“Oh, thanks very . . . ,” began Joffrey as he took the water from the secretary. “Oh. I’m sorry. I need tepid water. I should’ve said as much.” He handed the bottle back. “Overly cold water is bad for your digestion. Did you know that?”
“No, I did not,” said the secretary. “Tepid water?”
“If you don’t mind,” said Unthank. He made every effort to retain close eye contact with the secretary; he couldn’t afford the man looking down at the computer screen behind the desk, which was now advertising the following words in fairly large block letters: YOU ARE ABOUT TO SET ALL SECURITY SYSTEMS TO BYPASS. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS? Y/N.
“Not at all,” said the secretary. He wheeled about and walked down the hall and out of sight. Joffrey rolled around the side of the desk nimbly and jabbed his finger down on the Y key of the keyboard.
RETINAL SCAN REQUIRED.
He glanced at the elevator. The readout above the doors was proclaiming, in Joffrey’s inner ear, that the elevator carrying Wigman was now on the EIGHTH FLOOR.
“C’mon, c’mon,” hissed Unthank as he positioned his face in front of the monitor’s webcam. “Take your pretty picture.”
ACCESSING . . . ACCESSING . . . PLEASE WAIT.
7. 6. 5.
Little droplets of sweat appeared on Unthank’s brow; he could feel his face growing pink and warm. His heart began beating wildly in his chest. “Tra la, tra lee,” he murmured helplessly.
ACCESS GRANTED. SECURITY SYSTEM BYPASSED. THANK YOU, JOFFREY UNTHANK.
“No, thank you, tra la, tra loo!” he nearly shouted as he heard the elevator ding. He shot upright and spun around, staring helplessly at the elevator doors as they slowly hissed open. Like a video paused on a particularly unflattering frame, Unthank’s body was frozen, contorted into a bizarre and unbecoming shape, his mouth stretched sideways and his hands cocked in surprise like a campy vampire in pre-attack mode.
He had come face-to-face with Brad Wigman; or rather, face-to-bald-spot, as Brad Wigman was bending over, wiping some offending speck from the front of his chinos, presenting his blond pate and revealing to Joffrey that the Chief Titan was, in fact, losing a little hair on top.
Unthank thought fast; before Bradley had lifted himself upright, Joffrey dashed to the side of the elevator doors, safely out of sight. He then watched as Wigman stepped out of the open elevator and into the lobby. Joffrey silently slipped into the car as the doors began to shush closed, taking Wigman’s place. He watched as the closing doors slowly concealed the Chief Titan’s broad shoulders. Still holding his breath, Unthank punched the number twenty-two on the elevator’s keypad and glanced up at the readout above the door; the numbers began climbing.
Joffrey smiled. He allowed himself a long, loud melody, sung from the depths of his belly.
And then: the first explosion.
CHAPTER 17
Where Everybody Was
When the explosion happened:
Joffrey was in the elevator, singing loudly to himself. He was thrown to the back of the car by the force of the detonation; the lights went out. A red bulb flashed on, bathing the elevator in a stark light as the elevator’s climb became stuttered and uncertain, powered by some unseen generator.
Desdemona Mudrak was standing by the desk on the top floor of the tower, picking at her cuticles and watching Roger as he casually read the titles of the book spines on the shelves and tried to intuit which one was the hidden lever to open the case. The explosion made a ripple-like tremor, decreasing in strength as it made its way up the massive structure of Titan Tower, until it reached the top floor and merely rattled the trophies in their cases and caused Desdemona and Roger to look at each other in a confused silence.
Martha and Carol were in the safe room behind the bookcase, absently munching on pretzels and preparing to dig into the final chapter of Dumas’s jailbreaking masterpiece. The sound of the explosion caused Martha to drop the book.
Wigman had just stepped into the ground-floor lobby of the tower, having just removed an obstinate strand of lint from his otherwise pristine and pleated khakis. He was surprised to find the lobby empty; even the night secretary was missing from his station behind the desk. Wigman was about to say something when the secretary appeared, holding a plastic bottle of water. They both looked very surprised to see each other and equally surprised to see no one else. The explosion’s epicenter was some yards off, just beyond the gate of the guarding wall, but its power was enough to completely shatter the tall plate-glass windows that surrounded the ground floor and throw the furniture, which had been purchased cheap at a liquidator’s warehouse, into the air like beanbag chairs freed of gravity.
Rachel Mehlberg was huddled behind the cover of a stack of pallets with a cohort of fellow saboteurs, holding an unlit bomb in her hand. The explosion sounded, echoing off the cement walls and chemical silos that surrounded the tower, and splashing the dark nighttime scene with bright yellow light and a very sudden and intense heat. She could feel the shock wave rumble her lungs and she nearly fell backward, balanced as she was on the balls of her feet in a crouched position. Someone caught her; it was Nico. He was smiling. “Now,” he said. He lit a match and held it to the fuse of Rachel’s bomb. She let out a loud, prehistoric “WHOOP” and threw it as far as she could.
Elsie Mehlberg was crouched in a square, anodized aluminum duct, barely three feet across, at the front of her fellow Unadoptables-turned-saboteurs: the duct-rats. They’d been waiting for the little blinking red light above the latticed gate that blocked their way to turn green, at which point, they were told, they could safely open it without incurring a shock that would turn them, instantly, to small fuzzy piles of ash. This was a fate that none of them were interested in experiencing. When the green light came on, it was Elsie’s job, being the first in line, to reach out gingerly and undo the latch. It opened with a yawning creak, happily absent of any kind of electric flash, and she began shuffling on her hands and feet down the squat corridor toward the white light in the distance. When the explosion came, it shuddered the building and a very loud noise echoed up the metal vent, causing all the children to duck their heads. The light in the distance blinked out, only to be replaced by a strange red one. Elsie continued forward.
Michael and Cynthia had just returned to the Forgotten Place, to their warehouse home. They’d come back to resume leadership over their fellow Unadoptables as the eldest of the clan; they’d arrived with fresh blankets and fresh food and a promise that their two missing members would soon be rescued. Just as they’d announced this, the high, cracked windows of the warehouse were suddenly illuminated with a glowing light and the children oooooohed their appreciation, knowing that the great operation had begun.
Prue McKeel was on a ship, a prisoner in a belowdecks hold, staring out a barred porthole. The explosion sounded like a distant thud; she saw a flash light up the night, outlining in white the monolithic shape of a tall tower. More explosions followed; many of them, in fact, but a mist had settled over the river basin and she could no longer see the outline of the tower, and the ship’s wooden hull groaned as it began to move its way out of the inlet and onto the surface of the river, safely concealed from prying eyes by the presence of the all-consuming mist.
The Earth was revolving, orbiting a distant sun, one of a series of planetary chunks of rock and magma spinning in the vastness of space.
CHAPTER 18
The Assault of Titan Tower
Several more explosions followed the first, but they seemed fairly ordinary at this point, with all the windows of the ground floor stove in and the entire honor guard of stevedores rushing from various outposts to stem the attack that had been launched. It was very dark, being sometime just after ten o’clock, and a dense fog had descended over the river valley and was rushing across the Industrial Wastes like someone laying out a heavy winter duvet.
Elsie Mehlberg tried to subdue her very present fear as best as she could, her knees now feeling rubbed
raw from the extraordinary stretch of ductwork they’d crawled so far.
“Pssst,” hissed a voice behind her; it was Ruthie. “How much farther?”
Left. Right. Left. Straight. Elsie was trying to remember the schema of the ductwork. “Not far, I think,” she said.
They’d arrived at a four-way intersection.
“We go left,” said Elsie. Her memory had served her well: It was only a few moments before they arrived at the vent covering. She peered through the mesh and saw that the vent let onto a stark white hallway.
A gust of hot air blew over them; the slightest smell of smoke was in the air. “Harry,” whispered Elsie. “You ready for this?”
“As I’ll ever be,” came the voice, holding up the rear of the foursome.
Ruthie, Oz, and Elsie pressed themselves sideways against the wall of the duct so Harry could squeeze, feet first, to the front. There, he placed his shoes against the metal vent covering and waited.
“That security system’s disarmed, right?” he asked.
Elsie, at his ear, nodded. “It should be,” she said. But she knew: Their lives were now entirely in the hands of Joffrey Unthank and his ability to keep his madness at bay. She imagined the worst-case scenario: They kick open the covering, the security system engages, they get nabbed after a feeble chase and are thrown into the safe room with Carol and Martha, the very people they’d intended to save. Or worse: They suffer the same fate that so many captured members of the Chapeaux Noirs had faced—disappeared. Drowned. Fed to the dogs. It was enough to send Elsie’s stomach spasming in fear.
Harry looked back at Elsie. “Should I just do it?”
“Wait for the explosion.”
Just after she’d said it, it came: an explosion; a soft thud sending another shock wave through the building. Harry coiled his legs back and gave the covering a tremendous kick; it went clattering into the hallway beyond. He quickly peeked out of the opening, jerking his head right and then left. “Clear,” he said.
“Go!” whispered Elsie, and Harry, grabbing the outside lip of the opening, slid himself out into the hall. The other three were quick to follow.
“Which way?” asked Ruthie once they’d all assembled in the hallway.
Elsie ran the schema in her mind. “Left,” she said.
“I’ll scout ahead,” said Oz. The boy disappeared around a corner, briefly, before scrambling back. “Stevedores!” he reported in the loudest whisper he could manage.
Sure enough, a gang of the overall-wearing giants came stomping into view. They crossed the children’s vision, running along an intersecting hallway. The duct-rats all froze in place; they’d had too little notice to do any kind of evasive action. Thankfully, whatever it was that the goons were off to do seemed more important than anything down this side hallway, and the four of them survived unnoticed. Elsie looked around at her friends with wide eyes. “Let’s be careful,” she said. “This place is jumping with those guys.”
Oz scouted again and gave the all clear, which they’d agreed would be a kind of clicking noise the boy was able to make with his tongue. It sounded like the rattle of a radiator. They rounded the corner and made their way to a second vent cover, which presented itself, as the blueprint promised it would, at ground level just a few feet past the intersection. Ruthie, charged with the task, pulled out the screwdriver and began removing the screws from the four corners of the vent. Oz and Elsie edged outward to either side, their eyes trained on the empty hallway.
The vent grille clattered to the ground and the four duct-rats, one after another, slid into the tunnel with Elsie in the lead. She paused a moment, collecting her thoughts. “Straight on,” she said. “It branches in a little ways.”
They scuttled down the short passage, listening to the reverberant sounds of explosions somewhere far below them. Elsie thought they sounded like they were getting closer. She’d been disturbed by an exchange between Jacques and Nico, just before they were leaving for the action: Jacques had suddenly, emboldened by promised success, been very adamant that they achieve the thing they’d long angled for: the complete destruction of Titan Tower. He’d said that they weren’t likely to get this close again. That the time to strike was now, to deal the final blow. Nico’d warned against it, saying it was too rash. Their objective, as they’d promised the Unadoptables, was to simply free the Chief Titan’s hostages, full stop. And that’s how they’d left it, but once the explosions started happening—louder and closer than Elsie imagined they would be—she couldn’t help wondering if that wasn’t the sound of Jacques getting his way.
But there was no time to fret: They arrived at a T-intersect; following the blueprint of Elsie’s recollections, the four duct-rats crawled leftward and soon arrived at a vertical duct. One after another, they began their upward climb, spidering themselves against the walls of the duct and inching, ever so carefully, toward a glimmering light some five floors above them.
The elevator climbed; Unthank watched the numbers change in the readout above the door. The chaotic noises of the ground floor: the breaking glass, the howling voices, the sound of a multitude of footsteps running desperately to the scene of the explosion—they all ebbed away until Unthank was alone with his thoughts in the silent space of the elevator car.
“Tra la, tra lee,” he sang to himself. He felt at the small black package in the left-hand pocket of his coat. The thing was still there. He sang again: “Tra loo, tra lee.” The elevator dinged its arrival at the twenty-second floor. He waited cautiously as the doors slid open, revealing an empty hallway.
He stepped out uncertainly, unnerved by the quiet on the floor. He looked at his watch and confirmed that despite the inconsistencies in the plan, he was still on schedule. A tentative beep could be heard somewhere in the distance, and he began walking toward it, humming all the while.
The duct-rats had arrived at another vent cover; the dusty light from the hallway cast a hatch-marked etching on the floor of the duct. They waited for another explosion; it came, and Harry kicked the cover out into the hall, sending a spray of chalky drywall dust onto the floor. The way was clear; they extricated themselves from the low conduit and stretched in the open air of the hallway. Despite their small size, each of them was feeling the pinch of having to crouch so low for so long; what’s more, the five-story free climb through the vertical duct had taken all the energy they could muster. They were breathing deeply, gulping in air.
“To the bathroom,” instructed Elsie, and they all filed toward the door, which, as she’d known, was only a few feet to their right.
The bathroom was sparklingly clean; truly, the work of an organization that prided itself on spotless, bacteria-free cleanliness. To the children, having spent the last several years of their lives either in an overcrowded orphanage, in a woodland cottage with no working plumbing, or in an abandoned warehouse with even fewer amenities, the sight of the immaculately clean restroom facility was enough to bring tears to their eyes. Or at least Harry’s.
“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” he mused aloud.
“C’mon,” hissed Elsie, who, of the children, had had the most recent exposure to the everyday cleanliness of twenty-first-century life. She was committed to her task, which involved the careful cataloging of the byways of a ductwork that spanned hundreds of yards and stories. One kid’s potty break could be enough to throw that off. “The vent’s in the ceiling. Over here.”
“Can I just go to the bathroom once?” pleaded Harry, in thrall to the beautiful, snow-white porcelain that presented itself throughout the restroom.
“No,” whispered Elsie. “Let’s go!”
“What if it’s just a number one?”
Elsie grabbed Harry by the arm and dragged him toward the end of the room, where a black grate interrupted the cool white of the tiled ceiling. It hung directly above one of the bathroom’s toilet stalls, and Elsie had seen enough movies to know that one must look both under the door and above it to see if anyone is hiding wi
thin. The stall was clear; Elsie and Ruthie scaled the opposing stall walls and sat there, balanced on the metal dividers. Oz stood on the back of the toilet and braced Ruthie’s slippered feet while she undid the screws holding the cover in place.
The screws dropped, one after another, into the toilet. Ruthie slid the grate aside, into the interior of the duct, and they all climbed into the hole in the ceiling. All of them but Harry.
He’d been so taken by the bathroom that he lingered a moment longer, apparently ogling the facilities, before the hissed whispers from his fellow duct-rats shook him back to attention. Sitting on the edge of the top of the stall, he kicked one foot down and flushed the toilet, apparently just to see it work. The sound masked the noise of the bathroom door suddenly swinging open, though Harry saw the stevedore, moments after, as he came around the corner and made his way toward the stalls.
Elsie, her head sticking out of the hole in the ceiling, saw the intruder too; it all seemed to be happening in slow motion.
A voice shouted to the stevedore from the hallway beyond. “Come on, Tony! We got to get down to the lobby. This ain’t a drill.”
“Hold up,” said the stevedore as he walked along the corridor of closed bathroom stalls. “Nature calls.”
Elsie jerked her head backward into the duct; peeking over the edge, she stared wide-eyed at Harry, who was poised, spread-eagled, across the top of the toilet stall. The toilet stall that the stevedore had hurriedly selected.
Elsie held her breath. She could hear Oz and Ruthie suck in theirs as well. She only imagined Harry was doing the same.
The stall door swung open. The stevedore gave a cursory look at the empty toilet bowl before dropping his overalls and turning around, sitting heavily on the white toilet seat. He cupped his forehead in his hands and stared at the space between his knees as Harry, pale and terrified, stood only a handful of feet above his head, his legs painfully tenting the distance between the metal walls of the stall.