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“Hey! How’d you get in there?” one shouted.
“They’re kids,” said another. “Hey, this ain’t a playground!”
They were American, and they didn’t seem to know what to make of us. We didn’t dare respond for fear that the wights in the hall might hear us, and I worried that the workers’ shouting would attract their attention, too.
“Have you got that finger?” I whispered to Emma. “Now seems like a good time to test it out.”
So we gave them the finger. By which I mean we put on the dust masks (wet from the stream but still serviceable), Emma crushed a tiny bit of Mother Dust’s pinky, and we walked down the pipe toward the men and attempted to launch the powder at them. First Emma tried blowing it out of her cupped hand, but it just swirled into a cloud around our heads, which made my face tingle and go a bit numb. Next I tried throwing it, which didn’t work at all. The dust, it seemed, wasn’t much good as an offensive weapon. By now the pipe builders were growing impatient, and one had jumped down from the scaffold to remove us by force. Emma tucked the finger away and made a flame with her hand—there was a poof! as Emma’s flame ignited the dust hanging in the air, turning it instantly to smoke.
“Woah!” the man said. He began coughing and soon slumped to the floor, fast asleep. When a few of his friends ran to help him, they too fell victim to the cloud of anesthetizing smoke and fell to the ground beside him.
Now the remaining workmen were afraid, angry, and shouting at us. We ran back to the door before the situation could devolve further. I checked that the coast was clear and we slipped into the hall.
When I closed the door behind us, the sound of the men’s voices was muted completely, as if it hadn’t just shut them inside but had somehow turned them off.
We ran a short way, then stopped and listened for footsteps, then ran, then stopped and listened, spiraling down the tower in stuttering bursts of action and silence. Twice more we heard people coming and ran to hide behind doors. Inside one was a steaming jungle echoing with the screams of monkeys, and another opened into an adobe room, beyond which lay hard-packed ground and looming mountains.
The floor leveled and the hallway straightened. Around the last bend was a pair of double doors with daylight gleaming beneath them.
“Shouldn’t there be more guards around?” I said nervously.
Emma shrugged and nodded toward the doors, which appeared to be the only way out of the tower. I was about to push them open when I heard voices on the other side. A man telling a joke. I could hear only the burble of his voice, not the words, but it was definitely a joke, because when he finished there was an eruption of laughter.
“Your guards,” Emma said, like a waiter presenting a fancy meal.
We could either wait and hope they went away, or open the door and deal with them. The latter option was braver and faster, so I summoned New Jacob and told him we were going to throw open the door and fight, and to please not discuss the matter with Old Jacob, who inevitably would whine and resist. But by the time I’d gotten it all settled, Emma was already doing it.
Silently and quickly, she pulled open one of the swinging doors. Arrayed before us were the backs of five wights in mismatched uniforms, all wearing modern police-issue-type pistols at their waists. They were standing casually, facing away from us. None had seen the door open. Beyond them was a courtyard surrounded by low barracks-like buildings, and rising in the farther distance was the fortress wall. I jabbed my finger toward the finger hidden in Emma’s pocket—sleep, I mouthed, by which I meant that rendering these wights unconscious and then dragging them inside the tower seemed the most expedient course of action. She understood, pulled the door halfway closed, and began to dig out the finger. I reached for the dust masks, which were stuffed into my waistband.
And then a flaming mass of something flew over the fortress wall in the distance, sailed toward us through the air in a graceful arc, and fell splat in the middle of the courtyard, spraying dribbly blobs of fire everywhere and sending the guards into a state of excitement. Two ventured to see what had landed, and as they bent over to examine the flaming muck, another hunk came sailing over the wall and hit one of them. He was sent sprawling, his body aflame. (From the smell of it, which was pungent and traveled fast, it was a mixture of gasoline and excrement.)
The remaining guards ran to extinguish him. A loud alarm began to sound. Within seconds, wights were flying out of the buildings around the courtyard and rushing toward the wall. Sharon’s assault had begun, bless him, and not a moment too soon. With any luck, it would give us enough cover to search unimpeded—at least for a few minutes. I couldn’t imagine it would take longer than that for the wights to repel a few ambro addicts armed with catapults.
We scanned the courtyard. It was surrounded on three sides by low-slung buildings, each more or less identical to the next. There were no flashing arrows or neon signs advertising the presence of ymbrynes. We would have to search, as fast as we could, and hope we got lucky.
Three of the wights had run off to the wall, leaving two behind to extinguish the one covered in flaming excrement. They were rolling him in the dirt, their backs to us.
We chose a building at random—the one on the left—and ran to its door. Inside was a large room suffocatingly packed with what looked and smelled like secondhand clothes. We ran down an aisle lined with racks of clothes of every description, from all different time periods and cultures, all labeled and organized. A wardrobe, perhaps, for every loop the wights had infiltrated. I wondered if the cardigan Dr. Golan always wore to our meetings had hung in this room.
But our friends weren’t here and the ymbrynes weren’t either, so we tore through the aisles looking for a way into the next building that didn’t lead back through the exposed courtyard.
There were none. We’d have to risk another dash outside.
We went to the door and watched through the crack, waiting as a straggler ran through the courtyard, pulling on his guard’s uniform as he went. Once the coast was clear, we ran out into the open.
Catapulted objects landed all around us. Having run out of excrement, Sharon’s improvised army had begun to launch other things—bricks, garbage, small dead animals. I heard one such projectile utter a string of profanities as it smacked into the ground and recognized the shriveled form of a bridge head spinning across the ground. If my heart hadn’t been thrumming so tremendously I might’ve laughed out loud.
We made it across the courtyard to the building opposite. Its door seemed promising: heavy and metal, it would surely have been guarded had the guard not abandoned his post to go to the wall. Surely there was something important inside.
We opened it and slipped into a small white-tiled laboratory that smelled strongly of chemicals. My eyes were drawn to a cabinet filled with terrifying surgical tools, all steely and shining. There was a deep hum coming through the walls, the dissonant heartbeat of machines, and something else, too—
“Do you hear that?” Emma said, tense, listening.
I did. It was sustained and chattering, but distinctly human. Someone was laughing.
We traded a baffled look. Emma gave Mother Dust’s finger to me and lit a flame in her hand, and we each put on our masks. Ready for anything, we thought, though in retrospect we were not at all prepared for the house of horrors that lay waiting for us.
We moved through rooms I struggle to describe now because I’ve tried to erase them from my memory. Each was more nightmarish than the last. The first was a small operating theater, the table armed with straps and restraints. Porcelain tubs along the walls stood ready to collect drained fluids. Next was a research area where tiny skulls and other bones were connected to electrical equipment and gauges. The walls were papered in Polaroids documenting experiments conducted on animals. By then we were shuddering, shielding our eyes.
The worst was yet to come.
In the next room was an actual, ongoing experiment. We surprised two nurses and a doctor as they we
re performing some ghastly procedure on a child. They had a young boy stretched between two tables, newspapers spread below him to catch drips. A nurse held his feet while a doctor gripped his head and peered coldly into his eyes.
They turned and saw us with our dust masks and flaming hands and shouted for help, but no one was there to hear them. The doctor dashed for a table full of cutting tools but Emma beat him to it, and after a brief scramble he gave up and raised his hands. We pinned the adults in the corner and demanded they tell us where the prisoners were kept. They refused to say a word, so I blew dust in their faces until they slumped into a pile on the floor.
The child was dazed but unhurt. He couldn’t seem to generate more than a whimper in response to our hurried questions—Are you okay? Are there more like you? Where?—so we thought it best to hide him for now. Wrapping him in a sheet for warmth, we stowed him in a small closet, with promises to return that I hoped we could keep.
The next room was wide and open like a hospital ward. Twenty or more beds were chained to the walls, and peculiars, adults and children alike, were strapped into the beds. None appeared conscious. Needles and tubes snaked from the soles of their feet to bags that were filling slowly with black liquid.
“They’re being drained,” Emma said, her voice shaking. “Their souls drawn out.”
I didn’t want to look at their faces, but we had to. “Who’s here, who’s here, who are you,” I muttered as we raced from bed to bed.
I hoped, shamefully, that none of these poor wretches were our friends. There were several we recognized: the telekinetic girl, Melina. The pale brothers, Joel-and-Peter, separated so there was no chance of another destructive blast. Their faces were twisted, their muscles tense and fists clenched even in sleep, as if both were in the grip of terrible dreams.
“My God,” Emma said. “They’re trying to fight it.”
“Then let’s help them,” I said, and stepping to the end of Melina’s bed I drew the needle carefully from her foot. A tiny drop of black liquid leaked from the wound. After a moment her face relaxed.
“Hello,” said a voice from elsewhere in the room.
We spun around. In the corner sat a man in leg shackles. He was curled in a ball and rocking, and he laughed without smiling, his eyes like shards of black ice.
It was his cold laugh we’d heard echoing through the rooms.
“Where are the others being held?” Emma said, dropping to her knees in front of him.
“Why, they’re all right here!” the man said.
“No, the others,” I said. “There have to be more.”
