Dark Metropolis (18 page)

N
an caught a split second of Arabella’s usual composed expression before she noticed Nan was there. “Nan? Dear god…” Her eyes swept over the bloody work suit. There was still a hole in it right over Nan’s heart. “What happened?”

Arabella stood in the entrance room, late afternoon sun flooding the space behind her from a row of windows that faced west.

Rory was a storm cloud darkening the room, glowering and troubled. Although Nan’s spell had been interrupted, he seemed rattled, gesturing and raising his voice when he was usually so controlled. “You took Freddy,” he said, “and then you
lost
him?”

“Quite a trick he pulled on me,” she said. “He brought my hunting mounts to life.”

“What about your guard-spy?”

“He’ll be informing the rest of my associates of what is happening.”

“You know this girl,” he said, grabbing Nan’s arm and jostling her forward. “What is she?”

“I don’t
know
much.” Arabella straightened her stance, as if prepping for a duel. “But I believe she is something special. Not quite human. I thought she might be brave enough to destroy you and this world you’ve built. But it seems you’ve broken her instead.”

“I’m not broken,” Nan said.

“Well, you haven’t killed Freddy, you haven’t stopped Valkenrath, and you haven’t freed my daughter. It’s all right, Nan. I suppose you haven’t come into your powers. I can only trust myself, in the end.”

Nan let the words go. Arabella was not her goal, and she didn’t really care what the woman thought.

“Since we’ve reached this point,” Arabella said, “I want to see my daughter, who I believe is trapped down in your hellhole.”

“Your daughter couldn’t possibly be down there,” Rory said. “We don’t revive upper-class citizens.”

“She wasn’t exactly living like an upper-class citizen. She ran away from home to live in a sad little flat.”

“I certainly will not take you underground. You’re asking me to destroy everything I’ve built. If I call the chancellor, he’ll have both you and Miss Davies imprisoned on some charge until we can decide what to do with you.”

“If Freddy wants to let the dead go,” Nan said, “there is nothing you can do except prepare.” She looked at him, and he avoided her eyes—covertly, but she had begun to make him believe her. “Would you rather release the dead yourself, or have him make the choice for you?”

“What you ask cannot—should not—be done quickly,” he said carefully. “The dead help to run the city.”

“Then…let us help you replace them carefully,” Nan said. She didn’t really have the authority to say this. That magic belonged to Freddy. But right now she just had to keep Rory calm. Open. She had given him a taste of her power. That was a start. And, hopefully, enough. “Let’s just start with Sigi. If we get Sigi out of the underground, Arabella, will you cooperate with Rory to help the other workers?”

“I suppose. If he truly does what we need him to do.”

Nan turned to Rory. “Let us see Sigi.”

“I don’t even know for sure if Sigi is there,” he said.

“Well, I do.” Nan added pointedly, “She’s the girl who got caught carrying a flashlight.”

He raised an eyebrow, realizing now the state Sigi would be in when Arabella saw her—something Nan was trying very much not to think of. “I see.”

“Freddy told me she’s being kept in a cage,” Arabella said.

“She tried to escape,” he said. His tone was cool and unrevealing now. “Come with me.”

He led them down a hall and opened a door with stairs to the cellar. It was like any other cellar, cool and cobwebby. A steel door leading to the underground was tucked behind a supporting beam of the house. Now Nan remembered these doors and passages—the room where Freddy revived her, the hall through which the guards had dragged her.

“You built all this down here?” Arabella asked.

“I didn’t build it to begin with. Years ago, this house connected to a network of rooms beneath the royal palace.”

“It’s vaster than I expected,” Arabella murmured a moment later, seeing halls shooting off to the sides. “I must say, I’m impressed you were able to keep your prisoners from escaping.”

Of course, Nan knew the way he had kept them from escaping. But Rory didn’t say anything about the serum to Arabella.

When Rory opened the next door, Nan heard something scream. No, someone. Sigi. Nan hadn’t realized they’d reached a side entrance to the cafeteria.

Nan lowered her eyes and remained in the doorway while Rory moved forward, Arabella behind him, more reluctant. Nan didn’t want to see Sigi like that again, but she couldn’t block out the sound of her, moaning and scrabbling in the cage.

“What is that?” Arabella asked.

“That is your daughter,” Rory said.

Arabella’s scream drowned out Sigi’s moans. Nan looked up. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. Sigi was withered almost beyond recognition, her eyes too wide in shriveled eyelids. She didn’t recognize her mother or Nan. She thrust her nose between the bars, smelling the life of them, reaching with shriveled fingers.

“Help.”
She spoke hoarsely. “I need blood…blood….”

Rory was impassive to Arabella’s despair. He took a vial from his pocket, removed the stopper, and handed it to Sigi. “Drink this now.”

Nan took a deep breath.
It will be all right,
she thought. She clutched at the buttons of her work suit.

Nan’s eyes were riveted on Sigi, so she didn’t even notice Arabella take the gun out.

Until the shot went off, echoing sharply in the wide space.

Rory’s eyes widened, his hand clutching his chest while a stain spread on the back of his jacket.

Arabella pulled the trigger a second time, and his knees gave out. He died quickly, right at Nan’s feet, with a look of surprise on his face that Nan was sure echoed her own.

“He was doing what we asked!” Nan said, just those few words short of speechlessness.

Arabella’s face was streaked with tears. “Look at my daughter.
Didn’t you die so that you could stop all this?”

“Yes, but…shooting a man in the back?”

“It isn’t on your conscience, Nan. Don’t worry about it.”

“He was starting to understand. I know he was. I took his hands and—” She broke off, looking at Sigi again. Maybe Arabella was right. But it didn’t
feel
right.

One of the guards rushed through the door, halting in his tracks when Arabella pointed her gun at him. “Stop right there! Put your hands over your head. I’m a
damn
fine shot, as you can see.”

A second guard had come in behind the first one.

“Madam, there are a lot more of us than there are of you.”

“I will take out as many of you as I can before I go down,” she said. “I don’t care. I’ve done what I came to do. And that is my daughter in there.” With her free hand she pointed at Sigi, whose moaning had grown subdued after drinking the serum. She was crouched on the floor of the cage. “He did this to my
daughter
. I just want to see her before I go. So leave this room if you don’t want to join
him
.”

The guards looked at each other. The first one nodded. They slowly backed out and shut the door behind them. Nan doubted they went any farther than that; they were only biding their time. She hoped they didn’t think her an accomplice. She didn’t know how many times she could handle dying in one day.

“Arabella,” Nan said, speaking as carefully as she could. “Please. Sigi will be all right once the serum takes effect.”

“Sigi is going to die,” Arabella shouted back. She was still holding the gun, not quite pointed at Nan, but close. If she shot now, it might nick Nan’s arm. “I don’t know if I can describe how it feels to lose your daughter and feel like you were the one who had driven her to her death.”

“You’re in pain from seeing Sigi like this.” Nan spoke haltingly. What else might Arabella do in her grief? “But she isn’t gone yet. You can still say what you want to say. It’s not too late.”

Arabella’s cheeks were flushed, anger and hurt mingling in her red-rimmed eyes.

But she lowered the gun.

“Sigi!” Nan turned to Sigi, who was still huddled in the corner of the cage. Even her curls were listless as they spilled over her face. “Talk to me. Is the serum working?”

Nan’s heart was beating faster. She grabbed the cage, and her suddenly sweaty hands squeaked on the bars. “Sigi, I want to get you out, like I promised. Please.”

She turned to Arabella again, feeling an alarming desperation. “I don’t know how quickly the serum reverses. I told her I’d make sure she saw the sunshine before she died.”

“Was there something between you and my daughter?” Arabella said.

Nan didn’t answer. She took a deep breath.
Sigi is going to die.

Sigi is going to die.

And she had to let it happen. She had to make sure Freddy accomplished his mission, and see that he got out safely so his magic couldn’t be abused again. She had forgotten the guards outside the door, but they were there, and they wouldn’t stand idle for long.

Sure enough, she heard Gerik’s voice booming, and he burst in the door, a furious figure brandishing a gun of his own, brisk steps in expensive polished shoes. His eyes alighted on the fallen body of his brother. “Who did this?” he demanded. “Which one of you killed him?”

“I did,” Arabella said. She spoke without anger or arrogance; in fact, she sounded subdued. “My daughter is a living corpse crying for
blood
. You can’t scare me with your weapons. I don’t care if I die.”

Gerik was hurrying to Rory’s side. “Where is Freddy? Damn it, this is all your fault. You took the boy and now my brother.”

“Did you hear a word I said? I don’t care one whit about your brother. He started this. And if I see Freddy, I’ll kill him, too.”

This seemed to jar Gerik. He had crouched beside Rory and taken his hand, but now he turned. “Arabella, please. I am sorry that your daughter somehow ended up in the rabble. That was surely a mistake. We don’t keep people with noble blood.”

“What does it matter how noble her blood was?” Arabella said. “No one deserves this! But I know it’s too late for Sigi. Maybe it isn’t too late for you. I want you to give an order for all of your workers to evacuate aboveground.”

“I—I cannot do such a thing! We’ll have blackouts and shortages, and without serum they’ll turn into…” He waved at Sigi. “What would I tell the chancellor?”

“I
want
blackouts,” Arabella said. “I
want
shortages. I want the people to know how you’ve betrayed them.”

Nan approached Gerik very slowly. “I could have helped your brother understand, if I’d had more time.” Now she was almost standing face-to-face with him. “You can’t keep the workers, and—” She was conscious of Arabella’s impatience. “I think it has to happen now, even if it does mean blackouts. Freddy can’t let them go one by one, and we can’t tell the people one by one. They deserve to know what’s happened.”

“Rory’s the one who made all these decisions.” Gerik didn’t seem to want to look at her. “I really didn’t have all that much to do with it. The chancellor—”

“So now you will blame it all on Rory and the chancellor?” Arabella sneered. “You knew what was going on just as well as they did.”

“I did, but”—Gerik clutched his forehead—“I never came down here. I never saw any of this.”

Nan didn’t want Arabella to gain too much control over the conversation. “So, you couldn’t find Freddy?” she asked Gerik.

“No.” He was looking at Rory again. “No, I didn’t. I—”

“Please…you must…listen to Nan,” Sigi groaned from behind them. She crawled to the bars and pulled herself up, hand over hand, on shaky knees. “I’ve always known…down here…that…I shouldn’t be here. That I chose to kill myself, and I’m sorry now, but this wasn’t right….I wasn’t supposed to keep living like this. Please…let us die.”

Gerik looked at his brother instead of at Sigi. As if Rory’s still form would rise from the pool of blood and offer his opinion.

Sigi is going to die.

Sigi is going to die, and I will hold her while she does.

T
hea heard the pounding footsteps before the knock. She rose from the table and wiped her hands on a napkin, her thoughts turning abruptly from hunger to panic.

“It’s Freddy. Please open the door!”

He practically fell in the door when she opened it. “There’s a cab waiting. We have to go now.”

“What? Where?”

“Nan told me to go to
Vogelsburg, so that’s what we’ll do.”

“Nan!?”

“Just trust me. Gerik, Uncle, Arabella—everyone will be looking for me. I’ll explain when we get there.”

Thea snatched up the purse with Father Gruneman’s gun and hurried down the stairs with Freddy. She heard Miss Mueller’s door opening behind her and the old woman asking about “all the ruckus,” but Thea didn’t pay attention. Yesterday had been Sunday, her day off, and she had spent it in a state of painful indecision, wondering where to turn next. With Father Gruneman dead, she didn’t know if she ought to go back to the Café Rouge tonight. She would not hesitate now.

But why Vogelsburg? It had suffered heavy damage during the war, and no one lived there now. The cabdriver apparently wondered the same thing, because he glanced back at them and said, “You’re sure you want to stop in Vogelsburg? There’s nothing much there except squatters. It’s dangerous for a couple of kids.”

“We’re sure,” Freddy said. “Drop us off where the subway used to be.”

“What are you doing there, anyway?”

“None of your business, mister,” Thea said, with her best Telephone Club sass. “We’re paying you, aren’t we?”

“It’s not a good place for a rendezvous, I’m telling you.”

“And I told you to mind your own business.”

“That’s why I need you along, Trouble,” Freddy said, smiling a little even through the panic in his eyes. She couldn’t ask him what he’d already been through today, not until they had privacy.

“I hope I’m the worst of the troubles we’ll be dealing with,” she said, trying to tease back, but the words were forced.

As the city she knew was replaced by the war-torn outskirts, the only shops seemed to sell liquor, with rough-looking men hanging around outside. Drab five-story apartment buildings had gone up, but there were still vacant lots and burned-out husks of buildings.

A couple of blocks later, the apartments gave way to complete rubble, piles of bricks that had been moved off the street but not off the sidewalk. Some of the buildings clearly used to be quite elegant, with arched windows or attractive towers that still stood while the rest of the buildings were skeletal wrecks. The bright but broken pieces of a street organ rested on the corner, and the occasional book or shoe rotted in the gutter, but the only sign of recent inhabitance was some laundry hanging between windows. The cab slowed.

“Is this it?” Thea asked.

“This is it,” the cabdriver agreed. “Used to be a nice old neighborhood, but there just isn’t the manpower to rebuild it.” He turned a corner. A gaunt, tanned woman was tossing the contents of a chamber pot out the window of a house that looked half-destroyed. The poorest people still lived in the remnants of buildings, but there appeared to be only a handful of them.

The driver stopped the car in front of the subway entrance, which was still perfectly intact, at least from the outside. “There you are.”

Freddy paid up and they climbed out. The cab drove away, and Thea shivered, more from fear than cold. She hadn’t had time to really wonder what she was getting into. The woman with the chamber pot looked at them out her window. “Hello,” she called, but her tone said something more like,
Who the hell are you?

“Hello,” Freddy called back. “Do you own a flashlight?”

“You going down there?” She pointed at the subway stop, as if there could be doubt. “It’s dangerous. Convicts hide down there sometimes.”

“Terrific,” Thea muttered.

“We’re looking for her father,” Freddy said. “We think he went down there and got lost.”

It wasn’t exactly a lie, Thea supposed.

“Why would he go down there?” the woman asked.

“He’s a newspaper reporter,” Thea said. “He heard there was something going on underground.”

This answer didn’t seem to surprise her. “I have a lantern. I’ll sell it to you.”

Freddy offered her a few bills, twice what a lantern probably cost, and held them up so the woman could see. The woman nodded and turned back into her house. Freddy and Thea walked up to her window. A moment later she handed out a lantern and what might have been a curtain rod, or something like it, once upon a time.

“You’ll want something to beat off the rats and the crazies,” she said, grinning. Thea could smell her rank breath and unwashed body from where she stood. “Good luck finding your father.”

“Thanks,” Thea said. Her voice came out strangled.

They walked to the subway entrance. Their footsteps seemed too loud. No, it wasn’t their footsteps that were too loud; it was this place that was too quiet, without voices or automobiles. Grass pushed between the cracks of the subway steps.

It was even quieter underground. In the dim light, they could see that the station was still intact, eerie with the whispers of prewar life, details in stained glass and signs in fonts no one used now. The turnstiles with slots for tokens still stood—well, one, anyway. The other had been busted out. A chair remained in the empty ticket booth. It was warmer here, with air that smelled moist and earthy. “What are we doing, Freddy?” she asked. “Tell me what happened. You saw Nan?”

“She was…dead. Again. After I revived her, I tried to take her with me, but she was too weak, so she told me to come here if I wanted to find the people underground.”

“What will we do when we get down there?”

“We have to try to get the workers out, like Father Gruneman wanted. And we can find your father.”

I don’t want to find him.

The horrid thought skirted past her mind.

Of course she did. She did.

But not here.

Not this way.

Her last memories of him were good ones. He was young and healthy, optimistic that the war would end quickly and life would be better for it. She remembered saying good-bye to him at the train station. She’d been crying, but he didn’t seem scared. He’d told her to take care of her mother, and her mother had laughed and said, “For goodness’ sake, Henry, she’s got her hands full taking care of her dolls.” He’d laughed, too, and said, “Take care of your dolls, then.”

They were both so normal, that last time she ever saw him.

“And then what?” she asked Freddy.

He said nothing.

A huge lump sat in Thea’s throat. She didn’t want to acknowledge it. “And then you will let them all go.”

He shook his head. “I just keep wondering if—could it hurt to save one person?”

“But if people found out my father or Nan was allowed to live when everyone else had to die, that would be terrible. I don’t want to lose them, but you have to make things right. And right doesn’t always mean happy.” Gently, she straightened out his lapels; they weren’t resting correctly. “And you can save my mother. Cure her bound-sickness.”

He lowered his eyes. “Yes…”

It was so dim and damp here in the tunnels that, even standing close to him, she felt the loneliness all around them. Everything down here was forgotten. She was still holding his lapels, and now she leaned against him and put her arms around him, unsure which seemed more important: feeling his arms fold around her in return, or letting him know that he wasn’t alone in what he had to do.

She was so sad as she held him, knowing they couldn’t put off descending into the darkness much longer. But like the last tiny ember glowing in a dying fire, she realized one bright thing had come of all of this: she had met Freddy. She thought, when all was said and done, she might like for him to take her to the Hornbeam again, just the two of them, listening to music born from the forests where their bloodlines had sprung.

It will happen,
she told herself, and then she pulled back a bit. For a moment, his arms didn’t seem to want to let her go.

She frowned. “So—how do we do this, anyway?”

“Arabella had a man working on the inside,” Freddy said. “She sent him away when we got to her house and told him to get her people ready. So if we can find the revolutionaries when we start getting the workers out, I think they’ll help us. We just have to persuade the workers to follow us out. I think we should tell them we’re with the revolutionaries, too. We don’t want them to know who I really am. They might panic.”

“So…we’re not going to tell the workers they’re going to die?”

“I don’t see how we could.”

Thea suddenly realized she would have to choose between lying to her father and telling him he was about to die. “Should I tell my father?”

She would see him soon. She’d have to decide then. She didn’t know what state he’d be in. And would she be able to get him to the asylum, to see Mother? His death should cure her bound-sickness, but it would be much better if she could get well by seeing him one last time. He should be allowed to die in her arms.

Thinking of that, she knew she would have to tell him.

When they’d received word that her father was likely dead, she wished she had been able to say good-bye. But not like this. How would it help? He knew she loved him. She was going to see him, and she prayed he would still be like the father she remembered, but maybe he’d be broken from the years, and that would be her new memory, and she was afraid of that.

She had to see him one last time. And he would want to see her. And so she would come.

But it hurt. It was like a thousand tiny cuts on her heart.