Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

“Good. Bon. Your life depends on it.” Jacques then turned to Nico. “Hopefully she won’t take out any of your fellow saboteurs.”

It had been a sticking point between them, having Rachel on the bombing squad. Jacques had thought it was reckless enough to send children into the tower via the ductwork; it was another thing to actually employ an unseasoned teenager as a bomb thrower.

“Elle peut le faire, Jacques,” said Nico, steely. “Elle a besoin d’un peu de pratique, c’est tout.”1

“Nous n’avons pas le temps pour la pratique. Nous frappons ce soir.”2

Rachel walked up to the men and stood, knowing they were saying something about her. Her ninth-grade French was not enough to unscramble the men’s quick speech. She glared at the two of them, until one of them spoke in English:

“Well,” said Nico as he faced Jacques defiantly. “I hope your own pet project, the madman, has pulled himself together enough to not get us all killed.”

“He’ll do. Oh, he’ll do. And I’ll be glad to be nearer to him than to any bomb-throwing teenyboppers.”

Teenyboppers? thought Rachel. Does anybody say that anymore? She cleared her throat, hoping to get their attention, to no avail. They continued to argue like she wasn’t even there.

“Listen, this is your big project, Jacques. This is the chip on your shoulder.”

“Well, it’s not quite happening the way I’d have liked it. You had to go and make a promise to a bunch of children, that’s what’s got this whole thing going, you know.”

Rachel had had enough. She lifted the iron bomb to her neck, bent her knees and, recalling Nico’s instructions, threw it easily forty feet across the room, letting out a very unseemly grunt in the process. The unlit bomb landed with a loud clatter some ways down the hall that led from the room, and the sound seemed to bring all activity in the chamber to a state of sudden stasis.

“We’re not children,” said Rachel, suddenly aware she had the attention of the whole group. “And I’m not a teenybopper.” She looked over to where the bomb had fallen and, having surprised herself, exclaimed, “That’s pretty far!”

Nico smiled. He looked at Jacques. “See, comrade? She’ll do just fine. And now we know: When the bombs need throwing, look to les ados.”

The room returned to its former state of commotion; Rachel retrieved the bomb and continued pra

cticing her throw against the pile of flour sacks. Before long, several other saboteurs, apparently having been put in mind of their own lack of practice, joined her, and a good-natured competition soon sprouted.

Over in the corner, by a stack of emptied crates labeled EXPLOSIVES, sat a hunched figure, clad in a rumpled argyle sweater-vest, shuffling through a deck of white index cards. Like an immobile object in the midst of a hectic time-lapse video, he remained still, fixated solely on the cards in his hands, while the activity in the room spun around him. Elsie watched him for a time: the almost glacial pace of his reading, the way he mouthed the words of whatever had been written on the index cards. She broke away from her group of gabbing duct-rats and walked over to the man.

“Hello, Mr. Unthank,” she said.

The man seemed not to have heard her; he continued to mumble to himself, reciting the words on the cards in a low murmur. She repeated herself.

“Mr. Unthank.”

He paused and looked up at her. His eyes were wide and searching. He seemed to Elsie like a confused and scared animal.

“Do you remember me?” asked Elsie. “I’m Elsie Mehlberg.”

He shook his head. “N-no,” he said. “I d-don’t know that I do, tra la.”

“My parents went to Istanbul to look for my brother, who disappeared last year. They dropped me and my sister off at your orphanage. They’re somewhere in Russia now, I think. You made us Unadoptable, which is funny because we were never supposed to be adopted in the first place.” It felt good, this litany, this bit of autobiography Elsie was reciting.

Joffrey just stared at her, perplexed. Occasionally he sang “Tra la, tra lee” quietly while she spoke.

“You made us go into the Impassable Wilderness, Mr. Unthank. You put weird stuff in my sister’s ears and you gave me some kind of pill. And then you sent us into that place. Without food or water or anything. Do you remember? We would’ve starved if we hadn’t found the other Unadoptables there. Do you ever think of that, Mr. Unthank?”

The man continued to babble under her words; he shuffled the index cards in his hands nervously. Elsie thought she saw tears spring up in his eyes.

“But you know what, Mr. Unthank? I think you’re really a good person, somewhere down there in your belly. I think you just made a lot of bad choices in your life. You sent us into the Impassable Wilderness for your own weird, greedy reason, but we made it out. We made it out and we’re the better for it, too. I know more about myself now, I know that I have a special power that I didn’t know I had. And wanna know something else?” Here, she knelt down so she was looking Unthank directly in the eye. “I think it’s going to help me find my brother.”

She waited for a response; none came.

“So there. For all your greediness, you only made me stronger. How does that make you feel?”

More mumbling, singing. A full, bulbous tear dripped down from his eyelid and ran down the end of his nose.