Noir (17 page)

“You mean to tell me
they’re
the ones controlling our atmosphere?” I look around at the foul-smelling, soupy brine we’ve been forced to live in. “It’s not the result of—” I stop myself before I say it. My mind traipses back to the journals we found. To Eyelet and me, standing next to the Illuminator at the Core, the guilt we felt over our fathers’ connections.

“As sure as I know they ’eld me captive,” Masheck says.

“So, the sun, it could be up there, still. Hidden beyond the clouds.”
Still intact, as Eyelet always thought.

“Could be.” Masheck tilts his head.

I look hard into his eyes. “If we could somehow stop them from sowing the clouds, do you think there’s a chance we could reverse the damage they’ve done to our universe?”

Masheck thinks. “We could do, I suppose . . . maybe . . .”

“Than we shall.” My mouth teeters up into a crooked smile. “First, though, we need to save Eyelet.” I clap Masheck on the back. “Welcome to the mission, my friend.”

Th
irty

Eyelet

“You’ve got to get up! The march is starting!” Livinea shakes me.

I wake confused, disoriented, completely unaware of where I am. Livinea’s striking violet eyes blink down at me. Then it all comes crashing back—the shower room, the tortures, falling into seizure, the serum, the guard . . . that silly guard. A smile comes to me when I think of him. Thank God the shot worked.

Slowly, shadows of bright colours move in front of my eyes. An alarm bell bleats in the distance. “We’ve got to go!” Livinea yanks at my arm. “The walls are shifting!”

“They’re what?” I sit up. The whole room is moving.

Livinea loops an elbow through mine and hauls me to my feet with a grunt. “Come on!” She jerks me forward.
“Run!”

I stumble along behind her, my feet sloppy beneath me. There hasn’t been enough time for the passing episode to let go of my brain. There’s still a thread of silver in me.

“Just move your feet!” Livinea drags me along.

“I’m trying.” I fight hard to make my legs follow my mind’s command. My eyes, too, are refusing to completely register. Everything’s a blur.

“We’ve got to make it through the doors before they liquefy!” Livinea shouts.

I don’t know what she’s talking about, but I keep running the best I can. The clap of my shoes fills my ears. I look ahead. Why is everything echoing? Inmates stand in lines on the opposite side of a looking-glass-type wall. Where did that come from? It wasn’t there before. Was it? I squint. Another alarm bell sounds.

“’Urry!”
Livinea wrenches me forward.

The world around me grows more solid, more colourful—more familiar, less tainted by the silver. I’m finally feeling the ground beneath my feet. I let go of Livinea’s arm and double my speed, racing after a bolting Livinea toward a set of smooth black doors at the end of the room, in a now-shifting wall. A whistle shrieks, and the doors shiver—a wobbly, black-ink, disturbed-puddle-like movement. I slow down and stare.

“Don’t stop now!” Livinea hollers back at me, sprinting into the rippling ink.

I watch as she leaps through the shimmering liquid door. She flutters strangely over the threshold, her form disintegrating into tiny cube-shaped fragments before reintegrating into herself again once she’s landed on the other side.

“It’s all right!” she shouts back to me, her mouth vibrating, moving in tiny jerky squares ahead of her words. “Once you get across, it’ll be all right. Come on!” She waves me over. Her hand does the same thing, disintegrating inside puffs of steam and reintegrating again.

A flashing light goes off above the door. The alarm bleats faster.
“Now!”
Livinea screams. “You’re running out of time!”

The door wobbles harder. I suck in a breath, knees trembling, work up the courage, and leap over the threshold. As I pass through the membrane, a strange current-like sensation snakes through me. I look down, seeing my hands break into tiny unattached squares, then re-form back into hands again.

“Pretty fancy, ain’t it?” Livinea says when I land beside her.

“More like perplexing, I’d say.” I stare at my hands. “How did we get on the wrong side of that?” I glance back at the wall.

“Yuh tell me. Yer the one who took a nap,” Livinea says. “Come on, we need to get in line.” She grabs my sleeve and launches me forward. I stumble, not quite all together yet. The air in this room feels stale and static. All around us stand leafless tree-skeletons. “Where are we?” I ask, turning my head.

“Yuh ask a lot of questions for a girl in the Brink,” Livinea snaps. “Yuh shouldn’t do tha’, yuh know?” She tugs on me harder, wrangling me through the lines of inmates, her eyes glued to the floor as if searching for something.

“What are you looking for?” I trot along behind her, bouncing off other inmates’ shoulders.

“We’ve got to find our mark on the floor.”

“Our what?”

She flings me round onto a lit-up square, arranging my feet so they cover the light from heel to toe, shoving me around by the shoulders and propping me up straight. “Now stay there,” she says and slips over onto her own square, adjusting her feet.

The trees in the centre of the room shift, creating a clearing. A platform rises from the clearing’s middle. I squint, trying to figure how it’s all happening. It’s like an illusion—all seamless and mysterious, without end or beginning. Like an ongoing, liquid dream.

The guard from the night before, the one who hurt Livinea, steps into the centre of the platform, horsewhip in his hand. He wears a sardonic look. Twisting the ends of his moustache, he nods at the ceiling. A twinkling of lights begins. One by one, the squares beneath each inmate burst into flame. Inmates jump but stay fixed in place. “Don’t move,” Livinea hisses. “They’re counting us.” When it nears me, I wince, bracing against a pain that doesn’t come.
What is this place?

When finally, the last light is illuminated, music thunders down through the trees from a pair of cornucopia-shaped gramophone speakers, just like in the other room. They hang on wires suspended from the ceiling among the limbs. There must be twenty of them. The stark beginnings of
Preussens Gloria
crackle forth. Snare drums and trombones blare. The guard draws back his hand and cracks the whip. It licks the heels of the inmates in the row closest to him. “March!” he hollers, and the inmates whimper, leaping into action, jogging laps around the fake-forested stage.

“What is this? What’s happening?” I look to Livinea.

“Exercise.” She leaps forward. “Stay to the outside,” she shouts, steering me away from the middle. “Keep movin’ and avoid the lash! Not to wor-ry, though.” She grins, giggling. “It’ll be over in a loop or two. They’ve only gots one song.”

“Then what happens?” I jog beside her.

“Then we’s free to mingle for five or ten, before they takes us off to be tortured.”

Tortured.
My heart jerks in my chest. “We have to get out of here, Livinea!” I grab on to her arm, my eyes searching the walls. “We have to leave, right away!”

“Was it the sausage?” she asks, ignoring what I’ve said.

“What?” I look over at her strangely.

“Is that what knocked yuh out back there? Was it the sausage, do yuh suspect? I swear sometimes they give us stuff that’s gone skunk already.”

“No,” I shout. “It wasn’t the sausage. Livinea, are you listening to me?”

“What was it then, caused yuh to fall down like that?” She blinks at me.

As much as I’ve come to adore this silly girl, I don’t know if I can trust her. She can’t know my secret. No one can know it. “You ask a lot of questions for a girl in the Brink, you know that?” I say.

Livinea laughs her hearty, squealing laugh and folds her arm inside mine as we run. “Yuh’s quite the little minx, yuh is, Miss Elsworth.” She drops a finger on my nose. “I’m so glad we’s met.”

“Livinea, listen to me.” I pull her to a stop. “Did you sign that torture paper?” When she doesn’t answer me, I shake her by the shoulders. “Livinea, answer me!” Her expression tells me she did. “You do know what the pear of anguish is, right? What they do with it? Where it goes?” I drop my gaze to my lady parts.

Livinea’s brows jump. “Really?” she gasps.

“Yes, really,” I say.

“Oh . . . well, it can’t be any worse than electrocution.” She brings a finger to her lips.

“Electrocution? They’ve electrocuted you?”

“Oh, yes, many times, miss.” She smiles.

No wonder she makes so little sense.

“I was told it would ’elp take away me impure thoughts. The guard said if I signed the papers and the treatment worked, I’d be leavin’ ’ere forever, and I’d never ’ave to come back.”

“You won’t be coming back, all right. They’re planning to kill you, Livinea.”

“What?” The music falls silent. The inmates slow to a walk.

The guard sinks down through the platform on the stage, leaving nothing but a landscape of trees behind.

“Come on, Livinea.” I yank her forward. “We have to find a way to get out of here. Both of us. Right now. Before they come to take us away—”

“We can’t.” She pulls me back. “There’s no time.”

“Sure there is,” I say. “You said we had five or ten on our own before . . .” I look around. “What about the doors? Lady Rapture passed through them this morning, so there has to be a way—”

“No, miss.” Livinea’s voice falters. “We’ll never get past . . .” She pulls her hands from mine.

“Don’t tell me you’re more afraid of the doors than the pear of anguish! What’s wrong with you?
I don’t understand!
”

“I don’t expect yuh to understand me, miss.” Livinea grits her teeth. Her brows crouch over her violet eyes. “I’ve tried escapin’ through them doors once before,” she says in a low voice, checking over her shoulder as she speaks. “Them doors, they steal yer memories. They’ve taken every last one I ’ad. Memories is all you got when yer packed away in a place like this. Without ’em, you ain’t got nothin’.” She sucks in her quivering lip.

A buzzer sounds above our heads. Bars rise at the room’s far end.

“Livinea, listen to me, before it’s too late—”

“I can’t.” She shakes her head. “It took me a full year to remember me own name, and another to remember why I’m ’ere. I still don’t even know if the story of me mum is true or not. Or just some made-up piece o’ rubbish the guards fed me. But it’s all I’ve got, don’t yuh see! If I go near those doors again, I’ll ’ave nothin’ left. Nothin’.”

“What about your auntie?”

“What about ’er.” She clenches her teeth. “She’s the one ’oo put me ’ere. Traded me off for money for ’er drugs. I ain’t like yuh. I ain’t got nowheres else to go.”

She breaks away from me and bolts for the bars.

“Livinea!” I shout after her. “Wait!” I chase after her and hurl her round by the shoulders. “It’s not true. Think about it. You knew the way here and what to do in the shower room, and about the tea and the aftereffects of the pins. You haven’t lost use of your memory. It’s there when you want it. You just have to concentrate. Don’t you see, it’s the tortures you should be afraid of. That’s what’s damaging you. They’ve done far worse to you than the doors.”

Her eyes grow wet. Her pupils dart over my face. Confusion floods their centres. “I’m going to take me torture today,” she says. “You can try to run if you like. I won’t stop yuh. But I’m not comin’ with yuh.”

“But they’re going to kill you.”

She stares.

“No. I won’t let you do this. You’ve got to come—” I yank.

“I won’t.” She stands firmly. Tears spring to my eyes as she backs up from me. “Go,” she says. “I’ll cover for yuh. But I’m not coming, it’s not meant to be—”

“Livinea, please . . .”

“One minute to caging!”
The cornucopia gramophone speakers blare.

“’Urry, before yuh run outta time.” She turns me around and pushes me.

I sprint away, then dive back, kissing both her cheeks. “I’ll never forget you!” I say.

Her violet eyes fill with tears. “Go,” she says. “Head for the door. The horned one. Always the horned one. It’s the only way out. Go,
now
!”

She shoves me and I race toward the door at the opposite end of the room, working my way through the stream of inmates headed for the raised bars, a voice over the gramophone speakers barking orders for them to fall in behind. I look up when I reach the door, seeing a faint set of oxen horns waffling in and out of view, inlaid within the liquid black. Horns. Just as she said.

I push on the door.

“Hey!”
A guard’s voice breaks out above me on the widow’s walk. I look to him, then Livinea. He reaches for his whistle, and she screams, collapsing dramatically to the floor, a limp hand draped over her forehead. She writhes around as if in abdominal pain and spits foam from her mouth. Inmates scramble away from her as she starts to scream. “Scarlet fever, it’s the fever! Me stomach—it’s churnin’! Me eyes! Me eyes, is burnin’! I’s burnin’ up with
fever
!”

In between flipping and flopping, she winks at me.

I smile, close my eyes, and think only of freedom, of falling into Urlick’s arms when at last I reach him, and lunge at the door. I slam my palms against it hard. The surface laps like water against my hands—a great angry black ocean. Driving forward, I throw my palms into the membrane again and it pushes back, as if inviting me to just try and cross it. I push harder and the sloshing door snags me up by the wrists and snaps me forward, until I’m half outside and half in its jamb. I struggle against the sticky grip of the door, trying to either go through or break free of it, but neither motion works. It’s seized me and I can’t get away.

“Guards!” I hear a voice cry out behind me. The door clenches its jaws, tightening its grip on my arms. I swing my head around, hearing Livinea’s screams.

Her eyes bulge, seeing guards surge toward me.

I dig my heels in, struggling to break free of the door, as Livinea lets out a hair-raising scream.

The door startles, ejecting my arms. I fall on my bottom to the floor. Scrambling to my knees, I jump up and snap a limb from the fake forest using it to level the first guard who approaches me. He folds over, holding his gut. I chop a second in the knees, haul up my skirts, and run.

There’s a zing and a thwack, then a sharp
ping
registers in me. Something’s burrowed itself into the middle of my back. Whatever it is dulls my brain and stalls my feet. My muscles become jelly. Sloppily, I fall to the floor, a set of metal prongs embedded deep in my skin. I reach up to pull them out, but I can’t. I’m virtually tethered, like a chained dog, to a set of wires leading back to the nozzle of a smoking gun, feeding live current into the nerves of my back.

The room around me turns to blur. Tears spring to my eyes. I lay paralyzed, in a gyrating heap on the floor, guards swooping in all around me. Parthena Rapture joins them, her distorted face shuffling slowly into place—her eyes like black demons in a white, white nest. “Did you honestly think it’d be that easy?” She blows smoke from the end of a gun. “My sister was right. You are more trouble than you’re worth.”