Call Forth the Waves (7 page)

“Bah! Those circuits were worn out. The kitchen’s haven’t been used in years. They’re practically brand new.” Baba flipped the switch beside the door. “Winifred, close the circuit, dear.”

The system was set up so that no one could start the sequence by accident, just like on the train. My father didn’t want to accidentally trap someone in a shrinking room because he flipped the wrong switch while looking for a light.

“Don’t.
Please,
” Nola begged.

Winnie hesitated with her hand poised over the switch on the other side of the room, but only for a moment. Then her face hardened with the same resolve I’d seen the day she commanded Warden Arcineaux to choke the life out of himself.

“That’s the thing about the dead,” she said. “We have a hard time sympathizing with the living.”

She flipped the switch, and the whole house started to shake.

CHAPTER 7

It started with a tremor and tinkling glass. The kitchen light was an industrial octopus of a thing, based on a climber light but fixed in place, with extra arms to hold extra bulbs. The creepers abandoned their posts and fled to higher ground on the kitchen stairs as the different arms of the overhead light clinked against each other and began to flicker.

Dishes rattled from their cabinets. Dev and my sister rushed to catch as many as they could, but plenty fell between the gaps, bouncing or shattering against the floor, depending on what they were made of.

Baba looked completely unrepentant for the mess, barely bothering an “oops” for the trouble.

Beneath our feet, a wave rolled the floor, causing me to stumble into Jermay, him into Birch, and the whole group of us to lose our footing and land on Klok.

Birdie screamed. A sound of primordial terror I was too familiar with. She scrambled into Klok’s lap, wrapped herself around his armored body, and hid her face in his neck, crying, “No, no, no, no, no,” in an endless stream that dissolved quickly into blubbering gibberish. On the ground, this kind of commotion was the hallmark of a Commission raid.

The feeling of destruction was too familiar, dredging up memories of my bedroom being derailed and the night I caused my first earthquake, but the Mile had no ground under it to shake. The Center had shaken like this after Arcineaux sabotaged it; hopefully that didn’t mean the Mile was about to meet a similar end.

Bijou slithered into the kitchen across the ceiling, but it was as unstable as the floor, growing wider as the walls pushed out and thwarting his attempts to make it to the middle of the room. He coasted down to stand beside Xerxes. Both golems snapped into their alert state, ready to expand themselves without permission.

“Don’t even think about it,” I warned.

Bijou sat, but Xerxes chose to keep his own counsel and grew three inches taller, confident that I couldn’t reach him in time to stop him.

“Don’t! You’ll pop the whole house apart at the rivets,” I told him with all the authority I could manage while lying sideways in a heap of tangled limbs.

Xerxes snapped out another couple of inches, then screeched at me and deflated. He lay down with his wings crossed over his head and pretended to sleep.

“Penn?” Jermay called over the noise.

“It’s not me!”

“Could maybe something that
is
you try to stop it, then? I refuse to be killed by a runaway kitchen!”

“Get off the floor!” Winnie shouted down. She had perched herself on one of the cabinets, with her hands around her mouth for a megaphone.

“I’ll get right on that as soon as I figure out how to stand up!” Jermay shouted back.

Dev climbed onto the table. Nola was anchored with her hands against each side of the kitchen’s stairwell. Baba had found the single corner in the room that wasn’t shaking. They’d all anticipated it. The rest of us were behind the curve and couldn’t move until it was over.

Birdie was still screaming, but now she and Klok were nowhere to be seen. She’d made them both disappear.

Cabinets realigned themselves along the walls; the newly extended floor had wear lines, showing which tiles had been hidden and which had been exposed to dirt, light, and use. Finally, the kitchen table belched itself from a rickety square with four chairs to a long bar with benches on either side.

Belched.
Literally, with an angry rumble and a foul-smelling jolt that hinted at unpleasant things decaying out of sight.

“Blech,” Dev said, holding his nose. He hopped down now that the floor had settled. “It smells like something died!”

“Your grandfather’s sanity,” Nola groused. “That was a stupid thing to do!”

“Bah!” Baba said. It was pretty much his answer to everything. “We needed more space. Now we have it. What’s the harm?”

“Ask the invisible child trying not to vomit under the table.”

“You can see her?” I asked.

Birdie had released Klok back into the visible world, and I could hear her heaving and sobbing under the table, but there wasn’t even a ripple to indicate where she was. The creeper lights streamed out of hiding and relocated to the underside of the table, like they could sense her fears. They shined straight through her onto the floor.

“I see a lot of things,” Nola answered. “Whether I want to or not.”

With the expansion routine finished, the kitchen sat ready to entertain. Pots and pans had placed themselves on the stove, and a toaster oven had emerged from the counter. The fridge opened, allowing arms from the light in the ceiling to forage for the necessary ingredients. The table set itself, producing plates and glasses from sliding doors in the top. Everything was automated with the kind of convenience tech that terrified people on the ground who were afraid unnecessary machines and advancement would attract off-world attention.

“You had to go through this every morning?” Birch asked. One of the creeper lights whirled past his head onto the table in a flurry of spidery legs. It rushed from plate to plate, wiping off the collected dust.

“There were ten of us. We needed the space. But I don’t remember it being that bad.” Winnie gave him a hand up off the floor.

The room had completely changed. Not only could we stand, we could move. I walked to the entry we’d used. Previously, it had been a square arch with no door, only a foot from a pass-through window. Both openings were now blocked by a seamless metal plate. The living room was gone, shunted out of the way to accommodate the larger kitchen.

“Where did it all go?” Jermay asked. “There was furniture in there, shelves, stuff on the walls.”

“It’s no different than the golems when they lose mass. It’s gone, but still there,” I said.

My father had tried to explain it once, but it was over my head. Pocket dimensions and quantum displacement involving equations he used entire notebooks to work out by hand.

“It’s magic.”

Calling it that was easier than trying to understand it.

Twenty minutes later, things had calmed. The house was still. The knocking had stopped. Most importantly, Birdie was functional, seated at the table, and eating her breakfast—the first meal she’d sat still for since we reached the Hollow. Before Baba’s house, she’d reverted to her old habit of snatching food and running with it, nibbling hastily in the shadows, wherever she could find a space small enough that no one could follow her or force her out.

She still wasn’t completely visible—the blocked doorway to the living room and one corner of the stove were lightly etched across her skin and clothes where they showed through—but she was with us.
All forward motion counts,
as my father was fond of saying.

Of course, he only moved forward to avoid the things chasing him.

We’d eaten at tables like this on the train. Me and Jermay sitting together on one side, Anise and Birdie on the other. Everyone else scattered around us wherever they found a space when Mother Jesek signaled that a meal was ready. It felt familiar and homey, and it felt safe. All that was missing were bowls filled eight inches above the rim with food and Smolly slapping Squint’s hands away because he always managed to fill his plate with nothing but potatoes before she could stop him. Nagendra would have been seated near my father at the head of the table, and if the atmosphere was right, he would have blurted a random recitation from a play he’d learned at university because to him it fit the setting and the mood. I could hear his voice, precise, clear, and as enthralling as any of the snakes he considered his children. But now, when I thought of Nagendra, he was wearing the black polo shirt from the dossier photo in Warden Nye’s computer file. He was smiling, proud to have the Commission’s ankh embroidered on his chest. I’d never been afraid of the man who walked with serpents and had so many tattoos that his blood had likely turned to ink, but the younger version of him made me shiver. He was proof of how easily someone could fall for the propaganda, even someone as intelligent as Nagendra.

That thought changed the familiarity of the room and the table into something counterfeit. The people were wrong, merely arranging themselves to look like friends and family. There was no easy, empty chatter about the day to come. We were ragged and beaten strays taken in off the street.

The kitchen suddenly had more in common with the dining room in Nye’s Center than it did the train.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Baba asked politely. I still hadn’t figured out if the man’s blindness was a farce or if he had another means of telling who was where and doing what.

“Sorry,” I said. “Just thinking.”

I scooped some jam onto a piece of toast and shoved it in my mouth, thankful that the gooey sweetness gave me an excuse to chew long enough that no more questions came my way.

“I’ll tell you what I’m thinking,” Jermay leaned in close to whisper. “I’m thinking that I haven’t seen or heard a single animal up here, and I’m highly suspicious of things that look like bacon when there aren’t any animals involved. Especially when it won’t stay still long enough for me to stab it.”

He chased a fried strip around his plate with his fork, somehow managing to have it outrun him.

“It’s making a break for it! Shields up!” He propped his toast on the edge of the plate for a wall and smashed the bacon into it, before causing it to fall dramatically back onto his plate. “Phew. Crisis averted. I think it’s safely dead now, but I’d better eat it to make sure.”

He piled a little bit of everything onto his toast as a sandwich and ripped it in half with his teeth. His “you’re welcome” came out sounding like “ew elk’s comb.”

I nearly snorted my own food out of my nose. At least
he
wasn’t a fake. I could always count on Jermay to do something ridiculous to lift me out of a bad mood.

I held my hands out spokesmodel-style and put on my ringmaster voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Jermay Baán, the Human Goat! Possessing the face of a human boy and an insatiable appetite, there’s nothing this marvel of nature can’t or won’t eat! Let’s give him a round of applause.”

Anise and the others clapped and whistled, laughing while they stomped their feet like an enthusiastic Show crowd.

“Your act needs work, goat-boy.” Winnie threw him a napkin so he could wipe his face. “To really pull it off, you should at least munch on a couple of old cans.”

“Or a stinky shoe!” Birdie suggested with a giggle that started the table on a quest to suggest the most disgusting things Jermay should try to digest.

He didn’t take the joke as well as I’d expected.

“I’m not the one who’s eaten half the food on the table in one go. Save your garbage for the weed. I bet he couldn’t tell the difference between scrambled eggs and fertilizer.”

Where had that come from?

Jermay’s personality turned in an instant, costing him the natural light that usually marked his countenance. His impish grin hardened into a tense line.

This wasn’t even anger. When Jermay was angry, his eyes sparked, giving them an ethereal appearance. Now they were dark and hard as flint, fixated on Birch. Everything about Jermay went cold.

Across the table, Birch wilted. If there’d been any plants in the room, they would have done the same.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. He had multiple plates of food in front of him, mostly empty, with only crumbs for evidence of his appetite. “I didn’t realize I’d taken so much. I forgot to eat again.”

“How does someone forget to eat?” Nola asked.

“He’s still on Commission time,” Jermay said nastily.

At the Center, bells went off during the day to signal shift changes and meals. They’d regulated Birch’s life for as long as he could remember, so much so that, without them, he lost track of time. He didn’t know where to be or what to do. He was learning to run his own life, but with the exception of the few meals we had together in the Hollow, he’d forget that he could fix his own food whenever he wanted it. After a couple of missed meals, he’d be starving and eat anything offered to him.

“You can take the boy out of the Center, but I guess the Center never leaves the boy,” Jermay said.

“Jermay!” Anise snapped. “That is beyond enough. You’re making an idiot out of yourself, and you’re insulting our hosts. What would Magnus say if he could hear you? What would your father say?”

“Zavel’s dead, and Magnus probably is, too, so I’m guessing they wouldn’t have much to say about anything. But if they could talk, I’d think they’d be more concerned with you taking in a warden’s lapdog than my objecting to his being here.”

“He’s not your enemy, Jermay,” I said.

“My father is dead! Can you honestly tell me that the warden who hunted us down and locked us up had nothing to do with that? Who else would have known to raid the Hollow?”

“That’s not my fault!” Birch insisted. He’d stopped eating. He was looking down at his hands in his lap, worrying his napkin like he had at the Center when things made him nervous. It was how he dealt with people he knew could hurt him.

“Nye raised you! I’ve seen what you can do. You
could
have stopped him, but instead you played the loyal pet, running around free in your Commission silvers like one of them!”