Dark Metropolis

by Jaclyn Dolamore

  She shot Freddy a quick glance, realizing she wasn’t sure she could find her way back; it wasn’t as if they’d had bread crumbs to drop. “The Vogelsburg subway station,” she said.

  “Something’s already going on,” the balding man said. “Thomas heard shots in the cafeteria.”

  “Guards are massing around there,” said a younger man, who looked excited. He was just joining the conversation, having come down the hall as they talked.

  “Please listen to me,” Freddy said, raising his voice above their conversation. “All of you need to get out of here. You’re very close to the outside world, and there are people aboveground ready to help you. Wake everyone up and gather out here in the halls. I’ll lead the way.”

  They were all looking at Freddy with confusion and almost a touch of awe.

  “Who are you?” the man with the bald spot asked again. “I know you.”

  “Hurry,” Freddy said. “We don’t have much time. Get moving—make sure everyone’s up.”

  “But where are we going?” one of the men asked. “What’s aboveground? This is all we know.”

  Thea remembered Arabella saying at the meeting that the workers might have no memories. But being confronted with it—it was worse than Thea had expected. Would her father even know her face when she found him?

  “What’s aboveground? Your families.” Freddy stepped up onto the concrete ledge beside a stairwell so he could be seen by the increasing crowd—a few women were trickling in at the back now. “You might not remember them—but they remember you. They miss you. They think you are all dead and gone. All of you, in your old lives, you were parents, and children, soldiers and laborers and writers—every kind of person, and they took that from you, to force you into slavery down here. But it can all end tonight. You can be free, and when your families see you, they will know of your imprisonment, and this can never happen again.”

  Thea could see that the people believed him. Maybe they didn’t remember, but they knew there was more to their lives; some of them had tears in their eyes.

  She could hardly bear to see their hope, knowing that Freddy had to lead them with a lie. He could promise them freedom, but not for long.

  “Now, go, gather everyone here. I know there are more of you.” He spread his arms, and the people began to disperse, even as more bleary, pajama-clad workers were wandering in.

  Freddy stepped down off the ledge and rubbed his head. “I hope this works.”

  “It looks like they’re listening to you, at least.” Some of the people were ducking back into their rooms and grabbing things—clothes, sticks, even a tobacco tin. “But I need to find my father.”

  “I’m sure we’ll see him.”

  “I don’t know—what if he just pushes his way out through the crowd and we never cross paths? Can you sense him?”

  “I’m not sure. There are so many people here. Maybe if I take your hand.”

  She had not touched his hand again, all this time, since the first two visions. Now she offered her hand, and when their fingers met, the vision of her father flashed through her mind once more.

  “Come on,” Freddy said, keeping hold of her hand. “I think I can find him, but we need to hurry. I don’t want to abandon the crowd for long.”

  They stuck to the walls, slipping by against the tide as workers poured out of starkly lit halls and flowed down stairs.

  “Here,” Freddy said, gesturing to an empty hall. “Up ahead. He’s here somewhere.”

  Thea heard male voices, speaking low behind one of the doors, and a familiar head peered out when their footsteps drew nearer. “Who—who are you?” Familiar brows furrowed, and her heart almost stopped.

  “It’s me, it’s me, Thea! I’m your daughter, Thea!”

  “Thea…”

  She could not imagine a longer moment than this one, when she saw her father after eight years of hoping for him, convincing herself he was gone forever, missing him, seeing him every time she touched her mother…and now, having him look at her like this. His face searched hers. Hopeful—but unsure.

  The forgetting—it must have saved him from bound-sickness. But she hardly knew which was worse.

  “My daughter,” he said. “Thea. That’s your name.”

  “Thea!” she repeated. “Please…remember.” She reached for him, and he took her hand. This seemed to spark recognition in his eyes.

  “I’ve been trying to remember for so long…Thea.” He threw his arms around her. “Thea, Thea.” He kept saying her name and looking her over, as if trying to join two pieces of a puzzle.

  Her eyes ran over every detail of his face, every line and crease. He didn’t look as if he’d aged from the last photographs that were taken. His hair was the same shade as hers. They both had the faintest of freckles on their noses. He was hers, hers. Don’t take him away….

  “So many times I almost remembered you,” he said, tears trailing from his eyes. “It was maddening. Just little pieces. But—yes—yes, I’m starting to remember. You’ve grown so much.” He put his hands to her cheeks now. Her hands, grubby from her travels, had left smears of dirt on his shoulders and face.

  “You’re here, you’re alive.” The word slipped out, and just as quickly she thought, No—

  She could feel Freddy’s eyes on her, and when she glanced back at him, he turned away.

  She was only making this harder for him. But she needed this moment.

  She put her head against her father, clinging to him. She was somewhere beyond joy or grief, simply swamped with every emotion until she felt drowned by her feelings, until she could hardly imagine she had ever been laughing with Nan or working at the Telephone Club. This moment was all there was or had ever been.

  “Thea,” her father said. “That boy you came with…” He paused heavily. “Who is he?”

  “He—” How could she talk about this now?

  “I’m starting to remember him, too.” He paused and frowned. “I was injured, and he…was there when I woke up. He was younger, though. About your age. I mean, when I last saw you. He had blond hair streaked with silver then. I’d never seen anything like it.”

  “He…has magic,” she said. She struggled for words to explain.

  “The men in my dorms, we’ve been here for many years, and we’ve long thought”—he held her shoulders gently—“that we’re dead, only we’ve been kept in some unnatural half-life.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “But I don’t want to be the one to tell you….”

  “This life isn’t natural,” he said, clutching her shoulders a little tighter. “All of us veterans feel we’ve accepted that. If he’s here to undo the magic…then…that’s what we want.”

  She nodded, swallowing her sadness—the danger of this situation felt too close to lose herself in sorrow. “Do you think other people are going to remember Freddy, too?”

  “Possibly.”

  “That isn’t good. We don’t want a panic. We have to get everyone moving out of here. There isn’t time.” She caught Freddy’s eyes.

  “We’ll just have to move as quickly as we can,” he said.

  “Yes.” She drew closer to Freddy as they hurried back to the gathering crowd, but she held her father’s hand. She was never going to forget how his hand felt—warm and comforting and perfectly fatherlike. It seemed smaller than it used to be, but only because she had grown. He still felt strong.

  Freddy had just stepped onto the ledge again when a worker came running from one of the halls, shouting, “Valkenrath’s dead!” His footsteps stopped just long enough for him to shout it again, then moved on. She heard him slow again and pound on doors, still screaming the message, and now the conversation in the room rose to a din. Some of the people moved out to see what was going on.

  Freddy shot Thea a glance of alarm. The workers were looking to him now.
/>   “Well—good!” he said. “He won’t be able to stop you. Follow me!”

  The workers parted to let him move forward. Not long ago they’d found six men, and now there seemed to be people everywhere she looked, more than on the sidewalks of Lampenlight on Saturday night. As Freddy made his way down another hall, the crowd pressed in just behind them.

  It wasn’t difficult to figure out where to go. She heard shouting in the distance. As they drew closer, they crossed paths with a few workers who had gone ahead to see what was going on. “There’s a strange woman in the cafeteria,” one of them said. “She’s the one who shot Valkenrath.”

  “Are there guards up there?” her father asked.

  “Yes. Some.”

  Freddy pushed forward to a group of milling guards, all of a similar height and build, wearing what looked like police uniforms stripped of badges or markings. Their eyes alighted on Freddy with obvious recognition.

  “Freddy,” one of them said, with an undercurrent of relief running beneath his military bearing. “Gerik’s asking for you.”

  “Is it true that Uncle is dead?”

  “He’s been shot. But what are you doing down here?”

  “Let me see him,” Freddy said.

  The guards were giving the workers a hard look. One of them outstretched a palm, indicating they should keep back, as they opened the doors for Freddy.

  “Them too,” Freddy said, indicating Thea and her father.

  “But—that’s—” The guards looked flustered. “You shouldn’t be down here. We can’t let them in.”

  “If you want me to revive Uncle, then I insist,” Freddy said.

  Some of the workers were clustering behind Thea and her father. Waiting to see what would happen. Their energy was beginning to shift; they were growing bolder. She felt it. But for now they kept a distance.

  “All right,” one of the guards said, stepping aside. “Quickly.”

  Thea and her father hurried into a large room with tables and chairs from one wall to another.

  That was when she saw Nan.

  Nan, her clothes bloody, her face grim and streaked with tears.

  “Nan!” Thea flung her arms around her friend. “You’re—you’re here!” She pulled back, taking in the dried blood on Nan’s clothes, skimming her fingers over the crusty, ragged bits of Nan’s shirt. “What happened to you?”

  “I was shot. But—but I’m all right.”

  “Shot?”

  “I’m all right,” Nan said insistently, as if she could force it into truth, and quickly she threw her arms around Thea, as if that could make it true, too.

  They broke apart again as Gerik, a gun in his hand, muscled his way past a flood of workers to get to Freddy.

  “Freddy!” he said, his empty hand flung toward his brother. “Don’t just stand there! We need Rory. Everything’s out of control.”

  “I won’t revive him unless you call the guards off and let the workers go,” Freddy said.

  “I know she’s gotten to you.” It was obvious who “she” was, even though he didn’t look at Arabella. “But there’s no time for you to listen to some foolish radical! She doesn’t know the first thing about running this city.”

  “She hasn’t gotten to me,” Freddy said. “It’s you who lied to me my entire life. You told me my magic was saving people, when you’ve exploited them all along. And you were going to let me degenerate until I was an invalid, weren’t you? That’s why you wanted me to have children.”

  “Yes, to save you!”

  “Save me,” Freddy repeated, his voice dangerously low. “You know this is your chance to redeem yourself, Gerik. To tell me the truth. The only reason you wanted to save me was because you know that if I die, they all die.”

  Now Gerik shot a glare Arabella’s way. “Lad, I don’t know what—”

  “Don’t ‘lad’ me. I’m not your little boy. I’m the person who holds the fate of all the workers.”

  Gerik had barely begun to lift his arm in a direction Arabella apparently didn’t like when she suddenly grabbed Freddy’s arm and pressed the gun to his head. “Gerik, I think you’re just stalling for time now. Listen to the boy, or I’ll take him down with me. If he dies, all the workers will be gone in a blink.”

  Thea thought of the gun in her purse, but Arabella kept glancing back and forth, although she always returned to Gerik. She was watching for anyone to make a move. And Thea had never shot a gun before.

  “He’s going to kill the workers anyway,” Gerik snapped.

  “Gerik!” Freddy sounded briefly hurt. Then his eyes flicked to the corpse of Gerik’s brother on the floor. “You and Uncle can see each other again in hell.”

  Thea couldn’t imagine what Freddy must be feeling. Sometimes she had felt so alone, caring for Mother, but it must be far worse to be raised by someone who cared for your power instead of your own self.

  Gerik looked as if he’d been struck. “Freddy, I cared for you like a son. I did. But I couldn’t forget why you had come to me. And what do you think will happen when these workers go free? They all run to their families? They have no memories. And they need serum. You know about the serum. They already haven’t had it since breakfast. By tomorrow night the city will be overrun by monsters—or corpses.”

  Arabella let Freddy go. “You started all of this, Gerik Valkenrath,” she said.

  Gerik made a brief motion of his hand, and then he suddenly snatched Thea’s arm, while a guard rushed to grab Arabella before she could react. Now Thea had the cold barrel of a gun pressed to her own temple. Gerik’s fingers were digging into the skin of her upper arm painfully, but she didn’t dare move. Both her father and Nan were standing frozen, separated from her now by the eternal space between a gun and her head.

  “Freddy, let’s try this again,” Gerik said. “If you kill all these people, you’re killing the heart of the city. You need to revive my brother and come with me, then I will explain it all to you.” Thea tried to keep still, tried not to think about the metal warming where it touched her.

  “I have no reason to trust you anymore,” Freddy said. “And this has nothing to do with Thea. Let her go.”

  “Tell me honestly,” Gerik said. “Do you really want to stop using your magic? Can you, even? It’s a gift. It’s what you live for. You know it. You could never really be satisfied tinkering with clocks.”

  Freddy shifted his stance slightly, revealing that Gerik had hit upon some truth, but he said, “At least I’d be working with my real father.”

  Gerik’s grip on Thea’s arm tightened. He was afraid, too. He knew he was losing. Thea’s eyes flicked to Nan. Thea had always admired Nan’s bravery, but Nan had never looked bloody and broken like this. And Thea’s father? He looked like he wanted to act, but there was a guard standing right behind him, glaring and obvious.

  Thea sucked in a breath and threw her weight away from Gerik, twisting her arm against his grasp.

  Freddy shoved a guard out of the way and lunged for Gerik’s arm, trying to get the gun. Thea’s father ran to her. “Are you all right, Thea?”

  “Fine.”

  “Gerik, please,” Freddy said, suddenly lifting his hands. Gerik still had the gun after their struggle. “Is this really how you want it to be? Threatening me? Pointing a gun at a girl who just wanted to know where her loved ones went?”

  Gerik hissed a curse under his breath, but he sounded defeated. “Damn it, Freddy.” Then he said, “Just let me talk to Rory one last time.”

  The workers had been massing around the door of the cafeteria, now barely contained by the guards.

  “Tell the guards to leave the workers alone,” Freddy told Gerik. “Then I’ll revive, one last time.”

  “Fine,” Gerik said. “You heard him. Let them go.”

  The guards lowered their weapons.

 
This was it now.

  The beginning of the end.

  Thea turned to Nan. She didn’t want to think about Nan wearing a bloody work suit, Nan doomed to death like everyone else. She had no words.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, even though those words didn’t feel right, either.

  Nan drew back. She had an odd smile. “I’m not going to die,” she said.

  “You’re…not?”

  “I’ll explain later,” she said. She looked behind her at the girl in the cage.

  “Who is that?” Thea asked.

  “That’s Arabella’s daughter…Sigi.” Nan swallowed, as if struggling to find words. “They didn’t give her serum for a couple of days, to punish her, so she degenerated, and she’s coming out of it. But she’s still—she—she was my best friend down here, and maybe more.”

  “Nan…” This wasn’t like Nan. She didn’t seem empty anymore. “Oh, Nan…” Thea put her arms around her friend again. She didn’t know what to say. Sigi was going to die, and maybe she wouldn’t even be well enough to say good-bye. Thea could imagine nothing worse than seeing a loved one turn into a horror like the man in the tunnels.

  Nan finally shoved her away gently. “I’ll be all right. You should go with your father. I’ll find you later.”

  Freddy had walked toward them as they talked, his face drawn. “Thea, you should take your father and go. I still have to revive Uncle and make sure they don’t try to stop the escape. I know where you live. Wait for me at your apartment.”

  She searched his face, wondering if she’d ever see it again. But she understood that they each had a task, and neither one of them would have peace until it was done. She took one of his hands and one of Nan’s. “Stay safe, both of you.”

  Nan forced a smile. “I will if you will.”

  Thea hurried back to Father’s side, and they started to walk out together with the crowd. The way out was clear now; she didn’t even see the guards around anymore. Maybe they were planning on skipping town before things got ugly for them, too. A few of the workers, talking to one another excitedly about seeing the sky, quickened their steps, but others were very quiet and solemn, and she wondered if they were the ones who guessed at the truth, the way her father had.