0062104292 (8UP) (19 page)

There was some sort of system to these drawers, but she didn’t understand it. She did find that maps of one area or one type of place seemed to be filed together, so a glance at whatever was on top was enough to disqualify
a whole drawer at one go.

Faster,
she said when she started feeling tired.

There were maps with rivers on them, and maps of farms, and maps of structures she did not understand, but it was not until the twenty-seventh drawer that she finally found drawings of a building with an empty square place in the center. She took that stack over to the floor right under one of the brightest lights and went through it, sheet by sheet, doing her best to stack those sheets in order.

There were spaces marked
LABS
on the highest floor. She took very particular note of that. At the bottom of the stack were sheets much older than anything else she had seen, and with a simpler diagram. She looked at those pencil marks, looked up at the walls and windows around her, and her heart gave a little bounce of excitement: she was looking at the plans, the drawing—the
map
—for the very room she was in! There was the door into the other room, which had been turned into the claimants’ dormitory all those years later. There was the unused fireplace over there, and the closet on that other wall; everything was here in this picture, once you knew how to read it properly. Now she went back a sheet and studied that one, and there it was, yes, the old building embedded in the new.

She looked at those sheets for what seemed like a very
long time, tracing all the important edges of things with a finger so that the memory would sink deeply into her brain. Then she put those maps away, slung her lourka bundle across her back, shut the old door between the map room and the dormitory, and crawled into the fireplace.

Linny knew that back home in the village, the oldest, largest houses had fireplaces with narrow toeholds in their chimneys, so that the lucky boy sent up to clean out clumps of soot would not be always “slipping down into supper,” as Elias’s mother liked to say. (Elias’s house probably had the second-largest chimney in Lourka, after that of the floury baker.) This old, old house that the First Surveyor had built back in the distant past and that had been swallowed whole by the glass-and-metal Surveyors’ Court later—it was almost like Elias’s house, back in Lourka, wasn’t it? And indeed, when she reached up with her hands into that chimney, she found the toeholds waiting there for her.

Thank you,
she said to the First Surveyor, who had looked so much like Linny herself and who had also, to judge from her various portraits, loved a peculiar, wrinkled cat.

Still, it took an extra couple of seconds to gather the courage to start that climb up the dark chimney. She had to tease herself into it.
So silly to be afraid!
It would be
just like climbing a tree, probably—only inside out.

That made her smile, and before the smile could leave her, she flung herself upward and started scrabbling for finger- and toeholds. A piece of good luck: the top of the chimney had only the flimsiest piece of wood covering it. It was no trouble at all pushing that up and away, so that she could scramble out of the chimney into this strange, strange space that the plans had suggested must be here.

There was a kind of crawl space—dim and shadowy, but not (thanks to the outer shell of windows) completely dark—between the roof of the swallowed-up old building and the next floor of the new one. The chimney had disgorged her right near the highest part of that roof, where it came very near to the messy underside of the next floor, and she clung to the ridge for a few moments, fending off two fears at once: the fear of being too high and too precarious, on a surface that sloped too steeply for comfort to either side, and also the fear that comes over a person when the ceiling of a cave lurks too close to her head, because up here on the roof ridge, the next floor was very close indeed.

But that’s good,
she reminded herself, and in the workroom of her mind she brought out all the maps she had just studied and looked them over until they blended perfectly with this bizarre place she found herself in. And then she found she could move again, and quite fast.
This next part was the trickiest, of course. Linny scooted along the roof ridge, eyeing the ceiling above her, where according to the maps, there should be a weak spot somewhere—there!

It was an old-fashioned hatch, just a square cut into the ceiling, presumably so that workers could reach this very space Linny was now in (though why would they ever need to?). She inched closer and then pushed up at the square with the palm of her hand, and to her relief, the hatch’s cover shifted easily. No locks here! A moment later she had pulled herself into that next, much darker space, where she sat for a while, letting her heart stop pounding and clearing her mind again so that she could find her way properly. She was in the new building again now. Sitting where she was, she would never have guessed there was an old-fashioned house hidden beneath the floor if she hadn’t just scrambled up through its chimney herself. She felt around that space, and yes, her hand bumped against the bottom step of a small staircase. Good. She slid the cover back over the hatch and started climbing the stairs, counting the levels as she went. The fifth level was the one she wanted. That’s what the drawings had told her.

There was a door out of the stairwell that led into some kind of abandoned supply room, and a second door at the other side of that. She was just beginning to ease
it open when light and sound stopped her. On the other side of that door, people were arguing as they wrestled with something—something that hissed and yowled and made scratching sounds.

“Strap it down!” said one voice.

“You think it’s so easy?” said the other, and then there were more shouts and some swearing and the slam of a wire door.

Then a short pause.

“Well, how are we going to plug it in and get readings?”

“Sedate it.”

“Readings won’t be any good.
You
know that. And tomorrow morning they carve it all up. There won’t be anything left.”

“Do you know what time it is now? We should be home sleeping, not wrestling with monsters just because someone upstairs gets a sudden clever idea.”

Another silence.

“Oh, just wrinkle it all,” said the second man again—and that was something Linny had never heard before, “wrinkle” used as a curse! “Give me the lab book.”

Scribbling sounds. A gasp and a smothered laugh.

“They’ll figure out you faked it.”

“No way. I told you, the cat’s being carved up tomorrow. How will they ever know?”

“You’re nuts. I’m leaving. And you know what? If anyone ever asks me, I left already ten minutes ago—”

And then there was a flurry of hurried sounds, more bickering, and the light went off (except for a faint green glow), and doors were slammed farther away, and everything was still again.

Linny waited in her hiding place, breathing in and breathing out twenty times, to be safe, and then opened the door and pushed through a bunch of lab coats on hooks, right into a room filled with glowing machines, an ugly-looking table, and a cage with a lump’s worth of cat in it.

“Hey there, you,” she said quietly as she sprung open that cage, and the Half-Cat stepped out with the dainty nonchalance particular to cats, even cats who have just come very close to being strapped down, plugged in, and (Linny shuddered) eventually carved into pieces.

She pointed to the door she had crawled out of a few minutes earlier.

“Come on, let’s go!”

They needed to get out of there right away. They needed to scram!

And in fact a door opened or closed, somewhere not nearly far enough away. And Linny heard footsteps.

She didn’t wait another second. She stuffed the Half-Cat through the door into the little staircase area, and
(sudden inspiration) grabbed one of those lab coats off its nail to take along.

“Now upstairs!” she told the Half-Cat, and gave it a push in the right direction. It sprang to the side, not wanting to be shoved, but then it trotted up the stairs at a good pace.

One . . . two . . .

The staircase ended in another small door, just as it was supposed to, according to those maps, and this door, without even a latch to its name, led out onto the roof.

They were supposed to sneak quietly across the roof to another, slightly larger staircase, and Linny felt a little foolish as she put on the stolen lab coat and picked up the Half-Cat, just to be cautious, but halfway across, the roof suddenly became a much louder place than she had expected. Alarm bells! Sirens! Emergency lights!

“This way! This way!” huffed Linny as she started to run.

And then the door into the second staircase wouldn’t open! That was a bad moment. Linny had to drop the cat to fiddle with the latch. Her hands felt suddenly as clumsy as paws, but she twisted and jiggled, and to her infinite relief, the latch popped open. Not locked, after all—just a little bit rusted, like a latch on a gate back home.

She picked the Half-Cat back up and ran down this other staircase, which was larger and brighter and went
down and down and down, all seven levels to the street. As she passed the doors, she could hear people pounding on them and generally making a racket, but she had no time to worry about anything but going down those endless stairs. At the bottom of the staircase was an actual exterior door, and when Linny poked her nose out, she saw the most wonderful thing: an empty street, and no one nearby. It was amazing. It was incredible.

The Half-Cat jumped from Linny’s arms, and Linny followed it out into the square shadows of Angleside at night.

19

ESCAPING INTO THE DARK

L
inny was moving so fast at that point that she was several streets away from the Surveyors’ Court before she realized that the Half-Cat was no longer padding along at her side. It had sprinted off somewhere, she guessed. Linny felt a little pang of hurt, and then set it aside. You couldn’t expect gratitude from a cat. And at least nobody would be carving it up in the morning. That was definitely the main thing.

While she leaned her head against the nearest wall and caught her breath, she noticed how quiet the world was on this side of the river. True, there was a faint jangle from the Surveyors’ Court alarms, already far behind her. But apart from that, stillness.

At night in Bend there had been noises: people laughing, people singing snatches of rough music, cats or dogs or men fighting, something icky being thrown from some window into the street with a squelching
squerch
,
shouts, whistles, rumbles. . . . But here on the Angleside, even with the quiet jangle of the alarms in the distance, it was quieter than the village of Lourka in the middle of the night, where at least there were the calls of night birds and the snuffly noises people and animals make when they rest. But these Anglesiders! They had maybe even figured out how to sleep without snoring.

She almost laughed at that thought, but at that moment a small shadow jumped out at her and hissed.

“Oh,
now
you’re back!” she said to the small shadow. “You made me worry!”

At that very moment, a bigger shadow loomed up out of the darkness behind the small one.

Linny was already running away when she made sense of the thing the big shadow had just whispered at her: her name.

She whirled around, and the two shadows came up to meet her, the larger one not as silent as a person should be when sneaking around a woods or a Plain or a town at night—just like a clumsy oaf.

“Elias!” said Linny, remembering to say it very quietly.

“Oh, Linny, thank all goodness, I found you!” huffed Elias, and then it was as if the many words he’d been saving up since the magician dragged him away just came spilling out—a hushed flood of words, like a creek slipping past in the dark: “I heard you’d been taken! They
saw something from the other side of the river! And I was crazy with worry, and they wouldn’t tell me much, but then I volunteered for something they needed doing over here so I could come rescue you. And look, now I’ve done it! I’ve done it! Linny, you wouldn’t believe how you have them all sweating nails, back on our side of the river. They said you walked into a trap, going into that Bridge House! But I’ve got you now! How’d you get that white coat thing? I almost didn’t recognize you. That cat popped out of nowhere a minute ago and was showing me how to go—”

The smaller shadow preened a little in the dark, and the diffuse light that the moon made when filtered by the clouds glittered silver in one of its eyes and golden in the other.

“Oh!” said Linny. “The Half-Cat is the cleverest cat I ever saw. I bet it caught your scent in the air. I didn’t even know cats could do that. But how did
you
escape?”

“I told you. I’m not escaped. I’m on a mission. But first I came to rescue you. Which I guess I’ve done!”

“No, you did not,” said Linny, in a slightly louder whisper. “You keep saying that, but if you want to know the actual truth, I rescued myself.”

The Half-Cat gave an impatient whistle and started padding off along the street.

“Where’s it going now?” said Elias.

“I guess it wants to get us somewhere where we’ll be safe. It seems to know what it’s doing.”

“Don’t know about safe,” he said. “But we need to get you well out of here. And then across the river somehow.”

They were moving deeper into Angleside now, the river somewhere to their left side and rows of square buildings all around them shining slightly in the misty night.

“I can’t go back yet,” said Linny. “I don’t have the medicines. My Auntie Mina’s being kept in some research hub, deep in the Plain. I’ve got to find her so I can get the stuff for Sayra.”

“On into the Plain? Don’t be ridiculous!” said Elias. “After I went to all this trouble to save you? Listen, it’s the start of the fair tomorrow morning. There will be all sorts of crowds here. It’s perfect. You can just blend in with everyone else, and then wander away at the end of the day, simple as simple, back to the hills.”