The Empress's Tomb

by Kirsten Miller

  “Could they have made it back to New York by now?” Betty wondered. “Have you heard anything at the salon, Oona?”

  For a moment, it seemed as if Oona’s lips wouldn’t budge. Her anger had vanished, and she’d started to sulk. “I haven’t been spending much time there lately,” she finally said. “But Livia and Sidonia are top-priority topics. Someone would have called me if there had been any news.”

  “Should we check Kiki’s house?” asked DeeDee. “If you give us a couple of hours, Luz and I can disable the booby traps.”

  “And destroy all that work?” moaned Luz. “Come on, guys. Oona’s got a point. This isn’t the first time Kiki’s disappeared. It isn’t even the fourth time. Shouldn’t we wait a day or two before we start ripping everything apart?”

  “Maybe Luz is right,” said Betty. “Our weekly meeting is tomorrow. If Kiki doesn’t show up for that one, we can break into her house and search for clues.”

  “Okay,” I said, standing up from the table. “If you all want to wait, we’ll wait. I just hope we’re doing the right thing.”

  “Where are you going?” Betty asked.

  “I have research to do. If Livia and Sidonia are back in New York, there might be an item in the gossip columns.”

  “But Oona called the meeting, and we haven’t even let her talk,” Betty protested. Oona said nothing. She just concentrated on the table in front of her as if she were willing it to fly through the window.

  “Sorry, Oona,” I said. “What did you want to discuss?”

  “Never mind,” Oona mumbled.

  “Pleeeeeease,” Betty begged, trying to lure Oona out of her funk.

  “I’ll wait. It’s not that important,” said Oona, and I suddenly suspected it was.

  • • •

  That night, the weather worsened. Even with the windows open, my bedroom was hot enough to roast a goat. I lay on my bed in my nightgown, using the Daily News as a fan. Since returning home from the meeting, I’d combed through every New York newspaper. There was no mention of Livia or Sidonia Galatzina. The giant squirrels were the day’s big story.

  As if to prove to the city that they couldn’t be ignored, the squirrels had invaded the Central Park Zoo in the early hours of the morning and freed hundreds of animals from their cages. At 6:00 a.m., a jogger reported a pack of penguins feasting on fish in the Harlem Meer. An anaconda was seen sunning itself on the steps of a Fifth Avenue mansion, a poodle-shaped bulge in its belly. Jewel-colored tree frogs clung to pine branches like Christmas tree ornaments. Among the only animals left behind at the zoo were several enormous squirrels. The one that made the front cover of the New York Times had been painted on a plastic iceberg in the polar bear’s habitat. It was a thuggish-looking beast with a sign that said bluntly WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?

  According to the papers, security tapes at the zoo had captured a shadowy figure skipping past several sleeping guards, pausing from time to time to moon the cameras. Since the vigilante’s face had been cunningly disguised, and his butt lacked distinguishing features, the police were without solid leads. They had begun staking out pet stores and interrogating art students, but the culprit remained at large. Everyone in New York was anxious to see what he’d do next.

  A gust of wind blew through the room, rustling the newspapers I’d tossed to the floor. I turned my sweat-speckled forehead to catch the breeze and caught sight of an unnaturally pale face framed by wild, white hair peering at me from the fire escape. When I shrieked in terror, the face grinned and disappeared. Seconds later, my bedroom door swung open and my bespectacled father poked his head inside.

  “Still alive?” he asked, checking the room.

  “Barely.” I was feeling a little faint from the shock.

  “Boogeyman?” he asked.

  “Spider.”

  Having earned a degree in entomology, my father’s sympathies lay with the insects of the world, and he never missed an opportunity to bad-mouth an arachnid. “Repulsive little creatures,” he said, shivering with disgust. “Did you know they dissolve their prey’s innards and then suck them out like a Slurpee? They’re the eight-legged serial killers of the arthropod phylum. But just remember: You’re bigger than they are.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” I said.

  “That’s my job,” he replied as he shut the door with a smile.

  Once I heard his footsteps fade, I ducked through the window and onto the fire escape. Kiki Strike was leaning against the wall, waiting for me, her chic black clothes blending into the night. She wasn’t exactly the picture of a princess—at times it was hard to believe she was human. Though the poison she’d consumed as an infant hadn’t killed her, it had drained her skin and hair of color. And because the attempt on her life had left her allergic to most forms of food, she was unlikely to grow more than five feet tall. At fourteen, she was like a creature from a sci-fi movie, shockingly beautiful and strange.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she whispered. Even in the dark, I could tell there was something wrong. Her ice-blue eyes were bloodshot, her cheeks had sunk to new depths, and she hadn’t brushed her hair in days.

  “Twenty-four hours. I think you’ve set a new record for tardiness. Where have you been? I was sure you’d been kidnapped. I’ve spent all day trying to locate Livia.”

  “Verushka was sick. I had to take her to the hospital.”

  “Verushka’s in the hospital? What’s wrong with her? Is she going to be okay? Can I see her?” The questions shot from my mouth like badly aimed bullets, and my vision blurred as tears flooded my eyes. Not only was Verushka the kind of guardian I always wished I had—funny, understanding, and handy with a bazooka—I knew it was she who’d convinced Kiki to invite me to join the Irregulars. Without her intervention, I might have died of boredom long before I reached high school.

  “Verushka’s back at home. She’s doing fine. There was something wrong with her leg—the one that Sergei Molotov shot. It started turning blue a few days ago. But the problem’s under control now. In fact, she’d be mad if she knew I told you. She wouldn’t want to you to worry about her. She’s a tough old lady. I once watched her stitch up her own head wound with a sewing needle and some fishing wire. She’ll probably outlive us all.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said. “But how are you feeling? You look like you’ve been dipped in Wite-Out. Are you sure you didn’t catch something at the hospital?”

  “Nothing a little danger can’t cure. What do you say we finish the map tonight?”

  “I can’t. Some of us have to go to school in the morning. My teachers have been complaining that I keep passing out during class.”

  “Want me to take care of them?” asked Kiki with an arched eyebrow that I was afraid to interpret.

  “I think I can handle them on my own,” I assured her. “But I really do need to get some rest. My mother threatened to have me deported to the middle of nowhere if my grades don’t improve.”

  “Come with me tonight, and I promise you’ll get a nap tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Oh yeah? How are you going to do that?”

  “It’s a surprise. It won’t get you into any trouble.”

  “But I don’t want to go to the Marble Cemetery tonight,” I moaned. “It’s too much work.”

  “See,” Kiki countered with a cocky grin. “I thought of that, too. If you get dressed fast, we can use the entrance in Iris’s basement. Her parents are at a cocktail party.”

  “And her nanny?”

  “The nanny locked herself in the bathroom an hour ago. She polished off a bottle of cooking sherry, and now she’s singing show tunes to herself.”

  “I don’t know, Kiki.”

  Kiki’s smile faded as she chipped a piece of paint off the rail of the fire escape. Beneath all the bravado, something was still troubling her.

  “You win,” I huffed. “Stay here while I slip into something a little more practical. But you better think of a foolproof plan to get me out of school tomorrow.�
� Back in my room, I reached out the window and handed her the front page of the New York Times. “Here’s a little something to read while you wait.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen the squirrels,” Kiki said. “As long as they’re on the loose, they should keep me out of the papers. Thanks to the zoo footage, nobody’s looked twice at me all day. That butt on the surveillance tapes was undeniably male.”

  I poked my head out the window. “Worried your fifteen minutes of fame are finally up?”

  “Relieved,” Kiki corrected. “Another fifteen could get me killed.”

  • • •

  In June, the Irregulars had rewarded eleven-year-old Iris McLeod with an honorary membership. Not only had she saved Kiki’s life, she had also discovered a foul-smelling perfume that kept the man-eating rats of the Shadow City at bay. Without Iris’s help, we could never have continued our explorations once our Reverse Pied Pipers stopped working. The kazoolike devises had been designed to produce a noise that rodent ears couldn’t bear. For a while, the Reverse Pied Pipers had worked wonders, leaving only a few deaf rats to roam the tunnels. But over time, that handful of beasts had multiplied into a million-rat army. The large, fierce, hearing-impaired rodents were again on the hunt for trespassers, and anyone without the protection of Iris’s perfume quickly took his place beside the hundreds of rat-picked skeletons that littered the passages and chambers of the Shadow City.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and held on to Kiki’s black leather jacket as she steered her Vespa motor scooter onto Bethune Street without bothering to slow for the curve. When we skidded to a halt in front of Iris’s brownstone, the first thing I saw was the Irregulars’ logo stamped on the sidewalk. An i in the shape of a girl in motion, it marked all known entrances to the underground tunnels. Beneath an old trunk in Iris’s basement lay an ingeniously disguised trapdoor. A long, rusty ladder led to a hidden room seventy feet below street level that had once belonged to a bootlegger named Angus McSwegan. According to Glimpses of Gotham, a nineteenth-century guide to the dark side of New York, each bottle of Angus’s whiskey was spiked with a dash of formaldehyde, which gave it a nasty kick. It had been the beverage of choice in the Shadow City, which lay just outside Angus’s door.

  I saw Iris watching at the window as Kiki and I climbed the steps of her stoop. Before we had a chance to ring the bell, the door flew open, revealing a tiny blond girl in an oversized white coat.

  “Greetings, Irregulars,” said Iris. Like Kiki, Iris was unusually small for her age. Unlike Kiki, she possessed a set of cherubic cheeks that were often pinched by strangers who mistook her for an eight-year-old.

  We brushed through the door and into a front hall lined with the hideous masks and shrunken heads that Iris’s parents collected on anthropological expeditions.

  “What’s with the lab coat?” Kiki asked Iris. “Don’t tell me you’ve been experimenting on the nanny again. There are laws against that sort of thing, you know.”

  Iris giggled. “I forgot I had it on. I was getting ready for tomorrow.”

  “What’s tomorrow?” I asked. “Are you in a play?”

  “I’ve been practicing for the meeting tomorrow, remember?” Iris looked offended when I shook my head. “DeeDee and I are presenting our big discovery. The one we’ve been working on all summer? Remember now?”

  I didn’t, but I figured it was best to play along. “Oh right, that presentation. Yeah, we’re all really excited.”

  “You should be. My discovery’s going to make the rat-repelling perfume look like toilet water.”

  “Speaking of rat-repellent,” said Kiki, “we’ll need a new bottle for tonight. I ran out last time, and I had two hundred rats chasing me like I was made out of marzipan. By the way, want to come?” It was her way of apologizing for forgetting Iris’s presentation.

  “I’d love to,” Iris said. “But my parents will be home any minute. Plus, I want to make sure everything’s perfect for tomorrow. If you need perfume, there’s an extra bottle in the trunk downstairs. Just make sure you’re superquiet on the way out. My mom thought there was a burglar the last time you guys were here.”

  “Sorry about that,” said Kiki. “Oona slipped on her way up the stairs.”

  Iris’s nose twitched at the sound of Oona’s name. “That was Oona making all the noise? Little Miss Criminal Mastermind?”

  “Can’t you two get along?” Kiki sighed. “All this arguing is beginning to bore me.”

  “I get along with her just fine,” Iris complained. “It’s not my fault she doesn’t like me. On Monday she said that if I didn’t get any taller you guys were going to sell me to the circus.”

  “She did?” Kiki sounded both appalled and amused.

  “Just because she teases you doesn’t mean she doesn’t like you,” I tried to assure Iris. “Oona teases all of us. She doesn’t know any better. It’s like she’s socially retarded.”

  “Retarded or not, she’d better watch out,” Iris fumed, “or one day somebody’s going to teach her some manners.”

  We heard a door open upstairs, and a tone-deaf rendition of “Hey, Big Spender” rang through the house.

  “Time to go,” whispered Kiki, pulling me toward the basement. “See you tomorrow, Iris. And whenever you feel the urge to put Oona in her place, be my guest.”

  “Thanks,” said Iris with a mischievous giggle. “Maybe I will.”

  • • •

  The temperature dropped with every step we took down the ladder that led from Iris’s basement to the lost city beneath Manhattan. At the bottom, I shivered as I shined my flashlight around a chamber decorated with crates of rotgut whiskey and the rat-picked skeleton of Angus McSwegan, whose jaw hung open in a toothy smile. I unfolded my map. The last unexplored tunnel was on the east side of the Shadow City, more than a mile away.

  “We’d better get going,” I said with a yawn. “We’ve got a long walk ahead of us.”

  “Good!” For the moment, Kiki’s worries were forgotten. “I’m in the mood for a stroll.”

  Beyond the chamber lay a broad, stone-lined tunnel. One side was blocked by a mound of rubble, the result of an unfortunate explosion two years earlier that had sent DeeDee Morlock to the hospital and Kiki into hiding. The other side of the tunnel stretched ahead of us. A monstrous gray rat bolted from a hole in the wall and vanished into the darkness. As we passed the doorways that led to the Shadow City’s abandoned saloons, gambling parlors, and thieves’ dens, we could hear the patter of a million tiny feet all around us. Thanks to Iris’s rodent-repelling perfume, the rats kept their distance, but we both knew they were waiting for an opportunity to attack.

  We had just turned a corner in a familiar part of the tunnels, fifty feet below the crypts of Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral, when Kiki grabbed my arm and pressed a finger to her lips. A wooden door stood open, blocking the path in front of us. At first I felt the same unnerving sensation you might experience if you returned from school one day to find your books rearranged or your bedspread upside down. But when I saw what was painted on the door’s wooden boards, I almost sprinted for an exit. While the Irregulars loved nothing better than a new chamber to explore, we were always careful to avoid doors that were locked from the outside and labeled with a single red cross. We knew all too well what we would find. Whoever had opened the door, it wasn’t one of us.

  On the silent count of three, Kiki and I leaped in front of the doorway and lit the chamber with our flashlights. The floor of the room was stacked with skeletons, some still dressed in moldy dresses and moth-eaten suits. These were the citizens of the Second City—the criminals and con men who had met their Maker when the plague of 1869 swept through Manhattan’s hidden tunnels. The few survivors had locked the sick and dying in rooms labeled with a red cross. Their cruelty had prevented the disease from spreading to the world above and ensured that the Shadow City would lay forgotten for over a hundred years.

  “I don’t see anybody,” I told Kiki as my flashlight circled the room. �
�Do you think the door could have opened on its own?”

  Kiki examined the lock. “I doubt it,” she said.

  Just beyond my flashlight’s beam, something moved and I was overcome by a familiar terror. As many times as I’d visited the Shadow City, I had never been able to shake the feeling that some of the dead were still roaming the tunnels.

  “Maybe it was one of them,” I said, training my flashlight on a skeleton wearing a straw boater. “Maybe it was a ghost.” A large bulge appeared beneath the dead man’s shirt and crept slowly across his chest. A rat emerged at the collar and bolted past us as if it had been called to dinner.

  “You’re such an optimist, Ananka,” Kiki joked. “Let’s hope it was a ghost. But keep your eyes open. There may be somebody down here. Haven’t you noticed anything strange in the past few minutes?”

  I was about to shake my head when I finally figured it out. “It’s quiet,” I said. “I don’t hear the rats anymore.”

  “Exactly,” said Kiki. “That was the first rat I’ve seen in a while. Kind of makes you wonder where they’ve gone, doesn’t it?”

  • • •

  The last uncharted tunnel of the Shadow City snaked beneath Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Its crumbling brick walls were less impressive than the high, arched passages found elsewhere in the city, and at times, it felt as if we were strolling down the hallway of an abandoned penitentiary. I took measurements and scribbled notes as Kiki investigated the rooms we passed. Most were empty, though we discovered one storeroom stocked with enough barrels of pickled oysters to have fed a small town for a year (though I suspect most townsfolk would have preferred to starve). To our disappointment, none of the chambers appeared to have an exit to the surface. When the tunnel came to a dead end at a plain wooden door, I silently worried that our final exploration had been a dud.

  In the cavelike room beyond, we found ten rickety cots lined up in a row and a large wardrobe set against the far wall. Nine of the beds were made—the sheets and woolen blankets crisply folded and tucked beneath the mattresses. The tenth bed, however, was rumpled, and its sheets lay in a lump in the center of the mattress.