Clockwork Twist : Trick (9 page)

“No!  Don't...” Twist muttered, batting his friend's hands away. “Just...”

He meant to say so much more, to explain, but nothing else would leave him.  The world spun around him.  His mind burned with chaos and brilliant terror.  His senses told him nothing but impossible things.  His thoughts refused to do anything but run around screaming in his mind.  He closed his eyes tightly and covered his ears, forcing himself still.

It took a moment for him to find the now almost overly familiar electrical buzzing sensation in the base of his neck that he always felt in Jonas's presence.  It had been there for so long that he hardly noticed it at all anymore.  Once he did find it, he clung to it with everything he had, like a light in a black storm

His breath came back to him slowly, and his heart slowed down once again.  The buzz grew to take up all of his attention until there was nothing else in his world.  Once everything else fell totally quiet, he carefully let go of the sensation, letting it slip away, until he could move his hands down from his ears and open his eyes again.  The first thing he saw in the morning sunlight was Jonas, kneeling beside him with eyes closed and both hands clasped on the back of his own neck.

“Jonas...” Twist said, surprised by the weakness of his voice.  Jonas's deep purple eyes opened instantly, staring at him fearfully.

“Are you all right?”

Twist nodded and tried to push himself up on his side, leaning on one elbow in the sand.  Jonas reached out to help him, but his hand froze an inch away.

“It's over,” Twist said, smiling tightly. “You can touch me.”

Jonas's hands moved to help him, bringing a colder white fog than his touch usually did. Twist got back to his feet with help and found his legs already steady once again.  Even so, Jonas held his shoulders firmly as if he needed the support, and peered at his eyes intently.

“I pushed you too far,” he said, and Twist felt the echo of fear in his touch.

“You got me here,” Twist said, letting him stare into his eyes. “I'm fine.”

“Now don't start that again,” Jonas said bitterly, though Twist felt his fear ease. “You always say you're fine when you're not.  You'd run yourself into the ground if I didn't stop you.”

Something hidden in his voice made Twist smile. “Good thing you're here.”  Jonas shook his head, but he smiled too.  “So, we're here to save Myra, right?” Twist asked brightly.

“Yeah,” Jonas said, stooping to pick up the radio and the bag of silver things from the sand. “We're down.  What's the next move?” he asked the box.

“The hidden cleft on that side leads into a cave,” the radio said in Tasha's voice. “Find it and head as far down as you can.  Stay quiet.  They don't know we're here yet.  You should come to a large cavern.  When you do, hide and wait.  Ali is doing the same.”

“You heard the talking box,” Jonas said to Twist as he slipped it into his pocket and turned to look over the rock face nearby.

Twist felt numb and cold out of Jonas's attention, but he also felt like himself once again.  He was holding his pocket watch before he realized that he'd reached for it.  The slow, simple, monotonous tick and tock of the tiny clockwork that he knew so well, helped to steady him.  He turned his focus forcibly onto the task at hand.  He could worry about himself once Myra was safe.

Jonas crept quietly into the dry rock, following the natural formations deep into darkness.  Twist followed as the rock drew tighter around them.  After only a few steps it grew so dark that it was nearly impossible for him to see.  Twist reached back over his shoulder to turn on the light in his walking stick, already sitting in its holster on his back, but Jonas caught his hand in the dark.

“No, wait,” he whispered. “Someone could see the light.”

“I can't see without it,” Twist hissed back.

“Here,” Jonas said with a sigh, lacing his fingers through Twist's. “Just follow me,” he whispered, moving farther down into the rock.

Twist's Sight recoiled slightly from the touch—still a little sore from the flight, Twist supposed—but Jonas's emotions were level and calm.  Once the whiteness receded to the edges of his mind, Twist felt little more than Jonas's steady heartbeat through his skin.  Jonas, meanwhile, seemed to have no trouble at all navigating in the now total darkness.  In a few moments the passage opened around them and Jonas sped up his pace.  After a few more turns Twist's eyes began to detect the hint of light up ahead.  He also began to hear soft sounds whisper from farther ahead.

The passage finally opened onto a high ledge at the edge of a large cavern.  Torches lined the cavern walls below them, almost blinding Twist's vision after the time in the dark.  He shielded his eyes with his free hand and followed Jonas as he crept into the deepest shadow at the corner of the ledge.  Twist blinked to clear his eyes.  Down on the flat floor of the cavern, he heard voices speaking in a language he didn't understand.

Once his vision adjusted, Twist carefully peered farther over the edge to see a large group of men in sand-colored cloaks standing around a raised platform in the center.  They spoke to each other in quiet but excited sounding voices.  Every head was covered with a thick hood that hung low over the face, and the cloaks were so loose that Twist couldn't even be sure if those below were all men.  Twist caught a glimpse of movement on the opposite ledge.  Staring for a moment longer, he managed to make out the shape of Ali's hunched figure in the shadows.  He looked back to the crowd below.

“What are they saying?” Twist asked Jonas, whispering as softly as he could.

“What?” Jonas hissed back.

Twist repeated himself a little more loudly.

“Oh,” Jonas said back quietly. “No idea.  It doesn't sound like any kind of Arabic.”

“We're in Egypt, not Arabia,” Twist muttered back with a frown.

Jonas shook his head with a sigh. “Someday, I'm going to sit down with a map and explain the world to you.  They should be speaking some version of Arabic if they're Egyptian.”

“Where are you?” Tasha's voice hissed gently from Jonas's pocket.  He pulled the radio out and whispered back what he knew. “Good,” Tasha said softly. “Any sign of your friend?”

“No,” Jonas responded. “But there are about a hundred people just below us.  I can see Ali across the way, hiding.”

“Stay where you are,” Tasha said softly. “Stay out of sight and wait for a moment.”

“Come on,” Jonas said to Twist, slipping away from the edge to sit back against the wall, totally out of sight.

Twist followed and sat beside him.  They both listened silently to the people below as the excited murmuring continued.  It was a few moments more before a single voice called out loudly above the others, in a strange language but a very happy sounding tone.  Jonas frowned, listening to the words.

“I've never heard any language that sounds like that,” he whispered as he and Twist crept to the edge again.

One man stood on the raised platform, wearing one of the same sand-colored cloaks, with his arms out as he spoke.  The others fell silent to listen, and then all broke into a roaring cheer at the end of a very emphatic-sounding phrase.  Many of them clapped while others shook triumphant fists in the air.  It was then that Twist noticed that the figures' now-exposed hands were of a wide variety of skin tones from pale and pinkish like his own, to dark mahoganies and ambers.

“I don't think these people are Egyptian,” Twist whispered.

“Then why are they all here?” Jonas whispered back. “We're nowhere near a city or a port.”

Before Twist had a chance to make a guess, a new figure was brought into the cavern through an archway at one side.  It was smaller than most of them and covered entirely in a pure white cloth.  The figure was guided to the platform by two people in the sandy cloaks, and then taken up onto the center of it.  The others cheered and clapped again until the one who had been speaking held out a hand to calm them.  They all fell into total silence before the man grabbed a handful of the white cloth and pulled it off and away with a flourish.  The others stared in silence and wonder as Myra's clockwork form was revealed from beneath the cloth.

Twist gasped, seeing her look around fearfully, clothed now in a white silk robe over her purple sari.  After the initial stunned silence, the crowd erupted into cheers once again, this time louder and more excited than before while some voices seemed to repeat the same phrase over and over again.  Myra's form shrunk into itself and she shook her head, yelling out to the crowd in the same language that they used.

When the cheers died into confusion the apparent leader on the platform laughed.  He yelled something to the others which made many laugh and made Myra shake her head angrily.  She yelled the same thing again, but the leader put a hand on her shoulder, stilling her.

“What's going on?” Twist hissed. “What do they want with her?”

“Tasha said that these guys like myths,” Jonas said. “She is a myth: a living and breathing one.”

“We have to get her out of there,” Twist said, feeling unreasonably angry to see the leader's hand still on her shoulder as he spoke to the crowd.

“What would happen if she was struck by an electrical current?” Jonas asked.

“What?”

“Like lightning,” Jonas clarified quickly. “What would happen to her body if she was hit by a bolt of lightning?”

Twist frowned as he thought quickly. “It might blacken the copper.”

“Would it damage her?”

“I don't think so,” Twist said, shaking his head. “I can't imagine why it would.”

“Good,” Jonas said with a nod as he moved back from the ledge and pulled out the radio again. “Tasha, they have Myra.  She's surrounded.  We're going to use Niko's thingamajigs.”

“Wait,” Tasha's voice responded instantly. “Just another moment.  We've almost got it.”

“I don't know how much time we have,” Jonas replied.

Twist kept his eyes on Myra as he listened to Jonas.  Tasha didn't respond and Jonas repeated the message.  He waited again, while Twist saw Myra protest once again, yelling over the man beside her.  Some of the others in the crowd yelled back, not sounding pleased, and others chorused a similar sentiment.

“Oh to hell with it,” Jonas said, returning to the edge and opening the bag.

He handed one of the silver balls inside to Twist.  Once the ball was in his hand, Twist's Sight recognized the use and working of the tiny electrical bomb.  His jaw fell open as he stared at it.  Jonas grinned at him, taking one of the bombs for himself.

“I told you,” he whispered, his hand on the key. “Niko has the most wonderful toys.”

“All right,” Tasha's voice said through the radio.  Jonas paused with his fingers on the key. “We're just outside the main cavern.  Jonas, Ali, blanket the floor with the bombs and then get down here.  We can escape once we're all together.”

“Don't need to tell me twice,” Jonas said, turning the key.

He and Twist hurled their bombs into opposite sides of the crowd and immediately reached for more from the bag, while more of the bombs flew from Ali's hiding place.  A second after the first ones hit the ground the tiny copper points on each ball extended into spikes and sent out a wave of sun-bright lightning into everyone and everything within five feet of it.  Men screamed in fright and shock while those closest to the bombs fell instantly to the floor.  More of the bombs fell and went off in the crowd before anyone inside the sudden chaos realized where they were coming from.  By then, a quarter of the cloaked figures were lying still on the ground and everyone else had fled to the walls.  Only five of them remained in the center, surrounding Myra.

“Twist, my darling!” Myra called in pure joy as she caught sight of him, up on the ledge.

The man beside her howled in rage and suddenly the frightened masses snapped into motion, hurrying up the rough stone steps that led to the ledges above.  Jonas and Twist turned their rain of shocking bombs onto the stairs, but now the cloaked men knew to kick them away or to dodge, and the bombs' effectiveness dropped considerably.

Down on the floor, Niko and Tasha appeared and hurried forward.  Niko held a long, thin, curved, copper pole in one hand, and wore a cage of metal and wires over his other hand.  A long, straight lick of white lightning shot from one end of the pole to the other like the string of a longbow, and he appeared to be grasping the lightning itself with his caged hand.  He pulled the electric string back quickly and then let it fly as a wide, jagged wave of electric light shot out at the men on the stairs.  Every man it touched fell instantly with a loud and reverberating crack.

“I need one of those!” Jonas yelled with a wide grin on his face.

“Myra!” Twist yelled as he saw the man beside her take her roughly by the neck roughly and drag her off the platform at a run.

Myra screamed and struggled against him but was helpless to free herself.  Twist stepped to the edge with a bomb ready to throw just as the fastest of the men who were still moving made it to the top of the stairs.  Jonas ran behind Twist and took his walking stick from his back along the way, swinging it directly at the chest of the man in front.  Twist, hardly noticing, threw his bomb directly at Myra.  It exploded to the sound of her scream while the man holding her dropped to the floor with her.  She jumped instantly to her feet and then continued to jump and spin, shaking all over, and threw the white cloak to the floor in the process.

The men at the top of the stairs were now attacking Jonas directly with bare fists.  Another wave of lightning washed over them, knocking all but one to the ground.  The last one paused as sudden quiet rushed in.  He looked back to see that every one of his companions were now lying silently on the ground.  Niko was bounding up the stairs behind him while Ali ran around the ledge to join them.  Jonas spun Twist's cane in his grip and buried its silver tip in the man's chest as he hit the switch near the hilt.  A blue spark of light flashed against his sandy cloak and the man fell crumpled to the ground with all the others.

“Nice cane,” Niko said, slightly out of breath as he reached the top step.

“Nice bow,” Jonas said, eyeing it greedily.

“Myra, are you all right?” Twist called as he rushed down the stairs to her.

At the sound of his voice she sprang towards him and they met at the bottom of the stairs.  Myra jumped into his arms and threw her own around his neck.  Twist's senses were instantly overrun with her heartbreaking relief.  He found tears in his own eyes as he held her trembling form tightly, and wasn't completely sure that the emotions were hers alone.

“I'm so sorry,” were the first words he could manage to voice in the torrent of relief.

“No, no, no,” she said pulling back just enough to look in his eyes. “I'm sorry.  You must have been so frightened and worried...”  Her voice drifted off as her fingers moved to his face, softly touching the wet lines that fell from his eyes.  She bit her metal lip and looked as if she would cry too if she were able, as she gently wiped his tears away.

Twist shuddered at the tenderness of her touch and the guilt that he sensed following her words. “You're safe, and I have you back,” he said, focusing to keep his voice steady. “Nothing else in the world matters more than that.”

“Well, actually,” Jonas said, stepping up beside them, “these guys are going to wake up very angry and in a lot of pain in just a few minutes.  I'm pretty sure that matters too.”

“Oh!” Myra gasped upon seeing him.  She took one arm off of Twist and threw it around Jonas's neck, pulling him into a half-hug. “I'm so glad to see you too!”

“Hey, I got a hug!” Jonas said, smiling at her as she released him, still clinging to Twist with her other hand.