Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (26 page)

“Give him a top hat, and he’d look like the Abe, himself,” Richard said, awed.

“That’s the joke, honey,” Allie said.

Evelyn’s voice had sprouted a tone of grudging fondness beneath its icy veneer. “The council recognises Mr Lincoln.” She paused.

Jesus, it’s almost like she’s got something caught in her throat.
Her
, of all people
.

“We had word you and your party were stranded at City Airport. We …”

“Struck me off, dear madam?” He gave a bark of laughter, a sound that almost picked Norman up off his seat. “Nonsense. It’ll take more than a few shield-beating natives to take me down.”

Alexander had yet to take his hands from the old man’s shoulders. They spoke in hushed tones, but the silence in the chambers was now so deep that everyone could hear.

“Good timing.”

“Looks like it. Impeccable as ever, if I do say so myself. What did you do, sing ‘
Gloomy Sunday
’? You know you can’t hold a C-sharp for shit.”

They were walking down the aisle, flanked by Lincoln’s companions. They were heading for the raised circle before the bench, carrying something wrapped in a thick blanket.

It seemed the chambers could have quieted no further, yet they did just that; milky-eyed Agatha had stumbled from the bench. Having sat through the proceedings in near silence, staring up at the dust motes dancing in the sunbeams, she now made a beeline for the men by the door. There were tears in her eyes.

Lincoln approached her with solemn grace, and bowed deeply. He took her hand and kissed it. “My lady,” he muttered.

She giggled like a schoolgirl. “Ye old dog,” she said. She didn’t sound more than eleven years old.

Lincoln straightened and turned to Alexander. “You’ve been taking care of our good mother, I trust?”

“I’m forgettin’, Oliver,” Agatha said. A change had come over her, a brief clearing of the clouds. “But I’m still in here.” She blinked tearfully, taking no notice of the crowd. “I probably don’t have long … It’s good to see you.”

“And you, my lady.”

The mission’s three original councillors, together again.

Norman swallowed. An immovable lump had lodged in his throat.

They had raised him after his parents died, that night he got the scar on his forehead. He’d lost his memory of his mother and father, in any case. These three were all he’d ever had.

Before he knew it, he was on his feet. He heard Allie’s protests only distantly, passing through the crowd as though in a dream. He didn’t even bother with his cane; the pain in his ribs was dull and distant. The crowd’s stares glanced off him, failing to penetrate.

So this is what it’s like to be one of them.

They spotted him from afar, and the same expression shone from each of their faces: relief.

They must think I’m stepping forward to meet my great destiny. Rising up at the last minute, and all that. Why not? Let them have it.

A voice in the back of his mind cleared its throat.
Isn’t that exactly what you’re doing? Like it or not, you’re involved now.

“My boy!” Lincoln cried, gripping him with his iron-hard workman’s hands.

“I … I … you’re all here,” Norman said.

“Always, darlin’.” Agatha smiled, caressing his arm. “Must be damn awful, seein’ me every day and knowin’ I don’t see you back. For the both o’ you.” She glanced at Alexander.

They said nothing, didn’t need to. Norman’s chest ached.

Lincoln was looking around expectantly, searching the crowd. “Lucian?”

Norman shook his head. “They have him.”

Lincoln’s brow furrowed, but his lip twisted in a smouldering grin. “Well I’m not weeping yet. If anyone’s going to pull a miracle out of his arse, it’s that one.” He turned to his men, who were lowering their strange load onto the ground. “Shall we?” He gestured to the bench.

Norman smiled and made to return to his seat. But before he could take a step, he was jerked back. Looking down, he found three hands clasped around his arm.

“Where d’you think you’re goin’, sugar?” Agatha said.

“Now’s your time, stud. Great destiny, and all that,” Lincoln growled.

Alexander said nothing. His eyes said it all.

Norman felt himself nodding. What choice was there?

They headed back to the bench. Norman took a seat beside Lincoln, both of them to Alexander’s left. With two more chairs filled, the councillors’ bench didn’t look quite so bare. He tried not to wonder whose seat he was sitting in right now—were they trapped, or rotting somewhere out in the city?

He kept his eyes resolutely on the table, trying to ignore the pressure of hundreds of stares from the audience.

Cross your fingers for me, Allie. This could go badly.

Lincoln grumbled as he eased himself down, laying his rifle down on the bench with a reverberating clatter.

“How did you get here, Mr Lincoln?” Evelyn said.

Lincoln clapped his hands together and rubbed vigorously. “Well we were pinned down over at City Airport, just like you said,” he roared. “And, boy, they didn’t want us there. Rounds going over our heads every other second. I thought we’d be blue and bloated by sundown.”

His companions, who were all young dirty men, had stepped back from the package and stepped to the side. They were wiry and strong, gaunt-faced and stoic, but there was no hiding their exhaustion. Each of them was liberally covered with odd scrapes and bruises, charred by hot shrapnel, and half-blinded by dirt.

“But?” Alexander said.

Lincoln shrugged. “Well, boys and girls,” he said, addressing the room at large, “would you believe an old goat’s tall tale?”

“Stop playin’, Oliver. I have minutes before I git back to droolsville,” Agatha said.

“When they stopped shooting, we came out and saw their banners all over the city—they wanted us to see. They were marching north.” He barked, and slapped his knee. “Praise God for small miracles, folks, because they’re gone.”

By the time Lincoln finished, the room was on its feet, cheering.

“They’ll be back,” Evelyn said. Even her icy crispness couldn’t quite stamp out the celebrations.

People hugged and cheered. From elsewhere in the tower echoed laughter from the wounded and those tending them on the higher floors. Norman spotted Allie and Richard embracing, and he smiled.

He would have given a whole lot to be up there holding her, then. Mystery or not, good news was good news, and he’d seldom had opportunity to celebrate of late. He’d have liked to do it with her.

He settled for a hearty pound on the back from Lincoln and a shared smile of relief with Alexander.

The jubilation died down and eventually they were all seated again.

“It seems the knife is no longer at our throats,” Alexander said. “Perhaps we have a little time to prepare. If they are gone, we may stand a chance of communicating our plan to all of us who remain.”

“For the grand finale? The big showdown on horseback?” Thompson snorted. “What is this?
The Lord of the Rings
?”

“It is what it is,” Norman said. He blinked, surprised that he had spoken. Yet he found that the words came easy, and the pressure of all the stares afar failed to rattle him. “We’ve been suffering too long to go on wittering. We’re in the shit, and we have to dig our way out. Marek’s right: brass tacks, and now!”

The crowd bustled with cries of assent.

“
Braah, he speaks the truth!”

“
Leastways, the young’un sees sense.”

“The Chosen One’s got a tongue, after all. Hear him, every’un!”

That last cry had had a rough and gravely sheen, but had a touch too much of Allie and Richard’s voices to miss.

He thanked them silently.

Lincoln growled appreciatively, and his eyes twinkled with amusement as he turned them upon Evelyn and Thompson.

Evelyn shook her head with a tired sigh. Thompson scowled in turn and put her hands up in mock surrender.

“What is this you’ve brought before us?” Evelyn blustered, jutting her chin in the direction of the package in the centre circle.

“Ah! A treat for us all, and no mistake!” Lincoln said. His voice was suddenly excited, the kind of mindless enthusiasm of a young boy.

Norman knew that tone. Lincoln always sounded that way around machines. Especially Old World machines.

He leaned forward in his chair, along with hundreds of others as Lincoln clambered from the bench and shuffled to the leader of his companions, a young oval-faced Arab in his late twenties.

Latif Hadad. If Richard was the world’s last scholar to the last professor, then Latif was the last apprentice to Lincoln, the last engineer. He sported a threadbare baseball cap, and his copper skin was aglow, making him achingly handsome. He dismissed the other men with a flick of his head.

They fell back and took seats close to the front, leaving Lincoln and Latif hunched over the embalmed object. They stepped either side of it and, with a nod to one another, gripped the protective blanket and pulled it away. Underneath, a large cardboard box had been stuffed with sleeping bags, hay, rucksacks and spare clothing. Nestled amidst the wad of padding with almost religious care was a block of metal around fifteen inches square.

A HAM radio.

“The message you received, it was from this?” Alexander said. He sounded unlike himself, distant and awed.

Lincoln looked pleased by the gasps echoing around the chambers. “The very same.”

Norman leaned forward. He couldn’t bring himself to look away from the cobweb-strewn metal box, covered with knobs and switches. Ringing silence had taken the place of the restless whispering, as though the crate were warping space into a black hole that sucked in the light, sound, even fear.

“It works?” Thompson said. It sounded as if her throat had narrowed to the width of a needle. “Really works?”

By way of answer, Latif leaned over with reverential care and flicked a large red switch on top of the radio.

A screech like bear claws on a chalkboard filled the room, one that made Norman want to sink his teeth into the bench. Everyone was covering their ears and groaning, mostly with discomfort but also with disappointment. Latif, wincing, flicked it off again.

“Mr Lincoln?” Evelyn said.

The old lion grumbled. “I’ve spent the better part of forty years trying to fix communications equipment. Our only chance of reaching the wider world, and perhaps those stranded in the North by highwaymen, lay in establishing radio contact. But all I could ever pick up was that same scream, covering every frequency.”

The Blanket, Norman thought.

Lincoln continued. “As far as we can surmise, radio and microwave bands of the spectrum are useless for comms, and there’s been no sign of the Blanket decaying.”

Norman had heard stories of people going crazy listening to the Blanket’s wailing, searching for hidden messages.

“The whipper-snapper can barely keep his mouth shut since we found it, so why don’t I hand this to him?” Lincoln said.

Latif stepped forward with a courteous bow. “The Blanket is fractured,” he said. “A little over a fortnight ago, we were on a salvage run to the dockyards, gathering spares and backup components for our generators in anticipation of the siege. We knew we were pushing our luck staying so long after the recall order, but we thought we could make it—and we wouldn’t last long if we lost power—”

Just like New Canterbury
. Despite Latif’s spiel, Norman’s mind conjured an image of the darkened city after nightfall, surrounded by a horde of black shadows perched on hilltops, predatory eyes glinting in the starlight.

“—by the time we knew they were after us, we were surrounded. We lost Hicks and Carmichael before they pushed us back to the airport. We set up in one of the hangers and sealed it off.” He shrugged. “We dug in, and held them for a day or so. But we’re tinkerers, not military men. Sitting so close to all those Old World air birds … We explored during the lulls. I think we all wanted to keep looking when the bullets starting flying again. We were boxed in, after all. We got into some deep, dusty corners; that’s the only reason we found the hatchway.”

“Hatchway?” Alexander said. He was leaning forward with brimming intensity.

“It was some kind of door. Secret, like, built into the wall. You’d have to know it was there to find it … or be a hell of a nosy so-and-so. That’s when we got our first surprise: there was a service elevator inside, which lit up ready as you like. There was power.”

He paused and knelt down, tinkering with the dials, consulting a dense scrawl of biro on his forearm. “They hadn’t attacked for an hour, but they were coming back, and we didn’t have a lot of help, so what the hell? We went down. It was a treasure trove, all kinds of delights.” He rubbed his hands like a child faced with a room of honey jars. “Aircraft, motorcars, comms equipment, a few tonnes of stored sundries and foodstuffs, barrels of purified water, enough linen to clothe an army, enough weapons to arm one, and a truckload of these.” He gestured to the radio. “It was all perfectly sealed, all ready, all whole. The lights came on right away—some fancy power source must be hidden down there somewhere, but we couldn’t find it.”

Agatha leaned forward and made to speak. For a moment her milky eyes filmed over and Norman thought she had slipped away, but then—though it only seemed through sheer force of will—she cleared again. “Somebody wen’ an’ repaired all tha’ after the End and stuck it down in the dark?”

“No. There was no sign of the damage we usually see in transistors and other advanced circuitry. It was all fresh off the production line, never used.”

“How’sat possible?” Agatha glanced at Lincoln. “Billy goat ‘ere searched high an’ low for summat like that years before you sat on your mum’s teat.”

“The whole place must have been shielded somehow. We dug into the wall and found some kind of lining, though I couldn’t tell you much about it. We’ve never seen anything like it. It almost looks like there’s some kind of integrated circuitry woven into it on a molecular level—”

“Mr Latif, we’re short of time,” Evelyn cut across him. “Forgive my bluntness, but what’s your point?”