The White City (22 page)

“The agents spotted us,” Redfeather said.

The Pirate Queen grimaced. “You were supposed to be tourists. Unnoticed! If they realize you—”

“They didn’t know who we were,” Redfeather quickly explained. “They asked if they could help us, and Marisol said she needed air and that we were looking for the exit. We got away without raising suspicion.”

“Doubtful,” the Pirate Queen murmured.

“But don’t you see?” Marisol said. “Those people. They were infected by the Darkness. Somehow the Gog has activated the Darkness within the walls of his hall—”

“Or,” Redfeather interrupted, “they’re getting sick just by being close to where the Machine is being assembled.”

“Either way,” Marisol said, “the ones who are growing sick are being taken somewhere. Someplace down those stairs.”

“It must be where the workers from Omphalosa are completing the Machine,” Redfeather said.

“Poor Gigi.” Marisol twisted the hem of her dress. “We should never have left him in that awful place.”

The Pirate Queen stood and from her front pocket took out a cigar, which she waved at Redfeather and Marisol. “We’ll get you to describe the hall in detail for Mister Lamprey so he can work up a map.”

“When are we going to get the Nine Pound Hammer back?” Conker asked.

The Pirate Queen put a hand on his arm. “Patience. We’ll get it back. But not without a solid plan first.”

Conker scowled.

Si slumped back in her chair, shaking her head. “You realize what this means. There’s no doubting it any longer. Buck … he’s been infected by the Darkness.”

O
VER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, THE GROUP GRUMBLED OVER
Lamprey’s incomplete map of the hall, went back and forth on possible plans, and generally argued over next steps. Conker hardly slept for worrying over the plans and about Buck, who continued coughing but so far seemed to grow no worse.

It was late one night, as Conker was watching the moon set over the lake, that a bit of luck came their way. “We were reassigned,” Mister Lamprey announced before the rowboat had even touched the
Snapdragon
’s stern. “Malley, Jimmie, and me.”

“To the Gog’s hall?” Conker bellowed, as he caught the mooring line. He pulled hard, and the boat smacked heavily against the steamer’s hull, nearly toppling the crew into the lake.

“Easy there,” Mister Lamprey said as he scuttled up on the deck. “Let’s go first to the Pirate Queen’s chambers.”

As the others stumbled off to bed, Conker followed Lamprey to the Pirate Queen’s door, where he gave a small rap. “Are you awake, my lady?”

“I am now, you idiot,” she grumbled. “Come in.”

Conker followed Lamprey inside. The Pirate Queen sat up in her plush bed and placed the pistol she slept with at her side. Rosie, sleeping beside her mistress on the floor, opened her beady eyes and then closed them again with a whine.

“What is it?” the Pirate Queen asked.

“The crew assigned to the Hall of Progress,” Mister Lamprey said, “apparently they’ve disappeared. At least, the boss said they didn’t show up for work last night or tonight. So he put us on their route. We got in.”

“What about the danger of the Darkness!” she barked.

“Marisol and Redfeather, they already gave us those charms to wear,” Mister Lamprey said, patting the front of his shirt. “Just in case we got in.”

“But there’s three of you,” the Pirate Queen said. “Wouldn’t one of you get—”

“Big Jimmie never goes in,” he explained. “It’s the routine. Two collect the trash in the halls while the third unloads it in the wagons.”

Conker waved his hand impatiently. “Could you get the hammer?”

Mister Lamprey shook his head. “We don’t go on the main floor. There’s a service entrance around the back, down a ramp and below street level. All the trash for the hall is picked up there.”

Before Conker could say anything, the Pirate Queen raised a hand. “We learn more before striking. Lamprey, memorize the routine of the guards at the service entrance. Do they use the same men every night? See if there’s a chance to explore further in the hall. But be careful! No unnecessary risks.”

“Aye, my lady.” Mister Lamprey smiled and then nodded toward the door at Conker. Conker followed him down the hall and out onto the deck. Although he was trembling with impatience, he knew the Pirate Queen was right. And more important, they at last had a way into the Hall of Progress. The Nine Pound Hammer was nearly in his grasp.

One afternoon, just before Mister Lamprey and the others left for their evening work, Hobnob ran over to where Conker and Si were talking in the shade on the foredeck. “Ray!” he chirped. “Going to see Ray.”

“What do you mean?” Si said, laying the book she had been reading to Conker across her lap.

“Reckon he’s needing me, en’t he?” Hobnob opened his hand to show them the small collection of gray dandelion seedpods. “En’t but one that carries one of my dandelions around and that’s Ray. I’m setting out straightaway once I get permission from the Pirate Queen.”

He dashed off for the pilothouse, nearly colliding with Big Jimmie.

“Ray …,” Si said, looking at Conker.

“Think he’s all right?” Conker asked.

“I hope so.”

After a moment, Hobnob leaped down from the pilothouse.
He waved his dandelion hat at Conker and Si before plopping it on his head. He disappeared in a scattering of white pods being blown away by the lake’s steady breeze.

As Conker turned back to Si, Marisol came up from belowdecks and hurried toward them. “It’s Buck,” she said. “He’s getting worse.”

Throughout the evening, Buck’s coughing spells racked him for minutes at a time. The Pirate Queen ordered him to stay in bed. She also wanted him to return to her chambers so she could keep a closer eye on him, but he refused.

“I’ll cough just the same wherever I lie,” he grumbled at the small mob surrounding his bunk in the pirates’ sleeping quarters.

Si brought a damp cloth to his forehead, and although he frowned, he also relaxed. Buck was burning up with a fever and occasionally moaning insensibly about hope lying at liberty’s feet. Conker frowned as he saw the cowboy’s complexion. His skin was the ashen gray of the workers in Omphalosa that Marisol had described. How were they going to help him? If Nel had not been able to save the man Si had spoken of, the man from Kansas who had died at Shuckstack, how could they save Buck?

Conker thought with longing of Nel. He missed the old pitchman terribly. It was somewhat of a consolation that Marisol and Redfeather had sent the telegram to Nel so he knew that Conker was alive. But could he be sure that Nel had received it? Had he gotten the warning that Shuckstack was in danger … that the Gog knew of their whereabouts?

Overcome with anxiety for Nel and for Buck, Conker
went out on the deck. It was late. The lights of other bobbing boats were dimmed. A trail of cloud drifted across the setting moon. Conker strode to the bow and hooked his elbows on the railing, dropping his forehead to his arms.

He was there only a moment before a hand touched his back. “You okay, Conk?”

Conker lifted his head enough to see Si. “I’m tired of all this waiting around,” he said. “When are we going to get my father’s hammer back? It’s so close and yet …”

She nodded sympathetically and then rested her head against his arm. Conker felt his worries subside. They could not disappear. Even Si could not do that for him. But with her at his side, he always felt reassured.

After a week of learning the guards’ routines in the Hall of Progress, Mister Lamprey felt they were ready. Gathering the others around the table in the galley, the fish-eyed pirate explained the routine of the agents who guarded the service entrance, the procedures he and Malley had to follow in collecting the hall’s waste, and their best guesses as to how the service entrance led to the main floor above, where the Nine Pound Hammer was displayed. With a crude map rolled out before them, Conker listened to every detail.

“In the other buildings on our route,” Mister Lamprey said, “we have to pick up these big bins of trash on different floors. But not in the Gog’s hall. They don’t let us go more than a few feet inside. He’s got all the trash sent to the one location in the basement.”

“Who dumps it there?” the Pirate Queen asked, chewing on her cigar.

“In the other buildings, it’s normally cleaning crews that work during the day,” Lamprey said. “But not at the Hall of Progress. Mister Grevol has a kind of plumbing system built in. Air sucks the trash through a series of pipes.”

“Vacuum tubes,” Big Jimmie said.

Mister Lamprey paused and crooked an eyebrow, mystified.

Jimmie shrugged. “That’s what the guard called them.”

The Pirate Queen rolled her eyes. “So there
is
a brain in there! Go on, Lamprey. How do these tubes work?”

“Ain’t sure,” Mister Lamprey continued. “But after we shovel all the trash out, we’re supposed to pull this lever one last time. To suck out any remaining trash around the hall. I guess they have stations on different floors where people dump the trash, and by the offices on the upper level. When we pull that lever, it makes a huge noise like a cyclone, and there’s a howl of sucking wind. Terrible loud it is.”

“Who cares about those tubes?” Si scowled. “How are we going to get the hammer?”

“Ah, there lies the problem,” Mister Lamprey said. “None of the three of us collecting the trash can go.”

“Unless we knock out the Gog’s men,” Big Jimmie said, his smirk clearly showing his eagerness for this course of action.

The Pirate Queen narrowed her eyes. “If one of them fires a shot, the whole plan fails.”

“Right, my lady,” Mister Lamprey said. “Best we not tip off the guards.”

“What if I go with you?” Conker suggested. “I could stay hidden and sneak past the guards if you’re able to distract them.”

“I’d be better at that,” Si said.

“You’re forgetting,” Mister Lamprey said. “Malley and I need those charms so we can enter the hall without being harmed by the Darkness. Whoever sneaks in to get the hammer will be exposed to the Darkness.”

A hush settled over the galley. Marisol and Redfeather exchanged worried glances. The Pirate Queen held her cigar an inch from her lips, neither drawing on it nor lowering it, as she thought.

“Buck’s already been exposed—” Big Jimmie began.

“He’s too weak from the fever,” Si said. “I’ll go. Someone’s going to have to do it, and it might as well be me.”

“No,” Conker growled.

“Yes!” Si snapped. “You can’t get sick. We have to destroy the Machine somehow. It all depends on you, Conker.”

“If I go in, I don’t reckon the Darkness will get me sick,” Conker said.

The Pirate Queen swished her cigar back and forth. “Wishful thinking and fool’s hoping isn’t going to—”

“I’m saying the Darkness won’t affect me,” Conker said.

He was met with a series of frowns and confused mumbles. “Why would you think that?” the Pirate Queen asked.

“When Stacker took my father’s hammer from me at the roots of the Wolf Tree, I was shot twice. Once in the side and once in the leg.”

“I didn’t know you were shot,” Si said. “You never told me you were injured!”

“Because I wasn’t injured.” Conker stood and pulled the tail of his shirt from his pants. “Not really. I didn’t want to say nothing.” He looked anxiously at Si. “Because of your hand
and all. Didn’t seem right, you losing your tattoo and me healing so easily. But see …” He pulled up the shirt. The Pirate Queen and the others leaned forward over the table to look at Conker’s waist. His skin was smooth and unblemished, except for what could have been a pockmark.

“It healed almost immediately,” Conker said. “The leg too.”

“What?” Redfeather stammered. “What … how could that be?”

Conker dropped his shirttail and sat again. “I slept almost a year in the waters of that siren well—”

“But gunshots aren’t the Darkness,” Si argued.

Conker gave a firm gaze. “One of Jolie’s sisters came to the well, just before I woke. She took water from the well to heal her sisters in the Terrebonne who had been sickened from the Darkness. The sirens believe their waters can protect against the Darkness. I reckon it to have done the same for me.”

“But you don’t know!” Si snapped.

“I know,” Conker said in a low voice. “I feel it in me, just as certain as I feel the power of the Nine Pound Hammer when I hold it. I’m going with you, Mister Lamprey. I’m getting back my father’s hammer. So enough arguing. Tell me more about the service entrance.”

The wagon rattled over the paving stone thoroughfares of the silent fairgrounds. Big Jimmie drove the team of horses, with Mister Lamprey and Malley on the bench at his side. The wagon had tall sides, big enough to carry half a ton of garbage at a time. Conker huddled at the far corner of the wagon,
steeling his senses against the stench as the pirates dumped great bins of half-eaten food, discarded brochures and leaflets, and other soggy, fly-ridden trash around Conker. Unfortunately, the Hall of Progress was at the end of their route.

Jostling in the back in the dark, Conker heard Mister Lamprey’s voice whisper through the plank siding, “We’re almost there. Go ahead and get in the bin.”