Inside the Shadow City

by Kirsten Miller

  “My dear Ananka. It has been a long time—long enough for me to become an old woman.” She put a hand to my cheek and whispered in my ear, “I was pleased to hear that you are on our side again.”

  She ushered me into a living room teeming with a jungle of exotic plants.

  “Please excuse my hobby. I cannot leave the house as I once did, so I am forced to bring nature inside.” She stopped to tenderly stroke the leaves of a giant orchid covered with tiny purple blooms. “Did you know that an orchid, if properly cared for, will never die? They are immortal. If only we were all so fortunate.”

  Verushka sighed and sank into a sofa that was in danger of being swallowed by an overgrown Virginia creeper.

  “Now you must tell me. What has happened?”

  “We know who’s behind the kidnappings,” Kiki informed her. “It’s Naomi Throgmorton and Jacob Harcott. They’re working with the Fu-Tsang gang.”

  “The Atalanta girl and the boy from the park? No,” Verushka said, shaking her head in disbelief. “I cannot believe they could organize such an ingenious plan.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so, either. But there’s no doubt now. Ananka saw them in action.”

  “And were you able to plant the tracking device?”

  “Yes. But not in the way that we had hoped.”

  “No? Then how did you plant it?”

  “Something went wrong, Verushka. They weren’t after Tyler Deitz. They wanted another girl.”

  “How is this possible? Who did they take?”

  Kiki grimaced, unable to find the right words.

  “They kidnapped the Princess,” I told Verushka.

  “Sidonia?” The horror in Verushka’s voice told me two things. The first was that Kiki was not behind the kidnappings. The second was that they knew the Princess well.

  “Yes,” Kiki admitted.

  “I do not understand. What do they want with Sidonia? She cannot give them the map.”

  “No, but she has enough money to fund their little get-togethers. And she’s tortured Naomi for years,” I said, offering the only solution I had been able to find. “I guess this was Naomi’s revenge.”

  “Stupid children,” said Verushka sadly.

  “There’s more,” Kiki told her. “Betty tried to save Sidonia. They took her, too.”

  “You will have to find them,” Verushka insisted. “Tonight. You will not be the only ones looking. You must get to them first.”

  “We’re already on the case. The Irregulars are meeting us at Ananka’s house. I’m just here to collect some supplies.”

  Kiki set off down the hall and disappeared into another room. Verushka leaned back on the sofa, lost in thought. An opportunity had presented itself. With Kiki gone, I could ask the question that was bouncing around in my head.

  “Verushka?”

  “Yes, my dear?” she replied absentmindedly, still distracted by the news.

  “How do you know the Princess?”

  Verushka snapped to attention and looked at me with an amused expression.

  “Two years ago you were too shy to ask such a question.” She pulled herself up with her cane. The effort was clearly painful. “You ask how I know Sidonia? This is not a story I can tell in a few minutes. Just remember that all are not cooks who walk with long knives. If I tell you more, I will put you in terrible danger.”

  “As far as I can tell, I’m already in danger.”

  “This is true,” she agreed. She studied me for a moment, then walked to a bookshelf, where she retrieved a small red book. “Kiki has told me you like to read,” she said enigmatically.

  I nodded.

  “This is a very important book. You must keep it in a safe place and never let anyone see it. Even little books can be very dangerous.”

  I scanned the cover, but the book had no title. I slipped it into my knapsack.

  “What’s it about?” I asked.

  I could tell that I wasn’t going to get a straight answer.

  “Do you know why you were chosen for the Irregulars?” Verushka asked instead. It was a question for which I had never found an answer.

  “Because of my library?” I guessed.

  “No,” Verushka said, chuckling softly and shaking her head. “There are other libraries. Maybe they are not so good, but …” She shrugged. “You were selected because you were the only one Kiki did not have to find. You found her. That makes you very special.” I didn’t know what to say. “Take care of my book,” she said.

  “I will,” I promised, and Verushka reached out and hugged me with her free arm.

  Kiki walked into the living room stuffing a flashlight and a handful of hypodermic needles into a black knapsack.

  “How touching,” she said. “You’ve gotten awfully sentimental in your old age, Verushka. Let’s go, Ananka. It’s getting late.”

  We left the house, and I began to cross the lawn, heading for the fire escape.

  “Not so fast,” instructed Kiki. “We may have been spotted on the way here. We’ll have to take the fast way down. Here, put these on.” She tossed a pair of heavy gloves at my feet.

  “Spotted? Who could have spotted us?” I asked.

  “Bad guys,” said Kiki.

  “What kind of bad guys? And why are we running from them?”

  “Did you see Verushka’s leg? They shot her. She’ll be crippled forever.”

  “I don’t understand. When was Verushka shot?” I asked.

  “After the explosion in the Shadow City. Now stop asking questions and move faster. If we get caught, they’ll be happy to shoot us, too.”

  My hands trembled as I pulled on the gloves. Kiki walked to the edge of the building and threw two ropes over the side. She grabbed one, and without waiting for me, began rappelling down the building’s wall. I took the other in my hands, muttered a short prayer, and hopped over the side. But my feet never made contact with the wall of the building. Instead, I swung in through an open window and landed with a crash inside a dark bedroom where a teenage boy was sleeping in his underwear.

  “No, I don’t want to go to your spaceship,” he mumbled, tossing in his sleep. “I want to stay here on Earth.”

  I jumped back out the window, skinning both knees in the process. A few minutes and a panic attack later, I slid off the end of the rope and landed in a courtyard in the back of the building.

  “What took you so long?” asked Kiki with an arched eyebrow.

  “I dropped in on one of your neighbors,” I said, feeling a little light-headed.

  “Yeah, I saw that. Betty’s been kidnapped and you’re making social calls. Come on, we have to leave the Vespa,” Kiki said. “We’ll go out the back way.” She climbed over a fence that separated the courtyard from the backyards of several buildings. I scrambled behind her as we made our way to the other end of the block. Peeking out of a narrow alley, we checked Second Avenue for suspicious vehicles. A battered taxi sped through a cloud of steam that billowed out of a manhole in the middle of the road.

  “All clear,” said Kiki. “Let’s go.”

  • • •

  I found the door to my apartment unlocked and a figure pacing the center of the room. I flipped the light switch, ready to confront the intruder. When my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw it was Oona. DeeDee and Luz were seated on the couch.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” whispered Oona. “It’s past midnight. I didn’t think we should wake your parents up, so I picked the lock.”

  I made a mental note to change the locks.

  “Just be quiet,” I warned them. “My parents think I’m spending the night with Kiki. If they hear us, we’ll be stuck here ’til morning.”

  “What’s going on?” whispered DeeDee. “Where Betty?”

  I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  “They got her, didn’t they?” snarled Luz, jumping to her feet. “I knew something bad was going to happen. I can’t believe I snuck out of the house for this.”

  “Didn’t
the Miracle Mixture work?” DeeDee was distraught.

  “It didn’t have a chance to work,” I assured her. “They never tried to drug Betty. They weren’t after Tyler Deitz. The kidnappers wanted the Princess. They got her.”

  Every eye in the room turned to Kiki.

  “Then where’s Betty?” demanded Oona.

  “She tried to save the Princess. They took her, too.”

  Luz pointed a finger at Kiki. “Don’t you see? She’s behind all of this. She’s a liar and a thief, and you guys were idiots to believe her. I’m out of here.”

  I stopped Luz before she got to the door.

  “This is all about the gold, isn’t it, Luz? Are you really that greedy? Betty’s been kidnapped, and we don’t have long to rescue her. If they find out she’s a spy, she could die.”

  “Oh, come on, Ananka. Don’t you know when you’re being had? You can’t tell me that she didn’t set this whole thing up.”

  “Actually, I can tell you that. I know who’s responsible for the kidnappings. It’s Naomi Throgmorton and Jacob Harcott. I saw them drug the Princess with my own eyes.”

  Luz and I stared at each other. Any sign of uncertainty in my face, and she’d walk out the door. Finally, she sighed and tugged on her ponytail.

  “We need your help, Luz,” I begged.

  “Okay. I’ll do it for Betty. But as soon as we find her, I quit. Now give me the tracking device.”

  I reached into my knapsack and handed it to Luz. She turned it on and studied the screen. “The signal’s faint, but it looks like they’re in Chinatown,” she said.

  “Do you think they could be in the Shadow City?” I asked.

  “They’re not that far underground. The signal would be much weaker. But they could be in one of the hidden rooms with an entrance to the Shadow City.”

  “What are we waiting for?” asked Oona. “Let’s go!”

  “Hold on. I need to get the map,” I said.

  “The map of the Shadow City?” asked Oona.

  “Are we going back?” whispered DeeDee.

  “I’m not sure we have a choice,” I told her.

  I left the Irregulars in the living room and went to retrieve the map from its hiding place. I shut the door of my bedroom and scanned the towers of books that lined the walls. I snatched a book of fairy tales and shook it. The map of the Shadow City fell to the floor, its paper stiff with DeeDee’s dried blood. I grabbed Glimpses of Gotham and opened my knapsack. Inside was Verushka’s book. There was no time for reading, but I couldn’t stop myself from flipping past dozens of pages handwritten in Russian. One of the few entries in English was marked with a small photograph.

  It is the anniversary of the death of Princess Sophia. Ten years ago, she and her husband were poisoned, and Livia became queen of Pokrovia. Today, Livia and her men continue to search for us, and the world believes I am guilty of Sophia’s murder. When you are older, we will make sure that the truth is told. It is my duty to punish Livia for the terrible things she has done.

  I looked down at the photo of a stunning woman dressed in royal robes. Standing by her side was a tall man in a military uniform. He smiled down at an infant cradled in his arms. I turned the picture over to find the inscription Sophia and Her Family written on the back.

  The floorboards outside my bedroom creaked, and I tucked the little book under a pillow.

  “What’s taking you so long?” Kiki Strike stuck her head through the door. “Don’t tell me you forgot where you hid the map.”

  “No, I’ve got it,” I said. For a moment, I found myself unable to move.

  “Well?” Kiki demanded. “What is it, Ananka?”

  “Nothing,” I said, ignoring a little voice that was whispering in my ear.

  • • •

  The green blip on the tracking device grew stronger as the Irregulars slinked through Chinatown. According to Oona’s watch, it was one thirty in the morning. At the corner of Bayard and Elizabeth streets, Kiki grabbed Luz’s arm.

  “How close do you think we are?”

  “The building’s got to be nearby. It’s probably around the next corner,” Luz answered.

  “Okay, ladies,” Kiki called out to the rest of us. “The street’s too dangerous here. We’re going to have to travel across the rooftops,” Kiki said. “The buildings here are so close together, we should be able to step from one to the next.”

  “I don’t know. That sounds pretty risky,” said DeeDee.

  “We’ll be fine,” I told her. “When these buildings were built, the streets were far more dangerous. People used to travel around on the roofs all the time. If you lived on the top floors, you only went downstairs if you had to.”

  Kiki scanned the street, then pointed at a run-down tenement building across the street.

  “Do you think you can pick the lock on that door?” she asked Oona.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Oona marched over to the building. Within seconds, the front door was standing wide open, inviting us inside. We climbed a set of steep, rickety stairs, kicking trash and cockroach carcasses out of our way.

  “I can see why people stayed on the roof,” said DeeDee, struggling to catch her breath as we neared the sixth-floor landing.

  At the top of the stairs we opened the door to the roof and stepped out into the nighttime air. The smell of tar was overwhelming, and our feet stuck to the ground as we moved.

  “This way,” Luz directed us, pointing east. We quietly stepped over the low walls that separated the roofs of half a dozen buildings and ducked under clotheslines draped with damp sheets that floated like ghosts in the breeze. Finally, we stood at the edge of a building, looking down on Bayard Street. A streetlight illuminated the entrance to a warehouse where four men stood smoking cigarettes and chatting. To the casual passerby, the scene would have appeared perfectly innocent. Kiki took out her binoculars.

  “Have a look.” She passed the binoculars to me. One of the men had a telltale bulge beneath his jacket.

  “They’re armed,” I said. “And a couple have dragons tattooed on their arms.”

  “That means they’re members of the Fu-Tsang gang,” said Oona.

  “I guess we’re not going in through the front door,” noted DeeDee.

  “We wouldn’t stand a chance,” said Kiki. “What about the building, Ananka? Does it have an entrance to the Shadow City?”

  “The building has an entrance, all right. Look, you can still see our logo stamped on the sidewalk. The problem is, we nailed the trapdoor shut. This is Oliver Harcott’s warehouse—the place where we found the counterfeit shoes. There’s a secret room under the building. That must be where they’re hiding the girls.”

  I flipped through Glimpses of Gotham.

  “Here it is,” I said, placing my finger on a passage I had highlighted two years earlier. “Pearcy Leake heartily recommends a visit to the Jade Monkey Salon, located on Bayard Street but also accessible through the Shadow City. It says it was an opium den that was secretly owned by one of New York’s finest families.”

  “How appropriate,” muttered DeeDee.

  “So that’s where they’re holding Betty and the Princess?” asked Oona.

  “That’s my bet,” said Kiki. “Which means we’ll have to take them out through the Shadow City.”

  “But how are we going to get back into the Shadow City?” DeeDee wondered. “The Marble Cemetery’s boobytrapped, and we don’t have any gas masks.”

  Realizing what she had just let slip, DeeDee bit her lip and we all looked nervously toward Kiki. None of us had told her about our efforts to keep her out of the tunnels.

  “You booby-trapped the Marble Cemetery?” Kiki asked. “To keep me out?”

  “Well, you did lie to us about being Augustus Quack-enbush’s granddaughter,” said Luz defensively. “What did you expect us to do?”

  “I guess I thought you might trust me,” sighed Kiki Strike. “But it doesn’t matter now. It’s a good thing I know another way into the
tunnels.”

  We followed Kiki to Greenwich Village. At three o’clock in the morning, we reached Bethune Street. The Princess’s house sat at the end of the block, its windows dark. I would have expected a flurry of activity and perhaps a police car or two. But the Princess’s mother didn’t seem to know her daughter was missing. Kiki walked up the stairs of a brownstone three doors down from the Princess’s house. I noticed a little golden i stamped on the sidewalk, and I realized it was the same house we had escaped from two years earlier.

  “I can’t pick that lock.” Oona pointed to a sticker in the corner of one of the windows. “They’ve installed an alarm system. The police would be here in no time.”

  “Believe it or not, Oona, there are other ways of getting inside a building.” Kiki knocked at the door.

  Several seconds later, the door opened and a little head popped through the crack.

  “Hello, elf,” said a cheerful face.

  “Hi, Iris,” replied Kiki. “Are your parents still out of town?”

  “They won’t be back from Borneo ’til next week,” said the little head.

  “And the nanny?”

  “Sleeping off a bottle of tequila and a half-dozen wine spritzers. Want to come in?”

  We stepped into the foyer of the brownstone. The walls were covered with ceremonial masks, and two shrunken heads sat propped on a little table next to a stack of mail. The door shut behind us, and a girl wearing pink pajamas embroidered with ladybugs stepped forward to greet us. She was almost as small as Kiki had been when I first met her, with hair only a shade or two darker. In fact, her resemblance to the young Kiki Strike might have been uncanny if it hadn’t been for her healthy complexion and hazel eyes.

  “Ladies,” said Kiki, “this is Iris McLeod. Iris, you remember the Irregulars, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” said Iris, stepping forward to shake our hands. “They’re kind of hard to forget.”

  “You can’t be the little girl on the stairs,” said Oona. “She was just a baby.”