Not entirely.
The creature came fully out of its cage, cutting a swath through its own vapor, digging its quartz talons into the dragonite walls and keeping its wings close to its body. Jack could feel the desire to spread them aching in his own subconscious.
The dragon reared up on its hind legs, balanced there for a long moment, and then dropped onto its wing knuckles with the reverberating boom of a falling tree. The motion put its head little more than a foot from Jack’s.
The flame Yes. The fire Please, the flame.
Jack backed away, and the dragon’s eyes followed, trained on his right hand. Gwen’s flashlight. He had forgotten to switch it off. “It thinks the flashlight has real fire.”
“What are you talking about?” Gwen backed away with him. “Jack, what’s happening?”
The dragon stopped and fixed her with its black gaze, as if contemplating the words she had just spoken. Then it looked Jack straight in the eye.
Jack. Now the dragon knew his name.
The thrumming came back hard and fast.
The flame, Jack The fire, Jack Yes, Jack. The flame . . .
Now, Jack.
Jack stood his ground, fighting back the blinding pain. He shut off the flashlight and shook it at the creature. “No! See? No flame. Get back in your cage.”
Gwen looked from boy to creature and back. “Bad idea. Don’t antagonize it.”
But Jack’s gamble worked. The dragon reared up, taking on an utterly dejected expression. Jack marched up to it, close enough that if the creature came down again it would crush him. “Cage.”
The flame, Jack. Please, Jack. The flame.
He pointed with the flashlight. “I said, ‘Cage.’ Now!”
Finally, the dragon twisted its giant frame and toppled over, letting its wings slam down inside its cave. As it lumbered away into the shadows, the voice became a whimper. The flame.
Gwen pulled Jack into a run. “Let’s go, before the others come back.”
The elevator the Archivist had told them about waited ahead, not far past the big door—an old iron frame with wood-plank walls and a rope pulley at the back.
Gwen got there first.
Jack was only a few steps behind when he noticed the dragon’s tail lying across his path, concealed by the fog of drool-vapors still carpeting the passage. He tried to jump over, but the tail whipped up, tangling his legs and sending him headlong onto the dragonite. Blue sparks shot out from beneath the flashlight in his hand, igniting the vapors. A trail of fire snaked its way into the dragon’s cave.
Jack heard a great foomp, like the catching of a furnace. The whimpering voice in his head became a victorious roar.
The flame!
Chapter Twenty-One
“DON’T WAIT FOR ME. Go. Go!” shouted Jack as he scrambled to his feet.
Gwen needed no urging. She hauled down on the rope, lifting the oversize dumbwaiter off the floor.
As he ran, Jack caught a glimpse of the dragon emerging from its cage. The eyes were no longer black. They glowed orange, throbbing like embers. It opened its jaws. Yellow fire grew in its throat.
Jack made a desperate leap and hit the base of the elevator at his belt line, elbows slamming down on the wooden floor slats. Gwen pulled him the rest of the way as a stream of fire lit up the shaft below.
The flame, Jack!
“Shut! Up!”
“I didn’t say anything,” said Gwen, returning to the pulley.
Jack grabbed the rope and pulled with her. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
The dragon poked its head into the shaft and twisted its neck to look up at them, throat glowing.
“I was talking to him. Look out!” Jack pushed Gwen to the edge of the box and hopped back to the opposite side, pressing his body against the ironwork as the dragon let loose another blast. Tongues of fire licked at them through the slats. When the stream subsided, the planks continued to burn. “Really?” said Jack, setting to work at the pulley again. “A wooden dumbwaiter in a dungeon full of dragons?”
Gwen reached out with a boot and stomped through the burning planks. The pieces fell, smacking the dragon in the face. It groaned and ducked away, but not for long.
The pulley hit its upper stop, and the teens jumped out onto black slate stairs. An instant later, flames filled the elevator. The rope burned through. The iron frame crashed down through the shaft, and the dragon let out a long, angry howl.
“That should hold him,” said Gwen. “At least for a while.”
A sheer wall of slate blocked their path at the top of the steps, but a big iron lever stuck out from the wall beside it. Gwen pushed it down. Gears ground. Chains clinked. A section of the stone slid up, and the two stepped out onto an aging wooden dock.
“So . . . we’re still not outside.” Jack frowned as the door dropped into place behind them.
“No, but this will work,” said Gwen. “I know where we are.”
They had reached an underground pool, where brown stone columns rose up from the water to support a high arched ceiling. A single gas lamp burned on the central column, lighting a bronze sign that read THE BARBICAN.
Jack pressed his ear against the slate door. The dragons had started a ruckus below—a riotous blend of shrieks, screeches, and honks that might easily have been mistaken for street noises. “The dragos have their work cut out—”
Gwen pinched his other ear, cutting off his remark and twisting him away from the wall.
“Ow!” he cried, swatting her hand away.
“Exactly how did you do that?”
“How did I do what?”
“You know what. You and that dragon had a . . . a moment.”
Whatever had happened with that voice in his head, Jack wasn’t ready to discuss it with Gwen. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She looked at him sideways, walked over to a skiff tied up at the dock, and began tugging at the knot. “All right. You don’t have to tell me. Maybe you’d rather wait until you and Ash patch things up so you can talk to him.”
“Gwen—”
“And what about the fire, hmm? How did you manage to light off a whole squadron of dragons?”
“You saw what happened. The flashlight hit the floor and caused a spark that lit the vapors.”
Gwen stood up from her half-loosened knot and shook her head. “Impossible. That floor was dragonite. And nothing sparks off dragonite, not even metal.” Before Jack could protest, she raised her hands. “I’m not talking about tracker sparks, Jack. I’m talking flint-and-steel-banging-rocks-together sparks. It can’t be done with dragonite. That’s probably why the dragos house their little menagerie at the Archive. Dragons are as much mineral as animal, so they can make their own sparks by scraping their talons across normal stone.”
At that moment, Jack could not have cared less about the science of dragonite, or how he managed to make a spark with unsparkable stone. The spooks were after them. The thief was out there somewhere, getting away with the Crown Jewels. He and Gwen needed to keep moving. “You said you knew where we were.” He thrust his chin at the sign across the water. “What’s the Barbican?”
“Right. The Barbican,” said Gwen in a flat tone, giving him a look that told him they’d be coming back to the dragon topic later. She knelt down to finish untying the boat. “Eighteen centuries ago, this dock was part of a Roman fort that straddled a channel running between the Walbrook and the River Fleet.” She gestured at iron portcullises on either side of the pool, with bronze plaques that read THIS WAY TO THE WALBROOK and THIS WAY TO THE RIVER FLEET. “These days, all three waterways run underground, part of the Ministry Express transportation network.” She tossed the rope down into the skiff and stepped in after it, glancing over her shoulder. “You coming?”
Jack hesitated. The skiff looked like it had seen better days. The wood had turned gray. The bronze plating on the gunwales was scratched and worn. “Coming where?”
“As it happens, the best
place in all of England to find a burglar lies on the shores of an underground river, Jack. Hop in. We’re going to the Thieves’ Guild.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
GWEN TOOK THE BOW, and Jack sat in the stern, paddling with the boat’s single oar toward the portcullis marked FLEET. There was a digital reader on a post a few feet from the gate, and Jack reached out to press his ministry card against it.
“Nope. Gimme.” Gwen snatched the platinum card away, paired it with her copper version, and tossed them both over the side. “How do you think the spooks knew we were on that bus, hmm? We swiped those to pay the fare.” She drew out her uncle Percy’s titanium card and pressed it against the reader. A red LED turned green and a spindle of chain beneath the surface clinked into motion, lifting the portcullis dripping from the water. “Everyone is looking for Jack Buckles and Gwen Kincaid. No one is looking for Uncle Percy.”
She hung a lantern from the bow and lit it with a match that was tucked inside its glass door. As the orange glow expanded, a brickwork tunnel opened before them. Gwen took Jack’s oar away and laid it down across the benches. “Take a break. The current will carry us to the Fleet, easy peasy.”
“Right. Easy peasy.” Jack got nervous whenever Gwen used that phrase. It meant she was worried about something and compensating for it. “And the Thieves’ Guild is on the River Fleet?”
“Sort of.” She gave no sign that she had heard the concern in the question. “This channel pours into the River Fleet, and the Thieves’ Guild lies on another tributary, farther south.” She sat cross-legged on her bench and opened the book the Archivist had given them, flipping through the first few pages. After a moment, she said, “Huh. That’s weird.”
Jack watched a yellow spiderish creature drop from the bricks and plop into the water to escape the light of their lantern. “Yeah. It is.”
“Not the tunnel crab, you wally.” Gwen slapped his arm with the book. “This. Tanner’s book. It’s all about balas rubies—which is kind of like saying faux rubies or fool’s gold—they’re not exactly the most expensive jewels in the world.”
“So?”
“So the thief took the Imperial State Crown and the Sovereign’s Scepter, including the First and Second Stars of Africa—the two largest clear-cut diamonds in the world. If Tanner was behind this, why would he fixate on the crown ruby? The diamonds are far more valuable.”
“Because the professor isn’t behind this, Gwen. He’s a victim, like us.” Jack thrust a frustrated hand at her book. “Whatever he was or wasn’t reading before the heist doesn’t matter. You’re chasing rabbits.”
The boat drifted close to the brick wall, and Gwen pushed off, sending it back to center. “Let’s assume that I’m not, just for a minute. Okay?”
She wasn’t going to let it go. Jack hunched down on his bench. “Fine.”
“Good.” She held the book up for him, open to a picture of the very same ruby Jack had sparked on before the heist. “This is the Black Prince’s Ruby, arguably the least valuable of the big jewels in the crown, not to mention cursed.”
“Cursed?” For a moment, Jack forgot his defense of the professor. “What do you mean ‘cursed’?”
Gwen lowered the book, gaze lingering for another second. “I told you not to touch it.”
“Gwen . . .”
She held up a finger to quiet him and then read a few paragraphs, summing up as she went. “The Black Prince’s Ruby is thought to inspire loyalty for its wearer, and was named for Prince Edward, who always carried a black shield into battle. Prince Edward died of dysentery”—Gwen glanced up—“ew.” She looked down at the pages again.”—not long after receiving the stone from the Castilian Don Pedro the Cruel as payment for protecting him from his brother.”
Gwen scanned another page. “Apparently, that didn’t go well. Once Edward had left with the stone, Don Pedro was betrayed by his formerly loyal ambassador and got stabbed in the face anyway. Coincidentally, Don Pedro himself had gotten the ruby a few years earlier by slaughtering an ambassadorial entourage at a dinner party, murdering Abu Sa’id, an eastern usurper to the Moorish throne.”
She read a few more lines to herself and then rested the book in her lap. “Nearly every person to wear that ruby was betrayed, murdered, or died from a horrible disease. It was cut from the heads of not one but two kings of England on the field of battle.”
Cut from the king’s head. “Henry,” Jack muttered, remembering the Welshman’s cry.
“Yes. Henry the Fifth, to be more precise. He lost the ruby at Agincourt and was spared only because the Duke of Alencon paused to pick it up and got himself skewered in the process.”
“By a Welshman.”
“Correct.” Gwen cocked her head. “How do you know that?”
He shrugged.
“You were there, weren’t you?”
“Yeah, okay? That’s what I saw in my spark. It was horrifying.” Jack told her everything he had seen in the battle, leaving out the part about his father because that was a Pandora’s box he didn’t feel like opening just then. “I’d say the men showed more loyalty to the stone than to Henry,” he said as he finished. “A French foot soldier ran off with it, so how did it get back to England?”
Gwen turned the page and scanned a few more lines. “Here it is. Your foot soldier brought it to the royal tent after the battle, expecting to get paid, and spent the rest of his life in a British dungeon.” She tapped the page. “Cursed, Jack.”
What had the professor said? The most terrible crimes and notions of the worst rulers in history, trapped in crystallized carbon . . . infecting all who wear the gem. Jack shuddered, remembering his own hideous laugh at seeing a man killed. Had the curse in the stone infected him as well?
Gwen kept reading, musing out loud. “But why would the professor study such a dangerous artifact if it was already locked away?”
Jack never got the chance to answer. The shadows beyond the lantern light stole his attention. They looked too black, like an empty void. “Um . . . Gwen? What did you mean when you said this stream pours into the River Fleet?”
“Just something I read. Why?”
The void reached the lantern’s glow and Jack finally understood. Both passage and stream ended in a waterfall. He tapped Gwen’s shoulder and pointed, unable to get the words out.
She looked up from her book. “Oh” was all she had time to say.
Chapter Twenty-Three
JACK GRIPPED THE BENCH, Gwen clutched the book to her chest, and both of them cried “Aaaah!” as the boat pitched over the falls.
They dropped all of six feet.
The bow hit first, dousing the lamp, and the stern slapped down behind, sending a shower of smelly water over Jack. Once Gwen had the lantern glowing again, she looked up at him and gave a little start. She fished out a plastic bag of wipes and pointed at Jack’s dripping face, making a circular motion with her finger. “You’ve . . . um . . . got a little something . . .”
Jack snatched the wipes away. The new passage was wider than the last, with faster water and an odor that filled his tracker brain with green fog. Big, spoked control wheels stuck out from the bricks, paired with giant faucets that dumped brown water into the flow. He scrubbed his face and looked down at the result. The wipes were the same color.
Jack threw up a little in his mouth.
Doorways and stairwells drifted past, along with smaller waterways that fed into the main line or branched off at sharp angles. Any one of them could have been the tributary that would take them to the Thieves’ Guild. “How far?” he asked, scrubbing the front of his jacket with a new wipe in each hand.
Gwen was looking out at the passage ahead. “I didn’t know you could interact with your sparks.” She glanced back over her shoulder. “That’s huge, Jack. You could have told me. In the sorting room, I mean. Or on the train.”
Jack appraised the two wipes, now completely brown. He threw them down into the boat. “No. I really don’t think I could ha
ve.”
Gwen spun around to face him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that between the ear-bashing you gave me in the sorting room and going all Mrs. Hudson on me for leaving the Keep, I never had the chance.”
“Well . . .” Gwen’s retort stalled at her lips. She pressed them together again. “Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”
The boat had picked up speed. The stairwells and branches leading away were sailing by, but Gwen looked unconcerned. Jack glanced down at his wet sneakers. “I’m losing my abilities.”
That seemed to catch her off guard. “But you just learned a whole new way to spark.”
“Only with the professor’s help. And in the Vault I . . .” Jack caught himself. He didn’t want to tell her about the zed. What if it was some kind of artifact? What if she made him give it up? “Well, I almost didn’t make it out, okay? I can’t control my sparks, Gwen, and it’s getting harder and harder to see data. The headaches are coming back. Everything is noise again.”
Her expression softened. She touched his hand. “Like I said, you could have told me.”
He looked down at his knees and shrugged.
Gwen cleared her throat. “Well, you do look pretty awful and not only because you look like a drenched sewer rat.” She took his chin and turned his face side to side. “You have bags under your eyes. You’re not taking care of yourself, Jack. You never eat. You spend all your time at your dad’s bedside.”
He pulled away from her. “Really? You want to start this again. My dad is in a coma, Gwen. The doctors are useless. The ministry wants to lock him away. Mom has her hands full taking care of Sadie. If I don’t worry about Dad, who will?”
She had shrunk down into her scarf, and Jack realized he had been yelling. He let out a breath. “So where is this branch we’re looking for?”
She glanced up at him for a moment and then turned to the front again.
“Gwen, I’m sorry I yelled, okay?” Then Jack realized she wasn’t pouting. She was watching the walls ahead. They were solid brick, with the occasional batch of pipes and control wheels. No more branches. He slapped the bench beside him. “You’re lost, aren’t you? We missed the turn.” A misty, gray rushing noise rose in the base of Jack’s mind. Somewhere ahead, the Fleet would dump into the Thames. What would that look like? Another waterfall?