The Secret of Zoom (29 page)

The sound of breathing was loud in the confined space. The tunnel began to curve. The light from the entrance disappeared.

Christina stopped and fumbled in the dark with the matches, spilling the box. She bent down and found a match by feel; there was a scrape, a hiss of flame, a sudden sulfur smell. The candle's wick spurted and caught, sending a fitful glow to illuminate the frightened orphan faces that huddled close.

“Keep going,” said Christina, “deeper in. They don't know we're here; we'll wait until it's safe and then we'll go out again and escape.”

“But stay together,” added Dorset, stepping up to light her candle from Christina's. “There might be more than one passageway.”

The children who were nearest moved in to light their own candles, then turned to light the candles of those behind them. In a few moments, the line of bobbing candles stretched
beyond into darkness like a string of twinkling lights. Christina followed, last of all.

The tunnel was winding; the cave was chilly and damp, with multicolored slime growing at the edges. Christina stepped around a patch of mold. The cave wasn't as bad as the garbage truck, but it wasn't good, and it smelled musty, as if bats or snakes lived there.

Christina shuddered. If she could deal with a garbage truck, she could probably deal with snakes, but she hoped she wouldn't have to.

Ahead, the line of lights slowed, bunched up, stopped.

“What is it?” Christina pressed forward, working her way up the line of orphans, passing the little boy in the undershirt, the boy with the snub nose, the girl who wanted hair ribbons, Danny, who was still shirtless and dripping and, unfortunately, smelling now of wet garbage . . .

The musty scent was stronger here, and the passageway ended in a wide room.

“What now?” said Dorset.

Christina stood still, thinking. The children crowded near. The smell of their unwashed clothes mingled with the rotten odor of cave mold, and the sound of their breathing filled the rocky cave with a soft, regular sound like the sigh of bat wings.

No, it
was
bat wings. Disturbed by the noise and light, a colony of bats came swooping out from some hidden alcove in a flutter of beating wings and shrill high-pitched squeaks. Their fur-covered bodies rushed past the children's faces and
the orphans cried out in alarm, ducking low. The candles flickered; the candles snuffed out.

The children were plunged into darkness, deep and absolute.

Too late, Christina remembered the spilled matches, left on the rocky floor.

F
EAR
gripped Christina's chest like a claw. The tons of rock above them, which she had so far managed to ignore, hung heavy in the shadowed corners of her mind. It could cave in, like that other tunnel had done. She would be mashed by rock, instead of a garbage truck, but she would end up just as flat in the end.

An orphan began to cry. Christina was so close to doing the same thing herself, she couldn't get out a word of comfort. But then another child whimpered, and another, and in ten seconds, the whole cave was filled with the sobbing of hungry, cold, frightened children. And then, louder than the rest, came the lost wail—“
STEENA!
”

Christina made a massive effort and controlled herself. There had to be something she could do. There
was
something she could do . . . it was fluttering on the edge of her mind, she almost had it . . .

Oh. Of course. Christina lifted her chin and took in a breath.

Her voice wavered at first, but she steadied it quickly and her soft, perfectly accurate high G-sharp soared above the crying voices and echoed in the long, dark tunnel. The veins of zoom began to glimmer, faintly at first and then with greater strength. The children quieted with the coming of the light, hiccuping as their sobs ended. Christina saw Danny's head above the rest and reached for his hand.

“Sing with me, Danny,” she said, as she took in more air, and Danny gulped, tucked the cow in his waistband, and opened his mouth obediently.

His clear, pure voice joined with Christina's, and the thin streaks on either side glowed, flowing sluggishly down the rock in vivid phosphorescent trails. The orphans' dirty faces shone pink and green as they excitedly started to put their tin cups to the wall, then sobered, glanced at one another, and let their hands fall.

Christina and Danny stopped to breathe.

Dorset spoke into the silence. “You know the right note? Every time?”

Christina nodded. “I have perfect pitch.”

“Wow,” breathed the boy with the snub nose. “If you'd been here all along, think how much more food the guards would have given us!” His thick dark hair hung in his eyes, giving him the look of an eager and hungry bear.

“They still might,” piped up a girl with freckles. “We could show them all this zoom. They'd be nice to us then, I bet. They'd give us . . . lots of . . .” Her voice trailed off as she looked around the circle of orphans. Everyone was staring at her.

“Don't be stupid,” said Dorset quietly.

Christina looked from face to face. The hollows in their cheeks stood out like smudges. They were starving, she realized.

Well, she didn't have any food to give them. She watched the dimming colors of pink and green, and listened with half an ear to the orphans' restless movements, to their muffled coughs, to the murmuring sound of water, somewhere, flowing over rock . . .

“I'm thirsty, Steena,” said Danny.

Christina nodded. Of course he was; she should have thought of that herself. She looked around; she sang a G-sharp for more light, but she saw no running stream. Nor had they passed one on their way into the cave.

Still, the sound of water persisted, out of sight yet very near.

Christina looked at the wall of rock before her and its faint tracery of zoom. Once before, she had sung loud and long until the mountain itself had cracked open. She had had Leo Loompski's helmet then.

She had no helmet now. But could she perhaps sing enough zoom out to get to the hidden stream? If they had water, she might be able to persuade the orphans to stay in the cave for one or two more days, just until the search for them had moved on. Without water, she thought, there was no way. Water was even more important than food.

But her throat was tired. How long before her voice would grow hoarse?

Christina shook her head. She knew better than to have negative thoughts when she was working with zoom. She was
going
to find water for Danny and the rest of the orphans. She focused her thoughts on the stream she knew was there, just out of sight, and sang.

The cavern brightened. She paused for breath. The tunnel rang with echoing sound—with her pure, high note, with voices, with the tramp of feet . . .

But the children were not moving their feet at all. And the voices were coming from farther down the tunnel.

“—could have found them just by the smell—”

“Yeah, we didn't even need the shirt some moron left by the entrance!”

“Torkel signaled the orphanage—Lenny ought to be coming any minute.”

“Is he ever going to be mad! He'll want us to throw 'em
all
in the masher!”

Christina watched all the orphan faces but one crumple with fear.

“Bubby's not scared,” Danny said. “Steena will save us.” He smiled at Christina with utter confidence.

The certainty in his voice was irresistible. Christina felt suddenly as if she could do anything, anything at all—even the very dangerous idea that had just occurred to her.

She ran back down the tunnel, singing just enough for light. She paused for breath before the last curve and listened. The guards had stopped talking; they were listening, too.

She sang the high G-sharp again, only not quite so perfectly as before. She watched the wall with narrowed eyes, and adjusted her tone a micro-step lower. The walls began to smoke.

“Get out! GET OUT!” screamed a guard. “It's going to blow!”

There was a rush of trampling feet and a confusion of voices, fading as the guards ran off. Christina raised the tone to its perfect pitch once more, and the wisps of smoke drifted harmlessly away.

She jogged back the length of the tunnel, scooping up a pocketful of matches along the way and thinking fast. The guards were out of the tunnel for now, but they were undoubtedly watching the entrance, and sooner or later, they'd be back.

She lit one of the candles again and wedged it in a crack in the wall. “Listen,” she said. “We need more than water. We need to break through the rock and get out of here. I bet we can do it if we all sing together.”

The orphans looked at her in disbelief.

“Just
pretend
it will work,” said Christina urgently. “Make believe that you can sing so much zoom out, the rock will break. And don't stop thinking that you
can
.”

The orphans' eyes were wide and doubtful in the deepening gloom. Christina gave them the note.

“But you're the one who can sing the best,” said Dorset. “You don't need us.”

“I
do
need you,” said Christina. She looked at the faces that were becoming so familiar and felt pity and pride both. She might not have Leo Loompski's helmet to help her, but she had a hundred kids instead. Surely that would make a difference. That many voices and minds, all together, was probably strong enough to crack open the whole mountain.

Christina lifted her head and began to sing, louder and
more purely than she ever had before. She blocked thoughts of failure from her mind, and she thought of water, and breaking stone, and the free air.

Danny joined her, and then the rest of them, matching their tones to hers until the cavern rang with a powerful G-sharp and the zoom grew luminous, until the whole wall was a glowing, shimmering, flowing mass of color and light.

The streaks of zoom joined with the veins of zoom, and now, with the rock echoing and running with sound, the hidden sheets of zoom behind the rock were melting, too, pouring out of the wall like thick gleaming syrup. It covered the floor and the orphans' feet; they joined hands so they wouldn't slip and fall, and they swayed as they sang.

But there was no sudden crack, as had happened before; no rending of the stone wall. The orphan voices kept on and on, but at long last they grew weaker, and one by one they fell silent. The candle guttered out.

Exhausted, growing hoarse, Christina sang alone. The zoom poured out from the wall like a dam unblocked, glowing less and less as its level went down. And at last she realized that she couldn't go on forever. Her thin, thready tone weakened, dwindled, and finally died.

Christina sank to her knees in despair. She had failed. She had done her best, and it had not been good enough.

The voices of guards echoed in the tunnel. The shouts grew louder, came nearer.

Christina lowered her head.

And saw, in the gelling zoom at her feet, a bit of light. A dim light, a flickering light; a moving reflection of light. She
looked up. There was a gap in the wall ahead, where there had been more zoom than rock and it had flowed out like a draining lake, and coming through the gap was a—

A small oil lamp. Held by a familiar hand, lighting a familiar face.

“
TAFF!
” cried Danny.

T
HE
orphans hurried through the gap, following Taft. It was just wide enough for two, and it took a while for everyone to move through the passage. Christina had them begin by lighting one another's candles, so at least they weren't stumbling in the dark.

But the guards were drawing closer. They were moving slowly—afraid the zoom might start to smoke again—but Christina could hear them coming all the same.

Could she pull the same trick again? She looked at the zoom, now hardened on the floor in a marbled sheet of pink and green like wildly colored linoleum. There was an awful lot of it. She wasn't sure she could control the reaction of this much zoom, all fused together like this. It would make a terrible explosion, if it blew.