Call Forth the Waves (26 page)

“You’re the first one here, so you win the scavenger hunt, is that it?” I asked.

“Hardly. If I’d intended to bring you in, I wouldn’t be here alone. I came to give you a chance. This is the first time I’ve managed to make it to you before one of the others. And now that the trace has been disabled, the ones watching it will close in quickly, hoping to claim victory. I’d leave now, if I were you, and I wouldn’t exit at street level.”

The biggest problem with Warden Nye was his rationality. He kept a tight lid on his emotions most of the time, and he could make nearly anything sound plausible by exploiting the calm in his voice. He never gave opinions—opinion implied passion and belief. He stated facts, even if they were fabricated.

We all knew that it wasn’t in character for the man to help, but we also knew how vehemently wardens could oppose one another. He could be here to spite a rival, and was most likely planning to take us into custody himself, no matter what he said.

“How do we know?” Birch asked. “How do we know you didn’t get sacked for losing the Center? Anyone can iron a Commission patch onto a shirt. Maybe they took your command along with your uniform, and you want to make them suffer by stealing Penn away.”

“That uniform is at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, along with the command and everything else that fell with the Center. Or, to put it officially, that uniform never existed because there was no facility for it to exist within. I’ve been reassigned for the time being; my current position comes with a more casual dress code.”

He must have been placed in a public ground facility where the military look would cause too many questions. Polos and slacks made wardens look like grocery-store greeters or country-club dads waiting for a tee time.

“Arcineaux’s not on the bottom of the ocean,” Winnie broke in. “We saw him walking on dry land a week ago. Explain that, since I know for a fact
I killed him
.”

A subtle threat lay buried in her words. She wasn’t afraid to admit what she’d done, because she could do it again if she had to, and she wanted Nye to know that.

“That’s too long a story for the amount of time you have remaining to decide. Perhaps you should put it to a vote.”

Whether or not he was serious about others in the Commission coming to find us, our position had been compromised; leaving was the only option we had. Warden Nye made no move to follow us. He settled himself in to wait for whoever showed up after we were gone.

“Go on,” I instructed the others. “Fast as you can without drawing attention. Find a door with roof access, and we’ll leave that way.”

They hustled to other rooms in the suite to grab their things before heading out the main door. I went last, guarding the others just in case.

“Don’t think this is a favor,” I warned Nye. I refused to put myself into his debt, because we both knew I’d cave and pay him back if he called in the marker. Just like my father.

“Althea Dodge.” He timed the words so that I heard them at the exact moment I would have crossed the threshold. This was his favorite game, and like an idiot, I was playing by his rules. I turned around.

“Am I supposed to know what that means?” I asked.

“The favor you don’t owe me. Let’s just say it’s a name your sister Nimue should be used to hearing. Look her up. She’s not hard to find.”

I knew this trick. He’d toss out a tempting piece of bait, hoping to pull me into a confrontation or debate so I wouldn’t leave and he’d have the advantage in the next round. He wanted to make me angry, because experience told him that emotion left me flustered and sloppy. He thought I’d be easier to break.

I’d been running through one fire after another since the Center fell. Constant pressure had compacted and hardened the facets of my personality. I may have looked like the same weak teenager he’d manipulated before, but I was gemstone underneath, and I could show him what I was made of.

He’d already seen Flame, so maybe a bigger gesture was necessary.

Thanks to Nye, I knew how the mechanisms in his hands worked. I’d seen my father’s calculations. I knew how little it would take to overload them to the point that they would lock. I wouldn’t leave him helpless, but I could certainly give him a scare.

I sensed power lying dormant in the hotel’s walls. Wires and conduits, junctions and circuits all hidden away. Vibrating strings of a harp waiting to be played. I plucked one, and my body caught the tone.

Everything was a matter of harmony. Highs had to match the lows so that they flowed together. Conflicting currents could be coaxed and woven into cooperative patterns. I strummed another string and another in as little time as it took to think about getting it done.

Ebb and flow. Rise and fall. Energy never stopped moving so long as it had a clear path to travel. It drifted from the walls toward my fingers, where it dissipated like the fizzled smoke of a dud firework. The connection suddenly severed.

“No!” I spat, more tantrum than indignation.

“That’s happening a lot, is it?” Nye asked, prodding my temper in a more direct way now that he believed himself immune to it. “I’m assuming dear Magnus didn’t prepare you for that, either. Would you like to know what’s causing it?”

I shrieked. I growled. I made the kind of scene little girls make when they don’t get their way, determined to force my touch to reignite.

“You’re better than that,” Nye tsked. “And you’re running out of time. Perhaps you should pack up your toys and go home, since you’re in no condition to play with the big kids.”

“I don’t
have
a home!” I wailed. He’d succeeded in kindling my fury, but it wasn’t an advantage for either of us. I tried to
rip
the electricity off the lines to throw it at him all at once.

Those vibrating strings inside the walls began to thrum, all of them in conflict. All of them off pitch. The paint blackened where sparks spit from every socket plate at once. Light bulbs flickered, then exploded. The television came on and spun from one channel to the next in a whining blur.

I couldn’t stop it.

Sparks caught the couch and carpets. They raced up the draperies and across the tops of the windows. I was back in the Hollow, back in the train, unable to stop the burning.

Nye reached out and thumped me on the nose, exactly like Anise would have. It was an automatic, familiar, and very personal gesture that filled me with more dread than a dozen fully loaded Commission transports would have. Studying my act was one thing, but that was a secret off-switch for my temper that even my other sisters didn’t know.

The fires hiccupped, then raged back to life, bolstered by a sudden need to protect myself from being overexposed.

“Penn, what’s taking so—” Jermay choked on the question. He and Winnie had come back to find me.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“I didn’t mean it,” I said. “I can’t pull it back!”

I couldn’t keep the monsters in their box. They fooled me, hiding in my own anger and using it to escape.

“Go!” Nye shoved me toward the door. The room’s sprinklers activated. “All of you, go!”

I was off-balance and stumbling, too horrified by what I’d done to stand straight. I ran toward the door and bounced myself off the frame. Winnie and Jermay pulled me the rest of the way, so that we bounded for the stairs together, only stalling long enough to pull the fire alarm beside the roof-access door.

Up we went and over the adjacent buildings. The flames tunneled into other units, visible through open windows. People spilled into the streets. Sirens started in the distance, soon to streak past on trucks with whirling lights.

“What were you thinking?” Jermay asked once we’d gone a block or two. “I mean, it’s definitely a distraction, but . . . what were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t! I was trying to short out Nye’s hands, and, well . . .
BOOM!
”

I’d set a building on fire. I’d committed a crime. I could have killed a hundred people who had nothing to do with me.

When we met up with Klok and Birch, Klok picked me up in a rib-bruising hug, shaking me slightly so that my legs swung.

“I’m fine,” I told him. “I promise.”

He put me down and smacked me in the forehead with his palm.

“For being reckless with no exit strategy,”
he typed.

“Okay. It happened, and we can’t do anything about it,” Winnie said. “All we can do is go from here. Where to?”

“I don’t care, as long as it’s got Wi-Fi,” I said.

I needed to run a search for Althea Dodge, and I needed to do it somewhere Nye had no authority.

CHAPTER 24

We couldn’t stay in another hotel. The Commission would be watching all of them for the next fifty miles, and so would Nye. There were no unlocked churches with confession closets for us to use as cover, and no helpful ferrymen masquerading as madams to direct us to safety. We did, however, have Birch, and he found us a rooftop garden above the public library where someone had begun building a greenhouse. The roof door also had a very cheap lock that was easy to break.

I was able to get inside and use one of the public computer terminals to look up the name Althea Dodge. She was one of the female wardens who had come to dinner at Nye’s Center. A potato-faced woman with shrewd, heavy eyes, she had to be the one I’d later heard divvying up my sisters among her peers. There were only two women there that night, and I knew what the other one looked and sounded like because she was the one who’d wanted to see me perform a trick.

Dodge had an exemplary public record by Commission reckoning, though she had barely any contact with the public at all. And she’d just gotten herself a promotion. No details provided, meaning it was the sort of post that couldn’t be mentioned online.

She had Nim, and I needed to know where that post was to find her. Warden Nye knew me well enough to be certain that pointing me toward Dodge would keep me on her trail, even if he would be right behind me, step for step. Unless I chose to continue on the path that led to Cyril Bledsoe.

How could I prioritize my father versus my sister? Which mission had the greater chance of success? Who needed me more?

If I followed Nye’s bread crumbs and they led me into a trap, I wouldn’t be able to help anyone. And if I put off finding Cyril, I risked losing my best shot at speaking to him, which meant I’d lose my best opportunity to find out what had really happened to my father. It killed me, but I put Nim aside and swore to myself it wasn’t because she’d never missed a chance to be awful to me.

I turned off the computer in the library and fixed the lock back in place when I left.

My friends and I had to get out of the city and as far away as possible. A car was too obvious—and subject to roadblocks passing themselves off as normal police procedures. The airports would be under surveillance, but there was a chance that some of the trains had been overlooked. We had to risk another use of Winnie’s touch in public.

I couldn’t have been happier. The fire of the previous night seemed years away. I was getting better at compartmentalizing, and that didn’t scare me nearly as much as it should have.

Our train was called the Diamond Zephyr, a fortuitous nod to Vesper’s touch that gave me hope for a smooth ride, even after I’d seen the placards brazenly declaring it “The
Titanic
of the Rails” due to the opulence inside. Basically a hotel on wheels, the Zephyr was not a commuter train, nor was it the kind of low-lying bullet that a fugitive might use as a hideout. It was an ostentatious spectacle, suitable only for hiding in plain sight—the Orient Express of the modern age made to look like the original one, with a few extra bells and whistles for set dressing. And though you could board or disembark anywhere along the dedicated line, it ran from coast to coast as a period re-creation. A handful of people lived there full time, immersed in the era, watching the mundanes through fringed, curtained windows. East to west, then west to east and back again.

I couldn’t wait to get on board.

I ran past upholstered walls and paneled doors, five years old again and racing away from the engine so that I was moving double speed. Uncatchable. Unstoppable. Free in a way that was impossible to understand from the outside. I’m sure the people I passed thought I was crazy. A wildling child set loose among the gentle folk, with her hair streaming and a high giggle because she knew things they’d never understand and wouldn’t want to. Many passengers didn’t dress the part, so I didn’t stand out that way, but I wasn’t like them, either. For them, the Zephyr was a museum piece, something they were afraid to touch or break. They didn’t let it get into their blood, and for that, I pitied them.

I stood on the platform at the back, which was the only one not sealed in by silk-covered rubber to prevent people from falling as they moved from car to car. Here there were brass rails and mahogany siding, gas lights and a green-striped canopy where passengers could wave good-bye to loved ones. It was deserted once the station passed out of sight; no one wanted to ruin their costumes by letting the wind rip the feathers off their hats. But I stayed and let the moving air hit my face. Eyes closed and arms crossed, embraced by the sights and sounds of home. I was Juliet, and this was my balcony. My life had become a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions; it seemed only fitting that I got my own monologue.

’Tis but my name that is my enemy. Roma!

What is Roma? Not hand nor foot.

Not arm, nor face, nor any other part.

Not pyre, not ground, neither water nor wind nor stars.

I was more than the sum of my parts and the genetic code within them. That I could accept. It was the denying of my father and the refusing of my name that tripped me up. I would forever be a Roma, sworn and true, even if I was the last one standing.

Eventually, even I had to leave the platform. Jermay, Winnie, Klok, and Birch were waiting for me in our car. I’d volunteered to fetch our dinner so I could have some time alone with the train. Call it closure, if you need a technical term, but it helped. I could breathe again.

I entered the dining car. Two men opened the double-wide doors and held them until I’d crossed inside. They latched them back, with one man standing at attention on the right side of the doors and his twin on the left. Their faces were different in shape and complexion, but they dressed alike and stood alike. Queen’s Guard in purple rather than red.

Ladies in corseted dresses with fine hats and gloves gaggled at a corner table, drinking tea and exchanging cards that bore the images of other passengers. They were no doubt participants in one of the Zephyr’s famous Sherlock Society outings, where groups competed with each other to solve puzzles between stops and a murder mystery before the final destination.

Their rivals had possession of a booth beside the window, which they were using as a backlight to examine yellowed papers for invisible ink. Others in period dress milled around the room in scattered clumps or pairs, along with those in plain clothes, waiting patiently—or not—for plates to carry back to their berths and cars.

“Please order at the bar, miss,” said a polite man with a thick, black moustache and a starched white waiter’s coat bearing eight buttons in two rows. He must have thought my observation of the room was due to confusion about how the archaic system worked.

“Thanks,” I said.

He tipped his head and made his way to the doors with a stack of covered trays. The doormen jumped into action to help him out. That job must have gotten very old, very fast with the amount of foot traffic in and out of the car.

I floated toward the bar in a cloud of bliss, certain that the next four days would be the best in recent memory. And then it all came to a brutal, screeching halt. A familiar strangling sensation took hold of me at the first sight of a man in a black polo shirt and a tan baseball cap.

Warden Nye.
Again.

If this was the
Titanic
of the Rails, I’d just discovered our iceberg.

He sat in an elegant seat at the bar, sipping from a crystal tumbler and obviously waiting. His back was to me, but he’d seen me in the mirror tilted above the back of the bar.

I thought of running, turning around and returning to our car, but what good would it do? He was here for me, and there would be no ridding myself of him until I found out why. At least the public setting would ensure he kept up Commission manners.

“Did you look her up?” he asked. He didn’t bother to face me. We were talking like a couple of movie spies, out of synch with the surrounding décor.

“How?” I asked through gritted teeth.

He shrugged. “I assumed the robot came with his own hotspot. Iva got excellent reception.”

“How did you know we’d be on this train?”

And more importantly, did he know it was taking us closer to Cyril? Did Nye have his own version of Nafiza, capable of plotting our course before we knew it?

“Basic human nature, Penelope. You had the choice of a plane ticket or train fare, and it’s more difficult to get on a plane with your metal menaces and a giant whose internal organs would set off the security scanners in an airport. People seek safety in the familiar. For you, that’s a very specific breed of train. I’d offer you a drink, but they’re out of everything except diet soda.”

He swirled his glass to make the ice clink, much as he had before the Center made its final descent, only his humor was much improved.

“Is this some kind of game to you?” I asked. “Cat and mouse or hide-and-seek?”

“Everybody needs a hobby.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Nothing new,” he said.

The man behind the bar quirked an eyebrow at that. He was listening to us, gauging the conversation between a grown man and a teenage girl to see if there was anything interesting or troublesome to be heard while he polished glasses and plated meals.

Nye picked up his drink and headed for the last booth in the car, and I knew he wanted me to follow. I did, but I sat facing the bar in hope that I could signal for help if I needed it. The bartender was still watching, and the doormen were close.

“This place could make a person feel underdressed,” he said. “I generally try to blend, but this is the best hat I own now, considering my dress attire was tragically lost.”

“If you’re looking for sympathy, you should try your tailor, because I’d happily burn every stitch of clothing with a Commission ankh on it.”

“I bet you would,” he said, and sipped his drink through a smirk. “It wouldn’t help your sisters much.”

“Althea Dodge is one of the wardens who was at the Center,” I said. “I looked her up. Is that what you wanted to hear me say?”

“What I want you to do is listen.” He folded his hands on the table between us. “Do you know why I came to collect you and your sisters?”

Obvious questions couldn’t be trusted when they were asked by someone like him. He was a snake with too many layers of unshed skin waiting to be revealed.

“You said my father owed you. You came to claim the debt.”

“I said we’d made a deal and that part of that deal was protecting your family, which I did on more than one occasion throughout your life. It’s what I attempted to do at the train.”

“You tried to kill us in order to save us?”

Saying crazy things in rational tones didn’t make them any more plausible.

“Some of us take questionable paths to nobler ends,” he said. A similar sentiment to Greyor’s reasoning for serving a Commission officer. “Usually, it’s a matter of balance and counterweight. Your father’s untimely removal of himself from the picture triggered a series of events that I couldn’t stop. The scales tipped.”

“You showed up with an armored convoy and blew our train off the tracks.”

“No, your dwarf friend had a delusion of grandeur, imagined himself a hero, and
he
blew it up,” he said, speaking of how Squint had sabotaged the train to ensure that the Commission couldn’t take it intact. “I
derailed
it because I knew the precautions Magnus had taken in his absence. I never would have gotten near you without assistance. There are certain expectations to be met when one rises to my position, especially when that rise is made against opposition at the higher levels. If those expectations aren’t met, questions arise, and if the answers aren’t satisfactory, you’re left with
complications
.”

Was he actually trying to claim that sacking the train had been in our best interests? That he was saving us from some worse fate by hunting us down and taking us prisoner?

“You and your sisters would have been safe with me. We could have had this conversation as a group at the Center, but now that chance is gone and the scales have tipped again. Another drastic move is necessary.”

“You hung me off a balcony and threatened to let go.”

He shrugged.

“Threats don’t hurt anyone. I wanted to see what pushing you could accomplish, since your father found the idea so distasteful. The more I pushed, the more you found yourself able to do, and the more you impressed me. Magnus did you a disservice by holding you back.”

“Is he dead?” I finally asked the question that terrified me more than anything. It was no worse to ask than it was to keep imagining and filling in the details with every horrible notion that waltzed through my brain uninvited.

“I don’t know. He certainly hasn’t contacted me since that night, but a lack of contact proves only that he’s in no condition to break his silence.”

“You’re lying. He wouldn’t call you.”

“We’ve been through this—I
don’t
lie.”

“If a liar claims he tells no lies . . .”

“Touché. That
is
one of the oldest riddles in the world, but in this instance—”

He reached into his pocket. I had a sudden thought. What if all of the passengers were Commission plants? He could be signaling someone. The bartender, or maybe the ladies hunkered down over their cards. I, of all people, should have known better than to take a costume at face value.

“I’m here alone,” Nye said, as if he’d read my mind. “It’s a question I’d ask, myself.”

He took out a cell phone. Little more than a clear slip of glass contoured to fit in his hand. Far too advanced to be a commercial model. When he turned it to face me, the glass was opaque, and I was looking at my father.

“Be my guest,” Nye said.

I pressed the play symbol on his face.

“Stardust,” my father said.

That was it.

“Where’s the rest of the message?” I asked.

“That’s all he said. A call to arms, triggering the response you saw at the train.”