Noir (16 page)

In school, the headmaster forced all in attendance to study these tortures, as a means of deterring any of us from engaging in the practice of anti-state behaviour.

My heart punches the sides of my chest as my eyes drink the devices in, one by one. A mechanical set of cat-o’-nine-tails hangs over the back of a heavily spiked Judas chair. Against its legs leans a knee splitter, and a set of thumbscrews, and next to that a heretic’s fork. Beyond that lies a metal scold’s bridle and, atop a wired chair, a head crusher. I swallow, my blood running arctic in my veins.

Livinea was right. This is not just an institution where they hold the Mad. This is a scientific torture chamber. And we are their specimens.

I turn my back, with thoughts to run, and the sterling blades of a Spanish donkey glisten. Tucked in behind them, at the very back of the room, stands a heavily rusted garrote. I know enough to know no one returns from that.

The tortures today are designed to eliminate.

I shudder, my eyes catching on a square wooden bed filled with water. Young bamboo shoots float inside. A set of four posts line the bed on either side, equipped with shackles to chain the victim to. Slowly, the bamboo grows through the body, eventually killing its victim.
The bamboo sleep.

I gasp, bringing a trembling hand to my chest.

It’s not. I shake my head. It cannot be.

That’s an Eastern torture.

I’ve got to find Livinea. We’ve got to get out of here. Right
now
!

“Eyelet!” Livinea waves to me through the purple haze, smiling. “Over here!” She signals for me to join her in line. “They’ve got so many new things!”

Her eyes are big, her pupils dilated, her movements slow and sloppy.

“Back away from there!” I shout, clawing my way through the line toward her. “Livinea, back away!”

The clerk offers her something—some sort of device that looks like a pear sitting atop a set of four steel prongs. At the base of the pear, there is a crank that controls a threaded screw that turns up through the middle of it. The clerk activates the crank, and the steel petals of the pear peel slowly open.

Livinea’s eyes spring open, too.

I stare at the apparatus and my mind suddenly connects.

The pear of anguish. Oh, God, NO!
“Livinea!” I shout. “Livinea,
don’t sign that paper
!”

She turns to me, her eyes dancing, pencil in her hand. “But it’s special, just for me. The clerk said so.”

“
No!
Livinea!
No!
” I dive for her, but a guard hauls me back.

“Let go of me!” I shout into his glass-bubbled face.

“Get back in line!” He whirls me around. “And get this off your face.” He tears the cloth from around my mouth. Immediately, my head starts to spin. My eyes grow weary, the lids heavy, my vision blurred.

“Livinea!” I scream. I struggle against him, pounding his back, trying to break away. I finally thrust free, only to crash into a wall of glass.

A hand rises up from inside, swiping the condensation from inside the floating box. Through it I see Parthena’s gaze narrow in on me, dark and fierce. “Is there a problem?”

“No, miss—” The guard jumps in front of me, snatching me by the arm, and starts to lead me away.

“It’s all right.” Parthena raises her hand to stop him. “This one doesn’t need to get back in line.” She smiles smugly. “Her torture has been predetermined.”

“What?”

“Take her away.”

“No.”
I shake my head. “You can’t do this! I’ve done nothing!”

Parthena laughs. “You always say that.” She leans toward the glass and tsks. “How very naïve. Looking for justice, in a place where there is no law.” She jerks her head to the right, and the guards drag me away backward over the floor.

“Livinea!” I shout, twisting and kicking. “Livinea! Don’t sign that paper! Don’t put your name on it! Livinea!”

She waves as though nothing at all is happening.

Tw
enty-Eight

Eyelet

The guard drags me, staggering and stopping, through the common room into a smaller, cold, dark room off to one side. I writhe and scream, but it does nothing; no one I pass reaches out to help me. All fixed in their zombie states, they rock in their lines, waiting to hear their names, to choose their tortures—the way they’re possibly going to die.

I close my eyes, unable to stand the sudden weight of them. My blood jerks in my veins. Something is wrong, very wrong with me. I feel like I’m coming out of my skin. Metallic spittle curdles in the back of my throat. There’s a hint of burned toast.

All at once I know.

The room spins. The silver’s rising.

No.
I shake my head.
Not an episode. Not NOW . . .

I feel myself begin to shake, not from fear but from forces beyond my control. The world around me has begun to dim. Soon I’ll be left drooling and riveting about the floor, an uncontrolled animal. I can’t let anyone know.

In a quick move, I bite the hand of the guard to make him let go. He tosses me up against a wall. My head spins from the thud. I shrink dizzily down to the floor. Reaching into my pocket, I frantically search for the small syringe of serum I tucked into the seam before I left the Compound. The same serum that saved Cordelia’s life, pulling her from an episode, in case I needed it to save my own.

“You little dolt!” The guard lunges at me, shaking the pain from his bit hand.

I pull the syringe from my pocket, trying my best to conceal it in my fingers, but my brain is sloppy, I’m woozy and slow.

“I’ll take that.” The guard leans in, snatching the serum away. “What
is
this?” He holds up the syringe, examining it closely in the light, his eyes beaming through the tiny glass vial. “Thought you were gonna stick me with this, did you?”

I shake my head, shivering, trembling, trying to hold on, the silver coursing toward my brain.

“Sorry for you, I ain’t that dumb!” The guard swings around. He fists the syringe and stabs me with it, sinking the needle deep into the muscle of my arm. He launches the plunger, pushing the serum into my veins, and I fall back, relieved, onto the ground.

His wide-eyed, pockmarked face wobbles close to me. “You just lost thirty of your sixty minutes in the common today,” he says, tossing the needle aside. “We’ll see how you like that.” The room goes black, save for a set of crooked teeth laughing over me.

But really, I’m the one who’s had the last laugh.

Tw
enty-Nine

Urlick

We rumble through a thicket of leafless birch saplings. Branches crunch and crackle under the weight of the elephant. I look back, checking frequently to see if the authorities are still following us, astonished to see they’re not. It appears they’ve given up on us after crossing through that gurgling bog. Since then, there’s been no sign of anyone. Not a single Brigsman attempted to enter it. In fact, they retreated from its edge. C.L., however, crashed the elephant headlong through its steamy, smelly guts, as if he knew what the outcome would be. Then again, what other choice did two fugitives have? I’m only thankful the elephant made it through.

“Where are we?” I say.

“Almost there,” C.L. answers.

“How do you know?”

He says nothing, which I take as strange, but not as strange as the atmosphere, which has grown gradually darker and darker with every step. The cloud cover is thicker up here too, than it was below. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear we’ve entered the area of unprotected forest that runs between Gears and Ramshackle Follies by mistake—only we haven’t crossed a fence line, have we?

I reach out to clear a path through the thick mist in front of us, and it moves along in a chunk.
That doesn’t even happen at home
, I think to myself, shuddering. Perhaps instead of a fence it was a bog.

“There it tis!” C.L. jumps forward in his seat, pointing a wobbly toe toward the top of the escarpment. “There she is, there, you see. We’ve almost made it.” He sighs, sounding relieved.

I wave a hand through the soupy cloud cover. Madhouse Brink comes into view. A great beast of a building, ominously black in colour—a grand, Gothic-looking, windowless, whipped-meringue sort of castle—dressing the farthest peaks of Brethren in a frothy half-halo ring. Around it, giant rolls of candlelit barbed-wire fencing dance forward, backward, taunting all who dare to come near. I tremble, thinking of Eyelet stored inside the belly of that beast.

How will we ever get her out of there?

C.L.’s breath becomes quick and tattered. He starts to shake. I’ve never seen him like this in my life. Something is wrong. His eyes grow wide and glassy. He blinks often, as if trying to blink something away.

“What is it?” I say.

“Nothin’.”

He answers too quickly. He doesn’t look at me. I don’t believe him—for the first time in my life. I look ahead of us at the building, seeing something shift in the mist.

“Did that wall just move?”

“Yes, sir, it did.” I stare at C.L. “That’s the puzzle of the Brink. The walls are ever changin’, ever growin’, ever increasin’ in number. That’s why it appears to take up the entire landscape, when really only a portion of the walls you see are real. The rest are just an illusion.”

“An illusion?”

“Yes, sir. Not real.”

“How do you know all this?”

C.L. clamps up, stares ahead. The muscles at the sides of his jaws start churning.

“You were in here, weren’t you?”

He sucks in his upper lip. When he turns to me, his eyes are watery. “I did nothin’ wrong, sir. I assure you that. It was all just a wicked mistake. You see, me muvver died when I was seven”—he hangs his head—“and me father gave me up for seven pike.”

“A pike wouldn’t buy you a flake of soap.”

“I know, sir.” C.L. lifts his chin. “Me father, ’e just wanted me gone. ’E ’ated me. After me muvver passed, there was no one left to protect me. That’s ’ow I ended up ’ere.”

“But you escaped. That’s how you knew we could do it.”

“Yes, sir.” C.L. slowly nods his head. “But that was a long time ago. Things may have changed—”

“But still, you’re Eyelet’s best bet.”

“I suppose so, yes, sir. When yuh put it that way.”

“How did you end up with the freakmaster, then?”

C.L. sniffs. “He captured me that same day, not far off of the bog. ’E constantly threatened ’e’d return me ’ere if I ever tried to escape. That’s why when you took me in, I insisted you keep me secret.” He looks at me like a beaten puppy.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me this before?”

“Because I was afraid to, sir. I was afraid you’d start to fearin’ me, if you knew the truth.” His lips wobble, delivering the words.

I pat his back. “Never, C.L. Never.” I look away, up at the stretch of black moving wall that lurks ahead of us. C.L. wipes a tear and shifts the elephant back into gear.

“So how are we going to know which walls are the real ones going in?”

C.L. turns to me. “I’m afraid we don’t, sir.”

“There must be a way. How else does anyone enter?”

“There’s only one way in that I know of, sir, and it ain’t pretty.” He shivers. He veers off to the left.

“Where are you going?”

“Manoeuvrin’ round the back side of that hill, to come up on the ’ouse from behind. That’s where I told the others we’d meet them,” C.L. says. “They should be there by now. From there we’ll concoct a plan.”

He shifts the elephant into the next gear, and its framework stutters. Then, finally, the beast bursts forward, sure of one step, then not the next—tripping and stumbling, then surging forward, an unsteady mess.

“What’s wrong?” I clutch the sides of the breastplate seat as the elephant teeters off balance, nearly throwing us from our perch.

“I dunno.” C.L. shifts the gears backward, bringing the beast to a halt. He leaps from his seat, disappearing into a coil of cloud cover.

“What is it?” I shout.

C.L.’s brow furrows. “I’m afraid the bog back there may ’ave been too much for the ol’ thing.” He looks up at me.

“What do you mean?” Spirals of tinny-smelling steam billow up from the elephant’s legs. I jump down, dropping through the hissing yellow clouds to the mucky ground below. “Bloody hell.” I falter.

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

The brass outer coating of the elephant’s legs has melted away, leaving the inner workings of his metal mechanics exposed. Half-melted gears now thread through eroded teeth, their iron tips slowly drizzling in a line of hot metallic drool to the ground. Gaping pockmarks glare up from where effervescent jewels once lined the creature’s toes and ankle dressings. The shiny brass exterior is now a corroded shell of tin. The once-glistening, golden, majestic beast, reduced to a heartless heap of utilitarian steel.

My heart takes a bitter turn in my chest. Is nothing out of the reach of destruction in this world?

I pull my gloves from my pocket and bend down to explore the situation further.

“Don’t touch it!” C.L. shouts from above.

“Why not?” I jerk my hand away.

“It’ll do to yer ’and what it’s done to the steel,” he says, slowly crawling down. “Lost me friend to the bog, years ago, when she and I, we—” He stops himself. His eyes are swollen and red and caught on a memory, I can tell, but he offers nothing further. “It’ll melt the skin from yer bones. That’s all you need to know.”

“So what are we going to do, then?” My eyes shift in the direction of Madhouse Brink, my heart thrumming at the thought of Eyelet penned up in there. “We’re still some seventy metres away.” I turn to C.L. “The woods are too unpredictable up here.”

“Perhaps we can limp the beast there?” C.L. offers. He circles the elephant, surveying the damage on the rest of its legs. “These three aren’t as bad.” He pokes at one with a stick, and the stick dissolves. He looks up, gulps. “We’ll have to ’urry before the ’ole thing collapses onto its carriage.”

“Well, we’d better get going, then.” I grab the undamaged ear of the elephant and hoist myself back up into the passenger seat.

C.L. plops down hard in the seat next to me and starts pushing and pulling levers. The elephant bounces, careening this way and that. I hold on as C.L. recalibrates for balance. The elephant jerks sloppily forward, but it’s moving the gears of its left front leg, whirling and then sticking, as we pulse and bob our way up the road.

We arrive at the rear of the Brink in our bobbing caravan. C.L. pulls the elephant to a stop behind a bush and whistles into the trees. One by one the freaks emerge, and my heart does a full wrench round in my chest. I’m not proud of it, but it does. No amount of verbal coaching could have prepared me for seeing them in the flesh, though C.L. did try to warn me on the way up.

“Martin, this is Urlick. Urlick, Martin.” C.L. jumps cautiously down from the elephant in front of a very dry-skinned man.

“So good to meet you.” Martin sticks out a weathered hand for me to shake.

“The pleasure is all mine.” I accept his hand, a little worried I might be left with some of it.

“This is Sadar.” A man with a dastardly crooked spine bows to me, and I wince for the pain he must feel. I return the favour and he nods his head, bringing his hands to his chin in prayer.

“Reeke,” says a squat, round man with numerous tumours. He smiles, and a bit of drool seeps from between his rows of staggered teeth.

“Pleased to meet you, Reeke,” I say, stooping to meet his eyes.

“And this is Wanda,” C.L. announces as the last, a haired woman who looks much like an ape, dips shyly out of the bushes. She does not look me in the eye but instead stands and studies her feet, blinking, long lashes waving in the breeze.

“Hello,” I say gently. The woman rolls her shoulders.

“Wanda takes a bit to warm up to strangers,” C.L. says. “Idn’t that right, Wanda?”

She lifts her gaze.

“Been about eight years since she’s said a word to anybody, so don’t be offended,” Martin adds.

Wings flap behind our heads. I whirl around defensively, prepared to fight. “Clementine?” I squint as she hits the ground. She bounds to a stop in front of us, pawing the earth in her shimmering armour, extending a gilded wing toward my hand. The rider reaches for her face mask to throw it back. Eyelet? My heartbeat quickens. Could it be?

“Iris?”
I sound both shocked and disappointed.

Iris frowns.
Nice to see you, too
, she signs.

Clementine whinnies and snorts, as if laughing.

Iris dismounts, annoyed.

“Where’s Cordelia?” C.L. says.

“Right here!” Cordelia pops out from behind Wanda’s girth. “Iris and I have already made the freaks’ acquaintance. They let me stay with them while Iris did another pass over the building.”

“I see.” I stare hard at C.L.

“It was Iris’s decision to bring her, not mine, sir.” He raises his toes in defence.

Next a tall, stocky but well-built young man slips out from the trees onto the road. I suck in a quick breath. “Who’s this?” I say, onceing him over. He wears a pair of tattered trousers and a sleeveless vest. His skin is bronze and his head is shaved. He holds his fists tight at his sides, arm muscles tensed and bulging. Piercing navy eyes level me.

“Oh, that’s Masheck,” C.L. laughs.

“Where did he come from?” I say, still staring at him.

“Eyelet found him,” C.L. says.

“She what?” I feel my eyes pop. What does he mean,
found
? A prickly new emotion gnaws at my gut, an emotion I’ve never felt before now.

“In a warehouse on the outskirts of town. ’E ’elped us save you, in exchange for ’is freedom,” C.L. says, noting the heat in my eyes.

“Really,” I say.

The young man loosens the grip on his fists.

“Masheck, Urlick. Urlick, Masheck,” C.L. tries again.

He puts out a hand, and I tug at the points of my waistcoat before offering my hand to the stocky young man with the rippling, muscled chest.

“He was chained to the wall of a factory when we found him, poor bastard,” C.L. goes on.

Yes. Poor bastard.

“Forced to make killing machines, ’e was,” C.L. rambles.

“Make what?”

“Elephants like that one, only with guns for trunks.”

“Why?”

“Near as I could figure, they was plannin’ a war.” Masheck drops my hand.

“Who?” My brows cross again. “Over what?”

“Smrt and his lady friend. The one ’oo inherrited the factory. Over resources, I aspect,” Masheck says.

I ignore the mispronunciation, because the question’s burning in my mind, “What resources?”

“The skies and the water.”

“But the air and the waterways are contaminated. Everyone knows that—”

“Yeah, because o’ them,” Masheck snorts.

“What are you talking about?”

Masheck shifts on his feet. “It was them ’oo did it. They was the ones manufacturing all the bad ’ealth round ’ere. Toxifying the clouds and the water. Treating the ’ealth of only those ’oo’d pay the biggest purse. Leaving all the rest to suffer.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I over’eard ’em. Talkin’ ’bout their plan to weed out the weakness. And take only prized ones with ’em into the new world.”

“What new world?”

“I dunno. Suppose they were cookin’ that up, too.”

“How does someone toxify the clouds and the water?” I squint at Masheck, not quite believing him.

“They ’ad these pellets they dropped in the stream this side of Brethren. Made everything within a kilometre unfit to drink. Little round pills of death, they called ’em. Little purple things that smell like skunk. Manufactured out in Gears at another of their factories. They ruined the skies with the
cloudsower.
An engine they made to inject poison into clouds. It’s a giant bastard of a thing. I saws it once, guns and all. ’Oses comin’ out either end. One set to suck up the clouds, the other to spit ’em back out.”