Ghost Town (12 page)

Forty-eight hours, max, before she’d start losing focus, making mistakes, failing.

She couldn’t fail. She
couldn’t
.

The tears came then, even though she didn’t really want them. She didn’t know how long she cried, lost in a bleak fog of misery, until the smell of french fries made its way into her nose. She sat up, wiping her eyes, and saw Myrnin standing in front of her in that ridiculous pimp hat. He’d left the cloak somewhere.

He held out a paper bag stained with grease, and a gigantic paper cup with a lid and a straw. She took it and sipped the soda first. Pure, sweet, cold Coke. Somehow, it made her feel a little better.

“Follow me,” Myrnin said. “Eat, then rest.”

She got up and followed him through the lab, through one of the doors at the back that was normally kept closed with a gigantic, ancient padlock dangling above the knob. He searched through his pockets and came up with a clumsy-looking iron key, which he used on the lock, and then swung the door open with a flourish. He swept off his hat and bowed, which was so ridiculous Claire almost laughed.

Inside was a little room with a little table, and a very plain cot with clean white sheets. There were lamps, and in the dim light Claire made out tapestries on the walls. He’d put some colorful rugs on the floor, too. It looked oddly . . . nice.

“Is this your bedroom?” she asked, and turned to look at him. Myrnin straightened and jammed the big red floppy hat back on his head. The feathers waved back and forth.

“Don’t get any ideas,” he said. “I’m far too young and innocent for that kind of thinking.”

He backed out, closed the door, and she heard the lock snap shut. Panic kicked in immediately; no matter how nice it was, this was a
prison
. Myrnin held the key, and she didn’t trust Myrnin to remember tomorrow that she was still here. Claire dumped the food and drink on the table and rushed to the door, banging on the wood. “Hey!” she yelled. “I said I wouldn’t run! I promised!”

She didn’t think he’d answer, but he did. “It’s for your own good, Claire,” he said. “Eat, rest, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

No matter how much she shouted after that, he didn’t answer.

Claire finally ran out of fury, although the fear seemed there to stay. She went back to the table, sat down, and took out the burger and fries. She didn’t really feel hungry until the first bite, and then she was ravenous and ate everything, even the pickles. She was getting sleepy even before finishing the Coke, and had time to wonder what exactly Myrnin had done to her drink, then stumble to the bed, before she collapsed and fell into a deep, dark sleep.

SIX

T
he next day started with breakfast, provided by Myrnin again. He set it on the table while she was still lying on the bed, blinking at the lights. Claire said, “You drugged me.”

“Well, only a little,” he said. He was wearing a violent-looking Hawaiian shirt, all pinks and yellows and neon greens, a pair of checked pants that had probably been ugly when checks were in style, and flip-flops. “Did you sleep?”

“Don’t drug me again.”

“It wouldn’t be appropriate in any case. You won’t be able to sleep, you know. Not until we’re finished.”

“Don’t remind me.” She got up, stretched, and wished she had fresh clothes. These were wrinkled, and starting to smell funky. Not that Myrnin would notice, probably. “What’s for breakfast?”

“Doughnuts,” he said cheerfully. “I like doughnuts. And coffee.”

Claire was doubtful about the coffee, but he’d provided some cream and sugar, and the chocolate-covered doughnut helped wash the taste away anyway. She drank it all, with plenty of sugary bites to help; she was pretty sure she’d need all the caffeine she could get.

Breakfast didn’t last nearly long enough.

She couldn’t have said what made her aware that something had changed; she’d developed a kind of sixth sense for these things, being around Myrnin for a while. Maybe it was just that he’d fallen silent for what seemed like too long. She looked up and saw him standing in the doorway of the room, watching her with big, liquidly dark eyes that seemed . . . wistful? She wasn’t quite sure. He could have moods about the oddest things.

He smiled, just a little, and it seemed very sad. “You reminded me of someone just then.”

“Who?”

“It wouldn’t make you feel better to know that.”

She could guess anyway. “Ada,” she said. “You had that thinking-about-Ada look.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You look like you miss her,” Claire said. “You do, don’t you?”

His smile faded, as if he didn’t have the strength to hold it anymore. “Ada was my friend and colleague for a very long time,” he said. “And there was . . . a great deal of respect between us. Yes, I miss her. I’ve missed her every moment that she’s been gone, strange as that may seem to you.”

He pushed away from the doorframe, as if he was about to leave. She couldn’t stand to see him walk off with that lost expression, so Claire asked, “How did you meet her?”

That brought him, and the smile, back. It seemed less wistful this time. “I heard of her first. She was brilliant, you know. Brilliant and charming and well before her time. She understood the concept of computing machines from the very beginning, but not only that—she was a student of a great many things, including people. That was how we met. She spotted me in a crowd one night in London, and the next thing I knew she was demanding to know what I was. She could tell, you see. It fascinated her. No surprise, because her father and his friends were the original Gothic crowd, you know.” Claire must have looked blank, because he sighed. “Really, child. Lord Byron? Percy Shelley? Mary Shelley? John Polidori?”

“Um . . .
Frankenstein
?”

“That would be Mary’s work, yes. Dr. Polidori became famous for a similarly dark work of fiction . . . about a vampire. So Ada was much more perceptive than one would have thought. And terribly persistent. Before long, we were . . .” He stopped himself, looked sharply at her, and said, “Close friends.”

“I’m not
five
.”

“Very well, then; call it what you like. We became intimate, and we’ll leave this discussion there, I think.” He cleared his throat, looked away, and said, “Thank you.”

She was gathering up her grease-stained doughnut bag, and stopped to stare at him. “What for?”

“For making me think of that,” he said softly. “I do miss her. I really do.” He seemed a little surprised about it, then shook out of it with visible effort. “Enough. Let me show you what I’ve accomplished while you were out getting yourself in so much trouble.”

“I didn’t—”

“Claire.” He gave her a long, reproachful look, and put his finger to his lips. “Silence while I am speaking. We don’t have time for you to quibble.”

He did have a point, sort of. She nodded, and he led her over to the nearest lab table, which held undefined lumps of things under a gray canvas. Myrnin whipped the canvas off like a magician unveiling a trick, complete with, “Ta-da!”

It looked worse than it had when she’d last been here. It looked like a completely insane, random collection of parts, cobbled together without any sense of reason. Wires went everywhere, looping into snarls, and he’d used so many colors of wire that the whole thing had a strange rainbow look to it that made even less sense.

There really wasn’t much to say, except, “What is it?”

“Oh, Claire, it’s my latest attempt to bring up the barriers around the town; what do you think it is? Look, I added vacuum pumps here, and here, and a new gear assembly, and—”

“Myrnin, stop. Just . . . stop.” She closed her eyes for a second, thinking,
I’m going to die
, and finally forced herself to look at him again. “Let’s start from the beginning. Where’s the input?”

“You mean the point at which energy enters the system?”

“Yes.”

“Here.” He touched something in the middle of the device, which made even less sense. It looked like a funnel made of bright, shiny brass. In fact, it looked almost like a horn.

“And then where does the . . . ah, energy go?”

“Isn’t it obvious? No? I weep for the state of public schools.” He traced two wires, one that split off into a tangle of tubes, and one that went into what looked like a clock, only there were no numbers on the dial. “It draws power during the daytime hours, but it’s at its most powerful at night, under the influence of the moon, which is why I’ve made certain parts of it from elements that resonate with the lunar cycle. I tried to balance the effects of the different elements, day and night, to achieve a perfect oscillation. It’s obvious.”

If you were
insane
.

Claire sighed. “We need to start over,” she said. “Just start from scratch and build it again. One thing at a time, and you explain to me what it does, okay?”

“There’s no need to start over. I’ve been perfectly—”

“Myrnin,” Claire interrupted. “No time to quibble, remember? It’s going to take all day to tear this thing apart, but I need to understand what you’re doing. Really.”

He considered it, looking at her for the longest time, and then grudgingly nodded. “Very well,” he said. “Let’s begin.”

Autopsying Myrnin’s mad-scientist machine was weirder than anything Claire had ever done in Morganville, and that was
definitely
a new record. Some of the parts were slippery, and felt almost . . . alive. Some were ice-cold. Some were hot—so hot she burned her fingers on them. Asking why didn’t seem to do any good; Myrnin didn’t have explanations that she could follow, since they drifted out of science and off into alchemy. But she methodically broke down the machine, labeled each part with a number, and made a diagram as she did of where each thing fit.

For a device that was supposed to establish a kind of detection field around the town limits, and then a second stage that would physically disable vehicles that weren’t already cleared for exit, and then a
third
stage that selectively wiped memories, it was . . .

Incomprehensible, really. She could see pieces of what Myrnin was doing; the detection-field part was simple enough. She could even follow the purely mechanical part of how the machine broadcast a shutoff of a vehicle’s electrical system—which led into the more complicated problem of how to rewire people’s brains. But it was all just so . . .
weird
.

It took hours, but all of a sudden as she was drawing the plug-in for a vacuum pump that felt as if it was radiating cold, although she didn’t know how, Claire saw . . . something. It was like a flash of intuition, one of those moments that came to her sometimes when she thought about higher-order physics problems. Not calculation, exactly, not logic. Instinct.

She saw what he was doing, and for that one second, it was
beautiful
.

Crazy, but in a beautiful kind of way. Like everything Myrnin did, it twisted the basic rules of physics, bent them and reshaped them until they became . . . something else.
He’s a genius
, she thought. She’d always known that, but this . . . this was something else. Something beyond all his usual tinkering and weirdness.

“It’s going to work,” she said. Her voice sounded odd. She carefully set the vacuum pump in its place on the meticulously labeled canvas sheet.

Myrnin, who was sitting in his armchair with his feet comfortably on a hassock, looked up. He was reading a book through tiny little square spectacles that might have once belonged to Benjamin Franklin. “Well, of course it’s going to work,” he said. “What did you expect? I do know what I’m doing.”

This from a man wearing clothing from the OMG No store, and his battered vampire-bunny slippers. He’d crossed his feet at the ankles on top of a footstool, and both the bunnies’ red mouths were flapping open to reveal their sharp, pointy teeth.

Claire grinned, suddenly full of enthusiasm for what she was doing. “I didn’t expect anything else,” she said. “When’s lunch?”

“You humans, always eating. I’ll make you soup. You can eat it while you keep working.” Myrnin set aside his book and walked into the back of the lab.

“Don’t use the same beaker you used for poisons!” Claire yelled after him. He waved a pale hand. “I mean it! ”

She looked back down at the machine. The flash of intuition was gone, but the excitement remained, and she started in on the screws holding the next part.

She was exhausted, and she had no idea what time it was. Time didn’t exist in Myrnin’s lab; the lamps were always burning. There were no windows, no clocks, no sense of how long she’d been standing here over this table, tinkering. Days, it felt like. The only time she’d been able to sit down was when she had to go to the bathroom; even Myrnin admitted he didn’t think Amelie had meant for her to be denied restroom privileges.

He kept bringing her cups of things. Soup, when she was hungry. Coffee. Sodas. Once, memorably, a glass of orange juice that tasted like sunshine—at least, as far as she was able to remember sunshine.

She was
so tired
. She could hardly hold on to her tools anymore, and her hands were clumsy and aching. Her back was on fire. Her legs trembled with the effort to stay standing. She couldn’t work sitting down, as high as the table was, and when she tried to stop and sit for a moment, Myrnin was always there.

This time, as she inched toward the stool, he suddenly made a furious sound and knocked it away, and halfway across the lab, where it hit and rolled with a shocking clatter. “No!” he barked. “Stay awake. Do you think I like this?”

“I can’t
do it
!” she cried, and felt tears stinging her eyes. “Myrnin, I’m so tired! I need to sit down;
please
let me sit down! Amelie won’t know!”

“She will,” came a voice from the shadows, by one of the storage room doors. Claire blinked and focused, and there was Oliver, leaning against the wall. “You will always have observers, Claire. You chose this punishment, and now you have to survive it. Personally, I think that’s unlikely; I believe you’ll collapse long before you finish the work, and we both know that Amelie can’t afford to be seen as merciful to you. If you fail, all the better. I never agreed with this compassion nonsense.” He sounded dismissive, and still angry that she wasn’t in a cage in the middle of Founder’s Square, waiting for a bonfire. She felt a surge of hate so hot it shocked her. If she’d had a stake, she’d have used it on him, and never mind the consequences.