by Andy Marino
Out the rear porthole, the transport fish had backed off slightly, but its face was sprouting long tentacles, catfishy antennae that grew in pursuit of the submersible. The antennae whipped through the water, crystal tips nearly bashing the porthole.
Then the crystals flared. The noise inside the submersible changed abruptly from the creaks and groans of water pressure to an empty silence.
“Air pocket,” Hannah said, uselessly, since they were already poised in midair — the tentacles had carved out a hallway around them. The submersible had just enough momentum to carry itself across the air pocket and smash through the wall of rippling water at the other end. If the fish succeeded in making a larger trap, the submersible would find itself stranded on the dry lake bed.
“The honeycomb is our deliverance,” Eri announced.
“Nice vocabulary,” Nancy said.
Hannah looked down the narrow nose of the submersible and out the front porthole. The headlamps from the big fish illuminated a sheer rock wall looming just ahead. This side of the lake didn’t slope gently — it was practically vertical, and full of caves.
“It’s not Muffin,” Hannah said. “It’s a way out.”
The mouths of the caves were ringed with carvings that appeared in the light of the headlamps. Names of districts: LORMAYR, FRITH, YEUNKISH. Hannah scanned the honeycomb, thinking quickly.
“Eri, remember how you said the Institute tracked the rebels? The banished?”
“Every last raw nerve.”
“Do you know where they went after they left Jaretsai Station?”
“Of course.”
“Can you take us there?”
Stefan looked at her in disbelief. “I thought you didn’t care about Kyle! You said you were just here for your mother — what happened to all that? What could you possibly hope to gain by getting us involved in —”
“My father is with him!” Hannah said.
Nancy coughed. Stefan just stared.
In a few seconds, Eri would have to steer them into a cave or they’d smash into the rock wall. Instead, she abandoned the controls and spun to face Hannah.
“No more secrets.”
“That’s my last one.”
Eri turned back to the panel. “Hannah Silver, grab hold of that rose and spin it when I say. Stefan Weisz, do the same with the candle, pulling it back with all your strength.” Hannah placed her fingers against the pewter fixture. Stefan held the candle-shaped lever to her right.
“Air pocket incoming,” Nancy reported from her spot next to the rear porthole. Eri tried to turn a dial shaped like a high-heeled boot and the fixture came off in her hand. She tossed it over her shoulder and tried a key, which slid forward without breaking. The submersible changed course, nosing up along the honeycomb wall.
“Now,” she said. Hannah turned the rose. Stefan yanked the candle back. With a surprisingly lithe maneuver, the little sub halted, spun, and darted into a cave marked CAYMIRI.
The cave expelled the submersible into a labyrinth of pillars and stilts. Golden rays of light speared the depths, illuminating stone archways and the crumbling steps of an amphitheater. Hannah snuffed the lantern. Eri steered the ship between rusty hinges that flapped in the languid current, past half-disintegrated awnings that clung to long-abandoned shops. The main street of this sunken district dead-ended at a stone wall that was home to a family of parasites shaped like holiday wreaths. They dangled their crimson ornaments toward the sub in greeting, or warning, or threat.
Hannah spotted a massive sluice gate at the base of the wall. “Down there.”
“Yes,” Eri said. “I mapped this.”
“All clear on our tail,” Nancy said from the rear porthole. “I don’t know if we lost ’em, but we’re alone.”
“We did not lose them,” Eri said.
As soon as they were through the gate the sunlight was all around them, pooling along the flat bottom of what appeared to be a narrow man-made river. Eri nosed the submersible upward and Hannah squinted. Silhouettes like long footballs blocked the light in places. Boats, she realized. They broke the surface and the sun brightened every seam and crevice of the sub, bathing her in warmth. She stumbled over to the hatch. It was as if the light were pulling her from a long slumber beneath the city of the dead, guiding her up out of dreams to face the morning.
Not morning, she reminded herself. On solid ground alongside the river, Hannah helped Stefan, Nancy, and Eri climb out.
“Happy lightday,” she said.
Stefan shielded his eyes with a hand. “Ugh. Lightdays are the worst.”
“Wharf.” Nancy giggled. “Jetty. Dock. Quay.”
Hannah and her twin had once used a dictionary of nautical terms to add vocabulary to Muffin Language. Her eyes adjusted, and she saw what Nancy was getting at: Caymiri was a maze of canals, a twisting riddle of high-traffic waterways. Gondoliers steered their banana-shaped boats with wooden poles, drifting beneath arched bridges. Along the sidewalks and docks, crowds gathered in bars and cafés, overflowing onto bobbing rafts. Charlemagne flitted about the sidewalk, saturated with bright yellow hues, soaking up the sun. A fine mist hung in the air.
“Hey, Stefan,” Hannah said. “Take a big whiff.”
He breathed in through his nostrils and looked at her questioningly.
“Briny,” she said.
“That’s a boy smelling the ocean,” Nancy corrected. “Not a bunch of little rivers.”
“Canals,” Hannah said. She spotted a paper tacked to a dockside hut advertising boat trips and sightseeing jaunts along the famous —
“Floating canals of Caymiri,” Stefan said, tilting his head to look up into the sky. The mist hung like sheer drapery from aerial thoroughfares of flowing water that hoisted all manner of yachts and dinghies high above the neighborhood. Gondolas swooped and splashed, sending runoff down to be collected in great copper tanks and pumped back up to feed the canals. Recycling stations hummed with the flutter of enormous bellows, onionskin accordion machines suctioning up and down.
The steering poles of the gondoliers pierced the bottom of the canal, so that looking up, Hannah could see their candy-striped tips poking through and disappearing back up into the water.
“Ow!”
She felt a familiar pinch in the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. Mist from the air was collecting on her hand like poured mercury. The little worm of water clung to the side of her thumb, then slipped painlessly beneath the skin and vanished. Hannah thought of the other invaders: toothpick from the attic in the mansion district, fungus from the Nusle Kruselskaya subway station, space bar from the computer in Su-Ankyo, and now floating canal mist from Caymiri.
The words of the Memory Keeper came back to her, sudden and sharp: You’ve been here before.
Hannah wondered if this was the city’s way of welcoming her home.
“My sword is my own,” Charlemagne said, nuzzling the sleeve of her jacket. She looked up from her hand. The submersible was becoming a source of amusement for a gang of local children, who had taken to pelting its rusty hull with pebbles, abandoning the puppet theater that rose above the quay like a felt-wrapped vampire’s castle.
She looked up and down the docks. “Where’s Eri?”
Stefan frowned. “She was just here.”
“She went that way.” Nancy pointed toward the lobby of an apartment building. A green awning proclaimed DOCKSIDE ARMS.
“You didn’t mention it until now?”
Nancy shrugged. “Do I have to do everything?”
Hannah considered Eri’s absence. Maybe they were better off just going their separate ways. What was Hannah going to do when she saw Kyle, when she saw her father? Demand the location of her mother and expect to skip merrily away? She promised herself that when she got back home — if she ever got back home — she would become the kind of person who made detailed plans instead of just throwing herself into crazy situations.
“We have to get out of here,” Stefan said. “No
w.”
On the lower canal, gondoliers steered furiously out of the way as a group of sleek black ships surfaced. The teardrop-shaped subs crowded the canal, water sloughing off their backs, pointy noses poking traffic aside. Hannah counted eight gorgeous little pods of polished black steel. She led Stefan and Nancy through the crowd of pedestrians, dodging workmen in overalls and ladies in comically oversized feathered hats. Suddenly, a hand shot out from behind a barrel, pulling her down with such force that she almost landed flat on her back. Eri’s angry face was an inch from hers.
“I thought you were right behind me. Why were you standing on the dock next to our ship waiting to get caught?”
“We were distracted by the famous floating canals of Caymiri,” Stefan said.
Hannah pushed herself to a crouch and peeked around the barrel. She saw Urvashi’s sari among the crowd and caught the light glinting dully off Throckmorton’s helmet.
Hannah pointed at the Dockside Arms. “That’s where the banished are hiding, isn’t it?” The building was a nondescript ten stories, with a top floor that jutted out to meet the upper canal. There was nothing sinister about the place, but the buildings in her bad dreams always started out vaguely inviting, too. The temperature of the mist in the air seemed to drop, and she shivered.
Eri nodded.
“It looks so peaceful.”
“The Watchers have not yet tracked them here. The Institute is always several steps ahead.”
They waited behind the barrel as a papier-mâché float made its way along the sidewalk, carrying a smiling, waving woman with a sash across her chest that said LIGHTDAY QUEEN. Hannah wondered briefly, with an absurd flicker of hope, if the woman might toss out a handful of Tolliver’s. When the float’s cakelike shape blocked the line of sight between the canal and their hiding place, they ran into the lobby of the Dockside Arms.
Waiting for them in the corner was a single glass eye.
Hannah raised her hood and hid her face with her hands.
“This one does not spy for the Watchers,” Eri said.
Hannah peeked through her fingers. Eri and Stefan were standing directly under the glass eye, fearlessly peering up at it. Stefan pointed. “She’s onto something, see? There’s all this electric stuff around it.”
Hannah joined them beneath the eye. It was difficult not to flinch. But they were right: This eye had been captured. Its lens was imprisoned behind a thin, mesh screen connected to a battery pack, which was Velcro-strapped to the wall. Wires led away from the eye to the pack and disappeared up into a freshly drilled hole.
“The rebels have corrupted it,” Eri said.
Charlemagne scampered toward an open elevator door. “Corrupted,” he said. “Corrupted.”
“Guess they know we’re coming,” Stefan said.
Hannah wondered if Kyle was watching her on a screen at this very moment. She forced her mouth into what she hoped was a fearless scowl and glared unblinking into the eye.
Nancy followed the paint-lizard into the elevator. “Going up?”
“Top floor,” Eri said, and they filed inside.
“Gotta press all the buttons,” Hannah said as the doors slid shut. “Or the cable will snap and the elevator will fall. Remember that, Nancy?”
Hannah pictured the teachers’ elevator at the Carbine Pass Middle School. What day was it back home? Had years passed since she’d entered the city? Or was it more like minutes?
“There is no cable,” Eri said, pressing a button marked PRESIDENTIAL SUITE. Hannah felt water pressure beneath the floor of the elevator car, and up it shot like a popped cork.
“So what’s your father like?” Stefan asked. “Why is he working with Kyle?”
“I don’t know,” Hannah admitted.
“Well, is he going to tell you where your mother is?”
“I don’t know,” she said again, looking helplessly at her companions. “I’ve never met him before.”
Eri jabbed her finger into the EMERGENCY STOP button and the elevator halted.
Hannah put up her hands. “That’s not a secret I meant to keep, I swear. I just didn’t have a chance to tell you guys the whole story.”
“So we are meeting, uninvited, with a murderer and a complete stranger,” Eri said.
“Sorry,” Hannah said. “You don’t have to help me, you know.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why are you helping me?”
“Because I believe what Stefan Weisz believes.”
He raised an eyebrow — This is news to me.
Eri hit a button to cancel their Emergency Stop and the elevator resumed its journey. “That Hannah Silver is on her way to Ascension, and we would be foolish not to follow.”
When the doors slid open, Hannah expected to be staring into the faces of Kyle and her father. The Presidential Suite of the Dockside Arms was crowded with souls engaged in strange work, but there was nobody waiting for her. Cautiously, she gave Nancy’s hand a squeeze and stepped out of the elevator. The suite was actually a single massive room lined with huge picture windows. In the distance, Hannah recognized minarets bristling like arrows in a quiver.
The room had been designed for lightday living, and the brilliance of the world outside was parceled into shadows by iron sculptures placed against the glass. All along the buffed hardwood floor, spiral patterns twirled and spun, as if the shadows had been brought to life by the wiry artwork. Out one of the open windows, Hannah could see a gondola bobbing on the floating canal. A pair of middle-aged men in soccer jerseys tossed a large canvas bundle inside, and the boat slipped out of sight.
Stefan fidgeted nervously with his paintbrush. “You sure we’ve got the right rebels?”
Granite countertops and L-shaped desks had been pushed into squares throughout the high-ceilinged suite — it looked, to Hannah, like an office set up in a great hurry. Every surface was being used for some kind of manufacturing. Little piles of gritty powder — she thought it must be raw Foundation — were being sifted from vials to scales by men and women in lab coats, while carpenters hammered wood into interlocking boxes. In one corner, hidden behind a screen like the one in Eri’s bedroom, silhouetted figures were welding.
“Those things again,” Nancy said, pointing to the far wall. Glass doors opened onto a long roof deck, where hundreds of Foundation meters took their measurements.
Hannah’s eyes strayed back inside. The centerpiece of the room was an object about the size and shape of a pickup truck, with a tarp thrown over it. She wondered what it was, and was about to suggest they go take a peek, since nobody seemed to be giving them any trouble.
Then Kyle strolled out from behind it.
Hannah’s thoughts were clenched in barbed wire. Her mind, red and angry, launched her body into a dead sprint across the shiny floor, sneakers squeaking. Stefan shouted in alarm — without thinking, Hannah had snatched his paintbrush. There was a tiny bit of Charlemagne on its tip.
“Kyle!” she snarled in a voice that came from some long-buried place. As the name escaped her throat it called forth an image of her mother crumpled beneath the lighthouse, rain-soaked nightgown shrouding her face. And now here was the boy responsible, the boy who had come to her house and scattered his false kindness like poison. She hadn’t considered revenge before this moment, but now that Kyle was right in front of her, smiling warmly as she closed the gap, every nerve ending fired with the same message: Hurt him.
As if pitching a softball, she windmilled the brush and flung the dollop of paint underhanded, launching it straight at his forehead, where his shaggy bangs flopped so perfectly. Hannah screamed in triumph as the paint found its mark, the digital splatter hitting Kyle directly between the —
No.
Missing him as he sidestepped with impossible quickness. His fluid grace made Eri seem like a clumsy oaf. It wasn’t until she heard Nancy’s voice beside her, the syllables stretched like a song played at half-speed, that Hannah realized Kyle’s ability to give time a little nudge. He’d used the same technique
to help her bypass the stairs at school, except this was a nudge in the opposite direction, and everything except Kyle moved in achingly slow motion.
The paint splatter gradually, harmlessly fizzled out. Hannah was aware of her legs pumping ever so slowly. She watched as Kyle’s eyes darkened to black pools and leaked ribbons of smoke that curled prettily upward to wind about a chandelier. The shadow sculptures that played along the floor grew like a dreary forest to bind Hannah’s arms behind her back. Branches fastened her ankles to the floor.
And then Kyle blinked away a final puff of smoke and time crashed into itself in a dizzying rush.
“— kill you!” said Nancy, the end of her sentence abruptly sped up to normal speed. Hannah glanced over to see that Eri, Stefan, and Nancy were trussed up alongside her. She squirmed against her shadowy restraints, which seemed to emit a low, satisfied hiss, as if they were finally getting a chance to fulfill their purpose. She could feel them tightening, cutting off the circulation in her wrists.
Kyle wiped ash from the corners of his eyes and shrugged. “You can’t kill me. I’m already dead.”
All around the room, an assortment of weapons clicked and murmured and howled into place. That’s what they’ve been building, she thought. Off to her right was a teenage girl brandishing what appeared to be an oscillating fan with plastic blades. It looked far from dangerous, but Hannah remembered the aftermath of Jaretsai Station: aging brick, corroded metal, broken glass.
“Welcome to the revolution,” Kyle said with an infuriating smile. “First of all, I’m really sorry about tying you up. It’s just for right now, until we all calm down a little bit. Cool? Okay. Let me know if it’s too tight or anything.”
Hannah struggled against her bindings. Kyle’s eyes coughed up a wisp of smoke and the shadows eased off. She was still held fast, but she could move her wrists to recover circulation.
Hannah decided to get straight to the point. “You killed her.”
He looked directly into her eyes. She saw herself — an angry, squirming girl — reflected in his pupils.
