CHAPTER 12
It wasn’t until our lungs nearly burst that we stopped running. Our escape took us beyond the weeds of the theater and plunged us deep into the city, a mess of crumbling buildings and rusting pipes. Here, on grimy locomotive tracks, we paused for breath, gasping on stale, gritty air. I leaned against an abandoned railway car, in the middle of an abandoned train, in the middle of the abandoned rail yard, muscles aching and feeling . . . well, abandoned.
The immensity of what I’d just done poured over me. My one ticket back to Arthurise. I’d just torn it up. How could I be so stupid?
Still bent halfway with stitches, Anna leapt forward and grabbed a broken pipe from the piles of rubbish around us and backed away from me, sharp, brandishing it like a cricket bat, her blue eyes flashing. It looked as though she could barely lift the thing.
“All right, who are you?” she said. “Why did you help me escape?”
“Oh, ah,” I gasped.
“You helped me last night, too. Why?”
“Well, I—”
“Do you know me? You act like you do. I have no idea who you are. I should bash your block in right now and run!”
“I say,” I said, rather hurt.
She lowered the pipe a little and considered me. I considered her right back, taking in her mud-streaked skirt and tangles of hair. She was thinner than Hannah, with hollow cheeks, and her hair had overgrown like weeds, lending her prettiness an edge of feral. And then there was that scar. . . .
“Anyway, hello,” she said, backing away warily. “Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, too, I think,” I said, still eyeing the pipe in her hands.
“We’re lucky we ended up in this part of the city,” she said. “I know this section. A little. I’ve been lost here before.” She nodded to the misty railway around us, then, eyes still narrowed at me, slowly set the pipe down.
It clanged against the metal of railway track at our feet.
A snarl emanated from the railcar at my back. Claws scrabbled on the metal inside. I jolted away from the railcar.
“Riven,” Anna whispered, and she began to tremble all over.
“Riven?” I said, trying to decipher where I’d heard that word before. “What’s—”
She clamped a thin hand over my mouth, cutting me off. We stood as still as death until the thumping in the railcar subsided. I exhaled, unsure what I was relieved about.
BANG.
In shrieks and howls, three figures smashed themselves through the railcar door between Anna and me, bending it off its sliding railing and sending iron plates across the tracks. Anna cried aloud. I grabbed her by the arm and shielded her from the . . . creatures.
That’s the best word I could find for them. They were human only by default. Their torn clothes flapped wildly around them. Remnants of vests, dresses, coats. But it wasn’t the clothes—it was their faces. It looked like someone had molded two faces from clay then squished the faces together. Where a human had one nose, the noses of these creatures had split off in the center of their faces, creating two noses. One of them even had three, the third growing on her cheek. Extra eyes, too, pocked their faces, blinking at us or swollen shut.
They gathered around Anna and me, hunched. Their legs had been wrapped in rags, and instead of tapering to the ankles, they grew wider, until they had actually split into two extra pairs of feet, stunted and purple. The creatures stumbled on both pairs.
“Lookee here,” croaked one with five eyes, two of them swollen in the folds of his neck. “Fe upper crust come to visit us poor folk belo-w-ow.”
“Lookette them fine clothess,” said one, who probably was a girl, because she was shorter and thinner than the other two. She had two mouths. Complete with two sets of teeth and two tongues. They grew sideways down her neck, like a melting wax figurine. When she spoke, I could see the other mouth through her teeth, separated only with strings of sinew.
“All themsss flessh on themsss bones,” drooled the third.16 “’N’ I bet thems is too high ’n’ mightsy to share. . . .”
O-kay, I thought, turning as they hungrily circled. Anna had grabbed the pipe again. I carefully removed my golden coat.
“Han—Anna,” I whispered, nodding to the rusted ladder attached to the car behind us. “Start climbing over the rai—”
Anna dropped the pipe with a clang and threw herself up the rungs in a blur of white skirt.
The creatures lunged. I flung my vest into their faces and dove forward, shoving my fingers into their extra eyes, digging into soft tissue. I kicked and gouged again, until their many-fingered hands ceased clawing me for a fractioned moment. I leapt onto the ladder and pulled myself on top of the iron car—it clanged a giant echo—and rolled over, falling knee first onto the gravel on the other side of the train. I grabbed Anna’s hand, and we fled.
The chorus of shrieks and bangs grew to a symphony of chaos. Every single railcar behind us burst open and more of them poured out and became an advancing army. Creatures with three legs. Extra arms and heads splitting faces. They hissed and howled and ran on all twos and threes and fours, blazing in the morning light.
“There’s hundreds!” I yelled. “Anna, there’s hundreds!”
“I know!” she yelled. “Run!”
Their stench of unwashed human grew closer, their craggy breaths at my heels. Anna and I halted short at the end of the pavement, the river slogging below.
Anna leapt first, throwing caution to the wind. I followed after, and as soon as I’d smacked into the sour black water, I realized: I grew up on an aerial city. I didn’t know how to swim!
I flailed and sloshed, spitting mouthfuls of filthy water, and fell into a rhythm of not-drowning by swiping the water. I swiped after Anna through a stone archway.
I’d swallowed my body weight in foulness by the time I lunged my last water stroke to solid stone and inhaled precious air. Steps rose from the water, led up to a decaying door, and beyond, a very familiar courtyard. Anna and I staggered to our feet and broke into one last run through the old door. I found myself, once again, in the knee-high courtyard weeds of the Nod’olian Tower of London. And we did not stop running until we were up a crumbling set of stairs along the wall to a familiar tower. We dashed into a cell, and Anna shoved the door closed and threw her weight against a rusty deadbolt. It slid into place with a heavy dooong.
Outside, there wasn’t a scritch of sound.
“We should be safe here,” said Anna, between breaths and shivers. “I know there’s a few Riven in that big building in the courtyard, and there’s some on the other towers along the wall, but I’ve hidden here before, no trouble. I know a bit of the unRivened places left, here in the lower part of the city. There’s not a lot. That’s why most everyone here lives in airships or the theater. Are you all right? You look pretty sick.”
I felt green with moat water, and wiped my head on my sleeve. I recognized the walls around us. This was my cell—the one I’d been prisoner in before. The Nod’olian version had most of the same names scratched into the stone. It lacked everything else, except a pile of old ragged blankets. It had Smell in spades, however. Foul Air of Moat.
“What,” I said, letting my heart settle to individual beats, “were those?”
“Riven,” said Anna, pulling a ragged blanket from a pile in the corner and wrapping it around her wet self. “You know. People who’ve had too much fantillium. You must be from pretty far north, to not know what the Riven are.”
“People who’ve had too much fantillium?” I echoed.
“Mm. They’re practically all that’s left in Nod’ol. Are you hungry?” she added lightly.
I tugged my ear. “Well, yes, actually,” I admitted.
“Me, too,” she said sadly.
She stood there, drenched, the spitting image of Hannah the day I’d dragged her into the observatory library and she told me about the Westminster, her hair black and curly with water and her boots squishing with each step. Anna
brought me back to the present by looking at me curiously.
“It’s nothing,” I said, quickly lowering my eyes. “You just—you look like my sister, that’s all.”
Anna hesitated, then grabbed a blanket from the pile and threw it at me in a wad. It smelled rancid.
“I’m Anna,” she said. “Anna Goodwin.”
Goodwin, I thought. A schism from Gouden.
“Everyone knows who you are, of course,” Anna continued, entirely as cheeky as Hannah was. “Jonathan Gouden, the newest illusionist. You’re not bad at it, either. But don’t let that go to your head. Anyway. Thank you for—for not letting me die.” She turned away from me, digging through the pile of blankets for nothing in particular. “I—I fantillium-died last year,” she stammered in barely discernable tones. “During last year’s Masked Virtue. It’s—horrible.” And then, with the mental gymnastics of an acrobat, she flipped to a new subject with a glance back at me. “You look a lot like my father. And I’m from the north, too. Maybe we’re distantly related!”
“Oh, I suppose it’s possible,” I said vaguely, pulling the blanket around my shoulders. “Is your father here in the city?”
“No,” she said lightly, peering into an old rusty kettle, which she had dug up from the bottom of the pile of blankets. “I have some old tea leaves, fancy chewing on those? It’s something, at least.”
I remained silent, my eyes fixed on her, waiting for the rest of her answer.
She threw the kettle aside and began digging through the blankets again.
“He’s on our ship,” she finally said to the pile of rags. “Outside the city. The Compass Rose. That’s why I’m trying to get beyond the Archglass. There’s no way out of the city from down here; you have to get permission from the miners and Queen Honoria to even get on an airship. And it’s not often they open the panels above to let ships in or out. But I’ll get out, right? I’ve gotten out of the theater four times this past year. So how hard can it be to leave the Archglass? I’m pretty much halfway there.”
She said it all carelessly, but her voice was taut. I dared to lean forward and put a hand on her shoulder.
And that’s when I got a clear look at my fingers.
My fingers, which had been swollen this morning, had widened slightly. The thumb of my right hand had swollen so much it was beginning to split. My thumbnail had widened to two thumbnails, the skin smoothing over another thumb tip protruding from the side. It eased down into my knuckle.
I jerked my hand back sharply, examining it with horror. Anna quickly wiped her eyes and leaned in.
“Oh,” she said, not sounding concerned at all. “You’re Rivening.”
“What?” I said.
“You’ve been breathing in too much fantillium. That’s what happens. You’d better not breathe in any more until it heals.”
I bit my lip and examined my other hand. The fingers on the left hand were wider, too, and a thumbnail had started to grow by my thumb’s knuckle. I felt my face. The bridge of my nose was wider. I’m splitting in two, I thought. I’m schisming.
“I’m turning into one of them,” I said hoarsely.
“Look,” said Anna, kneeling in front of me, matter-of-fact, and tracing the thin purple scar below her eye. “Do you see this? That’s when I started to split apart, during last year’s Masked Virtue. It was an eye. It had eyelashes and everything. I saw things all broken, probably like what you see through those.” She pointed at the broken lens on my glasses. “But,” she continued, “I didn’t breathe any more after that, and it healed up all right. And yours will, too. It’s not too far along. It will take a few weeks, but all the extra bits will shrivel and scab over. Just don’t breathe any more of the stuff, and you’ll be fine.”
“And what happens if I do?” I said warily, prodding my extra thumbnail.17
“You’ll turn full Riven. Your face will split into two faces and your hands into lots of fingers and you’ll have extra eyes and ears and toes and pretty soon your heart can’t push blood to all of it. And then your brain starts to split, and that’s when people really go mad, all those disconnected thoughts, and that’s when you die,” she finished.18
I fell back into the pile of blankets, my head throbbing. Perhaps my brain was splitting already.
“So that’s why everyone here wears masks,” I said. “To cover their extra faces.”
And that’s why Queen Honoria wore a mask over that divot on her face, I thought. By now, it must have developed into a full eye. And Divinity—well, now the eyelashes on the back of her neck made sense. She was growing a face down her back.
And Constantine. I didn’t even want to imagine what Constantine’s face was like. He wore a mask with a snout.
Anna sat next to me and pulled the blanket tight around her shoulders.
“I—had an older brother,” she said. “Once. He died, when I was six. His name was Jonathan, too.”
So I had existed in this world. I shifted uncomfortably. It was rather like attending my own funeral.
“How . . . did he die?” I said.
Anna shrugged.
“The masked guard,” she said quietly. “My—mother was pretty. Really pretty. I mean, the sort of pretty that poets write sonnets about and men duel over. Anyway. Queen Honoria sent the masked guard to the countryside to find the prettiest and smartest people to take back to Nod’ol, and they found my mother, and it all went bad. At least, that’s what we think happened.”
Anna’s eyes became distant. Rain pattered against the Archglass high above. The theater was a smudge in the distance.
“I’d taken ill, you see, and my father brought me to York to find a proper doctor. And while we were gone—”
The rain was a thunder of a thousand drops. When Anna spoke again, I could barely hear her whisper.
“And when we came back . . . there wasn’t much left.” She seemed to pluck up some amount of courage as she continued. “At any rate, it’s my papa and I, now. We sail all over the empire in the Compass Rose and he barters at ports, when we can find one. At night he opens the stove and we roast bread and cheese and he tells me stories of Mum and all the places we would visit. We never can dock anywhere long. The masked guard is always after us.”
“Why?”
“That’s just what they do. They’re children who were taken to Nod’ol when they were little, and Queen Honoria trains them to be her guard. And when people in the city turn into Riven, she sends the masked guard out for more. She’s dead set on keeping the city alive.”
I remembered Queen Honoria’s impassioned tears the night before. “Well, that makes sense, anyway,” I said, and added, “They seem to take especial interest in you, though.”
“No idea why,” Anna said lightly. “I wish they would give up.”
You do have an idea why, I thought. You’re just too polite to say. She, like Hannah, had Mum’s looks. She could make Renaissance painters drink their tubes of cadmium red.
“A year ago the masked guard found the Compass Rose,” Anna said with difficulty. “They took me away from Papa and brought me to Nod’ol. That’s when I first met Constantine.”
My hands clenched involuntarily.
“It’s been all right, though,” Anna said quickly, noticing. “I manage to escape the theater before we even say hello. And—I hide in the city and find what food I can, and look for a way out of the Archglass. I’ll be with my papa again soon.”
She shook her curls back—they looked a bit like a rat’s nest—and then changed the subject.
“I saw your prize in the lobby. During the ball. The cure to the Venen. Did your sister catch it? The one who looks like me?”
I nodded miserably.
“I have a day and a half,” I said. “Less than that.”
Anna put a thin hand on my shoulder.
Her touch released a pour of words from me. I wasn’t even quite sure what my mouth was saying. It simply spilled everything that had been bottled up into piles of words and he
aps of sentences, all over the floor. And Anna listened, her hand still on my shoulder, her eyes wide.
I began with Fata Morgana. The Venen infecting my mother and my sister, and then all of our aerial city. I told her about Lockwood, and the Tower of London, and Queen Honoria bringing me to Nod’ol to illusion for Masked Virtue. When I told Anna about the illusioned door, she gasped.
I continued on about Lockwood’s escape from the theater and my botched illusion the night before. I told her everything, straight up until the masked guard brought her to the wood platform.
When I finished, the words just sort of lay there. Anna blinked at me with wide blue eyes.
“Ah,” I said uncomfortably. “Ha-ha. You probably think my brain is splitting now. . . .”
“Probably,” said Anna slowly. “Of course, it does explain why you don’t know anything.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Anna grinned.
“Well—it does,” she said. “Queen Honoria’s been looking for another illusionist for a while now. The last illusionist—Justinian—Rivened five months ago. The miners are desperate for new illusions, and she’s desperate for orthogonagen. But illusionists are really rare. No one thought there were any left anywhere.”
Anna lowered her voice.
“Only a few weeks ago,” she said, leaning in, “Queen Honoria said she’d found old illusionists’ secrets, and she disappeared.”
I nodded, the pieces of numbers and symbols formulating a whole equation. That was when Queen Honoria had illusioned a doorway to our world.
“And when she came back,” Anna continued, “she had you!”
She beamed, the Mystery Solved.
I picked at the threads on the edge of the blanket. Outside, airships stirred, maneuvering around one another beneath the Archglass. I hadn’t seen movement like this in the Nod’olian sky before. Like a flock of sluggish ravens.
They were looking for me.
“I’m going to have to turn myself in,” I said to the blanket. I shook my head. “I’ve got to get that cure.”
“And you think Queen Honoria will illusion your door back to Arthurise?”
Illusionarium Page 12