Dark Metropolis (7 page)

N
an could hear the moaning and screaming before she even reached the cafeteria.

This morning Helma and the boy were both at the bars, reaching out with awkward, flailing arms. Their eyes were beginning to sink. Their skin was discolored, darker and sort of shriveled, so their bones stood out. The change had been alarmingly rapid.

It wouldn’t have been as awful if they weren’t moving, if they simply decayed quietly like the dead. But the pair didn’t really look dead; they were something else entirely. Their desiccating flesh moved; their pathetic, shriveling eyes darted; their mouths opened. “Help…help…” Helma sounded hoarse, as though she’d been screaming all night.

The boy clutched the bars now, lunging his body against them when he saw Nan’s eyes on him. “Just a taste…so hungry…”

The guard never looked at them, never stopped them from reaching out or screaming, and he didn’t stop the workers from staring, either, although few did. He just kept the workers from getting close enough to touch the prisoners.

Nan watched for a long moment. She wasn’t even sure why. It didn’t do any good, but she stood there as if she could do something about it, if only she had a moment to think.

Sigi tugged on her sleeve. “Nan, come on. Let’s eat,” Sigi said. “I’d hate being looked at if—”

Helma’s eyes rolled to Nan. “Please…” she breathed. “Please. I’m so hungry….”

Nan’s fingers clenched her cup of serum. She fought an urge to throw the cup or yell at the guard. Her insides felt all twisted.

She noticed Sigi’s eyes move to a point behind her. Valkenrath was at her shoulder. “Miss Davies, would you come with me, please?” A guard stood with him.

“Why?” Nan asked, as she felt Sigi squeeze her fingers.

He gave her a tight smile and no answer. The guard put a hand on the pistol at his hip. Nan got the message. Sigi reluctantly let go of her, then almost dropped the tray she’d been balancing on one hand.

“I’ll be fine,” Nan said softly. Sigi seemed so worried.

Would they put her in the cage with the couple? Their withering fingers reaching for her…She forced this thought back as she followed Valkenrath down a maze of halls and finally through a door. The guard had followed them and now waited at the entrance. Valkenrath handed her a pile of clothes—nice ones: a dress, stockings, and heeled shoes.

“I need you to do something for me, Miss Davies,” he said. “I’m going to take you to see the boy who brought you back from the dead.”

“So, I am dead?”

“Well, not anymore,” he said impatiently. “And very lucky you are, after what you did to yourself. But this boy wants to know that you’re well. He’d be upset if he realized the extent of our program.”

“What program?” Nan struggled to grasp exactly what Valkenrath meant. “And what did I do to myself, anyway? Just tell me what the hell’s going on!”

“Calm yourself,” he said, sounding excruciatingly calm himself. “It’s very simple. You committed suicide. Freddy brought you back from the dead. You are in our work program, and your memories have been taken from you, because if you went right back to the mental and physical place that caused you to kill yourself, you might do it again.”

“So all the workers back there killed themselves? Do they ever get to remember anything, or do anything else? I’ve heard some of them have been there for years!”

“Some of them have no place to go.”

He was lying, and it was plain to see, because none of this made any sense. But he was a very good liar—she’d give him that. He spoke as if he believed all he said, and he never lost his cool. “Maybe you should let them die, then,” she said. “What kind of life is this? Who are you to decide they should live?”

“Would you like to die, Miss Davies?” For a moment, his eyes came alive with threat. “I could arrange it, if it’s what you truly wish.”

“No,” she snapped.

“Get dressed, if you would, and I’ll tell you what to say when you see Freddy.”

I made my own dresses, and they were better than this one.

She remembered the satisfaction of putting on a new creation. Of following a pattern. She liked patterns. Everything laid out so clearly, and yet it felt like art at the end. Nan had such trouble with art most of the time—her world was colorless, and music jarred her ears—but the symmetry of sleeves and seams made sense.

Even though she hadn’t made this dress, wearing silk again was nice. Not that she had much time to enjoy it.

The guard tied a cloth around her eyes so that she couldn’t see and led her down more corridors and up some stairs. When he removed it, she was in a house with sunshine streaming through glass windows. The outside world, just steps away from where she’d been.

But it wasn’t really the world she had known. The house felt quiet and insular; she didn’t hear the voices of passersby or the rumbling of motorcars. She imagined this gilt-and-brocade interior must belong to one of the wealthy houses in the city’s finest districts, set back from the street and surrounded by a gate. No one had to tell her that if she cried for help, she wouldn’t get any.

She heard murmuring male voices in a different room, and after Valkenrath delivered his instructions, the guard led her there.

“There she is!” A thin old man with a mustache sat at a table with a cup of coffee and a slice of pastry. The smell of the coffee was sharp and familiar and made Nan feel suddenly very homesick for a place she couldn’t quite remember. “Looking very well indeed.”

The younger man must be Freddy. He looked at her rather gravely. She didn’t want to say any of the things Valkenrath had told her to say.

“Nan?” Freddy said.

“Yes,” she said, glancing around. Dark oil portraits gazed upon her from the walls. The wealth and well-kept age of everything felt unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

“Are you feeling better?”

“It will take time for her to recover from the suicide, but she’s happy at her new job, aren’t you, Miss Davies?” Valkenrath said.

She held herself stiffly. “It’s all right.”

“Where are you working?” Freddy asked, leaning forward in his chair, clutching his cup of coffee.

“I pull levers all day,” she said. Valkenrath had told her to smile, but she was not smiling. She could feel his cold gaze on her.

Freddy looked like a question was blazing on his lips. One he couldn’t ask.

“Not much of a party girl, are you?” the mustached man said with a chuckle. She didn’t quite understand the situation, but it almost felt as if the mustached man was making fun of her. As though she would think the job fun if she were a different kind of girl. But no one would find that job fun, or anything about that sunless world.

“There isn’t much opportunity to party when you have nothing of your own,” Nan snapped back. “Not even good food. What would we party with?”

“Thea’s worried about you,” Freddy said. The mustached man frowned at him.

Thea!
Before she could ask him how he knew Thea—or for that matter, how
she
knew Thea—Valkenrath turned her shoulder to the door. “She’s ill-tempered, Freddy, but otherwise well,” he called as he forced her out. The guard was waiting just outside and grabbed her arms behind her back, holding them secure with one hand while roughly pulling the blindfold back around her face with the other. She stayed half limp, not trying to fight. There didn’t seem to be any point right now, when the guard could easily overwhelm her.

“You didn’t say a single thing I told you to say,” Valkenrath whispered as they led her back into the depths.

“Why would I?”

“I could make your life much worse.”

“So Freddy brings us back from the dead, but he doesn’t know anything about it afterward,” she said softly.

“I’ll tell him the truth someday,” Valkenrath said. “When he’s old enough to understand why we do it.”

“Why do you do it?”

“For the good of the city, Miss Davies. But I don’t expect a troubled, suicidal girl to understand.” They had stopped walking, and he pulled off the blindfold. They were back in the room where she’d changed out of her work suit. A nurse was waiting, with as much animation in her face as a coatrack, and he nodded at her.

“I wasn’t suicidal.”

“I wonder why you poisoned yourself, then.” He turned away from her, opening a cabinet. “Why you chose to die alone in some squalid alley.”

The fire inside her was white-hot. He could lie all day, but she knew her own essence. She knew she had never been troubled and suicidal. She didn’t have to remember to know. “I would never do such a thing. If you take all my memories, you can tell me anything, but you can’t make me believe it.”

“You’re sharper than most.” He watched the nurse prepare a syringe. “There’s something special about you. I do sense it. You were probably quite a charming girl in your life before. Used to getting your way. But trust me. You just haven’t been here long enough.”

“This is ready, sir,” the nurse said.

Valkenrath’s eyes indicated the guard should restrain Nan again, holding one pale arm out for the syringe. Her throat tightened, and she had to force herself not to struggle and fight, knowing it would only make things worse.

“Over time,” Valkenrath said, “you will believe anything.”

The needle entered her skin.

O
n Thursday morning, Thea changed into a day dress to try to catch Father Gruneman at his breakfast table. After the other night, she was nervous to see him again, but if he knew anything more about what had happened to her father, she owed it to her mother to find out.

When her father was alive, the whole family used to have dinner with Father Gruneman on occasion, but it had been so many years ago. In her childhood memories, his house was practically a mansion, but in reality it was a cottage, with a steeply pitched roof and two dormer windows. The walls were weathered, the roof patched. Like the church, it was a remnant of an earlier age when the city had not yet spread this far.

She rapped on the door.

Father Gruneman opened it promptly. “Thea,” he said. He was still…friendly, but not as easy with her as before. “I wondered when I’d see you. I just heard about your mother being taken away.”

“I need to talk to you.”

He glanced at the street behind her before motioning her in. His windows were all curtained, even though the sun was up. The house was furnished with sturdy wooden furniture, the kind that would be passed down through generations, and there were piles of dusty books. It should have seemed comfortable and lived in, but the pent-up darkness was uninviting.

“Would you like some eggs?” he offered. “A glass of milk?”

“I’m not hungry, really,” she said. “But don’t let me stop you from eating breakfast.”

He briefly shook his head and motioned for her to take a chair. “I had no idea you were working at the Telephone Club.”

“It’s a good job,” she said, trying not to sound too defensive.

“For a young woman, I suppose. But where do you go from there? I hate that you left school for your mother’s sake.”

“Well, I had to do something. The veteran’s widow checks aren’t even enough for the rent, and the savings are long gone.” She looked at him carefully, almost expecting to see a stranger, but it was still her Father Gruneman, with gentle eyes. “Never mind me. I—I had to talk to you. The other night—”

He interrupted. “I didn’t mean for you to see any of that meeting.”

“But I can’t unsee it now.” She laced and twisted her fingers, wishing she could blurt out all her questions, tell him what she’d overheard him say. “Who was that woman?”

“That was…” He hesitated as though he was deciding how much to tell her. “Arabella von Kaspar.”

“How do you know her?”

He stared at the ashes in his unlit hearth. “My dear Thea, I only want you to be safe. You must be patient. Your father was a good friend, and I want to help your mother, but if you ask too many questions and walk down a dangerous path, I would never forgive myself.”

“But you do know something! How can I not ask? You’re the one who told me they took Mother away to erase her memories! Every day that goes by—” She swallowed. This was an idea she tried not to face.

He sat back with a sigh, stroking his weathered cheeks. “Let me put it this way. You know me at church. When I’m there, my role is to speak the word of God, as much as I am capable, not to lead you into danger. But away from that—my own personal quest, if you can call it that—is to
live
the word of God as much as I am capable. To fight for peace and freedom and love. That is what led me to the revolutionary movement in this city. But it is not an easy business. I’ve put myself in danger, and I’ve sometimes succumbed to my own darker motives—revenge, or anger—because I’ve lost people in this. Your parents, of course, are among that number.”

“But you won’t tell me anything about it?”

“How could I tell your mother, if something happened to you? She’ll need you when she comes back.”

“Shouldn’t I fight for peace and freedom and love, too? You don’t want me to actually learn anything from your sermons?”

“I did walk into that one, didn’t I?” He met her eyes, and she was taken aback by the steeliness in his gaze. “Look, Thea, I understand and admire your impulse to help. But I will not put Henry’s daughter in danger. I know what I’m doing, but I also know—” He shook his head. “Just lie low. Wait. I will help your mother. I promise you that.”

“Will you just answer one more question?” she asked. “Then I’ll leave you alone.”

“If I can.”

“Was my father…part of what you’re doing?” Her whole body was rigid. She had to know if he was alive. If he was in prison.

Father Gruneman caught her hand. “No. It was the war that led me to this work. And he was already gone.”

She bit her lip. “But he could still be alive, couldn’t he?”

“I don’t know for certain.”

Of course he would say that. There was no body.

But she had heard him say, at the club,
She knew he was alive.

He’d been talking about her mother. It must be. But if Thea confronted Father Gruneman, he would know she had spied on him. And it was obvious he had no intention of letting her in on the other half of his life.

Still, she couldn’t just sit back and do nothing. All the things that had happened so quickly seemed to be leading her on this path, whether or not she wished it.

“Are you sure I can’t offer you a bite to eat?” he asked, obviously trying to move off the subject.

This time she accepted, just to be polite, but she was already thinking ahead. Maybe it was better to pursue the answers alone. He wouldn’t be putting her in danger, then. She would be choosing to get involved on her own. She knew the revolutionaries met at the Café Rouge, and if she happened to take an interest, could he really stop her?