Noir (23 page)

Fo
rty-One

Urlick

I stumble to the edge of the ravine at the back of the Core, ashes kicking up beneath my boots. Embers belches its own brand of filth into the sky, adding to the toxic cocktail that looms above our heads. I kneel, thinking I see something, which turns out to be nothing, just like the eighteen other times I thought I spotted something since we got here. I stand, holding a hand to my eyes, and look around. The whole area is burned out, blackened, charred. Pools of melted, cooled, now-hardened metal shine up from the ground like futuristic lakes. It’s as though Eyelet and I have entered another dimension altogether.

“Pretty horrible, isn’t it, ol’ girl?” I stroke Clementine’s withers, and she whinnies.

“Did you find something?” Eyelet murmurs through her gas mask, approaching.

“No.” I turn.

She falls apart coughing, and my heart picks up speed. “You all right?” I step toward her. She waves me off and straightens. “I don’t think we should stay out here too much longer,” I say, haunted by the incident at the campfire.

“Nonsense. We’re here to find the necklace, and find the necklace we will. Besides, we’ve come all this way. There’s no going back now.” She scowls. “What’s the matter with you?”

“You’re right,” I concede, seeing the worry in her eyes. She
needs
the necklace. More than ever now. Secretly I decide I’ll give it an hour—then we fly back, and I’ll return alone tomorrow if I have to. Whatever it takes. She can’t go on like this.

I lower my head and resume combing the edges of the ravine along the side where Smrt and I last struggled. Where I’m sure I lost the vial. Visions of Smrt’s last breaths shiver through me. The look in his eyes. His desperate gaze. I swallow down the guilt that purges into my throat and shake away the cold, murderous feeling that crawls my skin.

“It was here,” I say, batting at the undergrowth, making a third pass over the same trek of ravine. “I know it was here. Right here!” I point, stamping.
Think. For the love of all that is good in this world, Urlick, think!

“It’s all right.” Eyelet looks up from the pit where she’s digging. “We’ll find it, eventually.” Her eyes tell me she thinks I’m overreacting. I’m not overreacting. She’s treading into dangerous territory again with that cough, I can tell.

“I mean, how hard can it be?” She makes light of the moment, swaggering toward me, all bright-eyed and silly-faced. “To find a shiny glowing object, when everything else around here is”—she holds up a burnt stick—“well . . . not shiny.” She coughs and my nerves flare.

“Here,” I say, offering her a canteen of water.

She takes down her gas mask and drinks in a sip, coughing.

“It’s nothing, really.” She reads my expression. “Just water down the wrong way.” She pats her chest. I know she’s lying. I can hear it in her breath. It’s become raspy and hard since we arrived in the forest. There’s a new rattle in her lungs. I don’t care what she says. That cough of hers has gotten worse. And it’s happening more frequently.

We’ve got to find that necklace.

I turn and poke the bushes again.

Perhaps it isn’t the previous exposure to the light that’s causing it. Perhaps she picked up something in the Brink. I only pray the vial is the answer. I couldn’t bear life without Eyelet in it.

“You’ve got a little . . .” I motion for her to wipe the smut from her nose. She reaches up and smears it further, blinking at me like a prizefighter, a dash of smut under each eye.

“Where?” she says, making it worse.

“Here, let me.” I remove my ascot and dunk it into the canteen, then charge over to where she is. I tip her chin back, feeling my breath ball in my chest at her beauty. I could look at Eyelet forever and never tire of her. Her eyes shine like they did that day in the cupboard of the kitchen when I first kissed her. That seems a lifetime away.

I think back to how just the thought of her kept my heart beating as I faced the gallows. How her image, behind my eyes, gave me the will to live on in the jug. Gives me the will to continue today.

She bats her lashes, her body rippling in gooseflesh, and I long to just throw her down and have my way with her. But then I remember where we are and how crazy that would be, and I force myself to return the mask to her face.

“We’d better get back to it,” I say.

“I guess.” She smiles at me through her visor and starts poking about the earth again.

We search for another good hour, producing nothing, Eyelet intermittently coughing behind me. The sound of her uneven breathing whittles away at my spine. We’ve got to give up on this. I’ve got to get her back.

“We were struggling right here,” I say, pulling a frustrated hand through my hair. “Right here.” I pace over to the point at the edge of the ridge where I tossed Smrt in. “The vial should be here, but it isn’t.”

“Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe it’s a little bit that way.”

“No, it’s gone.” I feel my features grow stern. “We’ve got to give up on this.”

“Give up!” Her nostrils flare. “I refuse to give up. It’s got to be here somewhere.” She turns, searching frantically.

“Look.” I clutch her hard by the shoulders, and spin her round to face me. “We have the formula. I can make it again. Let’s just return to the Compound. I’ll make it there. Please, Eyelet, let me try—”

“No,” she says, backing away from me. “We’ve got to find the vial.”

The ground wrinkles beneath our feet. We both collapse to our knees.

“What was that?” Eyelet looks to me, her eyes screaming. “Are the Vapours on the move again?”

“No, they can’t be.” I look around. “It’s too soon. The moons haven’t changed. It must just be an aftershock.”

“That strong?” she asks as the earth ripples beneath our feet again.

“Come on, we need to take cover.” I grab her hand.

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Clementine!”

The earth buckles, spooking Clementine. She tears off into a haphazard gallop toward the road. “Clem!” I scream after her. “No! Clem! Come back!”

A tree crashes down between us, driving us back.

“What now?” Eyelet gasps, fogging up her gas mask. The ground continues to pitch and jolt crazily.

I pull her to me, catching sight of something through the cloud cover, something poking up from the ground off in the distance, to the left of what used to be the Core. I’ve never seen it before. “Run!” I press my hand into the small of her back and push her toward it. “Over there! Do you see it? That wooden structure!”

“Yes!” She stumbles forward.

The earth revolts again and I race past her, grab her by the hand, and bolt for the structure, dragging Eyelet along behind me.

“What is this thing?” she shouts when we reach it, clinging to the broken beams.

“An abandoned mine shaft, I think.” I pant. “Left over from the coal-excavation years. They’re all over the place out here in the woods.” I fall to my knees, scraping the earth below the rickety structure, searching for a door, some way in. At last I find it and yank the door up by its latch.

“We’re not going inside it.” Eyelet shakes her head.

“We’ve no other choice. There’s nowhere else.”

“But the ground, it’s unstable.”

“We’ll be safe below ground, trust me.”

“Unless it fills in. We’ll never get out of there.”

“These shafts have been around for a hundred years. They’ve survived many cycles of Vapours. It’s our best bet, Eyelet. There’s nowhere to go.”

“What about Clem?”

“She has wings, we don’t. She’s not stupid—”

The earth rolls at our backs.

“I’ll go first.” Eyelet nods.

I help her down inside, her feet searching for the metal rungs of a long, descending ladder. At last they connect. When her head dips below the earth, I follow, hauling the broken door down over our heads.

“It’s too dark,” she says. “I can’t tell where my feet are going.” I sense the panic of her voice inside my ribs. “I can’t tell what we might be climbing into.”

I pull out my pocket watch, snap it open, and depress a button on its back. Up from the lens pops a miniature metal anemometer—a pinwheel of cones—and with it comes light, in the form of a flame. It shoots up frighteningly high, driving Eyelet back, then dulls to a cool, blue glow, thank goodness. The pinwheel starts to spin, sniffing the air as it turns.

“What
is
that?”

“I call it a Quantum Tunneler.”

“A quantum what?”

“It’s an electronic nose. It can sniff out the presence of various chemicals, even in their slightest odour. It’s so accurate it even measures the acetone in your breath and the sugar in your blood.”

“Oh, now you’re just making things up.” She purses her lips at me.

I wave the device past her mouth and a beep goes off, a number registering on the gauge immediately. “One forty-two.” I grin like a cat fat on a canary as Eyelet’s mouth falls open. “Must have been that peppermint sweet you ate back there.”

“Show-off,” she says.

“If there’s anything down the hole we shouldn’t be into, it’ll let us know immediately, and we’ll have to come up with another plan.”

Eyelet drinks in our surroundings, as I swing the device in all directions. “Here’s hoping it finds nothing.” She gulps.

“Here, you hold it.” I hand her the watch. “I’ll go in first.” I slide past her on the rungs. “If anything flashes, let me know right away. Keep it steady,” I tell her. “Don’t tip the face. It won’t work.”

She stabilizes herself on the ladder and starts her descent. I steady her from below, in a halo of dim light, my hand on her knee, trying not to look up her skirts. With my other hand, I lower myself into what appears to be a cavern. Or a cave.

“We okay?” I say about halfway down.

“Yes.” She lifts her chin from reading the watch face.

The earth balks again above our heads, shaking the ladder beneath our feet. I dig my fingers into Eyelet’s boot. “You all right?”

“Yes.” She sounds breathy, worried, though in a million lifetimes she’d never admit it. Sometimes she’s too tough for her own good.

“We’re almost there.” I look below me, seeing the bleed of light. Just a tiny glimpse, but still, it’s there . . . mysteriously. I drop down from the last rung, amazed at what spreads out before me. Not only light, but more . . .

“Good God in Heaven,” Eyelet gasps as she steps from the ladder, her eyes wide as beams.

In the hollowed-out entrance of a lavish cave hangs a dazzling display of colourful stalactites. The ceiling above them twinkles in shards of amethyst and corundum. “This is not an abandoned coal mine at all,” I say.

“I’d say not.” Eyelet laughs. “What is it, I wonder?”

“A gem mine?” I guess, checking the watch in her hand. “It’s safe. We’re safe. Incredibly safe.” I can’t believe the reading. The air down here contains fewer toxins than on the streets of Brethren. It’s the purest air I’ve ever recorded. I snap the watch face shut and pocket the contraption. “We don’t need these gas masks anymore.”

Eyelet peels off her mask and dashes away. “Look at this!” she shouts travelling deeper into the cavern.

I shed my mask and follow her, a little worried at her overzealous pace. “Wait, I’m not sure we should be—” My jaw drops at the sight of a small blue pool at the centre of the cavern. Its shimmering waters lap at my feet.

“It’s a dream.” Eyelet turns to me. “It can’t be real.” She runs her hands along the side of a stalactite. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“I am.”

“It’s unbelievable. Like a fairy tale.” She walks around, touching everything, every formation, every rock, dipping her hands into the water.

“Don’t tell me you believe in those, too.”

She scowls at me, then suddenly looks up, her face all at once illuminated as if standing in a ray of sunshine. “Look!” She draws in a childlike breath and stands, enveloped in a capsule of light. “Where is it coming from?”

I rush to her side, my heart racing, entering the beam of shining light that pours in through the centre of the hole above our heads. “I don’t know,” I say slowly. “I don’t even know how it’s possible.”

She squints. “But it’s definitely here, right? I’ve not imagined it.”

“No, it’s definitely here.”

“There!” she shouts. “It’s coming from there!” Her eyes register on something and she darts forward, leaping haphazardly rock to rock across the pond.

“What are you doing? Be careful!” I bolt after her, not as agile of step. I slip at one point, arms backpedaling in a fight to regain my composure, bringing a cheeky smile to her lips. At last I land next to her on the island where she stands, staring up at the same hole as she, neatly carved in the cavern’s roof, just a few rock jumps ahead of us. It’s not a large hole—they’re more like slats, several of them, cut next to each other to form one big hole. “They must be part of the old mine-shaft construction.”

“But what about the light? Where is it coming from?”

“I don’t know.” I squint. “I don’t understand it. There’s nothing up there. We’ve just come from on top. Or, at least I think we have.”

The earth rocks again, very slightly this time, and I rush forward, collecting Eyelet up in my arms. I crush her to my chest, harder than I mean to. She feels warm and soft against my ribs. Our hearts beat together until the rumble passes. I’m reluctant to let her go.

“I have to know where it leads.” She pushes off from me.

“No.” I reel her back in. “You can’t go in there. We’ve no idea how deep the water is!”

“But I have to know.” She pushes off again, and continues jumping rock to rock, until she’s directly under it. My heart thunders in my chest.

“Well?” I say, as she tips her head.

She raises a hand to her eyes and squints. “I don’t know. It’s blinding.”

“It’s likely just a reaction from the minerals.”

“Minerals?” She lowers her chin.

“Yes, minerals and oxidization and all that sort of thing.” I tug at my waistcoat.

“You haven’t a clue what you’re talking about, have you?” She stares at me.

“I suppose you have a better explanation?”

She looks up again. “It appears to have no end to it. The light, I mean.”