Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (43 page)

Laura hung on to him.

“Laura!” he yelled in exasperation, broke out of her grip, and ran back to the still choked exit, dodging firemen unraveling hoses and opening fire nets. He found his way up the steps and through the main doors and vanished from Laura’s sight.

Laura looked up at the People’s Palace. Streetlight caught on the woolly underside of a pall of smoke that didn’t seem to
have come from any exterior part of the building. Perhaps it was oozing through the roof, or up an internal air shaft. The smoke hung, quite still and colored only by the lights from the plaza. It looked so innocent, so anticlimactic after the crush of escape. The sounds of human frenzy were dying down. People still called out to loved ones, and there were orders, from police and firemen, and the pounding of pumps and rattle of hose reels and extension ladders.

Then came a deep, bright smash from the building, and flames burst out of an exploded window on the second floor. The crowd shrieked, then moaned. Arms went up, pointing. The innocent fleece of smoke above the building now had the light of fire at its heart.

It was one of the attendants in the dressing room who first noticed the smoke. She supposed it was the smell of scorching and went to check that the two irons had been returned to the stove top. The irons were where they should be, the kettle was still half full, its base in no danger of burning through. For a few moments the woman stood frowning at the stove and sniffing.

Somewhere in the large building a door opened to the outer air, and the faint whiff shifted and became a strong odor. Then, in the cloakroom—the room nearest the hallway—an attendant shrieked as a wisp of smoke coiled in and spread thinly across the ceiling. She ran into the powder room, screaming, “Fire! Fire!”

“Be quiet, child!” her superior commanded.

Rose was before one of the full-length mirrors giving herself a final check. Her face was still too pink, and she was very
uncomfortable. She heard the shouting, and, at the same time, the lights wavered as a film of smoke covered them.

Rose picked up her train and hurried out toward the hallway. Everyone else followed her.

They found the hallway filled with a haze of gray-white smoke. But halfway down its length, pouring along the ceiling, as though gravity had reversed itself, was a brown pall, oily and thick.

It was Rose’s instinct to move away from the sight. But she didn’t know what lay the other way. There were no signs pointing to exits—as in the Rainbow Opera. This was a much older building. It still had gaslight on its upper floors, and Rose couldn’t remember ever having noticed fire escapes bolted to the heavy carving of its stone exterior. She pulled her train up, pressed it against her mouth, and, with a quick glance at the woman beside her, set off into the smoke.

After she’d gone a short way, she realized that only three other young women had come with her. Her eyes were streaming. She began to cough through the cloth muffling her mouth. She, and the women who had followed her, turned around and retreated.

Chorley ran up the steps of the building at the same moment that some shift in the air inside the building—a window breaking, a door opening—gave the conflagration a breath of fresh air. He was in the entranceway, pushing through firemen toward the stairs, when the main staircase seemed to open like a dragon’s throat and vomit fire. The flames spat down the stairs and sailed free from their bases, touching curtains and carpet, the beautiful oiled-silk wallpaper, and
the deadly, glistening cellophane decorations. Everything flammable caught fire. The firemen staggered back. Chorley was knocked over, and the back of his head hit the marble floor.

Grace was waiting to one side of the jostling group of people who had gathered at the balustrade of the terrace where, they judged, the first ladder would touch down. The people were craning over, watching the ladder swivel and expand as men on the back of a fire truck cranked it into place.

Grace wasn’t in any great hurry. She thought it would be safer to hang back than to join the shoving bunch. Besides, from where she was, she had a better view of People’s Plaza.

Her eyes hadn’t yet found Rose. She’d spotted Chorley and Laura as soon as they appeared. Chorley’s graying gold hair and height made him easy to find in a crowd, and Laura’s dress was highly visible. A moment ago she’d seen Chorley leave Laura and run back to the Palace, passing out of sight under her, where the main entrance was. She knew he was looking for their daughter. Rose wasn’t in the plaza.

Grace’s eyes went back and forth, back and forth.

There was Mamie, standing with her mother, grandmother, and brother. Cas Doran was on the steps of the State Library, with the President and other ministers and dozens of bodyguards and police. It made Grace furious to see all those able bodies in uniforms forming a fence around dignitaries instead of doing something.

Grace looked over her shoulder and into the ballroom, the far end of which was on fire. Only a few moments before, fire had come, following the smoke. It had climbed the vines of cellophane streamers that festooned the entrance to the ballroom.
The cellophane went up like a fuse and dissolved into drips of flame. The velvet hangings behind the orchestra ignited.

The fire was more than sixty yards from where Grace stood, but she could hear it. The sound it made was solid and soft, like a huge audience clapping with gloved hands.

Grace tilted her head back and looked up at the façade of the People’s Palace. She saw smoke wafting through only one window on the third floor, a few threads straining into the air above the window’s deep molding, then dissipating. It looked so innocent. It looked like smoke coming from the window of a busy workingmen’s bar.

Grace walked along to the corner of the terrace. She joined a young man who stood with his coat held up over his head as if it could protect him from anything that fell from above. He seemed to sense her approach. He turned and said, “Careful,” and pointed at the tiles beneath her. Smoke seeped between the slabs, and Grace could feel heat through the thin soles of her dancing slippers. The man turned back to the balustrade, dropped his coat, and pointed. Grace looked and saw what he’d been watching.

In the side street facing the State Library, the whole wall of the People’s Palace was ablaze. Smoke poured through every window, and fire through a good half dozen of them. A fire truck and a water tender were in the street, and the cobbles were already submerged. The stream from one hose played in spurts on the building but reached only as far as the second story. The other hose was trained into the side entrance of the Palace. As Grace and the man watched, something moved or collapsed inside the building, and a gout of fire spat out the entrance. It swallowed the men holding the hose, then retreated again, leaving them rolling on the street, their uniforms and skin smoking.

Grace put her hand over her mouth.

The man shouted to her that his mother and sister were up in the third-floor dressing room. “I’m sure of it!” he shouted.

“I think maybe my daughter is too,” Grace said, then burst into tears. She gripped the hair at her temples and held on to it as though it were her only handhold and she was hanging over an abyss. She could see the man had begun to cry too. He was saying, over and over, “That’s where they went in,” about the red maw of the side entrance. “That’s where I left them.”

Some of Grace’s hair came away in her hands. It hurt. She looked at the smoke seeping through the tiles and said, “We should move. The fire is under us.” She took his arm and led him away, back to the balustrade but not into the crowd. A window exploded over their heads and showered them with glass. The crowd on the terrace howled, and a number of people scrambled up and knelt balancing on the stone coping of the balustrade.

After her uncle left her, Laura stood for a few moments watching her aunt, a little isolated figure, head turning back and forth, back and forth. Laura knew that if Rose was anywhere to be seen, Grace would see her. Laura watched. She held her breath, let it go, held it again. But no matter how long or hard she stared, she didn’t see her aunt seeing Rose.

Laura came back to herself. She couldn’t obey her uncle—just stay put and do nothing. Not when she had someone to turn to for help. She looked around for a gap in the crowd and went through it, away from the burning Palace. When she reached the street that led to the river, she began to run. She
ran alongside a hose not yet fattened by water. She burst out onto the west embankment and swerved to avoid the firemen and their big pumping truck. They had a hose in the river.

Laura set off toward Market Bridge.

None of the busy firemen noticed as the fleet little figure in coral red silk sprinted by them.

The women shut the cloakroom against the smoke. They retreated from the outside door. Rose ran into the powder room and pulled open the curtains covering one window. She threw up the sash—ignoring the sudden shrieking behind her—and thrust her head out. The window opened onto an air shaft. The air shaft had a jumble of rubbish at its bottom and was already full of smoke.

Someone hauled Rose back and slammed the window shut. It was the head attendant. The woman was more stern than frightened. Rose saw that there was more smoke in the room than before she’d opened the window and instantly understood that, by opening it, she had offered the smoke free passage into their sanctuary. “Sorry,” Rose said.