Will led her to the stairwell on the far right. Up a flight of stairs, down a narrow windowless hallway, both grunting as each step aggravated at least one source of internal bleeding. Finally Will pushed open a wooden door to reveal shelves full of foodstuffs—they were inside the pantry of the kitchen, still one floor below where Molech’s goons were conducting the world’s most destructive search for their missing hostages. Will hurried out, trying to help haul Zoey along, her body feeling like she had been cut open and stuffed with broken glass. Will ran over to the room’s one, large window.
“We’ll cut across the courtyard. Stand back.”
He grabbed a barstool and smashed the glass, then jumped up onto the sill—the man was actually as agile as a cat, when properly motivated. On the other hand, it took a lot of help to haul the crippled Zoey up and over, with Will’s hand clamped over her mouth to suppress her screams when shards from her splintered rib started grinding into her lung. They emerged into the cold of the snow-covered courtyard and Zoey had to stop and cry for five seconds before she could move again. She sneezed, and flecks of blood flew across her shoes.
But soon she was lumbering along like a zombie, the two of them making laughably slow progress across a diagonal path toward the ballroom—Zoey could see where the shrubs over there had been flattened by the flatbed truck the other night. She fought to suck in each harsh, wheezing breath.
There was a blast behind them, and a row of windows exploded on the second floor.
Zoey said, “Who the hell is Gary? Or … was Gary? And why the hell didn’t you know about him?”
“You ever run into a new coworker, ask them their name, only to have them tell you they’ve worked there for five years? That was Gary, a man so dull and forgettable that he never appeared on your radar. It’s like that was his superpower. A stealth human being. We never stood a chance.”
They entered Santa’s Workshop and Zoey shuffled over to the console on the caterpillar.
“Here! Take Stench Machine!”
She shoved the cat into Will’s chest, who immediately set him on the floor. If he got cat hair on his suit, he would probably shrivel up and die like a salted snail. Zoey started swiping through the menus.
“How do you work it? How do you tell it to make the thing on the list?”
“Which ‘thing’?”
“Arthur did create the One Ring. It’s on here. I saw it earlier.”
“Zoey, nobody even knows what these—”
“No, listen. He left it to me. Arthur left me the One Ring. That’s why he left me the coin. Look.”
She scrolled down, and down, until she found the very last entry in the list, the one marked with her name.
“See? It’s literally the only thing on here in plain English. Because he assumed we wouldn’t be so dense as to not browse the whole list right away.”
Will looked at the listing and scrunched his face ever so slightly, his mind working.
Zoey said, “Come on! How do you make it go?”
“You tap that symbol, the one that looks like an owl that’s on fire. But Zoey, we don’t even know—”
She poked the owl. A row of numbers popped up, and started counting down.
She asked, “What does that mean?”
“It’s the production time. It’s going to take fifteen minutes.”
She groaned, and kicked the machine.
“We don’t have fifteen minutes.” The house wasn’t that big, and they’d just left an obvious trail behind them consisting of a broken window and a clear line of snowy footprints.
But Will was already on his phone, swiping through what looked like security camera feeds from around the grounds. He found one with a view of the rear of the house. They watched together as a low, flat black sports car went roaring down the drive, having emerged from the garage door Zoey had smashed a few hours ago.
Will said, “The son of a bitch took the Bugatti.”
“Well, you told him to make it noisy.”
A moment later, two of the Molech crew monster trucks went rumbling after Wu. They kept watching, but the other truck never joined the chase.
Zoey cursed.
“All right,” said Will, “this is why your plan has layers. We still have a big card to play with Molech, and that’s Andre’s bomb threat. All we have to do is—”
He was interrupted by a call—Echo’s hologram face popped into view and immediately said, “Will! Everything is about to go to hell here.”