking, Ember thought. No wonder.
The queen had been sure it was something wrong with her machines that was doing it — some mechanical issue that she’d been sure Ember could fix.
But the wall wasn’t cracking — it was melting.
“You.” The screaming man prodded Ember’s neighbor in the shoulder. His tone was still harsh, but the flailing panic of a moment before had been replaced with the tone of someone who was used to being obeyed. “Find an Envoy. We need to alert the queen at once. You” — he turned to another person on his left — “fetch some help.”
Ember took a step toward the hole. If she could just get over the sharper bits of trolley remains, she might be able to pull herself through the wall—
“You! Get away from there!” The man’s hand grabbed the back of her shirt and yanked her away from the hole. “Do you want to kill us all?”
“What’s out there?” she asked, even though she knew the man wouldn’t know — might even know less than she did. The air was still hot on her skin as it came through the hole, and the dripping around the edges had turned almost to a trickle. It would be a stream soon.
“It doesn’t matter,” the man grumbled. “Stay back.”
As if she had a whole lot of options with him holding her by the shirt like that. Ember could’ve fought, perhaps, but the man wasn’t threatening her — he kept glancing at the wall, at the stream of water sluicing off the edges of the hole, and his whole face was wracked with terror.
The roar of copter blades interrupted the other noises coming from the trolley passengers and the crowd that was beginning to form around them, and a moment later, the copter itself came thrumming into view. Everyone turned toward it, their terrified faces turned up like worshipers to their god, and murmurs of “The queen, the queen is here” rose beneath the other noises.
And indeed, as the copter set down, the blades spinning to a stop, the queen stood up from behind the driving levers and pushed open the door to the passenger bubble. “My dears, I need you all to look at me.”
Everyone turned to her. The man holding Ember’s shirt seemed to have forgotten her — his grip dropped away, and Ember was able to straighten the neck so it wasn’t cutting into her throat.
She could guess at what was coming. The queen would make some kind of speech to calm the people around her, to whom she couldn’t deny the truth of the hole, the warmth, the conspicuous not
-end of the world beyond, then declare this section of town off-limits and pretend to the rest of the city that nothing had ever happened.
Ember wasn’t interested in hearing it. With everyone focused on the soothing words of the queen, she might be able to slip out, maybe follow the driver doll.
Sand.
Those who said it spoke it like the name of a place, the way one said Dusk or Frost. But, like those places, Sand seemed to be named after some important feature of its surroundings.
If she could just get through the wall, she was sure she’d be well on her way to finding Sand. To finding the prince of Sand who was calling to the dolls.
A flash of color caught in the corner of her eye. Ember turned toward it, startled by the red in the usual pale colors of Frost.
Something sharp stuck into her neck. She had just enough time to wonder if she’d hurt herself worse than she initially thought, then everything went dark.
Chapter Twenty-Three
There were monsters everywhere.
Ember couldn’t quite see them — every time she turned, tried to look straight at them, they vanished into the empty white nothing around them. But she could feel them, pressing in, angry and hungry.
She woke with a gasp, sucking in air like she’d been holding her breath to the point of suffocation. Her head felt like it had been stuffed with mud, her thoughts thick and heavy and slow. Her mouth was dry, and her limbs ached.
She tried to sit up, to stretch her arms and legs, work the throbbing soreness out of her muscles, but she couldn’t move. Something was wrapped around each wrist and ankle, and it took her a moment longer than it should’ve to identify it as rope.
“Ah. You’re awake.”
The voice floated toward her, pierced her aching head, equal parts familiar and threatening. Ember blinked, trying to force her eyes to focus, to stop seeing everything as monsters. The figure in front of her swam, edges leaking like the monsters in her dream, but the color, paired with the voice, allowed her to recognize it.
The queen.
Ember squirmed. The restraints around her wrists and ankles — rough, braided rope — bit into her skin. The places where it touched her burned, as if she’d already rubbed herself raw against it.
The queen took a step forward and placed a cool hand on Ember’s hot forehead. “Be calm, devushka. I know it’s a lot all at once, but you need to let yourself wake up gradually.”
“You drugged me.” Her voice scraped against her throat like fingernails.
“Not I.”
“One of your people.”
The queen smiled without humor. “Everyone inside Frost is ‘my people.’”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s what you said, devushka. Perhaps you should learn to think before you speak.” The queen’s fingers moved slowly across Ember’s forehead. The motion was gentle, motherly — sickening.
Ember jerked away. “Don’t touch me.”
The queen let her hand drop away but continued to smile that same empty smile. “My apologies.”
“What do you want?”
“Well, then. To business, I suppose.”
There was another chair placed in front of Ember’s. The queen took it, crossed her legs at the ankles, and folded her hands on her lap. Normally, Ember wouldn’t have noticed or cared how someone sat in a chair, but there was a deliberateness to every motion the queen made that made it hard to overlook. Everything she said, everything she did, even how she sat down, seemed to be filled with some kind of other unspoken purpose.
“You were on the trolley at the wall. Don’t lie to me — I saw you there. It was where you were taken from.”
Ember swallowed down a remark about how the queen couldn’t read her quite as well as she thought. Ember had no intention of lying about that. She hadn’t done anything wrong, after all — it was the doll, one of the queen’s people, who’d driven the trolley into the wall and torn open the hole.
“I take it you saw what happened there?”
“Obviously,” Ember said when the queen paused for an answer.
“This is what I was trying to prevent. Why I needed you to repair my machines.”
“They aren’t broken.”
The queen was deadly quiet for a moment, and Ember wondered if she’d even heard her words. She tried again, a little louder.
“The machines aren’t the problem. They aren’t broken.”
Still, though Ember was sure the queen must’ve heard, she didn’t respond, just fixed Ember with a look that made Ember’s skin prickle.
“Fix my machines, Ember Mikailanova.”
“I can’t. They aren’t broken. Neither are the dolls. I think they might be getting instructions from somewhere—”
“That’s not possible. The wall prevents it. The dolls only started malfunctioning when the wall began to crack. Fix my machines, and we’ll solve all the problems in the city.”
“But it’s not the machines.” Ember fought to keep her voice level, to not let it stretch up into her upset range. “It’s the heat behind it that’s making it crack. It’s not malfunctioning — it’s melting!”
The word sounded just as strange coming out of her mouth as it had echoing inside her head an hour or two before. But the truth of it was inescapable — she still felt the scorching heat of the air tingling against her skin, a phantom of warmth like she’d never felt before.
Of course a wall made of ice and snow was failing. The real wonder was how it had ever been built and maintained at all if that was what was pushing up against it.
The queen stood. She glanced toward one corner of the room, where an Envoy had stood, silent and staring off into the middle-distance, presumably since the queen had come into the room. “Fetch them.”
The Envoy nodded once and left the room, but was back in another moment, this time trailing two more Envoys. Each held a knife and shoved in front of him a hooded figure with wrists bound behind their backs.
“What—?” Ember began but was interrupted when the new Envoys, almost as one, pulled the hoods off the heads of their captives.
Eli had clearly put up a struggle, had forced the Envoy to fight with him — both his eyes were ringed with bruises, his left eye swollen almost all the way shut, and his nose looked a little off-center from where it was the last time she’d seen him and was still bleeding freely down his chin and neck.
Felix hadn’t gotten so roughed up — perhaps he’d gone willingly with whatever Envoy or doll that had fetched him — but fear and confusion shone like sunlight from his eyes. “Ember,” he said softly. “What’s going on?”
Ember wanted to get to her feet. Wanted to throw herself at the Envoys holding knives to her friends’ throats. She’d probably take a drubbing herself, but it would be worth it if it got the threat of death away from them. But she couldn’t move. The ropes bit harder against her skin as she pulled against them, tried to struggle her way free.
It was no use. She was trapped.
The queen stepped into Ember’s line of sight, blocking most of her view of what was happening to the boys behind her. She was smiling again, and Ember was put in mind of a doll, always smiling whether it was warranted or not.
“Fix my machines, Ember Mikailanova, or you’ll watch your friends die.”
* * *
Ember followed the queen and Envoys through the hallways of the palace. She kept her steps light and even, determined not to give away anything more than she already had.
She couldn’t launch herself at the Envoys, not while they had knives to her friends’ throats. She didn’t think the queen was bluffing when she said that she would have Eli and Felix killed in front of her if she didn’t behave, and, even if she was, Ember wasn’t willing to risk their lives on the chance that the queen wasn’t being fully honest in her threat.
The hoods were back on their heads, and Felix in particular kept stumbling in his blindness. The Envoy holding him wasn’t especially rough — perhaps he
was one of Vallenovich’s men, and maybe threatening the boss’s son was a lot for him, even if it was on the order of the queen.
The Envoy holding Eli wasn’t so tentative — he kept shoving at Eli as they walked, and he had the knife pointed out at Eli’s throat, a proper threat rather than just a menacing prop. Ember noticed with no small satisfaction that his face was almost as bruised and bloody as Eli’s; apparently Eli had gotten in a few solid hits before being subdued, and while that probably made him somewhat less charitable to his charge than the other man was, it still made Ember have to swallow her smile.
Of course Eli wouldn’t take kindly to a kidnapping.
They ended up in a huge room full nearly to bursting with machines the size of buildings. Despite the fear and anger and confusion that ran through her veins, Ember couldn’t help but marvel at the space.
“I assume I won’t have to tell you again.” The queen’s voice cut through the near-deafening roar of the machines.
Ember grimaced back at her. The walk had helped to clear her head, but the noise still hurt worse than it ever had. Her head was throbbing, and that made it as hard to think as the drugs had.
She glanced over at her friends. Their hoods were still on, their hands bound, but she could still read the confusion in their stances, in the way both of them were turning their heads like they hoped to catch a glimpse of where they’d been brought. She wished she could talk to them, just for a second, just to let them know that she was working on a plan, some way to get them free.
They had to get to the copter. If they could just slip away from the room, get out of range of the Envoys’ grasp, away from their knives, they could make it to the copter and fly over the wall.
Would the queen follow them? Ember didn’t know. But it would be a lot harder to find them out in the sand beyond the wall, where people were afraid to go, than here in the city where everything was eventually reported back to her.
And perhaps the prince of Sand, whoever he was, wherever he was, would offer them a safe harbor.