The Uncommoners #3

by Jennifer Bell

  “Good idea,” Valian agreed, getting to his feet. His mouth twitched as he looked back at Mr. Rife. “Will you be all right on your own?”

  “I’ll be fine.” Mr. Rife gave him a weak smile, pushed a shaky hand inside his cape and withdrew the gold magnifying glass. “Hold this over your heart and it will amplify your abilities,” he explained, passing it to Ivy. He tapped his ear. “I’m a Sasspirit: we have exceptional hearing.”

  * * *

  —

  Ivy, Seb, Valian and Judy entered the mountain via a craggy dark hole between the timber skeletons of two half-finished buildings. The pebbly tunnel floor sloped down, into darkness. They read a sign nailed to the rock:

  RESTRICTED AREA

  ALL VISITORS SHOULD BE EQUIPPED WITH

  UNCOMMON NAIL CLIPPERS AND HARD HATS

  The crackle of Judy’s roller skates reverberated around the mottled brown walls. The cool air carried the odor of damp clay. Ivy untied her coat from her waist and pulled it back on, her heart thudding in her rib cage. Despite her nerves, she was glad to move away from natural light and the increased danger of Octavius Wrench.

  Judy rolled to a halt at a fork in the passageway. “This is where we lost Mrs. Bees and the dancer. Ivy, can you tell which way they went?”

  Ivy broadened her field of sense. She caught the pleasant whisper of Judy’s broken soul and the voices of the uncommon objects they were all carrying, but the tunnels were vacant. “No, sorry,” she said. “Nothing yet.”

  She lifted the uncommon magnifying glass over her chest, just as Mr. Rife had told her to do. The backs of her arms prickled as her senses spread farther. She winced as the gibbering voices of every fragment of soul, all the way to the jade temple, filled her head. “I think I can pinpoint the control center of Strassa, ahead of us,” she told the others in a strained voice. “It’s along the left-hand passageway. The other feels empty.” She concentrated a moment longer, trying to identify any individual voices. “I can’t isolate the Sands of Change yet. I’ll keep trying as we go, though.” There was no time to waste.

  They jogged along the left-hand passageway, the blue-tinted glow from Valian’s uncommon trowel lighting the way. Soon the stony walls turned into gleaming steel panels, lit by uncommon lemon squeezers. A door labeled ENGINEER’S ENTRANCE appeared up ahead.

  “We need to come up with a plan to get inside unnoticed,” Judy decided. “The facility might not be fully staffed, but there will be people working around the clock to keep Strassa running. If we’re seen, we’ll blow our chance of finding Rosie.”

  Valian put his trowel away and patted his jacket pocket. “I can use my boat shoes to escape if I’m spotted, and Judy can use her camouflage,” he told Ivy and Seb, “but I don’t have any liquid shadow for you two.”

  “I’ve got an idea for us,” Seb said, reaching into his hoodie pocket. “Only, it’ll require one of you two giving us a piggyback.”

  “What do you mean?” Valian asked.

  But Ivy knew exactly what her brother was thinking.

  Not again…

  Ivy stamped on the cotton lining of Valian’s outer top pocket, checking it was strong enough to hold her weight. The zipped opening was at neck height, so her head protruded above the top. As Valian turned a corner, she fell into Seb’s shoulder.

  “Will you please hang on!” he snapped, gripping the zip pull. They were both about ten centimeters high—bigger than the last time they’d shrunk themselves using the measuring tape, but still the size of hamsters. “The last thing we need is for you to fall out and get hurt.”

  “Sorry, but it’s difficult when I’m holding the magnifying glass over my heart,” she countered.

  “Can you sense anything yet?”

  She listened for broken souls in the surrounding area. “There are uncommon objects everywhere in this place, but none of them are the Sands of Change.” She communicated with Scratch, who relayed the information to Valian and Judy since she and Seb were too small to be heard naturally.

  Valian continued along the corridor, holding Scratch close to his ear. Glass doors on either side led to empty offices. Judy offered them a wobbly smile of good luck before turning invisible. Ivy caught Valian’s reflection. He was wearing her satchel across his body, his ratty dark hair tucked behind his ears and his boat shoes fastened with fancy bows. Ivy and Seb looked like strange dolls sticking out of his top pocket.

  Just then, light flickered at the end of the passageway. Before either Ivy or Seb could react, Valian darted through the nearest wall to avoid being seen. Ivy felt a cold, ticklish sensation all over her body, like silk gliding across her skin, and realized she was moving through the wall. She guessed the abilities of Valian’s boat shoes extended to her and Seb also. Valian emerged into a large laboratory, where the strange shapes of machinery loomed all around and white coats hung on a hook beside the door. A shadow drew across the glass. Ivy and Seb bashed heads as Valian nose-dived behind a desk to hide.

  The door creaked open and a tall woman in a green-and-silver skyguard uniform stepped in, brandishing her toilet brush. She scanned the gloom carefully. Ivy could feel Valian’s heart racing, as fast as her own. Eventually the skyguard scowled and muttered something in Chinese before leaving. Ivy wished she could have understood. Valian took a deep breath, tossing Ivy and Seb forward.

  “This is worse than hitching a ride on Johnny Hands’s sneaker,” Seb complained, rubbing his forehead. “Where are we?”

  As if on cue, Valian rose to his feet and looked around. Hanging from a track on the ceiling were a dozen silver bells engraved with a fingerprint symbol—like the one used to ID Ivy at the entrance to Strassa. A robotic arm had its fingers frozen around the waist of one bell. Ivy followed the track across the ceiling and down the wall, where it passed over a large cylindrical vat. Valian climbed a stepladder beside it and peered over the rim.

  The drum contained a transparent liquid.

  Ivy wrinkled her nose as a chemical tang filled the air. “Is it just me, or does that smell like Alexander Brewster’s Statue Salt to you?”

  Seb scrutinized the identity bells. “It looks like they’re coating the bells in the formula.” He sniffed one of his drummer’s gloves. “Yeah—they must be. I rang the bell when we were IDed with this hand, and it smells the same.”

  Ivy hurriedly passed the information on to Scratch, who explained it to Valian. “Hmm, Alexander mentioned that he’d given the Dirge several of his recipes,” Valian said. “They must be behind this somehow; perhaps one of them works here. But why?”

  Just then Judy shimmered into sight beside them. She looked flushed. She brushed a wisp of hair away from her nose.

  “The bells have been coated—sabotaged, you could say—with one of Alexander Brewster’s concoctions,” Valian told her. “It turns people to living stone.”

  “I know,” she replied in an ominous tone. “I found another lab just like this one on the other side of the hall. From the labels, the staff must think that the mixture is ever-shine polish. And that’s not all they’ve done.” She held up a wad of papers. The top sheet was printed with a list of numbered addresses. “I came across this in one of the office rooms. Last week, Strassa shipped these identity bells to every undermart in the world. That means anyone who has entered an undermart in the last seven days will have contaminated their gloves.”

  The heavy clutches of dread fell around Ivy’s shoulders. “This has got to be part of New Dawn,” she told Seb. “It would only take the sound of an uncommon music box to turn the chemical on everyone’s gloves into powder, and then they’d freeze, like we did. The Dirge would be able to immobilize the majority of uncommoners in the world…”

  “…meaning they could attack the common cities above without anyone trying to stop them,” Seb said. “Ivy, we can’t let that happen!”

  The hairs on the bac
k of Ivy’s neck stood to attention as an unsettling voice crept into her ears. It hummed somberly like a meditating monk, filling her with a deep feeling of emptiness. She knew immediately what it was.

  “Findings Ivy the Sands of Change!” Scratch announced. “Is fast movings; hurry follow Scratch, please.”

  In Scratch’s voice, Ivy directed Valian and Judy away from the laboratory, through a staff canteen, across a large atrium and out of the Strassa control center altogether. They had worked their way back to the mottled-brown rocky tunnels they’d started in when Ivy brought them to a stop. The broken soul inside the Sands of Change had settled in one position.

  Ivy tried to pinpoint its location.

  Strange…

  It sounded like the object was inside the rocky wall just to the left of them. Ivy wondered if there was a secret chamber on the other side. She explained it via Scratch.

  “I can try walking through it,” Valian said. “But just to warn you: I’ve never used the boat shoes to pass through something that thick before, so I don’t know what may happen.”

  He took a deep breath before stepping forward. The cool, slippery feeling over Ivy’s skin lasted longer than before, but they eventually emerged into a dimly lit lounge. She tingled with relief, examining the Tudor-style beams running across the ceiling and the tapestries adorning the mahogany-paneled walls. The room was decorated in the style of an old English stately home. Logs had been laid in the cold fireplace, and the air smelled medicinal, like bitter herbs. Valian lifted Ivy and Seb down onto the ground so they could use the measuring tape to return to normal size.

  “This is the right place,” Judy hissed, inspecting a brightly colored mask and costume dumped on a sofa in the center of the room. “This is the outfit that dancer was wearing.”

  “I wonder where the real Midas is,” Seb said. “The Dirge must have gotten rid of them in order to assume their identity.”

  Ivy fixed on the location of the Sands of Change as Valian handed her back her satchel. She could tell the necklace was close by. “This way,” she told the others.

  They padded across the room toward a door in the far wall. Beyond it was a workbench scattered with uncommon equipment: crystal prisms, conical flasks, a Bunsen burner and an alchemist’s crucible. It didn’t exactly fit with the rest of Midas’s décor.

  “This looks out of place; it has to belong to one of the Dirge,” Valian said in a hushed voice. A lab coat identical to the coats Ivy had seen hanging in the Strassa control center was draped over the back of a chair. “It’s all starting to make sense now,” he muttered bitterly. “After Octavius Wrench read our minds, he must have instructed another of the Dirge to hunt for Rosie and the Sands of Change. Somehow they discovered the truth about Mrs. Bees before we did and posed as Midas in order to lure Mrs. Bees and Mr. Rife away.” He nodded to the lab coat. “Maybe the Dirge member knew who Midas was because they work in the control center. That would explain how they were able to interfere with the bells.”

  Ivy examined the items on the table. “Looks like they’ve already been trying to fix the clasp on the necklace,” she said. “Come on, the Sands of Change is behind that door.”

  Seb and Valian positioned themselves, one on each side of the door. Behind the melancholy, droning voice of the Sands of Change, Ivy caught a faint whisper and identified the tapestry hanging beside the door as uncommon. “Careful,” she muttered as Seb brushed the fabric with his shoulder by mistake.

  “Hang on,” he said, frowning. “There’s something behind this.” He heaved aside the wall hanging to reveal a gray stone door engraved with a crooked sixpence. Ivy tensed. It wasn’t the tapestry she’d sensed after all.

  “It must lead to the Hexroom,” Seb decided. “But whose door is it?”

  From her coat pocket, Ivy fetched the crooked sixpence that she’d picked up at the building site and flipped it over between her fingers. With every turn, a new face appeared. She recognized Monkshood’s scaly mask and the two pointed tusks of Blackclaw’s. After a few more turns she found the mask that matched the one carved on the stone door. “Judging by the design, I’d say it was…Hemlock.”

  Valian’s nostrils flared. “I should have known it would be Hemlock behind this! Probably wants to finish what they started when they killed my parents.”

  Just then, light flickered under the other doorway, and they heard a clatter of metallic objects. Ivy reached for her yo-yo. She wasn’t sure what to prepare for if they really were about to fight a member of the Dirge. They’d only survived their encounter with Monkshood at the summit of Breath Falls because he’d chosen to leave.

  Valian nodded at everyone, and then flung the door open.

  Ivy stared as she beheld the space beyond. She had never seen so many gold objects in all her life. Gleaming ornate swords and pistols decorated the walls; sparkling jewelry, coins and clocks were displayed in cabinets; military flags embroidered in gold thread hung from the ceiling; and a headless suit of gilded armor stood in one corner.

  Mrs. Bees sat in a chair in the center of the room, her wrists fastened to the armrests with thin metallic wire. Light glowed around her, blinking on and off like an emergency beacon. With every flash of light, some aspect of Mrs. Bees was reverting to Rosie. Her dark hair tumbled down and went blond. Her skin darkened, and the wrinkles disappeared from her forehead and around her mouth. Her scowl smoothed into a wide-eyed look of fright, and her clothes sagged like a collapsed tent around her bony shoulders. She became so scrawny that she was soon able to try wriggling free from her paper clip shackles.

  As she did so, a raven-haired person wearing a lab coat stepped forward, grabbed Rosie and retightened her bonds. For a split second, the aggressor’s surgical gloves were peeled back in the struggle. Ivy caught sight of their shriveled, blistered hands—a deformity she had seen before, and it meant one thing:

  They were a member of the Dirge.

  Just then, Valian barged through the doorway and charged in. “Get away from my sister!”

  Valian knocked Hemlock over and they both slammed into a case of jewelry. The glass front shattered, sending precious gems rolling across the floor.

  Hemlock twitched. Ivy saw her face—a hawkish nose, pale blotchy skin and hooded brows. Her dark hair was scraped back into a taut bun. She bounced to her feet and pulled out the electric cord she’d used to attack Mr. Rife. Valian leaped back as she lashed it toward him. The metal claws in the plug tore splintering holes in the wooden boards.

  Her voice, however, was soft and sweet. “Stay where you are,” she warned, moving to Rosie, who was still strapped to the chair. She held the plug threateningly close to Rosie’s trembling chest. The claws splayed with the sound of a knife being sharpened.

  Rosie’s cheeks were wet with tears, her eyes drawn so wide it looked to Ivy as though she was seeing the world for the first time. “Valian?” she squeaked.

  “Rosie, it’s me,” he said, his eyes shining. “Don’t worry.”

  Ivy hoped Valian had a plan. Judy used her camouflage to disappear; Seb was frozen, a drumstick in either hand, waiting to see what would happen.

  “Come any closer and I’ll kill her,” Hemlock assured them calmly.

  Ivy couldn’t sense any broken soul within her, so Hemlock must be alive.

  “I have no use for the girl, now that I have this,” she explained. Dangling from Hemlock’s free hand was the Sands of Change. The pendant was just as Ivy had seen it in Rosie’s photo—a black crystal set in a silver mount. The rope chain was unfastened, the clasp undone.

  “Leave her alone,” Valian growled, his face contorting with anger.

  Hemlock leered. “Or you’ll do what? You are no match for me, especially in this room.” She signaled with her surgical gloves to the hoard of golden objects on display.

  Ivy broadened her senses. Almost every item present was uncom
mon—from the jeweled crowns and trophies, to the gold bars and Olympic medals. She had a bad feeling that they would all have unfriendly powers.

  “Your parents defied me,” Hemlock continued. “You don’t want to make the same mistake.”

  “You murdered them…” Valian’s voice fractured. Ivy noticed him squeezing something behind his back.

  “Yes,” Hemlock declared, lifting her pointed chin. “Even after a dose of tongueweed, they couldn’t tell me where the Sands of Change was. It wasn’t till they were dead that I finally believed their assertion that they’d lost it through carelessness.”

  Valian was shaking. “They were my mum and dad!”

  Ivy curled her hands into fists, liquid welling in her eyes. Valian’s pain was written across his entire body.

  “They were in my way,” Hemlock replied simply. “I would have poisoned you and your sister also, but your parents wrestled the hemlock away from me and drank the last of it. So you see, there was nothing left to leave as a trap for you.”

  Tears streamed down Valian’s cheeks. Ivy wanted nothing more than to throw her arms around him, but she didn’t dare move. At least Valian knew now that his parents’ death hadn’t been for nothing: they had died to save him and Rosie.

  “Now, let’s see if this device is correctly mended, shall we?” Hemlock fastened the clasp of the necklace and then swiveled the pendant once clockwise. A beam of shifting sand about the width of a broomstick shot out of it, glowing with golden light. Within the swirling dust, Ivy recognized the shapes of Chinese characters. Hemlock angled the pendant so that the beam moved across the floor toward Seb. Where it touched the boards, it left behind a bizarre trail of changes. In some places the wood appeared rotten or burned; in others it became metal or glass.

  Without warning, Judy materialized over Hemlock’s shoulder and snatched the Sands of Change from her grasp. Hemlock jerked with surprise and lashed her electric cord, but Judy dodged the flailing plug before vanishing again.