“They go all the way to the top of the building?” Ferbus asked.
“Yep.” Skyla pointed at a series of pipes snaking their way up the wall and disappearing into the ceiling, like pneumatic tubes at a drive-through bank. “The citizens of Necropolis aren’t allowed anywhere near our vault to the Afterlife. Since it’s located in the president’s office, she’s the only one with access to it.”
“So you don’t have any Afterlife Relations people?” Elysia asked, baffled at how her former job wasn’t even a job here.
“We don’t need them,” Skyla replied. “We’re all Afterlife Relations people here.”
“How’s that, if you don’t have access to the vault?”
“Well—”
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
An earsplitting alarm sounded as the hub became filled with a red warning light. The regular lights came back on a few seconds later, but were now punctuated by blasts of emergency strobes. The people on the floor jumped in surprise, then turned their eyes toward the flat screens, where President Knell’s face had appeared.
“Citizens of Necropolis,” she boomed, like the Evil Pantsuit Overlord that she was, “I may have been a bit . . . hasty with my earlier announcement. The outlaw Grims from Croak have indeed breached the walls of Necropolis as previously reported, but they are not currently in custody. Repeat: They are not in custody.” Lex could tell by the tightness of her mouth how pissed she was to have to admit that failure. “Necropolis is now on lockdown. No one comes in, no one goes out. I realize this may be an inconvenience to some of you, but trust me, this is for your own safety.”
Lex snorted. “She sounds just like Norwood.”
“Our best teams are on top of the situation,” Knell continued, “and are sweeping the building as we speak. But we need your eyes and ears as well; be sure to report any sightings, and we’ll keep you updated as much as we can. But sleep easy, Necropolis.” Here, she actually clicked her finger like a gun. “We’ll get ’em.”
“Nice touch,” Skyla muttered as the screen went back to the departure times. She turned back to the Croakers. “So this is it: You’re on your own.”
“Where will you go?” asked Pip.
“I need to get back to my control room. I lost a lot of valuable time when those nasty Croaker fugitives knocked me out.” She grinned, flashing her holey teeth. “Try and stick to the Backways. Remember, no one knows about them, and neither do I. Wink-wink.” She winked anyway. “But when you do have to go out into the open, make your routes as erratic as you can. I’ll do my best to play dumb, but the president has never fully trusted me, and she’ll catch on the second I show any hesitation. You have to stay one step ahead of me at all times.”
“While at the same time avoiding civilians because they’re obligated to report us on sight,” said Lex.
“Of course they are,” said Skyla. “Standard protocol.”
“How do you know so much about the protocol?” Lex all but growled. She certainly wasn’t making this easy for them.
“I wrote the protocol, kid.” She yanked a copy of the schematics out of her bag. “Now, take one last good look at these and memorize as much as you—”
“Wait, we can’t take them with us?” Elysia said.
“And risk the guards finding them in your possession if you get caught? Proving that you had help from me and ruining our operation in the process? I think not.” She went back to the blueprints. “Now. In each of the three sectors the guards will start at the bottom, search to its top, then continuously sweep back down and up again. My team, on the other hand, will be exclusively focused on tailing you. All the way up to the top, if everything goes to plan. You burst into the office, I burst in after you, and then . . . it’s portal-destroying time.”
Uncle Mort nodded. “Right.”
“So I’ll see you there,” she said simply, packing the schematics away. “Good luck, you guys.” She exchanged one last look with Uncle Mort, then headed out the door labeled HUB.
Lex looked back at the pandemonium below. Skyla had appeared in the room and was walking down a set of stairs, yelling for calm.
“This better all be worth it,” Lex muttered.
Of course, Uncle Mort overheard her. He always overheard her. “You don’t think saving the Afterlife is worth it?”
“Of course I do,” Lex said. “I just mean that I hope it works. Sealing the portals, then Annihilating Grotton—if we get the Wrong Book back, that is.” She sighed. “It’s a lot. A million things can go wrong. And let’s say we do everything right—the Afterlife erosion is halted, we fix it entirely with the reset—but then what? Who’s to say history won’t repeat itself one day? I mean, I’m not Damning anymore,” she affirmed, shooting a look at Driggs, “but in the future another Grim might come along who can. Isn’t it possible for someone to undo everything we’re doing to repair it? And then the Afterlife erosion will start all over again?”
Uncle Mort was quiet. “Well, it’s not likely,” he said. “But yes, it’s possible.”
“Well, then—” Lex grunted in frustration. “Isn’t there a way for us to fix everything permanently?”
He rubbed his chin. “I’ve been asking myself these questions for years, Lex. But as far as I can tell, no. There’s no way to fix it forever. There’s no way to prevent some bad-seed Grims from coming along down the line and committing a whole heap of new violations, trashing the Afterlife all over again. All we can do is fix it as best we can and hope that future generations don’t shit the bed as much as ours has.”
Lex grunted again. She hated feeling so helpless. “What about the Wrong Book?” she said. “Maybe there’s something in there that can help!”
“Well, I doubt it, but—” Uncle Mort looked intrigued for a moment, then shook his head. “We’re out of luck on that front until we get the book back from Norwood. Unless Bang already found something useful in it and didn’t tell us,” he said with a laugh, turning to look at her.
Bang didn’t look back. She was reading something—something that looked a lot like a handful of papers with rough edges. As if they’d been ripped out of a book.
She signed something.
“Not yet,” a smiling Pip translated. “But she’s working on it.”
***
They pounded up about twenty more stories before stopping, and only then because Ferbus’s lungs had collapsed. Or so he claimed.
“Please,” he gasped, sprawling across the stairs. “Two minutes. So they can reinflate.”
Elysia jogged up and down around him in a spritely manner. “Kind of makes you wish you got outside a little more instead of spending so many hours on the computer, huh?”
“If said exercise involved throwing your sporty ass into a lake, then yes.”
“That’s really more for building upper-arm strength,” Driggs said. “Not so much endurance.”
“You shut your ugly face, Casper,” Ferbus countered, giving him a dirty look. Driggs had figured out yet another ghost perk: while the others had to lug themselves up the stairs step by agonizing step, he was able to float right up the center of the stairwell without exerting an ounce of effort.
“You going to let him talk to me like that?” Driggs said to Lex. “Defend my honor, woman.”
“Defend your own honor,” Lex said, wiping her forehead. It seemed that the Croakers’ steady diet of junk food was doing none of them any favors.
Except, inexplicably, Pandora. “You wusses,” she said, shaking a gnarled finger at them. “When I was your age, I could do a one-handed pushup with ten canned hams on my back.”
“Canned hams?” Pip asked.
“There was a war going on!” she shouted, as if this explained something.
They soon came to a landing with an unmarked door. Uncle Mort peered at it, then up the stairwell. “Okay, I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.”
“I’m going to call shenanigans on you right there,” Ferbus said, panting. “That’s never true. It??
?s always bad news and worse news.”
“You think it’s bad news that we’re almost done with stairs?”
“No more stairs?” Ferbus blinked. “That is great news.”
“Well, that’s the problem—we’re not going up any more stairs because, if memory of the schematics serves me, there are no stairs that go from sector to sector. Probably a security feature, designed to keep intruders contained.”
They all had a hearty laugh at this.
Uncle Mort scratched his head. “So I’m not sure if we should exit here or keep going up to the next one. We’re just a few stories away from Residential, and that’s where it’ll get dicey. There aren’t as many Backways in that sector, plus there are a lot more people around, all of them on the lookout for us. And with most citizens trained in basic security protocols, it’ll be like running headlong into a small army.” He drummed his fingers on the door, thinking. “Up, or out?”
“Come on, it can’t be that hard,” said Lex, impatient.
He raised an eyebrow at her. “You want to call the shots, kiddo?” he said. “Be my guest.”
They all stared at her. “Um—” She looked at the door, then up at the remaining stairs, then at Driggs, who was trying not to burst out laughing at the pickle she’d just gotten herself into.
“Up,” she eventually said with gusto, trying to hide that it was a total guess. “Keep going up.”
“Up it is, Magellan,” Uncle Mort said, patting her a little too hard on the back.
The crew gathered their stuff and resumed their climb. A dozen or so stories later, the stairwell ended in a single door with a dusty keypad. Uncle Mort frowned. “Hmm . . .”
Driggs whispered something to Pip, who leaned forward and typed in the code.
Beep. The light went from red to green.
“What?” Driggs said when everyone gaped at him. “I watched Skyla type it in. I’m not totally useless.”
“She must not have changed the codes yet, to give us a little head start,” Uncle Mort said with such admiration in his voice that Lex couldn’t help but scowl.
At least they can’t make googly-eyes at each other now, she thought.
And then, Wow, I am truly an awful person.
Uncle Mort grabbed the door handle. “Hang on,” said Driggs. “We have no idea where we are. Let me peek through to get a sense of what we’re dealing with.”
He disappeared into the door, only to return moments later, scowling. “Yeah, we’re boned. It’s the public escalators.”
“Oops,” said Lex.
“Then we go back down to the last door,” Elysia said. “It’s not far.”
“Actually, I think we should stay,” Uncle Mort said, rummaging in his bag. “The escalators are the last place anyone would expect us to go, all out in the open like that. Driggs, you go out and watch for a break in traffic. Once it’s clear, give the signal, and we’ll scramble onto the escalator as quickly and as quietly as we can.”
“Are you nuts?” said Lex. “People are going to recognize us!”
He withdrew his hand from his bag, something golden glinting between his fingers. “Not with this.”
“The bubonic football?” Lex said. “What are we going to do, sneeze them to death?”
“Oh, if only our paltry weapons were as destructive as Lex’s diabolical wit,” Uncle Mort countered, deadpan.
“I’d say diabolical wit is something that runs in the family,” said Pandora.
“Don’t forget the superiority complexes,” Ferbus added.
“And the bossiness!” Pip threw in.
Uncle Mort cleared his throat. “As fun as it might be for us to all sit here and pick apart all the delightfully whimsical foibles of the Bartleby family, we’ve kind of got a war to fight here, remember? Let’s go do that.” He pulled a tiny pin halfway out of the football and nodded at Driggs. “Okay, go.”
Driggs stuck his head back out the door, waited for about twenty seconds, then barked, “All clear! Go!”
The Croakers piled through the door and onto the waiting escalator. Uncle Mort was the last one out, gathering them together into a close-knit huddle. The door shut behind them as they ascended.
“Fire in the hole,” he said.
Out came the pin. The device dropped to his feet, teetering on the edge of the step he was standing on. And just as Lex was starting to think that maybe it wasn’t really a storage device for one of the deadliest diseases in human history, but instead a grenade of some kind, the gold device emitted—
A bubble.
As in a dead ringer for the kind that come out of children’s bubble wands, a wobbly hemisphere that surrounded all eight of them perfectly.
“Impressive, Mort,” Ferbus said, reaching for the membrane. “Do you also moonlight as a children’s birthday party magician, or—”
“Don’t touch it!” Uncle Mort said, grabbing Ferbus’s hand and yanking it away from the surface. “No one touch it, or it’ll affect us too.”
“Affect us?” Lex finally caught on. “It’s Amnesia?”
“Yep.” He picked up the football and stuffed it back into his bag. “But unlike Amnesia smoke bombs, which dissipate and fill the space in which they’re detonated, the Amnesia grenade cloaks only those within its blast radius.”
“But if there’s no smoke,” Lex said, barely moving her mouth as she stared at a woman only a few steps down on the escalator, a woman who happened to be reading a copy of The Obituary, with Lex’s photo on the front page, “then people can still see us.”
“Doesn’t matter. As long as we stay in the bubble, they won’t remember who we are. They’ll forget that our pictures have been splashed all over the news and that they’re supposed to be looking for us. See? It’s already slipped their minds.”
The woman looked up for a second, her eyes landing squarely on Lex. She gave her a polite smile, then went back to reading all about those dangerous Juniors who were tearing up the Grimsphere and must be reported immediately.
“Well, great,” said Ferbus. “So now what do we do?”
Uncle Mort shrugged. “Enjoy the view.”
And once the initial terror of exposing themselves dissipated, Lex had to admit: the view was nice.
As the escalator carried them up the curved side of the building, Lex looked out across the horizon. Kansas was so flat it might as well have been the moon—except that even the moon had craters. Kansas just had corn. Corn and grass and . . . darkening clouds. Lex frowned. Weren’t there a lot of tornadoes in Kansas?
She looked up at one of the mounted television sets along the escalator’s path that displayed the time, temperature, and various news items of the day. She caught the weather—clear skies?—but turned away when her photo popped up yet again. Something about the “HIGHLY DANGEROUS” warning scrawled beneath it made her skin crawl.
Looking out the window again, all she could see was more flatness, but those stormy clouds were kind of cool—they drifted by so peacefully, as if they were moving with minds of their own. One of them even looked like Cordy.
Wait a minute.
One of them was Cordy.
Lex gasped and almost slapped her hands against the glass before remembering not to touch the membrane. “Look!” she hissed to the rest of the group. “There are souls out there!”
Uncle Mort gave her a sly smile. “Indeed there are.”
“But you said the vault is all the way up on the top floor!”
“The vault is all the way up on the top floor. But the atrium part of the Afterlife is all around us. That’s why Necropolis doesn’t need Afterlife Liaisons. Every Grim in the city has that job.”
“What the . . .” Lex returned to the glass and looked more closely this time. What she had mistaken for clouds—and what she had earlier mistaken for a fog surrounding the whole of Necropolis—were actually souls. Up close, they were just as solid as they were inside Croak’s atrium. Some were looking inside, some were chatting among themselves, and some w
ere conversing with the live Necropolitans who were riding the elevator, just as Cordy was trying to do.
“Numbnuts!” she was saying, her voice coming through the glass as clearly as if she were inside. “Over here!”
“Right, sorry,” Lex said, shaking the cobwebs of confusion. “Cordy. Hi.”
“Dude, this place is Swankytown USA,” Cordy said, her big eyes running up and down the height of Necropolis. “I mean, the size, the sophistication—the luxury apartments! You wouldn’t believe how many people have pools, Lex.”
“Shh,” Lex hissed. The lady was looking at them again. “We’re trying to go unnoticed. And how are you even seeing us right now?”
“Amnesia doesn’t work on dead people,” Uncle Mort said. “And I already told you, our fellow escalator passengers have no idea who we are. For the time being. As long as they stay put and no one enters the bubble, we’re fine, so let’s make the most of this opportunity. Cordy, what can you—”
“Oof—” Cordy huffed as Tut slammed into her. She looked angry for a second, then beamed, turning to Lex. “He’s like a little puppy dog, following me everywhere—agh!” she yelled as her camel bumped into her other side. “And Lumpy, of course, feistier than ever—oww!” Poe swooped in as well, kicking her in the shins. She glared at him. “And lest we forget, Mr. Sunshine himself.”
“They took my best ascot!” Poe spat at Lex. “They took it and they won’t give it back and now my neck is most chilled!”
“His neck is most chilled, Cordy,” Lex said. “Give it back.”
“But Tut looks so good in it! Honeybunch, pose.”
Tut, wearing said ascot and not very much else, flexed his muscles. “See?” said Cordy. “It brings out the fullness in his lips! And pants.”
“Cordy,” said Lex. “Ew.”
“Fine.” Cordy yanked the ascot off Tut’s throat and handed it back to Poe, who held it between his fingers at an arm’s length, a most distasteful look upon his face.