Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

“Good question,” said Rachel. She turned to Elsie. “What does that mean?”

Elsie spoke up. “There’s little tunnels, right? Metal tunnels. That run through buildings. It’s where the air goes, where it comes from.”

“Metal tunnels,” repeated Jacques. “Where the air comes from.”

“Ductwork,” said Nico, a light coming over his face. “She means ductwork. The HVAC system.” He spun the blueprints around and began thumbing the pages. “Runs through the whole building. Access points at each floor.”

“We’ve gone over that,” said Jacques, realizing now what the girl had meant. “They’re too small for a man to get through.”

Rachel had caught on. She beamed at her sister. “Too small for a man to get through, yeah,” she said. “But not an Unadoptable.”

Jacques looked at Elsie, surprised, before he suddenly began laughing. Laughing loudly. The sort of laughing that racks the body an

d seems to ripple from its core. He held his hands over his stomach in an almost comical depiction of someone laughing hard and gasped for breath. His friends, the black-clad saboteurs in the room, all stared at him with little smiles pinpricking their faces. They’d never seen the man so jubilant, it was clear. The laugh was contagious; soon everyone in the room was laughing with Jacques, some more timidly than others, not entirely sure why they should be sharing in one man’s strange reaction to what amounted to a very good suggestion from a very small girl.

“We were lucky indeed to have crossed paths with you,” said Jacques. Nico had peeled aside the first pages of the stack of plans and was studying, with new eyes, the intricate ductwork that wove around Wigman’s fortified structure like veins around a heart. His finger tapped at each intersection, each access point where the renderings showed the HVAC tunnels connecting with the interior walls.

“Brilliant,” said Nico. “But flawed.”

Elsie frowned; it had been so simple on the Intrepid Tina episode.

Nico continued, “We’ll still need to get beyond the outer wall, to even get the kids into the ducts. And that security system is going to be a thorn in our side. Not to mention the fact that the vents likely end in vent coverings, impossible to remove from inside the ductwork. They’ll have to kick them out, and that’s just going to draw attention.”

“But still,” said Jacques. “It’s a good place to start.”

“There’s something to it,” Nico said. The saboteur continued to frown, though he nodded in agreement.

Michael had moved to Nico’s side and was hovering over the plans, searching them. He pointed to a ghostlike shaft that fell away from Wigman’s safe room. “What’s that?” he asked.

Nico squinted his eyes, trying to make sense of the splayed lines. “An elevator,” he said. He tapped his finger on it, twice. “Must be some kind of secret elevator, an escape route from the safe room. Leads down to the ground floor—doesn’t stop anywhere else.”

“So if we can get into there,” said Michael, “through the ducts, with the smaller kids, we can get them out the elevator. Wigman’d never know.”

Nico chewed on his lip before replying, “But the ducts don’t connect directly to the safe room. There’s a route we could map, but you’d still have to transfer a few times. Meaning you’d have to kick out the vent coverings and reenter the ducts at another place. Meaning you’d create an awful lot of clamber and likely set off the alarm—not to mention the fact that you kids’d be out in the open until they found the other access point.” He shook his head. “Too risky,” he said.

“That’s where your decoy detonations come in,” said Jacques, having recovered from his jubilant laughing fit. He was still smiling, and the tone of his voice suggested that he still very much liked the cut of Elsie’s idea. “We stage an attack—a real brazen one. Draw the stevedores away from their stations. Time the explosions so they happen right when the vent coverings are kicked.”

“What about the security system?” asked Nico. “I hate to rain on everybody’s fun parade here, but I seriously doubt that a state-of-the-art security system is not going to go off when you’re getting pieces of the wall kicked out from inside the ductwork.”

“Blow up the security center,” said Jacques. “Take it all down with explosives. Level the thing.” A mad gleam had appeared in his eyes.

Nico watched him warily. “That brings us back to Operation: Urban Renewal, Jacques. The whole place comes down and the kids get buried.”

“That’s not going to happen,” said Rachel. “You’re losing the plot here, guys.”

But before any reasonable alternative could be aired, loud noises suddenly came from the hallway: the sounds of shouting voices and heavy doors being thrown back violently. Everyone in the room turned to watch three members of the Chapeaux Noirs rudely drag a very sad figure into the room and throw him, even more rudely, onto the floor in front of the table.

“Jacques!” shouted one of the men. “We got ourselves an intruder.”

Elsie craned her neck around the bodies of the men in her sight radius to catch a glimpse of the person who’d just been thrown to the floor. She saw not so much a human being as a pile of greasy rags, lumped messily in a heap like a pile of bedding en route to the washing machine. She recognized the figure immediately—she’d seen him only the night before, wandering the Wastes. It was the mysterious Weirdo, the figure that was always loitering at the perimeter of the Forgotten Place. As the figure settled, a face appeared amid the heap: a tired, grizzled face, more unkempt facial hair than flesh, and a pair of sad, gray eyes, lined deeply in red. She immediately felt very sorry for the poor soul.

“The Weirdo!” hissed Michael, making the same connection Elsie had.

“Who?” barked one of the saboteurs, kicking absently at the man’s side.

“Easy,” chided Jacques, looking as much surprised by the stranger’s sudden appearance as his treatment at the hands of his fellow saboteurs. “He’s clearly no threat. He’s just some homeless man, found a way into the sewers for shelter.”

“We found him in the main pipe,” said one of the men. “He must’ve followed Nico and the kids in here.”