JI PULLED HER back into the chute. “Wait!”
“No way,” Sally said. “I’m getting him right now.”
“You see those guards?”
“I’ll take care of them.”
“With what, Sal? They’re twice your size. And what about the threads?”
She wiped tears from her face. “What threads?”
“Those kids are woven in place,” he said. “Chibo is woven in place.”
“What are you talking about?” Sally looked closer . . . and her jaw tightened when she saw what he meant. “That’s evil.”
Threads were wrapped around the kids’ wrists and ankles in thick knots, roping them to the looms. Every time they moved, shuttles slid and gears turned and spindles bobbed. Ji felt a simmer of anger. A hundred kids, treated worse than servants—treated more like machines than people.
Sally took a shuddering breath. “I can’t leave him, Ji.”
“I know.”
“I’d rather be tied there beside him.”
Ji rubbed the sting from his eyes. “Yeah.”
“So what’re we doing to do?” she asked.
Ji frowned into the color-swirling air. “I don’t know. How about, um . . . okay. I’ll run and untie Chibo. I’m good with knots.”
“What about the guards?”
“They’ll leave when you and Roz make the distraction outside.”
“What distraction?”
“The big one,” he told her. “The huge one. The massive, earthshaking, tooth-quaking distraction that gets the guards called away.”
“Oh.” She peered at him. “Maybe I should untie Chibo, and you should think of a distraction. It’s dangerous down there.”
“Sally, if someone whacks at us with a lance, I’m hiding behind you. If we have to arm-wrestle a goblin, you’ll go first. But he’s woven into place with knots. Those are my job.”
“That’s not a boot, Ji.”
“Everything’s a boot when you’re a boot boy.”
She bit her lip. “Just be careful.”
“Don’t you mean ‘just be honorable’?”
“Shut up.” Sally shoved him with her shoulder. “Jerk.” She grabbed the twine and started climbing up the chute. “I’ll see you outside.”
“No, head to the town house,” he told her bum as she scooted higher. “They probably won’t notice I’m missing, but if we’re all gone for too long . . .”
“Okay,” she said. “See you there.”
“And throw me more rope!” he called after her.
A minute later, another length of twine tumbled down the chute and draped around Ji’s head. He tied it to the first length, then wiped tears from his cheeks, watched the guards, and waited for the distraction.
Ten minutes.
Twenty minutes.
Thirty minutes . . . and a striped flag flashed across the factory floor. One guard jerked in surprise. He grabbed the other guard, and they jogged from the room. Ji grinned to himself. He didn’t know what Sally and Roz had done as a distraction, but it must’ve been pretty massive and earthshaking.
“Those two really know how to quake some teeth,” Ji said.
He unraveled his double length of twine onto the factory floor, then jumped from the grate. He aimed for the heap of wool bales, which he expected to be as fluffy as a bunny rabbit made of smiles.
It wasn’t.
He hit hard, then did a little groaning and rolled onto the floor.
The floor wasn’t exactly soft, either.
When he caught his breath, he pushed to his feet and headed to the work floor, his side aching and his nerves jangly. The looms slammed overhead, like a thousand bear traps. He kept his gaze low, jogging through the colorful, swirling flakes. He slunk into a forest of threads, then slipped into Chibo’s row.
Up close, the kids still looked almost interchangeable, with shorn scalps and skinny faces. Attached to the loom like puppets. Ji only recognized Chibo from his rosebud mouth and his dark skin, more like Ji’s than Sally’s.
He stepped beside Chibo and murmured, “Stay quiet. We have to get out of here before—”
“Jiyong!” Chibo yelled. “It’s you! It’s you!”
“Chibo,” he hissed. “Quiet!”
“Hey, everyone, it’s Ji!” Chibo announced, shouting to be heard through the color flakes. “He’s here!”
“Would you shut up?”
“I told you he’d come, I told you!” Chibo clung tightly to Ji. “I knew you’d come, you and Sally.”
“She wanted to burst in with her sword swinging,” Ji told him. “But what do you mean, you knew? We didn’t know!”
“’Cause I’m smarter’n you are,” Chibo said, raising his smiling face.
The pigment in the air brought tears to Ji’s eyes . . . but there weren’t any tears on Chibo’s cheeks. And his eyes weren’t focused on Ji’s, either. He was looking slightly to the side, like he saw the basic shape of Ji’s face, but not the details.
“You’re mixing up ‘smarter’ and ‘shorter’ again,” Ji told him. “Let’s get you out of here.”
“Get us all out of here!” Chibo said.
Ji knelt to unravel the threads around Chibo’s ankle—and jerked in surprise. “There’s someone under here!”
A girl was sleeping in a cubby beneath Chibo’s place at the loom, her arms and legs jerking gently as the threads around her wrists and ankles moved.
“That’s Ximena,” Chibo said. “She works this station when I sleep. Then I work when she sleeps and—”
“Done!” Ji said, unwinding the last tendril from Chibo’s ankles. “Give me your hands.”
“Um, if you untie me—” Loops of thread spewed crazily from the gear in front of him. “That! That happens.”
“Who cares?” Ji said, starting on Chibo’s wrists. “The guards are gone.”
A bell dinged, shrill despite the colorful flecks. “Not all of them! Oh, badness. The overseer . . . he’s coming!”
“The overseer?” Ji murmured, desperately unknotting the last snarl around Chibo’s wrist while threads unspooled past his face.
“You did it!” Chibo told Ji, raising his hands. “Now do everyone else!”
“I can’t!”
“You have to, Ji! Look at them!”
Ji looked at them. Dozens of skinny kids surrounded him, working the looms, heads shaved and eyes blank. As if while they wove magical visions into tapestries, they lost their own vision. When they heard Chibo’s words, their faces turned toward Ji, unseeing but full of desperate hope.
“There’s no time!” Ji cried. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—”
“We’ll come back,” Chibo told the other kids. “I promise, we’re coming back.”
Ignoring the sick feeling in his stomach, Ji dragged Chibo through the swirling air. At the end of the row, he caught sight of a burly man ambling toward them.
“Oh, no,” Ji whispered.
“What’s happening?” Chibo asked. “I can’t see!”
The overseer took two steps closer . . . then a bunch of gears in the next row started spewing thread. The overseer spun, yelling something that Ji couldn’t hear.
“The other kids,” Ji said. “They’re covering our escape.”
The overseer stalked into the next row. Ji wiped the tears from his face, waited three seconds, then raced with Chibo to the pile of wool bales.
“Climb the rope!” he said.
“What rope?”
Ji shoved the twine into Chibo’s hand. “Here. Put your foot in my hands, then climb onto my shoulders and keep climbing!”
The bell shrilled again. Ji watched Chibo climb and waited for the overseer to spot him. When Chibo disappeared through the opening in the wall, he scrambled up the twine. Slats in the wall made perfect footholds, and a minute later he crawled into the chute beside Chibo.
He yanked the twine in with them and slid the iron grate closed.
With the color flakes on the other side of the grate, the noise of the looms started again. “You can’t leave the other kids!” Chibo shouted.
“What else can I do?” Ji asked.
Chibo wrinkled his nose. “Save them.”
“How?”
“You’ll think of something.”
“I—I’ll try,” Ji said, hating himself for lying. “But first we need to finish saving you.”
“Okay, as long as you’ll try!” Chibo squinted higher in the shadowy chute. “Where’s Sally? Is she up there?”
“She’s waiting for you at home,” Ji told him. “She and Roz distracted the guards and had to run.”
“I haven’t run in forever!” Chibo raised one foot. “Look, no threads! Forget running, I can jump and tumble! I can hop! I can spin till I’m dizzy!”
“Hop later.” Ji started to close the cloth panel overhead. “They’ll be searching the streets. We’ll wait here a few hours, then sneak out.”
Chibo reached up to help with the panel but missed the strap by two inches. “Ow! Oops.”
Ji frowned at his wide brown eyes. They looked the same but didn’t seem to work so well anymore. Still, Chibo was as bubbly and enthusiastic as ever. Ji didn’t know how he’d stayed so cheerful, after what he’d been through. Ji would’ve wanted to burn the factory down and spit on the ashes.
Actually, he did want to do that. He remembered the other weaver kids’ hopeful faces and nearsighted eyes when Chibo promised them that he’d save them. He remembered their broken expressions when he’d said that he couldn’t. All they wanted was freedom; he knew how that felt. But he couldn’t help. Instead, he curled in the chute with Chibo for hours, quiet as a cheese-flavored mouse in a room of cats.
Deep in the night, Ji shook Chibo awake. They crept through the factory together and slipped into the midnight street.