Firebreak, p.28
Firebreak, page 28
The floor buckled and broke. A geyser of ice-cold saltwater sprayed into the sub with the force of a firehose, the flood already beginning to swirl around their feet. Vail hauled Elmer to his knees and started to drag him, the sub jolting this way and that as the Corpse played with it like a toy.
Amy brandished her tarot cards, the ones she’d never returned to the vault, and fought to find her center. They were on the edge of disaster. Everything hinged on this moment, on finding balance in the chaos. She took one deep breath and called the chant.
Another rupture opened in the side of the sub, metal tearing like cheap cardboard, gallons of water flooding in by the second. It was around their ankles now and rising fast, the Corpse intent on its feast, tearing away at the powerless machine to get at the tender meat and souls inside.
Amy spun the wheel lock and threw her shoulder against the bulkhead door.
***
The next thing she knew she was slipping, falling, sliding along the basketball court floor in a torrent of frigid, foamy ocean water. Elmer and Vail were ejected from the broom closet right behind her, spat back out onto dry land as the last echoes of the dying submarine, crushed and drowned, thundered into silence at their backs.
Vail lost hold of Elmer in the slippery spray and he rolled across the floor. He started to sit up, furious eyes crackling with amber lightning, the first syllable of a curse rising to his lips.
A brass-tipped cane slammed down against his sternum hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs and pin him flat on his back like a bug. One by one, the professors — Kamaka, Mallory, Lanca — loomed over him. Chalk held the other end of the cane in both hands, gazing down at Elmer with an air of grim finality.
“Good sir,” Professor Chalk said, “I recommend that you stay down.”
Chapter forty-one
“Ithought,” Chen Lan said, gazing across her desk at Amy and Vail, “about making a big production number out of this. You endangered your own lives, and that is not behavior I feel inclined to reward. That said, let’s be real: despite breaking a plethora of Academy rules, you and your friends also captured an elite Network operative and, quite possibly, saved this entire school. Expulsion is not in the cards, and it would be a waste of our time for me to pretend otherwise.”
Before either of the girls could speak, she raised a finger for silence.
“I have conferred with the faculty to decide upon an appropriate punishment. Because we still can’t open the beaches until this Shaddock creature is caught — which I expect won’t take long now that Elmer’s been dealt with — the two of you are going to assist Professor Kamaka on a special project. Namely, designing a new obstacle course for the year, on the back lawns.”
Amy sank an inch in her chair. The headmistress’s smile had a nasty, gleeful edge to it.
“Of course, in addition to designing it and building it by hand, you’ll have to help him test it. Thoroughly. Possibly hundreds of times. After all, if you two want to act like action heroines from a movie, you might as well get the acrobatics down, hm?”
“Death by cardio.” Vail grimaced. “Couldn’t we just…write an essay?”
“Oh, you’ll do that too. I want a full report on your confrontation with Elmer Donaghy, in detail, to pass on to our investors. They’ll be studying this incident for a while, I think, and the more information you provide, the better they’ll be able to put these lessons to work.”
“Ma’am?” Amy asked. “What happens to Elmer now?”
“At the moment, he’s enjoying our hospitality down in the dungeon—”
“We have a dungeon?” Vail blurted out.
“Don’t get overwrought, it’s just a small, heavily warded room with a barred door down in the sub-basements. Barely ever been used. We’re waiting until his partner is found, not to mention his inside contact. Once they’ve all been rounded up, the investors will send a recovery hopper and pick them up.”
“And then?” Amy asked.
“Not your concern, Miss Nettle. Suffice to say we won’t be hearing from them again.”
Amy sank into her thoughts for a moment. It wasn’t over. They’d cut the head off the snake — Shaddock would only be able to hide for so long without Elmer’s help — but this was far from finished.
“Let us talk to him.”
The headmistress lifted her eyebrows. “Why?”
“Vail and I have come face to face with Elmer more times than anyone at this school. We beat him twice. He’s an egotist. He wants — he needs — to prove he’s smarter than we are. I bet that if we give him just enough rope, he’ll reveal who the traitor is.”
Chen Lan pursed her lips, deliberating. “I don’t like it, but…I suppose there’s no real harm in it, either. All right. Go fishing. See what you can catch.”
***
“You should talk to him alone,” Vail said, as they paused before a stout, barred oaken door in the dismal sub-basement. Violet light from a single crackling wall-sconce washed over their faces. Professor Chalk was with them, on hand to supervise, and he held his silence as they worked out their strategy.
“Why?” Amy said.
“You’re gonna play on his need to feel superior, right? If we gang up on him, he’s already at a disadvantage. If you’re alone, he’ll feel like he might be able to prey on you. Heck, let him try to turn you against me. Maybe we’ll figure out how he recruited the traitor.”
Amy squeezed her hand. “If you’re sure.”
“Yeah, also, I really want to punch him in the face, a lot, and it’s not cool doing that to a person who’s tied up so…” Vail gave her a wan smile. “I’ll wait right here with Professor Chalk and listen in. Safer for everyone that way.”
Amy walked to the cell door, alone.
“Miss Curran,” the professor said. He gave Vail a tiny nod. “Good tactic.”
The heavy door groaned open. Amy stepped inside.
Elmer sat in a lone chair at the heart of the room, its legs bolted to the floor, his arms behind his back and his chest and legs wound with heavy chains. The chains glimmered in her second sight, encrusted with spells of muffling and warding, and the dank stone walls had been etched from floor to ceiling with sigils intended to banish outside energy and block any attempts at scrying. He wasn’t going anywhere, and no one was coming to his rescue.
He greeted her with a cold smile. One of his front teeth had been knocked out in the fight. His gums were inflamed and swollen, his incisors stained cherry-red.
“Come to savor your triumph?”
“No,” Amy said. That much was honest. “I have questions.”
“I have nothing for you but mysteries. So few pleasures are left to me now. Perplexing you will have to suffice.”
“Why do you do it?”
He looked surprised by the question. “Why? Not ‘how’?”
“Why?” she repeated.
He glanced to one side, dwelling in a memory.
“I was born on a waste-world, a generation after the necro-bombs fell. The air was toxic, the water poisoned. Nine out of ten children died before their fifth year of life. But I was different. Gifted. I had an…innate sense of the flows of life and death. I soon realized that when I felt sickly, I could just put my hands on one of my little playmates and drain him like a juice box. Take his life to sustain my own.”
“You were a killer, even as a child.”
“There was no malice in it. No more than a hunter killing a deer to put meat on his family’s table. I was a survivor. And that harsh early life taught me the truth that the petty ‘professors’ at this joke of an Academy, refuse to grasp because they’re too weak to face it. There is no higher order. There is no greater goodness, no cosmic powers of redemption. Kindness and love are selfish affectations, no more useful than lipstick on a pig. The cosmos is cruel and hungry. It’s dog eat dog all the way down.”
The words of an old poem she’d learned in school — Yeats, she thought — rose to Amy’s lips unbidden.
“Things fall apart,” she whispered, “the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
He responded with a scarlet-gummed grin. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. Yes. You understand. Morals and ethics are a fancy coat of lies that we wear to feel better about the fact that there is, quite simply, nothing out there, and no point to life beyond life itself. Nothing but the Kings of Man and their hungers. We are all animals, locked in an endless battle for resources and survival. Some of us just put on airs.”
“And…the Network?” she asked.
“When a team of their explorers found me, they found a natural-born survivor. They brought me into the fold, and I found a home that suited me.” His chains rattled as he shifted in his chair, giving her a sickly smile. “You know…I get the growing impression that you want more, so much more, than what this school can teach you. I saw it the first night we met, when I offered you those cards at the Night Market. Perhaps a new home would suit you, too.”
That’s it, she thought. Bite that hook.
“Sometimes I wonder,” she confessed, “what would have happened if I’d taken your offer that night.”
She knew he wouldn’t hear a lie in her voice, because it was the absolute truth.
“Wonderful things,” he whispered. “You know…you’re a survivor, too. I can tell. I’ve never taken an apprentice, but maybe, just maybe…”
He trailed off, sly, leaving her to fill in the rest. Amy saw a fresh angle of attack.
“I thought Mr. Shaddock was your apprentice.”
Elmer scrunched up his face like he’d bitten into a lemon.
“That buffoon? Please. He’s not even a Network man. He and his clan are mercenary scum. Useful for jobs that require heavy lifting and he’s a reasonably talented magician as long as I write out the instructions in simple words, but in the end, vermin are vermin. I came to the Night Market last year seeking more skilled hands. I wanted you. You and your friend — Vail, is it? And I think I almost had you both.”
He had come closer than Amy ever wanted to admit.
“But you did find someone,” she countered.
“I did. And you were never able to ferret them out. They still walk among you, close enough to breathe on the back of your neck, close enough to cut your throat. I wonder…are they standing by, ready to enact my rescue? Or will they resort to a backup plan, and begin spreading death and terror through these lovely halls? Do you think, Amy, that I was unprepared for the possibility of my capture?”
Now give him a little more line, she told herself. She let her shoulders fall, gazing down at the dark flagstones between them in a calculated pose of defeat.
“You beat me. I admit it. I spent month after month trying to figure out who the traitor was, and I got nowhere.”
“Ah, no shame to be defeated by a superior gamesman, young Amy. I’m sure you were simply asking the wrong questions.”
An invitation to ask the right ones, to let him gloat.
“Why?” Amy asked him.
“Why would we want an inside partner? That should be obvious.”
“No,” she said, “why did they say yes, knowing that the end result means leveling this entire school and everyone in it?”
His manic grin grew a notch. He was loving this.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“About an hour after sunset, why?”
“Oh, no reason. You know, you’re blossoming into quite a leader among your little friends. Well, more like a babysitter, under the circumstances, but everyone starts somewhere. Tell me, do you know what an urban legend is?”
He was dragging his heels on purpose. She knew it. He’d asked about the time for a purpose, and now he was off on a seemingly random tangent, keeping her in this room, locked in conversation while the world upstairs moved on. She didn’t know why, but there was nothing she could do but ride it out and see where it took her.
“Sure,” she said. “It’s like…a modern piece of folklore. A story, usually a horror story, that didn’t really happen but it’s told as if it did.”
“Quite. And do you know the story of the babysitter and the stranger who calls her?”
Amy had first heard that one around a Girl Scout campfire, deep in the woods outside Holybrook.
“A babysitter is watching a pair of kids,” she said. “She’s put them to bed for the night, and she’s watching TV downstairs when she gets a phone call. And the man on the other end, a stranger, says, ‘Have you checked the children?’”
“Mm-hm,” Elmer purred, gleeful. “And what happens then?”
“He keeps calling back. The same thing each time: ‘Have you checked the children?’ Finally she gets freaked out and calls the police. The cop on the other end of the line tells her to drop everything and get out, just run, as fast as she can…because the phone calls are coming from inside the house.”
“Tell me how it ends,” he said.
“There’s different versions, like any campfire story, but in the one I heard she gets out of the house and the police are waiting for her. But then they go inside and…” Amy paused, a cold chill spreading along the small of her back and prickling at her arms. “The children are dead. Chopped up in their beds. The maniac was hiding upstairs, trying to lure the babysitter up there so he could get her, too. The kids had been dead for hours, before he even made the first phone call.”
“Ah, poor children. Like those poor children you’ve gathered around yourself, Amy. I told you, when you interfered with me at the Night Market, that I’d remember each and every one of you. And so I must ask you a very important question, and I urge you not to get it wrong.”
Elmer leaned forward in his chair as far as his chains would let him, leering up at her.
“Have you checked the children?”
His mad, cackling laughter followed her, echoing off the dungeon walls, as she turned and ran. She burst through the door, meeting Vail and Professor Chalk with wide, panicked eyes.
“We have to find them. Now. Dalton, Colin, Olivia, Bahati. All our closest friends. Everyone who was there that night, the first time we fought.”
“What’s going on?” Vail said.
“Something terrible is about to happen.”
Or it already has.
Chapter forty-two
With the wildfire doused before it could do much damage and the students back safely behind the Academy walls, one wave of excitement had faded just in time for a fresh one to surge. Word about the showdown with Elmer was spreading through the grapevine fast, the topic of the hour, and Dalton had taken up station in the Academy foyer, basking in his share of the credit while a pair of pretty third-year girls hung on his every word.
“Yeah,” he said, leaning against the paneled wood and conspicuously flexing one bicep. “I wasn’t scared. You know, back home, everybody called me Danger Dalton, ‘cause…well, danger’s what I do best.”
In the dining hall, Mr. Orris clanged a pan in lieu of a working bell, calling the students to dinner.
“So, ladies,” he said, curling his arms around their waists as they walked together, “you have any after-dinner plans, or…”
He was interrupted by Olivia, red-faced and huffing as she hauled a heavy knapsack over one shoulder.
“Dalton,” she sighed, “I bit off a little more than I can chew and I could really use like, five minutes of help? Please?”
“Ladies,” he told the third years, “go on without me. I can never refuse a call for aid. That’s just the kind of guy I am.”
As soon as the girls were gone, he dropped the smooth routine, quickly pulling the canvas strap off Olivia’s shoulder.
“Hey, you know I’ve got your back. Literally. Wow, what’s in this thing?”
She smiled apologetically at him.
“Well, you know how Amy and Vail got assigned to help Professor Kamaka with the new obstacle course? I wanted to pitch in, because, I mean, fair’s fair. I didn’t realize he was going to ask me to carry construction gear out to the back lawn. I managed the first two, but this one’s just a little too much and I don’t want to tell him I can’t do it.”
“Hey, no worries,” Dalton said, shouldering the load. “I won’t tell if you won’t. Let’s drop this off real quick and grab some grub. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”
“Same,” she said, walking with him outside into the empty courtyard. Dalton flicked a glance up to the woolly gray stone walls that ringed the Academy grounds. He couldn’t shake an uneasy feeling, like he was being watched.
“Still creepy out here, knowing that rat-thing is on the loose,” he said. “Not that you need to worry. I’ll protect you.”
Olivia laughed. “Thank you, Danger Dalton.”
“Between you and me,” he murmured, “nobody actually ever called me that one.”
“Hey, Dalton, I…” Olivia bit her bottom lip as they walked together, alone, gravel crunching under their dress shoes. “You know I like you, right?”
“Yeah, I like you too. I mean, we’ve been friends for over a year now, so I hope that’s obvious.”
“No, I mean—” She shook her head. “Never mind. Hey, let’s take the gate, it’s faster if we go around the outside.”
They approached the Academy gates, the tall wrought iron bars hanging slightly open, the shadowy forests beyond. As they neared, Olivia spoke up again.
“Do something for me?”
“Sure, babe. Name it.”
“When you get back, tell them I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
He started to turn, brow furrowed. “Huh?”
Olivia shot forward, put both hands flat against his back, and shoved him through the gate.
As soon as he crossed the threshold, a half-dozen shock curses went off at once, erupting from the backpack and wreathing him in pure agony. He crashed to the ground, twitching, barely conscious as his arms and legs flopped in the dirt.
“Shh, shh,” Olivia said, crouching to scoop up the backpack. “Don’t try to talk. It’ll wear off, I promise. Believe me, I know. I found out about those shock traps the hard way. You’ll be okay.”
