Authors: Anne Nesbet
It was definitely, actually Elias, that lummox! She had really thought he was gone. But here he was—and to her surprise, Linny found she had never been so glad to see anybody in her life.
T
hey were walking through those long fields, heading away from the Plain Sea, and as tired and as hungry and as wobble headed as they felt, they were both filled with an extraordinary feeling: with hope. It made them want to tell each other everything, the past and the future, which for the first time looked less than totally black (if you kept your eyes studiously away from the dark spots in the picture). Linny talked about the leaf-green antidote, how she hoped it would cure Sayra of the magic that had sickened her, how she would carry it up to Away, where Sayra’s spirit was, more alive than the faded shell of her body back in Lourka, and Elias told his own story over and over again: the dandelion-haired woman grabbing at him, the jacket slipping off, water filling his lungs—
And that was the point in Elias’s description when they came over the top of a little swell of land in that
otherwise flat world—and found the Surveyors right there, waiting for them.
They had a sand-colored wagon that blended into the grass of the field. There were four of them waiting, with their gray uniforms on and circles of black glass hiding their eyes.
“Oh, no. Run!” said Elias, his voice hoarse, but it was too late for running, because the Surveyors had already jumped on them, from what felt like all sides. Linny and Elias were already being led to the wagon now by all those rough hands, and the Half-Cat was emitting muffled meows from over to the left, as if it was being stuffed into a sack and didn’t like it.
“Well, that was easy,” said one of the Surveyors to Elias. “Like tracking a clumsy bear. And now we’ve nabbed you and the girl, as well. Why didn’t you go home, girl? That’s what we thought you’d done—lit back out for the hills.”
“Two for the price of one!” said another one of those Surveyors. “Hey, don’t you start struggling. Won’t do you any good.”
The Surveyors were bundling them into their wagon. There was no way to wriggle out of their grasp. (Linny did try, and the hands on her shoulders just became tighter and heavier; over to the right of her, she could hear Elias trying to shrug off one of those hands and failing.)
It was a large wagon, much bigger than the cart Linny had driven out of the Broken City. Linny and Elias, their hands tied, and the dangerous-looking sack that contained the Half-Cat, were dumped into the back seat. The lourka in its sack was at Linny’s feet. Her mind, meanwhile, was full of skittering panic but couldn’t come up with a coherent thought, much less an actual plan. She was still dazed from her time at the edge of the Plain Sea, and dazed from the happy shock of finding Elias again. And now dazed all over again from the sudden hope suddenly being ripped away.
And she was hungry. She hadn’t eaten in ages, it seemed like to her. Not since those juicy tomatoes. And tomatoes only go so far.
The road the wagon took went right by the research hub, where the blank walls gave no clue about what had happened to Aunt Mina after Linny had left.
The thought of Mina was bad enough, but then a worse thought caught up with Linny:
she gave everything she had to me, and it made no difference.
And that made Linny shrink down in the wagon, hoping Mina could not, would not, see, so that her heart wouldn’t break all over again.
Even if in the Plain they did not call it “breaking.”
Because she was slumping and despairing, Linny missed the very beginning of what happened next.
They were at the intersection beyond the research hub when one of the gray men said, “Wait, who’s that there?”
And as he pressed the button that stopped the wagon, a dart suddenly appeared in the side of his neck, and he dropped down to the left, as if he were a stone column kicked by the giant who had built the fairground bridge. And the Surveyor next to him had sprouted a dart of his own and was dangling over the side of the wagon.
“Down!” said Elias and Linny to each other, at almost exactly the same time, but it is hard to get really far down in the backseat of a wagon when your hands and feet are bound. She shut her eyes tight, though, willing herself invisible. And Elias, too. Let them both be invisible.
There were thumps and bumps for a minute or so, but no more shouting, and then a breathless, familiar voice said, “Well, hello, little guide of mine! Hello, hello!”
Elias must have opened his eyes before Linny, because he was already saying, “Who are you?” while Linny spluttered and tried to sit up again.
It was the Tinkerman, looking over at them from the front seat. He looked a little shaken, but pleased as punch.
“They were going to waste you! Waste you! So I had to stop them. They’ll thank me in the end.”
Linny peered over the edge of the wagon and saw the bodies of those Surveyors at the side of the road, where the Tinkerman must have dragged them. She shuddered
at the suddenness with which a person could become an unmoving
thing
. She couldn’t imagine those bodies ever thanking anyone again for anything.
“Oh, they’ll wake up eventually,” said the Tinkerman, who must have followed her gaze. “It’s strong stuff, but not
that
strong. We should probably not waste too much time.”
He had moved a bulky bag of his own into the front seat. Now he was looking at the wagon’s buttons and levers, and he actually rubbed his hands together in glee, as ogres and bandits do in the worst stories.
The Half-Cat yowled forlornly from inside its sack.
“Oh, is that my own dear cat, as well?” said the Tinkerman. “Really, this is turning out to be a very good day.”
“Thank you so much for the rescue, sir,” said Elias, and Linny could tell from the stretched sound of his voice that his headache must be bad again. He would have to be remembering how much he hated being in the Plain. And being kidnapped by Surveyors had not helped. “But who are you, and where are you taking us?”
“He’s Arthur Vix,” said Linny. “The Tinkerman. Irika Pontis’s sort-of father.”
“Your gra—!”
Linny kicked his shins with her trussed-up legs. It was the best she could do, under the circumstances, to keep him quiet.
Elias’s eyes were as wide as teacups. Linny could see that he was getting entirely the wrong idea about the Tinkerman.
“But let’s hear what Mr. Vix has to say,” she said to Elias, in her sweet-little-lamb voice. She hoped Elias would take the hint.
“Ha ha! What I have to say is,
research expedition
!” said the Tinkerman, starting the wagon machine. “Finally, finally under way. When you babbled about going home and ran off from the fair, well, I thought we might be losing our best chance, with you skedaddling back into the hills, so I came to see my dear Mina, just to check in on how her research was going. She’s been working on that hillsickness remedy for a long time now. Sadly, still no cure, says Mina. But I’m heading into the wrinkled hills, antidote or not.”
“You!” said Linny.
“Oh, yes. Who else better, to put my theory to the test? And imagine my surprise when I gathered, from various things her coworkers were saying, that my own recent guest, my impossible visitor, my future guide, was in the neighborhood! Well!”
He chuckled. The wind was blowing through his silver hair. He seemed very, very pleased with himself indeed.
“I heard enough to know they had captured someone, and then I set up my ambush. Criminality is so easy, it turns out, if you remember to bring enough darts. Here
we are, happy as clams and on our way. Why did I slouch around so long, hoping they would give me official permission to test my theory? Who even gives permission for such things anymore? Who’s in charge? The regent and that awful magician are glaring at each other over the Broken City like it’s their own personal chessboard. They would have kept me waiting until the mountains wore down and the river ran dry!”
“What theory?” said Elias, that lummox.
“Don’t encourage him,” said Linny. “He said we’re happy as clams, but we’re
not
. We’re tied up in
ropes
.”
“Complexity, like water, flows downhill,” said Vix modestly as he upped the speed of that wagon. “And can be tapped in to for power. This is the nutshell version I’m giving you now! Wrinkled places are complex, right? Even you can see that. The limit case of complexity is what you call Away. So, run a wire from there to the Plain, and your light bulbs will burn until the end of time. You can use that power to change the world. Like damming a river! Simple!”
“If the universe doesn’t just go
pop
,” said Linny. “Which I understand could potentially also happen. You shouldn’t mess with Away. Your plan’s the worst one I ever heard of. Don’t pay attention to him, Elias.”
Elias had been chewing over the Tinkerman’s explanation, and his teacup eyes were narrowing now, like
saucers being turned on their sides.
“So they’ll use Away to power their grid,” he said. “To make things go, I guess, but also to unwrinkle the world. Like what they did at the fair, only more so.”
“Yes,” said Linny and the Tinkerman at exactly the same time, only the Tinkerman added a happy exclamation point at the end.
“And my theory will be proved correct!”
That shut even Elias up for a while. He had probably never met anyone before who was willing to risk the end of the universe just to prove a stupid theory. He looked at Linny, and Linny looked at him. They were in very grave need of a backup plan.
“Excuse me, Mr. Vix,” said Linny, trying sweetness again. “But my feet are falling asleep. Would you mind please untying us, now that we’ve been rescued?”
Almost to her surprise, the Tinkerman pulled the wagon to the side of the road and stopped it. “We’ll need you in good shape when we get to the hills,” he said. “Good shape and rested.”
“Yes,” said Linny, spreading the sweetness on thick. “But what if my feet have to be cut off because they haven’t had any blood in them so long?”
She had gone a little overboard there; the Tinkerman was laughing.
“All right, all right,” he said. “And we’ll travel faster if
you’re resting. So, good night—”
And before Linny could say anything more, or even register what was happening, Vix had pulled out two more darts from that satchel of his, had turned around as casually as can be, and had stabbed one into Elias’s shoulder and the other—ouch!—into Linny’s own poor arm. Sharp as sharp, right through the sleeve of her dress. She wanted to shout, but before she got her mouth open, she had forgotten what shouting meant, forgotten what mouths were, and had slipped down into the utter dark.
T
here was an infinite period of total nothingness that passed in no time at all. Space and time, both emptied out of everything that used to fill them. Nothing.
Until the nothingness was replaced by aching bones and a feeling of heaviness, and Linny realized she was lying flat on the ground, no longer in the wagon, and there was sunlight warming her eyelids.
She tried to open her eyes, but nothing happened.
How long had she been lost in nothingness?
It was coming back to her now. That treacherous Tinkerman!
She tried again with her eyes, and this time got one of them a tiny bit open. Just enough to catch a blurry glimpse of what looked like Elias, stretched out not far from her. The world started spinning, so she shut her eye and rested back in the comfortable darkness for another minute before trying again.
She opened her eyes more carefully, noticing this time that Elias’s eyes were open, too, and he was looking at her.
“Where are we?” she whispered.
She could see the top of a hill to the right, and beyond that a forest that became wilder and denser as it marched up another, more complicated slope. Her heart jumped a little in hope. That didn’t look like the Plain.
“Shh,” said Elias. “You were really out there for a while. I mean, so was I, actually. Sheesh.”
Then he smiled, a sweet ghost of a smile.
“You do realize
you
just asked
me
where we are,” he said.
But by then Linny had moved her head just enough to let her eyes soak up the contours of the land all around, and she
did
know where they must be.
They were on a flat field, looking up toward the hills and the trees. A simple line of rocks ran past them and off as far in both directions as she could see. A butterfly of four different colors winkled through the air, but it was careful not to cross the line of those rocks and come over to them where they lay on the field.
“Wait,” she said. “It’s wrinkled over there.”
There wasn’t a river here, as there was in the Broken City, to mark the edge between wrinkled and Plain. The river came down from the hills and turned, and then turned again at the other end of the Broken City,
beyond the fairgrounds. If they hadn’t crossed the river, they must be far to one side of the world, where walking across a field might be enough to take you from Plain to wrinkled places. That was interesting to Linny. It was the sort of data that woke a person up.
“I know,” said Elias. “He had to stop driving that wagon. He attached it to a power stump over there, see? And now he’s fooling with his wires.”
The Tinkerman appeared to be connecting an almost invisibly thin wire to some part of the metal charging station that the Surveyors had planted in the ground here, where the Plain bumped up against the wrinkled half of the world.
“Do you think you could run away, Linny?” said Elias, under his breath. “He did untie your feet.”
She moved one foot and then another. They still felt oddly remote from the rest of her. Every part of her felt sort of remote, actually.
“Not quite yet,” she said. “In a few minutes, maybe?”
It was already too late for that, though. The Tinkerman had noticed them watching him, and he came over now, an expectant bounce in his step.