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FLUPPIT RAN THROUGH the darkness. She panted as she sprinted on all fours. The Folk hardly ever ran that way anymore. Unless they really needed to run. She crashed into the end of a corridor as she took the corner too fast and slammed into the T-junction wall. She gasped, licked her fur quickly on the bashed side, shook her head and ran on.
She took the stairs at a sprint down the planks in the middle of the massive stairs. She blinked back tears and ran on into Gantrytown. The mass of folk everywhere made a mess of her Air-sense, or maybe she wasn’t focusing on them. She ran on, dodging through legs and avoiding being trodden on by a whisker in this direction and that.
Then there—a twitch of nose. Coiled in the miasma of the market like a rope guide—a scent to follow.
“I’m coming Auntie Kaj!”
Fluppit stopped and stood on her hind legs as high as she could reach, she flicked her nose, this way, then that. There. That was the smell—engine oil, clean sweat and cream. Gotcha. She sprinted into the thick of the crowd. She stopped by stalls she knew and asked at each one. Still no Kaj, but the scent was fresher and fresher as she went.
“Auntie Kaj! Auntie KAJ!”
Then out of a cloud of circuit board and component smell, there she was, “Hey Flup-Pup! What’s the hurry?”
“Auntie Kaj OneLove isn’t well he’s not talking to anybody and Daddy won’t wake up and Uncle Dun said for me to come and find you and Nev and bring you back because everything’s awful and I’m scared and OneLove is sick and I ran all the way to find you and— He won’t die, will he?”
“Not if I’ve got a say in it, no. Let’s grab Uncle Nev and get back.”
****
SANCTUARY WAS CHAOS. Nev was already there. Folk rushed about here and there, Padg still lay on the floor and Dun was fussing around with Nev by the side of the vat. They seemed to be scrabbling with a cable loom and bickering loudly. Fluppit still held Kaj’s hand as they entered the room. When Fluppit tried to concentrate on Air-sense scenes like the one before her, she always found it made her head swim. Her auntie slowly released pressure on her hand and let it fall.
“What in the hells is going on here?” Auntie Kaj sounded mad. The room smelled off today too. The underlying scent of was normally organic—maybe cleanly sweaty, but also notes of grass and lemons and stale breath. That smell was fading to a memory. Sharp in the air was an angry, acrid, almost wounded smell, mixed evenly with the smell of something syrupy and suspiciously sweet.
“He’s dying.” Fluppit had her hand on the skin of the vat.
“But how? He can’t be. Gods, what’s that smell?” Kaj sounded as panicked as Fluppit had ever heard her.
“I think he’s been poisoned,” said Dun.
“We’re trying to reconnect the speaker— Shreds!” Nev howled.
“Concentrate.”
“My driver slipped.”
“Where’s Amber?” said Kaj.
“On her way,” said Dun around grunts from Nev. “Look, it’s not going to help the connections if you bleed all over them.”
Fluppit had a cloth in her pocket. She figured even while she could taste the panic in the air, she could do something useful. She shuffled along the vat and found Nev’s hand. His fur was slick with blood, which was not improving how he held a screwdriver. One palm had a ragged score right across the middle, which was where the bleeding was coming from. “Here Uncle Nev, let me tie that up for you.” She flourished the cloth from her pocket and made a fair job of a makeshift bandage. He hissed through his teeth as she tied the final knot, “Too tight?”
“No. Smarts.”
“Be careful Unca Nev?”
He put a hand on top of hers.
“Thank you Fluppit,” said Dun, “Now he’ll stop bleeding on the wires, we might get this finished.”
“Shove over and I’ll help,” said Kaj.
The door of the Sanctuary creaked open. Everyone was having to open it manually, with a deal of pushing. Clearly some automated, or assisted system that OneLove was in charge of was not working. The familiar wisp of Amber’s perfume came through the door. “What happened?”
Fluppit was there in two strides and gave her a massive hug.
“OneLove,” said Dun.
“Someone’s, tried to hurt him,” said Fluppit.
“Nearly there,” said Kaj.
“How bad is it?” Amber asked quietly.
“There,” Nev clicked a wire in place.
A jet of screams came from the speaker. The keening of a wounded beast with a thousand voices. Fluppit found it hard to tell where the noise in the air stopped and the noise in her head began, she could hear the howling and ululation from inside and out. She put her hands over her ears, but it didn’t help. Dun was on the floor by her feet, hands over his ears too.
“Shut that off!” shouted Amber.
Nev was right by Fluppit, frozen in space, speaker stretched on two thin wires, unable to react or move. It seemed impossible for such a noise to come from such a small device. It was hypnotic.
“Shut it off!” Amber yelled.
Fluppit focused on moving her feet, feeling where she was the only sense that wasn’t overwhelmed, if she concentrated hard enough. She lifted a foot and placed it squarely against Nev’s tense form, then pushed. He went over like a tree and the speaker, still clutched in his hands, went with him. One of the tiny speaker wires went too, the other went taut then snapped from one of its terminals and the room fell into silence. The inside of Fluppit’s head did not.
