Quite Contrary (24 page)

We ducked down the side street, but the smell didn’t go away. “Another way, Rat,” I repeated. I didn’t want to push, but his nose kept swiveling every which way, and I knew this was worse than it looked.

“Up, Miss Mary. The smoke is heavy.” His squeaky little voice had gone raspy, and he sneezed twice at the end. This smelled worse to him than it did to me, and I wanted to get away from this stink badly. Running forward a couple of steps, I bent down and yanked Rat up off the street. Even, smooth building fronts were the exact opposite of this city’s look. I could climb up on that counter, or—

I bolted forward, took one step up on a box, another on a bent pipe, and lunged around the corner to grab a hanging fire escape ladder in a tiny alley. Rat clung to my sleeve with all four legs, and I pulled hard until I hooked a knee into the lowest rung, then reached down to grab Scarecrow’s upraised hand. Oh crap, she was heavy. That was a lot of wood. I had my knee under me, and I shoved my whole body up until her fingers closed on the lower rung. My knee now stung furiously, but I got my feet onto the rungs and climbed. Scarecrow lifted herself up enough to grab the next rung, and the next.

Seconds after that, we were all on the roof of a two-story building. The air still smelled like burning tires and mustard, but there wasn’t any yellow smoke up here. Leaning anxiously over the edge of the building, I saw the smoke turn the corner we’d come from. I also saw it flowing down the street ahead of us. We’d have been trapped down there, and I didn’t like the way walls gleamed when the smoke pulled away from them even for a moment. That rainbow shine reminded me of gasoline.

Yuck.

Oh, and crap. I had to say it again. “Thanks, guys.”

“We did it together, mistress,” Rat wheezed. He lay on his back theatrically, four little legs poking in the air as he let out the occasional cough. If he didn’t look at me so directly, I might have been worried.

Worrying about Scarecrow would be pointless. She crawled up to the edge beside me and stared down. “Pretty. It’s like an island in a sea of poison,” she piped.

Her cheer infected me. Maybe I just liked the description. Rooftops poked out of the surface, but that yellow fog hid the streets completely, like a sea of poison. That had me looking around, and while the chimneys and pipes and tanks and weirdly shaped buildings gave me a lot to see, I had to pay attention to one thing first. “Is that what I think it is, and does it go where I think it goes?” I asked Rat.

Held aloft by girders sticking out of the roof, a corroded metal tube as big as an adult crossed above this building, and the next building, and all the buildings I could see, down to the huge twisted metal building in the middle of town. From up here I could see it better, although dirty air blurred the lines until I couldn’t tell what were smokestacks and what were castle towers. The tube ran right to it. There were other tubes in the distance, angling in to the castle from the walls of the city, but this one ran right over our heads.

“Yes and yes, Miss Mary,” Rat coughed. Flipping over onto his feet, he jumped up and grabbed my skirt, climbing. “It has ladders, so there must be a way in.”

So it did. Amidst the struts and beams holding the tube off the roof were the rungs of a metal ladder. When I circled around and grabbed a rung in both hands Scarecrow reluctantly pulled herself away from the view and trailed after me. The ladder was thin, and I was already too high up for comfort, but height only gave me a momentary prick of anxiety. I climbed, and at the top, a loose grate already stood open.

The tube wasn’t solid. That is, it was only half a tube, the lower half, making this more a chute than a pipe. Rails ran down the center, which explained how it used to work. Nothing moved in either direction now. Nothing except us. Scarecrow and I followed the faint slope towards the castle, which looked less like a castle and more like a factory every minute. One of those freaky industrial messes with all of the tanks and pipes that you’d think they’d keep inside.

Whatever it was didn’t matter much. We were going there. I looked over the side, watching fog ooze around the buildings. It crawled after us as we passed beyond it, then slid away, a glob of yellow smoke creeping hungrily through the city. “It was chasing us. How did you get Elizabeth to the castle through that?”

“It avoided us then, Miss Mary. She’s the true and rightful princess of the city, and the fog knew it. It stayed away.” After a pause, he added, “Sorry.”

“That’s why I gave you to her. I knew which of us deserved to be a princess.”

“I messed it up,” he squeaked.

Dumb rat. Making me come out and say it. “Then we’ll make her a princess together.” His climbing brought his head up over my shoulder, and I rubbed the top with my thumb.

The chute really did run straight to the factory. I could see all the way to the end now, where it emptied into a bin on a second floor balcony.

’d half expected the chute to break dramatically, but Scarecrow and I hopped off into the bin without trouble, and climbed over the sides of the bin onto the balcony. This close, the building obviously wasn’t a castle. It was just an industrial nightmare in the shape of one. Railings and metal balconies looked like parapets, the squat outer ring looked like walls, and tanks and smokestacks looked like towers. The whole building seemed to be metal, too. Rusted horribly, but metal.

Case in point, a modern metal door led from the balcony into the building, or perhaps the other way around. I tried to turn the handle, but found it locked. When I tugged, metal snapped, and the door came open easily.

Inside, the building was hard to make sense of. The outer walls were just a shell. Inside, chutes and pipes and bulging machines filled up empty space around the edges, while rising tiers of metal platforms occupied the center. They didn’t look safe, held up on thin, rusty struts and loaded down with machines, but nothing looked safe. Parts of this factory still worked, and drills with teeth mashed rock on conveyor belts, glowing hot metal oozed into open bins, and steam whistled out of cracked pipe joints. Nothing was shielded for safety. This was a chaotic death trap a hair’s breadth from collapse.

“This place is awesome,” I whispered.

Scarecrow bounced enthusiastically on wooden heels. “I was born here!”

“Just so long as we don’t die here,” I replied,in good humor, but not exactly joking.

A narrow bridge connected the platform we were on with the second story of the inner tower, and I edged out onto it. It wobbled and squeaked, daring me to be incautious, so I marched the rest of the way and put a little extra stomp into every step.

The floor was mostly open, just crowded with tubes. Tubes merely as wide as my head connected tubes like fat barrels lain on their sides. A lot of joints where tubes joined had little wheels to turn or levers that did who-knows-what. Liquid gurgled inside the barrel next to me as I looked over this mess, and warmth radiated from its surface. In some places, scraps of white paint hadn’t entirely peeled off the corroded metal.

“So, Elizabeth is in here somewhere?” I asked.

He pointed upwards. “On the top floor, caught in the final test.”

‘Test.’ Uh oh. An expected uh oh, but still an uh oh. “How do we get up there, and what do I have to do to pass these tests?” Peering around some more, I squinted at a square metal cage. “It can’t be as easy as taking an elevator.”

“It is now that I have all the keys,” Scarecrow assured me.

“Which Elizabeth is carrying,” Rat corrected.

“Oh, right.”

“Answers, Rat. What do I have to do?” I repeated, trying to hold onto my patience. I didn’t like having mysterious tests hanging in front of me.

“We’ll take the stairs. On each floor we had to get a key to pass, but now they’re all unlocked.” His little pink hand pointed at the other end of the platform, where a fenced off staircase ran up to the next floor.

I picked my way between and over the spider web of pipes. “Just spill it, Rat,” I ordered him. I wasn’t going to spend an hour probing him with question after question to get at whatever he didn’t want to tell me.

He squirmed next to my shoulder, then sighed. “You can’t just walk in and become a princess, Mary. There are traps, challenges. Without them it’s not a story, is it? I knew they’d be deadly, and they were. I knew they wouldn’t be fair, and they weren’t. We needed a trick that proved Elizabeth’s worthiness, so I had her make a puppet, and I brought it to life with clockwork. The city’s full of scrap wood and hearts like hers. It was a sacrifice that couldn’t be killed because it wasn’t alive.”

My brow furrowed, and my eyes got that hot feeling as I started to glare, but Scarecrow piped up behind me, “And it worked! I got all the keys. It was easy!”

Hopping over pipes, Scarecrow rushed past me to the railing at the edge of the platform and pointed down. “Do you see those teeth grinding up rocks? The key was behind them. After I lost the first arm, we put a metal glove on the second arm. I lost that one too, but I got the key out.”

“She’s a puppet, Mary. She’s made of wood!” Rat put in desperately, “If she broke, Elizabeth just made her a new arm. She’s amazing. It only took a few minutes, and the new one fit right where the old one did.”

Spinning around, Scarecrow rushed over to one of the biggest tubes, a tank as tall as me laid on its side. “The second key was in here.” She dug her fingers into a hatch on the surface and pried it open. The smell that rushed out had a nasty, drain cleaner sharpness even from a distance. “This was the fifth one I tried. I needed a new arm after that, too, and a new head because the smell ate my face.”

I’d reached the narrow stairwell, and as promised, it had fence doors with obvious locks at the bottom and top, and also as promised, they stood open. “Come on, and don’t stick your hand in anything until we rescue Elizabeth. I can’t make you a new one,” I called over to Scarecrow.

She skipped over after me. Skipped rhythmically. She tried to play hopscotch with the pipes. I wanted to be mad and impatient, but it wasn’t happening.

I led her up the stairs to the next floor, and flinched at the heat. Nothing in the factory was safe, but molten metal poured from spouts into funnels here, or sat in tubs, baking. I wished Rat hadn’t said the elevator was useless, because it was much closer than the next stairway at the entire opposite end of the platform. I threaded my way through the glowing mess while it gave my face the painful crispy feeling of a bad sunburn. I just had to figure out how to get past one red hot pipe lying across the floor.

There was no way past that pipe. It had broken off its supports and laid right across the path to the stairs. The open end hung off the edge of the platform, pouring liquid metal down to cause havoc on the first floor. The open basins on either side looked just as hot.

Oh, and the door to the stairs was shut.

“Rat?” I asked cautiously.

“The test is resetting. See? The key is hanging by the door.” His voice sounded grim as he pointed. Yes, a big metal key hung on a hook next to the stairwell. We’d have to cross the pipe to get to it, and since the pipe was wide as the trunk of an oak tree and so hot the platform underneath it glowed and sagged, that wasn’t happening.