The Lost Property Office

by James R. Hannibal

  A building across the street from the tower exploded in a ragged plume of black and gray, threatening to knock him off his perch. If he fell in his vision, would he fall off the real tower? Or would he simply never wake up again? Spark or not, hanging around in the middle of a bombing raid did not seem like a good plan. Then he remembered his desperate push during the chaos of the glass, the push that had taken him all the way back to the fire.

  It was worth a try.

  Another explosion. A shape hurtled up from the street below. In the split second that Jack focused on the shadow, it coalesced into a black sedan, flipping right at him. He pushed. Hard.

  The falling sensation, combined with being precariously perched on a tower, was almost more than Jack could bear. But he jolted to a stop a heartbeat later, still kneeling on the ledge. He had the feeling of pitching forward from the force of the landing, and yet something held him fast to the tower. The push had worked. If for no other reason, he knew he was deeper in because the brokenness of the vision had increased. And hodgepodge didn’t come close to describing it.

  The brick building that had blown up across the street was gone, replaced with a wall of disjointed black flame, dancing with spasmodic, staccato rhythm. A massive lake of obsidian fire stretched as far as Jack could see. He found it strangely beautiful, and certainly more peaceful than the war zone he had just escaped. There were no screams or cries, no wailing sirens—only the dull, distorted roar of the inferno.

  A shape moved toward the fire. Focusing, Jack broke out the image of a man marching resolutely forward, directly into the wall of flame. He held an object out before him, carrying it at arm’s length like a holy relic. To Jack’s astonishment, the flames parted. The man continued forward into a tunnel of fire, and the curtain of flames closed behind him.

  The street fell silent again. Jack waited for something to happen, but there was no change. He wished he had a remote for these things. Why couldn’t he rewind or fast-forward? Then it occurred to him that he could.

  If pushing pressed Jack deeper into the brick’s memory, maybe pulling would do the opposite. He tried pulling his hand away from the brick. Nothing. He could neither move nor affect the spark. Jack wanted to scream in frustration, but he couldn’t do that, either. All he could do was let go, relax, and try again. After taking a moment to open his senses the way Gwen had taught him, Jack concentrated on another pull, this time making it more mental than physical.

  It worked.

  Too well.

  Jack’s mind rushed upward through the memory of the brick, right back to the bombing—right back to the moment he had left. The flipping car was inches away. “Aaah!”

  Daylight. The whistling breeze. A street full of people oblivious to his cry. Jack was hanging out over the edge, his hand already free of the gap Gwen had made. “Help me!”

  “What do you think I’m doing?” grunted the clerk, who had him by the collar of his jacket. “You might consider piping down and helping yourself.”

  Jack scrambled backward into the copper rail and held on tight, staring down at the traffic below. “That was—”

  “Cool?”

  “No.”

  “Brilliant?”

  “No. It was—”

  “Epic?”

  “Terrifying.” Jack glared at her. “I was going to say terrifying. And you knew I was going to lose all sense of reality out there. You should have held on to my collar the whole time.”

  Gwen gave him a freckle bounce. “I did.”

  As she spoke, a flash of reddish brown caught Jack’s eye from a hilltop plaza across the street. A man in a suede duster raced toward a Tube station at the center of the square. Another man, all in black, was hot on his heels.

  Chapter 29

  “WE HAVE TO help him!” Jack sprinted across the busy street, dodging traffic, doing his best to block out the angry chorus of honking horns.

  Gwen was close at his heels. “Him, who? I didn’t see—” A scooter beeped and she stopped short, going up on her toes as it shot between them.

  “It was Dad, and the Clockmaker was after him. I swear it,” breathed Jack, taking the steps up the hill two at a time. At the top, he tore across the plaza, straight for the Tube entrance. The wall of turnstiles came up fast. As he planted his hands to vault over them, he caught a flicker of black ahead. The Clockmaker—it had to be—disappearing down a tunnel marked DISTRICT LINE. Jack touched down on the other side, adjusting course to follow, and smacked into a heavyset man who had come through the next barrier down. He pinballed off the big pedestrian and tumbled to the floor.

  “Watch it, kid!”

  Jack picked himself up and sidestepped Mr. Angry-big-and-tall, but he had lost precious ground. When he reached the tunnel, he saw no sign of either his dad or his tormentor among the crowd in the narrow passage. Fortunately, there were no other tunnels leading off to either side—there was nowhere to go but straight ahead.

  The sound of Gwen’s apologies followed in Jack’s wake as he slipped and shouldered his way through the commuters. He saw an escalator up ahead, a bottleneck for the passengers, but the stairs next to it were wide open. Jack launched himself onto the rail, fingers gliding along the steel as he slid down.

  The man in reddish brown ran through the passage below, barely a stride ahead of the Clockmaker, along a line of archways that led to the platforms on either side. He glanced back at his enemy, and for the first time since Jack had come to London, he saw his father’s face.

  “Dad, it’s me!”

  Neither man looked up at him. They took a right through the last archway, heading for the east platform. Jack followed less than three seconds later. He stopped at the edge of the tracks, breathing hard, looking frantically up and down the line of waiting passengers. His father and the Clockmaker had disappeared again.

  “Jack, you have to stop.” Gwen came panting up beside him. “You’re acting insane, drawing too much attention.”

  He didn’t answer. What did it matter if he drew the world’s attention now that he had found his dad? He jogged along the line of bewildered pedestrians, searching their faces. “Dad! John Buck—”

  Jack lost his footing.

  Pain shot through Jack’s ribs as he slammed down onto a steel rail. He tried to groan, but the impact had knocked the wind from his lungs. The people on the platform shouted for him to get up. A moment later, Gwen was on her knees above him, offering a hand. “Don’t touch the center rail! You’ll complete the circuit and electrocute yourself.”

  He nodded, still unable to speak. As Jack carefully pressed himself up, a light appeared in the tunnel, along with the echoing rush of an approaching train. The shouts above him became more insistent.

  “Now, Jack! Get out of there!” Gwen dropped to her stomach to reach for him. But Jack saw something else in the light—a dark figure, much closer than the train. The figure paused for half a second, then melted into the tunnel wall.

  Jack got up and raced after him.

  The platform wall came and went. The shouting people fell behind. And Jack was in the tunnel, alone with the oncoming train. His bruised ribs screamed in protest, but he kept up his pace. He had no other choice. Either the door was there, or Jack was going to die.

  Brilliant white light and earsplitting sound engulfed him. Sparks flew as the driver applied the brakes. Then Jack saw it—a greasy push bar in an otherwise black wall. An instant later, he was through, fighting for his balance at the top of a steep, pitch-black stairwell. He pawed at the wall to keep from falling forward. The train, brakes squealing, flew past, daring him to fall backward and be obliterated. Finally, he steadied himself, let the door close behind him, and stepped down into the dark.

  Jack descended three long flights, gaining confidence and speed as he went. Despite the utter darkness, he knew what lay ahead. He could read the translucent blue echoes of his own footsteps bouncing off the walls and the stairs. He saw a door at the bottom, the push bar outlined in rippling blue,
and he hit it on his first try, hoping John Buckles was on the other side.

  He was. And so was the Clockmaker.

  Fire shot from a brass tube protruding from the Frenchman’s sleeve, backing Jack’s father into a wall of yellow tiles. The chase had led them to an abandoned platform, lit by a few emergency lights over the tracks. Old papers were strewn about the floor; several were burning.

  “I don’t have it,” said Jack’s father. As soon as his back hit the wall, he pushed off, trying to jink around the Clockmaker, but another burst of flame forced him back again.

  “Stop!” shouted Jack. “Leave him alone!”

  The Frenchman didn’t turn around, didn’t even acknowledge Jack’s presence. “What kind of fool do you think I am, Buckles? I have won. You have lost. Accept it. Hand over the Ember, and I will let you live.” He took another step forward, leveling the flamethrower. “Refuse, and I will take it from your ashes. Then I will recover the amplifier you stole and the people of London will finally pay for their crimes.”

  At that moment, Jack saw his father’s eyes narrow, his jaw set. He knew that look. It was the same look his dad got when Sadie had him against the ropes in a video game, the same look he got when the light turned yellow at an approaching intersection. John Buckles lowered his shoulders to charge, and immediately vanished behind a veil of flame.

  “No!” Jack rushed out into the open, and came jogging to a stop in total confusion. The Clockmaker had faded away, leaving nothing but cold, scorched papers and blackened tiles behind. His father was gone too, vanished without a trace.

  Jack dropped to his knees on the empty platform and cried.

  Chapter 30

  A BEAM OF blue-white light washed over Jack. He jumped to his feet and turned, fists up.

  “It’s Gwen, Jack.” The clerk shined the light on her own features as the stairwell door closed behind her. “It’s only Gwen. You remember me, don’t you?”

  Jack lowered his fists, wiping his cheeks with his sleeves. He did not want her to see his tears. “He killed my dad,” he said, trying to steady his voice. “The Clockmaker had a flamethrower . . . a flamethrower!”

  She approached him slowly, staring into his eyes like he was a puzzle that needed solving, brow scrunched up in confusion.

  “What part of that didn’t you get, Gwen? My dad was right here. I watched the Clockmaker kill him with a flamethrower and then vanish into thin air.” Another tear escaped his eye and he quickly wiped it away. “I lost him all over again.”

  Gwen coldly stepped around him, shining her light on the scorched wall. “You sparked.”

  “What?” Jack blinked, trying to determine why she would say such a thing. “No. I saw them. You saw them too. We chased them, Gwen. How could that have been a spark?”

  “It was several, actually. Jack, what you saw wasn’t real.” She knelt to the ground and inspected the charred papers. “Well, it was real, but it didn’t happen today.” She picked up a paper and gently blew across the burned edge. A few black pieces crumbled away. “See? No glowing red, no lingering heat. This paper has been cold for twenty-four hours or more.” She let it fall. “Think, Jack. Where were your hands when you saw your dad from the tower?”

  Jack wasn’t sure if he wanted to believe her or not. He closed his eyes, remembering the moment he saw his dad sprinting across the square. At the edge of the memory he could see his own hand holding tight to the balcony rail. He winced.

  “Yes. Now you’ve got it. You were touching other metal objects each time you saw them, weren’t you?”

  He thought back through the chase. There was the aluminum ticket barrier he had vaulted over, and the stairwell rail, and the Tube track. When he had seen the fight, both his hands had been on the push bar. That was why the Clockmaker and his dad had faded as soon as he had run onto the platform. He’d let go of the steel bar, let go of its memory. Jack let out a long breath. “What about the train?”

  “That’s the tricky part, isn’t it? Those trains run every two minutes. You may have seen a train in your spark, but the one you played chicken with was as real as you and me. And that means we have to get out of here.” Gwen took him by the elbow and steered him toward a set of brick stairs at the back of the platform. “You can’t jump in front of a train and expect the world to be happy about it. The authorities will be down here any second. Come on.”

  “You know another way back to the surface?”

  They topped the stairs and Gwen pulled him left down another tunnel. “We’re not going to the surface. We’re going to the ministry Archive to get your father’s journal. We’ve been following in his footsteps the whole time, Jack. We’ll have to skip ahead a bit if we want to find the Ember before the Clockmaker’s deadline.”

  The Ember. The name alone made Jack want to scream. He quickened his pace and stepped in front of the clerk, stopping her at the intersection with the next passage. “It’s over, Gwen. My dad died, just like you said. Forget the Ember. Take me back to my sister.”

  “No, it isn’t over at all.” Gwen eyes lit up like Jack hadn’t seen all day. “There’s more hope now than ever. Don’t you see? Your spark proved me wrong. It proved your dad didn’t die at the Tower of London. If he made it out of there alive, why not here?”

  “But the flamethrower . . . No one could have—”

  She stomped her foot. “No buts, Jack! You held out hope that your dad was alive against all the evidence, against everything I told you. I’m not giving up on that hope now.” She brushed past him and continued down the passage. “Are you coming, or what?”

  Jack watched her march away, flashlight swinging back and forth, shining its blue-white beam alternately up and down the tunnel. He sighed. She asked him that a lot, but she never really gave him a choice.

  By the time Jack caught up, Gwen had stopped at an old ticket booth, struggling to budge the remains of a magazine rack that sat against the wall. “This is Mark Lane Station,” she grunted as she pushed. “Closed in ’67. But they never sealed the entrance.”

  “And so you plan to finish the job by blocking it with that magazine rack?”

  Gwen kept pushing. “Not . . . the Tube entrance.” The rack let out a long scritch as it suddenly gave way and shifted to the side, exposing a low, arched portal in the wall. The clerk dusted off her hands and grinned. “This entrance. It’s an old Ministry Express line.”

  On the other side, she found a large, two-pronged electric switch and flipped it up into its housing. It sparked, and hummed, and the magazine rack slid back into place, sealing them in.

  “Now what?” Jack asked the darkness.

  Gwen was not rattled. She elbowed his bruised arm. “Wait for it . . .” As if by her command, green fluorescents flickered on, revealing a station unlike any of the others Jack had yet seen. There were no tracks beyond the old turnstiles, just five rusty cylindrical cars suspended over rectangular pools of black water, each oriented in a different direction.

  “Spares for the maglev?”

  Gwen laughed. “Hardly.” She hopped the turnstiles and began inspecting the pools, moving from one to the next. “Believe it or not, these cars date back to days long before the Ministry of Trackers. The Ministry Express used them well into the 1900s, even though the maglev came on line during Tesla’s prime.”

  Jack hopped over the barriers behind her. “Nikola Tesla worked for the ministries?”

  “Not at all.” The clerk seemed to find the pool she was looking for. She knocked on the car above it with her flashlight, sending a musical pong echoing through the station. “Tesla had nothing to do with the Elder Ministries, but that didn’t stop the spooks from stealing his work.”

  Jack joined her by the pool, giving her a flat frown.

  She shrugged. “What? I told you they were cheats.” Gwen tugged him to the side and pulled a rusty lever on the car, bringing its door crashing down on the lip of the pool. The impact sent up a cloud of dust, but when it cleared, Jack saw that the hatch double
d as a set of stairs. Gwen gave him a tilt of her head. “Up you go, then.”

  He took a seat on a bench of stiff leather padding, so ancient it felt like wood.

  The clerk handed him a strap with a buckle on the end and nodded to the other half, lying on the seat beside him. “You’ll want to put your seat belt on.”

  Jack did as he was told, though he couldn’t see why. The maglev hadn’t required seat belts. This car, as old as it was, didn’t look much different. He pulled the belt tight and glanced over at Gwen, who was securing her own. “And what are the seat belts for?”

  She grabbed a T-handle that hung from the ceiling above them.

  “For this.”

  Gwen gave the handle a good yank and the hatch-stairs closed with a tremendous bang, forced up as the car dropped through the platform, plunging into the black water below.

  Chapter 31

  JACK DUG HIS fingers into the leather. Water surged around the bubble windows at either end of the cylindrical car. “What did you do?”

  “Oh, relax,” said Gwen, unperturbed. “This form of transportation is quite reliable.”

  “Right. And that form is gravity, guaranteed to take us straight to the bottom.” Jack glanced around the car. He didn’t see any tanks or ventilation. “Don’t we need oxygen?”

  The clerk shook her head. “We have all we need in the car itself.”

  A green glow developed at the edges of Jack’s vision, illuminating the algae-covered bricks passing by the windows. He unbuckled from his seat and walked unsteadily to the nearest bubble, trying to determine the source.

  “Bioluminescent bacteria on the outer hull,” said Gwen, shutting off her flashlight and letting the glow envelop them. “Activated by motion through the water.” She joined Jack at the window as a perfectly round tunnel rose into view. The car eased forward through the opening, caught by the current, lighting up the bricks as it entered. “See? The steel frames of the bubbles are covered in the stuff, like headlamps. The faster we go, the brighter they get.”