by Devon Monk
“Could you find him some clothes?” I asked Neds.
“And miss the explosion he’s about to let off?” Left Ned said.
“He’s not going to explode. But he’s going to draw attention if he’s walking around naked—don’t you think?”
“Yes,” Right Ned said. “We do think. Which is why we already found him some duds. Nothing fancy, but it will get him through the streets and past the cameras.”
“If our luck holds,” Left Ned said. “Which it won’t.”
“Which it will,” Right Ned said.
“Won’t,” Left Ned replied.
“Where are the clothes?” I interrupted. When those two got caught up in petty arguments, they snipped at each other for days. I already had a headache; I didn’t need two more.
“Hold on.” Neds walked out of the room and came back a few seconds later. “You want to throw them at the angry lion, or shall I?” Right Ned asked.
“I’ll do it.” I took the pile of clothes out of his one hand and the pair of well-worn boots out of the other. He wasn’t kidding; they weren’t fancy. They were ragged enough, a beggar wouldn’t wear them.
Great. I drew them up to my nose and took a hesitant sniff. A little musty, like they’d been in storage for a long time, but otherwise they didn’t smell too bad. “So, how’s the patient doing?” I asked with my cheerful firmly in place as I walked up to the table.
“He’s improved greatly,” Gloria said, handing Quinten a hypodermic needle, which Quinten jabbed into the side of Abraham’s neck.
Abraham winced but otherwise didn’t show that he was in pain.
I wondered why he was hiding his pain. Maybe so Quinten wouldn’t know he could feel. Maybe so Gloria wouldn’t be aware of it either. But I’d already told them that he had sensation.
“Do you need to tend the shop?” I asked Gloria. “You said you’d need to open it soon, right?”
“I unlocked the doors and set the sign,” she said. “There’s a camera in the front. I’ll know if anyone comes in. I don’t get a lot of early traffic. However . . .” She nodded toward the second hallway that led off in the opposite direction of the stairs and attic.
“First door on the right is my feed. Could you keep an eye on it for me?”
At my hesitance, Quinten said, “It’s fine, Matilda. Abraham will be on his feet in under five minutes. Just give us a moment. You can put the clothes down there.”
Gloria wheeled a cart over to the table. On it was a machine that seemed to have a lot to do with electricity. The paddles and clamps attached to it seemed to have a lot to do with pain.
“Are you okay with them?” I asked Abraham.
He was breathing slowly again, staring at the ceiling, his hands clenched loosely in fists. He knew how to bear the kind of pain he was in. Had probably done it many times before.
“It won’t take long,” he said, so, yes, he must have done this many times before. He knew what they were doing, even though I didn’t. “You shouldn’t stay,” he said. “I’m fine.”
It wasn’t until the Neds walked me out of the room that I realized all of them had wanted me out of there.
“Why?” I spun on my heel, and Neds nearly ran right into me.
“A little warning?” Left Ned snapped, poking a finger in my shoulder.
“Why what?” Right Ned asked, gesturing me toward the feed room.
“Why are you all trying to get me out of there? What are they going to do to him?”
The distinctly mechanical whine of a battery charging with electricity pierced the edge of my hearing.
A heartbeat later, Abraham made a sound I’d never heard out of a person before. It was a choked-off cry of raw pain that was oddly soft.
“What are they doing to him?” I said again.
The whine started up again, and Abraham cursed quietly. I could hear Gloria’s voice, comforting, professional. Abraham pulled another long breath.
“The Shelley dust dissolved the connection in some of the parts that make him up,” Right Ned said. He blocked my pathway out of the room. “On the inside and the outside. Stitches alone aren’t enough to fuse all those bits back together again. That out there is standard repair for galvanized. You should know that, Tilly.”
“I haven’t had to be . . . put back together again since I was first made,” I said.
Abraham yelled. His pain ended on a hard sob, and I wanted to run to him, comfort him, shoulder the pain with him.
“Galvanized don’t usually feel pain. He shouldn’t be feeling this. The thread, my thread, is in him now. He can feel that. He feels all of it.”
“Well, that sucks for him,” Left Ned said. “They gave him a shot—the one in his neck—so he won’t remember most of this. And as far as I know all the galvanized feel this kind of mending with or without your thread. Whatever nerves are still working are going through hell right now.”
“Get out of my way, Harris,” I said.
Both of them shook their heads.
“Best not,” Left Ned said. “Matilda, it’s hard on anyone to watch. For some reason you like Abraham. Let your brother spare you seeing him inflict that kind of pain on him.”
Left Ned was not the sort of man who was given to dispensing wisdom or comfort. It was surprising enough, it drew my attention away from the next wounded-beast cry from the other room.
“Let’s just do our part right now,” Right Ned said. “We said we’d watch for Gloria’s customers. It won’t take them long to get this done.”
He gently turned me and I walked the rest of the way into the room, wishing there was something else I could do. But stopping Quinten and Gloria from fixing Abraham was exactly the opposite of what we needed most right now. And I knew if I went out there, I would tell them to stop.
I couldn’t stand the sound of his agony.
“I didn’t know,” I said as Neds stood in front of the door, closing it partly behind him, maybe trying to block the sound or just trying to keep me from bolting past him. “About the procedure. Quinten had to do that to me once too, didn’t he?”
“I suppose he did,” Right Ned said.
Quinten had been only thirteen and I’d been eight. I couldn’t imagine what kind of horror that had been for him.
Mom and Dad said he’d sat awake by my bed for days after he’d put me in this body. None of them knew if the procedure he’d invented to place one person’s memories, thoughts, and personality into another person’s mind would work. They could have ended up losing me. They could have ended up with the original girl as a daughter. Or they could have ended up with us both dead.
Dad had been furious at Quinten. So had Mom. I didn’t remember that part, but Grandma had told me about it once, in her faltering, forgetful way.
Still, there had been no cure for my illness. The chance Quinten had taken to save me could have killed me, but I would have been dead anyway.
I remember he was there when I woke up. I remember how glad I was to see him smile.
“Oh, shit,” Right Ned breathed.
I shook out of my thoughts. I’d been standing there for a good minute or three, staring at the screens but not really seeing them.
I focused on them now. The cameras were trained on the front door to Gloria’s shop. It was open. A man walked in. The man was dressed in black—boots, gloves, and hood—a long coat almost covering all the weapons he was carrying.
Shit.
“We have to go,” Left Ned said. “Now. Right now. We have to run.”
He pushed me out the door and was right behind me as we sprinted to the treatment room.
“Who is that?” I asked. “Ned?”
“Domek.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Assassin, hunter, killer of all things,” Right Ned said. “Killer of us if we don’t get the hell out of here. Now.”
“If he’s that good of an assassin, why did he just stroll into a shop rigged with surveillance?”
“Because he doesn�
�t care if we see him coming,” Left Ned said. “Hell, he might prefer it that way. Hope we’ll run scared and make mistakes. He is that good. And if we don’t run, we’re gonna be that dead.”
11
I’m happy. You should know that. As long as the Houses leave us alone, I know everything’s going to be all right.
—from the diary of E. N. D.
Abraham was sitting on the exam table, covered in sweat, his hair finger-combed off his forehead. He had on pants and boots. Quinten was tying off a knot in a bandage he’d wrapped over both Abraham’s shoulders and down around his chest and stomach.
Gloria looked up from where she was putting things away on a shelf.
“We’ve been made,” Left Ned said. “In the shop. Domek. Assassin. Run. Now. You want to get out of here quick, Gloria. He’s armed.”
“Domek?” Abraham’s head snapped up and his eyes cleared. “Are you sure?”
Everyone seemed to know about this assassin except for me.
“More than sure,” Left Ned said.
“How long until he can get back here?” Quinten asked as he quickly shoved medical supplies into a duffel Gloria tossed to him.
“Can’t get in from the front,” Gloria said. “Did he come into the shop?”
“Yes.” Neds cased the room and stuffed his pockets with jars of pills.
“He’ll discover there’s no access to this part of the building in five minutes or less,” she said. “How quickly he gets in here depends on how much firepower he’s packing.”
I jogged over to Abraham and helped him into a flannel shirt and jacket.
His hands trembled. He was kicking off an awful lot of heat even though he was shivering.
Fever.
“Can you stand?” I asked as I helped him up off the table. “Can you run?”
His feet touched the ground and his eyes tightened. He hissed air between his teeth, and I looked around for the stretcher.
“I’m fine,” he gasped, one arm pressed against his stomach. “Let’s move.”
“Are there any other ways out of here besides the parking lot?” Right Ned asked.
“Basement,” Gloria said, pulling a coat off a hook and slipping into it. “This way.” She ran toward the hall Neds and I had just come in from.
“Hurry,” Quinten said, throwing the duffel over his shoulder and following Gloria.
Abraham took one step, then another. From the way his body stiffened against each movement, I knew it hurt like hell.
If he was already feeling everything, then I didn’t see how me touching him could make it worse. “Here,” I said, sliding my arm around his back and drawing his arm over my shoulder. “Lean if you need it.”
He leaned.
I helped him take the next few steps, and wanted to scream for how slow we were moving. But with each step his body seemed to come back to itself; muscles and joints and nerves seemed to remember how to move as one whole.
And then he seemed to remember how to move smoothly and quickly, until we were walking at a fairly fast pace.
But we were not running. We were nowhere near running capabilities.
“Faster, faster,” Left Ned chanted behind us.
Gloria and Quinten dragged a heavy cabinet away from the end of the hall and shoved it up against one wall. Gloria crouched down and pressed a button in the floorboards. A hatch popped up, and she pushed it to one side, where it slid seamlessly into the floor itself.
“Watch your step.” She started down a ladder, Quinten hurrying after her.
I looked up at Abraham. This wasn’t going to be pretty.
He scowled at the ladder. “Go,” he said, pulling his arm away from me.
“I won’t leave you.”
“Down. I’ll be right behind you.”
I didn’t waste any more time arguing. I sat and slipped my boots to the first rung, then scurried down as fast as I could.
Not a lot of light at the bottom of the ladder. It smelled of damp and mold and rot. I took a few steps away from the ladder. The ground beneath me felt like hard-packed dirt.
“What’s taking them so long?” Quinten whispered from the shadows to my right.
Abraham’s boot, first one, then the other, pressed against the ladder rungs. He climbed down methodically, but not nearly as slowly as I’d expected.
Neds scrambled down almost on top of him.
As soon as Neds’ heads cleared the floor above us, the hatch closed, snicking into place, then sealing with a thud of metal sucking down vacuum tight.
The darkness was complete now.
“This way,” Gloria said. She shook something and a soft yellow glow appeared in her palm.
I heard Quinten shake something too, and then the little packet strapped to the back of his hand glowed.
“Do you need assistance?” he asked Abraham.
Abraham was leaning against the ladder, still breathing hard. Sweat caught in small droplets at the ends of the hair over his eyes, and his clothes were soaked with it. He looked like he’d just run a marathon, not walked down a single hallway and a single ladder.
“Go,” I said to Quinten. “We’ll catch up.”
Abraham pushed away from the ladder. “We’ll keep up,” he said.
Neds, probably Left Ned, swore softly. He stepped over to Abraham and wrapped an arm around him.
I came up on the other side and did the same. I’d expected Abraham to argue, but from how much he was leaning on us both, I didn’t think he had the air for it.
“Don’t like ladders?” I asked as we moved forward over the hard, uneven dirt.
Abraham breathed for a bit, as if just trying to keep his lungs and feet moving at the same time was taking all his concentration.
“Most. Repairs,” he said, one word on each exhale. “Days. To recover. Coordination. Difficult.”
“It’s coming back to you pretty quickly,” I said.
“Wouldn’t hurt to step it up a bit, though,” Left Ned said.
The glow of Quinten’s and Gloria’s lights bobbed ahead of us faster than we could keep up.
“Think you can?” I asked Abraham.
Instead of wasting breath, he just put a little more effort into walking. He had longer legs than either Neds or me, but I wished he was moving at about twice the speed.
“Do you think Domek will find the hatch?” I asked Neds.
“Yes,” Right Ned said.
“How long?”
“Hopefully not before we’re out of this tunnel,” Left Ned said. “We’re fish in a barrel down here.”
“Where do you think this empties out?”
“No idea,” Right Ned said.
Abraham was doing what he could to stay breathing and moving. Even wounded, fevered, weak, and hurting, he didn’t complain.
“Hold up here,” Gloria said from ahead of us. “I’ll see if we can cross.”
“Just a little more,” I said to Abraham. We finally caught up to Quinten where the tunnel widened a bit. The walls were a rough mix of dirt and bricks, the ceiling supported by wooden beams. Gloria’s light skipped ahead, casting yellow over more bricks and more beams; then she took a sharp right and was gone.
“Let’s lean for a second,” I suggested. Neds and I guided Abraham to the wall and leaned against it.
We were all sweating and breathing a little hard. Abraham closed his eyes and tipped his head back, trying to get his breathing under control.
Quinten squinted at the shadows that filled the tunnel where Gloria had been moments before. Then he dug in the duffel over his shoulder and pulled out a soft canteen. “It’s water,” he said, offering it to me. “He should drink as much as he can.”
I took the container, a waterproof fabric with a hard nozzle and cap at the top. I unscrewed the lid and held it up for Abraham. “You should drink,” I said. “Doctor’s orders.”
It took him a moment, but he opened his eyes and tipped his head down again. He shifted and pulled his arm from around my sh
oulders, then did the same with Neds.
He locked his knees to hold himself up against the wall and held out his hand for the water.
I gave the canteen to him and he drank several long, deep swallows. He pulled it away from his mouth, paused to get his breath again, then drank more.
While he repeated this, his breathing getting better and better after each time he drank, I studied the tunnel, trying to set its location in my head.
“Do you have any idea where we are?” I asked Quinten.
“Other than under the city? No. She’s told me she had a way to get out if she was ever discovered by a House.”
“I think I love her a little for that,” I said.
He smiled, the shadow and light carving into his profile as if he were made of wax. “There’s a lot about her to love.”
I walked the short distance to my brother and leaned in close. “I need to talk to you about Abraham. Now. In private.”
“Wait here,” he said to Neds and Abraham. “We’ll walk partway down the tunnel, to watch for Gloria.”
Before Neds could argue, Quinten took my wrist. We strode about halfway to the junction Gloria had taken to the right.
“What?” he whispered.
“He feels pain. Ever since he first woke up, he’s had sensation,” I said. “I told you that. I think it’s the thread you used on him. My thread. And the scale jelly. Whatever it is, he can feel now.”
Quinten frowned and glanced back over his shoulder, then back at me. “He seemed to handle the procedure normally. We administered the block before we did it.”
“I’m sure. How painful would that procedure be on a normal human?”
“It would be excruciating.” Quinten wiped at his mouth with his nonglowing hand. “He shouldn’t be walking. Matilda, we need to find a safe place to leave him. He won’t be able to keep up. Running will only do more damage to him.”
“I won’t hold you up,” Abraham said. He walked on his own toward us. I had to admit, he seemed to be carrying himself better.
Neds followed behind him. I couldn’t see their expressions in the darkness, but Right Ned shook his head.
Abraham appeared calm, confident, and collected.
Yeah, I’d seen him put on that act before. I knew he was weak, wounded, and hurting.
