“No! No, I’m not,” I said as the visions faded. “Let’s go.”
I led the way through the corridors, tripping over whatever was schisming in my shoes. Thankfully the world was right ways up now. We turned a corner—and there was the fallen chandelier, still a mess of glittering prisms at the end of the hall. I ran for Lady Florel’s room—
And masked guardsmen filled the hall from the doorway at the end. They poured into the corridor, filling every inch. They swarmed over Lockwood and me, pinned us by the dozens before we could fight, wrenched our hands behind our backs and pinned us down. Queen Honoria’s voice broke through the walls of crimson: “Let me through. This instant.”
She strode through, dressed in a nightgown and thick boots. Her hair was pulled back into a severe bun. At her waist, over the nightgown, she wore a holster with a Nod’olian pistol, and at her face, no mask, but an angry frown.
There was no eye, not even a divot, between her eyes.
She strode through the guard, and each of her steps echoed severity and function.
A thin man straggled after her, looking utterly dumbfounded, lost, shocked, and hopeful all rolled into one with a dab of cream on the top. It was the reporter, though he’d lost his little notebook and pen. He drew a quavering hand through his mussed hair.
“Her Ladyship has gone . . . gone good!” he cried.
“Release them! This instant!” she snapped at the guard, and they released us so quickly we hit the rug.
“Lady Florel,” I said hoarsely.
“Jonathan Gouden,” she said, and she smiled. I doubted she smiled at anyone, because it looked like she had to practice to do it. But she smiled at me, a real, sincere smile. She knelt down, took my hand, and pressed a brown bottle full of liquid into my palm.
The antitoxin.
“On my feet in less than a day,” said Lady Florel, striding down the hall after the masked guard, who led the way up to the roof. We hurried after. “Amazing, really, how quickly the cure resolved things. Obviously the first thing I did was surmise the situation. Find the cure, of course, and then find you. Button up your uniform, soldier! You’re a disgrace!”
Lockwood buttoned up his jacket like a man on fire.
“These guard fellows have been a great help,” Lady Florel said crisply, striding on. “They do whatever I ask. I could have certainly used them years ago at the battlefield hospital.”
“They, ah, they think you’re the other . . . queen,” said the reporter timidly, scurrying along after us. “They’re some of the children from outside the city. The . . . other . . . queen, you see, she took them away from their families when they were young and raised them to be guards—”
“She what?” Lady Florel whipped around, bearing down on the reporter, who cowered. I grinned. This was the Lady Florel Knight of Arthurisian legend! Every movement, action, and word from her resonated with intimidation, power, and . . . virtue. “This city is a mess!” she continued angrily, whipping back around. “Stealing children! Corrupt governments! Insensible, indecent clothes! Corsets worn over your clothes? Really? And Nod’ol! What an utterly ridiculous name! It will change!”
We turned a corner and hurried up the stairs after the masked guard. I’d explained to her that we needed to go out again into the fantillium, in order to illusion a door, and the roof was nearest. We reached the theater attic, full of old broken statues and smelling of moldy rugs, the domed roof with peeling plaster, and I stopped short before going through the door. The bottle of antitoxin felt heavy in my pocket.
“What is wrong?” said Lady Florel, frowning at my hesitation.
“I don’t know if I can illusion the doors,” I said honestly. You didn’t lie to someone like Lady Florel. “I—I tried before. I failed. Miserably, Lady Florel. I didn’t know them well enough.”
Lady Florel holstered her pistol and took me by the shoulders with firm hands, staring down at me with her arched, angry eyebrows and dark eyes.
“Look at me, boy,” she said, not unkindly. “There must be a doorway you know well. Think!”
I thought. I thought of every door I’d grown up with, all them vague, shifting masses of colors. My family’s row house . . . the panels swam in my memory. The infirmary doors—I couldn’t even remember what they were made of. I’d never paid attention to doors before.
I shook my head, distraught.
“Think! I know it is in you!”
I scraped my memory, gritting my teeth. The statues bore down on me, and the attic room’s dark walls felt like prison.
Prison.
“Prison!” I said, inspiration hitting me like an airship hull. “The cell door! On the Valor!”
And the gridiron of the bolted metal plates formed so vividly in my vision it could have been standing just there in front of me. I remembered everything; the crisscrossing grate, the smell of rusting iron, everything I’d taken in during the journey to Arthurise. It was embedded in my mind.
Lady Florel gripped my shoulder and nodded to the gable door. Our obedient masked guard threw it open, granting us access to the roof. Fantillium mist poured in.
“Good luck, Jonathan Gouden.” Lady Florel saluted me and returned to our faithful reporter, who had been watching us from the shadows of the old props.
“You’re not coming?” I said.
“I am not,” she said. She smiled at my expression, but her eyes had a bright kind of sadness.
The reporter behind us gulped air.
“Yes, Mr. Wickes,” said Lady Florel severely. “I am staying.”
“You can’t stay here,” I said. “Not in a place like—”
“Quiet, boy,” she said, looking at me intently, and I fell to silence. “Yes. Yes, I can. There have been times in my life, Jonathan, when I have seen as clearly as day a course unfold before me, as though I were sailing on a long journey, and I know precisely where I must navigate. This is one of those times. Do you understand that, Jonathan Gouden?”
I touched my chest.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“Then do tell the king for me, won’t you?” she said, smiling. “I’m staying behind to turn this city back into London.”
“Johnny!” Lockwood yelled, plunging through the doorway.
I bowed, glimpsing Lady Florel for the last time before I gulped a breath of untainted air and held it, dove through the doorway and into the mist. The reporter had pulled off his mask and was wiping his eyes.
“Why are you crying?” Lady Florel’s voice carried severely through the doorway. “That is silly. Please refrain, Mr. Wickes!”
“There is a—a f-f-foretelling a—a prophecy,” the reporter was stammering.
“Prophecies! Superstitious loads of tripe, excuses to sit back and do nothing while you let the world around you fall to dust. Don’t speak to me of any such ridiculous—”
Lockwood slammed the gabled door closed, and we stood in the center of a landscape full of green rooftop slopes, gables, and mist. We inhaled the fantillium air at the same time. The world, once again, flipped underneath our feet. Lockwood and I slid and hit the jutting gable door now beneath us, knocking our heads against it.
“I’ll kill you for this illusion!” he snapped as we scrambled to find our footing on the gable.
I closed my eyes and pulled together my memory of the cell door on the Valor. The square window with scratches, rims with bolts, the latticework of the iron at the handle, the clanging it made when the ship rumbled . . . I inhaled deeply and exhaled the thoughts from my head and numerous fingers onto the door at our feet.
It took my blood and bones with it. It sucked everything from me and left my skin a shell. The cell door formed over the gable door at our feet. Every rusted plate, hinge, and bolt drew itself from me in glowing strings of mist. The cell door of the Valor lay before us, glowing white hot and then fading to bronze with such completeness that I knew I had illusioned it to the very scratch.
Above us, the air rumbled. The silhouette of Queen Honoria’s air
ship loomed. I saw a glimpse of her peering below at us over the deck, removing her fresh-air mask.
“We fly!” Lockwood yelled, diving and grabbing the cell door latch, tugging it upward in a shriek of iron.28 We leapt into the dark, gaping rectangle as red forms slid down lines cast over the side of the airship.
Black enveloped me. All my organs and veins twisted and blipped as the threshold blurred past me.
BAM.
We smacked against the metal wall, and with our first gulp of air, the dim metal hall around us flipped ninety degrees, and we toppled again onto the floor. We’d landed in the brig hall of the Valor. I had done it.
“Ha-ha!” Lockwood exulted, throwing cell door shut behind us. Nod’ol had vanished, leaving only the cell of bronze walls and a tiny port window. “You did it, Johnny, you great fool! Ha!”
His laugh was distant.
I writhed. Glass and mechanical creatures with numerous legs crawled up and down my head and chest, into my ears and mouth, hissing, hissing inside my head.
Jon . . . a . . . than, they clicked.
Lockwood’s hand broke through the darkness and boxed me.
“Come on!” he yelled, lifting me to my feet. The reticulated creatures crawling through my orifices skittered away. My muscles felt surgically removed. Lockwood half carried me away from the brig. “On your feet! Stop daydreaming, Johnny boy!”
The cell door bent outward behind us, and then burst. It exploded forward and hit the opposite wall with a thunderous clang.
The masked guard poured forth as blood from a mortal wound. They smashed into the wall and over one another in a tangle of red fabric, hats, gloves, and masks, and pulled themselves to their feet like liquid, streaming down the hall and up the stairs after us.
Lockwood and I bounded. We clanged up the stairs, three at a time. The brig master, an elderly airguardsman with white hair, stood at the top of the stairs and leapt backward as we barreled past.
“Get out of here!” I yelled at him.
He furrowed his brow at us. I glanced back. The rivers of guards swept him up, casting him to the side and flowing on. Lockwood and I kept running, up more stairs, to the main floor and out onto the observation deck. Cold air hit us like a hammer.
Fata Morgana lay before us like a white castle, ringed with vertical docks, northern airguard ships, the Westminster, spires, and docks touching the black polar sky and canal offal falling down the sides in slow drifts.
We ran around the arc of the deck to the back of the ship as the masked guard poured through the entrance and out onto the dock. I caught a glimpse of Queen Honoria, graying hair frizzing wildly, her mask askew and red lips pursed, entirely pressed in the crush of the masked guard descending down the long dock and into the city.
We rushed past the row of airship dinghies, their balloons tied to the underbelly of the envelope above us. Lockwood hurriedly unharnessed the pulleys and ropes and dropped one to the deck between us. It clonged to the ground, and the metal deck thundered under our feet.
Lockwood shoved me in, and I hit back-first into the hull of the boat.
“No one,” he snarled, leaping in after, “accuses me of not being able to steer an airship! Figur-a-tively or otherwise! Hang on, Joooohnnyyyyy!”
He flung the orthogonagen wheel open and shoved the accelerator stick forward. I tumbled back into cases of food and ropes, just as the masked guard poured from around the side of the Valor after us. Their gloved fingertips just brushed the edge of our dinghy, and we fell, down—down—down—
The blood-red masks staring down at us over the railing grew smaller and smaller. My excitement turned to panic as they unharnessed the dinghies themselves, boarded, and sailed over the side of the ship, descending after us.
“Lockwood!” I yelled.
“I know!” he snapped, wincing. He turned the ascension wheel in a blur, firing the engines, throwing the ship sharply upward. “Good luck to them finding the altitude lever on these stupid boats!” He shoved the stick forward, and I knocked back again, banging around the ship’s supplies as we zipped forward.
The ships that had been plunging downward like dead flies immediately fired up at the same time, shot upward, and zoomed after us.
“Looks like they found it,” I said.
Lockwood gritted his teeth and we raced forward in a polished blur. Fata Morgana’s spires and observatory dome grew larger.
“Where’s the infirmary?” he said.
I pointed out the building, in the center of the city. The ship propelled forward. Freezing air whipped around us. The ships behind us grew larger.
“No one outsails me,” Lockwood snarled. He shoved another lever forward and we shot up again, narrowly avoiding a masked guardsman’s dinghy, which crashed into a vertical dock, then spiraled into the silver city below. My throat fell into my stomach, we rose so fast. Within seconds the dock had become a silver ribbon and the weathervanes on the city’s towers spun in our wake. A few seconds more, and the entirety of the city lay before us.
Lockwood pulled steady at this new altitude. My ears rang.
“I didn’t know ships could do this,” I rasped.
“Yes, neither did I,” said Lockwood.
The dinghies below us rose as spirits from the grave.
“Hold on,” said Lockwood, and he cut the engine.
We plummeted freely. Our clothes lifted from our shoulders, my stomach lifted into my throat, our entire selves lifted away from the floor of the ship. We blurred past the masked guard, catching a glimpse of their masks and hulls.
Lockwood fired the engines. We smacked onto the dinghy floor, and before we crashed into a cloud canal, Lockwood jolted the ship forward. We skimmed the surface of the river of mist, dipping and bobbing. He gave the engine more fuel and we shot forward in a wake of white. The canal-front townhouses and white brick buildings smeared past on both sides.
Lockwood turned the boat around corners, tightly dipped it beneath walkways, just brushing the top of the balloon. The engine whined. Lockwood grabbed my arm.
“Jump!” he said.
“What?”
He shoved me over and leapt after me. I plunged into the misty black depths of the canal, suspended in orthogonagen-smelling fog, slopping against a curved brick wall and sliding down in a trail of slime. We slid to a stop on the mucky canal floor.
I coughed up mist. I used to play in these canal bottoms when I was boy, but you couldn’t breathe this generator offal for long. Your lungs would fill with water.
The bang of our dinghy crashing into the canal side sounded in the distance. Lockwood’s form appeared next to me, caked with muck.
“Yeah,” I said. “All those things I said, about you not being able to steer a ship, you know, I think I take them back.”
Lockwood laughed, and then winced and held his head. I took the lead now, slopping through the bottom of the canals. Chemical light behind metal grates cast strange shadows around us, illuminating sky mussels clinging to the walls. Beneath them, numbers and letters marked the location. S-C-498. Stratus Circle, where the infirmary stood.
Metal rings had been built into the wall. Lockwood and I climbed them. I stumbled and slipped in my now too-small shoes, reminding me of my Rivening. I didn’t dare look at my hands. Breaking through the mist surface and inhaling dry air, I pulled myself onto the smooth pavement, shivering. I helped Lockwood up.
The infirmary loomed before us. Frosted light shone from the windows.
My over-tight shoes squished and squashed as we careened through the entrance hall, shoving doors open and running to the main wing. It was evening now. I prayed I wasn’t too late. The infirmary felt silent. Far too silent.
I should have recognized that.
Slamming through the main wing’s doors shoulder-first, I pulled up sharp.
The entire infirmary, normally a stark white, was filled with crimson. Masked guardsmen flanked the walls, filled the spaces between the beds of dying women, and swarmed upon Lockw
ood and me. Blue-uniformed men lay at their feet, either unconscious or dead. King Edward lay in a mountainous heap in the corner, knocked out next to the unconscious form of Dr. Palmer.
At the end of the wing, standing among the chess pieces of masked guardsmen, my father stood, chin up, his jaw set. A pistol was held to his ear. On the other side of the pistol was Queen Honoria, her chin raised haughtily.
“Jonathan!” she said, and she smiled, sweet as sugar. “Well! Isn’t this familiar!”
CHAPTER 22
The masked guard forced me to my knees. Constantine came up from behind Lockwood and with a swoop of his clawed glove, knocked his head so hard that Lockwood—already drunk—glazed over. He folded up into a blue brass-buttoned heap.
My father stared at me. He looked terrible. Unshaven, unkempt. Like he hadn’t slept in a week. He probably hadn’t. His horrified expression made me reach up and feel my face. My splitting fingers felt two bridges of a nose, extra nostrils, and the indent at my temple had a bulb of an eye beneath the skin. I winced.
Mum and Hannah lay in their beds. Hannah shivered and trembled. Mum didn’t move at all.
“Jonathan, I think it’s wonderful you illusioned a door so well,” said Queen Honoria in a patient voice. “This will be helpful in the future, of course. But right now, Jonathan, you need to stop this silliness and come back to the theater.”
I slowly reached into my pocket, keeping my eyes fixed on my father and the pistol pointed at his head. My fingers closed around the small brown bottle inside.
“Jonathan,” said Queen Honoria, smiling.
“Please,” I rasped. “Please. Just let me cure my mother and sister. Leave my father alone. Let me cure them, and I’ll go back with you, through the doorway. Please.”
“Let him,” said a hoarse voice behind me. Constantine.
Queen Honoria wavered.
“Let him,” said Constantine again, his eyes fixed on my father. “Give him five minutes, Your Highness. Then he’ll come back with us. He’ll get more orthogonagen with his illusions and help fix Nod’ol. Won’t you . . . Jon . . . a . . . than?” He said my name with difficulty, like a rusty clock trying to run.