The Forgotten City (12 page)

Beatlebee Bellbeater I

Beatlebee “Swifty” Bellbeater IV

Tears rushed to Eli’s eyes. Swifty had been one of his best friends when they were young – they had been roommates when they first moved out of home into a tiny apartment above a popped corn store. The store’s machinery had regularly suffered malfunctions, flooding their apartment with oceans of popped corn. They’d also gotten their first “legal” job together, stacking books for Mr Bellbeater, Swifty’s great-great-great grandfather. They’d then taken separate paths, and never properly said goodbye.

Eli lowered his head and cried for them, whispering the Khaiti blessing for the passed. He stayed there until something stirred behind him and he heard a
quark
. Eli looked over his shoulder to see a blackbird sitting on a pile of bricks. The poor thing had obviously been in some trouble – its feathers uneven and dirty, one wing hanging askew. Eli assumed it was a lost pet, maybe belonging to someone who had been killed.

He sniffed and wiped a hand over his eyes, then stood carefully.

“Hey there,” he said, his voice thick with grief. He moved toward the crow with an outstretched hand. “It’s okay. Are you hungry?”

He came right close to the bird and it climbed onto his arm, digging sharp claws into the skin. It stared into his eyes with a shiny blue gaze, then lunged forward and pecked him on the nose. Nelly darted out of his pocket chattering, scolding, and the blackbird flew upward. Eli grabbed his throbbing nose – it was a sharp reminder.

“The book!” he yelled. “Bellbeater’s book on dark magics!”

Eli buzzed his wings and shot up into the air after the blackbird. It saw him coming and took off, leading him on a speeding chase through Ufftown. It darted through windows and out doors, up along buildings and down tiny winding streets. It crashed through one apartment, where Eli got tangled in the curtains and fell down onto a bed, on top of a person who was lying in it. He apologized profusely and tried to move away as fast as he could, only to realize the person, a girl with an extremely cheeky smile, was dragging him back in. He managed to evade her clutching hands and escape out the window, where the blackbird was resting on the ledge. It took off again, Eli just behind it, grabbing at it, his hands clapping empty each time. He just couldn’t get hold. Something dark crashed in from his left, slamming into the bird and trapping it in shadowy hands. Eli touched down on the ground as Luther materialized with the squirming crow in his grasp. The bird gave one last indignant squawk and morphed into the book.

“Good work, Luther!” Eli said. He reached for the book, but was shunted to one side as someone else ploughed into him. He hit the pavement and looked up to see the imp-breed girl from the bed straddling his chest. She had a very pointy, keenly inquisitive face, bright eyes, and bouncing blonde curls covered with way,
way
too many bows.

“Hello!” she grinned into his face.

Eli tried to maneuver her off but she kept rolling back on, grappling with him and giggling hysterically.

“Sorry … Sorry … oh, sorry,” she kept saying. Luther watched on, his eyes darting, not sure what he was seeing or what to do about it.

“Okay, okay,
okay
!” Eli said, shoving her off him and scrambling up.

The girl continued grinning, beyond oblivious. She came at him again, trying to hug.

“Enough!” Eli shouted. “This is not a game! I am not playing!”

The small Greer’s face was sober for a micro-second and then she was laughing and grabbing at him again. Her hands went downward toward his pants.

“Hey!” Eli fended her off.

“You have one too!” Her eyes shimmered with childlike excitement.

“One what?” Eli backed away, confused and unnerved.

“A slinky minx!” She rifled in her pocket and dragged out a small and shiny black slinky minx, smallest of the animal cat-breeds. It meowed at Eli with the tiniest of voices.

“This is Mr Nimbles. What’s yours called? Your slinky minx – I see it there. In your pocket,” the girl said.

“She’s not a slinky minx, she’s a miniature freshwater otter,” Eli said, finally realizing what she was talking about.

“Ooh, I had a great-great aunt on my mother’s mother’s side who knew someone who knew someone else who had an otter,” the girl told him, then started bouncing up and down in front of him saying
wee – weeee – weeeee
. Eli stared, incredulous that anyone could actually be this hyperactive, then he realized he’d been this and more when he’d first met Copernicus. The thought of the commander sent pain lancing through his chest.

The girl Greer stopped bouncing as suddenly as she’d started and said, “I’m Diamond LeSwer – and you, you are Eli Anklebiter. I know seventeen of your cousins.” She held up one hand and started listing, “Sem Swish; Nehemya Hooperhopper; Samsmall; Samtall; and Tallsmall Spidersleg —”

“That’s – that’s great,” Eli cut in. “Look I don’t have time to talk right now, so —”

“Did you see, we’re the same,” she interrupted him. “Look – look – lookey – look – look.” She held up her arm marked with the bloodlines of both Glee and Greer. “You and me,” she grinned and raised her eyebrows. She started singing a song featuring the lyrics “you and me”, which Eli had never heard and highly suspected she was just making up now.

“Great. Excellent. Awesome,” he said with forced restraint. “It was nice meeting you. Now I’m going this way – you go that way – and good luck to you.”

Eli turned and marched with Luther to the end of the street, where he stopped and took the book from the Midnight Man. The last time he’d had this book it had opened for him by itself, but this time it just lay there unresponsive, so with caution he flipped it open, searching the first few pages for a table of contents. Someone started breathing right behind him. He looked over his shoulder and Diamond LeSwer was there, with her wide, shining eyes and over-eager expression. Eli realized, this one was going to be extremely difficult to shake. First he’d try ignoring. He turned his back on her again and found the contents pages of the book. He scanned down the Ps. If he could figure out how to reopen the portal the commander and the others had gone through there was a chance to get them back. Diamond leaned over his shoulder, eating strawberry sour chews. Some saliva dripped on his neck. His heart leaped as he found the entry for
Portal
and the page number – 784. He flicked fast with trembling hands.

He opened it to 782, flicked over the page – but it was 785. He checked again. The page was missing – ripped out.

“Nooo.” Eli clenched his fists, his panic surging back in. It blurred his thoughts in a way he’d never experienced before. He could barely breathe or think. He felt himself passing out and started counting back from forty-six, while his unwanted new best friend tried to force-feed a sour chew up his left nostril and pickpocket him at the same time.

Veins convulsed in his temples – one in his neck felt just about to burst.

“Go away!” he yelled at her. “
Seriously
!”

She regarded him with confusion. “To where?”

“I. Don’t. Care!”

“Why?”

“Because you’re aggravating me!”

“How?”

“By being here.”

“Who’s that – what’s his name?” She looked at Luther.

“It doesn’t matter. Just —”

“Shh. Wait. Listen.” She cut him off. Eli paused, waiting, wondering if she’d heard something ominous.

“Listen,” she repeated. “Closer, closer – closer.” He moved nearer and, in the silence of their listening, Diamond released a squeaky toot of gas. Immediately a noxious odor engulfed Eli’s senses. He couldn’t believe it. He had no words at all. The girl was laughing uproariously, rolling around on the ground, until she stopped suddenly, looked up at him from her sprawled position, and said with all seriousness, “I love you. Marry me.”

Eli saw a flash of an image of him and this girl, with her all-too-revealing pink tutu, standing at the altar. He stifled his first response of hysterical laughter and instead said, “Look! Ice-cream craft!” He pointed to the end of the street.

“Ice-cream!” the girl shrieked, leaping up and flying wildly away, falling for the very oldest trick in the book.

“Quick!” Eli said to Luther. He clutched the book against his chest and the two of them ran, winding their way back out of Ufftown to where Eli had parked the
Gypsy Rose
. The craft’s exterior was unfinished, but the engine was running well enough to fly. Eli approached it, lost in a hurricane of thoughts, not registering the person standing near the
Gypsy
until Luther halted beside him and Moses released a rippling growl. Eli looked up and saw Smudge K-Ruz and her black panther standing in the shadows. He stared at the stunning pair – Smudge, lean and aloof, with glowing eyes and small dark marks all over her face and body. For him, she defined beauty, and under any other circumstances, finding her waiting here would have made him melt into a sticky mess on the ground, but today, with everything he was facing, he managed to just stand there looking vaguely constipated. He noticed that Smudge’s eyes were bloodshot, her face tearstained. Inski pawed restlessly at the ground.

“I want to speak with Kane,” Smudge said.

“The commander …” Eli struggled with the words. “He’s gone …”

“The Fen?” Smudge asked.

“Gone too.”

“The Ar Antarian?”

Eli shook his head. “It’s just me left.”

Smudge looked him up and down, her anxiety showing in the whites of her eyes, desperation crumbling her usually cool exterior.

“No,” she murmured.

Eli spoke quickly. “I think they’ve all been taken through a portal by the people who attacked us, but I’m working on a way to get them back. I will get them back.”

Smudge shook her head, and he could see she was still in shock.

“They’re already fighting to replace him …” Her voice was detached, “Julio will win. He’s not Caesar. He has no control. He will have war with the machines until Scorpia is nothing but ash.”

“I’ll find them. I’ll bring Caesar back,” Eli tried to reassure her.

She looked into his eyes, and for a moment they were connected, then her gaze shifted to something behind him. Eli glanced back, then did a double-take – Luther was grinning at her with eyes like knives. He was staring and then looking away and all around in a staccato way. The ground started to tremble as Flintlock ran up to them – she started to roar, but Eli jumped to intervene.

“No – no – no, Flintlock – this is – this is …” Eli’s mind went blank.

“Smudge,” Smudge said and Inski flicked her tail in annoyance.

“I don’t know – I mean I know that – I know who you are – definitely – completely,” Eli said, then a giggle escaped him. His eye twitched and a dye bomb exploded over his head, drenching him in purple goo. Diamond LeSwer flew past, laughing and farting.

Smudge’s expression was a mix of disgust and disbelief.

“I should never have come here!” she growled and ran away.

“I’ll be touching you … I mean, getting in touch,” Eli called after her.

To say the moment had been ruined was perhaps the grandest understatement ever uttered, but it really was the least of his worries, unless embarrassment suddenly became fatal. He used the flash-key to open the
Gypsy Rose
and climbed aboard. He put Bellbeater’s book of dark magics into Nelly’s carry cage and shut it, in case it morphed back into a blackbird. Flintlock and Luther stood waiting outside the craft.

“You two should go. I don’t want either of you getting hurt because of me.”

Luther gestured in the air.
No. I’m with you.

Flintlock agreed. “I’m staying. I’ll never leave you.”

The words caused unexpected pain – maybe it was being back in the old neighborhood – but he saw a memory of himself as a kid, standing on the sidewalk in the rain, waiting for his father to come and pick him up. His father, Farleigh Freely, an especially shifty Glee by all accounts, had made contact with him – against his grandparents’ wishes. He’d said Eli could come and live with him in Thrumburstone. He’d told him to pack his things and sneak out – to wait for him on the street corner – that he would come. So Eli had waited, with a suitcase full of comics and inventions, all day and half the night until his gran’pa came out and got him. He and Gran’ma had been watching him from the window the whole time. He’d never seen his father again and it made him wonder why he’d called in the first place.

If Eli ever crushed a child’s heart like his father had crushed his that day, he thought he would actually stop breathing from guilt. He shook the memory out of his mind; he chose not to focus on these things for a reason. His real family were the friends who loved him – and they needed him to be strong for them again.

He heard a wrenching sound as Flintlock ripped out his backseat and threw it down on the sidewalk. The Corámorán climbed in, lowering the craft in a significant way. Nelly stayed quiet in Eli’s pocket, not game to challenge the giantess in the way she would have any other girl trying to climb into Eli’s craft. In Eli’s mind, he heard Ev’r saying
Snack-size,
and his next step came to him. Clearly this situation was over his head, and he needed someone wiser to help him. He needed Ev’r Keets – and the formula he believed would change her back from Ravien was already rattling behind him in the cargo hold of the craft. It felt like fate.

He turned to Luther. “We’re going to Golmaria to revive Ev’r Keets. She’ll know what’s happening.”

Luther dipped his head and he and Moses vanished back into the shadows.

Eli turned over the engines. They shuddered and the craft lifted upward. He initialized the desert mapping system he and Silho had created together, and as they flew, the past replayed in his thoughts …

*****

Occasionally Eli carried on conversations with himself – especially if he had a new idea or high levels of stress – and he realized he was definitely doing it now, talking, plus laughing randomly. He wiped his expression clear and shot a furtive glance into the rear-vision mirror. Luckily, Silho was still consumed by the task at hand. She wore telescopic glasses and held Ev’r’s desert map on her knee, managing to look both at the aged parchment and through the transparent base of the craft down to the Matadori plains flashing by beneath them. Using the re-routed steering column that Eli had set up for her, Silho navigated the borrowed craft toward their destination. She had insisted on taking the backseat, saying she needed more room to spread out the map, but Eli knew a compassionate lie when he heard one. Their friendship had developed into a little-to-no-explanations-necessary arrangement, and she understood that sitting in the pilot’s seat would help calm his nerves. With the face of a pixie girl, and the stare of a war survivor, Silho was singularly lovely and phenomenally dangerous – and for a person who claimed to be socially inept, she was also painfully insightful. Eli had gotten used to feeling psychologically nude in her company. She was very much like the commander in that sense.