The Uncommoners #3

by Jennifer Bell

  Valian managed to land on his shoulder and roll to his feet. “Everyone all right?” he checked, just as, high above them, Johnny Hands vanished through the wall.

  “I think so,” Ivy said, rubbing her jaw.

  Seb lengthened the tape measure between his fingers. “We only have to wrap this around us to reverse its original effects. Now’s our chance.”

  Within moments, all three of them had returned to normal size. From their new perspective the room looked completely different. Ivy noticed Curtis’s boots stuffed inside the Returns bin they’d planned to hide under, so she guessed she must have visited the room before them.

  “Hey, I recognize that,” Seb said, inspecting a velvet tray resting on top of one of the cabinets. It contained pairs of cufflinks arranged in neat rows; one link was missing. Seb reached into his pocket to retrieve the cufflink Curtis had planted on them and held it against the single gold one in the tray. “Hmm, identical,” he murmured. “This is the cufflink we saw Curtis reading earlier.”

  Before Ivy or Valian could stop him, Seb twisted it out from under its fastening. Immediately, the drone of a horn filled the air. It was deep and resonant, like an ancient war cry. Ivy clamped her hands over her ears, her ribs quaking. The lights in the room flashed as a voice bellowed over a loudspeaker: “UNKNOWN INTRUDERS DETECTED. All agents report to the Equipment Room.”

  Grinning sheepishly, Seb tucked both cufflinks into his pocket. “Oops, sorry…”

  Ivy glared at him. “We need to go.” They dashed out into the hallway and found the mirror portal they had passed earlier. “I can’t think of another secret to tell it,” she cried frantically.

  “I’ve got one,” Seb groaned, “but I’m not going to share it with you two. Cover your ears.”

  Ivy did as he asked. Despite her curiosity, she was determined to give him his privacy. If the situation had been reversed, she’d hate it if he listened in on her. Seb was staring at his feet as he spoke, and without meaning to, Ivy understood one word: Judy.

  But there was no time to dwell on that. One by one they disappeared through the mirror and emerged inside a derelict block of toilets. Judging by the stale air and lime-scaled taps, the place hadn’t been used for ages. Ivy spotted one of the vanity mirrors returning to normal behind them; a divergent arrow was stenciled onto the corner of the glass.

  “What happened?” Seb asked, taking in the cracked floor tiles and empty cubicles. “This isn’t where we were before.”

  “We used a different mirror,” Valian reminded him. “They must each hide a different entrance to the Tidemongers’ base.” He went over to the only door and poked his head through the opening. “Looks like we’re in some sort of depot. It’s all clear.”

  They found an unlocked fire escape and rushed out into a quiet street in Third Quarter. There was no one around.

  “Do you think the Tidemongers will know it was us?” Seb asked guiltily. “That voice said ‘unknown’ intruders.”

  Ivy’s head was swimming with questions. “They’re spies—they’ll figure it out soon enough.”

  “And when they do, we’re in trouble,” Valian added. “We snuck into their base, listened to secret intelligence and stole a pair of cufflinks. We have to hope they don’t catch up with us until after we’ve found Rosie.” He stopped at a T-junction and looked up and then down the adjoining road. “I think I know where we are. The Bureau of Fair Trade isn’t too far away, but we have to be quick. It closes soon.”

  Valian led the way as they hurried along a deserted avenue flanked by tall, graffiti-covered buildings. Dingy alleyways with rickety fire escapes ran between them; their windows were either boarded up or broken.

  Ivy shoved her gloved hands into her pockets, thinking of what they’d just learned inside the Tidemongers’ base. The air was cold in this part of Nubrook, and the threat of Alexander Brewster and New Dawn only chilled her further. Worrying that they might have been pursued by Tidemongers, she extended the perimeter of her whispering senses as wide as she could. The rattling voices of broken souls trapped inside uncommon objects muttered all around, although there were far fewer than there’d been in First Quarter. There was something else at the very edge of her reach too, something different, only it was too far away for her to tell what it was.

  “Why is the Bureau of Fair Trade all the way down here?” Seb asked. “Don’t people use it that often?”

  Valian shrugged. “It’s more for storage than anything. Whenever two uncommoners shake hands, a record of the transaction is transmitted to the Bureau. The only time you ever really have to visit is if you’re trying to settle a dispute.” He scowled. “That’s why I know the Lundinor Bureau so well. I once got shortchanged by…”

  Ivy zoned out of what Valian was saying as a strange hissing voice soon became clear in her mind. It was one of the dead, moving closer. She listened intently as it chanted over and over, like a sorcerer casting a spell. It was impossible to distinguish the exact words, but whereas the broken soul inside Scratch seemed innocent and full of fun, this soul felt menacing and cruel.

  She scanned the vacant shop fronts, her nerves tingling. Scratch, you there? she asked, reaching him with her whispering.

  Ivy’s not something right, he warned in her head.

  I know. We’re being tailed, and I don’t think it’s a Tidemonger. Do you know what race of the dead it is?

  Her satchel shuddered against her hip. Scratch met never before.

  Valian was still rambling on, recounting his tale of being shortchanged (“…and the underguard wouldn’t believe that I’d originally handed over seven grade…”), but a movement at one of the windows drew Ivy’s gaze. She saw the figure of a tall man in a black suit and bowler hat silhouetted against a bright light. Ivy couldn’t see much of his face, other than a wide chin and dark mustache. Was he their pursuer?

  Just as she was about to warn Seb and Valian, a dozen underguard officers rounded the corner, the stomp of their heavy boots reverberating around the street.

  “They’ve probably just come from the Bureau,” Valian said, crossing to the other side of the road.

  Seb steered Ivy out of their way. “Are you all right?” he asked, studying her expression. “You look distracted.”

  “I…” She eyed the window again, but the suited figure had vanished, just as it had disappeared from her field of sense too. “It’s nothing,” she reassured him. “Don’t worry.”

  Having visited a tree house department store, a windmill workplace and a circus-tent shop in Lundinor, Ivy wasn’t entirely surprised when the Bureau of Fair Trade building came into view. Shaped like an American football stadium, the oval concrete structure also had a mammoth brass funnel inserted in the roof, so it almost resembled an old-fashioned gramophone.

  “The glove signals are collected through that trumpet before being processed inside,” Valian explained. “The system uses all kinds of uncommon objects working together.”

  Having passed through the automatic front doors, they found a small reception area staffed by a mustachioed gentleman sporting a rainbow wig and feather boa. Behind him were two doors: one decorated with garlands of autumn leaves, the other with large paper lanterns painted to look like Thanksgiving turkeys.

  “Welcome to the Bureau of Fair Trade,” he said cheerily. “What name are you looking for?”

  “Kaye,” Valian replied.

  The receptionist signaled to his left. “Take the turkey door to hall four. Please don’t forget your headwear—it’s against GUT law to use any of the record rooms without it.”

  “I know,” Valian grumbled.

  Ivy and Seb walked behind Valian as they ventured along a curved corridor with numbered doors on either side. The air smelled distinctly of peppermint. “Headwear?” Ivy asked.

  “You can’t exactly see glove records,” Valian told her. “You ha
ve to listen to them. Uncommoners use certain…devices to help them do that.”

  As he opened door number four, a babble of chatter erupted from the space beyond. It sounded so similar to what Ivy sometimes heard with her whispering that for a moment she thought the voices belonged to broken souls. The speakers were mostly calm-toned adults, although Ivy did catch the occasional child.

  “Who’s that talking?” she asked.

  “Glove owners!” Valian shouted back. “This way.”

  The large hall they’d entered was filled with thousands of crisscrossing silvery threads. Each one was strung taut between a tiny hook on the floor and another on the ceiling, giving the impression of a vast spider’s lair. Valian guided Ivy and Seb through a gap in the center of the web. Ivy watched the strands quivering around them; every time one of them vibrated, a new speaker could be heard.

  “They’re too thin to be guitar strings,” Seb observed. “What are they?”

  Ivy crinkled her nose; the smell of peppermint was so strong, it gave her a strange idea. “It isn’t dental floss, is it?”

  Valian smiled. “Spot on. Glove signals pass through the floss in here before being logged in the next chamber.”

  When they reached the far side, they moved under an arch into a room full of floor-to-ceiling storage chests. The noise from the dental floss hall faded slightly so that they didn’t have to shout.

  “Everything is stored alphabetically,” Valian said, reaching into a plastic drum mounted on the wall beside the arch. “See if you can find the right drawer.” While Seb searched for the label KAYE, Ivy watched Valian remove three cardboard egg boxes from the plastic container. A length of elastic was fixed to each one.

  “Got it,” Seb announced, pointing to a spot between KAYDOP and KAYEB.

  Valian pulled the correct tray out and placed it on the floor. Inside was a stack of sheet music, stapled together in batches. “Now we put these on,” he said, handing Ivy and Seb an egg box each.

  Ivy flapped hers open experimentally. “This is the headwear?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Valian said. “You can’t choose which uncommon objects do what.” He made it sound like the phrase was something he’d been told a hundred times before. “If we want to hear who my parents last traded with, we have to use these.” He sighed and slid the egg box over his messy hair, making himself look like a toddler wearing a homemade space helmet. Ivy stopped herself from giggling by reminding herself of the serious reason they were there, and positioned her egg box on her head, stretching the elastic around her chin.

  “If this isn’t a photo moment, I don’t know what is,” Seb said, laughing. “It would have been even better seeing those underguards wearing them.”

  “Just put yours on,” Ivy insisted, glad that Seb’s phone was out of action—common technology didn’t work well in undermarts.

  Once they had fitted their egg boxes, they all got to their knees beside the drawer. Valian inspected the first batch of music, put it aside and then spread the other sets over the floor. “The top one was mine, so I guess I was the last one to use this drawer. We need to check the rest until we find the ones belonging to my parents. There can’t be that many other Kayes.”

  He studied the nearest file for a moment, shook his head and put it back in the drawer. Ivy slid a batch toward her and hesitated. She couldn’t read music and she knew that, despite all his lessons and band practice, Seb couldn’t either. Scanning the top page, she expected to find a meaningless jumble of swirly symbols, straight lines and long-tailed dots, so it wasn’t what she saw that surprised her; it was what she heard.

  “…and I swear that this…,” a soft voice said in her ear.

  Ivy flinched. The sound was coming from her egg box, she was sure of it. She ran her eyes farther along the notation.

  “…is an honest and true…”

  Every note seemed to account for a single syllable of speech. Ivy checked which elements around her were uncommon, trying to understand how they worked together. The sheet music, egg boxes and dental floss were the only items containing broken souls; somehow the combination of their three abilities enabled her to read the document.

  She started from the beginning.

  “My name is Cherry Kaye and I swear that this is an honest and true account of my uncommon trades.”

  Ivy recognized the name: it was Valian’s mum. She regarded him as he sat across from her, scrutinizing another sheet. He would have known that coming to the Bureau meant he would end up listening to his parents’ voices. It couldn’t be often that he heard them talking, or—thanks to the Frozen Telescope—saw them. Today must be making him miss them more than ever. Continuing to read, Ivy listened carefully.

  “Seven years ago, on the twenty-seventh of November, I exchanged objects worth four grade to a sky driver named Lucien Brown, for a ride to the shores of Breath Falls. On the twenty-fourth of November, I purchased two glasses of Hundred Punch in Lundinor for—”

  “Valian, I found your mum’s records,” Ivy blurted. “Her last trade was on the twenty-seventh of November for transport to Breath Falls. Where’s that?”

  He looked up from the page. “It’s a famous waterfall in the First Quarter of Nubrook. I’ve got my dad’s records here. He hired a snow-globe photographer to take a picture of him and my mum in front of the Falls on the same day. They must have finished scouting in New York and spent an afternoon sightseeing in Nubrook before coming home—the twenty-seventh of November was the date they were murdered.”

  “So…if your parents were in Nubrook before they died, then it had to have been the Sands of Change they’d found, not the Sword of Wills,” Seb concluded. “Amos wrote that the Sands of Change was hidden in Nubrook. I wonder how your parents had come across it.”

  “I have no idea,” Valian admitted, “but whatever object the Sands of Change is, that’s what Rosie has. Did Amos Stirling write anything else about it in his journal? Without knowing what it is, we can’t understand what happened to Rosie.”

  Fetching the journal from her satchel, Ivy cringed. “There is one thing I found a few weeks back—but you’re not going to like it. Amos discovered some sentences in an ancient text that mention the Sands of Change.” She found the right page and, after using more of Valian’s raider’s tonic, read aloud:

  “Light to darkness, life to death

  Crystal droplet, bathed in breath

  Clasped within silver hands

  Deep within hide the Sands.”

  “Of course,” groaned Seb, dragging a hand down his face. “It had to be a riddle.”

  “We need to work out what it means,” Valian said, clearing everything away. “Start brainstorming.”

  Ivy ran through the rhyme in her head while she gave Valian a hand tidying the sheet music. Her gaze happened to fall on the notes of one of the files, and she heard a girl talking.

  “…I swear that this is an honest…” The speaker had a youthful, innocent voice that reminded Ivy of Scratch. Even though the file wasn’t stapled, the paper felt too thick to be a single sheet. Ivy prized away the thumb and forefinger of her glove, licked her fingertip and rubbed it against the corner of the paper: two leaves separated with a satisfying crackle. Carefully, she studied the piece from the beginning.

  “My name is Rosie Kaye and I swear that this…”

  “Valian—” Ivy tugged on his sleeve. “This file is your sister’s.”

  He huffed. “Yeah, but it’s empty. Rosie had only just received her uncommon gloves a few days before she went missing. She never made any trades.”

  “Are you sure?” Ivy asked. “There are a few notes on the next page.”

  Valian sidled closer, frowning. “I examined her file after she went missing. There was only the one sheet.”

  Ivy tilted the document toward Valian so he could see too. His
eyes sped hungrily over every note—

  “My name is Rosie Kaye, and I swear that this is an honest and true account of my uncommon trades.”

  As the rest of the paper was blank, Ivy flipped over to the second sheet.

  “Transactions in which no goods were exchanged are as follows: seven years ago, on the fifth of December, I shook hands with Mr. Rife of Forward & Rife’s Auction Company.”

  The speech finished there.

  “But—” Valian jabbed a fist into the floor. “Then Mr. Rife has seen her! He was lying to us.”

  Seb shot to his feet. “We should go and confront him. He has to tell us the truth now that we’ve got evidence.”

  “We can’t,” Valian argued with a shake of his head. “Not tonight, at least. The auction house will already be closed, and I have no idea where to find Mr. Rife if not there. We’ll have to wait till morning.”

  * * *

  —

  There were no three-person road signs available when they got to the boarding zone at the nearest atrium. Seb took a seat on a SCHOOL CROSSING placard; Ivy and Valian shared the HIGHWAY 17 EXIT behind.

  “I’ll start working on that riddle in Amos’s journal right away,” Ivy promised. “Scratch can help me—he’s good at puzzles.”

  Valian picked at the paint on the edge of the sign, the muscles on his face tight with nerves. “We have to hurry, though,” he said. “The longer we take to figure it out, the more chance there is that Alexander will find Rosie before we do….

  “And I can’t let that happen.”

  I sit splashing my feet into a clear pool of water. The zing of freshly cut oranges fills the air. Larks dart through the blue sky as my shoulders warm in the morning sun….

  Ivy forced herself awake. Bird-shaped silhouettes zigzagged across the plaster ceiling; the invigorating fragrance of citrus filled her nostrils. She pushed herself up in bed, feeling groggy.

  Her room was painted mustard yellow with bold-patterned curtains hanging at the windows. All at once, the evening before rushed back to her. Valian had already organized hotel accommodation for himself, but she and Seb, having assumed their babysitter would be a commoner, hadn’t planned on staying overnight in Nubrook at all. It had taken them an entire hour to locate an available room. The 1970s-themed Guesthouse Swankypants had been the first place they’d found that wasn’t fully booked.