Martha Song was dreaming. Or at least she thought she was. She was standing in front of a large crowd of people, receiving an award. Someone was standing near her; she turned to see who it was and immediately recognized the man as the mayor of Portland himself. She’d never actually known who the mayor was—Unthank had kept the orphanage under a pretty serious information lockdown—but it was as if her unconscious self was implying that the man in front of her—tidy three-piece suit, horn-rimmed glasses, neatly pomaded hair—was, in fact, the mayor. She must’ve remained suspicious, as, out of the ether, a sash suddenly appeared over the man’s shoulder, reading MAYOR OF PORTLAND. The bespectacled man pointed to the sash, smiling.
“Oh,” said Martha. “Hi.”
“It is my utmost pleasure to present to you, Martha Song, the key to the City of Portland,” the mayor said, speaking into a funny spaceship-like microphone. The jubilant crowd that stretched out into the horizon cheered loudly. The mayor continued, “For your hardships, for your sacrifices. Just so you know they have not gone unnoticed.”
“Well, thanks,” said Martha, bowing her head so that something could be placed over it. It felt strange, the award, and Martha put her hand up to her face, feeling the wispy tendrils of a long, gray beard.
She looked up and saw that she was suddenly in the middle of a very dark chamber, made of smooth stone. A small glint of light came in from a barred window, high above. Her hands were dirty; she saw that she’d been using them to dig a tunnel. The opening to this tunnel presented itself, clawed out of the corner of the stone wall. She spat into her palm and crouched low, preparing to continue her labors.
That was when she was shaken awake. An alarm was sounding. Soft, thudding explosions could be heard somewhere, far off, like pillows dropping from a great height. She opened her eyes.
“Elsie?” she managed. Another thing presented itself to her: The back of her head was slightly damp and pounded with a very rare kind of dull pain. The blur of her eyes gave way, and the girlish contours of the nine-year-old’s face came into focus. “How did you—”
“We don’t have time!” shouted Elsie. She was out of breath; it seemed that she’d just undergone some great travail to be there, looming over Martha like an orbiting planet. “What happened to Carol?”
It all came wheeling back to her: They’d just been sitting there, in the room. The room that was not the dusky basement of some craggy castle, but in fact the weird room that led off from Brad Wigman’s office. They’d been there, Martha and Carol, when the first explosion rocked the building, sending a tremulous shake up to this, the top floor, like a shiver up a spine. They’d been in the middle of reading, hadn’t they? She’d dropped the book and locked eyes with Carol, even though Carol couldn’t see. That was when the door to the room had drawn back and that man Roger had appeared, strangely dressed in some kind of ceremonial robe.
“He closed the door behind him,” Martha continued to explain, lifting herself onto her elbows, “murmuring something about a book, about how easy it had been. Then he grabbed Carol, really hard, by the arm. I jumped up to stop him and he hit me over the head with something. A bottle, maybe? I don’t know. It hurt. I fell. Everything kind of went dark. And that’s when you showed up.”
More of her fellow Unadoptables were now appearing, as if materializing from the walls. She rubbed her eyes and tried to refocus. “Oz? Harry? Ruthie? What are you all doing here?” She couldn’t help but feel a warm glow of relief spread through her chest.
The three other children, all piled into the small room, had the same look of desperation on their faces as they studied the room’s every corner with the flightiness of spooked jackrabbits.
Another thing was happening, something that Martha realized had somehow figured into her dreamlike unconsciousness: Someone was pounding on the wall. Martha sat up; the other children froze. A voice came through, a voice dipped in a dialect that sounded like something one might hear pealing away as one rode a belled troika across the Russian steppe.
“I demand the door is opened!”
The children all recognized the voice: It was the voice of their old orphanage matron, Desdemona Mudrak.
“No!” shouted Elsie, taking initiative. “Not until you tell us what happened to Carol!”
Silence reigned on the other side of the wall; Desdemona was evidently rejiggering her circuits to these strange new phenomena. Apparently Carol was not in the room, but instead had been replaced by one of the other orphans—an orphan who had not, to her best recollection, been in the room before.
“Who is speaking?” she called.
“It’s Elsie Mehlberg, Miss Mudrak,” cried Elsie. “And we’re here to save our friends.”
“Carol is not in the room? Not Mr. Swindon, neither?”
Elsie glanced around the room, as if to confirm. The room was barely ten feet square; its interior decoration was limited to a wall of shelves faced by two chairs, one of which was toppled over. The other now carried the weight of Martha Song, who had her head in her hands. “Nope,” said Elsie.
Desdemona seemed to chew on this information for a second before saying, “Open door. I help you.”
Elsie looked around. “There’s no door.”
“There is,” came the response. “Keypad is below shelf.”
Sure enough, a small ten-key calculator-like pad presented itself below the first shelf on the far wall.
“Punch in five-eight-three pound key nine,” instructed Desdemona.
Elsie did so, and the door slid open. There, standing silhouetted by the lighting in the gigantic room beyond her, stood Desdemona Mudrak. She eyed the five children in the small room and frowned. “That TУΠИЦЯ,” she said, directed at the man who was not present, the man who had scuttled off with Carol. Elsie guessed it had been a bad word. “What happened?”
“You tell me,” said Martha. “We were in here one moment, next moment your guy comes in wearing a dress and hits me over the head. Grabbed Carol and”—she made an explosion noise with her lips—“vanished.”
“Elevator,” said Desdemona. “They take secret elevator.”
“Right!” shouted Elsie, remembering herself. “They didn’t just vanish.”
“There was an elevator in here?” asked Martha, suddenly very deflated.
“Secret elevator,” qualified Desdemona. “Required access pass. Roger must know pass.”
“He didn’t need to know the pass. The security is turned off,” said Elsie. “Mr. Unthank did that. That’s our escape route.”
Desdemona, on hearing her former boyfriend’s name, seemed to lapse into a silent stupor. As if moving by a control that was not her own, she walked into the room and proceeded to peel back a panel on the other side of the small space. It rolled sideways fluidly, following unseen tracks, revealing the twin metal doors of a rather small elevator. An illuminated button, the size of a silver dollar, was inset in the panel to the left of the doors and it flashed a few times; an upward-pointing red arrow, lit, suggested that the elevator had just deposited its load and was in the process of returning to the top floor.
Martha forgot the ebbing pain in the back of her head where the man’s bottle had connected with her skull and leapt up, along with the other Unadoptables in the room, and dove for the elevator. Elsie managed the leap first; she was stabbing her finger repeatedly against the call button.
They would’ve been joined by Desdemona, had she not heard her name called to her, loudly, from inside Wigman’s office. She turned around to see Joffrey Unthank standing in the cavity between the massive brass doors at the front of the room.
“Joffrey,” she said.
“Dessie,” said Unthank.
Elsie glanced over her shoulder, witnessing the scene briefly before hearing the elevator arrive and the doors whisper open. She ushered the four other Unadoptables into the waiting car. The doors closed in front of her as she climbed in, leaving Desdemona and Joffrey to their private reunion.
“What is happened to you?” asked Desdemona, walking slowly toward Joffrey.
“I had to take some time, Dessie,” said Joffrey. “I had to clear my mind. Tra la tra lee.”
They arrived at the center of the room together, and Desdemona reached out her hands. “Oh, Joffrey, I’m so sorry for what it is I’ve done,” she said softly. “I did not mean to hurt.”
“I know, darling,” said Joffrey. “I know. In a way, you taught me. I emptied out, baby. I lost it all. But I found me.” He seemed to then shake himself from his surprise in seeing his girlfriend. He seemed to apprise himself of something much more serious. “But you shouldn’t be here now. You weren’t supposed to be. It’s not safe.”
A quick succession of explosions happened just then; a trio of soft, blossoming glows erupted outside the tall windows of the office, one after another, like fireflies. They backlit the two of them, Desdemona and Joffrey, as they gripped each other’s hands tightly, the line of their arms an obtuse angle.
“What’s happening?” asked Desdemona, searching Joffrey’s eyes.
“The Chapeaux Noirs, they’re attacking. This is it, Dessie. This is the big one.”
“The Chapeaux Noirs? But how do you know?”
“I’m with them now,” said Unthank, tears welling in his eyes. “Like I said. I found me. I’m changed. I’ve found my true self. And I want you to come with. I forgive you, Dessie. It was you who led me out of my darkness, tra la, my internal darkness. The fog of my mind. You set me on the right course, tra lee. You were my beacon, my guiding light.”
“Oh, Joffrey,” smiled Desdemona as another explosion pummed and lit up the windows. Suddenly, there, in that moment, she felt something soft and warm encompassing her, a sparkle of déjà vu that seemed to descend on the two of them like a summer shower. She realized what it was: She was suddenly and acutely recalling her first onscreen kiss. The one she’d shared with Sergei Goncharenko on the set of A Night in Havana, there in a dusty back lot in Kiev, when they’d had only one shot left and the crew was getting tired and the budget had been strained and they had to nail this one final shot, a bare minute of film, and they’d fired the pyrotechnics and the rain was pouring down from hoses suspended above them and Sergei had said his one line (“Let’s make this one count, then.”) and Desdemona had felt such an upswell of emotion that she’d completely transported herself to that place, to that café in Havana, amid the chaos of a popular uprising, and had kissed Sergei so deep and long that when he’d gasped and fallen back, per the screenplay, and feigned the first spasms of his character’s death, she’d gone there, hadn’t she, she’d believed it. And now: Desdemona, as if reenacting the screen directions of that seminal film, leaned in to kiss Joffrey and their lips met.
A very loud bang sounded. It seemed to shake the white paper chandeliers that hung over the wide room. Then a look of intense surprise awoke in Joffrey’s eyes as he pulled away from the kiss and his eyebrows jutted upward and his face slackened and his mouth fell open. Then, a little trickle of blood, the bloom of a rose, appeared on his argyle sweater-vest and as it was absorbed by the fabric, it flowered out like an opening poppy, red and full, across the breadth of his chest.
Desdemona looked over his shoulder, shocked, and saw the figure of Bradley Wigman standing in the gap between the brass doors, holding a pistol, straight out away from him. A thin tongue of smoke licked away from the barrel. A cough escaped Joffrey’s lips and he tumbled, a rag doll, into Desdemona’s arms.
“My beacon,” repeated Joffrey weakly. “My guiding light.”
“Bradley!” Desdemona shouted in disbelief. “What have you done?”
Wigman drew closer, the gun still outstretched. As he came into the light, she got a better look at him—he looked as if he’d just escaped some horrible car accident. He was covered in a fine black spray, head to toe, like a coal miner in some old photo, and his bespoke shirtsleeves were torn into little shreds along his dirtied arms. His hair, typically so immaculate in its pomaded wave, literally could not have been more mussed up—if you had tried to muss it any more you would have only succeeded in making it more groomed.
“He’s the enemy,” said Wigman, a kind of traumatized gravel to his voice. “He’s a turncoat. A rat.”
“You shot him,” she replied, barely able to speak.
“Damn right I did,” said Bradley, approaching them. “For the good of the Wastes. For the good of the Quartet.”
Joffrey coughed and his knees buckled and Desdemona fell to the floor under his weight, kneeling and cradling him in her arms. “Oh, Joffrey,” she cried. “Dear Joffrey.” His head jerked a little in her palms, and he turned to look up at her face. He became still. He smiled warmly, lovingly at Desdemona. His hand moved imperceptibly toward his left coat pocket.
When Titan Tower exploded, erupting in a shower of glass and concrete and bathing the entire Industrial Wastes in unearthly light, the five Unadoptables had only just made it out of the emergency elevator and were running across the grounds of the tower, racing after a pair of figures they’d spotted who were, in turn, struggling away down a gravel road toward a distant line of trees.
All of them, the five Unadoptables, the two figures struggling away (revealed in the light of the detonation to be Roger and Carol), the little groups of warring stevedores and Chapeaux Noirs on the outskirts of the containing walls—all of them stopped to watch the magnificent immolation of Titan Tower. It was as if day had arrived in the middle of the darkest night. The world was flooded with illumination. The stevedores, some frozen in position with their red pipe wrenches held high above their heads, blinked and stared at the sight. The Chapeaux Noirs saboteurs, in midthrow, tossed their lit bombs to a safe distance and watched the glass cascading from the top floors like a shower of crystalline rain, ignoring the detonation when their own bombs had landed, some feet away, and exploded impotently.
The stevedores all but shriveled at the sight; the heart of their entire operation, the center of the hive mind, was crashing down before them in a cataract of silver light and heat. They dropped their wrenches, each one, and fell to their knees. The Chapeaux Noirs gaped and stumbled; some pulled their black berets from their heads and held them, crushed, to their chests, so great was their reverence for this single gorgeous explosion. The tremendous light made long shadows across the blasted ground of the Industrial Wastes from all the combatants; the light touched the farthest reaches of the Wastes, the boom and rattle soon after. In Portland, even, among the quiet, dormant houses filled with Outsiders at their evening leisure, the light could be seen, a beacon of flame in some far-off field. Somewhere in the north part of the city, a child ran to his window and called out to his parents to see the strange light; he was loudly shushed and sent back to his bed so his parents could finish watching their television show.
Rachel Mehlberg, standing by a group of similarly shocked and frozen saboteurs, spied the group of five Unadoptables, shadows cast by the burning building, racing across the tower’s grounds toward some unknown goal; she’d been waiting for them at the East Gate of Wigman Plaza, having long deployed her allotted four bombs, worried sick about the welfare of her sister and cursing herself for ever letting Elsie out of her sight. The sound of the battle had been deafening; a high-pitched whistle was singing in her ear. She’d just checked her watch, the chain watch that Nico had given her, and was chagrined to see that ten o’clock, the time of the rendezvous, had long passed. That was when she saw them running, charging across the budget-bin landscaping that served as greenery in the tower’s interior square, now covered in a squall of glass and ash.
“There they are!” shouted Rachel. She’d counted five children; she made the quick guess: “They’ve got Martha!”
Nico was standing with her. “Let’s go,” he yelled over the sound of the tower’s residual collapse. The two of them arced out, away from the falling debris, in line to bisect the Unadoptables’ course.
“Elsie!” screamed Rachel, as she charged after them. The noise of the settling wreckage of the tower blotted out all sound. A cloud of smoke and dust was barreling out from the base of the demolished building, obscuring everything in a deep, dark haze.
Just as this fog consumed them, Rachel and Nico managed to fall in line behind the running Unadoptables. “Elsie!” Rachel tried again.
Her sister quickly looked over her shoulder, seeing Rachel in pursuit. “He’s got Carol!” she shouted between heaving breaths.
“Who?”
“Just . . . follow them!” shouted Elsie, exasperated.
Rachel looked ahead; they were now funneling into one of the narrow corridors that etched the face of the Industrial Wastes. The buildings in the smoke and fog were just shapes in the dark. Ahead of them, the way was lit by the occasional yellow streetlamp, glowing dimly in the haze; about fifty yards away, she could see two figures emerge into the light and disappear again.
The air around them was hot and close. Enveloped by the cloud of dust, they each pulled their black turtlenecks to their mouths to filter the grime and charged ahead. No sooner would the two figures, stumbling through the fog, disappear from sight, than they would appear again as the swirl of cloud parted and eddied away.
“STOP!” yelled Rachel, pulling her mouth away from the fabric of her shirt long enough to shout that one, sharp directive. She was immediately thrown into a fit of coughing, and she stumbled as she ran. Elsie saw her sister falter and fell back to help.
The dust cloud grew all-consuming. The horizon was blotted out. Only the closest streetlamps could be seen on the road. The looming chemical silos along the gravel roadside became deeply shrouded in the gray dust, transforming into still, white ghosts in the dark. The pursuers continued forward, arriving after a short time at a chain-link fence.
“Look!” shouted Nico, pointing to a ripple in the fence where the bottom had been lifted from the ground. A piece of rough gray fabric was caught in the wire mesh; Nico grabbed the wire and pulled, holding it open as the six children scrambled through. On the other side of the fence was a wide, fallow stretch of scrub brush and scotch broom. Just at that moment, a gust of wind picked up and peeled away the curtain of clouds like a hand on a fogged windscreen, revealing the way ahead: a looming line of trees, a dense weave of bracken and greenery, a whining creak from ancient boughs.
Ahead, not far off, a robed figure could be seen, ankle deep in fern fronds, dragging his reluctant companion past the threshold of trees and into the Impassable Wilderness.