by Devon Monk
“Do you remember what time it was?” Quinten asked, giving me my glass.
I sniffed it too. Brandy, I thought. I took a sip. Hot, strong, with the smoke of burnt cherries on the back of my tongue. Yep. Brandy.
“It was a few hours after dawn, I think.” Abraham rubbed at his jaw and scratched at the stubble there. “Maybe closer to noon.”
“Was there a bell that usually rang out in town at that time?” Quinten walked back to the liquor cabinet and took the last two tumblers with him. He eased down onto the couch next to Gloria. She accepted a glass, tapped the edge of it against his, and took a drink.
Quinten just held the glass in one hand and rubbed at his forehead with the other. He looked dog tired.
“No,” Abraham said. “There was a church bell for service on Sundays and for emergencies. A school bell rang in the morning. But this bell, this sound . . . it resonated in everything.”
“No mills, factories, mines using bells for shift changes?” Quinten asked. He raised the glass to his lips, drank down half the brandy.
Abraham shook his head again. “Noon whistle for the factories and mills. Train whistle when it came in and out of town, but not a bell. And not a bell that was so . . .”
“Unworldly?” Quinten offered.
“Yes. I said it was ringing, but it wasn’t a metal-on-metal sound, not a wooden sound. It was more like. . . .” He paused again. “All these years, all the things I’ve seen, and I don’t have a way to describe it. If Earth were a bell, the whole world made of a material that would resonate, it sounded like that. As if something had hit the whole world so hard, it gave out a single, endless peal.”
“You’re not far off on that image, really.” Quinten finished his drink, then leaned his head back on the couch and closed his eyes. “Something hit time so hard, it cracked. And we are going to see it glued back together properly.”
Abraham offered no comment. I didn’t think he entirely believed my brother.
I didn’t blame him. The longer I thought about all this, the more the whole idea seemed outlandish. If I weren’t in the middle of it, I’d think it was all a fever dream of a crazy genius who refused to face reality. Just as he had refused to face the reality of my dying when I was a child, and had instead, foolishly, transferred my thoughts and mind into this body.
Quinten’s response to impossible situations was to find an equally impossible solution to it. Sometimes it worked. I was proof of that.
Sometimes it didn’t.
I just hoped that he’d found the right impossible answer this time.
18
The Houses have tightened security. Quinten keeps telling me everything is going to be okay, but I don’t think I can believe him.
—from the diary of E. N. D.
“This is a cabin?” Abraham asked.
“It used to be,” I said.
We’d been hooded and unloaded from the pod into a small room, then put on a bus Neds drove for about a half hour.
Finally far enough from the secret speed-tube drop, Neds had given us the go-ahead to remove the hoods. Not that it would have mattered. It was so dark, none of us would have been able to see anything anyway.
We made it to Pock Cabin by four a.m. The cabin was a block of concrete and metal, with narrow slits for windows. It looked like a cross between a medieval fortress and a postwar bunker.
Neds drove the bus around back of the place and parked it there.
“This is it,” he said. “As close to the property as I can get us and still be safe for the night.”
I stood and stretched, trying to loosen muscles without making the wounds in my thigh, shoulder, or hip break open and bleed.
“You done good, Harris,” I said. I swung the duffel up over my good shoulder. “Let’s go, people. It may not be the prettiest accommodation, but it has all the guns, ammo, and rations you could want.”
I was out of the bus first, followed by the others. Quinten and I knew about Pock Cabin, of course; our parents had befriended the crazy old guy who had originally built it. And when he’d passed on, it had sort of fallen into our unofficial keeping.
I hadn’t been up here since I was ten. I didn’t know the last time Quinten had visited.
The damp forest air and smell of pine wrapped the lonely arms of home around me. We were only out a few miles from our property, and it was making me itchy to get back to where I belonged.
I wanted to make sure Grandma was okay.
“Did you bring the key?” I asked Neds.
“It’s not my hidey-hole,” Left Ned said. “Figured your genius brother would know the secret knock.”
Quinten pressed his fingertips along the edges of the metal door, then stepped to the left and ran his fingers along the concrete wall.
“It’s been a while,” Quinten muttered as he pressed and prodded. “Ah, here.”
The door rolled open with the grinding of metal gears and a pop of rods.
“It’s about time you got here,” a man’s voice said from the other side of the door.
Abraham pulled the gun, but I grabbed his arm.
“Wait.” I peered into the shadows. “Welton?”
The door finished opening and Welton Yellow, ex-head of House Yellow, stood the doorway, eating a chocolate bar.
“I’ve been waiting for hours,” he said. “Good to see you’re all still breathing.”
Behind him, taller even than Abraham, was the mountainous galvanized, Foster First. His thick yellow stitches tracked through the scar tissue across his craggy face, almost glowing against the albino white of his skin and hair.
“Come in,” Welton said.
“We trust him?” Gloria asked.
“I think we need to,” I said, walking into the structure.
Abraham was right behind me, and clasped Foster’s hand in his own. “Foster, my friend.”
Foster gave him a crooked smile, and they leaned in and gave each other a fond embrace.
“Do you know what Welton is up to?” Abraham asked.
“Helping,” Foster said in his crushed-boulder voice. “Helping.”
He stepped aside and waited for everyone else to walk in before he scanned the shadows behind us and closed the door, setting the locks.
“Food and weapons this way,” Welton’s voice echoed down the hall.
It was cool and dimly lit here in the highly defendable entryway. More light poured from the hallway. “Are you and Welton the only people here?” I asked Foster.
“Yes.”
The hall ended at a large, brightly lit room filled with sturdy but homey furniture. Communication devices, tracking gear, screens, and feeds that almost rivaled what we had at our house spread across the walls.
“I don’t recall all this being here last time I stopped in,” Quinten said.
“I brought a few toys along with me,” Welton said. “I’ve always wanted to test a few of our newer designs in the field.”
“Are you sure you’re not being tracked?” Left Ned said. “Or that any of your equipment isn’t being tracked?”
“Of course I’m not being tracked,” he said with mock offense. “I made sure of that before I left the House rulership in Libra’s hands.”
“Your cousin?” Abraham asked. “She’s . . . a little chaotic to be standing as ruler, don’t you think?”
“No,” Welton said. “I think she is a lot chaotic. Which means she is making all sorts of crazy choices and decisions right now. Trust me when I say technology will not be easy for any of the Houses to access or use for a while. It’s . . . delightful.” The smile spread into a grin, and I couldn’t help but shake my head.
“You are a troublemaker. You know that, Welton?” I set my duffel down next to one of the couches and sat.
“Please. I made this world a better place when I took over that House. Any trouble that comes out of Libra is long overdue, if you ask me. Now, food, drinks, kitchen—that way. Bedrooms there.” He pointed the opposite direction.
“There is a fully stocked basement and some interesting storage in the attic, if you’re the curious type.
“Abraham,” he said as he dropped down into a stuffed chair, propping his heels up onto a matching hassock. “I have a question for you, my friend.”
Abraham was standing with Foster near the hall. He walked a little farther into the room. “Ask.”
“Did you shoot and kill Slater Orange?”
Quinten hadn’t taken a seat yet. Gloria was halfway to the kitchen. They both paused and looked over at Abraham. Neds and I were looking at him too.
His eyes narrowed and the muscle at his jaw worked. Then he very calmly said, “No.”
Welton’s expression was unreadable as he studied Abraham. “He has video that shows otherwise.”
“I assumed he would,” Abraham said evenly. “Do you think I’m lying?”
Welton shook his head. “I do not. You take the moral ground so high, you could step over heaven. I’m not surprised he framed you for the crime, though. He has never liked you.”
“He hates all galvanized,” Abraham said.
“He hates all living creatures,” Welton said.
“And what about you?” Quinten asked. “I am not as convinced that we should trust you, Welton Yellow.”
“Just Welton,” he said, pushing his fingertips together in front of his mouth and peering over the top of them at Quinten. “Listen, Quinten. If I wanted to betray you, I wouldn’t have hauled my ass all the way out here in the middle of nowhere. I would have taken you down while you were on that seaplane or in San Diego or down that underground train line. Oh yes,” he said at Quinten’s sudden stillness. “I knew where you were every step of the way.”
“But we removed the bugs,” Gloria said.
Welton nodded. “Very practical of you. But I have eyes everywhere. Well, I did.”
“Matilda,” he said, switching his gaze to me. “I knew you lived on a farm off grid, but did it have to be out in the middle of the scrub? I’m practically blind out here.”
“Farms are funny like that,” I said. “So far away from cities and such. You’re saying we can trust you?”
“Don’t you already?” he asked with a slow smile.
“I’m not the one you need to convince.” Yes, I trusted him. But Quinten had known him longer—hell, he’d worked for the man. He must know a lot more about Welton than I did. It didn’t hurt to be a little cautious.
“All right. Proof,” he said. “It’s probably best we get this out of the way quickly. You are running out of time. You have—what—eight hours left?”
Quinten nodded, and my throat was suddenly too dry to swallow. No one had said the exact time. Eight hours. Not even a day left.
And we still didn’t have Grandma’s journal.
“You will want to see this news feed from the past two days since the gathering,” Welton said. “I’ll give you a moment to take it in.”
He tapped his finger against his palm, and the upper part of the wall across the room filled with dozens of images. Dozens of voices; dozens of text scrolls in dozens of languages. It was pretty easy to understand exactly what all those images and voices added up to.
“We are so screwed,” I said.
The screens scrolled through the gathering where galvanized Helen Eleventh shot Oscar Gray, the head of House Gray, in front of all the world’s watching eyes.
An act that broke the treaty between the galvanized and the Houses they served.
A flurry of images showed each of the Houses taking their galvanized in chains to a high-security compound. Once inside the heavily armored solitary-confinement cells, the galvanized were pumped full of drugs that sent them into medical comas.
Helen was confined even more harshly: bound, blindfolded, and intubated, she was locked in a close-fitting body cage that was welded onto a medical table in a featureless metal cell.
Foster made a soft sound in the back of his throat: sorrow.
“It’s all right,” Welton said comfortingly. “You’re not going there. Ever. I won’t allow it.”
I knew Welton genuinely cared for Foster’s welfare.
Being the oldest of the galvanized meant Foster had been experimented on the most and carried the most flaws and scars. He rarely spoke, but I’d seen him stand by Welton out of more than a sense of duty—out of fondness.
On the screens, the heads of each House gave speeches and promises. Most of them said they would go to all ends to find Abraham and me and put us down like the inhuman criminals we were.
Some were even more blunt and bloody about what should be done with us when we were found. Cutting off our heads seemed to be the most popular option.
But most interesting to me was Slater Orange, in the body of Robert Twelfth. He gave a short, convincingly humble speech insisting he would serve House Orange with the careful oversight of Reeves Silver, his actions and decisions fully transparent to the other Houses and public at large.
It was chilling to see Robert not acting like Robert, not even speaking like Robert. I didn’t know how other people couldn’t tell that it was the mind of Slater Orange in that galvanized body and not Robert Twelfth.
Seeing the proof of my brother’s handiwork made my stomach sick. Robert was truly dead.
The image of Oscar’s face repeated on the screen many times, along with the face of Slater Orange and, of course, my face and Abraham’s.
Following Oscar’s face was that of his brother, Hollis. The man didn’t look a bit like Oscar’s affable, absentminded scholarly image. Hollis was clean and slick as a snake, his dark eyes dead, his smile a practiced thing. If he was grieving his brother’s murder, he didn’t show it. He looked like he was pleased with things going his way, now that the control of the human resources of the world had fallen into his well-manicured hands.
Abraham had gone a deathly kind of still watching Robert, a galvanized, one of his dearest friends, demanding his death for murdering Slater, head of House Orange.
“Robert certainly takes after Slater,” Welton said, watching Abraham’s reaction.
“That’s not Robert,” I said.
“Oh?”
“I am at fault,” Quinten said. “I put myself and my . . . skills with galvanized right into Slater’s hands. He forced me to implant his mind, personality, and thoughts into Robert’s body.”
Welton straightened in the chair, suddenly very focused on my brother. “How?”
Quinten pressed his lips together and said nothing.
“Fine,” Welton said. “But if you won’t tell me how, you must tell me why. Or I will find myself unable to trust you, Quinten Case. Why did you do such a thing?”
Quinten’s gaze didn’t leave Welton, but something in him tightened, as if he were trying to speak around a great pain. “He said he’d kill her,” he whispered.
“Who?”
“Matilda.”
A wash of shock spread over my skin. “Me?”
“How?” Welton asked.
“Assassins. He had snipers covering her twenty-four hours a day. He . . . showed me.”
Oh, God. I couldn’t imagine that fear, that pain. I couldn’t believe I’d been used against him.
It was my fault that Robert had died. My fault my brother had been used to do this horrible thing. I pressed my palm over my face, wishing I could be anywhere but here.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I said.
“Did you know?” Welton asked.
I pulled my hand away, sniffing back tears. “No. But it’s my fault that Robert is dead,” I said. “If there’s blame, I will bear it.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Welton said, “you’ve been hanging around Abraham too much. This isn’t about blame. It’s about truth and information. Who has it and what they’ll do with it.
“We know that Slater is in that body. And he knows you, Quinten, guard his secret. If I were him, I’d want you dead.”
“Galvanized don’t have the power a head of House has,” I
said. “We aren’t even considered human. Why would he want to be galvanized?”
“Nothing better than an immortal body,” Welton said. “A chance to live forever. Given enough time, House power can be bought, bribed, won. He was the one who released that recorded message from your mother, by the way. To flush you out, Matilda. Or, rather, to cause Oscar Gray to send Abraham out looking for you, to see if you were real—a modern mind in a galvanized body. You were his proof that he could gain immortality. He was . . . no, he is a very clever man.”
“I walked right into his plans,” Quinten said. “I put this madman in a position to take head of the House and to order us hunted down, blamed, and destroyed.”
“This madman,” Abraham said evenly, “has always been the head of a House. The only thing that is different now is that he is in a galvanized body.”
“Immortal,” Welton said. “Well, until noon today, if my calculations are correct. Are they correct, Mr. Case?”
Quinten nodded, pulling the screen out of his pocket. “This is . . . beautiful,” he admitted. “I tried for years to nail down the exact timing. How did you do it so quickly?”
“I cheated.” Welton shrugged. “I watched you while you researched. Paid moderate attention to the texts you were going through.”
“I took no notes,” Quinten said. “I never take notes for just this reason.”
“I might have also analyzed your eye movements, body temperatures, pulse rates.” Welton pulled his fingers back through his hair, and it slipped back into place like a silk curtain. “Recorded the pages you read, acquired said pages, went through them myself, paying attention to the pages you reacted to. I didn’t say it was easy, but, then . . . I do like a good puzzle.”
“From that you extrapolated I was looking for the mending point in time?” Quinten asked.
“No. From that I extrapolated you were trying to isolate a point in time. So, this does have something to do with the Wings of Mercury experiment?”
“You’ve been watching me for years, haven’t you?” Quinten asked.
“I do admit you’re a very interesting person, Mr. Case,” Welton said. “Your meteoric rise to the head of House Brown—”
