Blaine coughs—blood spatters the clay earth—and he collapses.
I run to him, roll him over, but he is already dead. There is an arrow in his forehead and around us, the clay earth has become snow. Bloody snow, starting beneath Blaine’s skull and then blooming outward: searching, fanning, covering the world in red. And then the blood is everywhere. On my clothes, my hands, my face.
Blaine sits bolt upright and grips my elbow. His eyes are black now, every last inch of them, blood streaming from them like tears. “You murdered me.”
I jolt awake—sweating, shaking—and bite on my knuckles to hold in a sob. In the darkness, all I can see is Blaine. My brother was in that Forgery I killed back near Stonewall. Just like Jackson, the real Blaine existed somewhere beneath his programming, and I killed him. I killed him before he could surface.
You didn’t know, I tell myself. And even if you did, it’s not the same thing. It wasn’t truly him.
I close my eyes.
I can live with this. I will live with this.
I have to.
Titus and Bruno come to retrieve us in the morning, but only Clipper and I are untied and led from the room. I get an uneasy feeling that I’m in attendance solely in case Titus needs to revisit our bargain. I hope it doesn’t come to this.
We pass a large group of Burg’s citizens as we head for the Room of Whistles and Whirs. They are paired off as couples and filing into a separate hallway. Bringing up the rear is Bleak. I can see him properly for the first time and he looks different than he did under moonlight. He is definitely around my age. Unlike most of Burg’s citizens, his hair hasn’t given itself over to a matted mess; he’s kept it incredibly short, as though he drags a blade over his scalp every few evenings. He walks with his shoulders held back, an almost bored look on his face, but the girl at his side doesn’t seem to mind. She’s smiling at him playfully.
Bleak’s eyes find mine and before rounding the corner he gives me a small, indifferent shrug. I know exactly what he’s feeling. I experienced it during every Claysoot slating. It’s hard to hate what awaits, because it’s far from torture, but the formality of the entire affair is both draining and depressing. I don’t blame Bleak for his emotions. If anything, I’m surprised there aren’t more people in Burg that share nicknames like his.
“Get to it, boy,” Titus says, shoving Clipper forward.
We’ve reached the Room of Whistles and Whirs. The door is a heavy thing, thick and solid, no hinges or handle. Its edges are recognizable only because the door is recessed from the rest of the hallway, set back about a palm’s width.
Clipper opens the small silver box mounted near the door to reveal what looks like a series of buttons. He pops these off, exposing a mess of wires and small panels that glint beneath the torchlight. This seems to make more sense to Clipper than the buttons, because he bends to retrieve something in the bag. Several moments later, he’s attached his own wires to the box on the wall, and then attached those to some sort of thin, handheld panel.
The boy slides to the floor, the device resting on his knees, and waits. The screen keeps flashing sporadically, but it’s not until it goes still, a constant blue light illuminating his face, that Clipper seems interested. He taps at the device frantically, tongue hanging out the corner of his mouth, eyes squinted in concentration.
“A knife,” he says, jumping to his feet. “I need a knife.”
Titus hesitates.
“Do you want to open the door or not?”
Titus snaps his fingers and Bruno complies. Clipper takes the knife and gathers the wires that spill from the silver box, flattening them into some semblance of order against the wall. He counts, recounts, moves his blade between them. Biting his lip, he puts the knife behind two of the wires and tugs. They split. He uses the blade to strip back some sort of casing on the wires and then twists two of them together. Bruno snatches back his blade.
Clipper returns to frantically tapping at the blue-screened device. I’m wondering why he bothered to cut the wires if he only wanted to rejoin them, when a deep, mechanical click echoes behind the door. Titus darts forward.
“Ya did it,” he whispers.
And Clipper has.
The door moves. We stand there, breath held, as the Room of Whistles and Whirs opens.
TWENTY-EIGHT
IT SMELLS WEIRD.
Not bad.
Just weird. Like dead air. Like lost space. Like a place time forgot to touch.
And there’s this noise. The steady whir that gave the room its name. Louder now that the door is open.
Clipper goes in first, using the illuminated screen of his device to light the way. Moments later there’s a dull bang, like him throwing open a very stubborn window, and shoddy light fills the room.
The room is dull in color—grays and tans, like dead crop fields under a winter sky—and square. To our right is gear that reminds me of Crevice Valley’s technology wing. Computers sit on a long table gathering dust, and additional screens hang on the wall above them. The other walls of the room are lined with large, rectangular components, all metal and flush edges. The whirring noise is coming from one of them.
“Generators,” Clipper says, looking them over quickly. “Just like I suspected. Not enough to power the whole town, though, so they must be for these computers. And the cameras, too, probably. Power and fuel lines must be underground—I mean, we didn’t see any on the way in. The Tolling is the sound of generators kicking on and off while they take turns powering things, but I still don’t really get it: Why waste resources keeping cameras on in a place you think is extinct?”
“Maybe Frank’s not keeping an eye on the inside. Maybe he’s watching the Outer Ring. Making sure no one wanders across his project.”
“Destroying the place seems easier, although I guess that takes resources as well.” Clipper’s eyes go wide. “If they are monitoring the Outer Ring, wouldn’t they have seen us entering the other day?”
I think the Order would have shown up already if this were the case, but I don’t have a chance to answer Clipper, because Titus has started shouting.
“This was s’posed to be it!” he screams. “This was our way out. If it ain’t, what’s the point of the room?” He throws his knife in fury. It clatters off the wall and lands on the keyboard of one of the computers. Its screen comes to life, dim beneath layers of dust.
“Examine it,” Titus orders Clipper.
“For what?” the boy asks.
“Anything. Find its secret. Find the way out of Burg.”
“You have to climb the Wall. It’s the only way out.”
Titus punches Clipper so hard, the boy ends up on the floor.
“I ain’t askin’ for yer insight! I’m askin’ ya to examine that thing and I ain’t gonna ask again.”
“Our deal was only to open the door,” I say. “We’ve done our part.”
But Titus doesn’t acknowledge me. He grabs Clipper by the shirt, yanks him to his feet. The boy looks right at me, and though his eyes are wide, I don’t find them filled with fear. They are stubborn, brave, willing to take a stand. I think back to what feels like years ago, an afternoon when I tracked Clipper in the woods. I might get scared, but I’m not a coward.