Clockwork Twist : Trick (6 page)

“Well, we might be able to find a couple of camels,” Jonas said with a heavy sigh as they left the Suez train station in the gathering dusk.

“I'm going to pretend you were kidding about that,” Twist answered. “How many hours is it until nine in the morning, anyway?” he asked, glancing at his pocket watch.  He stared at the hands for a moment before he realized that he had no idea which time zone it was set to.  Somewhere, it was a quarter to three.

“Oh, we're about twelve hours from nine, at the moment,” Jonas answered, looking at the clock fixed into the face of the station building, which read nine twenty-seven.

He glanced down the now emptying city streets with uncovered eyes, showing little fear.  The station was on the edge of town, and there was nothing but an endless sea of sand just behind it.  To his left, behind Twist, the dessert crept right up to the city through a small, sandy plaza with a simple marble fountain and a few wooden benches around it.  Myra sat on one of the benches and stared into the horizon with wonder in her glinting jewel eyes.  To his right, a few shops, and a café with seating on the street, were glowing with candlelight.

“Well,” Jonas asked, “if we're going to wait till the next train, should we get a room for the night or just drink a lot of coffee and sleep on the train tomorrow?”

“Coffee sounds marvelous,” Twist muttered, rubbing at a new dull pain in the side of his head.  It seemed to grow concurrently with the number of complications before him. “I'll get Myra,” he said, turning to call to her in the plaza, a few steps away.

For a moment, he didn't actually realize that anything was wrong.  He thought he just couldn't see her in the darkening gloom.  Then he was sure she wasn't on the bench.  She wasn't in the plaza.  She wasn't out in the shifting sand just beyond.  As he turned slowly, searching a wider and wider circle for her glinting copper skin, Jonas came to his side with fear in his flashing green eyes.

“Where is she?” Twist asked.  His voice sounded strange to him, hollow and thin.

“She was right there,” Jonas said, looking through the shadows with his powerful vision.

“Myra?” Twist called to the air in his small voice.

“I don't see her anywhere,” Jonas said darkly.  “She couldn't have gone by us.”

“Myra!” Twist called again as a chill of cold dread burned down into his stomach.

He started to move, though he didn't know where he was heading.  The streets that led into the city were all empty.  The street he was on was empty but for him and Jonas.  The shops and cafes were full of people, but none of them were made of clockwork.  He heard Jonas's voice calling for her too, but he never heard a response.  His heart was pounding and he couldn't find enough breath.  It took far too long for him to realize that he was panicking.

“Can I help you?” a voice asked as Twist hurried past a form that was in his way.

Twist spun on the spot to find a woman standing in the street, looking at him with concern.  She was tall, pale, and proud, in a long green sateen gown that billowed gently from her hips to her feet, with a black jacket that made her waist appear even more slender, and a scarf of white fur even though they were in Egypt.  Her hair was mirror black and tied up in a soft bun, with perfectly disordered strands falling out around her dark eyes and ruby red lips.  Her startling beauty stalled Twist's tumbling thoughts for an instant.

“Have you lost someone?” she asked Twist gently with a distinct but soft Russian.

“Yes,” Twist said, finally recognizing the signs of panic in himself now.  He forced his racing breath to deepen and slow. “A girl.  She's this tall,” he said, indicating, “blue eyes, red hair.  And she's made of clockwork.”

The woman's fine black eye brows rose upward sharply at the last detail.

“Oh Lord that sounds bizarre,” he muttered quickly. “She has copper skin and she was wearing purple,” he continued, stepping closer. “Have you seen her?  She was just there, but now she's gone.”

“Did you say copper?” the woman asked. “Is she made of copper metal, or is she only painted to look so?”

“No, she—“  Twist's scattered mind took a moment to process everything she'd said. “Wait, what?  I just told you my friend was made of clockwork, and this is your question?”

“You're obviously in a hurry,” she said, looking wholly sincere. “You're also obviously quite serious and seem to be sane.  We can talk about why your friend is made of clockwork once she's been found safe.  Suez isn't the safest place for a fairytale.  Now, you said she's made of copper?”

Twist stared back at the woman in amazement. “She's predominantly made of copper,” Twist said, unsure what else to say.

The woman turned towards the cafe beside them. “Niko,” she beckoned, waving someone closer.

Jonas ran up to Twist and stopped, gasping to catch his breath. “I've looked down every street,” he said quickly. “She's nowhere around here.  Even if she were hiding I'd be able to find her.  I don't understand where she could have gone.”

While he spoke, a young man—just old enough for university—came to join the woman.  He was very thin and taller than Twist by a full head and shoulders.  He glanced at Twist with eyes of such a brilliant blue that they almost gave off their own light, in a young face made entirely of sharp angles.  He was dressed fully in black and had short black hair, giving his pale skin a truly ghostly appearance.  Niko said something to the woman in what sounded like German to Twist's ear, but his tone was clearly impatient.  The woman responded gently in the same language, though her eyes sharpened slightly.  The young man gave a sigh and pulled a device unlike anything Twist had ever seen, out of his coat pocket.

The woman nodded and said something else.  Niko shot her a glare and gave another sigh, looking to the device.  Jonas took interest now too as he and Twist peered at the thing Niko was holding.  It looked like a sphere of thin metal bars in a semi-open globe, with odd little knots of wire at all of the many intersecting points.  Niko placed his long pale fingers on three of the knotted points on each side and pulled.  The sphere grew in his hands and tiny shocks of blue lightning flashed off the metal under his fingers to join together in the center of sphere with a crackling light.

Twist and Jonas both jerked away a step, but neither Niko nor the woman seemed even slightly alarmed.  They both watched carefully as the tiny blue ball of lightning flickered and grew stronger, and then began to move weightlessly inside the sphere.  Niko gave a tone that suggested surprise.

“Which way is that?” the woman asked him in English.

Niko nodded his head back towards the city. “It's at a depth of minus three meters,” he added with a voice that sounded deep for his age, and was colored heavily with a German sounding accent.

“I don't know how,” Jonas said softly to Twist as he stared at the sphere with uncovered eyes, “but that thing he's holding is reflecting off all the copper metal in the area and generating that image inside like a map.  It can see Myra's body through everything else.”

“They've gone underground?” the woman asked Niko.

Niko nodded again. “Moving slow, though,” he said. “And still under the city.”

“Lead the way,” she said, eliciting another sharp look from Niko. “Come with us,” the woman said to Twist, as she and Niko began to move. “There's no time to explain, but we may be able to catch your friend before they make it to the open desert.”

It took less than a second for Twist to hurry after them down the street.  He could understand everything later.  At the moment, he didn't have a better lead.  Jonas followed him with a nervous sounding groan, but he followed nevertheless.  Niko took the lead, running down the dusty streets as he stared into the sparking metal globe.  He suddenly came to a stop just before a bare, blank wall that stretched out for ten feet on either side of the point at which he stood.

“What's wrong?” the woman asked.

“I don't know,” he said, turning his fingers slightly on the sphere.  Inside, the blue mote of lightning jumped up back towards him, then forward again as if jumping off an invisible ledge, back and forth a few times. “This is where the copper descended from.”  He looked at the wall spitefully.

“There must be a hidden door,” the woman said, running her fingers over the surface of the empty wall.

“Who are these two?” Jonas asked Twist.

“His name seems to be Niko,” Twist offered. “Beyond that, I haven't the foggiest.”

“I wish I could look at her face,” Jonas muttered. “She's familiar for some reason...”

“You know her?” Twist asked, astonished.  Jonas shook his head, looking uncertain.

“There!” the woman said, accompanied by the sound of an echoing click.

Twist looked up to see her hand come back out of a small hole that had appeared in the side of the wall, while a whole slab of the wall itself jolted inward and then slid away with a mechanical sound, to reveal darkness within.

“That was neat,” Jonas said.

Niko shoved the right sleeve of his black jacket up to his elbow to reveal an extremely complicated cage of copper wires and bands that wrapped tightly around his bare arm.  He turned a dial just below his wrist and a lick of intensely bright white light flashed to life up one of the exposed coils and remained at a sustained glow.  He put his fingers back on the sphere and then hurried into the darkness.

“And that was neater,” Jonas declared as he and Twist hurried to follow him.  The woman flashed Jonas a smile as she ducked inside just in front of him.

A set of rough stone steps led to a black, square tunnel at the bottom that continued on under the city.  Twist turned on the light in the hilt of his walking stick and then slipped it into the holster on his back to let the light flow out over his shoulder.  When Niko saw the blue light mixed in with his own white light, he glanced back and spared a somewhat interested look at Twist's cane.  Almost right away, the tunnel branched off into two different directions.  Niko never lost a step as he hurried down the way to the right.  After a few more steps, the tunnel diverged again, and again Niko led the way.

“We're getting closer,” he said, picking up his pace.  Only a few moments later he slowed and spat a sharp-sounding word at the globe.  At the end of the hall, they all saw why he wasn't running anymore.

The tunnel opened up into a huge empty cavern that led out into multiple, circular tunnels, each over ten feet across.  Niko stopped at the mouth of one of them and stared spitefully into the darkness within.  Now that they had stopped running, Twist could hear the distant rumble of some kind of engine and grinding machinery echo back from the tunnels, and the loose sand at his feet seemed to vibrate ever so subtly.

“What's happened?” Twist asked.

“They got away,” Niko grumbled, slamming his globe shut sharply.  The blue light inside sparked its last and went out.

“They?  Who's they?” Jonas asked.

“If she went that way, why can't we just keep following her?” Twist asked, gesturing to the large tunnel that seemed to have provoked Niko's scorn.

“Those tunnels were built,” the woman said, gesturing in the direction they'd come. “They are made of brick and solid stone.  These are dug in sand,” she said, looking to the larger tunnels. “The men who took your clockwork friend have a machine that lets them burrow under the desert sand like worms through earth.  But the tunnels they dig are weak and they collapse easily once the machine is gone.  It's too dangerous to follow them that way.”

“Are you saying that sand worms took her?” Jonas asked in disbelief.  Niko gave Jonas a look that could have wounded a more sensitive man.

“I've never even heard of anything like that,” Twist said, shaking his head.

“Your girlfriend's made of metal,” Jonas said. “Don't judge.”  Twist opened his mouth to retort, but Jonas spoke first to the woman. “Who do you think took her?”

“Cyphers,” Niko said from the darkness.

“Cyphers?” Jonas said with a mocking tone. “You're kidding, right?”

“My girlfriend's made of metal,” Twist said. “Don't judge.”  Jonas turned on him with a glare, but this time Twist cut him off. “What is a Cypher?” he asked the woman. “Besides something one uses to work out a code, I mean.”

“Damn, I was gonna say that...” Jonas muttered.

“They are a group of people who believe that all the world's religious and mythological texts have been mis-read,” the woman answered.  Twist noticed that she was smiling now, albeit lightly. “They started by finding mathematical formulas in the Torah,” she continued. “No one believed them at the time, so they went off on their own.  They might have been right, because those 'sand worms,' as you called them, were clearly written about in some obscure ancient myths.”