The Keepers (43 page)

“And if we stay, we will be able to destroy the crucible?”

Horace started to frown, but realized Gabriel would see it. “I don't know yet, but I have to find Chloe—tomorrow's Chloe, I mean. She'll be brought back here, and I need to know where she'll be taken.”

“If you use the Fel'Daera, they'll sense it. How will you protect yourself?”

“I don't know, but . . .” Horace searched for the right words. “Finding Chloe . . . it's what
has
to happen.”

“Understood. Let's go, then.”

“No. You lead the crucible dog away. We can get out of here ourselves.”

If Gabriel hesitated, it was for the briefest blink. “Very well. Once I move away, you'll find yourself outside the humour. Get free and get to the next level down. I came across a boiler room, almost directly below us. There were little cells there with barred doors—like jail cells. They're empty now, but tomorrow . . . who knows?”

“We'll try it.”

“Meanwhile, I'll lead the Riven up into the theater, keep them distracted. If I keep using the staff, perhaps they'll have a harder time sensing the Fel'Daera below. I'll come find you there when I can.”

“Thank you, Gabriel.”

“I must go. Wait for my signal. May yours be light.”

“And yours,” Horace said.

Silence. Horace could do nothing now but wait, made deaf and blind and mute by the humour. No way to tell what was happening. Chloe still didn't speak. At last Gabriel's voice rang out like the deep peal of a bell. “Now!”

A mighty tearing sound ripped the air, and Horace's sight returned. He was beneath the elevator, bathed in red light. The tiny size of the space shocked him all over again. Across from him, Chloe's eyes found his.

“I'm sorry,” Horace said.

“You said that already,” Chloe replied, already rising.

“I know what I'm doing.”

“That makes one of us. But even if you don't know what you're doing, just do it right, okay?”

“Okay.” Horace got to his knees, peeking out of the pit with Chloe. Shadows swallowed the corridor's far end. Gabriel, or darkness? Horace began squeezing out of the shaft. Chloe slid out easily and rolled nimbly to her feet. She watched him clamber clumsily to his own, and they crept down the corridor.

No sign of the crucible or Riven or Gabriel—not that Horace knew what the humour looked like from the outside. They took a right, then a left, then eased down a wide ramp into a huge, echoing room with a forest of narrow pillars. Horace realized they were beneath the stage. More theater equipment here: leaning stacks of wall-sized canvas-covered frames, lots of furniture, racks of costumes, all of it in ragged disarray. They wove through lumpy, looming shapes draped in cloth and piles of wooden crates, risking only the light from the jithandra wrapped in Chloe's fingers. They heard a heavy crash and a low, round rumble. The golem, but it was far off and overhead—chasing Gabriel, perhaps?

They reached the far wall and decided to follow it to the left, hoping to stumble across a way down to the level below. Soon they found themselves in a cramped, cluttered hallway lined with a row of doors—dressing rooms, Horace guessed. As they picked their way through a field of paint buckets and bricks, Horace thought he heard music, distant and sweet. He turned his head toward it and lost his balance, sending a stack of long metal rods tumbling. A painful fist of sound split the air.

Shouts from behind them. A moment later a lilting voice
replied, smooth and commanding and unmistakable. Dr. Jericho. Footsteps pounded.

“Go, go,” Horace whispered. They dodged through the clutter, racing. Soon the hallway widened and cleared, and they began running in earnest. Almost immediately, though, Chloe skittered to a halt.

“Ladder.” Metal rungs jutting from the wall led downward through a round hole in the floor. On the opposite side of the hall, another dark corridor yawned. Three short steps there led up to a landing and a brown metal door.

“Wait, I think I know where we are,” said Horace. “That door leads outside—it's the door Dr. Jericho is going to bring you in tomorrow night, I'm almost sure.” He dropped his voice, suddenly wary. “But Gabriel said it might be guarded.”

“It won't be now, with all that's been going on inside. Wait here—I have an idea.” Chloe scurried down the hall and threw the door open, revealing a concrete stairwell. A draft of fresh air billowed over Horace. Back the way they'd come, a flicker of light and bobbing shadows appeared.

Chloe dashed back. “That'll give them something to wonder about.” She grabbed the ladder and started down. Horace followed, easing himself as quickly as he dared down the iron rungs.

They sank into cold and damp, and a dim light. At the bottom of the ladder, the passageway split off in three directions. Two of the tunnels were lit by glowing lights not unlike the amber lights the Wardens used, but these were dimmer
and redder, kicking off faint crimson sparks. Chloe ducked instead into the third tunnel—the smallest and darkest, not much more than a slit in the wall—and Horace had no choice but to follow. He was puffing hard now. They were in some sort of utility tunnel, with broad pipes and conduits just over Horace's head. He thanked the slight breeze that told him the passageway was open at the far end. Their feet slapped noisily against the damp floor as they ran. Halfway along it, they ducked into a small alcove and crouched down.

“Do you think that worked?” Chloe whispered. “Opening the door like that?”

“I don't know. I don't hear anyone.”

“Maybe they think we left.”

“Maybe.”

“But we didn't, did we?” She stared at him hard, eyes dark and steady.

“No. We need to find you first.”

“Find me here tomorrow, you mean. I heard what you said, back in the molester soup.” She picked a tiny pebble out of the sole of her shoes and tossed it away. “But Horace, so much has happened since you saw me taken. Will that future still come to pass?”

“It will. We're still on that path, even with the golem and everything. I said something would go wrong, didn't I? And it did. I know you're here—you
will be
here. Everything's been so clear. We just have to find you. We have to find that boiler room Gabriel mentioned.”

Chloe gave him another long, hard silence. Even here—even now—nothing could stop Chloe from being Chloe. “You don't really know where it is, though.”

“Not exactly,” Horace admitted. He gestured off to the left. “Somewhere over there.”

“And you think they'll take me there tomorrow night.”

“I think you can make sure they do.”

Chloe barked a laugh. “I am good at pissing people off.” She glanced up at the pipes overhead. “Well, if it's a boiler room, we should be able to find it if we follow these pipes.”

Now it was Horace's turn to laugh, relieved, as he examined the pipes. Brilliant. “Sometimes I love you, Chloe.” The moment the words popped out, Horace almost slapped his hand over his mouth. Instead he scratched his forehead, hiding his face, and looked up again at the pipes as though they fascinated him.

“Well, sometimes, Horace,” Chloe said, standing and stretching, “I'm awesome.”

Following the pipes, however, turned out to be more difficult than they hoped. At the far end of the tunnel, the pipes branched off. They chose a likely path, but again the pipes branched. The place was a labyrinth of low, stony corridors, cavelike and damp—and rooms beyond rooms beyond rooms. There was just enough light that they could do without their jithandra. Some areas were clearly in more use than others—some lit by red crystals, others dark and cobwebby. Twice they passed crumbling walls that revealed rough-hewn
passages leading farther underground, one of which smelled strongly of brimstone. They gave them both a wide berth.

They saw no one. The nest's inhabitants must have been on the floors above now, searching for them. Or chasing after Gabriel, maybe. As for the golem, they heard it overhead once and turned into panicked statues, but the slithering rumble passed by. After several minutes, when they still hadn't found the boiler room, Chloe began making very brief, cautious excursions through some of the walls, hoping to find the boiler room more quickly. They were at an intersection they'd already been to twice before . . . they thought. Chloe eased through a wall up ahead to scout, and just then Horace thought he heard music again, a strange sweet melody. Chloe burst through the wall almost at once, wide-eyed and breathless.

“What happened?” said Horace.

“There's someone here. A girl—the one I told you about, that first night at your house. I was right, she
is
Tan'ji. It's a flute. I heard it upstairs, and now she's down here.”

“I heard it too.”

“She was with two of those Riven, not a prisoner or anything—
with
them. She was playing the flute. There was no way she could've seen me—I was in the wall—but the music was . . . touching me, and then all of a sudden she stopped, and she looked right at me. But there was no way, I'm telling you. My face was barely through.” Chloe turned and looked over her shoulder, as though she could see back through that wall. “She's with them, but she didn't say anything or give an
alarm when she saw me. What do you think that means?”

“I think we better move.”

Two minutes later, they found themselves following a likely looking cluster of pipes into a round hallway, wider than any they had yet encountered this deep. Their footsteps echoed wetly against the damp floor. Up ahead, the curved walls seemed to dead-end, but red light spilled from an opening on the right-hand side. An interstate of pipes ran out of the opening too, spreading in all directions. They slid toward it. Chloe crept to the corner and peeked in.

“Oh, thank god,” she said.

The boiler room was narrow and deep. The omnipresent smell of dust was acrid here. Above the doorway, a single red light glowed. The high walls were busy with pipework and utility boxes and covered grates. Pieces of old furniture and some other junk were pushed up against the right-hand wall: a table, a busted-out chair, a shovel, large chunks of machinery. Most prominent of all, though, was the round face of a massive old furnace, protruding from the left-hand wall, as if it were the front of a locomotive buried in stone—the front of the furnace was black and hulking, eight feet high. Soot stains fanned out across the brickwork above.

Horace approached and laid his hand on the surface; it was cold and gritty. He'd seen this kind of furnace before, an old coal-burning boiler. There was one in the basement of his school that, like this one, hadn't been used in years. Mr. Ludwig had taken the class down to see it during a unit on steam
power. And this one also had two heavy hatches in the front, both sealed tight—a large one in the center through which coal could be shoveled, and a smaller hatch down low.

Past the boiler, deep in the room, Chloe was checking out three shadowy doorways. She called Horace over. Crude stone bays, black and dank—coal cellars. The cellars were dark and cramped, three feet wide by five feet deep. A heavy wooden door with a small barred window had been added to each bay, turning them into grim prison cells, just as Gabriel had described. The doors were open, the cells empty. They were tall enough for Horace to stand in at the front, but barely big enough for a dog at the rear, where the arched ceiling curved down to the floor.

“This is where they'll bring me?” Chloe asked.

“Let's find out.” Horace unholstered the box and took a deep breath. He gathered together all his awareness of where they were and how they had gotten here. He traced all the steps that had taken them to just this place at just this moment. The thoughts formed like a map in his head, a shifting chart of place and purpose and change, and Horace breathed it in and out until he thought he could feel the stars overhead and the dirt underfoot. And then he opened the box.

The first two cells, still open and empty—but the third cell, closed
. Horace's heart skipped. He kept his focus and stepped just inside the opening of the third cell, through what would be tomorrow's closed door, and there—
Chloe, sitting cross-legged on the black dirt floor, her head bent down; now looking up
toward him, just for a moment; her face sharp but now bending again; her hands blurred and fuzzy along the ground in front of her, all the rest of her solid as stone
.

“You're here. I see you.” And with the sight of her, another piece of the puzzle fell together for him. It clicked into place as if it had been there all the time, like the perfect chess move.

He turned to Chloe, wondering how he would begin to explain. She examined the tiny cell she'd be occupying in a day's time. “You found me,” she said. She jiggled the handle of the open door. “Am I clear?”

“Yes.”

“And what about the other two cells?”

Horace shook his head. “No one's here but you.”

“You sound surprised.”

“Just thinking it through.”

“Okay, so . . .” She faced him and put her hands on her hips. “Why am I not escaping?”

Horace had to proceed cautiously. “Well, obviously you don't have the dragonfly with you, otherwise you'd have walked out of the cell.”

“Because Dr. Jericho took it. He'll take it from me tomorrow night.” She spoke calmly, but her hands became fists.

“I don't think so.”

Chloe ran her tongue across her teeth. “So why let myself be caught? You're going to tell me why, aren't you?”

“Dr. Jericho wouldn't bring you back to the nest with the dragonfly still in your possession. That would be foolish.”
Horace held the box in front of him, as if he were presenting evidence. “The only logical conclusion is that tomorrow night, when you go with Dr. Jericho, the dragonfly won't be with you.”