Jacaranda (The Clockwork Century 6)

“Everyone stay calm!” shouted the Ranger.

“I can do something…” It was Violetta, so yes, her sister was the one crying. “Please, let me pass,” she urged as she struggled through the press of frightened people. “Please, move—let me feel my way…there are candles in the office.”

“I have some matches, sweetheart,” Korman told her.

“Save them. I don’t need them, yet. There are some in the manager’s drawer.”

He struck one anyway, and for a brilliant white flare of a moment, there was light around his face. He held it aloft, and it showed a little more. But only a little. Only more frightened faces, outlined against the blackness of the hotel lobby.

Violetta tripped over something or someone, scrambled on the floor, and kept moving. The padre tracked her with his ears, wishing he could hear her movements better over the rain, and wishing he could be helpful, but he didn’t know what to do—and the girl knew her way around better than he did.

The match went out, and the Ranger struck another one.

The padre counted four faces, five faces, six. All eyes wide, every pupil as large as the face on a watch. There were twelve men and women, all together. Wasn’t that right? Twelve in all, now that Emily Nowell was gone.

Heaven seemed to like that number. Maybe hell did, too.

The girl’s hands slapped against the front of the counter; she drew herself up it, then along it, then behind it. “I’m almost there,” she relayed.

The match went out.

The Ranger withdrew another one, but the padre told him, “Don’t. She’s right, you should save them. We may need them tonight.”

“We have a few back here at least, but we can always use more! Keep them, do not waste them!” Violetta agreed.

The padre followed the sound of her voice, and let it lead him to the counter in her wake. He followed her voice, because it made him feel like he knew where he was, despite the blackout. She was at the counter. She was behind the counter. She was entering the office on the far side of it.

So when he trailed behind her, he could believe that he was far from the spiral mosaic on the floor, as far as he could get—even though it wasn’t true, and he was still well within its reach. It might have been some irrational, human instinct, the idea that he could scale the counter and escape the floor—maybe escape its carnivorous design. If he could get up higher, remove his feet from the tiles and the designs, it might not be able to touch him.

It was a stupid notion, but still he clung to the counter’s edge, and took some slight reassurance from the cool marble top so hard and unyielding beneath his fingers. But he did not climb atop it.

Violetta reached the office door, and found it locked. She swore in Spanish, something about her mother and the keys, but with a few shoves of her shoulder and one solid kick, she’d knocked the knob free and let herself inside. It was only a little crash, when the door snapped back and beat itself against the office wall. It was barely a thing worth mentioning, in that hall where the rain and the rumbling sky were the only constants, and the wind came and went, screaming obscenities.

A minute or two of fumbling—the padre could hear it, between the rise and fall of the weather—and Violetta emerged, bringing a lit candle. She also brought four others unlit, gathered up in her free hand. “This was all I could find,” she said with a note of apology. “But it’s better than nothing.”

“Very good, thank you,” the padre told her. “We should’ve done this at the start, but I guess we ran out of time, didn’t we?”

She handed one to him, and he held it still while she shared her fluttering spark. Then he passed it off to the Ranger, and eventually all five candles burned brightly, spread throughout the lobby so that there was light enough to see by—even if there wasn’t much to see.

One by one, and sometimes two by two, the men and women chose seats around the lobby, as near to any given candle as possible. The padre, the nun, and the Ranger shared a candle with Violetta—who remained behind the counter with the inertia of duty.

She rubbed her hands together like they were cold, and paced back and forth along the counter’s length, never quite leaving the edge. She let the tether of the candle keep her there with them, and sometimes she prayed quietly in Spanish. Sometimes she only stared from corner to corner, from candle to candle, and back to the spiral design on the floor.

Finally she looked up at the padre, meeting his eyes directly. She blurted out, quietly enough to sound like a private request: “Tell me, Father—does it talk to you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The hole in the floor, in the tiles, you know what I mean. It’s supposed to be a design, like a whirlpool…but it’s not. It’s a mouth, and the devil uses it to speak from below.” She withdrew then, the look on her face implying she wished she could take her question back. “Sometimes…when it thinks I’m not watching…sometimes I think it moves. Does that sound crazy, too?”

He shook his head. “Not at all.”

“And it’s no trick of the light, either,” she added.

“No, no trick of the light.”

The nun and the Ranger both glared toward the dark spot on the floor as if they dared it to budge, but Violetta told them, “It only shifts when you’re not paying attention. I only noticed it after a week or two, after taking these jobs at the counter, and standing here with the books—staring at it, and looking away. The shape changes, like it’s…like it’s…spinning. Like when you pull the plug of a drain,” she added brightly, not because it was a lovely image, but because she’d found the perfect comparison. “

The way the water goes, as it falls down the hole in the middle. That’s what it does, very slowly.”