Page 67 of Odder Still
“There will be.” But I don’t mean it, not anymore. I think this is what it feels like to die. It’s the point where hope finally runs out. Where the future stops being a tunnel before you and starts looking like the top of a well you’ve dug so deep that there’s no redirection, no chance of something new. Elspeth’s help is all I have.
As we pull into the dock, something between a drizzle and thick fog begins to fall, cutting us off from the town with a barrier of chilled quiet. I retrieve Elspeth’s walker, and they open the door in the side of the cliff, ushering us inside. They flip a switch.
A steam machine chugs to life somewhere to our left, and one by one the lanterns on the hall’s high ceiling flicker awake. Their orange glow reflects golden off the black rock. Cautiously, we follow the path of the light through a wide kitchen of low counters and past a bedroom with dark-purple drapes tied around the bed’s three and a half posts, a couple crooked paintings of sunsets layered beneath pinned diagrams boasting things like half-dissected sirens and ignit classifications and elaborate chemical formulas. One looks eerily like the cross section of a Murk’s aurora-latched mangrove.
At the final bend the hall opens to a massive chamber. Glittering strings of silver and black beads drape between each peak in the ceiling, surrounding dozens of purple-glass lanterns. A few of the finfolk’s glowing rainbow curtains drape between them. The smooth floor looks like a small explosion tore out chunks of it. Shelves with glass fronts embed the polished, black walls, some filled with oddities, from organs in jars to wavy vials of fluorescent liquids, others with thick tomes and skinny notebooks.
Between the shelves hang blackboards packed with chalk scribbles. A row of dark aprons and a few cloaks fill the only empty wall space. Low, black tables that sparkle like they were painted in glitter take up the center of the room, many with a railing curling off one side. A variety of machinery clutters them, and a chemistry set winds through it all, tubes running over microscopes and flasks balanced on elaborate radios with twisting antennae. Two silver metal balls clang against each other, the first shooting the second forward only to be hit back the way it had come a moment later. A small tunnel twists upward off the end of the lab, but it looks like a back entrance, rugged and unrefined.
We all flinch when someone pounds at the front door and shouts, “By order of the Mara Diplomatic Assembly, come out with your hands up!”
“Sorry, better luck next time!” Elspeth calls back at them, shoving a lever beside the lab’s entrance. The floor rumbles with the clicking of gears, and wall of metal and glass lowers, blocking us off from the hallway. “My blast door should hold them back for somewhere between indefinitely and ten minutes,” Elspeth explains, waggling a hand my direction. “So best to get moving.”
“What do you need?” I ask
“First, a look at you.” Elspeth reaches for my neck, and I force myself not to pull back. Their eyes narrow, then widen. “It hasn’t latched?”
“No, but it’s trying its damnedest,” I reply. “That’s why I’ve come. And since you wrote what I’m told is a rather inspired paper on ignit energy, you seemed like as good an option as any to help me remove it.”
“You’re outrageous. I respect that.” They grin, and I can’t tell whether I’m outrageous for trying to remove my parasite or for asking someone like them to assist me in it. Their smile wanes at the clatter of soldiers against the blast door. “Wheel out the cart under the table for me, won’t you,” Elspeth says, leaning against their walker with one arm to don a cloak in a dramatic swoop.
“Can I be of help?” Tavish drags his cane across the floor, fidgeting from one foot to the other.
I kiss him on the cheek as I pass. “Sorry, princeling. You do the talking, I do the lifting.”
His laugh hurts to hear.
Elspeth and I wind through the room, them pointing and me loading, filling the cart with a series of small machines, books and papers, blueprints and tools. They add in a case of glitter and a bottle of whiskey at the end. “Glitter for the aesthetic, whiskey for the victory.”
“You’re a genius.” I wink at them, trying not to flinch every time the selkies in the hall slam against the blast door. “Where to now?”
“Up, up, and away.” They flick their fingers in the air. I swear a tiny shower of glitter halos their head for a moment. With a sigh, they point toward the ascending tunnel. “That’s the back exit. It leads out to the other side of the mountains.”
I grab Tavish, and together the three of us work our way up Elspeth’s exit tunnel. The lights grow farther and fewer between, and by the time we reach the end, my parasite forces my lungs not to turn to ragged wheezes. Elspeth unbolts the door, this one the same solid metal from the lab, and leads us onto a bluff with a large garage.
Inside sits a monstrous, steam-powered vehicle that must be a truck, but everything about it gives a slight middle finger to the concept of labels. Its smokestack curls like horns over its canvas roof, and one of the high sides of its bed flips down into a ramp when Elspeth hits a button. They crawl through the open gap to the main compartment and settle into the hugest driver’s seat I’ve ever seen, complete with gears and steam pipes and a row of water bottles.
I wheel our cart into the truck, latching it to the bed, and sit beside Tavish in a giant bag stuffed with something squishy.
“This can’t possibly be safe,” Tavish mutters. He crosses his legs daintily over my lap, his grip on his cane squeezing all the blood from his knuckles.
“I don’t usually have guests. But I think you’ll probably live!” Elspeth jabs a button on the console, and the engine whirls to life, shooting steam so thick that it fills the garage before we pull out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Communication Crisis
But if you burn yourself to be my light,
if you fight my dark by flaring bright.
You may be ashes in the aftermath.
Soot scattered across an empty path.
I HOOK MY FEET under loops in the truck floor and wrap an arm around Tavish’s back to keep either of us from bouncing into the bed as we peel out onto a worn dirt road and head down through the hills. Elspeth controls the car like the boats back home, their arms moving between their wheel and an assortment of levers with ease. After a series of dramatic drops and tight turns, the path meets up with what looks like a main road, though the nearest vehicle is only a steam smudge beyond the hills.
By the time the BA round the coast to collect their own land transportation, we’ll be far ahead of them. Somehow, that knowledge doesn’t shake free my anxiety. Or my guilt.
