“Well, now that you’ve wiped your feet on the doormat,” she hooked a thumb in the direction of the vanished man, “Welcome to Hell. You are—?”
Agatha realized that she hadn’t even considered a false name. “I’m…Pix.”
If Sanaa noticed the slight hesitation, she chose to ignore it. Agatha continued, “Do I have to fight you now?”
Sanaa laughed. “Nah, that’s a boy game. In here, we girls stick together. ‘Play fair, do your share, and we’re there.’” Then her face got serious. “If you don’t, you’ll be dead soon enough. It’s real easy to wind up dead in here. People do it all the time. You got any problem with that?”
Agatha shook her head. “It’s a better deal than I got out there.”
Again, Sanaa flashed a grin and patted Agatha on the shoulder. “Ha! Knew you was smart! Knew it when I saw you! Now, you’re new, so you got kitchen duty.” She sighed in resignation. “I don’t suppose you can cook?”
Agatha nodded with confidence. Old Taki, the circus cook, had cheerfully shared several of his “secrets”—tips on feeding large groups of hungry people, many of whom had knives. “I can cook. It’s just chemistry.”
Wilhelm brightened. “Really? Oh gosh, we need a good cook! The guy doing it now’s a mechanic, and he’s a complete idiot. I’d rather eat his engines!
“If you’re really good, you might not have to do any repair work at all! I mean, you’d be stuck in the kitchen all day…but still, it’s a pretty sweet deal.”
Agatha frowned. The last thing she wanted was to be confined to the kitchens. She wanted to be out and moving as quickly as possible.
Wilhelm continued. “So—what did you do to wind up in here, anyway?”
Agatha gave her a sardonic grin. “Poisoned thirty-seven people who complained about my cooking.”
Wilhelm just looked at her for a moment, then changed the subject—going into the details of the worker’s routines and the location of various facilities. “And we girls all bunk together. That way we can watch out for each other.”
Agatha nodded in approval as Sanaa continued. “So, we all eat twice a day, both at six—”
Agatha realized what was disturbing her. The complete blandness of what Sanaa was talking about. She interrupted. “This is all everyday stuff.”
Sanaa looked surprised. “Well…yeah. In here, the routine stuff is what keeps you going.”
Agatha waved a hand. “Okay, but didn’t a Heterodyne girl—?”
Sanaa’s face soured. “Oh. Her. Yeah, she’s here. She’s holed up with Professor Tiktoffen. You’ll meet him.” Her eyebrows went up. “Oh wait—I get it! You think she’ll fix the Castle and turn off all the deathtraps and la, la, la! We’ll all go home in time for supper!” She snorted. “Well, forget it. People’ve been working on this man-eating trash heap for years. And she thinks she’s gonna waltz in here, snap her fingers, and be the new queen? Shyeah.
“I been in here too long. There’s no easy way out. Just in.” Suddenly she whirled upon Agatha and leaned in. “But…and you gotta know this…I did see someone get out. Just once, but I saw it. She was smart. Collected her points, played the game, and walked out free. She did it. You can do it. Just like I’m gonna do it.” Her eyes darted up into the shadows and her shoulders hunched slightly. “Just as long as this place don’t get mad at me first.”
They walked quietly for a while, leaving the entry corridor and stepping into a larger passageway. Boxes and bales of supplies were stacked against the graffiti-covered walls. Agatha couldn’t help but read some of it as she passed by. Most of it railed against the Baron, the Castle, various magistrates, or just fate in general. There also seemed to be a great deal of wanton destruction. Entire walls looked like they had been smashed with hammers. Sanaa saw the direction of Agatha’s gaze.
“Most of the Castle is alive. You might’ve heard, but I’m telling you, you really don’t know what that means, yet. This area is one of the few that…isn’t. It’s just a building. So sometimes, when you want to smash the whole place down, this is one of the few places where it’s safe to just go nuts.”
She must have seen a touch of disapproval upon Agatha’s face. “You just wait until someone you like gets squished, or you’ve been grinding away on some pointless job for fourteen hours because if you stop, you’ll get squished. You wait until you been in here a couple of years and you wake up and realize that you’re probably going to die in here and that you’ll do anything to not get assigned to the Room of Rust and Hooks, or maybe you’re just shaken because the new kid you’ve been explaining things to trusted you and got killed doing what you told her to do. Something you’ve done yourself. Something you’ve done a hundred times before. And that’s if you’re lucky. You just wait and see. You’ll be taking a hammer to that wall before the month is out.”
Agatha said nothing, which was, apparently, the correct response, because when Sanaa next spoke, she seemed her previously cheerful self.
“We’re almost at the kitchen. That’s where they’ll take those shackles off.”
“So why don’t the Old Timers want this ‘cushy job’?”
Sanaa started with a touch of guilt. “I knew you was smart,” she muttered. “Okay, there’s a reason they make the newbies do it,” she admitted. “No one wants it. The kitchen’s a Live Room. Now, nobody’s ever been killed in there, which is, frankly, kind of weird. We think it gets more pleasure just messing with us, and whatever deal it made with the Baron—well, it knows we gotta eat. Anyway, it’s so annoying, it gets to the point where you’d rather face death somewhere quieter.”
Agatha considered this. “You’re putting me on.”
Sanaa gave her an honest grin. “Ha! Oh, don’t you worry, people will have you fetching devil dog chow and left-handed trilobite tighteners soon enough!” She paused. “Go along with the first one or two of those, by the way. You’ll fit in better. But if you get suckered more than four times, you’ll be everybody’s little minion.” She looked at Agatha. “You don’t look like the kind of person who wants that.”
Sanaa stopped outside a doorway. “Okay, here’s the kitchen, and here’s our lousy cook.” She raised her voice. “Hey! Moloch! Supplies are here.”
Agatha froze in horror at the name—and, indeed, it was her old acquaintance Moloch von Zinzer whose head popped around the corner.
It was Moloch who had first brought her to the attention of the Wulfenbachs. Indeed, it could be argued that he was the one person responsible for everything that had gone wrong for her lately.
When Agatha first stumbled across them, Moloch and his brother Omar had been a pair of itinerant soldiers—remnants of a small private army that had challenged Baron Wulfenbach and lost. It said a lot about Europa at this time that they were unremarkable for that.
They had wandered into the town of Beetleburg, where Agatha had been living for the past eleven years, and had robbed her. They stole the golden trilobite locket she had been told to never remove—the strange mechanical locket built by Barry Heterodyne to keep Agatha’s mind suppressed and far from the brilliance and madness that would identify her as a Spark.
The device in the locket—with its mind-deadening effects—had quickly killed Omar. Moloch, believing Agatha to be responsible, had sought her out to extract revenge. But Agatha’s Spark had already begun to manifest and—in the subsequent confusion that nearly always follows a Spark’s breakthrough—both she and Moloch had been captured by Baron Wulfenbach. Eventually, she had managed to escape. Apparently, he had not.33