My ears are ringing. My head’s hammering. The rope binding us to the bench comes undone, and I collapse onto the floor in a daze, coughing and gasping. I can’t see a thing. Someone tugs my arm. Says my name. Helps me to my feet and holds me. We stagger through the smoke to the back of the plane. Gunshots fire somewhere. Somebody screams.
“Violet,” I gasp. “Hickory?” The person holding me grips me tighter. “Slow down . . .”
“Here,” they shout. A man. “Over here! I’ve got her! I’m on your side!”
A jangle of beads. A bony arm digging into my side.
Masaru’s dragging me from the plane.
“Get off me!” I shove the old man, slip out of his grip, trip down the broken ramp and land in a heap on the floor. Manor candles dance and spin. Sparks burst from Betty’s crumpled hull, lighting up the corridor like miniature fireworks. A stampede of boots echoes around me. Leatherheads click and clack. A Tin-skin barks furiously. Chains rattle.
“Here,” Masaru cackles, clawing at my clothes, my hair, my neck. “Praise be to Roth!”
The old man waves his arms and jumps up and down like an excitable dog, until—wham—Hickory shoves him aside and helps me up.
“Time to go.”
“Violet,” I say. “Where’s—”
The Leatherheads open fire. Bullets ricochet around us, sparking off the wreck, blasting the corridor to pieces. We duck into a nearby hallway, leaping over debris. Elsa’s red-cloaked guard’s already here, wide-eyed, panicking, babbling things under his breath.
“Jane,” Violet cries out from inside the wreck. “Run!”
I try to help her, but Hickory grabs me and pulls me back into the hallway as another volley of rifle-fire tears the corridor apart. “Let—me—go! We have to save her!”
“Get out of here,” Violet screams. “Hickory, if you’ve got her, go!”
“You can’t save her if you’re dead,” Hickory says, pulling me farther down the hallway. “Run now, fight later. We’ll get her back, Jane. I promise.”
Hickory’s right. The Leatherheads are swarming around the crash site.
We dash down the hallway, following the frantic red-cloak. My knees ache. My back, too. My body’s still recovering from the crash, but I can’t stop. Judging by the racket behind us, a Tin-skin’s caught our scent.
We take a right, a left, leap down a stone staircase, and come to an archway boarded up with long, rotted planks covered in faded red crosses.
“Not a good sign,” Hickory says.
But we can’t turn back. The Tin-skin’s almost here.
We pry a plank away. I’m about to squeeze through when the red-cloak shoves me aside and scrambles into the darkness first.
“Hey,” I shout, “slow down—you don’t know what this place is like!”
Chandeliers flicker to life, illuminating a long, downward-sloping corridor and the red-cloak bolting down it. Me and Hickory squeeze through after him, warning him to be careful. We scan the walls and floor for traps and triggers, but our pal’s already found one.
A stone-slab switch in the floor.
The corridor rumbles. We turn around as a panel above the archway slides to the side, revealing a gigantic, perfectly round boulder. A boulder that’s already rolling forward.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I mutter.
“Run!” Hickory shouts.
The Tin-skin bursts through the planks. The boulder squashes it at once, crashing into the corridor and bowling toward us, scraping the walls, knocking the chandeliers. There’s no way we can get around it, no way we can jump it. Forward is the only way, and fast.
We run. The corridor gets steeper—the boulder picks up speed—but the end’s in sight. I’d like to think we’re in with a shot, but the red-cloak’s skidding to a halt up ahead, and for good reason.
A trapdoor’s opened at his feet. A gap in the floor several yards long.
“Don’t stop,” Hickory yells. “Jump, jump, jump!”
I step up the pace. Focus on the glowing chamber beyond the trapdoor. The red-cloak backs up, takes a run-up and jumps just as we reach the edge. The three of us leap over the gap and land together safely on the other side. I spin around just in time to see the boulder fall into the seemingly bottomless pit, scraping down the sides.
Hickory sits up and grunts. “So nice to be back.”
I collapse onto my back. “At least we got away from the Tin-skin.”
Thrilled by our escape, the red-cloak leaps to his feet and cheers. But the party ain’t over yet. We’ve landed in a small torch-lit chamber full of statues armed with serrated swords. And as the boulder hits the bottom of the pit with an almighty crash, the final mechanism of this infernal device is triggered.
A huge stone tablet rolls into place over the chamber’s archway, sealing our retreat. I shout, “Duck!” pull Hickory to the floor, and clench my eyes shut as the statues swing their blades. One of them slices so close I feel the air brush past my cheek. I hear the red-cloak hit the deck a second later, and after that—nothing.
I refuse to look. “Um, Hickory? Is he . . .”
“Yep.”
We lie in silence for a bit, catching our breath. I don’t know what to say. Technically, he was one of the bad guys, after all. One of Elsa’s goons. It’s a bit awkward, really. I mean, we’ve gotta get moving. Gotta get back to the others. “We should probably—”
“Go,” Hickory says. “Yeah. There’s another door across the way. Just watch your step. He’s . . . all over the place.”