Whereas Drumm had been thrashing about in pain before, he stopped completely in his tracks. He stared dumbfounded at the syringe protruding from his flesh. This bought me enough time to whip out my knife and saw through the bolas around my ankles with a few heavy strokes.
Drumm snapped back into action, lifting his boot to stomp down on my chest, but I rolled away. His eyes quickly clouded over as the concentrated Blyss flowed through his body.
I defensively rose to my feet in front of the war memorial’s venerable oak tree. Drumm lunged for me. His meaty fist drew back, ready to crush my skull in a single blow. The Blyss hadn’t sapped his strength yet.
It had, however, dulled his reflexes. I easily saw the punch coming and dodged left. Instead of intercepting my face, his powerful cross connected with the tree trunk. A loud crack resounded on impact, and I couldn’t be sure whether it was the bones shattering in his hand or the oak tree splitting down the middle.
The Blyss must have overloaded Drumm’s nerve endings by then, because he didn’t even cry out. He held his mangled hand up to his face in awed bewilderment, studying his fingers, now twisted in unnatural directions. Two of his knuckle bones protruded from the skin.
I watched the fight drain out of him. In fact, in his drug-induced haze, he seemed to forget that I was standing a few feet away with a knife gripped in my hand. He took a few uneasy steps before he collapsed against the bell, the back of his skull clanging against the bronze as he slipped into a sitting position against the stone base.
Even as tears streamed from his eyes, Drumm unexpectedly began to laugh, a high-pitched giggle as though he’d heard the funniest joke. “He sent me to collect a brother and a sister,” he said between gasps, “and you both stuck me with a syringe. Like a couple of fucking doctors.”
The laughter stopped abruptly as the high from the Blyss passed. His expression sobered and his chest rapidly huffed in and out with shallow, hyperventilating breaths. Soon, his chest stopped moving at all. In a final moment of lucidity, he looked me straight in the eyes and whispered, “I hate this job.”
Then his head lolled to the side. The gaze from his dead eyes landed on the crack he’d made in the oak tree.
As I stared at the mercenary’s corpse, my whole body trembled. My survival instincts screamed run, run, you have to run, but I stood frozen, trying to process that the soulless vessel in front of me had been a breathing, thinking human being just a minute ago. Trying to process that I had been the one who’d snatched the life from him.
I wanted to feel some wave of victory, the thrill of vengeance. This man had played a role in the murders of both Smitty and my brother. Given a few more seconds, he would have killed me, too. I could still feel the tender spot on my neck where he’d pressed the needle.
So why, I asked myself as I touched my cheeks and my fingers came back wet, was I crying?
For the first time, I truly grasped the long and ugly road ahead of me. This wasn’t just a race to find the Sapphire, it was a game of last man standing. My family would be in grave danger so long as Grimshaw and Aries and Nox still breathed.
Before this would all be over, the three of them would have to go. Did I have it in me to see this through to the end?
I gathered my wits enough to wipe down the syringe’s handle to remove any fingerprints. I slipped the needle into Drumm’s hand, which even in death, had closed into a fist.
In the direction of the museum, I heard the barking of dogs. I sprinted across the park, heading toward the light.
Meanwhile, at Nox Manor
Horace Nox stood inside an eight-foot-tall glass cylinder, completely naked except for the electrodes on his chest and neck to monitor his vital signs. Encased within the human-sized test tube, he watched transfixed as the opaque, silvery liquid bubbled up out of the metal grate beneath his feet. The fluid lapped at his toes, rising around his ankles, then began its ascent up his shins. In less than sixty seconds, he would be totally immersed in the cold slime.
Someone tapped on the glass. The man on the other side looked like a distorted reflection of Nox, taller and awkwardly shaped, as though the crime lord was gazing into a funhouse mirror. He had a pronounced hunch in his upper back that was visible beneath his lab coat, and the left side of his face twitched uncontrollably. With great difficulty, Wilbur Nox stuttered out the same seven words that he’d repeated to Horace so many times since they were kids:
“I’m g-going to f-fix you, little br-brother.”
But Horace knew that the chemical soup creeping past his knees was no cure. It was just a temporary patch to get his rotting body through another month. The liquid was fully oxygenated and breathable, an experimental treatment that had originally been developed for the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients. “At f-first,” Wilbur had warned him, “it will feel like you’re dr-drowning.”
Once the serum had filled his airway and lungs, it would deliver its medical payload, a series of plant-based drugs that Wilbur had genetically engineered to suppress the symptoms of Horace’s terminal condition. A fungal spore to reduce pulmonary inflammation. Cedar resin to restore elasticity to his alveoli. A mutation of rhubarb that would slow but not entirely inhibit the growth of the strange tumors that had networked through his torso.
Nox shivered as the liquid climbed over his buttocks and genitals and up his abdomen. When it reached his neck, he drew in a deep breath and pressed his palm to the glass to brace himself. On the other side, Wilbur placed his hand reassuringly over his brother’s. The serum soon covered Nox’s face, and the laboratory outside the tube disappeared through the murk.
When Nox could hold his breath no longer, he opened his mouth and inhaled.
The first minute truly did feel like drowning. Nox thrashed wildly, pounding his fists on the cylinder wall, screaming muffled pleas for Wilbur to open the watertight doors.
But then, miraculously, Nox felt a calm settle over him. The liquid coated the air sacs in his lungs, nourishing his oxygen-starved bloodstream. He could breathe again, just not the way he was accustomed to. It was uncomfortable, but his panic subsided and he let himself float, suspended in the watery abyss.
An indeterminate time later, a loud clack echoed up from below his feet. The fluid rapidly drained out of the tube and the cylinder doors parted. Nox collapsed out onto the lab floor.
On his hands and knees, he vomited what felt like a gallon of liquid onto the white tile. Toward the end, as he hacked the final remnants from his airway, he could see where the serum had been tinged dark red, stained with the bloodied mucus it had cleaned from his lungs. This would allow him to breathe easier for a time, until the mutation filled his insides with more detritus. Then it would once again feel like he was breathing through gravel.
Wilbur rubbed his brother’s back with a spindly hand. “I’m s-sorry,” he stammered. “I w-wish I could g-give you more than b-borrowed time.”
Nox actually found himself smiling. “Every day of my life has been borrowed time. But soon, I’ll steal eternity.”
A half hour later, Nox wandered into a room in his mansion labeled “Chrysalis.” Its whitewashed walls contained only two objects: a sledge hammer and the gnarled remains of a secondhand wheelchair, the metal prison that had confined Nox for much of his childhood. Once a week, he came here to take a crack at it with the hammer, to the point that it was hardly recognizable as a wheelchair anymore.
Nox picked up the shaft of the sledgehammer but hesitated. He felt so refreshed from his treatment that maybe he didn’t need to take a swing today.
The phone in his pocket vibrated with an incoming voicemail. At first all he could hear was the barking of hounds, before Pearce finally said in his croaky Southern twang, “Drumm’s dead. Girl’s gone.” The line went dead after that. Pearce wasn’t much of a talker.
Nox let the cell phone clatter to the floor. With a scream that reverberated out of the room and across the indoor jungle, he hoisted the sledge hammer over his head and drove it down onto
the warped wheelchair with all his might—splitting it right down the middle.
Back at the Dollhouse, I knew that something was wrong the moment I stepped out of the elevator. The condo’s door had been left ajar, a sliver of red-tinged light glowing through the crack. I could hear the rustling movements of somebody inside, as well as the clatter of something glass. My hand flew to the knife on my keychain and I held it out in front of me. Had Nox discovered my whereabouts? The eighth journal page was still in there and I would protect it at all costs.
As I edged closer, though, I could hear something else: a familiar song from my childhood, one of my mother’s holiday favorites. I’d recognize the dulcet tones of Andy Williams singing “Sleigh Ride” anywhere.
I folded up my knife and pushed open the door.
The inside of the condo had transformed in the few hours I’d been gone. Evergreen garlands decorated the ceiling trim, intertwined with strings of red lights. An enormous mound of gingerbread cookies dominated the kitchen counter, and the sweet aroma of another batch in the oven permeated the air.
Most perplexing of all was the Christmas tree by the windows, so tall that the halo on the angel topper grazed the lofted ceiling. Atlas balanced precariously on a step ladder, hanging a series of Norman Rockwell ornaments. When he spotted me, he froze. “I can explain,” he said.
I leaned against the doorway. “What is there to explain? You celebrate Halloween a little differently than the other kids at school, and that’s okay. I mean, I typically carve pumpkins and decide whether I’m going to be a cat or a sexy ninja this year, but if you want to go crazy with tinsel and holly, who am I to judge?”
Atlas glared at me. “Are you done?”
I flicked the mistletoe hanging over the door. “Oh, now I see what’s really going on here. I’m into it, but we need to lay a few ground rules. First, you can call me Mrs. Clause, but only if you decorate the bed like a sleigh. Second, as soon as reindeer get involved, I am out. Number three—”
Atlas jumped down off the ladder. “Careful: The fortuneteller at my tenth birthday party told me I’d marry a sarcastic girl one day.” He frowned. “She also told me I’d grow up to be a dolphin trainer.”
I wandered over to the cookies, and after poking one to make sure it wasn’t made of wax, I popped it into my mouth. “You should have been a baker instead. But seriously, why does the condo look like the Polar Express just threw up on it?”
“Boss’s orders.” Atlas stood back and admired his tree. “They’re having trouble selling a few condos downstairs, so they decided that with the holidays coming up, we should dress up the model unit to feel more welcoming and festive.”
“Uh-huh,” I mumbled through another mouthful of cookie. “And when a realtor brings a family through here and they find me sleeping in the master bedroom?”
Atlas shrugged. “I’ll just tell them I went overboard when they said I should make the model unit feel ‘lived in.’” He slapped my hand away as I reached for a third cookie. “Easy on the props, Cookie Monster. These need to last through October. How was your visit to the hospital?”
My hand unconsciously drifted to the sore spot on my neck. I pictured my harrowing escape through the museum and the gardens, then Drumm’s dead eyes at the War Memorial. “Dull,” I replied. If I wanted to preserve my freedom to come and go from the condo without Atlas trying to play bodyguard, lying was my only choice.
Atlas’s jaw drew tight. He’d obviously been worrying about me. “I can’t tell you not to visit your sick sister. But next time I wish you’d let me escort you, rather than making me come home to find nothing but a scribbled note.”
“Escort me?” I echoed. “Back that horse up, Don Quixote. You’re not my bodyguard; you are my history textbook.”
The moment I said it, I knew I’d gone too far. Atlas wouldn’t meet my gaze. He took a potholder out of the drawer and dropped it onto the counter. “Take the next batch of cookies out of the oven when the timer goes off,” he said quietly. “Your history textbook will be in the second bedroom trying to solve your next riddle for you.” He marched over the carpet and peeled it back, the hiding spot where we’d agreed to store the loose journal page.
I knelt beside him and laid my hand gently over his. “I’m sorry. I just had to say goodbye to Echo for the foreseeable future, so I’m wound a little tight. I shouldn’t have unloaded on you like that.”
“How’d she take it?” Atlas didn’t move to retrieve his hand from under mine.
“As well as any sick kid would after her older sister said she had to go off the grid.” I bit my lip to stop it from trembling. “The thing is, Atlas: Echo needs you. I need you. I inherited all of my father’s street smarts, but absorbed very little of Jack’s book smarts, so I could stare at this riddle for days and get nowhere. But with you, Echo actually has a shot.”
Atlas squinted. “Just to be clear, you’re saying that I’m the brains and you’re the brawn? Because that wouldn’t be at all emasculating.” Still, the idea didn’t seem to offend him.
“The point is,” I continued, “that I need to minimize the opportunities Nox and his people have to see us together. Right now, he has no idea where I am and who I’m working with. But if he identifies you, he will figure out where you work. He will find this condo. He will corner the two of us. And then it will be that bastard who’s being healed by the Sapphire, while Echo …” I trailed off. A tear fell from my face onto the riddle’s laminate coating.
Atlas wiped the wet trail from my cheek. Then he asked me something that made no sense. “Home Alone or Elf?”
When I stared blankly at him, Atlas hopped over the couch. He returned from the coffee table clutching an armful of DVDs and dropped them onto the carpet. They were all holiday-themed movies.
Atlas touched the one titled Christmas Vacation. “This is one of my favorites, but it doesn’t feel like a Chevy Chase kind of night. Scrooged is a little too dark, Mixed Nuts is a little too wacky, and It’s a Wonderful Life is way too sappy. So I figured if we wanted the right balance of funny and hopeful, our best bets are Will Ferrell running around Manhattan in an elf suit or Joe Pesci getting hit in the face with a can of paint.”
“You want to watch a movie?” I asked. “Right now?” My eyes drifted to the journal page.
“Trust me, I’m going to solve it,” Atlas promised. “But I’ve been working on that riddle all day, searching keywords, poring through library texts, and racking my brain as I put up all these decorations. I know it so well that I can recite it to you backwards. Whenever I hit a problem like this I can’t solve, the most helpful thing I can do is to empty my mind and come back fresh. Something tells me that you could use a few hours of non-thinking yourself.”
He was right. Even if I wanted to search tirelessly for the Sapphire, exhausting ourselves would only be counterproductive.
So I pointed to a DVD in the pile. “This one.”
Atlas actually looked impressed. “White Christmas—a classic.”
I shrugged. “Between Bing Crosby’s sultry eyes and Danny Kaye’s dance moves, how could a girl choose anything else?”
“You have good taste in men,” Atlas said.
I barked out a laugh. “My mother might disagree.”
Next thing I knew, we were curled up on opposite ends of the couch, watching a movie I’d probably seen fifty times as a child, while the heat from the fireplace warmed the room. On screen, Bing Crosby sang in his smoky baritone to his troops, who were huddled up in the war-scarred shell of an old city.
For the first time, I truly understood this part of the film. Even when your world was falling to rubble around you, it was human nature to grasp for small, familiar comforts.
Yet oddly I was more familiar with this movie than with the boy who I was watching it with. I blurted out, “Who are you, Atlas?”
He smiled patiently. “Don’t you think one riddle is enough for the night?”
I shook my head. “If you’re going to contin
ue to harbor me as a fugitive, I need to get to know you three-dimensionally. At the moment you’re just sort of a paper doll.”
“You want, like, Atlas trivia?” he asked through a yawn. “Like how I enjoy the smell of lawnmower exhaust, or that I was afraid of the moon until I was five years old, or how I find the sensation of plucking out a stray hair to be strangely pleasant? I can keep going but it only gets weirder from here.”
I planted my hands on my hips. “Take this seriously.”
Atlas drummed his fingers on the armrest and his eyes lit up. “Well, if I’m some sort of enigmatic onion to you, I know just the game to start peeling away the layers.”
He rummaged through the coffee table drawer until he found a deck of what looked like playing cards. With a flourish of his hands, he rapidly shuffled the deck, then held them out for me to pick one.
When I flipped my chosen card over, there was no suit or number. “Who was your first kiss?” I read aloud. “Omit no details.” It was then I realized that the cards were a series of icebreaker questions.
“Ooh, a juicy one.” Atlas folded his hands under his chin and waited for me to launch into a story. “Do tell.”
I didn’t take the bait. “I’m not sure that a drinking game intended for a sorority mixer was what I had in mind. This is like the Milton Bradley version of ‘getting-to-know-you.’”
“Call me crazy,” Atlas said, “but I think you can learn a lot about a person based on whose tongue they first invited into their mouth.”
In his defense, I found this to be an ironclad argument. “His name was Chad Barnes.”
“He was your first kiss, too?” Atlas mock-pouted. “And he told me I was special.”
I brandished the card. “I am on the precipice of paper-cutting your jugular right now.” Atlas held up his hands in surrender. “In the seventh grade,” I continued, “I was best friends with his sister, Melissa. Chad was in eighth grade and one of those junior high heartthrobs who develops earlier than everyone else, so we all had his name doodled in our notebooks with hearts around it. Melissa had a sleepover for her thirteenth birthday. Later that night, we were all passed out on her living room floor. I woke up when I heard the floor creaking. The TV was still on, muted, so I could see Chad tiptoeing his way through the labyrinth of sleeping bags.”