Dark Metropolis (22 page)

“
P
honographs and marzipan and fall leaves,” Sigi murmured beside Nan, closing her eyes as they pushed their way out with the rest of the workers. She opened them again when the entire stairwell shook so that dust and bits of plaster sprinkled on their heads.

“All that trouble to save me, and I’m going to die anyway!” Sigi cried.

Nan grabbed her hand, and so did Freddy.

“We’re not going to die,” he said. “I insist.”

The lights flickered again, and then—gone.

“Come on,” Nan said. “We can push our way out while everyone’s panicked.” Standing at the doors and windows of Rory’s house were men she thought must belong to the resistance—their clothes were shabby and bohemian. They were moving the workers through. “This way, come on.” One young man noticed their group.

“Aren’t you—Sigismunda von Kaspar? And the silver-haired boy. I’d better get Yann.”

The world aboveground had gone to hell. Houses and cars set on fire, people unconscious or hunched on the ground bleeding, running and fighting and shouting everywhere: revolutionaries, workers, policemen, even servants from the grand houses. Nan stayed close to the young man, who was talking to another man with silver in his hair. He noticed them and urgently waved them forward.

“What’s going on?” Nan asked the man with the silver hair, whom she assumed was Yann. “Who started all the fires?”

“We did,” he said, running as he spoke. “The more chaos, the better. Where is Arabella?”

“She’s…dead,” Sigi said.

He pulled off his cap. “Oh, no….I’m so sorry, Miss Sigi. We’ve never met, but I heard a lot about you.”

Sigi looked a bit appalled.

“Arabella gave her life for Sigi’s,” Nan said. “We need to get out of here. All of you should.”

“I’ll get you to safety,” he said. He put his cap back on.

“We need to meet up with Thea,” Freddy said.

“Don’t worry—we won’t forget Thea,” Nan assured him.

They ran down the street after Yann. The streets were so busy it might have been a holiday, only with celebration replaced by tension. An old couple in ragged clothes ran around shouting for someone named Torsten, and Nan realized that word must have spread that the missing dead were wandering lost, and so their relatives had gone looking for them. Sirens howled nearby. She heard a gunshot. Sigi was shivering, covering her ears.

Nan put an arm around her.

“This is horrible,” Sigi said. “Is this what we wanted to happen?”

“It isn’t what we wanted,” Nan said. “But it’s a consequence.”

Rory was probably right—more people would be hurt and die. That wasn’t what she wanted. Of course not. But for so many years, she had carried that feeling of imbalance and wrongness inside her, and she had to let that be her compass, even if the immediate repercussions were violent.

Yann’s car was old enough to need a crank. “Get in,” he said while he worked at it. “She’ll go in a minute.”

“Where are we going?” Nan asked.

“Our base of operations, in the old factory district.”

Nan wondered how far they could get in a car, but at least the windows would give them some protection.

Yann was aggressive, honking the horn liberally and driving on whichever side of the road suited him. The power was out for several blocks. People ran through the darkness, and two men carried a dead or injured person wrapped in a bloody sheet. Hundreds of stories raced by in those blocks, and none of them appeared to be happy ones.

“Don’t worry,” Yann said. “This is war. It’s unpleasant business. But we’ve been preparing for it. The reign of suppression and terror will be over soon enough, and all of this paves the way for a new regime—a government for the people.”

“Who will lead?” Freddy asked.

“I had hoped it would be Arabella,” Yann said. “But we have some different factions in our ranks. That will all shake out as we go. All I know is, we have to band together to keep anything like this from happening again. Of course, I hope you’ll be right there with us, Freddy. To have you will be invaluable.”

Freddy scoffed. “That certainly isn’t what Arabella said. She was happy enough to kill me.”

“She was…impulsive at times.”

“Is that really a quality you want in a leader?” Freddy asked. “If I ever use my magic for anyone else again, it will have to be someone who can make good decisions.”

“I’m sure the right leader will…” Yann trailed off as they turned the corner to an appalling sight. Half a dozen workers lay writhing in the street, conscious but shot to pieces: holes in their chests, a hand blown off. Freddy stiffened, leaning forward to get a better look.

Sigi covered her mouth. “The army must have come through,” she choked, “and they can’t die! They can’t die unless you let them go, Freddy!”

“Stop the car!” Freddy shouted at Yann, who had slowed to maneuver around the bodies but wasn’t stopping.

“We can’t. We have to get you to a safe place.”

“Stop the damn car!” Freddy grabbed the steering wheel, and the car jerked toward a lamppost.

T
hea had never run so fast, for so long, in her life. She was glad the night hours were hers; she was accustomed to the darkness, although she wasn’t accustomed to sharing the streets with so many people at these hours, or this awful smoky smell, or the ever-present air of confusion and fear.

The asylum was a foreboding building by day, a terrifying one by night, the gothic towers looming over stone walls in the darkness. She hadn’t considered how she’d get in, but even as she approached the gates, she could see a number of workers crowded at them, and then she could hear an awful sound on the wind: women shouting and moaning.

Bound-sick women.

She hadn’t even thought of it, but they might sense their husbands were free. And the spell must have tugged these workers here as well, even if they didn’t remember their wives enough to be sick.

A man who appeared to be a night watchman was on the other side of the gate, trying to reason with the men. “I’m afraid I can’t let you in! These women are being treated for illnesses.”

“But that’s my wife in there!”

“What’s her name?”

“I don’t know. I just think she’s in there….”

“If none of you can tell me who you’re looking for, why should I let you in?”

“Please,” Thea said, making her way alongside the men to press against the metal bars. “I’m looking for Mrs. Henry Holder. She’s my mother. But you’d better let all of them in. The wives will be cured of bound-sickness if they can just see their husbands.”

“I—I don’t know about all that. Where did they come from?”

Thea didn’t have time for this! “They’ve been trapped underground! Brought back from the dead and robbed of their memories, and all they want is to see their wives. My father is bleeding in an alley somewhere, and if he doesn’t see my mother, I’ll—” She didn’t know what she’d do, though. “Please!”

The night watchman looked flustered but unconvinced. “I’m under strict orders.”

“Her name might be Alice,” one of the men ventured. “Is there anyone named Alice?”

“I’m sorry,” the night watchman said.

Thea saw that he had a gun. And she had a gun. So she might point hers at him, but she knew she couldn’t shoot a man who was just trying to do his job. And would he shoot her? If there was any justice in the world, he should see all these desperate men, any of whom could have been her father, and let them in.

But he wasn’t going to. Her father was dying, her mother was
behind the gate, and Father Gruneman had given her the gun.

She took a deep breath and slipped her hand in her purse. Her hands were cold in the night air, and the gun cold in her grasp as she drew it out. “
Please.
Do you know what I’ve gone through tonight?”

He put a hand on his own weapon. “All right, miss. Calm down. Put that away.”

“Let me
in
.”

He removed his pistol from the holster. “Calm down,” he repeated.

Her hands were sweating through the cold now. “I’ve had a living, walking corpse try to
eat
me. I was in the abandoned subway tunnels, searching for good men like these, trying to free them so they could see their families just one last time. Can you imagine having rotting, withering flesh trying to claw at you? Whispering for blood? Can you imagine the eyes of something dead still…
looking
at you?”

“I cannot,” he said, sounding unsure.

“Well, in a few hours, that’s what these men will become, if—if they don’t see their wives!” She invented the last bit, but it burst out of her mouth as if true, because she so wanted to believe it. She wanted to think her mother’s touch might heal her father, save him, keep him close forever….

It was at that moment that one of the women screaming out the windows of the asylum building, across the wide green lawn, jumped out, plunging four stories. She didn’t get up again.

Thea’s breath caught painfully in her chest. It was too far to see if it could be her mother.

This seemed to be the last scrap of evidence the guard needed that matters had gotten beyond his control. He opened the gate.

All the men started running, and Thea with them, still holding the gun carefully. The men were faster, and they stormed the doors for her. The staff already seemed to be in an uproar, trying to corral the women. Their screams echoed through the lobby, a heartbreaking din of “Where—?” and “Let me go!” and the names of lost husbands.

Thea grabbed the first woman she saw, a young one in a nurse’s dress. “Where is my mother, Mrs. Henry Holder?”

Father Gruneman had told her that hopefully she would only need to point the gun at people, and it seemed to be true. She felt like a different person with a deadly weapon in hand, the woman looking at the gun in terror. “I—I think I just saw her. I’m not sure.”

Thea let the woman go, spotting her mother standing against the wall, clutching her head as if trying, amid the shouting and sobbing, to sense the magic that bound her to Thea’s father.

Thea ran to her side. “Mother!”

Her mother’s tense expression turned to relief. She was already dressed to move. “Your father,” she said. “I know your father is close. You’ve seen him. You’ve seen Henry. Where is he?”

“He’s—he’s hurt. And he’s going to die soon. Mother—” Her voice faltered.

“We’ll get to him.” Her mother grabbed Thea’s arm. “We just have to hurry.”

T
he car crumpled against the post, throwing Freddy and Yann forward. They hadn’t been going fast. Freddy glanced back just long enough to see Nan and Sigi blinking back at him, and then threw open the door.

He had brought these men back from the dead. Brought them back to slave away, to lose their memories—to die in agony. He ran to each of them, touching their heads or hands, severing their threads as quickly as he could. After the first two, after they realized, they started begging him, thanking him, as they died.

As if he’d done them any kind of favor. They ought to be using their last breath to curse him.

It was getting easier to feel them slip away.

Yann got out of the car. “We don’t have time for this! We can’t let anyone find you! Look, maybe it’s time. Just let them all go. Enough of them have gotten out; we can take it from here.”

Freddy turned on Yann. “This isn’t your magic. I’ll decide how and when to do it. I’m not working for you, and I don’t want your protection.”

How long would it be before the revolutionaries wanted to keep someone important alive? He couldn’t trust anyone, he realized. And Yann was already talking as though Freddy belonged to them.

“You
need
our protection,” Yann said. “You know that every person aware of your existence will be looking for you, and the word will spread.” He reached for Freddy. Like he was going to grab him. Drag him back into a world where his power wasn’t his own.

Never again would he allow someone else to be the keeper of his magic.

“If you don’t come with me, the chancellor’s men will find you,” Yann said.

“No.”
He shoved Yann and punched him in the jaw. Yann staggered back, and Freddy punched him again before he could recover.

He heard two pairs of boots behind him and saw Nan and Sigi, and this spurred him on. He wasn’t alone.

Maybe Yann was right about one thing: if the workers were suffering, maybe it was time to try to let them go. But at this very moment, Thea might be rushing her father across the threshold of the asylum. He had to see her first.

They kept running until they were sure Yann wasn’t following anymore. They had taken a few turns, and he wasn’t in view. The power was out here, too, the streets dark and busy.

“We have to get out of these work suits,” Sigi said, her voice tremulous. “If the police or the army shot those workers, they might shoot us, too, if they see us. They won’t know we’re alive.”

“If we can just get to Thea’s apartment,” Freddy said, “we can figure it out from there. We’re not far.”

As they moved from a largely residential district to Thea’s neighborhood, where shops and apartments mixed, they saw that some of the shops had been looted. Shards of window glass glinted on the sidewalk, and people were running off with cans of food.

“What is this?” Sigi said. “Are people going insane?”

“They’re panicked,” Nan said. “You come from a good family, so maybe you weren’t fully aware of what the war years were like, but most of us had to get ration books and stand in breadlines, and sometimes the food ran out. We would stand for hours and get nothing. That wasn’t really so long ago. At the first gasp of anarchy, people just want all the stuff they can stockpile.”

“I knew it was bad,” Sigi said. “But I guess I don’t remember
how
bad.”

“Well, maybe we should join in,” Nan said, pointing to a raided dress shop. “We do need to get out of these work clothes.”

“I think we’re a little late,” Sigi said. The mannequins in the window were stripped naked.

“There are still some things left,” Nan said, picking her way over the glass. “What size do you wear?”

Sigi groaned and said, “I’m coming.”

Freddy stood guard at the window while they quickly exchanged their work suits for dresses. Even he could tell they weren’t very flattering, but neither of them complained.

Thea’s street was one of the quietest they had yet seen, and they reached it as the sky was beginning to pale in the east. Just seeing a familiar place gave him renewed strength, and he charged up the stairs.

The building was silent. As if everyone was still asleep.

Thea’s door was shut, and when he tried the knob, it was locked. He knocked, and there was no answer.

“She hasn’t gotten here yet.” Nan stated the obvious.

“What do we do?” Sigi asked.

“I hope she isn’t hurt…or running into trouble,” Freddy said.

Nan sat down against the door with a sigh. “There’s no way of knowing, really. I guess we can wait for a bit. But, Freddy…when are you going to let the workers go, if Thea doesn’t come back soon?”

“How long before they’ll start to…turn?” Freddy asked.

Sigi’s brow darkened. “Another day, I think.”

“You can’t wait another day,” Nan said. “They’re suffering. The army is shooting them to pieces. You saw what happened. And it might take Thea a long time to find her way back here.”

He sat down on the stoop and closed his eyes. Nan was right. But when he imagined Thea racing to bring her father to her mother, he couldn’t stand to think of ripping that chance out of her hands. He closed his eyes, trying to find the individual thread that belonged to her father. Maybe he could sense Thea through it. Maybe he could find out.

Before, he had sensed Henry through Thea’s touch. Now it was not so easy. He searched through the fog of confusion and pain, and—there—

Henry was hurt. Freddy’s stomach twisted. His own heart skipped as he sensed Henry’s ripped insides, organs too destroyed to function, a life clinging by a thread. A thread that led back to Freddy.

He couldn’t see Thea. He didn’t know if she was there. He could only feel Henry’s trembling life, and he knew he would have to break his promise to Thea. He would have to hope she and her mother were with him.

“The sun is rising,” Sigi said softly. “I’d like to see it. Freddy, do you think you could wait for the sunrise before you let them go? Because all of us were always talking about the sun, and how we missed it.”

Thinking of Henry’s pain, he wanted to say no, but he might want to suffer through it and see the sunrise, too. Freddy didn’t want to decide for him. “Yes, I can wait until sunrise,” he told Sigi.

They found a stairwell to the roof and climbed onto its flat surface. The sky was turning a faint orange now, and then the colors began to deepen and change, blooming into different shades, transcending the drab apartments.

“Oh,” Sigi said. “It’s so beautiful. I forgot just how beautiful. It looks so new, like it couldn’t possibly happen every day.”

“Just like I promised,” Nan said.

“You did,” Sigi said. “But I hardly dared to believe you.”

Nan took Sigi’s hand, and Sigi turned as pink as the sunrise. Freddy crossed to the other side of the roof, looking not to the sun now but to the edge of darkness.

I promised you something, too,
Thea. But there’s no way for me to know. You’ll forgive me for doing what’s right, I know.

He had never before realized how quickly the sun rose. It seemed almost as if at one moment the western sky was still deep blue with a few determined stars shining in it, and in the next moment the whole world was full of all the light and hope of morning.

He closed his eyes and turned inward. Thousands of threads, years and years of spellwork…

In one moment it was undone.