They cleared the table in the center of the room with a flourish; a heavyset man who’d been introduced as “Le Poignard” unfurled a large blueprint map and stretched it out on the table’s wooden surface. A host of Chapeaux Noirs gathered there like priests unveiling a holy writ. The glow of a single lightbulb, from above, illuminated the blue ink on the waxy paper: an incredibly detailed architectural diagram of what appeared to be a very tall and very fortified building. On the bottom of the sheet was written TITAN TOWER in the perfect symmetry of architectural script. The Unadoptables all crowded around one edge of the table and peered down at the blueprint, their eyes wide. Jacques Chruschiel loomed over them, his hand tracing little imaginary lines on the paper.
“An outer wall, made of five-foot-thick concrete and topped with concertina wire,” said Jacques. “Guarded tout le temps by the tower’s best-trained stevedores.” His finger, unrestricted by the tower’s defenses, made its way past the gridded outline of the wall and into the square that was the building’s ground floor. “A state-of-the-art security system, linked to a closed-circuit video surveillance package on every floor. Stevedores here, here, and here,” he said, his finger tapping on each corner of the box. “And here. Access to the top floor is only viable through the elevator ici, here.” Tap. “Which is security-locked, accessible to only those whose handprints have clearance.”
“How do you know all this stuff?” asked Michael.
“I told you,” said Nico Posholsky, who was cast in the bulb’s dim light on the opposite side of the table. “A good man died to bring us this intel.”
“The blueprint we’ve had since December. The rest is stuff we’ve learned over months of hard recon work,” said Jacques.
“Who was it?” asked Elsie, Intrepid Tina held tight to her chest.
“What?” asked Jacques, surprised to hear the little girl speak up.
“Who died?” She looked at each man in turn, each black-bereted man who stood around the table staring at the stolen plans. She’d been thinking of the man who’d died bringing the “intel” ever since Nico had mentioned it back at the Forgotten Place, and it bothered her. She couldn’t help but imagine him, this man who wore a black beret too and was once as alive as the men who were now crowded around this table, talking espionage.
“Michel,” said Jacques, finally. “Michel Blatsky. A good man. Vraiment un bon homme.” He smiled at Elsie warmly. “It’s good you asked. Too soon we forget.”
“He’d posed as a stevedore, infiltrated their ranks. He had to gain seventy-five pounds to do it,” said Nico. “Ten weeks of work, reporting back to us every other night on the sly. In the end, it was too much. He slipped up, dropped some French into a casual conversation, and he was made.” He stopped talking here, as if overcome by the memory. “All that we found later was his maroon beanie.”
“Since then, our hopes of staging an attack on the tower itself have been abandoned,” said Jacques, still staring at the blueprint. “It was too risky. We’ve been hitting smaller jobs ever since.”
“How can you be sure that Carol and Martha are in there?” asked Rachel.
“Michel was there when the stevedores brought them in. They were escorted into the tower under heavy security. More than likely, they’re here.” He threw back the blueprint, revealing a stack of pages beneath. Flipping through, he found what he was looking for and spread it flat. It was labeled TITAN TOWER: TOP FLOOR DETAIL. His finger stabbed down on a small, closetlike room that branched off a rectangular space that dominated the surface area of the floor. “Wigman’s safe room, connected by a secret door to his office and trophy room. The man’s a paranoid, deep down. He had this room built as a safe harbor were the tower to come under attack. It’s the hardest room in the building to crack. In a building that’s impossible to crack. If he really cared about these two—and it appears he does—this would be the best place to keep them.”
“So how do you get in?” asked Michael.
“You don’t,” said Jacques. “Before Michel was nabbed, we were in the midst of an action called Operation: Urban Renewal. It was to be the biggest action in the history of the Chapeaux. A full-scale attack on the tower, detonations set at every floor. The whole thing—the tower, the stevedores, Wigman and his cronies—would all come toppling down in a glorious explosion. Needless to say, that wouldn’t necessarily work in a search-and-rescue mission.”
“The only way is to blow our way in,” said Nico. “Put enough C-4 on the outer wall to make a hole and hope that a few more guys can get through to blow the doors.”
“Security system then puts the whole building on lockdown,” said Jacques. “Elevators lock, doors lock. Alarms everywhere. And then you’ve got the entire stevedore security detail to wrangle with.”
Nico rubbed his chin. “But if you threw some decoy detonation on the east and north corners, just to throw ’em off . . .”
“So you’ve scattered the stevedores,” Jacques interrupted. “You’ve still got the lockdown and a stevedore threat that’s bigger than our team could handle, especially if we’ve got technicians on the east and north wall, laying bombs.”
“Say one of the bombs is lobbed at a generator,” said Nico. “Knock the power out.”
“Have you been listening at all during the council meetings?” asked Jacques disdainfully. “Generator’s underground. And there’s backup in the building.” A group of men began arguing these points across the table from Jacques and Nico; soon, the entire room became lost in a buzz of anarchist saboteurs, all heatedly discussing the minutiae of storming Titan Tower.
Elsie, standing next to Jacques, her arms folded on the lip of the table, was stroking the cropped hair of Intrepid Tina and trying to think how she could be of help. She’d been so accustomed, in her former life, before her parents’ abandonment, to sitting back and letting the adults handle the big decisions. But things had changed. She was now a parent to herself, her own mother and father, and the adult world now appeared to her less fortified than it had seemed prior to life as an Unadoptable. She now saw adults as incredibly fallible people, just like children. Their adulthood did not necessarily save them from constantly making bad decisions—in fact, she speculated, they were more likely to make bad decisions. Surely, Elsie herself should be able to come up with a reasonable plan to snag Martha and Carol from Wigman’s clutches. She was a nine-year-old girl, after all.
She bit her lip and thought. And thought. The swarm of voices around her became like a distant hum as she meditated on the circumstances. It seemed awfully familiar, the scene: There were two captives in a tall tower, surrounded by guards and a vengeful overlord. She realized that it was exactly the setup for the season finale of Intrepid Tina: Danger’s Foil, in which Sailor Steve, Tina’s sometime love interest, had been captured by the Robot Fiend and was being held prisoner on the Island of Doom, at the top of the Robot Fiend’s hideout, which was very towerlike. Elsie searched her memory, trying to recall how it was that Steve was eventually freed. Very suddenly, it came to her.
“Where does the air come from?” asked Elsie quietly.
Rachel looked askance at her sister. “What did you say?”
“Can you ask them where the air comes from?”
The noise in the room had become nearly deafening. No one had heard her; they were all much too busy arguing their own points, gesturing wildly at the plans on the table.
“Excuse me!” shouted Rachel, who had a deeper and louder voice than her sister.
No response.
“EXCUSE ME!” she screamed, and this time, everyone stopped talking. In the silence, Rachel cleared her throat. “My sister would like to know where the air comes from.”
“What?” asked Nico, perplexed. “What does that mean?”
“Good question,” said Rachel. She turned to Elsie. “What does that mean?”
Elsie spoke up. “There’s little tunnels, right? Metal tunnels. That run through buildings. It’s where the air goes, where it comes from.”
“Metal tunnels,” repeated Jacques. “Where the air comes from.”
“Ductwork,” said Nico, a light coming over his face. “She means ductwork. The HVAC system.” He spun the blueprints around and began thumbing the pages. “Runs through the whole building. Access points at each floor.”
“We’ve gone over that,” said Jacques, realizing now what the girl had meant. “They’re too small for a man to get through.”
Rachel had caught on. She beamed at her sister. “Too small for a man to get through, yeah,” she said. “But not an Unadoptable.”
Jacques looked at Elsie, surprised, before he suddenly began laughing. Laughing loudly. The sort of laughing that racks the body and seems to ripple from its core. He held his hands over his stomach in an almost comical depiction of someone laughing hard and gasped for breath. His friends, the black-clad saboteurs in the room, all stared at him with little smiles pinpricking their faces. They’d never seen the man so jubilant, it was clear. The laugh was contagious; soon everyone in the room was laughing with Jacques, some more timidly than others, not entirely sure why they should be sharing in one man’s strange reaction to what amounted to a very good suggestion from a very small girl.
“We were lucky indeed to have crossed paths with you,” said Jacques. Nico had peeled aside the first pages of the stack of plans and was studying, with new eyes, the intricate ductwork that wove around Wigman’s fortified structure like veins around a heart. His finger tapped at each intersection, each access point where the renderings showed the HVAC tunnels connecting with the interior walls.
“Brilliant,” said Nico. “But flawed.”
Elsie frowned; it had been so simple on the Intrepid Tina episode.
Nico continued, “We’ll still need to get beyond the outer wall, to even get the kids into the ducts. And that security system is going to be a thorn in our side. Not to mention the fact that the vents likely end in vent coverings, impossible to remove from inside the ductwork. They’ll have to kick them out, and that’s just going to draw attention.”
“But still,” said Jacques. “It’s a good place to start.”
“There’s something to it,” Nico said. The saboteur continued to frown, though he nodded in agreement.
Michael had moved to Nico’s side and was hovering over the plans, searching them. He pointed to a ghostlike shaft that fell away from Wigman’s safe room. “What’s that?” he asked.
Nico squinted his eyes, trying to make sense of the splayed lines. “An elevator,” he said. He tapped his finger on it, twice. “Must be some kind of secret elevator, an escape route from the safe room. Leads down to the ground floor—doesn’t stop anywhere else.”
“So if we can get into there,” said Michael, “through the ducts, with the smaller kids, we can get them out the elevator. Wigman’d never know.”
Nico chewed on his lip before replying, “But the ducts don’t connect directly to the safe room. There’s a route we could map, but you’d still have to transfer a few times. Meaning you’d have to kick out the vent coverings and reenter the ducts at another place. Meaning you’d create an awful lot of clamber and likely set off the alarm—not to mention the fact that you kids’d be out in the open until they found the other access point.” He shook his head. “Too risky,” he said.
“That’s where your decoy detonations come in,” said Jacques, having recovered from his jubilant laughing fit. He was still smiling, and the tone of his voice suggested that he still very much liked the cut of Elsie’s idea. “We stage an attack—a real brazen one. Draw the stevedores away from their stations. Time the explosions so they happen right when the vent coverings are kicked.”
“What about the security system?” asked Nico. “I hate to rain on everybody’s fun parade here, but I seriously doubt that a state-of-the-art security system is not going to go off when you’re getting pieces of the wall kicked out from inside the ductwork.”
“Blow up the security center,” said Jacques. “Take it all down with explosives. Level the thing.” A mad gleam had appeared in his eyes.
Nico watched him warily. “That brings us back to Operation: Urban Renewal, Jacques. The whole place comes down and the kids get buried.”
“That’s not going to happen,” said Rachel. “You’re losing the plot here, guys.”
But before any reasonable alternative could be aired, loud noises suddenly came from the hallway: the sounds of shouting voices and heavy doors being thrown back violently. Everyone in the room turned to watch three members of the Chapeaux Noirs rudely drag a very sad figure into the room and throw him, even more rudely, onto the floor in front of the table.
“Jacques!” shouted one of the men. “We got ourselves an intruder.”
Elsie craned her neck around the bodies of the men in her sight radius to catch a glimpse of the person who’d just been thrown to the floor. She saw not so much a human being as a pile of greasy rags, lumped messily in a heap like a pile of bedding en route to the washing machine. She recognized the figure immediately—she’d seen him only the night before, wandering the Wastes. It was the mysterious Weirdo, the figure that was always loitering at the perimeter of the Forgotten Place. As the figure settled, a face appeared amid the heap: a tired, grizzled face, more unkempt facial hair than flesh, and a pair of sad, gray eyes, lined deeply in red. She immediately felt very sorry for the poor soul.
“The Weirdo!” hissed Michael, making the same connection Elsie had.
“Who?” barked one of the saboteurs, kicking absently at the man’s side.
“Easy,” chided Jacques, looking as much surprised by the stranger’s sudden appearance as his treatment at the hands of his fellow saboteurs. “He’s clearly no threat. He’s just some homeless man, found a way into the sewers for shelter.”
“We found him in the main pipe,” said one of the men. “He must’ve followed Nico and the kids in here.”
Jacques moved forward, splitting the sea of men, to look into the stranger’s eyes. “You’re safe here, friend,” he said.
The man in the heap of clothes looked up to see Jacques approach, and a look of terror came over his dirty face. He threw himself backward, and the men behind him wrangled him down to constrain him. “You!” shouted the man in a voice hoarse as a whisper. He then began to quietly laugh.
“Careful, Jacques,” said Nico. “He’s a madman. No telling what he’ll do.”
“Friend,” said Jacques consolingly to the Weirdo. “Why have you come here?”
“Where? Am I anywhere?” asked the man, between fits of high-pitched laughter.
Someone from the back of the room said, “He’s crazy. Listen to him.”
“Quiet!” Jacques shouted to the room. “We are the Chapeaux Noirs, comrades. Enemies of the elite, friends to the downtrodden. Allow this man to speak.”
But the man didn’t so much speak as mumble in a syntax that seemed nearly alien, graced as it was with quick fits of laughter and strings of melody. “Yes, yes,” said the man. “Let the man speak, yes, yes. Tra la tra la. To speak of old times. To speak of new times and old times.”
“How did you get in here?” asked Jacques through this burble of nonsense.
“Through the under, under through. By way of the night and the light. To find my children. To find my long-lost children, tra la tra la,” said the man.
“See?” said one of the men behind him. “He’s followed the kids in. We’ve given away our location.”
Elsie edged forward; for all the dirt and matted hair clinging to the Weirdo’s face, for all the pile of clothes he had huddled about him, for all the smell that was emanating from the poor, wretched thing, there was something vaguely familiar about him.
“Please,” continued Jacques, stepping closer to the quivering man. “We mean you no harm.” He reached out and pushed aside a wisp of the man’s long, oily hair to get a better look at his eyes; just then, Elsie could see that the same vague recognition had overcome the elder Chapeau Noir as well.
“Hello, Joffrey,” said Jacques.
It was true: Crouched there, held fast by the men around him, was none other than Joffrey Unthank himself, the proprietor of the Unthank Home for Wayward Youth and the children’s former guardian and overseer. Elsie could see that his goatee still outgrew the rest of his beard, bereft of its once well-trimmed shape. The pile of scavenged bedding he had collected over his shoulders fell back to reveal a dirty argyle sweater-vest below. “It’s him?” asked Nico.
Michael and Cynthia both wormed their way through the crowd and looked down on the sad man with surprise. “It’s him, all right,” said Michael, barely containing the anger and disgust in his voice.
“A serendipitous day, indeed,” said Jacques. He watched the huddled figure of Joffrey Unthank as one would a frightened animal.
Michael knelt down by Jacques’s side and stared at Joffrey. He took a deep breath and said, “You stink, Mr. Unthank. Do you remember me, Mr. Unthank? Michael Denison. My parents were killed in a plane crash, and I ended up in your little home. I manned the steam furnace. Do you remember?”
Joffrey’s dazed eyes became dewy, and they darted back and forth, searching Michael’s face. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said in a whisper. “How do you do again. Tra la la.”
“I broke the nozzle on the furnace and you made me Unadoptable, do you remember? Took me into your office and stuck a needle in me and sent me out into the woods.” Michael’s voice was overcome with emotion, and it quavered as he spoke. “I swore that if ever I saw you again, I’d tear you limb from limb.”
“Oh yes, child,” blubbered Unthank. “Oh yes, oh yes.”
Michael’s hands reached out and touched the cheek of his former boss, his former captor, and his hands shook.
“Don’t do it, Michael,” said Cynthia Schmidt, coming up from behind and laying a hand on his shoulder.
Instead, Michael pursed his lips and spat a bright glob of phlegm at the sad man, hitting him directly below his right eye. A stain of white skin appeared, the moisture having cleaned away a spot of the filth that covered the man’s face.
Just then, Joffrey began to cry. Deep heaves of sobbing, punctuated by more weird laughter, came from the man, and tears dripped down from his nose. Michael stepped away from him, a look of revulsion on his face.
“What’s happened to him?” asked Elsie, who was standing at her sister’s side. She’d only once seen an adult man cry who wasn’t on the TV; it had been her dad, after her brother’s disappearance. This was different, though. This bout of crying seemed to come from a further-off place, a stranger place.
“I don’t know,” responded Rachel. “He’s crazy, I guess.”
“Serves him right,” said Cynthia. “That place was like a prison. It’s a crime what he did to us.”
Jacques had put his arm around Unthank and pulled his sobbing head into the crook of his shoulder. “There, there,” said Jacques, a consoling parent. “Cry it out, Joffrey. It’s true, my old friend. My old partner. You’ve done terrible, terrible things. Not just to these children: Oh, no—though that was a very serious misstep—worse, you’ve corrupted yourself and your own mind in your search for satisfaction, despite the costs. You’ve lost track of the man inside in your restless need to create things, to amass stuff, to have power. It is the disease of desire, my friend. And it has rotted your soul to the very core.”
Joffrey, smothered in the fabric of Jacques’s turtleneck, could only mumble a weird, “Hmm hmm tra la. Tra la.” The tears continued to fall, and they wet Jacques’s shirt.
“But you can redeem yourself, Joffrey,” continued the saboteur. “You can rise, like the phoenix, from the flames of your destroyed creation. You have arrived here, at my home, at your former fellow Titan’s home, to come face-to-face with your past and all the terrible decisions that you’ve made and that have led you, inexorably, to the place you currently, sadly, desperately inhabit. Look at your failed life, Joffrey: It is standing right in front of you.”
At this, Unthank pushed himself away from Jacques’s embrace and stared, teary-eyed, at the figures that surrounded him: the Chapeaux Noirs, the Unadoptables. Elsie, standing frozen by her sister, saw that Jacques, too, had started weeping.
Planting an affectionate kiss on Joffrey’s forehead, Jacques spoke again. “But you, like the rest of us, are a victim. You are ultimately not to blame. You were set up by a cruel and unfeeling master. You are not bad, not at the core. And fate has deposited you here to be a part of a great rebirth, a grand destruction of an empire of which you yourself have been its most recent victim.”
“Wiggggg . . . ,” mumbled Joffrey through his sobs. “Wiggggg . . .”
“Yes,” prompted Jacques. “Yes, speak his name. Speak his name as a soul newly hatched.”
“Wigmannnnn!” shouted Joffrey.
Just then, Jacques abruptly yanked Unthank from the floor and dragged him, stumbling, to the table. He held him by the scruff of his neck, as a mother cat would hold its litter, and pointed to the sheaf of pages on the table. “Here is your Babel, Joffrey. Here is your pillar of salt. Here is the beacon that has brought you to us, that has brought us all together. Look on it and laugh. For you are now free.”
And Joffrey Unthank began to laugh.
She’d placed the eagle feather on her dresser, right next to the framed mirror, in a little brass bowl. She wasn’t quite sure how the spirit wanted the things presented to her, but she figured a little bit of ceremony couldn’t hurt. It was a little disappointing to have the mirror do nothing when she’d arrived home, her hair a snag of twigs and moss, to present the feather she’d labored so hard to retrieve. True, the spirit only visited at night, when the clock chimed twelve—but she thought that maybe the ghost would make an exception now, when she’d brought the first thing the spirit had requested. When she got no response, Zita grabbed the little brass bowl, the one she herself had chosen from her mother’s belongings, the one her mother had kept her rings in at night, and set it in front of the mirror, placing the newly won feather in the dish. Still, nothing. She waited out the clock, waiting for the night to come.
When it did come, when the chime rang out in the hallway and her father was silently asleep in his room, she was prepared for the spirit’s return.
GOOD was written in the fog on the pane of glass of the mirror.
“Thank you,” said Zita, getting over her initial chill to see the words appear. What’s more, she found herself to be ever so slightly more comfortable with the fact that she was in the presence of a disembodied soul, one who was communicating with her through the mist on a mirror. “What’s next?” asked Zita timidly, her hands clutching her duvet.
The mirror cleared and again a mist, unseen in the room, clouded the surface. PEBBLE was scrawled.
Easy enough, thought Zita. A pebble could be gotten from just about anywhere.
ROCKING CHAIR CREEK. The words had taken up all the remaining real estate on the mirror. Zita’s face fell. She had never heard of Rocking Chair Creek, let alone where it might be. “I don’t have to go to the Avian Principality again, do I?” she asked to the ether.
But there came no response from the mirror. The fog disappeared. The mirror again reflected the small, dark room and the glow of the candle at Zita’s bedside. A moon, half-full, shone through the window and cast its light across the room as Zita contemplated her next move. Her father’s atlas would have an answer, she decided. Retrieving it from the hallway, she opened its cracked and dusty spine and smoothed the pages that showed the Wood in its entirety. Optimistically, she searched the area directly around her house, in the mercantile district, for the Empress’s words: ROCKING CHAIR CREEK. As she’d sadly expected, she found nothing. Moving farther afield, she crossed with her eyes the boundary of the Avian Principality and scanned the area’s many squiggly blue lines for the words—still nothing. It wasn’t until she’d glanced even farther north that she saw what she was looking for. Rocking Chair Creek did exist.
It was a creek that was deep in the heart of Wildwood.