Call Forth the Waves (22 page)

I set one of the alarm clocks in the room for five minutes before sunset. When it went off, Winnie was facedown in one of the bedrooms, sleeping off the marathon use of her touch. “Do not disturb” was implied by her threat to take Jermay’s previous suggestion and make the first person to wake her up cluck like a chicken for the remainder of our time at the Harts and Palms.

Birch was keeping busy inspecting the greenery while I paced from room to room to orient myself to the layout in case I had to find an exit fast. We crossed paths in the entryway. Unlike the Mile’s trees and flowers, the plants inside our penthouse were resplendent and well cared for. He didn’t need to nurse any of them back to health, so he was upgrading them.

“I got the idea from the offset box,” he said. “If we really add things to the room, or fix it up, then we’re not stealing it.”

Not a bad idea. Once I was able to settle my nervous feet and hands, I’d see if there were any actual repairs I could do that might make our presence less of a lie.

I made sure all of the curtains on the panoramic windows were securely fastened by the time the last minute ticked down. The pay box displayed a green light on its face, and a minute past curfew, Klok had not turned into an oversized paperweight. He and Jermay were still busy scrolling through news programs to track Commission movements.

Official activity was never mentioned overtly, unless it was a parade, but there were code words to indicate increased presence in an area. If what Jermay had seen before we caught that bus was accurate, someone should have been talking.

Xerxes and Bijou were still functional, too. They and the creeper lights had come up with a game that involved the golems leaping from the upper balcony toward the crossbeams, where they had to grab one of the lights without the benefit of their wings. Bijou overshot his turn and had to loop the beam with his tail, ending up hanging like an oddly shaped monkey. Xerxes swooped down on his chosen light, then crashed beak-first into the empty couch below because he didn’t open his wings fast enough.

I started to scold them for the noise when I was stopped by one of those unexpected points of clarity between me and a set of machines that shouldn’t have been able to communicate. They were trying to help sell our cover story by making destruction . . . er . . .
construction
sounds. They even tried to demonstrate the concept by copying the
thwack, thwack, thwack
of a busy hammer.

All of the creeper lights on the crossbeams danced and shined their faces in different directions to create a strobe effect they equated with applause. They weren’t coming down anytime soon, if ever.

What had started off as one of the worst days of my life was actually getting better.

I let myself into the office where I’d put my father’s briefcase. I left the computer on the desk, still displaying its hateful lock screen, but dumped the case out on the floor so I could sort the contents into piles. Maybe I’d find the password jotted down in the margin of a notebook.

I made a pile for pictures and different stacks for different inventions. Things I couldn’t place went into a single heap that I tried to sort out as I went. I kept at it until Jermay knocked and poked his head in the door.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I found this in the welcome folder.”

He threw a laminated booklet at me—an advertisement for a magic act in one of the lobby’s showrooms. The man on the cover was decades younger than Zavel and didn’t wear the antiquated top hat that had been his trademark, but he had the same stance and the same intensity in his expression. Jermay flopped dramatically onto the room’s leather sofa.

“Next time, I vote for a ground-level room with no entertainment brochures lying around.”

“I thought you were helping Klok scan the news.”

“I was. They’ve changed the official story. Now they’re calling the debris from the Mile a freak meteor shower and blaming a comet no one’s ever seen or heard of.”

“That’s worse than calling it an equipment platform,” I said.

“Yeah, but this time people are buying it. I’ve lost all faith in humanity.”

“Is that why you stopped watching?”

“Nope. Someone’s pollinating in there. I had to leave.”

He’d switched from calling Birch fertilizer-related names to “someone”—this was progress.

“It’s a nervous habit,” I said.

“The wallpaper had flowers painted on it. He made them pop out and sprout over the windows. Someone’s going to notice that, and if they spread beyond our side of the wall, he’ll blow our cover. The smell’s enough to gag a florist.”

Jermay threw his arm over his face, his not-so-subtle way of playing for attention.

“He’s
very
nervous,” I said.

“How long are you going to keep making excuses for him?”

“Long enough to wear you down. Concede defeat and come help me.”

He stood up with the same exaggerated movements and joined me on the floor.

“What is all of this?”

“Stuff my father had in his briefcase. Notes and scribbles, mostly.”

Hallmarks of a cluttered mind. He’d be seized by a whirlwind of ideas and jot them down on whatever was close. Paper, napkins, clothes, and walls, even skin. They were a puzzle of unknown size and shape with an unspecified number of pieces, none of which included thirty-three letters or numbers that would open the computer.

“I recognize some of this,” I said, tapping a pile. “He was working on upgrades for the caravan exhibits. This one’s the Constrictus.”

Security specs. Attack commands. He worked on his most secret projects where they couldn’t be seen or found, even by family.

“This one is all details about Nye’s hands.”

Unfinished and drawn freehand, but the final blueprints would have allowed Nye to maintain them without my father or me.

Jermay dug through the piles, settling on some photos.

“Hey! Nagendra with no ink. He actually had hair!”

He picked up one of the snapshots I’d discarded. Half an hour earlier, I’d obsessed over it myself. Young Nagendra and my father along with two other men, all standing in an open field with a large building in the background. Some kind of estate or maybe a university.

“Who’s this with them?” Jermay asked.

“I don’t know. There’s all this stuff, but most of it’s not labeled. This folder is filled with ideas for fixing the traveling coat that took me to Nye’s Center.” Something it might be worth seeing if Klok could duplicate. A reliable transportation device would be handy. “This one’s nothing but names, but they aren’t random. Do you see?”

I pointed to one of the names.

“Winnie?” Jermay asked.

“It took me a while to crack the pattern, but these are refugees, all grouped by age and the location they were taken from. There are seventeen in her group.”

All girls who were inside Arcineaux’s Center when she escaped. All part of the hundreds my father protected while my sisters and I stayed in the Commission’s crosshairs.

“Could this be Magnus’s partner?” Jermay held up another snapshot. This one showed my father and a man I assumed was Baba because of his size and the turban. A chubby red-faced man with a grin was off to the side, nearly out of frame. “The same guy’s in a lot of these shots. So’s this building. Maybe he’s a professor.”

“Even if it is Cyril, he could have retired years ago. We don’t even have a last name.”

“But someone there might recognize him. Have you had any luck with the computer? Surely there’s something in there.”

“I’ve only got two shots left at the password,” I said.

“That’s okay. You’ll figure it out.”

There was absolutely nothing wrong with what Jermay said or the way he said it. I knew he wasn’t making fun of me, but those last four words triggered something. I wiped my eye in an attempt to stifle the tears trying to collect there. They rushed to fill the other one. I couldn’t head them off.

It all hit.
Everything.
The full force of losing Evie and seeing Anise’s body broken on a dirty reed mat because we couldn’t get her the help she needed. Birdie’s frown when I sent her away. All the fear . . .

So much fear. So much anger and helplessness and pain.

I couldn’t see the light anymore, not even through the stars. Someone had stuck me inside a jar and put out my flame. I was choking on the smoky stench of dark emotion left behind without that fire.

“Hey,” Jermay said. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

“I can’t help it. What am I supposed to do? To find Vesper and Nim, I need to first find two wardens, and I don’t have their names, much less a location. I’ve got even less on the guy who might be able to tell me how to find my father. My only hope at this point is that stupid computer, and I can’t even open the home screen without first outsmarting a man who designed and built an entire flying city . . . I can’t do it.
I can’t.
”

I wasn’t as strong as people thought I was. Putting my family back together had gotten too complicated, and a good bit of that complication was thanks to my father. He hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me the truth, so how was I supposed to trust myself?

“Is that really what you see?” Jermay asked me.

“What else is there?”

“You’ve got tunnel vision. All you see is
you
against the problem, but if you’d widen your focus, you might notice that you’re not out here on your own. You say you can’t save two people—so what?
We
just saved more than twenty, and before that, we evacuated hundreds, maybe even thousands. You say you can’t figure out Magnus’s computer? Big deal—Klok
is
a computer, and since he was actually made by your dad, I’d bet he’s got the advantage over some mass-produced hunk of plastic. And there’s nothing so special about that flying city, either. Magnus may have made it fly, but you brought it down. You made sure that the Commission couldn’t salvage it. You don’t have to do anything other than let us help you.”

I wiped my eyes again, and this time they stayed dry. He always knew what to say to make things seem better, even if they hadn’t changed a bit.

“Thanks,” I said. “I needed to hear that.”

Winnie was wrong. Jermay may not have been touched, but he wasn’t powerless. His strength was in bolstering others. He saw the weak points and reinforced them. He made others stronger, which made him the most powerful of us all.

“It was nothing,” he said. “I just figured the tears were a bad idea, considering your track record. The hotel might sympathize and flood, floor by floor.”

“
That one
you’re going to pay for.”

“Now, Penn . . .”

He jumped up and backed away, searching the room for something to defend himself with.

“Begging gets you nowhere with me,” I said.

“What about bribery?” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, deciding which way to go. He faked right, ran left, and vaulted over the desk to the other side.

“Depends,” I told him. “What are you offering?”

“Umm . . .” He considered the items on the desktop and held one out. “This pen. If you flip it upside down, the palm trees inside lose their coconuts. A very good bribe, in my opinion.”

A moment like this was everything I’d ever wanted. Penelope and Jermay. No need to hide who or what we were. No one watching us, and no chance that the walls would fall in, revealing enemies on the other side. All of our problems were still lurking in the deep shadows of later trouble, but for this one moment, we were able to lock them out.

I was as carefree as the kids I’d seen playing games on the Mile.

“After careful consideration, I reject your offer,” I told Jermay.

There was a round flower bowl set out on the desk. I flicked my fingers at him, and the bowl spit a tiny stream of water in his face.

It was unusual for anyone to really surprise Jermay. His reflexes were too fast, but the wide-open eyes and slack mouth told me I’d struck a rare vein of gold.

“You did not just do that!” he yipped, wiping his face with his sleeve.

I flicked him again and he growled. He ducked under the desk and crawled through to my side.

I pointed behind him.

“You may have got off a couple of shots, but I’m not falling for
that
,” he said.

“Suit yourself. It’ll get you, either way.”

Warily, Jermay turned around to face my sailfish, shimmering blue to match the dye from the water that had filled the flower bowl.

“You wouldn’t . . .”

“You might want to start running.”

“Are you seri—”

I sent the sailfish streaking after him, and he ran around the room. Jumping furniture, tossing couch pillows, ducking, and doubling back. He could have run out the open door any time he wanted, but he kept circling the room. I was laughing so hard I nearly fell back to the floor.

“This stopped being funny four laps ago!” he squeaked. My sailfish had backed him into a corner, with the tip of its bill pointing at his throat. He closed his eyes and turned his head away like there was a real chance I’d run him through.

“Do you give up?” I asked.