It took the others a moment to react.
Then Seb smashed his drumsticks and Hemlock was thrown into the headless suit of armor in the corner of the room. Valian ran to Rosie, wrapped his arms around her, and then hurriedly began removing both their shoes. Ivy had seconds to formulate a plan. She couldn’t risk using her yo-yo: a room full of flying golden weapons would be as dangerous for themselves as it would be for Hemlock.
Cackling with amusement, Hemlock pushed herself upright. There was a fresh cut across her cheek. “OK, little lambs. If you really want to fight…”
At her feet, the disassembled pieces of the ancient suit of armor convulsed and reshaped themselves into the body of a huge golden beast. Four strong legs, a barbed tail and two clawed wings formed in quick succession. The individual leaves of gilded metal became scales, covering the belly of a headless medieval dragon.
Ivy edged back as the dragon stretched its wings. Cold sweat trickled down the back of her neck. She saw Rosie move her hands free of her restraints as if they were made of nothing more than wet tissue paper. Valian’s boat shoes were fastened to her feet. Ingenious! He’d used them to enable Rosie to pass through the unbreakable wire in the same way they allowed him to pass through walls.
With a flick of her wrist, Hemlock turned on them, striking the ground with her electric cable whip. Valian jumped aside and lobbed a bath plug into the air. Ivy had seen him wield one before; when activated, they behaved like tiny black holes, sucking in all matter for a short amount of time.
Where the plug landed, a crack of darkness opened and began dragging everything toward it. Ivy dodged aside as a rapier sprang free of its fastenings and sliced through the air on its way toward the maelstrom. She went to grab the edge of a table to stop herself sliding forward—“Humph…” —and received a blow to the ribs from the dragon’s tail, which sent her spinning.
Her satchel fell open and Scratch bowled onto the floorboard. “Watch out, Ivys!” he cried.
Before she could roll aside, a fan of daggers came loose from the wall above and careered toward her, points first. She shielded her head with her arms as they stabbed the floor all around, sounding like a battering ram. Shaking with fear she waited for one to strike, but, miraculously, she didn’t feel a thing.
When she looked again, she saw Judy’s bright face hanging over her, wincing. Two daggers had stuck in her ribs and shoulder, but she wasn’t bleeding. There was no time to say thank you, as, just then, Valian cried out in pain. Ivy got to her feet as Judy hurried over to help, the Sands of Change swinging in her grasp.
The bath plug black hole had vanished. The room filled with the repeated crash of metal as Seb battled the headless dragon in one corner and Valian defended Rosie from Hemlock in the other. But, as Judy ran, the tip of the dragon’s wing caught her in the arm with enough force that the Sands of Change was knocked from her hand. Ivy watched the necklace fly across the room almost in slow motion. The pendant spun clockwise and the flowing stream of sand burst from inside.
First it passed over the headless dragon, which clattered to the floor in a pile of lifeless armor.
Next Judy leaped to catch the necklace, but the shaft of glowing dust touched her, and the pendant rotated yet again. She rolled away, apparently unscathed.
Finally the sandy beam fell onto Scratch, and the pendant rotated twice more. Ivy threw herself toward him, but, when she got there, the bell had gone and a scrawny little boy with gray eyes and freckles had taken its place. A large white scar ran from his left temple up into his light brown hair. “Ivy?” he asked in Scratch’s high-pitched voice. “What be happenings?”
Ivy wobbled. “Scratch?”
Overhead, there came a loud whoosh like the blades of a fan, and they saw the necklace had become tangled in the ribbon of a medal hanging from the ceiling. The dangerous beam of sand spun around the room, creating havoc. It missed Ivy by a few centimeters as it glided over Scratch once more. With a little shriek he vanished, and a bicycle bell reappeared in his place.
Ripping the necklace down, Valian turned the pendant counterclockwise, shutting off the beam of sand. But in doing so he’d left Rosie unguarded….
“Give the necklace to me or I’ll kill your sister!” Hemlock was holding Rosie tightly around her shoulders, the jagged claws of the three-pronged plug lifted to her throat.
Ivy gripped Seb’s hand. She could feel him shaking, but both of them stayed silent.
“Don’t do it, Valian!” Rosie squealed. Her voice was determined, but her face shone with fear.
Valian’s body was like stone, his expression unreadable. Ivy had no idea what he was going to do. He’d be protecting thousands of lives if he kept the necklace—including those of her own parents—but he’d also lose the sister he’d spent almost half his life looking for. An impossible choice. Ivy felt her heart might tear in two, whatever he chose to do.
“I…I’m sorry,” he muttered, glancing at Ivy, Seb and Judy. He carefully unfastened the clasp of the Sands of Change before throwing it to Hemlock, where it landed by the foot of her lab coat. With Rosie still locked in one arm, she bent down and scooped up the necklace in her free hand.
“Now let Rosie go,” Valian demanded.
Hemlock snickered and held the plug claws closer to Rosie. “Foolish children, just like your parents!”
“PUT THE CHILD DOWN!” bellowed a voice from over Ivy’s shoulder.
She turned to see Mr. Rife standing in the doorway. With his head down, he bull-charged Hemlock, grimacing through the pain in his leg.
There was a creak and a slam. When Ivy looked up again, Rosie was collapsed in a heap on the floor, sobbing.
But Hemlock and the Sands of Change were gone.
Valian threw his arms around Rosie, both of them sobbing so hard they were shaking. Deciding to give them some privacy, Ivy and the others rushed over to check on Mr. Rife.
“Are you all right?” Ivy asked as Seb and Judy helped him sit up against a wall. The dark patch of blood on his trousers had grown bigger.
“I’ll be fine,” he replied. His gaze flicked to Rosie. “She’s OK?”
“Yes, thanks to you,” Seb told him. “I don’t think Hemlock would have released Rosie if you hadn’t charged in. How did you know where to find us?”
“I discovered a cufflink in my pram,” Mr. Rife croaked. “I assumed one of you was carrying the other, so I was able to locate you.” He took a few deep breaths, still staring at Rosie. “I…hadn’t really considered what it would mean to have Rosie back and Mrs. Bees gone. I’d grown quite fond of the old woman really. If it wasn’t for her, the reputation of my business would still be in tatters.”
Ivy remembered what Valian had uncovered during his research on Forward & Rife’s auction house. It must have been thanks to Mrs. Bees that they’d stopped making false claims about the items they were selling.
At the sound of sniffling, Ivy turned to see Valian and Rosie approaching, holding hands. Rosie looked just like her picture, except older—as scrawny as her brother but shorter, with sloping cheekbones and deep-set dark eyes. Using the belt from Valian’s jeans, she’d fashioned Mrs. Bees’s oversized shirt into a dress. Her shiny ice-blond hair appeared gold as it reflected all the objects in the room.
“Thanks for saving me,” she said, wiping her nose on the back of her arm. “Valian told me you’re all his friends.”
Ivy smiled. “It’s great to meet you at last, Rosie. I’m Ivy. This is my brother, Seb, and this is our friend Judy.”
“Hi,” Judy said. Seb waved gingerly.
“And this is Mr. Rife,” Ivy said cautiously.
“Hello again, Rosie,” Mr. Rife rasped. He raised a shaky glove to Rosie’s face, but she backed away. The lines around his eyes deepened.
“It’s all right,” Valian reassured her. “This is the man who looked after you
while you were lost.” Ivy, guessing Rosie didn’t remember much of the last six years, smiled encouragingly.
Rosie shuffled closer, curious. “I know your face,” she said softly. She held his fingers to her cheek. “You’re hurt. You need to be treated at a hospital.”
“She’s right,” Valian said, assessing Mr. Rife’s wound. “We’ve got to get you up and get you back to the main part of Strassa right away.” He bent down and lifted Mr. Rife under his shoulders, hugging him around his middle to help him to his feet. Ivy pondered if that was the very snapshot Mr. Punch had seen in the face of the uncommon clock.
They emerged from the side of the mountain a short while later, Seb supporting Mr. Rife under one arm as he limped along. Ivy squinted at the blue sky through Strassa’s shimmering dome. The defiant afternoon sun warmed her face and neck, although her insides felt cold. The Dirge were now in possession of the Sword of Wills and the Sands of Change. She wasn’t sure if anyone was powerful enough to stop them now that they had two of the Great Uncommon Good.
She looked from face to face around her as the five of them traipsed back through the building site. No one had spoken since leaving Midas’s gold-filled room. In the quiet, her mind had filled with worries about the fate of her parents and of everyone else in London.
Valian and Rosie trudged a little way off from everyone else, Valian with his head lowered. Ivy wanted to tell him that she didn’t blame him for giving the Sands of Change to Hemlock—she would have done the same thing had it been Seb’s life under threat—but she thought it better to give him and Rosie some space.
Weird beings in squidgy body was, Scratch said in Ivy’s head.
Opening her satchel, she brought him out into the sunshine. “Do you feel OK?” she asked.
“Like strange dream happened,” he said, “not back yet to normals.”
Ivy couldn’t get the image of Scratch as a little boy out of her mind. He’d been dressed in metallic-gray jeans and a T-shirt with an orange-and-white logo—the same colors he sported as a bell. She thought of all the instances when his quick thinking had saved her life or when his words had filled her with courage. And yet she’d never realized before just how young he was.
“It might take a while,” she reassured him, “but you’ll feel better eventually.”
She deliberated how the pendant in the Sands of Change worked. It had rotated twice while focused on Scratch, transforming him from a bell into a human, but that hadn’t been all….
“I…” She hesitated. While Scratch had transformed, she hadn’t been able to sense him. “Your broken soul wasn’t inside you back there, Scratch. Was it made whole? Were you alive?”
He went quiet for a moment. “Thinkings so me yes; Scratch never knowings it was possible.”
Ivy gazed over at Judy, who was skating ahead. She realized with a jolt that she couldn’t sense Judy’s soul anymore either.
Light to darkness, life to death…
The words in Amos’s journal certainly rang true. Judy was alive, Ivy was sure of it. She didn’t understand why Judy hadn’t told anyone yet, but Ivy knew that it wasn’t her information to share. She held Scratch to her chest, giving him a hug. She’d never once considered if he minded being a bell or if he’d prefer to be a human boy. As she tucked him back into her bag she decided that, when this was all over, they’d talk about it and she’d help him with whatever he wanted.
“Ivy,” Mr. Rife wheezed, struggling to fetch something from the pocket of his crushed velvet jacket. “Please, give this to Rosie. I want her to have it.”
Ivy helped him pull out a familiar silver object. “The Frozen Telescope—”
“There’s so much for Rosie to understand,” Mr. Rife said sadly. “By looking through the device, she’ll be able to see everything that’s happened to Mrs. Bees these past seven years.”
As Ivy carried the telescope over to Rosie, she considered how crucial it had been in their search for her. If Valian hadn’t peered through it three days ago, they never would have learned the truth about the Sands of Change, and none of this would have happened.
Rosie gazed up at Valian, listening carefully as he explained how the telescope worked. Ivy liked watching the two of them together. It was obvious how much Rosie idolized her big brother, and in her company Valian seemed more relaxed. There was a playful, easy swagger to his walk that Ivy had never seen before.
But when they reached the edge of the construction zone, an alarm sounded, wailing like an old World War II air-raid siren. The timber building frames rattled, and the dome overhead turned an alarming shade of red, transforming the sandy roads into Martian earth. An announcement crackled over a loudspeaker, first in Chinese and then translated into English: “STRASSA IS IN LOCKDOWN DUE TO AN INTERNATIONAL EMERGENCY. All guests are to remain inside the protective domes for safety.”
The red light of the dome flashed, making Ivy’s temples ache.
“Something’s happened,” Valian said, pulling on Rosie’s hand as he sped up. “Come on!”
As they reached the main part of Strassa, they saw skyguards lining the streets, directing people inside buildings and helping stallholders lock up. Yurt flaps were being rolled down; music was replaced with nervous chatter. Judy made a hasty trade at an uncommon button stall before it shut. She brought back two buttons and popped them both in Mr. Rife’s jacket pocket. “One to help heal the wound, the other to soothe the pain,” she explained briefly. “They’ll have to do for now because we don’t have time to visit the hospital.” (Ivy had been treated by uncommon buttons before and knew there was a different button for every ailment. You only had to tuck them in your pocket for them to take effect.) Mr. Rife nodded to Judy in thanks.
Valian scanned the road and fixed his gaze on a group of skyguards. “Something’s happening to all the skyguards,” he said in an unsteady voice. “Look, their bodies are going rigid.”
Ivy examined their faces. Their eyes had glazed over.
“They look like you did when you were under the influence of the Sword of Wills,” Seb observed.
Ivy grabbed the magnifying glass from her pocket and held it over her heart, using her whispering to listen hard. “Neither the Sands of Change nor the Sword of Wills is here,” she said. “The Dirge must be controlling the skyguards from somewhere else in the world….How is that possible?”
“The powers of the Great Uncommon Good are limited only by the user’s knowledge of them,” Mr. Rife croaked. “If Blackclaw has read and understood the directions in Amos Stirling’s journal, he will be able to control the minds of anyone, even across oceans.”
There was a loud crackle and another announcement sounded over the loudspeaker. This time, the voice was strained, making Ivy wonder whether the announcer was under the control of the Sword of Wills too: “THIS IS A SECURITY UPDATE. A dangerous criminal has been discovered masquerading as a quartermaster in Lundinor, in the United Kingdom. Underguards have been dispatched to arrest one Mr. Punch. ALL UNCOMMONERS WILL BE PLACED IN TEMPORARY PARALYSIS IMMEDIATELY. This measure is being taken for your own safety and will last until the criminal, Mr. Punch, has been detained. PLEASE REMAIN CALM. You will be released from your paralysis once our work is complete.”
“What?” Ivy exclaimed. “Mr. Punch? No—they’ve got it all wrong!”
The air rippled as several giant materializers dropped from the sky and hovered into positions where all the remaining uncommoners in the street could see them. The same video image appeared on every one: a figure in a black suit and bowler hat standing in a moonlit field. His face was masked by the shadows of the surrounding trees, but Ivy knew who it was immediately. She gritted her teeth as he started speaking.
“As of this moment, every undermart in the world is under the Dirge’s control,” Octavius Wrench announced triumphantly. “We are the pioneers of a new future for uncommon-kind, a future tha
t will see commoners submit to our superior wisdom and technology…or die.”
Before anyone could make any comment, the tinkling melody of a music box began seeping out of the loudspeaker…and wisps of noxious dust burst from everyone’s gloves.
“Everyone, take your gloves off, NOW!” Seb shouted, ripping open the Velcro tabs around his knuckles. “The Statue Salt will start seeping from the material. We’ll only be affected by it if we breathe it in.”
Ivy pulled on the cotton fingers of her dress gloves, scrunched them into a ball and lobbed them several meters away. Valian and Judy did the same with their gloves; Rosie helped Mr. Rife remove his. A puff of white powder arose from where they hit the ground.
All around in the street, pale dust motes swirled into traders’ faces. Coughing and spluttering, they wiped at their mouths and clawed at their throats. Some people stiffened within seconds; others got as far as running a few paces before their legs locked. Ivy saw a mother go to grab her young son before freezing in midair with her face caught in a wide-mouthed expression of terror. As the air clouded with Statue Salt, the only people left moving were the skyguards, who looked on impassively.
“We need to get as far away from here as possible,” Ivy said, covering her nose and mouth with her bare hands. “We can return to the construction zone—there’s no one there, which means there are no gloves covered in Statue Salt. The air there will be cleaner.”
They turned and sprinted back the way they’d come. Valian and Seb each shouldered one half of Mr. Rife’s weight, helping him hobble as fast as he could. A veil of Statue Salt had developed over the rooftops of Strassa, obscuring the sky through the red dome. Ivy listened to the eerie tune of the music box and knew that, in every undermart around the world, at that very moment, adults and children were being paralyzed. She remembered the sickening panic she’d felt at Guesthouse Swankypants as her limbs had gone numb. People would be terrified.
The Uncommoners #3 Page 16