“Cordy,” Uncle Mort interjected, “helpful things. Please.”
“Sure, yeah,” Cordy said, still staring at her honeybunch’s biceps. “What do you want to know?”
“You can see into all the windows, right? What’s going on?”
“Well, ever since that alarm went off, everyone’s been going schizoid. The place is swarming with guards—all looking for you, I assume?”
They nodded.
“Well done. I think so far you’ve thrown them, but . . .” She looked up. “They’re all over the place, especially the next few floors.”
“Residential.” Uncle Mort nodded. “That’s where they’ll be thickest. What about near the top, in Executive?”
Cordy shrugged. “I don’t know—the windows are blocked to us for the uppermost twenty floors or so. Sorry.”
“Damn, she’s good.” The sparkle in his eye left little doubt that he was talking about Skyla. When Lex looked offended, he crossed his arms. “Hey, if we were defending this building instead of attacking it, you’d be very impressed right now.”
Cordy pointed at him and gave Lex a questioning look.
“Uncle Mort has a girlfriend,” Lex explained.
“Whaa?” Cordy said.
“Don’t even ask. It’s beyond our powers of human comprehension.”
“Gross!”
“They even have a weird pool table euphemism for the dirty stuff.”
“Super gross!”
“Here’s an idea, Cordy,” Uncle Mort said, his irritation barely contained. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and keep a lookout for us?”
Cordy pouted. “Fine.” She leaned in to Lex and pointed back at her uncle. “I want to hear more about the lovefest later.”
“You really don’t.”
Once Cordy left, Uncle Mort nodded as they passed a hidden door similar to the one through which they’d entered. “We’ve just spiraled one complete revolution around the building,” he said. “So we’ve gone up about five stories, I think. Five more, and we can get out—there should be another Backways access door there, unless—”
“Hola!”
All eyes flew back to the glass, where Riqo was waving cheerfully. “Pipito! Everyone! You are safe!”
The Croakers weren’t as enthusiastic. “You’re dead?” Pip cried, his voice choked. “You’re dead!”
Riqo waved this minor detail away. “I am fine. I did what I always wanted: to help out in some way, to matter. And here you are, alive and fighting the good fight. It was worth it.”
Lex’s mouth was moving, but nothing was coming out. She never knew what to say in situations like this. She wished she had a set of greeting cards at the ready, but Hallmark probably didn’t make any that said Thank you for giving up your life so that me and my friends could escape! It was SO appreciated. XOXO!
“What happened back there?” Elysia asked him. “When we left DeMyse?”
Riqo’s face lit up. “You were no longer there to see it, but once Zara stabbed me, Broomie opened up a very large can of the whoop-ass until Zara finally Crashed out to look for you. After that, Broomie and LeRoy teamed up and have been working together around the clock, making many preparations for the destruction of the portals.” He shook his head. “Sad, no? But it will all be for the best.”
Pip leaned in and whispered something to Riqo, who winked as he floated away from the glass—presumably back toward DeMyse. “Good luck, Croakers! Adios!”
Lex watched him fade into the horizon, then flinched as she spotted a bright flash of light—a metallic reflection, maybe?
“What’s wrong?” Driggs asked.
She shook her head. It was gone. Either that or she was losing it. “I thought I saw—”
“Good afternoon, Necropolis.” The flat screens once again flashed President Knell’s giant floating head. Her voice was still calm and friendly, but with a notable twinge of frustration. “Just wanted to give y’all an update on the Croakers. Still not in custody, but my field teams assure me that they’re hot on the trail.”
The Juniors nervously looked at Uncle Mort, who gave his head a dismissive shake. “You don’t see any guards, do you? She’s full of shit.”
“However,” Knell continued, “I wanted to take this opportunity to address the Croakers personally, should they happen to be listening. In fact, I hope they are.”
Uncle Mort tensed. Cordy drifted back into view, watching the screen through the glass.
Knell knit her fingers under her chin, a string of matching green pearls clattering around her wrist. “In particular, I’d like to wag my tongue a bit at Lex, the ringleader of this little group of rebels. Yes, Lex, you: the one responsible for terrorizing the Grimsphere and the outside world alike with your senseless Damning sprees. Oh, sure, I could go into a whole lecture spouting this and that about what a loathsome, heinous scourge on the planet you are, but you know what, Lex? I’m gonna do you one better.” Abruptly, Knell’s face disappeared. The screen flickered back to life a second later, this time showing a video feed of two bound figures on the floor of a darkened room. The woman was mostly in shadow, unidentifiable under that blindfold—
But Lex and Cordy could have recognized that goatee and shiny bald head anywhere.
11
“I have your parents, Lex,” Knell continued in a voice-over, the image of the Bartlebys still on the screen. The room they were in was stark and dirty-looking—the lighting seemed vaguely familiar to Lex, but she couldn’t place it. “My proposition is simple: Their freedom for yours. Turn yourself in, and I’ll let them go.”
Lex and Cordy looked at each other, their faces mirrored in terror.
Knell’s self-satisfied grin filled the screen once again. “As for the rest of you, do have a glorious day!”
Lex felt sick. She grabbed the escalator’s railing, the heights and motion suddenly making her dizzy. The Juniors shot her scared glances, Driggs trying to hug her but not solid enough to do so.
“They’ll be okay.” Uncle Mort grabbed Lex’s shoulders, then glanced at Cordy, addressing them both. “She’s not going to hurt them. She needs them for—”
“Leverage,” Lex spat again, for the millionth time. “Yes, I know. I’m so fucking sick of that word. And how it’s constantly being used to describe my loved ones.”
“Hey,” Driggs said, “she protected them herself by putting them on the air. She can’t hurt them now, not with the city as witness, right?”
Uncle Mort nodded. “And if we needed an even better reason to storm her office, she just gave it to us.”
“But what happened to Lazlo?” Elysia said. “Wasn’t he guarding them?”
“We have to assume he’s been”—Uncle Mort paused to reword—“compromised.”
Lex was shaking her head. “I told them to get out of the house! God, if Knell doesn’t kill them, I’ll kill them myself!”
Driggs raised an eyebrow.
“Okay,” she said, cringing, “that was maybe the poorest choice of words ever.”
He smirked. “And you’ve made a lot of poor choices.”
“Cordy,” said Uncle Mort, “I need you to spread the word: Once we start to seal the portals, the Afterlife is going to feel the repercussions. Until every one of them is closed, things will probably get worse in there, so you souls are going to have to deal with the fallout. Patch up things where you can and just try to hold it together long enough for us to do our thing.”
“You got it,” Cordy said.
Kloo swooped in, breathless. “Now is probably a bad time to tell you this,” she said, “but there are guards coming. You need to get out of here.”
While the rest of the group scrambled to leave, Lex turned back to Cordy. “I’ll find them, okay?”
“I know you will.” Cordy gave her a pained smile. “You loathsome, heinous scourge on the planet.”
Lex grinned. If Knell intended to discourage them with her threats, the woman was stupider than she looked; all Lex could
think about right now was kicking some serious Necropolitan ass.
Uncle Mort was doing some calculations. “We’re still a couple of floors away,” he told them. “And with the speed of the escalators versus the speed of the guards, I think the guards will reach us before we reach the door.”
“So we make a run for it,” Lex said.
“I don’t think that’s—”
“Go!” she commanded, bursting out of the bubble.
Stunned, the Juniors watched her go. Then, realizing they really had no choice but to follow their unhinged colleague, they pounded up the escalator after her.
As Kloo had promised, a team of guards was waiting, all decked out in those black uniforms and aiming stun guns. Lex hoped that one of them might be Skyla, but a quick assessment of their relative sizes affirmed that she wasn’t among them.
The mountain of a guard who’d arrested Uncle Mort, however, was. “FREEZE!” he shouted.
Lex could see the door now, slowly coming into view on the right. They just had to stall for a few more seconds; then they could make a break for it.
Drawing on what must have been a burst of adrenaline—because it sure as hell wasn’t a burst of good judgment—Lex thrust her hand into her bag and grabbed the first thing her fingers touched. “You freeze!” she yelled at the guards, holding Cordy’s glowing Spark high above her head.
Perfect. Since Sparks were Uncle Mort’s own invention and had never been produced outside of Croak, the Necropolitans wouldn’t know what on earth it was. “You do not want to be held responsible for what happens if I throw this,” she growled in a voice that she hoped was as confident and threatening as it sounded in her head.
The big guard shot a glance at the guard to his right, who gave a shrug. A lengthy pause ensued. “Lower your weapon!” he eventually yelled back, though he sounded uncertain.
Lex grinned. “Oh, I don’t think you want me to do that.”
The guard shifted his stance but made no moves to come any closer. “Stay where you are,” he ordered.
The door was now within reach. “No, I don’t think we will,” she answered.
And then, in a surprising and not altogether wise turn of events, Lex attempted to kick down the door.
Even more surprising, it actually worked.
“In!” she shouted at her crew, who wasted no time in obeying. The guards stood at bay, still unsure about what to do; this type of situation apparently wasn’t covered by Skyla’s standard protocol.
Lex counted heads as the Juniors hurried through the door. Just as she was about to leap in herself, she paused. They were one short.
She whirled around. The head guard had grabbed Uncle Mort and was twisting his arm behind his back. “Go!” her uncle shouted, waving her on with his free hand.
But Lex finally did what the guards had commanded. She froze.
“Keep going!” Uncle Mort insisted, his face contorted in pain as the guard pulled tighter.
Lex blinked once, then snapped out of it. Why had she even hesitated?
In perhaps the first graceful movement of Lex’s life, she darted over to the guard, raised Cordy’s Spark, and brought it down on his skull. It shattered. The Spark’s light went out, glass shards flew everywhere, the guard’s forehead was covered in blood—
And Uncle Mort wrenched out of his grasp. They’d passed the door during their struggle, so he pushed Lex down the escalator toward the exit. Lex took one last look outside the windows at her stunned sister, then wedged herself through the narrow opening and into the green corridor.
After slamming the door shut, Uncle Mort pulled a crowbar out of his bag and wedged it into the gap underneath. “That should hold them,” he said.
Lex sank to the floor to take a breather, but Uncle Mort wasn’t going to let that happen. “What were you thinking?” he said, shaking her shoulders. “There’s not a machine on earth powerful enough to calculate the number of ways that could have gone wrong!”
“But it didn’t,” she said, surprising even herself with the devilish twinge in her voice. “So maybe you shouldn’t be giving me any crap about it.”
He held her gaze, his jaw working. She couldn’t tell what was going on in that expression of his—fear and anger, surely, with a healthy dash of disappointment—but at the moment, it didn’t matter. They hadn’t gotten captured, they’d bought themselves some time, and they were still on their way up the tower.
“Or maybe,” she said, her lips curling up, “you’re just jealous because I thought of it before you did.”
His face barely changed, but it was enough for Lex to tell that she’d cracked him—his eyes crinkled slightly, and he let her go with only a mildly irritated sigh. “Come on,” he said, heading down the hall. “This way.”
But the Juniors were too busy fawning over Lex. Driggs was practically drooling, but Elysia was the one who grabbed her elbow. “Lex. Lex. That was so amazing! How did you do that? I didn’t know you could kick down a door. Did you know she could kick down a door?” she asked Ferbus.
“I didn’t think she could open a door,” he said.
“Ugh, you’re so mean.” She turned back to Lex. “But seriously! Awesome! And you did it all without Damning anyone!”
Lex blinked. “Yeah, I guess I did. I broke Cordy’s Spark, though.”
“Well, that doesn’t matter. It’s only a measurement of life force, not her life force itself. She’ll be fine.”
Lex tried not to think about how dark the Afterlife was getting. I hope so.
After darting through a few more Backways, Uncle Mort ground them to another halt. “Here,” he said, looking at the wall. “This should be about right.” He got down on his knees, pulled a small pickax out of his bag, and chiseled a wad of rock out of the wall and onto the floor. “Grab a breather. This might take a while.”
The Juniors were understandably confused, but they didn’t hesitate to take him up on his suggestion. “Hey, Shawshank,” Ferbus said to him. “You know this sort of thing takes like twenty years, right?”
“It’ll take longer if he has to pry the ax out of your chest first,” said Driggs with a grin.
“And then clean up all that sticky leprechaun blood,” Lex added.
Ferbus rolled his eyes. “My GOD, you two are hilarious.” He turned to Elysia. “Smack me if we ever get that awful.”
“But I smack you so often,” she said, “how will you know that’s what I’m smacking you for?”
“We shall work out a smacking code.”
“So what’s going on here?” Driggs asked, pointing between the two of them. “You guys finally bumping uglies now, or what?”
Elysia crossed her arms. “Not in those exact terms, no. And what do you mean ‘finally’? Ninety-eight percent of the time I’ve known him, I’ve hated him.”
“Well, that’s just not true at all,” Driggs replied.
Elysia frowned and stomped to the other side of the hallway, muttering, “Lex said the same thing.”
Lex watched her go, then switched her gaze to the youngest pair of Juniors, both sitting on the floor a few yards away. Bang was still poring over the pages she’d ripped out of the Wrong Book, and Pip was across from her, staring absent-mindedly at the wall.
Lex sat down next to him. “Find anything?” she asked Bang.
“Not yet,” she signed back, setting down the jar containing the essence of Grotton’s thumb. “The earlier sections were written more recently, but this part is older, and it’s all in—”
Lex couldn’t figure that last part out. “What did she say?” she asked Pip.
Bang signed for him. “Old English,” he translated in a flat tone.
“The point is,” Bang signed, “it’s taking forever.”
“Well, keep at it.”
Bang did just that, diving back into the pages. Pip resumed staring at the wall so intently that Lex had to nudge him three times to get his attention.
“Pipster,” she said. “Are you okay?”
>
“Hmm?” He looked at her and blushed. “Yeah, I guess. I just feel so bad about Riqo. He died for us. He barely had anything to do with any of this, and he’s the one who got killed!”
“I know. It sucks,” said Lex, certainly no stranger to survivor’s guilt by now. “But at least he chose it, you know? His life wasn’t stolen from him like Cordy’s or Corpp’s, or Driggs’s—” Her voice got thicker, her stomach twisting with every name she rattled off whose life had been cut short because of her.
She cleared her throat and focused. “I mean, yes. He did give up his life for us, and I can’t say for certain that we are altogether that deserving. But at least he did it willingly. That’s a pretty noble thing to do, right? Way nobler than anything I’ve ever done. I just keep running away, leaving only the occasional blunt force trauma in my wake.”
Pip still seemed sad, but not as much as he had before. “It is a pretty good way to die, I guess. So that your friends don’t have to.”
“Best way there is, probably.”
He looked at her again, his eyes bright. “We’d better make it worth it, then, huh?”
Lex leaned her head back against the wall and looked at the ceiling. It’d only be worth it if they could seal the portals. And trigger a reset. And it would really only be worth it if they could figure out a way to prevent the damage from ever happening again, yet they still had no idea how to do that.
But all she said was, “Yeah.”
“Got it!” Uncle Mort tumbled a large chunk of cement to the floor and peered into the hole it had left. “Come on,” he said, waving them in.
“Through there?” Ferbus said. “It’s so . . . tiny.”
“Afraid it’ll knock off your tiara, princess?” Pandora said, shoving him out of the way. “Let me through.” She got onto the ground and wriggled through the hole until the only things showing were her stockinged legs.
“Whoa!” Driggs yelled as everyone got an eyeful. “Didn’t need to see that!”
“My undercarriage is a national treasure!” she shot back. “Now get your asses in here!”