“What is it?” I asked again, staring at the creature. It was all fur and claws.
“Dunno,” said the assistant. “But it was waiting for you.”
It was nothing I could identify—it had a lumpy body, fanged teeth, and giant bulbous eyes, and even they seemed to be covered with fur. I wondered if Caul put it there—if maybe he’d anticipated his brother’s plan and booby-trapped all the shortcuts into his Panloopticon.
The stream carried the body away.
“Bentham said he didn’t have any guns,” Emma said.
“He doesn’t,” the assistant said. “This one’s mine.”
Emma looked at him expectantly. “Well, could we borrow it?”
“No.” He put it away. Pointed to the cave. “Go through there. Retrace your steps backward to the place we came from. Then you’ll be with the wights.”
“Where will you be?”
He sat down in the snow. “Here.”
I looked at Emma and she looked back, both of us trying to hide how vulnerable we felt. Trying to grow a sheath of steel around our hearts. For what we might see. Might do. Might be done to us.
I descended into the stream and helped Emma in. The water was numbingly cold. Bending to peer into the cave, I saw daylight glinting dimly at the other end. Another changeover, darkness into light, pseudo-birth.
There appeared to be no more toothy creatures waiting inside, so I lowered myself into the water. The stream rushed up over my legs and waist in a freezing swirl that took away my breath. I heard Emma gasp behind me as she did the same, and then I grabbed the lip of the cave and slid inside.
Being immersed in cold, rushing water hurts like being stabbed with needles all over your body. All pain is motivating, and this type especially so; I scrabbled and pushed myself through the stone tunnel with a quickness, over slick sharp rocks and low under-hangs, half choking as water flowed over my face. Then I was out, and turned to help Emma.
We jumped out of the freezing stream and looked around. The place was identical to the other side of the cave except there was no assistant, no bullet casings in the snow, no footprints. As if we’d stepped through a mirror and into the world it reflected, minus a few details.
“You’re blue,” Emma said, and she pulled me up onto the bank and held me. Her warmth coursed through me, bringing feeling back to numbed limbs.
We walked, retracing every step of the route we’d taken. We found our way back through the brambles, up the hill, past the waterfall—all the scenery just the same except for the THIS WAY sign Bentham had set out for us. It was not here. This loop did not belong to him.
We arrived again at the small forest. Darted from tree to tree, using each one as cover until we reached the place where the path ended and became a floor and then a room, framed and hidden by a pair of crossed firs. But this room was different from Bentham’s. It was spartan—no furnishings, no poppy-laced wallpaper—and the floor and walls were smooth concrete. We stepped inside and searched the darkness for a door, running our hands along the walls until I happened to hook a small recessed handle.
We pressed our ears to the door, listening for voices or footsteps. I heard only vague echoes.
Slowly, carefully, I slid the door open a crack. Inched my head through the gap to peek out. Here was a wide curving hall of stone, hospital clean and blindingly bright, its smooth walls toothed with tall, black, tomblike doors, dozens of them curving away sharply.
This was it: the wights’ tower. We had made it inside the lion’s den.
* * *
I heard footsteps approaching. Pulled my head back inside the door. There was no time to close it.
Through the crack I glimpsed a flash of white as a man walked by. He was moving quickly, dressed in a lab coat, head down to read a paper in his hand.
He didn’t see me.
I waited for his footsteps to recede and then squeezed into the hall. Emma followed, pulling the door shut behind us.
Left or right? The floor ran uphill to the left, downhill to the right. According to Bentham we were in Caul’s tower, but his prisoners were not. We needed to get out. Down, then. Down and right.
We turned right, hugging the inner wall as the hallway spiraled downward. The rubber soles of my shoes squeaked. I hadn’t noticed the noise until now, and in the amplified quiet of the hard-walled hallway, each step was cringe-inducing.
We went on for a short while, and then Emma tensed and threw her arm across my chest to stop me.
We listened. With our footsteps silenced, we could hear others. They were ahead of us, and close. We rushed to the closest door. It slid open easily. We dove inside, closed it, threw our backs against it.
The room we’d entered was round, walls and ceiling both. We were inside a huge drainage pipe, thirty feet wide and still under construction—and we weren’t alone. Where the pipe ended and broke into rainy daylight, a dozen men sat on a pipe-shaped scaffold, staring at us, dumbfounded. We’d interrupted them during their lunch break.
“Hey! How’d you get in there?” one shouted.
“They’re kids,” said another. “Hey, this ain’t a playground!”
They were American, and they didn’t seem to know what to make of us. We didn’t dare respond for fear that the wights in the hall might hear us, and I worried that the workers’ shouting would attract their attention, too.
“Have you got that finger?” I whispered to Emma. “Now seems like a good time to test it out.”
So we gave them the finger. By which I mean we put on the dust masks (wet from the stream but still serviceable), Emma crushed a tiny bit of Mother Dust’s pinky, and we walked down the pipe toward the men and attempted to launch the powder at them. First Emma tried blowing it out of her cupped hand, but it just swirled into a cloud around our heads, which made my face tingle and go a bit numb. Next I tried throwing it, which didn’t work at all. The dust, it seemed, wasn’t much good as an offensive weapon. By now the pipe builders were growing impatient, and one had jumped down from the scaffold to remove us by force. Emma tucked the finger away and made a flame with her hand—there was a poof! as Emma’s flame ignited the dust hanging in the air, turning it instantly to smoke.