His shoulders stuck, and, for a panicked moment, he thought he had miscalculated. He squirmed and scraped through the opening. The vent was larger than the opening, and Rafe slithered on his back, using his hands against the walls to thrust himself forward, feeling his head exposed in this short straight length. Let anyone shoot into the opening, and he’d be dead.
The bend in the pipe came suddenly; Rafe almost pitched down the smooth slope, angled into darkness. Shouts echoed in the hollow metal tube. Rafe pushed himself with his hands, sliding down like an uncertain swimmer slipping into murky waters.
It was not a smooth trip. Ridges and breaks in the vents snagged his clothing and scratched his skin. At the bottom, Rafe kicked out a grate, pooled out of the pipe, and landed in a heap in one of the palace’s many operations rooms. The room dated later than the now-useless vent.
There was no time to wait for his brains to cease rattling in his skull, or to nurse his bruises. Roland was on his way to hook himself up to the Machine. Rafe had to get there first, before Roland closed down all the doors and underground ways, or sent machines after him.
He’d never thought he’d be hunted in Oakhaven like he had been in Blackstone.
Rafe rose and hobbled past boxes of spare parts, stacked lengths of pipe, and barrels of nails and screws to the doorway. To his relief, the door swung open into a wide stubby thumb of a corridor lit with mage lights. Rafe crossed the concrete floor, and pressed his palm against the metal panel on the opposite wall. He was a Grenfeld, part of a family whose blood had intermingled with that of the royal Bloodoaks for centuries. This had worked before when he’d been so small that he’d had to rise up on tiptoes to do it.
A green light flashed across the panel, paused, beeped. The metal door in front of him slid aside with a contented chirp and Rafe stepped into the Oakhaven Machine Room.
It was a chamber of marble, glass, and metal. The core of the Machine stood in the far corner, a column of rippled glass that pulsed and throbbed with a white light, hidden behind wires, gears, and pipes. A chill emanated from it. The familiar beginnings of his quartz-sickness churned his stomach, and bile rose into his throat. Rafe clenched his teeth against it, jabbed a button behind him, and the door slid shut.
He hurried over to the console in the middle of the room, and rolled a wheeled stool up to it. Roland’s reclining chair, big and comfortable, was upholstered in worn leather and bore the imprint of the king’s body. A metal helmet with wires running from it was suspended above the chair, but Rafe didn’t want to be in such close contact with the Machine. Instead, he turned to the console with its displays, dials, switches, and buttons, labels all faded and indecipherable, and put his hands into an open compartment, wiggling them into the cool metal gloves that Roland had had him try on so long ago.
The king would regret that moment of avuncular affection. Rafe’s smile was sour, even as doubt niggled at him. Would the Machine recognize him? Might it not turn against him, like a dog whose master was threatened?
Then his fingertips touched sensors, and Rafe gasped as a zing, lemon-sour, orange-hot, bit through his skin and leaped into his nerves. A buzz of white light swelled up in his mind, and he fought it down with a determined
Not now!
This was not the raw energy that had attacked him at Grenfeld or the other agri-caves, but something that had been both sterilized and sharpened. He tasted that energy, its pressure upon his lips and tongue familiar.
The Machine reminded him of Isabella’s daggers.
And then the white haze coalesced, blinked out, and the Machine focused unseen eyes on Rafe.
He let out his breath slowly. This was not the warm regard of a woman, as Roland always described it, but the sardonic detached gaze of an entirely alien being.
Something—a voice—touched upon his ears lightly, as though a film of some kind separated it from Rafe. An almost inaudible voice, almost a sigh, that prickled all over Rafe’s skin.
Welcome, child of the Blood. What… is… your… will?
Shut all the doors leading to this area. Keep everyone out,
thought Rafe.
The voice recoiled as if in shock.
You… hear? You… do…
It drifted closer, like a circling shark, with the casual curiosity of a predator.
Just do it
, thought Rafe, jaw tight against the unsettling combination of citrus smell, energy pricks, and the bile in his throat. Somehow, he’d bypassed all of the buttons and dials to connect with the Machine itself and he didn’t relish the experience.
This acquaintance would be short-lived.
As you wish.
The voice vanished and Rafe sagged as the pressure of that unwavering attention eased. He started as several switches on a panel clicked one way, indicating locking doors. Great. Safe from Roland’s entry for now, Rafe took his hands out of the gloves, and walked over to the panel which controlled the palace machinery.
Sorry, everyone
, he thought, and, with steady clicks, he began switching off power and deactivating machinery. On a display next to the panel, power lines dimmed and moving dots paused. Rafe mentally overlaid the display with his own memory of the palace’s layout. He hesitated, then walked over to the corner and reached through a tangle of metal to lay a hand on the cool glass of the column.
Machine?
Yes?
Faint, but still audible, and no longer shooting nausea-inducing sparks into him.
Can I take that courier wagon there
—Rafe nodded to a metal flap behind which waited the small machine that brought Roland his meals and messages—
to the outside?
For an answer, images blazed in Rafe’s brain—movement along a map with the relevant controls interposed upon it—a perspective that nearly turned his brain inside out.
Maps, these are all maps
, thought Rafe. He’d worked with maps before. Rafe broke contact and stumbled back to the console where he began tapping out his instructions.
When he was mostly sure that he’d not end up dumped into a coal furnace somewhere, Rafe unbolted the little door behind which the wagon waited. The Machine’s attention followed him, tinged with… what? Wistfulness?
“Machine,” he said, out loud.
Yes?
Disturbing. He could
hear
it without touching the gloves or console. “Can you keep Roland out for another stage? Please?”
It wasn’t until he’d already folded himself into the trolley, after winding up the mechanism that would provide the necessary push, that he heard its response.
Yes.
Rafe leaned back and unhitched the trolley. He whipped his hand back just in time as the trolley, winched tight and drawn up to the top of a peak in the narrow tunnel, plummeted down its track, heading for the palace kitchens.
Rafe jumped off his ride before it came to a stop at the kitchens, and wiggled out into the dark laundry room, still steamy, smelling of harsh soap and wet towels. He stumbled his way between the tubs and out the door, keeping himself small and hunched as he ducked into the kitchen gardens.
Tiers rose from the center of the room, bearing ceramic pots and raised beds. Rafe grabbed a gardening smock from a row of hooks. With that and “Gregor’s” clothes, he should pass for a palace servant. He rubbed dirt on his cheeks and hands for good effect, slouched his shoulders, let his face fall into surly lines (Tristan made a good model), and pulled out a few beets.
The smell of earth pierced Rafe with a strong desire to be back at Grenfeld, to be a farmer rather than a framed fugitive, and his thoughts circled from home to family.
With a jolt, he thought,
Bryony!
They knew the affection he felt for his sister; they might use her to flush him out into the open. Rafe pressed past walls of fungus, carelessly squishing several delicacies like ladycaps and swirlstars, and towards the one door he’d left unlocked.
It opened to the underground tunnels. Rafe climbed into an empty storage container and waited tensely until machines came to life all around him. One of these, a forklift whose instructions he had reprogrammed, lifted the container up and hummed away. Exhausted and aching, lulled by the movement, Rafe fell into an uneasy doze.
She was not there.
Rafe stood in Bryony’s dark and empty apartment, lingering violence slick against his skin. The door had swung open at a light touch from his hand. The bolt had barely fit into its shattered socket in the door frame. Bryony’s few items of furniture—graceful wicker chairs and round bamboo tables—lay overturned. A coat and scarf pooled together on the floor, papers lay scattered next to them. The other rooms—Bryony’s neat bedroom and small bathroom—were untouched by the struggle. Rafe tightened his lips against the surge of emotion at the sight of Bryony’s hairbrush on her dresser, a few dark hairs still caught in it.
They’d already come for her, then, and stages ago. Had Wil ordered her arrest even as Rafe fled Roland’s receiving room? He’d circled Bryony’s building for most of a stage, and he was sure there were no watchers now, but his tension ratcheted up yet another notch.
There was nothing else to be gotten here. Ashes lay in Rafe’s mouth as he turned to leave. Paper crunched under his foot. Without thinking, Rafe bent to pick it up, smoothed it out, and squinted at the note written on top of a playbill for a production Rafe had never heard of. Scrawled across the illustration of an overheated swooning woman in the arms of a masked cavalier was a note in flourishes,
Bryony, darling, are you coming to the party at Leonard’s right after the show? Do say you will since he is your neighbor!
The performance was tonight and Rafe recognized the name of the eccentric playwright and director who was, apparently, giving a party on Belle’s Row. He crumpled up the poster. Bryony would attend neither the performance nor the party.
But… he stilled, hand poised to toss the wadded paper onto the floor. He checked the cast list on the poster and nodded to himself. He knew someone who would likely be at that party. Someone who might be willing to help him. For a price.
R
AFE SAT UPON A
bench in Belle’s Row, pretending to read a news sheet in the light of a gas lamp turned low for the night. For the past quarter stage, sedans and chairs had deposited visitors to a downstairs apartment four houses from Bryony’s place. Voices, laughter, and music drifted out upon tendrils of sickly-sweet smoke from the open doors. The visitors were a mixed bunch; Rafe caught sight of some gentlemen of quality, distinguished by the cut of their coats, as well as theater folk in flamboyant costumes. A gaggle of giggling women hurried past him, the wide sleeves of their crazy-patterned quilted smocks visible under the cuffs of their coats. One of them still wore greasepaint, another’s eyes were outlined in kohl and glitter.
With all this bustle, it would’ve been easy to slip among the party-goers, to step up to the doorway with a smile for anyone whose eyes he met. A tap on a shoulder, a touch on an arm, and he could’ve slid through the crowd, instead of sitting here feeling exposed.
Yet here he was outside in the cold, reading the same headline over and over again—A
NARCHISTS
D
ESTROY
C
OMPRESSOR
S
TATION
; P
ALACE
E
NRAGED
—and not moving, waiting for the person he’d never expected to ask for help. He tried not to think of his shattered reputation, of Bryony in the ungentle custody of the Guarda Royal, of Uncle Leo’s face all worn and shocked, of foreign meddlers who’d wormed so deeply into Oakhaven that they could fund the antimachinists and set Rafe up to take the blame for it.
And now Rafe had made the decision to throw himself at the mercy of one who might be as deeply mired in all this muck as anyone else.
Rafe twitched his tense shoulders. He was bruised and sore everywhere. His mouth felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton wool, and his exhausted sleep in the storage container and his subsequent hiding place near the canals had done little to remove his tiredness. His eyes felt as if they had been sandpapered. A passerby hurrying into the party house gave him an oblique look before moving on.
Rafe shook his head, and tucked the salvaged newssheet into his coat pocket. Foolish, foolish, to sit here like a crippled scooper. Had he made a daring escape from the palace only to be found lurking like some kind of bedazzled lad outside a party, four doors down from his sister’s?
Get in there fast, Rafe. Move.
He eased himself up, knee joints cracking in protest. Another theater troupe—dancers, he guessed, from the fish net stockings beneath the hems of their short flared red coats—swept past him. Several gave him appraising looks from under impossibly-long lashes.
He tipped his hat, part of the attire he’d bought from a no-questions-asked pawnshop. “Evening, ladies.”
One of them stopped. “Hiya, handsome.” Her plump painted lips pursed into a smile. “Going to Leonard’s?”
Rafe smiled back. “Alas, I have not been invited. I’ve been hanging out here all evening, hoping for a glimpse of some theater notables, but so far everyone is wearing their hats low and their coats close. Can’t see enough to accost my favorite actors, which is probably what they intended.” He hoped he projected enough adoration.
The actress smiled more widely and tugged at her coat to reveal more of the dress underneath, bodice barely holding her bosom in. Her companions tittered from a few feet away.
“Consider yourself invited, handsome. I’m Dulinea Darling, by the way.” Her look was both arch and expectant.
Rafe did a quick mental search of the name. A smalltime star, always a sister or a best friend, never the lead. “Charmed, madam. I’d offer you my arm, but I’ve heard you denounce from the stage such antiquated gestures as unbecoming to the modern liberated era. I meekly admit to not having the least desire to bring your wrath and eloquence down on my head.”