“Leaf! Have you hit your head or something?”
“Well, yes…but no! I know it sounds strange. Remember the dog-faces we saw?”
“Yeah…”
“They’re part of it. And this new bioweapon, the Grayspot thing. That’s part of it too. Oh, and the Arthur that’s here now isn’t the real Arthur. I don’t suppose he…it…will get into the closed quarantine areas, but if it does, don’t let it touch you. Not even a handshake or anything.”
“Leaf, you’re freaking me out! What do I tell Mom and Dad? They thought you must have been hurt in that water explosion and no one’s found you yet.”
“What water explosion?”
“On the fifth floor. Some kind of big pipe called a firefighting riser exploded and flooded a whole bunch of rooms. It was all over the Net until this Grayspot thing.”
“The Border Sea…” whispered Leaf. Ed had to be
talking about the wave that had carried her and Arthur and his bed out of this Secondary Realm.
“What?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Leaf quickly covered. “I need to work out some way of getting out of the hospital. Past the quarantine line.”
“Leaf! They’ll shoot you! Just…I don’t know…relax. You sound really stressed out.”
“I
am
stressed out! Look, can you think of anything or not? I haven’t got much time.”
“Hang on, Dad wants to talk to you—”
“Leaf?”
Leaf’s father sounded very anxious.
“Dad, look, I know it sounds weird, but I’m caught up in something—”
“Leaf, we’re just relieved to hear from you. Stay where you are, and stay on the phone. I’ll arrange for the police to come to you—”
“Dad, I don’t need the police. This isn’t…it’s not something…look, I can’t explain. Love you!”
Leaf dropped the phone on its cradle, collapsed onto the chair, and pressed her fingers into her forehead. That reminded her she was still wearing the glasses. She thought about taking them off for a moment, because it was a bit
distracting seeing the colored auras. But she left them on, since they might help her see things that would help.
“There must be some way out,” she whispered to herself.
I can’t go out any of the main doors or the staff exits or anything like that on the ground floor. There’s no point going higher, because there’s no way out from there, unless I got picked up by a helicopter or something off the roof, and that’s not going to happen. But lower down…there are the parking lots. But those entrances will be guarded too. All the entrances for people or cars will be guarded.
The door handle suddenly rattled. Leaf jumped in her seat. She heard male voices on the other side and tensed, waiting for the door to be unlocked or broken down.
“Locked,” she heard a man say. “Try the next one.”
Leaf listened intently. She heard footsteps, then someone else talking, though she couldn’t make out the words. Then more footsteps, going away.
The search had begun. It could be either hospital security, catching her on a surveillance camera, or mind-slaves of the Skinless Boy. Or they could be both, Leaf realized.
I can’t go out at ground level. No point going up. But there must be other ways out. A laundry chute…
Leaf got up and carefully looked around, but there was
only the door she’d come in. Still, an idea lurked at the back of her mind. She just couldn’t tease it out of her bruised and numbed head. Something had flashed up when she was talking to Ed…
The firefighting riser that burst. FB Wet Riser. The big red pipe. Caution wet floor. Maybe the pipe went somewhere…
Leaf went to the door, listened, opened it, and slid out into the corridor. There was no one visible on this side of the swing doors. Quickly she ran to the utility door and went in, shutting it after her.
She had only just started to inspect the pipe when she heard running footsteps move past her, then a man shouting.
“She’s in 3G104—she called from there two minutes ago!”
Leaf turned to the pipe again. It was only a few inches wider in diameter than her shoulders and extended through the floor and the ceiling. At first it looked like there was no way in, but when Leaf walked around, she found a panel had been unbolted from the back, the eight nuts laid out neatly on the floor. There was a long wrench next to them and an open lunch box next to it, with a half-eaten sandwich and an apple indicating the workers had been forced
to leave quickly, presumably to join everyone else waiting upstairs.
Leaf looked inside the pipe. There were beads of moisture all over the steel lining, but it wasn’t full of water. Looking up, she could see that other panels had been removed, and cold white fluorescent light was shining in.
Looking down, it was dark and the pipe was blocked. But as Leaf’s eyes adjusted, she saw that the blockage was a big box mounted on a swiveling ring that had little wheels all around its edge. The box had probe-arms that touched the sides of the pipe, and there were warning stickers on it that Leaf couldn’t quite make out in the dim light.
It was some sort of remote-controlled device for inspecting the pipe. It had electric motors too, driving the four biggest wheels, as well as a whole bunch of electrical and other cables hanging below it.
“Not here!” shouted the voice down the corridor. “Check all the rooms.”
Leaf hesitated, tucked the box with the pocket into her waistband, and wriggled into the pipe, standing on the inspection unit. It rocked within its ring, then started to slowly slide down into darkness, taking Leaf with it.
Alone, pressed in on all sides, accompanied only by the sound of her beating heart and the faint whirr of the
inspection unit’s wheels, Leaf felt the sides of the pipe get wetter and wetter, triggering an instant of total panic.
What if there is water down below, and I go straight into it?
Rational thought fled. Leaf clawed the sides of the pipe and pressed her back against the metal, trying to slow her descent. But the metal was too water-slick, and the inspection unit kept going down, taking Leaf with it.
A light swept down from above. Leaf looked up, but the flashlight beam fell short of her.
“Nothing!”
The guard’s voice echoed down the pipe, from at least fifty feet above. Leaf stared up at the light, choked with panic, desperately trying to draw a breath so she could scream for help, fear now overriding her desire to escape with the pocket.
The scream suddenly became a stifled grunt as a dim red light spilled in from the side. Leaf just had time to throw herself against an open inspection port and grab hold of the lip before the wheeled unit continued on its way down.
As Leaf hung there panting, she heard a splash below and then a
glug-glug-glug
as the inspection unit continued down the riser, into deep water.
Two seconds later, the weary but relieved girl pulled herself up and slithered out onto the floor of a narrow tunnel filled with pipes, cables, and all the other circulatory systems of a major modern building. She lay there for several minutes, gathering her strength, then sat up and looked around.
As above, the inspection panel here had been unbolted. In this case the nuts had been put in a plastic bag taped to the panel.
The tunnel stretched off as far as she could see to the left and right, but that wasn’t far, because there were only the small, dim red lights in the ceiling every fifteen yards or so. It was also extremely cluttered, with only just enough space between all the pipes and cables for a small adult to crawl along.
That was plenty of room for Leaf. She chose a direction at random, checked that she still had the box with the pocket, and started crawling.
“
I
can’t let them wash me between the ears,” said Arthur.
“There’s not much choice,” said Fred gloomily. “Even if you hide, they always find you. We’d better start getting ready.”
“There must be a way to avoid it,” Arthur insisted. “And what do you mean ‘start getting ready’?”
“Start writing down the important stuff,” said Fred. “You know, name, friends, favorite color. Sometimes it’s enough to bring some memories back. Of course, if we had some silver coins and some salt…”
“We could even forget our names?” In Arthur’s weary state it was only just beginning to hit home that cleaning between the ears could be even worse than he’d thought. He’d been worried about forgetting some details about his life on Earth, or his family, or the Morrow Days and the Keys…not that he might entirely forget who he was.
“You must have been cleaned quite recently if you can’t even remember
that,
” said Fred. “If they do a complete job you’ll forget everything about yourself. And they
don’t care if you were only done yesterday, they just do you again.”
“What was that about silver coins and salt?”
“A silver coin under the tongue is supposed to help resist the washing,” said Fred. “And salt in the nose. But we’ve got neither, so we’d better start writing. I really hope I don’t forget how to read this time. It’s going to set back our training too. I’ll never make general if I get washed between the ears too often. Come on.”
He marched back to the beds, Arthur following more slowly and out of step. But no NCOs appeared to berate him. As far as he could tell, it was the middle of the night and their appointed wake-up time would be in only three or four hours.
Despite his weariness, Arthur followed Fred’s lead and got out a service notebook and scarlet pencil with the platoon name on it in gold type. But while Fred wrote busily, Arthur wondered about what he should put down. If he wrote his real name and other important stuff, someone might see it.
In the end, he compromised by starting his list with
Ray Green
and then putting underneath it
Real name?
and then
AP
. After that, he put down his favorite color, which was blue, his parents’ first names,
Bob
and
Emily,
and his
brothers’ and sisters’,
Erazmuz, Staria, Patrick, Suzanne, Michaeli,
and
Eric
. Arthur thought for a while, then added
Suzy TB, Leaf,
and
Mister Monday, Grim Tuesday,
and
Drowned Wednesday
. If those names didn’t trigger memories, he’d be in a really bad state.
He wanted to write more, but he felt faint. The paper was swimming around…or maybe his vision was. He managed to lose a few seconds in between writing
Drowned
and
Wednesday,
waking with a start as his chin hit his chest. So he closed the notebook, slid the pencil into its pocket, and lay back on his bed. He told himself he’d just sleep for a little while, maybe half an hour, and then he’d wake up and write some more.
The next thing he knew, he was being shaken awake by Fred. Groggily, Arthur swung his legs out of bed and stood up. There were trumpets blasting out long, irritating notes, and only half of the hurricane lanterns were lit. Fred thrust a towel and a leather case into Arthur’s hands.
“Come on! We have to wash and shave.”
“But I don’t shave…”
“Neither does anyone else, really. Hair doesn’t grow much in the House. But we have to try. Regulations.”
Arthur stumbled after Fred. In a dim, more-asleep-than-awake way, he was surprised that they were walking,
rather than marching, and heading for a door he hadn’t seen before, on the east side of the barracks.
The door shone slightly with a faint greenish light. When Arthur stepped through it into a narrow, dark corridor, he almost lost his balance, the floor wobbling under his feet like jelly. He threw out a hand to steady himself on the corridor wall, and that gave way under his fingers.
“This is a weirdway!” he protested.
“Yes,” Fred agreed. “It leads to the washroom.”
A few steps later, though as far as he could tell he’d passed no other door, Arthur came out into a truly vast washroom that had no roof. The night sky above was brilliant, with strange constellations of stars that looked too close, and a rather unsteady crescent moon that cast a pale green light. Arthur stopped where he was, momentarily stunned by the unexpected night sky and the sight of endless lines of Denizen soldiers stretching out as far as he could see in the moonlight, standing in front of equally endless lines of mirrors and washbasins, each one lit by a naked gas flame above the mirror.
The Denizens were mostly stripped to their undervests, but even these varied with their units. The uniforms’ trousers, kilts, or leggings included every kind Arthur had in his cupboard, plus a few more he hadn’t seen before.
“We share the washroom with the whole Army,” said Fred. “Come on, let’s find our spot. You need to get some cold water on your face, I think.”
He set out on a diagonal path, walking right through a couple of Legionary Denizens and their washbasins and mirrors, as if none of them were there, and they were all just ghostly images. The Legionaries ignored Fred, but Arthur saw them talk to one another, though he heard no sound.
“Hold on!” Arthur yelled. “Where are we? How come you just walked through them?”
“Oh, they’re not real to us, or us to them,” said Fred. “Corporal Axeforth explained yesterday morning. We just have to find our washbasins. They won’t be far away.”
He kept walking. Reluctantly, Arthur followed, flinching as he stepped through the Legionaries. Fred was still ahead, passing through a couple of buff-coated Artillery Denizens. On the other side, there was a row of vacant washbasins, and to either side of them, some other Recruit Denizens. They turned to look as Arthur and Fred arrived, and Arthur heard the gurgle of the water in their basins and the chink of razors laid down on the porcelain.
“But how does this work?” asked Arthur. “Are they all here or not?”
“The corp wasn’t all that informational,” Fred said as
he opened his leather case and removed a cutthroat razor, brush, soap, and lathering bowl. “Something about weirdways leading to lots of different washrooms that coexist in the same place within the House but offset in time. Saves on hot water or some such.”