Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (44 page)

“The only windows on an outer wall are those above the toilets,” the attendant said. “And they only open a gap.”

Rose ran to look. She made sure she shut the two doors between the dressing rooms and bathrooms. Her caution was unnecessary. The toilet windows were already ajar. They were frosted glass, about fifteen inches high and twenty-five across. Metal catches were firmly screwed into the frames on either side of each window, allowing them to open at an angle, with a gap of perhaps seven inches at their tops.

Rose lowered a toilet seat and climbed onto it. She reached around the tank and gripped the top of the frame with both
her hands. Then she lifted her feet and hung her whole weight from the frame, which creaked and buckled. The glass cracked, and most of it dropped out. A large piece scored a cut in Rose’s cheek as it fell. She released the frame and dropped back onto the toilet seat, then tumbled to the floor of the stall. She pressed the back of her gloved hand to the cut and looked up at the angled window frame—still firmly in place, though empty of glass. She picked herself up, shook glass from her gown, and left the toilets.

In the dressing room, the head attendant and the one mother were soaking hand towels in a basin and handing them around.

The head attendant passed Rose another basin and told her to fill it with water in the bathroom and, before she did that, to wet her own gown and hair thoroughly.

Rose went into the bathroom and turned on a tap. Water came in a dribble, then stopped altogether.

The gaslights in the room flared, then dimmed and were extinguished. Rose dropped the basin, and it shattered with a sound like the single stroke of a big bell.

The room in which Rose stood was now dark, except for a fluttering, sullen glow and the rectangles of faint light from the high windows over the toilets.

“Rose!” the attendant shouted. “Come back!”

Rose wasn’t surprised to be known. But it did seem strange and lonely to hear herself summoned out of the dark by a stranger’s voice.

“Nown!” Laura’s shout reverberated in the hollow of the first arch of Market Bridge. She had come only partway down
the steps from the embankment. The light from the nearest streetlamp reached no farther.

A shadow appeared out of the blackness and resolved into her sandman. He mounted the steps. She held out her arms, and he picked her up. His limbs felt coarse and very cold. She realized that she was making a comparison between the feeling of being held by Nown, and by the warm and pliant Sandy. “Run,” she said, and held on tight.

Nown bounded up onto the embankment, and Laura let go one arm to point at the pall of red-lit smoke several blocks away above and beyond the buildings. “Faster,” she said. She was out of breath after her run. She wanted to say, “Why didn’t you tell me that the Place was a Nown?” and “You said you were with yourself, but you never said what you meant.” But Nown had picked up his pace so much that his running jolted her and she had to press her head against his shoulder so she wouldn’t suffer whiplash. His body began to heat up and smell like rain on hot stones.

He ran in the shadows of buildings backlit by fire. He bore down on the firemen with the hose in the river, went by them, and turned to follow their hose, turned so fast that a snap of white sparks outlined one of his flexed feet. Laura’s stomach lurched.

He slowed as the street opened out onto the People’s Plaza. He came to a stop and set Laura down.

“Rose is on the third floor,” Laura said. “North side. But you’ll have to shout for her.”

Nown looked at her, and Laura saw the black band of iron sand drain away from his eyes, like dampness seeping through him. The black settled beneath his cheekbones and over his mouth and jaw. She didn’t know what it meant, the shadow passing down his face, but it made her think of sorrow. Then
he jumped away from her and plunged through the crowd, straight at the building. He scattered people—all of whom had their backs to him and their faces toward the fire. The people left reeling in his wake were perhaps able to get a look at the missile of his body only when he was yards beyond them. He sprinted in a straight line and with inhuman speed to the main steps of the building, among the firemen, who at this distance were only strokes of black against a maw of flame. Some of the firemen took a step or two after this mad figure, but they stopped when he ran straight into the flames on the blazing staircase.

Grace saw Chorley carried out of the People’s Palace. She saw him placed on a stretcher and borne away through the crowd. She had lost sight of Laura. She could see the debutantes. Many were draped in borrowed coats, but still all their lustrous white dresses reflected the fire as faithfully as polished silver.

The air between the terrace and the plaza was distorted with heat. Grace could no longer recognize any of the faces below her. She stood, frozen in place, till someone took her arm, drew her to the balustrade, lifted her up, and lowered her onto the ladder. Her feet and hands found its rungs. She looked over her shoulder, saw others well below her making their way down. She began to follow them.

Grace was fit and nimble, and her skirt was a manageable length. She soon caught up to the person below her. Then someone pulled her off the ladder, and for a moment she stood on the vibrating back deck of a fire truck. The air smelled of steam and hot steel. A fireman took her arm and showed her where she could climb down. The cobblestones
were drenched. Another fireman drew her back from the truck. She was in the way.

Suddenly Laura was standing beside her. Grace put her arms around her niece, and together they walked away from the Palace, the pounding engines, the torrents of cold and warm water. They stopped at the edge of the crowd and stood, clinging to each other. Grace was drenched and shivering, but her feet smarted, as though they’d been sunburned.

When Rose returned to the others, she found the head attendant had finished passing out wet towels. “There’s no more water in the taps,” Rose said.

“There’s no time,” the other woman replied, and passed Rose a towel. Then she walked out of the only illumination—smoke-bruised firelight—and fumbled her way across the room. Her workmates began to bleat at her. “Come back!”

She returned carrying scissors. She squatted and began to hack at the train of Rose’s gown. She made a sizable hole, then wrapped the cloth around her hands and ripped the train away from the skirt. Then she picked up her own towel, went to the cloakroom door, and opened it.

For a moment all they could see was smoke—they’d made way for it, and it came toward them, twisting and black, as solid and supple as kelp in a fast-moving tide. The women and girls instinctively ducked, cowered on the carpet in the hallway, where they found that the air was clearer.

The head attendant choked out, “Hold on to one another’s skirts.” She began to crawl toward the staircase. The others followed her. Rose came last and reached back to pull the cloakroom door closed behind her. She wasn’t sure why she did it, but she had the sense that the fire was behind the
smoke, pushing it, hungry for drafts, like those coming through the high windows in the bathroom.

The women crawled quickly along the hallway to the head of the secondary staircase. The smoke there was like black mud, obscuring everything. The women stopped, coughing through their muffling towels. Then there was a flurry among them, a galvanizing panic as the head attendant rolled away into the muck, without a word or sign. The girls behind swayed with indecision, then followed, one after another. Rose hesitated a little longer. She hadn’t seen the head attendant go—she’d been too far back. If she had, she might have thought—wrongly—that the woman had fainted and fallen. As it was, she followed the others into the smoke-filled stairway. She followed them because it simply seemed better than being alone.

Rose tumbled down; she knocked against the walls and against something soft. She kept her eyes closed but felt sparks touch her face when she reached the bottom.

She found herself on a flat surface. She’d gotten turned around and wasn’t quite sure where she was. The head attendant seemed to know, though, because she was gathering them together, crawling in a circle around the entire group. Rose was relieved to be able to see again. Here the smoke poured blackly only along the top half of the hallway and was transparent below that. The clearest air was near the floor. It was as though the smoke was sediment and had settled on the ceiling because the ceiling had its own gravity.

Rose felt the head attendant pulling at her, driving the decorative seed pearls on her gown into the flesh of her arm. It hurt, but when Rose turned back to detach the hand, she saw she was being hauled away from a drop.

The lower flights of the secondary staircase were entirely gone. The women were on a landing that ended in hanging
strips of smoldering carpet and charred floorboards. Below that was a shaft full of fumes and sparks and rags of floating fire.

Now that she’d shown them what to avoid—and where they couldn’t go to escape—the head attendant continued to crawl the other way, along the corridor that, Rose recalled, should join the main staircase.

Rose paused to fold her skirt up and stuff its hem under the boning of her waistband. She bared her knees, then picked up her wet towel and followed the others. She’d gone only a little way when a sensation brought her up short. A
memory
of a sensation she’d felt just a few moments before and hadn’t fully registered. On her tumble down the stairs, she had struck something soft. Now she knew that it was a body in a dress and petticoats—a girl like her.

Rose dropped her towel, turned around, steadied herself, and plunged past the open shaft and back up the stairs. She ran up five, eight, ten steps, her arms out wide, touching the top of each step. She held her breath. Then she felt silky cloth, and a solid body under it. She followed the shape of the limb and closed both her hands on one of the girl’s ankles. She threw her weight backward and dragged the girl down the stairs.

Once Rose had the girl out in clearer air, she saw it was another debutante, a girl from the class a year ahead of hers at the Academy. Rose found her towel and slapped the girl’s face with it. She shouted her name. The girl didn’t stir; her face was a terrible color, waxy, her lips tinged black, as though the smoke had been kissing her. Rose shook the girl, who flopped, her head banging on the carpet.

Then, through her own hoarse shouting, Rose heard her name, “Rose!”

Rose dropped the girl—the
dead
girl—and retreated. She
scuttled along the hallway in the direction she’d seen the others go. The smoke seemed to be thinning, streaming away faster behind her and sucked into something ahead of her. It was as if where she was—perhaps halfway along the hallway that joined the two staircases—was at a tipping point, a summit with solid avalanches of smoke breaking loose on either side of her.

“Rose!” The call came again. It was a deep voice, like an echo out of a dark cave. It wasn’t the voice of the head attendant.

Suddenly Rose saw the others. They were a distance away, their faces and figures brightly lit and stripped of their individuality by the color of fire. The head attendant was signaling to her, Rose was sure. Then, the next moment, she was equally sure the woman was trying to call another one of their number back to her. Rose recognized the mother of the girl who had been left behind on the stairs. She recognized her by her finery—all the other women were attendants, not guests at the ball. And Rose recognized her too by the expression on her face—one of horror and despair.