Lumière (The Illumination Paradox) (31 page)

She pulls her arms loose from my grip. “What would
you
have us do, hmmm?” She pinches her hips. “Turn around now, after we've come this far, we’re this close?”

“Of course not,
no
—”

“Well then?”

I pull a worried hand through my hair.

“There, you see, we’ve no other choice but to go on with the plan.” She turns and flits away.

“You don’t even know if what we’re after is where you think it is!” I hiss after her.

“Then there’s only one way to find out if I’m right, isn’t there?” She hesitates. “Are you in?”

I stare into her less-than-confident eyes. “I’m in,” I say, grabbing her by the hand.

We speed off down the hallway together, treading softly to silence our steps. “What did he mean by ‘business partner,’ do you think?” She turns to me on the run.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

At the end of the hallway, she hangs a sharp left, then another right at the end of that hall. Zigzagging our way past another stand of statues, she leads us down a dark, narrow corridor, and then off into separate wing. Her shoes skid to a stop outside an office door second from the end of an abandoned hallway. “This is it,” she says. “My father’s old office.”

I lurch to a stop beside her, waving dust motes away from my nose. Everything smells of mildew and mothballs. “Are you sure this is it?” I look around. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s been down this hall in years.”

“They haven’t,” she says, fussing with her skirts. “They abandoned the entire corridor after my father’s death. Headmaster’s orders. His office has been kept like a shrine. That’s why I’ve never been able to get near it.”

“Why is that, do you figure?”

“My guess is, the headmaster feels guilty about betraying my father.”

“Either that, or about what’s hidden behind these doors.”

She flips up her skirt, exposing her entire thigh, and I nearly faint at the sight.

“What?” She pulls the notched pin from the raven’s wing out of the top of her stocking.

“Nothing.” I choke on my breath. Hot roses bloom in my cheeks. I shuffle in place, trying to compose myself. I swear if she doesn’t stop with these drapery antics it’ll be the end of me.

“Brace yourself.” She pushes me aside, threading the notched pin slowly into the lock on the door. She thrusts it heartily in and out of the hole and the lock pops opens, gasping as if relieved. The door creaks open wide.

“How did you know to do that?”

“I didn’t.” She flits in past me. “But it worked, didn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose it did.”

“Now if I could just be right about the room being the crypt for the treasure, we’re all set.” She slips into the room.

I follow, closing the door behind, turning the handle back slowly so it doesn’t clunk, then turn, shocked to find the room in complete disarray.

“Looks like someone may have beaten us to the treasure,” Eyelet says, standing in the middle of the room, long-faced. I’ve not seen her this close to tears since the day she ran off in the Vapours.

Boxes are overturned, papers lie strewn about the floors, and chairs are tipped, as if somebody’s already ransacked the place.

“Hogswaggle,” I say, crossing the room in a few staggered strides. “Looks to me like whoever was in here before us left pretty frustrated.” I turn over a broken cup. “Besides, whoever it was didn’t have the benefit of your father’s magic message, now did they?” I cup her sagging chin in my hand.

“No, I suppose they didn’t.” She smiles.

“That’s right. Now,” I drop her chin and dust off my trousers, “I believe we’ve got a riddle to solve. Where’s this blooming sun you’ve been going on about?”

“Over here,” she grins. “Can you help me with this?” She stalks over to her father’s desk and takes hold of the edges. “It should be under the rug beneath.”

Together we hurl her father’s desk aside, reach for the carpet, and throw it back. A shimmering oracle of the sun appears embedded in the floor. Each ray of sunshine forms a separate spoke in the wheel that surrounds the intricate drawing.

“Well, I was right about one thing.” She falls back to admire it. “It’s just as I remember.”

“Now what do we do?” I bend at the knees.

“Solve the rest of the riddle.” She paces. “As fast as we possibly can. Let’s start with the tortoise.” She wrings her hands. “We need to find the tortoise.”

“You work that side of the room and I’ll work this. Once we find it, we’ll move onto the next clue.”

“Good thinking.” She scurries to the opposite side of the room and dives into a stack of papers.

I lower my head and start digging too. “Oh God,” I hear her gasp.

“Everything all right?” I turn around in time to see a rat cross over the end of her boot. The skin on the back of my neck crawls a little. I shudder, shaking off the feeling.

“I’m fine—” she clutches her heart. “Just wasn’t expecting that.”

We return to our search, her tossing over boxes, me combing through stacks of paper.

“This is futile.” She slams her fists down over the lid of another box. “I don’t even remember him having a tortoise.”

“Perhaps he didn’t.” I step toward her. She glares at me. “I mean, perhaps he didn’t mean a
real
tortoise. Like he didn’t mean a
real
bird. Perhaps he meant something like a tortoise, or some representation. He was talking in the text of a riddle.”

“All right.” She charges across the room, her eyes fixed on something in the rubble. “So, perhaps something like this?” She holds up a shadow box. Inside is a drawing of a mechanical tortoise. Its shell is made of scrap widgets and gadgets with gears pasted below to form its legs. Some sort of wheel sits embedded in a hole in the middle of the tortoise’s scrap-metal shell.

“Precisely,” I say. I’m across the floor in a blink, letter opener in hand, and use it in one smooth movement to break the glass, throwing a towel over the top first to muffle the sound.

Eyelet can hardly contain herself. She reaches in, twisting the wheel-like ornament in the middle of the tortoise’s back. Nothing happens at first and her face falls in disappointment—then we share an astonished glance as the wheel suddenly spins in the opposite direction and sinks into the depths of the shadow box. A moment later it pops loose from the box altogether, in a dramatic puff of silvery steam.

Eyelet grabs the abandoned wheel piece, pokes her finger through the center of it, and holds it up for me to see. “This is it.” She spins the wheel off the end of her finger. “Get it?
‘At the spin of a velocipede, or two.’
The answer to the second clue. This makes one—”

“So, there must be another one somewhere.” I dash across the room, prepared to search.

“What was that?” Eyelet freezes. Her eyes are twice their size.

A creak in the floorboards sends us scuttling off into the corner like bedbugs, hiding behind her father’s desk. Eyelet reaches up, clutching her necklace, concealing its flash within her palm. I pull her close and wrap my arms around her, preparing for the worst.

The tick of the clock on the wall by the door echoes throughout the room, challenged only by our racing breath, nothing more.

“Whatever it was,” I swallow, peeking out around the leg of the desk, “it appears to be gone.” I creep out slowly, then wheel my feet.

“Urlick.” She stares past my shoulder. “What is that?”

I turn, half afraid to, tracking her hand to where she points. Across the room, in the corner behind the door, stands a stack of timber crates. Leaning against the wall behind them is an object hidden by a blanket. Just a sliver of its rusty rim is exposed.

I’m across the floor in a breath, tossing aside the crates. Eyelet follows, yanking away the blanket once I’ve cleared the way. Together we gasp at what we’ve found. “The second wheel,” Eyelet shouts. “We found it!”

“Now the question is, what do we do with it?”

Eyelet pulls out her petticoat message.

“Heed the underpinning of the raven’s troubled wing, for beneath it hides the master key,”
she reads. “The master key—” She throws up her skirts, pulling the pin again from her stocking. “This is it! The master key!

Inside a spoked and circular tomb,”
she continues.
“You will find the treasure you seek.
Spoked and circular.” Her eyes land on the giant wheel. “Help me with this, will you?” She bends to pick it up.

I lunge to help her and it nearly takes me down. I can’t believe the weight of it. Together we drag it across the room, to the emblem of the sun beneath her father’s desk. “You see,” she says, pointing to it. “It’s a match. An exact match.”

“It is, too,” I marvel, dropping the wheel to the floor on top of the sun, amazed at how the rim is exactly the same size and shape as the circle that surrounds the sun in the design on the floor.

“Stand it upright, will you?” Eyelet turns as I do, and jabs the slotted raven pin through the wheel like an axle. It clicks as it passes through, then locks into place halfway.

“Now, toss me the small one, will you please? I have an idea.”

I grab the small one and lob it her way. She holds it up, and sure enough, the circle at the center of the sun’s design is the exact shape and size of the smallest velocipede wheel. She slips it over the top of the pin, just like the first one, and pushes it down. It, too, clicks into place.

“I knew it!” She grins. “Now for
‘the spoked and circular tomb, beneath a shimmering sun.’
’ Steady this for me, please.” She motions for me to take hold of the pin. Her gaze drops to the floor. She bends, picking at a metal cover at the oracle’s center.

“What are you doing?” I say.

“Looking for a keyhole.” The metal cover pops up, exposing a thick brass ring. She loops it in her fingers and pulls. “It’s stuck.” She looks to me.

I drop to one knee and give it a yank, steadying the pin-skewered wheel in my other hand. The ring gives way like a stopper from a tub. I crash backward into the glass cabinet behind. Beakers and instruments rattle and jump and shatter on the floor around me. “Now we really need to hurry,” I say, leaping to my feet, kicking bits of broken beaker beneath the cabinet legs, trying to cover our tracks.

“Ready,” she says, lifting up her side of the wheel.

I race to lift up my side. Together we hover over the center of the oracle, feeding the rod of skewered wheels—the mostly unlikely key—into the plug in the center of the floor.

It drops squarely into place with a generous click.

“Inside a spoked and circular tomb, you will find the treasure you seek.”
She grins. “Let’s hope so. Ready?” She grabs the smallest wheel, I grab the larger. “Turn!”

She spins hers one direction and I spin mine the other. When nothing happens we switch directions and try again. Sure enough, a pulse of steam begins to rise from the seams in the floor. Jumping back, we hear the grind of a piston shunting and then the floor begins to peel back. Each ray of the sun, in a neatly cut triangular section, curls upward from the floor, like the individual petals of a flower extending in the heat. Cool white clouds of steam waft out of every section of the oracle, filling the room in white billowing mist.

Eyelet gasps, as do I, as below each and every section of spoke appears a slot in the floor, a tiny crypt containing one hidden journal, twelve in all.

T
hirty six

Eyelet

I’ve found them. After all the years of searching, they’re really here. My father’s journals. I can’t believe it.

I sink to my knees and run a finger down one of the spines of the red hardcover journals. “Volume One – Rayon. That’s French for ‘ray’—this one has to be connected.” I yank it from its crypt and start leafing through the pages. Drawings of parts of the Illuminator appear. Urlick drops to his knees beside me. “Do you know French?” I say.

“Some, why?”

“It appears my father’s coded the journals. Look for words like ‘cathode ray,’ or ‘particulate matter,’ or ‘radiate.’ Only in French.” Urlick looks up at me through queried brows. “Oh, and anything that means ‘light’ or ‘lightning,’ or ‘ray,’ as well. We can leave the rest and come back for them later.”

Urlick rolls up his sleeves and busies himself, pulling journal after journal out of the ground and sorting them. “So, yes to
Foudre
and
Un Éclair
, but no to
Sang
and
Cellule
?”

“That’s right.”

“What about
Noir
?” He holds it up. “Another one of your father’s riddles, perhaps?”

I frown at the volume. “Pass it here.”

He tosses it over then continues to weed through the rest, stopping to thumb through the volume that sits in his lap.