Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

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.