The Drowned Vault (9 page)

Cyrus cleared his throat. He had to sound confident. He had no experience negotiating for anything. “Everything’s for sale,” he said. That sounded right. “I know there’s a price or something. Just tell me how much you want.” That was wrong and he knew it. He was going to get gouged.

Donald’s eyebrows climbed slightly and wobbled. He gnawed on his cigarette.

Be confident, Cyrus told himself. He felt Antigone’s hand on his elbow and ignored it.

“Can you get it now?” Cyrus asked. “Please.”

Donald fetched a short stepladder.

The little drawer he opened was in the very top row. From inside it, he pulled a small white cloth sleeve. Then he climbed back down, held it out to Cyrus, and chewed his cigarette.

While Antigone leaned in over his shoulder, Cyrus slid the patch out onto his palm.

The colors were old but still rich, and the patch’s embroidery was incredibly intricate. It was a shield, but not a simple shield. Its curves were exaggerated and … Gothic? Medieval? Flowy? Cyrus searched for words briefly, and then focused on the design itself.

The shield was bloodred with a thin gold border. A thick gold diagonal stripe ran across it. Inside the gold stripe, there were three heads, shown in surprising detail. The upper head was the oldest and bearded. The center head had a long mustache that hung down past his jaw. The lowest head was young and clean-shaven. All of them had black hair. All of them had a stripe of red blood at the base of their necks, and all of them were wide-eyed and apparently conscious.

Above the shield, there was an unfurling scroll, embroidered with a Latin motto.

Cyrus traced the old thread with his fingertip.

“Cy …,” Antigone said.

“I know,” said Cyrus.
“Thus to all dragons.”

Antigone sighed. “Close enough.”

five
LOCKDOWN

C
YRUS OPENED HIS EYES
, yawned, and tried to stretch—something his hammock wouldn’t allow. Frustrated, he kicked his one thin blanket onto the floor, swung over the side, and dropped onto his sleep-tender bare feet. Straining his arms toward the ceiling, muscles quivering back to life, he stared at his bedroom window.

The solid sheet of spider silk was backlit by the morning sun, and the whole room glowed silver. The weave was tight, complicated, and perfect. Cyrus stepped forward, squinting. There was a design in the center, the ghost of an image, embroidered with silk on silk—the shield and boxing monkey of the Polygoners.

Cyrus smiled. “Tigs, you see this?” He looked at the other hammock. Antigone was gone.

Once he was in the living room, Cyrus heard the rush and rattle of water through pipes in the floor. On the other side of the wall, he heard the shower bleat and hum. A muffled yelp told him that his sister was braving the water too soon.

Cyrus dropped into the armchair and looked at the windows and the fireplace. The weave of the silk was a little different on each one. And the embroidered image changed. In the first window, the monkey had shaken off his boxing gloves. Over the fireplace, he had stepped outside of his shield. In the next window, he was swinging away.

“Good morning,” Arachne said.

Cyrus jolted in his chair. Arachne was stepping out from the Book Dump. She was in the same black clothes she’d worn the day before, but her hair was pulled into a tight braid. Her eyes were alive and bright.

“Did you sleep in there?” Cyrus asked.

Arachne nodded. “I did. Up at the top of the piles, near the ceiling.”

Cyrus looked all around. Behind him, another sheet of silk covered the front door. He couldn’t see if there were any extra images.

Arachne sat in the wooden dining chair across from him.

“Where are the spiders?” Cyrus asked.

“Eating,” Arachne said. “Sleeping. Resting. They had a long night, but they’re close if I need them.”

Cyrus studied the girl’s pale face. “How do you get them to do what you want?”

“Practice,” Arachne said. “It used to be harder.”

“When?”

Arachne smiled. “Centuries ago.” She drummed thin fingers on her knees.

Cyrus closed his eyes and dragged his hands down his face. “Do you know how long we’re going to be stuck in here?”

“That depends on the presence and behavior of my fellow transmortals,” said Arachne. Cyrus didn’t like how cheerful she sounded. “At least a week. And getting off on the right foot is important. We’re going to divide our energies. Part of the time, we will overhaul and clean these rooms. Part of the time, we will study. And part of the time, we will train.”

Cyrus looked at her. She was talking like she was a lot more
in charge
than he’d thought. In the other room, the shower turned off.

“Train?” he asked. “At what? There’s not a lot of room in here.”

“Rupert has given me a list.” Arachne’s eyes sparkled. He felt rude staring at them—into them—but he couldn’t really help it. “I enjoy lists,” she said. “There are very specific things he wants me to work on over the next few days.”

Cyrus scratched at his head. His scalp was oily. He needed his own shower.

“A list?” he muttered. “Can I see it?”

Arachne shook her head. “The list is for me. Goals from my perspective. How would you like to begin? Cleaning, studying, or training?”

Cyrus slumped deeper into his chair. “Eating.”

The bathroom door opened and Antigone stepped out, cinching her wet hair back with a toothed headband. She was in shorts and an old short-sleeved safari shirt. Her bare feet left damp tracks on the wood floor. Through the door behind her, Cyrus could see the shower spasming out the last of the water still in its gullet.

“Water’s cold this morning,” Antigone said. Cyrus caught her eyes and then rolled his own. “What?” Antigone glanced at Arachne and then her brother. “What’s going on?”

Arachne straightened in her chair. “Rupert has given me a list of things to work on with you while you’re locked in.” She smiled. “And I’m going to help you clean and freshen this old place.”

Antigone blinked in surprise. She looked at her brother, confused by his obviously dark mood.

“That’s terrific,” she said. “Lists are terrific, and we could definitely use help in here.”

“Oh, gosh …” Cyrus stood and moved past his sister toward the bathroom.

“It’s cold!” Antigone said. “You might wanna wait.”

Cyrus shut the bathroom door behind him.

A really cold shower isn’t too terrible when you know that you’re going to walk outside into frying-pan heat. Tight cool skin, tight cool muscles, and a near ice-cream
headache were all solid preparation for a long morning in the sun. But Cyrus wasn’t going to have a long morning in the sun. A long morning, yes. Sun, no. Air, no. Grass, no. Sky, no. Spiders, probably. Dust, for sure. Two girls talking about paint colors and decor or whatever they called it, almost certainly. And a list that sounded a whole lot like homework. Training wasn’t supposed to be homework. Training was diving. Fencing. Running. Climbing. Sailing. Shooting.

Cyrus shut his eyes and ducked his chin to his chest. That was the only way he could fit under the low showerhead.

Water that had obviously been ice thirty seconds before, and would likely be ice again in another minute, splashed irregularly down his neck and back. Despite the loud pipes, Cyrus could hear the girls laughing.

His new boss was smaller than he was, and she had a face like an almost creepy doll. If almost creepy dolls could also be incredibly beautiful. Her eyes weren’t real. They couldn’t be. Looking into them was like … what? Falling? Tripping? Like taking an awkward extra step on stairs when the stairs have already run out. Her eyes—that’s why she was in charge. Or at least why Cyrus didn’t argue about it. Her eyes were the only part of her that said she wasn’t just another pretty girl a few years older than him. Her eyes were all the way old.

Like the moon, Cyrus thought. They had craters, but
not literally. There was a lot of damage in there. Old hurt. But they were young eyes, too. Not like Nolan’s. There was no anger in them, no hardness. They could sparkle like the sun on water. Like the sun through water.

Cyrus let his mind drift away, and he was back under the lake’s surface, looking up at Arachne’s silhouette, looking at the sun’s golden rays slicing through the blue and the floating, weightless spider army all around. That’s what her eyes were like.

He hadn’t argued with her, but he had sulked. No one likes a sulker.

Cyrus bent his knees and tipped back his head, letting the glacier water tighten his face. The week was going to be awful, that much was obvious. But he wasn’t going to sulk again.

The pipe shook in the wall. The showerhead quivered. Cyrus opened his eyes wide.

“No.” He tried to jump back, but too late. Steam whistled at him. His bare feet skidded and he fell as the scalding water lashed across his skin. Yelling, he rolled on the tile and pinned himself into the corner, out of direct fire. But even the spattering drops were pure pain. Wincing, straining, he stretched his leg up through the lava lasers and grabbed at the handle with his toes.

Outside, overlooking the tented green, the red-winged blackbird was sitting on a windowsill in the sun. She
heard the yells, and she knew the voice. She knew the sound of water in the pipes. She wasn’t worried. She shut her eyes against the morning and nestled her head beneath her wing.

When Cyrus walked from the bathroom to his bedroom, most of the red stripes on his skin were hidden by his T-shirt. Antigone and Arachne were eating on the floor beside a pile of books. They smiled. He didn’t. Books? And the pile wasn’t small.

No sulking
.

Cyrus stopped in the bedroom doorway.

“Water got a little warm,” he said. “I feel bad for lobsters. Don’t eat all of that.”

While they laughed, he moved inside to root through his cardboard box for his cleanest clothes.

Day one: For Cyrus, it crept by like a snail parade. He could hear airplane after airplane descending, but he couldn’t see the sky. He could hear Acolytes laughing on the green and training on the gravel paths, but he couldn’t see the grass. For breakfast, he ate some cold bacon and a bowl of fiber flakes with what he was sure couldn’t be more than two teaspoons of milk. There was no lunch. Arachne said they were in training. He ate some stale crackers that had been around for months.

And he cleaned. And cleaned. He scrubbed what he
was told, he swept where he was told, and he even dusted the ceiling, balancing on the back of the armchair. And for all of that, the rooms were only slightly less moldy and rotten—though now they reeked so much of lemon and pine that Cyrus’s nostrils burned and he couldn’t stop blinking his watering eyes.

The training was as uninteresting as it was grueling. Arachne said she was only testing their physical starting points, and she needed to see their bodies in motion. Which meant push-ups and sit-ups and lunges and planks and frozen poses.

Dinner was cold potatoes, sausage, and a pitcher of water.

Nolan delivered yellow paint up through the heat vent, Rupert never came by, and Cyrus climbed into his hammock early, trying not to listen to the girls talk about ancient Greek syntax while he bounced his foot against the wall.

Day two: Before breakfast, Cyrus did more push-ups and more sit-ups and more lunges while Arachne watched, hardly blinking. His legs burned with soreness from the day before, but he wasn’t going to tell her. Nolan delivered three plates of cold, slippery eggs up through the heat vent, but left before Cyrus could talk to him.

After breakfast, Cyrus reslung his hammock. He resorted his cardboard box of clothes. He got the wobbly, clear Quick Water out of the wooden box on the mantel
and played with it. Arachne pointed out particular books in the Book Dump and Cyrus carried them out in stacks and set them wherever she told him to. Antigone thought they looked interesting, but the titles made Cyrus’s brain water.

The Seven Depletions of Bajan Voo. The Neverwhere Voyages of Timothy Maggot. Soils and Salts. Theses on Economic Inversion. Your Best Maps Now: A Cartographic Memoir
. And more and more and more …