The Lost Property Office

by James R. Hannibal

  He pursed his lips. “No. That’s Mom. And her maiden name is Smith—Mary Smith. She didn’t meet Dad until he immigrated to New York fifteen years ago.”

  “Right.” Gwen gave him an ironic chuckle. “And I’m sure that’s what the ministry believed as well. But I’m betting that story is a lie.”

  “You’re telling me Mom was part of the ministry too?”

  Gwen placed the photo back on the shelf, angling it just so. “Not just part of the ministry, Jack, the daughter of another tracker family—ministry royalty, if you will.”

  Jack paced back toward Sadie, who was too busy examining the knickknacks to follow the conversation. “If Mom knew about the ministry, why didn’t she go to the Lost Property Office the moment we arrived in London?” Even as he uttered the question, Jack realized his mom had known. Of course she lied about where she had gone. She had been lying to him his whole life. His eyes narrowed. “Gwen, did you see my mom yesterday?”

  “No one has seen Mary Fowler for fifteen years. She quit. Disappeared. And now we know why. There are rules about this sort of thing.”

  Jack didn’t like the tone in her voice. “What sort of thing?”

  “Marriage, Jack—within the tracker ranks. Section eight, rule six: ‘The tracker bloodlines shall never be joined under any circumstances.’ Never, Jack.” Gwen joined him in the circle of light from Sadie’s lantern. “The ministry fathers understood the potential of tracker abilities, and they were deathly afraid of what the union of two tracker lines might produce.”

  “Produce.” Jack repeated the word. “Wait. You’re talking about me. I’m the genetic freak they feared.” He drew in a breath. “Is that why I can see ghosts?”

  “You can see ghosts?” exclaimed Sadie, so loud that her voice echoed down the hall.

  The other two turned to shush her.

  “Yes,” said Jack.

  “No,” said Gwen at the same time. They frowned at each other.

  Sadie held the lantern up to her brother’s face. “Cool.”

  Jack pushed the light down again. “Mom and Dad broke the rules. That’s why she disappeared and changed her name—so she could marry him in secret. Why would she do that, knowing what it might do to her children?”

  Sadie smiled up at him. “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “Mom’s not here, Sadie.” Jack was sure he had experienced this conversation before.

  His sister gave him the same incredulous look she’d given that morning in the café. “Of course she is. She’s right here, in this building.”

  Chapter 49

  FOOTSTEPS INTERRUPTED JACK’S train of thought—heavy footsteps that reverberated in his head like bowling balls thrown into a pond. “Someone’s coming.” Down the hall, at the intersection of another corridor, a long shadow fell across the wood floor. “Someone big.”

  The clerk pushed open a panel between the shelves. “Through here. Quickly.”

  As Jack backed toward her, a huge man came into view, dressed all in tweed, lowering a head the size of a basketball as he passed beneath an archway to enter the grand hall. He turned in Jack’s direction just as Gwen yanked him sideways through the wall. She shut the panel and covered Sadie’s lantern with her scarf. “Are you trying to get us caught?”

  Footsteps thumped their way, coming to a stop outside their panel. All three held their breath. Then the footsteps thumped on and the great bronze door groaned. Giant-tweed man had gone out into the cavern. Jack let out his breath. “The ministry knows we’re here. They’re looking for us.”

  “No. They’re looking for Sadie.” Gwen uncovered the lantern, illuminating the landing of a stairwell. A wooden stairway curved slowly out of sight above and below. “She wandered off when Mrs. Hudson turned her back. Remember? But that warden will come back. Thanks to Shaw’s handiwork at the bridge, he has nowhere else to go.” She handed the lantern back to Sadie and took her hand, starting down the steps. “This is the Great Stair. It winds around the perimeter of the Keep, all the way to the bottom level. Which is where I think we’ll find that locker you’re looking for.”

  A good many steps below, they came to a landing. It led inward for several yards before the stairs resumed, next to a door labeled SUBLEVEL 6. Gwen explained that the Keep narrowed every few levels, like an inverted wedding cake.

  “And how many levels are there?” asked Sadie.

  “Twenty-six in all, varying in size. One of them is more than ten stories tall.”

  Jack considered the long stretch of steps below, slowly winding around the giant underground tower. “Isn’t there an elevator or something?”

  “Lift, Jack. You do have some British blood, don’t you? And they all have cameras. We wouldn’t descend a single level before the Chamber froze the lift and sent in the wardens.”

  “What about an inner stairwell? Anything would be faster than this.”

  Gwen paused, turning to look up at him from the step below. “Jack, this is a three-hundred-year-old structure, designed and built to house history’s most dangerous artifacts and train its best detectives. The inner workings are a veritable labyrinth, and sneaking through the storage levels would be nothing short of suicide.” She and Sadie started down the steps again. “No sticky wickets, Jack. We use the Great Stair. Down to the bottom and back up again. Easy peasy.”

  She was not kidding about the size of the levels. Sublevel Ten, in particular, seemed never-ending. They passed door after door, descending through the alphabet—10A, 10B, 10C, and so on. Not far below 10G, Jack noticed the lantern light had become a cottony yellow sphere around them. The air thickened with a growing fog. At 10K, he saw the source. Heavy mist poured through the crack at the threshold, billowing down the stairs. “Gwen?”

  “Sublevel Ten is the arena,” said the clerk, without so much as a pause as she stepped down into the flowing mist. “A little larger than a first-class cricket ground. The ministry uses it for various forms of training—and, of course, the annual Tracker Games.”

  “Games?” asked Sadie.

  Gwen glanced down at her with an officious smile. “Ministry regulations, volume one, section six, rule nineteen: ‘Competition breeds excellence.’ Our arena is so large that it even has its own weather system—gets a little foggy on cold nights, drizzles in springtime, that sort of thing.”

  The clerk seemed to be joking about the rain, but Jack wasn’t laughing. The mist filling the stairwell beneath him had started to glow. A low, harmonic hum drifted across his mind in spiraling ribbons of blue and white. He recognized the sound from his time in the Chamber. “Gwen, look.”

  The clerk backed up a step. “I see it.”

  Jack shot a glance back at the door where the mist was pouring through. They had descended too far to get back up there in time. “Your scarf. Hurry!”

  “I can’t, Jack.” Gwen shook her head, keeping her eyes on the approaching glow. “Those things are too quick.”

  “Maybe you can’t. But I can.” He snapped his fingers, opening his palm, and Gwen placed a loop of the scarf into it just as the bronze mini-drone rose out of the fog, blue light shining within its four circular engine housings. The drone paused when it saw them, hovering a few feet away, level with Jack’s eyes. It shifted back and forth with jerky movements, sizing him up.

  Jack stared the thing down, widening his senses and trying to pick out its tells. With each movement he caught minute fluctuations in engine glow and tiny shifts in the angling of the circles. He could do this.

  Gwen was still backing away, pulling Sadie with her. “Now, Jack. Before it reports us.”

  Both Jack and the drone moved at the same time. He missed the main body, but the end of the scarf shot through one of the circles as the drone passed over his head. He grabbed the other end and held on, trying to pull the thing down. The drone pulled him up instead.

  “Gwen?” Jack shouted, twisting in the mist as it carried him up the stairs.

  “I’ve got you!” The clerk jumped up, grabbi
ng his legs. And still the drone climbed.

  Gwen’s added weight gave Jack some leverage. He yanked down with all his might, tilting the engine housing and sending the drone careening to the side. It smacked into the wall and dropped several feet, blue lights dimming. Jack and Gwen crashed down on the stairs. Ignoring the pain in his back, Jack gave the scarf another hard pull and steered the drone into the other wall. Broken pieces clattered to the steps.

  Gwen was ready when it fell. She lifted a foot high and stomped with a satisfying crunch, scowling down at the machine. “I suppose that’s coming out of my pay, isn’t it?”

  Jack rubbed his aching back. “That thing was strong.”

  “Quantum Electrodynamic Drones,” said Gwen, twirling her scarf about her shoulders again. “QEDs, we call them. Borrowed the technology from your American Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They’ve always been overpowered. I once saw a QED lift a life-size statue of Queen Victoria”—she puffed out her cheeks—“the later years.”

  Jack laughed, instinctively looking toward the lantern light to see if Sadie got the joke. But Sadie was not with the lantern. She had left it sitting in the mist at the next landing down—one of those that turned inward as the Keep narrowed. From the shadows around the corner, Jack heard a door click closed.

  Chapter 50

  “YOUR SISTER DOES this a lot,” panted Gwen as she and Jack raced down the stairs.

  “You have no idea.”

  Jack cracked open the door marked SUBLEVEL 11 and peered through. Sadie was twenty feet away, walking down the center of an endless hall of paintings. Many of the figures in the artwork resembled his dad; some, his mother. All of them appeared to be wounded, with an arm in a sling or leaning on a cane. “Sadie!” he called in a harsh whisper.

  If Sadie heard him, she didn’t show it. She was looking slowly left and right at the doors between the paintings, finger resting on her chin, as if searching for the right room. Jack ran out into the open, with Gwen right on his heels. “Sadie!” he hissed again.

  “Get back here!” added Gwen.

  They were too late.

  A shadow fell across the crack of light beneath the door to Sadie’s left. The lever turned. It opened. Then it paused. “Get some rest,” said an aged voice from the other side. “I’ll check in on you tomorrow.”

  Jack and Gwen pulled Sadie into the room across the hall, one door opening as the other closed. Through the gap, Jack caught a glimpse of the person entering the hall. He wore a mirror strapped to his head and a stethoscope around his neck. “Was that a doctor?” he asked, turning to Gwen as the footfalls receded.

  Gwen didn’t answer. Her eyes were fixed on the room behind them. They were not alone.

  They had chosen to hide in a bedroom from a bygone era, moderately furnished with a high-backed chair that faced a small bed and dresser. A man was propped up against the pillows, sandy hair poking out from the bandages that covered half his face.

  “Uncle Percy!” exclaimed Gwen, racing to the bedside. “You’re awake!”

  Percy reached for her with a hand laden with IV tubes. “Gwen,” he said in a weak, raspy voice. “And you brought your new friends, I see.” With the phrase your new friends, his one visible eye shifted to the high-backed chair, and Jack realized someone was seated there.

  A woman’s hand appeared on the arm, clutching a pair of red leather gloves. She rose and turned, still wearing the blue peacoat she had worn when Jack had last seen her. At the sight of her two children, her legs gave out and she dropped to her knees.

  Jack forgot about the Ember. He forgot about the Ministry of Trackers. He forgot his anger over years and years of secrets and lies. Nothing remained but the rush for his mother’s arms. “I’m sorry,” he said, squeezing her tight. “I’m so sorry we left the hotel.”

  Sadie reached her mother a split second after Jack, hitting them so hard she nearly toppled them both over. “It was my fault. I thought I saw Daddy.”

  Mary Buckles held her children for a long time before finally standing up to look at them. “It’s all right. I know all about it.” She dabbed her tears away with her gloves. “At least, I know some of it. Percy has been filling me in.” She sniffed, showing Jack that sad smile he had told himself he never wanted to see again. “But I suppose you have a lot of questions for me.”

  Jack checked his watch. It was past ten o’clock. “My questions will have to wait. We have less than two hours to rescue Dad.”

  “Rescue your dad?” Percy winced, trying to sit up. “But John is—”

  “Alive.” Gwen finished the statement for him. She steadied her uncle, leaning him back against the pillows again. “John Buckles Twelve is still alive.”

  “I can feel him,” added Sadie, looking up at her mother. “I can feel his heart.”

  Jack squeezed his sister’s shoulder. “And I believe her. But we think Dad is hurt pretty bad. The Clockmaker has him, and he’ll give him back in exchange for the Ember.”

  “Which means we’re on the clock.” Gwen rolled her eyes at her own words. “No pun intended. Long story short, Jack thinks the first Buckles hid the Ember in the Keep. And I’ll bet you can guess where I was taking him to look for it.”

  “You were headed downstairs.”

  The clerk nodded.

  Mary Buckles set her features and took her daughter’s hand. “Then I’m coming with you.” She turned to Percy and tried to speak, but he raised a bandaged hand.

  “Ol’ Percy’ll be fine, Mary. Won’t go anywhere without you. I promise.”

  Fifteen sublevels separated the hospital floor from the basement, where Gwen hoped to find the Ember. During the descent, Jack told his mom the full story, and his mom told him hers. She had been trying to make contact with Percy in secret ever since she had arrived in London, but to no avail, since he was unconscious. Then she had returned to the hotel and found both her children missing. She had searched everywhere, from Edgware Road to Piccadilly, and had been about to turn herself in to Mrs. Hudson and beg for the ministry’s help when Percy finally called. He had told her that Sadie was safe and Jack was with Gwen, at large in London and last seen exiting the Ministry Express station at the Tower.

  She finished as the four of them reached the bottom of the Great Stair, and Jack let out a long breath, knowing the worry he had caused her. “I’m sorry, Mom. I—”

  “No. I did this,” Gwen interrupted, lowering her head. “If I hadn’t interfered, Jack and Sadie would have gone back to the hotel. They would have been waiting for you when you returned.”

  Jack’s mother turned to the clerk with a soft smile. “The Clockmaker set all of this in motion, Gwen, not you. He was the one who lured Jack and Sadie away from the hotel and steered them to the Lost Property Office. And if you hadn’t interfered, the Clockmaker would still have found a way to separate Jack from Sadie and use him to find the Ember.” She placed a finger under Gwen’s chin and gently lifted. “Don’t you see? If not for you, Jack would have had to face all of this alone.”

  She gave the clerk a little hug and pulled an old brass key from the pocket of her peacoat. Its ornate head formed into the letters J and B. She winked at the clerk. “I’m not sure how you expected to get through without this.” Then she slid it into the lock.

  The door opened into a great domed cavern, one Jack realized was not actually part of the main structure of the Keep. Far above, in the dim light, he could see the bottom—or perhaps the top—of the great underground tower, jutting down through the ceiling. Its crown of stone battlements pointed down into the cavern, and its eight gargoyles were inverted, looking up at the dome, as if the entire tower truly had been shoved into the earth upside down.

  Beneath this strange sky rested a tiny neighborhood right out of the seventeenth century. At the end of a cobblestone lane that led from the stairwell, four timber and plaster houses stood in a semicircle around a small plaza lit by gas lamps, with a bubbling stone fountain at the center. Three were dark, but a warm light glow
ed from the upper room of the first house on the right.

  “Welcome to Tracker Lane, Jack,” said his mother. “Welcome home.”

  Chapter 51

  JACK WALKED SLOWLY to the edge of the cul-de-sac. “The trackers live here?”

  “Usually . . . so I’m told.” Gwen walked beside him, looking as awed by the old houses as he was. “But, as I said before, the ministry is in a sort of minimum-manning phase, treading water until the fourteenth generation. The twelves are dispersed—in Australia, Hong Kong, Switzerland—caring for the thirteens. They only come in for special assignments.”

  “That’s why Dad was always traveling.” Jack turned to his mom, a flicker of hope in his eyes. “What about the elevens? Some of them must still be around.”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Jack. That part of what your father and I told you was true. Both of your grandfathers are gone. It was a terrible year. Three elevens died, not long after the twelves took over, in a series of unfortunate accidents. The fourth, Edward Tanner, is bound to a wheelchair, teaching medieval history at Cambridge.”

  Jack glanced up at the light in the window. “If everyone is gone, then who’s up there?”

  The door to House Buckles—that’s what Gwen called the house with the light on—opened to the brass key. Jack could practically see the clerk’s freckles shining as she crossed the threshold. His mom hung her coat inside the door, lifting a long brass tool from the hook beside it and lighting the gas chandelier in the hall—as naturally as if she were just coming home from a very long trip. She nodded at the stairs. “You and Gwen go on up. Sadie and I will stay down here and see what we can find in the kitchen.”

  Jack led Gwen up four flights of stairs, trailing his fingers along a banister alive with stalking animals—falcons, panthers, and wolves. The wood-panel walls were hung with eleven paintings of men with eleven variations of Jack’s face, dressed in clothes from eleven eras. At the top, he stepped out into a well-lit study that took up the whole of the upper floor, filled with tall bookcases and plush furniture. Jack felt a tinge of disappointment. No one was there. A tiny part of him had held out hope that his father would be waiting for him. Finding his dad in this cozy study, ready to regale his wife and children with a grand story of escape, might have spared Jack the ordeal that lay ahead.