Before Tomorrowland (17 page)

“Follow me now!”

The woman flew up the stairs, bounding two or three steps at a time. Lee wrapped his arm around his mom and helped her up the steps. “Good foot to heaven—”

“Shut up with that!” she wheezed, trying to manage her breath. “That woman! She’s...she looks just like...”

“I don’t care who it is, just get up the stairs!” Lee shouted.

They exited on the hotel roof. The high wind almost whipped his mom’s pillbox hat off her head. In front of them, swinging in mid-air, was a rope ladder leading up to...nothing. It just
hung there from the middle of the sky. The woman caught hold of it, planted her feet and waved them forward.

“Climb!” she yelled.

The ladder was at least twenty feet up. To nothing.

“My mom can’t climb that!” he yelled.

Lee heard a crash and whipped around to see Henry burst onto the roof through the stairwell door. There was a clear glint of metal where his clothes were shredded from gunfire. There was no
blood. Before Lee could make sense of what that meant, the large man barreled toward them. His mom jumped onto the rope ladder and wobbled up the rungs. Lee was surprised by her effort, and
inspired, too, and he began to climb. He shouldn’t have looked down, but when the ladder began to twist and shake, he did. The woman was on the rungs and on his heels, and as he looked into
face, it occurred to him that—

“Yes I’m Amelia Earhart!” she screamed. “Now climb already!”

E
ARHART FELT
the ladder jerk and go taut. The boy above her screamed. The assassin below her was holding the bottom rung,
his feet skidding across the top of the building as the unseen vessel above pulled away.

“Your heard your mother! Climb faster!”

The kid thrashed to action, and in seconds, he literally vanished as he joined his mother inside the invisible airship.

She took the rungs like she took the stairs, two at a time, and when she was near the top, the ladder stretched taut again and snapped. The handhold went limp, and once more, Earhart was falling
from the sky. She tucked for an impact she hoped would come sooner than later. It did, and it still hurt like hell. She rolled clear as he brought his foot down hard on the spot where she landed,
shattering the concrete. She stood quickly, then ducked even more quickly to avoid the fist swung at her face.

Earhart backpedaled, putting some distance between her and her attacker, and whipped out an electric shocking device, shooting it in his direction, half blind. It caught him in the shoulder. He
didn’t so much as flinch. She fired again. This time he skipped out of the way and caught her in the stomach. She flew across the rooftop, her leather jacket catching and scratching as she
rolled to a stop. She propped herself up and saw him in silhouette, standing in front of the sun. He stepped on the shocking device, crushing it, and kicked it aside. He remained still, staring her
down.

“I saw you die,” he said.

Amelia was heaving, trying to catch a good breath, trying to think.
He saw her die?

She looked at him again, at the heavy, muscled outline of his form. It was him. It was the man from the photograph. The one who shot her out of the sky. Whoever he was...

Wait...

Rotwang. A synthetic man. Metal beneath flesh...

No. No no no no...

“Henry?”

“Why did you let them do this to me?” he thundered. “I thought you were my friend. But you’re just another corrupt little cog in the Plus Ultra machine, aren’t you?
You let them do this to me!”

“What are you talking about?!”

But he wasn’t listening. He was ranting again. Earhart wasn’t getting out of this easy, she saw that much. “I saw you die!” He strode toward her.

She gritted her teeth: “You should get your eyes fixed!”

Henry lowered his head and looked at a spot in front of her. “I did.” His eyes flamed electric blue and a beam of light cut across the rooftop. Earhart had just enough time to jump
to the parapet on one side of the roof as the other half caved and a quarter of the building’s upper stories slid away in an avalanche that spilled into the streets below. It looked like an
opened doll house, a cross section of rooms with all their tiny furniture tumbling into the air. Severed water pipes fountained their contents into the air. A maid on the twelfth floor caught in
the middle of stretching a sheet over a double bed stared up at Earhart with her mouth wide open. For once, it had nothing to do with recognizing a dead woman walking.

There was another flash out of the corner of Earhart’s eye, but it was different this time. The airship had shut off its cloak, and she could see the magnificent zeppelin hovering parallel
to the New Yorker. Its boarding hatch was still open, and it drifted and bobbed a few yards from the edge.

She shoved up from the concrete, sprinted, and, with a final push, leapt out over the city and reached for the platform. She caught the hard edge and clamped down, her skinny body swinging under
the Zeppelin’s deck. Several pairs of hands grabbed the shoulders of her jacket and dragged her up as she fell forward, belly first on the cold deck of the ship. She felt it pitch and rise
beneath her.

“Thanks for the lift,” she said, and then she was out like a light.

T
HE ZEPPELIN’S
rigid silver shell glistened with sparks like snaps of firecrackers, then disappeared. It was still
visible in Henry’s alternate spectrums, but even he couldn’t bridge the growing gap between roof and vessel to board it now.

He didn’t need to.

He cocked his head and checked the signal of the beacon he’d placed on Clara’s glasses when he took them in the elevator. The transmission came through, clear and accurate.

Sirens squealed from a half mile down the street below him. Henry knew he needed to move, but his legs felt sluggish. Lasers always took something extra out of him. He tried to estimate how long
it would take to replace the energy. Not long in the dense electric jungle of New York, but longer than he would have liked.

The sirens grew louder.

He needed to move. He needed to hide. He needed—

I just sliced off a quarter of a hotel.

Irrational.

A simple idea came to him. There was one way to move that required very little energy.

Henry looked over the side of the roof, scanned the ground below, and identified the best possible spot, then heaved himself over the edge. His heels skipped along the hotel’s
façade. As he plummeted faster and faster, thirty feet, fifty feet, seventy feet, sounds came and went as he fell past screams and alarms. He pressed his arms to his sides and pointed his
toes, punching through the sidewalk and finally landing hard on his hands and knees in the sewer main. He heard, but didn’t feel, the water trickling past his wrists and ankles. Most of his
organic exterior had been ripped by the layers of rock above him.

He lurched to his feet and took a dozen steps forward in the gloom, groping his right hand along the concave wall. He followed it to a connecting passage. There was comfort in being wrapped in
the muffled dark, so he travelled by echolocation instead of switching to night vision.

After a few more steps, Henry found a small alcove. He collapsed into it, crunching the bricks beneath him.

The light from a subway train rumbling down an adjoining tunnel crept over the water in front of Henry, and he caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection. His face would grow back during the
recharge. He knew that, but it never stopped frightening him to see his metal insides.

The dream would come now. It was always the same when he drained the core too far. The moment he let himself be still, the dream always came back.

First came the searing white circle of light against the stars, then the delayed punch to his chest as the rocket’s sound shot across the airfield. They all clapped and
whooped, and some of the men raised their bottles to the sky while the firework crackled and dissolved into the horizon. Henry took a swig of his dad’s beer and lay back against the cold
airplane wing. There were perks to working for Howard Hughes under Prohibition, and perks to being fourteen and the son of Colonel Max Stevens.

They hadn’t taken the Fourth off like most workers. Henry wouldn’t have wanted to, seeing as they were so close to finishing the rocket. Not that he had a vote. He was just a parts
runner for the mechanics; he didn’t actually work on the rockets and things, but he felt pride in them, regardless. He also got to study at the Underground, the Plus Ultra school for young
recruits. Most of the people in his classes were nineteen or twenty, but Henry got in through a lot of his dad’s influence and some of his own merit. It was so much better than real school.
So much better than throwing papers or pumping gas, or listening to Laurence say “hardly.”

Henry “hardly” thought about Laurence anymore, or his mom. He got out of Plus Ultra classes by ten in the morning, ran to the field hangars to work, ate a huge pile of dinner at the
mess hall, then dropped and did it all over the next day. His dad was building the future, and he got to be there while it happened.

Max chuckled. “Gimme that back, you, or you’ll stop growing,” he said, and swiped the bottle from Henry. “You want to be five feet tall forever?”

It usually stung when somebody jabbed Henry about his height, but that night, it didn’t sting one bit. His muscles were tired and heavy and his laughs came easy. Next to him was a row of
smiles all laid out in a line on the bomber’s wing. His friends and idols. They worked long shifts in a team of eight. Tom was the manager; John, the engineer; Frank, Otis, and Glenn, the
mechanics. Amelia was the test pilot, and his dad was the lead mechanic.

They watched the fireworks burst over the runway and Henry listened as they laughed about romances, stupid things they’d done, and whatever Plus Ultra gear they were working on. Sometimes
the stories involved all three, and those were the best. Like the time Mr. Tesla caught Amelia in the
Columbiad II
with one of her paramours. She would have gotten sacked on the spot if it
weren’t for the fact that she was such a hotshot pilot.

Amelia held her own no matter what she did. She enjoyed girl stuff, but she knew how to have a good time like any of the guys. Henry wished he’d been just a few years older, and about a
foot taller, but he took what attention he got from Amelia, even if it was a punch on the arm. Tomorrow, after they finished the rocket’s thrusters, she was going to take him up for his first
flying lesson. He couldn’t wait.

Tom was “singing” again. “Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies, forever something...fruited valley...along the wing of a plane...” The rest of them died laughing as three
rockets whizzed up and pop-pop-popped, then fizzled out. The scent of gunpowder and burnt paper hung in the valley air, dry and warm, and every once in a while the breeze blew it up and Henry
smelled it fresh again.

Most of the other crews had left, but there were two hangars still lit up behind them. One was for RJP (rockets and jet propulsion), the other was Dr. Rotwang’s robotics facility. Henry
rolled over onto his stomach and gazed across the shadowy airfield to the hangar windows. Rotwang was the only Plus Ultra staff member who never left before they did, only he didn’t seem to
do it out of love for his work. Maybe Henry was wrong about that, but he never saw Rotwang smile. He was just an intense guy. Henry sometimes ran over a power drill from their hangar to his, but
Rotwang never said a thing to him. Otis and Glenn told Henry to just give the good doctor a wide berth, and he did, mostly.