The Blood Guard (The Blood Guard series) (18 page)

“You two have no training,” Dawkins said. “Yes, yes,” he added, as I began to object, “you’ve taken classes in hand-to-hand combat and fencing and who knows what else, but we’re facing a dozen of the Bend Sinister, all of them intent on killing you.”

The sound of typing made us all turn back to Ogabe. He was hunched over the laptop again, furiously pecking at the keys.

STOP ARGUING, JACK.

That’s what you always do, just flap your gums while everyone waits. Lives are at stake. The clock is ticking. The risks are too high to chance losing.

And don’t even THINK about leaving me in the car.

“He really knows you well, doesn’t he?” I said to Dawkins, closing the laptop and putting it in Ogabe’s hands. “But he’s right. Like it or not, we’re all in this together.”

C
H
A
PT
E
R
24
:

DOWN A GIANT’S THROAT

“S
o
this
is how we get in?” Greta asked.

“Since none of you will listen and stay in the car,” Dawkins grumbled, “I suppose so.”

It was a little past nine in the morning, and we were standing on the grass of a deserted park, in the shadow of an enormous arm, part of an eerie metal sculpture of a giant working his way out of the ground at the very tip of East Potomac Park.

The giant’s right arm stretched twenty feet up, the shoulder and bicep flexing, its fingers clawing at the air. Thirty feet from us, the left hand had only just broken through the soil, the wrist still underground. The toes of the giant’s right foot were visible some distance away, and the bent left knee arced high enough off the ground that I could walk under it if I ducked my head. The whole thing was made of a dusky silver metal that was cold to the touch.

The giant’s face looked blindly up at the blank sky, his mouth open wide. Was he angry? Suffering? Sad to be waking up into a world that no longer believed in him?

“Mourner’s Mouth makes sense,” I said. “He does look sad.”

“It
is
a bit spooky,” Dawkins admitted.

“Spookier than driving around with a headless man in the passenger seat of the car?” I asked.

Dawkins glanced at Ogabe and said, “Only that one woman noticed, and who’s going to listen to her? Headless man in a sports car? That’s crazy talk!”

“This sculpture is actually called
The Awakening
,” Greta said. “My dad took me here last winter. He said he wanted to show me something cool. But I guess he was just casing the site.”

“There’s no reason he couldn’t have been doing both,” I said.

“Stop lollygagging, you two,” Dawkins called. He led Ogabe straight to the giant’s bearded face. Its silver tongue curved back into shadow, past enormous teeth. I felt cold air wafting up out of the mouth. On the drive over, Ogabe had explained that there was a shaft directly under the giant’s mouth that connected to the storm drains.

“Everyone got their torches?” Dawkins asked, holding a flashlight aloft. We nodded, and he placed Ogabe’s hands on the giant’s lower lip. “This better work.”

Ogabe bellied headfirst into the giant’s mouth. After a moment of kicking his legs in the air and Dawkins pushing his feet, he slid into the dark and disappeared.

Dawkins leaned forward into the mouth, then backed out in a hurry.

The giant seemed to cough up a round metal disc. It flew out of the mouth and rolled in the dirt like some sort of enormous button.

“It appears Ogabe got the cover off the manhole,” Dawkins said, swinging his legs into the mouth. “Will be a bit of a drop, but I’ll be there to catch you two.” He let go and plunged out of sight.

“You next,” I said to Greta.

She grabbed the giant’s nose for balance, and slid her sneakers into its mouth. “This is…kind of creepy,” she said, scooting backward. “Though plenty of stuff in the past day has been loads creepier.” When just her hands and head were visible around the curve of the giant’s tongue, she said, “Thanks, Ronan.”

“For what?” I asked.

“I don’t know. For everything? For helping me look for my dad. For putting up with me when I’m less than awesome. For being, whateve
r
—
a
friend.”

And then she let go, slipping away before I could reply. I wanted to tell her that
she
was the one who deserved thanks, not me, that I wasn’t like her. Whenever I did something good, it was by accident, or because someone had told me what to do. But Greta tried to do the right thing just because it was the right thing.

I took one last look around at the empty park, then climbed into the giant’s mouth. The wide metal tongue was cold against my belly, and it stank like stale, grimy water. I turned and let my feet dangle.

“We’re not getting any younger,” Dawkins called from below.

I let go and fell about ten fee
t
—
r
ight into Dawkins’ arms.

“Ogabe and Greta have already gone down,” he said, setting me on my feet. We were in a tiny concrete chamber barely large enough for the two of us. At our feet was a round concrete shaft, metal rungs like enormous staples leading down into the gloom. “Greta shouldn’t be here at all, but there was no way to stop her from looking for her father. So I’m relying on you to stay back and protect her.”

“You can count on me,” I told him.

“I know that,” Dawkins said, placing his feet on the rungs. “I just wanted to make sure that
you
know it, too.”

We went down.

Greta and Ogabe were waiting at the foot of the ladder, their flashlights on. We were in an enormous concrete tube, maybe twelve feet high: The storm drain.

“Which way?” Greta asked.

I cast my light over the map Ogabe had us print out. “Looks like we hike north,” I said. The two storm drains and the substation weren’t connected on the map, but Ogabe assured us there was a link between them.

Dawkins led. Twelve feet of rope connected him and Ogabe. Behind them was Greta, and I brought up the rear.

Eventually the tunnel ended at a metal grill. It stretched from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, like the bars of a jail cell. Stringy bits of moss drooped from the crossbars. “This is what Ogabe told us about,” Dawkins said. “We should now be level with the top story of the substation.”

Ogabe stood in front of the grill as though he were looking it ove
r
—
t
hough of course, he couldn’t see a thing without his head. He reached up and pulled at the bars, but they didn’t budge.

Dawkins played his light across it. “Typically there’s a gate somewher
e
—
t
here!” Along the right-hand wall, his beam caught a rusty padlock.

Greta examined it. “I can’t pick something this old without the right equipment.”

Dawkins smiled and produced a leather pouch. “Miss Sustermann,” he said, “may I present to you your father’s lock-pick set.”

Greta’s smile in return was huge, and her voice wavered as she said, “I’ve missed these!” She ran her thumbs over the worn leather of the pouch, then untied the laces and unrolled it. Inside were four pockets filled with hooked metal blades. “These are as good as a set of keys.”

She got to work. At first I’d found it strange that she and her dad shared this hobby, but now I couldn’t help feeling a little jealous. My dad and I never did anything together these days. At least Greta and her dad bonded over lock picking.

With a click, the padlock fell open.

“I’m sure Gaspar would be proud,” Dawkins said, smiling. “All right, we are now entering the substation. The plan: I park you two somewher
e
—
a
nywhere saf
e
—
w
hile I go in search of Ogabe’s head. I reattach it, and then he and I find your dad, Greta, and the three of us destroy this Eye of the Needle thing.”

“No,” Greta said. “You need hel
p
—
t
hat’s what Ogabe said. So we’re going to help.”

“I’ve let you come this far,” Dawkins said, “because it was too dangerous to leave you at your dad’s house, or up in that empty stolen car. But I will
not
have you in harm’s way.”

“Fine, we’ll stay out of harm’s way, but we’re still coming with you,” Greta said. “Right, Ronan?”

I thought about how she’d thanked me earlier, and then about how our parents were probably somewhere up ahead. “Greta’s right. You need all the help you can get,” I said. “We can come with you and still be safe. I promise.”

Dawkins threw up his hands. “I don’t know why I waste my breath with you two.” He swung open the gate, and we all passed through.

We turned down one tunnel after another until we heard a deep thrumming up ahead. Dawkins shut off his flashlight and we followed suit.

“What is that?” Greta asked.

“Generators,” Dawkins whispered.

The tunnel ended in the corner of a large, warehouse-
like room. The floor was a checkerboard of clear-glass brick
squares and steel planking. And filling the room were eight enormous devices, each about as big as a garbage truck. They were the source of the humming.

“Turbines,” Dawkins whispered, pointing. “River water gets pushed up those massive fat tubes there
”
—
g
iant pipes rose from the floor and curved around the central engine housing for each of the turbine
s
—
“
and the water pressure turns the blades in those generators, creating electricity. It’s supposed to be decommissioned, but as you can see, the Bend Sinister has it up and running again.”

Control panels the size of refrigerators were set in a row down a central aisle, one at the foot of each turbine. Strung from the high ceiling were banks of floodlights, but they weren’t turned on. What light there was in the room rose up from below, through the squares of glass.

“The Bend Sinister must need a lot of power for…”

“The Eye of the Needle?” I asked, but Dawkins didn’t answer.

We moved single file out of the tunne
l
—
D
awkins, Ogabe, Greta, and then m
e
—
a
nd crouched down between the humming turbines. Along the way, Dawkins paused to peek down through some of the glass brick squares in the floor. “It appears that operations are visible through the floor of this room,” he said. They were like skylights into the rooms below. The first bunch we looked through revealed an empty room packed with plastic-shrouded desks and dark computers. On the far wall was a pair of white doors, the only way in or out other than the tunnel we came through.

“Clearly, we can get downstairs through those,” Dawkins said, pointing. “But before we do, let’s make a systematic search for our friends via these glass brick window
s
—
t
aking pains not to be visible to anyone who might be below. Greta, you take the right side of the room; Ronan, the left; we’ll park Ogabe beside the exit; and I’ll check out the middle.”

I had checked only ten glass square
s
—
s
ome empty rooms, another four that seemed to follow a hallwa
y
—
w
hen I looked down and saw something round lying on a cot: a dark-skinned head. It looked at me and blinked, then broke into a huge smile.

“Hey!” I whispered. “I see Ogabe!”

“Never mind that,” Greta hissed. “Something very weird is going on over here!” She was on her knees against the right wall, just out of reach of the light from the room below.

Dawkins and I crouched down next to her and looked down upon a strange scene.

The chamber below was a bizarre cross between an operating room and a computer lab. There were banks of monitors and keyboards along one wall, and, in the center, five people gathered around a stainless-steel operating table. One of them was speaking, a gray-haired man in a lab coat and surgical mask. He was waving one hand in the air as, with the other, he guided a big metal ring to the head of the table. It was attached to a pivoting metal arm like a dentist’s X-ray machine and was about the size of a hula hoop, made out of segmented chrome parts and bristling with wires and cables.

Whatever they were going to do, I didn’t like the looks of it. “We should get back,” I said. “Before someone sees us.”

“Shh,” Dawkins said, quieting us. We could hear the faintest of murmurs, like people talking in a distant room. “Sounds like there may be a way to hear what they’re saying.”

Dawkins withdrew a screwdriver from his pocket. Then he went to a row of ventilation grills along the base of the wall and removed one. Immediately the murmur became slightly clearer. “Right,” he said, wiggling into the shaft behind the grill. A few minutes later, he backed out, gray with dust, holding a pair of filters. “Had to remove a few obstructions,” he said.

“Shh! They can hear you,” Greta whispered.

Everyone in the room had stopped what they were doing. They were gazing up toward the glass brick panels.

We scooted back until we were out of sight, fully hidden from below by darkness. But we could still see them, frozen and staring upward.

At last, from the vent, we heard the faint echo of a man’s voice. “It’s nothing. This old substation makes all sorts of noise
s
—
i
t’s like a house settling on its foundations.”

Another voice, a woman’s, said, “It sounded like people
talking.”

“You worry too much,” said the man in the surgical mask. “As I was saying, the Eye of the Needle is nearly ready. Please throw the switch, Donald.” The lights in the room below dimmed for a moment, and the metal hoop filled with a net of brilliant red light.