Grizelda (23 page)

“They’re in love!” said Geddy. “They keep
fighting because they don’t want each other to know. This is
brilliant!”

“I’m not sure, Geddy.” Grizelda shook her
head, but she was smiling.

Then the cordial was ready. The ratriders had
eventually settled on thimbles for the two of them, and these were
carefully passed up to Grizelda, who gave one to Toby. They looked
at each other, then downed their thimbles at the same time.

At first it was sweet, but after a few
seconds it burned the back of Grizelda’s throat. It got hotter and
hotter. She coughed. By the look on Toby’s face, he was
experiencing the same thing.

“Um, thank you.” She gave the thimble back,
eyes watering. “I think I’ve had enough.”

Just then, a tiny trumpet sounded. The
conversation stopped – then erupted again in excitement. Everything
the ratriders had been doing they dropped as they rappelled down
the cave walls, shimmied down ladders and ropes to get to the cave
floor.

“What’s going on?” she asked Geddy.

Geddy was already halfway down the rock by
this point, caught up with the rest of the crowd. He paused long
enough to call over his shoulder.

“The dance is about to start!”

“There’s dancing?” Toby said, horrified.

His feet had gone leaden, but she dragged him
out onto the cave floor where the ratriders were forming into a big
double ring. They linked hands, the ones in the inside ring facing
outward and the ones in the outside facing inward. When Grizelda
and Toby approached, they made spaces for them on either side of
the outside ring.

There was a band perched on a ledge near
them, all their instruments made out of seashells except the fork
guitar. They struck up a strange, fey tune that made Grizelda think
of a beach at night in some distant country. The moon came out from
behind a cloud and all at once the moonstones caught fire, each one
collecting the silvery light in some hidden reservoir and sending
it out again, a beam into the night sky.

With a start she realized the dance had
already started, and she was dancing along with it. She’d been
seeing things. The ring was making a slow revolution
counterclockwise, all the ratriders stepping rhythmically and
holding hands. She checked her feet to make sure she was keeping
pace with them. A quick glance across told her Toby was also
concentrating fiercely. The ring stopped, then started revolving in
the other direction.

As the tempo sped up, she felt like she was
getting the hang of it. It felt natural. She stopped looking at her
feet. She looked across again and Toby had a goofy look on his
face. She felt kind of goofy too, to tell the truth.

“What do you think of magic now?” she called
across to him, over the music.

He thought about it for a minute.

“Okay, you win!”

The direction changed and they were whirled
around the other way.

“These ratrider people are okay. They’re not
like sorcerers at all!”

She frowned briefly. That wasn’t exactly the
answer she had wanted. But then the ring changed direction again
and she had to concentrate on the dance.

Chapter 23

Not that much happened the day before the
breakout. Grizelda went to work as usual. Her hands were shaking as
she threaded up a new spool on the sewing machine. The ratrider
party had helped, but as soon as it was over it all came rushing
back. Something bad was going to happen tonight. Something very
bad.

Tunya was in her home in the ratrider grotto,
brushing out her hair in increasing bewilderment. It didn’t make
sense. It would not get frizzy again. No matter what she did to her
hair, it would not go back to the way it was. Then when it dawned
on her what the girl must have done, she sat down slowly, a hand on
her chest.

Another thing happened that day: Kricker
started vomiting around sundown. He took himself off to the
furthest part of the sewers where nobody would find him and knelt
over the edge of the bank. His dread just kept getting worse and
worse as the time for the breakout drew nearer. All that swaying,
all that space – all night. He couldn’t ever let
anyone
know
he didn’t want to go. If he did, Tunya might find out.

After a while, he didn’t have anything left
to bring up. He got up shakily, wiped his mouth. It was time to
go.

A glare of gas lamps, swinging unevenly and
lighting up random patches of cave wall and water, faces and hands.
The Undergrounders huddled together, even though many of them had
been in the goblin tunnels before during the rehearsals. It was the
empty manufacturing floors they passed on either side, aching,
abandoned; it was the way the carvings on the walls cast
multi-pointed shadows from their lanterns and the lantern-sticks of
Laricia’s batriders that flew alongside them. It was the mysterious
sticky coating on the floor. When they spoke, they kept their
voices low. Grizelda could see on their faces, when they were
visible, that they were beginning to realize something she already
knew: that the awe of the dark was immense, and they were nothing
but frightened teenagers and a handful of pixies.

So this was it, the big day. Strange, but it
was oddly like stage fright the way she felt. The girls at Miss
Hesslehamer’s shop had gotten together to put on a play once, for
the Liberty District Revolution Day pageant. Somehow they’d made
the mistake of casting Grizelda as the ice fairy. This was like
that. She had the same sweaty palms, the butterflies. As soon as it
was time for her to say her line that day long ago, she’d panicked,
blanked out, and had to run off the stage in tears. Good omen,
that. She wished she was one of the ones carrying a lantern now. It
would give her something to grip.

Soon it would be time for them to split up.
It would be harder for the gendarmes to detect a smaller group,
Jamin had decided, though there was not supposed to be anybody down
here who would see them. Grizelda checked her headscarf. She’d put
it on, just in case.

She realized with a sudden panic that there
was no way that they were going to be able to do this. They were
just a bunch of street kids! What was she thinking? How had they
managed to delude themselves these past two weeks? She should call
it off right now, tell them all to get out of these tunnels, get to
safety–

There was a noise. Quickly, all the lanterns
where shuttered, the lantern-sticks covered, and the Undergrounders
listened, holding their breaths. The noise came again: the clack of
a lone pair of footsteps. It was coming their way.

Bodies scuffled invisibly, and by some
unspoken consensus, they all moved off in the same direction. They
moved by sound and touch, not by sight. Grizelda followed them,
blind, not speaking. She felt bodies going past her in the opposite
direction.

“That way’s a dead end. Go the other way,”
somebody whispered.

She turned around and went the other way. No
time to think, now, about the disaster that had come crashing down
in answer to her foreboding. Just blind reaction. Her hand ran into
somebody else’s.

“Solander?”

“Take my hand!” came Solander’s urgent
voice.

Grizelda gripped it tight. Together they
waded forward in the dark. The footsteps were louder, closer. It
sounded like the still-unseen person could burst in on them any
moment.

“Run!”

Grizelda ran one way, but Solander tried to
run the other. Before Grizelda could stop, Solander’s hand tore
away from her. She stopped, groped around for it, but it was gone.
The footsteps were almost on top of them, she was sure. Grizelda
ran.

Somebody snapped open a lantern. Jamin’s face
appeared, fragmented by the shadows his own face cast on itself. A
flicker of hand appeared as he lifted the lantern, used it to look
around. What remained of the Lonnes Underground looked back at him,
huddled together under a metal overhang. It looked like they were
in the corner of one of the abandoned manufacturing floors.

“Is everybody all right?” he asked.

More lanterns opened, and the ratriders
uncovered their lantern-sticks. Stevry was there. So were Katarin,
Mitchell, and Tian… Laricia, perched on Mitchell’s shoulder,
started counting her fliers.

“Where’s Grizelda?” Geddy said.

There was no sign of her. Toby and Solander
were missing, too.

Jamin hoisted the lantern and walked out into
the empty manufacturing floor a few paces. He couldn’t tell how big
it was; the two far walls and even the ceiling were beyond the
reach of his light. There was nothing but a beach of tar-coated
empty floor and bits of rubble and wrecked machines.

“You can’t go out there!” said Katarin. “What
about the thing we heard?”

“I think it’s gone.”

As if in response, at that moment they heard
someone walking towards them. Jamin stumbled back to their hiding
place and Katarin uttered a stifled scream.

“No, it’s me!”

Solander stepped into the range of their
lanterns, breathless. She’d been running. “I was lost until I saw
your lights go on.”

“Have you seen Grizelda or the bourgeois?”
Jamin said.

“They’re gone?”

Katarin and Mitchell nodded.

“I was with Grizelda, but then I lost her. I
hoped she was with you.”

“All right, so what do we do?” Jamin squatted
down with the other Undergrounders as Solander came over to join
them.

“We have to call it off,” said Katarin.
“There’s not supposed to be people down here!”

“We don’t know for certain yet that
anything’s wrong,” Laricia said. She waited a moment, then
continued. “Grizelda and Toby could just be lost. Here’s what I
propose: Keep with the plan until we know for sure what’s going on.
The ratriders will fan out and look for the two of them.”

Undergrounders and ratriders nodded, though
Kricker looked oddly pale.

“Geddy, you stay back and guide the kids to
the holding cells. Kricker, Tunya, you take the north end; Willis
and Bline take riverside. Let’s go!”

Laricia kicked her bat, which sprang off
Mitchell’s shoulder and circled up and away. A few seconds later,
the other ratriders followed her.

For a while, Grizelda ran blind. She scraped
into walls, skinned her arms, tripped over unseen blocks in the
dark, went sprawling, picked herself up and started running again.
But as she got over her panic, gradually she slowed. She came to a
stop and listened. There was nothing but the sound of her own heart
pounding, and beyond that, darkness and ear-muffling silence, like
being inside a velvet bag. Oh, lord, God, she was back in that
human kennel again, when they’d taken the lantern away from her.
The darkness had run into her, tried to choke her…

But it wasn’t completely dark.

From the bodice pocket of her dress came a
dull green glow, steady as cave fungus. It was Tunya’s lantern
stick, still there. Cautiously, she took it out.

She was at an intersection of four passages.
They were too wide, the ceiling too high to be part of the ruined
goblin mines. The walls were plain and the floor was clean. None of
it was at all familiar. She was lost.

She held up the lantern and looked in each of
the four directions, trying to choose. None of them seemed any
different from the others.

It was then she heard the noise again:
footsteps. Unlike the even clacking of the steps that had caused
the Undergrounders to split up, this person sounded in a hurry. He
paused every few seconds, as if he couldn’t quite decide whether he
should be running at all. The light coming toward her was wobbly,
swinging back and forth so much she was sure its bearer must be
about to spill his lantern. She quickly stuffed the lantern-stick
back in her pocket and hid around one of the corners.

The steps came closer, and the place where
she was hiding brightened. She wasn’t going to try her usual trick,
not until she saw who it was. But she held her breath and pressed
herself farther back. When the person passed into her view, she
relaxed. She’d recognize that distracted, gangly form anywhere.

“Toby?”

Toby jumped, and this time he really did drop
the lantern. It went out.

“Is that Grizelda?”

She took the lantern-stick back out and the
two of them looked at each other.

“Where are we?” he said.

“I don’t know. I think we’re lost.”

He turned around slowly, looking at the four
paths available to them. Each one was identical, fading into
invisibility.

“Each way is as good as another, right?”

“I don’t know. I guess so,” she said.

“Then let’s go!”

He picked a direction and started to run. To
her surprise, he snagged her by the arm, almost making her trip.
She caught her balance and ran alongside him.

Toby was in his element: he barely had to
duck to get under the crossbeams. He had the chance to really pick
up speed, eat up distance with that long-limbed jog of his. Poetic
justice, she guessed, for her mad dash through the sewers earlier.
Grizelda had to run as fast as she could just to keep up with him.
Her legs were sore in minutes. And where were they going?

“I don’t think this is the right way,” she
gasped.

“You’re right,” he said.

Then he actually turned her around like he
was steering a cart. She was about to object, but then they both
froze.

Footsteps. The
real
footsteps this
time, the clacking ones. There was a bend in the tunnel ahead of
them, and someone, or some
thing
, was coming towards
them.

“I think I heard something over here! Come
on!”

Tunya darted around the corner on her
bat.

When Kricker didn’t reply, she looked left,
where he had been flying alongside her all this time. He wasn’t
there.