Mothball dared a peek. “Gotta be it,” she whispered. “Monster or two just ’round the corner, guardin’ a door. Lug a Squeezer, we should.”
Sato reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the small grenades in answer. “I’ll throw it. Soon as it pops, let’s charge in shooting the Shurrics.”
Mothball nodded then returned her attention forward, gripping the Shurric firmly, its business end pointed away, ready to shoot. Sato stepped away from the wall so he could have the right angle, then tossed the Squeezer around the corner.
It bounced off the far wall then hit the floor with a clang, disappearing from sight as it bounced forward. Seconds later it exploded, sending out a spray of small metal rods. Many of them clinked against the stone, but a few found their marks with a deadly thud. Two or three creatures howled an unearthly shriek.
“Go!” Sato yelled.
He moved to run around the corner, keeping Mothball to his right. He was about to pull the trigger of his Shurric when he saw two bear-like creatures sprawled on the ground, unmoving. A small lamp stood on a table, its glass broken in two places but still lit. Two chairs had toppled over, along with the guards.
Sato looked at the wooden door they’d been guarding. “A Rager ought to—”
Heavy thumps from Mothball’s Shurric cut him off, like invisible lightning and soundless thunder—felt, more than heard. On her third shot, the door exploded with a spray of splinters, flying away from them several feet before falling into some kind of abyss. Sato waited and watched, but he never heard the wooden shards hit anything below.
He exchanged a puzzled look with Mothball then warily crept toward the gaping doorway—he didn’t want a sudden uptick in the never-ending quake’s strength to send him over the edge—his Shurric armed and ready. He reached the threshold of the door and saw that the other side had no floor, only a sheer drop-off with no bottom in sight as far as he could tell. He slowly leaned his head out to get a better look.
They’d reached a vast, round chamber, at least one hundred feet in diameter, that tunneled toward the depths below, narrowing into a hole of blackness far, far down. Along the walls of the chamber were countless rectangular compartments, alcoves set deeper into the stone and open-faced. Inside those compartments were filthy mattresses with thin, ratty blankets. And on top of those nasty beds lay the most terrified-looking children Sato had ever seen.
“Oh, no.”
Rutger hadn’t spoken in awhile, and Sofia realized she’d kind of fallen into a daze, worried about Tick and what it meant that his nanolocator had died. And why Master George seemed to think that was okay, or at least expected.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Rutger turned away from the busy computer screens, scratching his nose as he stared at the floor. “It’s a big one. A really big one.”
“What is?” Sofia insisted, almost reaching out and shaking his shoulders.
Rutger looked at her, the usual sparkle in his eyes gone. “A massive tidal wave. Bigger than anything I’ve ever heard of. It’s completely destroyed several monitoring stations. And I know enough to see it’s gonna hit us dead on!”
Sofia choked on several attempts to ask the obvious questions, but finally managed to speak. “When? How long?”
“Thirty minutes.”
7:32
7:31
7:30
7:29
Tick had given up on the closed-eyes thinking bit. It wasn’t working. Not at all. The lines of the riddle didn’t make any sense whatsoever. None.
Something told him there was a visual aspect to it. Something in the first and last line appeared to be instructional, not part of the riddle itself. He forced himself to pretend he didn’t have it memorized and read it from beginning to end once again.
Look at the following most carefully, as every line counts:
Be gone in times of death’s long passing.
Henry Atwood sliced his neck.
Hath reeds knocked against thee?
If our fathers knew, then winds, they blew.
The sixth of candles burned my eyes.
Horrors even among us.
Leigh tries to eat a stone.
The canine or the cat, it spat.
Pay attention to the ghoul that weeps.
Your number’s up, and it is missing. Wary the word second.
Shout out your answer.
5:47
5:46
5:45
5:44
His mind continued churning, pressing, scrambling, processing. There was definitely something visual about the riddle.
Look carefully.
Every line counts.
Your number’s up. It is missing. The word second.
Look. Line. Counts. Number. Missing. Second.
His thoughts honed in on those six words. Somehow he knew they meant everything.
There were a lot of things Sato didn’t understand as he stood on that dangerous ledge, staring at the curved walls of cubbyholes filled with children. He had questions aplenty. Like why they were kept in such an odd location, why there weren’t any ladders, how the children were used in the first place, where they came from. Plenty of things to wonder and ponder and feel disgust over.
But with the whole Factory shaking and ready to collapse at any second, there was only one thing that mattered: getting the nanolocator patches on every kid in sight.
“Divvy them up,” he told Mothball, holding out his hand. “We don’t have much time.”
“Got no ladders or steps,” she replied as she put a huge handful of the patches into his hand. “Got no rope. Whatcha ruddy thinkin’ we’ll do, fly around like birdies to save ’em?”
Sato slipped the square pieces of paper into his pocket and gave her a glare so hard that she took a full step backward. He was instantly filled with shame, but he said what he felt anyway. “Yes, Mothball. We’ll fly if that’s what we have to do.”
Without waiting for a response, he turned until his back was to the abyss behind him, his toes balanced on the former threshold of the door. He crouched down, then let himself slip over the edge.
Chapter 56
What Is Missing
Sato put his hands out, letting the pads of his fingers and palms scrape along the surface of the stone wall as he fell. He focused his concentration so he would be ready for the first opportunity to grab onto something. Fighting off the terrifying panic, he felt as if each nanosecond seemed to beat out a long rhythm.
Bumps and cracks and knobs of rock tore at his skin, but his attempts to grip them proved worthless. The dark surface of the wall suddenly lightened, and he found himself staring into one of the rectangle cubbyholes at a small boy curled up into a ball on his ragged mattress, shaking from the earthquake or bodily ills, or both.