Chapter 28: Cut the Feed

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a Chapter in which the villain is stopped by something heroic and expensive, close this book now. Dear Reader, here is a riddle to carry out of the dark. What lives only while somebody is watching, and dies the instant they look away? The answer is not a ghost, although it has haunted a great many people.

Matt Oscatt ran at the wall with his whole heart, his bare feet slapping on the tile, and the wall, which had been waiting for years for somebody to run at it, did what walls do.

It did not move.

It was a very good wall. It was thick, and cold, and the exact color of bone. Matt would have gone into it at full speed like a bird into a window, and the sound would have stayed with every person in the corridor for the rest of their lives, if the Labyrinth had not, at that moment, done the thing it almost always did when somebody took a step.

It shifted. This time, for once, it shifted in his favor.

Somewhere inside the stone, a gear that did not exist turned over. A section of the wall slid left, and a small green door, brass-handled and frosted at the top, slid into the space where Matt was about to be. It did not slide shyly. It slid with the confidence of a door that had been waiting its whole life for one particular boy.

Matt hit it with his shoulder at full speed. It swung open as if it had been oiled.

He went through it like a cork out of a bottle, and the rest of them went after him, because only one thing moves a group of terrified children faster than a monster behind them, and that is a door in front of them. Carter first, with a grunt. Jaquan, scarf flying. Bliss, with Matt’s jacket still clutched to her chest. Arthur, pulling Hadjer by the hand, with the serpent flattened against his wrist like a ribbon in a gale. Behind them, the corridor came down all at once, with a long, grinding roar, like a building sighing.

The door slammed and dissolved. Then everything around them shivered, and broke like a sheet of glass dropped from a great height, and a flat, hot light came pouring in.

They were lying on asphalt.

Matt was on his back with his arms spread and his bare feet in the air, wearing a small, smug, astonished smile. His expensive shoes were somewhere in a collapsed Labyrinth, and he would mourn them later. "I told you," he was saying, in a voice that was mostly breath. "Be thankful you were born into my world. Bow, fools."

"Thank you," said Bliss, from the ground.

"Thank you," said Carter.

"I would like to formally apologize for all prior doubt," said Jaquan, flat on his scarf. "Please add it to the record. And please note that I was holding my breath for about forty percent of that."

Hadjer sat up slowly. The asphalt around her was already yellowing. She looked at the clock tower, and then she looked again, because the hands had barely moved.

"Could you tell me the time, please?" she said.

Everybody looked.

They had gone into the Labyrinth at twelve twenty-four. They had run, and argued, and hidden, and made a plan, and been chased across half a world of shifting stone, and had spent, by any honest count, the best part of an hour inside it. Out here, two minutes had passed.

"Time acts strangely inside a Happy Place," said Jaquan, still on his back. He said it to the sky, with the weariness of a man explaining a very old joke. "That’s the whole reason people use Happy Places. Time inside runs faster than time outside. Rule of thumb, for anyone below Gold, is about thirty to one. Thirty minutes in there is one minute out here."

"So an hour in the Labyrinth," said Hadjer, slowly.

"Two minutes in his yard. Which is what the clock says."

"And his yard is a Happy Place too."

"Which is why it stacks. His runs about thirty to one against the real street, probably worse, but let’s be generous." Jaquan raised a finger and began to count on it, with great reluctance. "Twenty-six minutes on that clock since we walked in. Divide by thirty. Out on Alder Street, it’s been less than a minute." He lowered the finger. "Don’t make me do decimals. I get a headache."

"A minute," said Carter.

"Every Happy Place keeps its own clock," said Jaquan. "He started his at noon because noon is when the happy moment he had in that place usually begins. It has nothing to do with what time it is in the real world. Do the street’s math instead."

Hadjer did. She had a talent for it, and no wish to use it. "School let out at half past three. Ten minutes on the bus. An hour and a half with Lyra. Half an hour to Carter’s." She frowned. "That’s five-forty when we got here. The couch and the phone call took the next forty minutes."

"So we walked into his yard at about six-twenty," said Jaquan. "And it’s about six-twenty-one now. Out there, it’s still the same dusk we left."

"Bliss," he added, "that’s how you fit so many runs in. On a normal clock, that’s years. The rest of us probably assumed you were counting the game attempts too."

"Yeah," said Bliss. "Time is relative, or whatever. Why the hell are we doing math? We should be running away."

"Guys," said Carter.

He had been looking over Hadjer’s shoulder. He did not say it loudly. It was the kind of word a man says when he has seen something he had hoped not to see.

They turned.

The yard was coming apart.

It was not dramatic. It happened the way a bad photograph fades. Where the hopscotch squares had been, the patchy grass of an overgrown lawn showed through, like a second picture laid over the first. The sandbox was a pile of dirt under a dead tree. The clock tower stood transparent, and through it, as if both places were fighting to be the one that existed, rose the sagging porch of the abandoned house on Alder Street, with its brick propping the door and its boards across every window. A low sound ran through everything, the sound of a very large sheet of paper being torn very slowly. Breaking the Labyrinth from the inside had cost the collector’s yard something it could not afford.

And across the flickering asphalt, in a line that stretched from where the swings had been to where the hedge still stood, the monitors were walking toward them with their whistles in their teeth and the sand brushed from their faces. They did not hurry. In front of them, with his cap tilted over one eye and his gray jacket gone grayer with the dust of a collapsed world, walked the collector.

He was not smiling. It was the first time that day, and possibly the first time in many years, that nothing at all was on his face.

"Bronze," he said.

He said it to Bliss.

"You are a Bronze," he said, in a voice that shook very slightly at the edges. "A Bronze-rank Happy Place. I have been doing this for a very long time, and I know exactly how long a Bronze should last against mine. About a second, Miss Euphoric. And you kept yours standing for two whole minutes of my time, and in the end I had to tear it apart with my own hands." He took a step. "What kind of twisted, mutated will do you have?"

Bliss, in the middle of the group, did what she always did when somebody stared at her. She looked at her shoes.

"Guys," she said, very quietly, to her friends. "Is he allowed to use violence in this game?"

"I can hear you," said the collector, in an angry voice, "and it’s rude to ignore an adult."

"I’m sorry, Mr. Announcer. Please don’t hurt me."

For a moment, the collector looked at her as if she had spoken in a foreign language. Then he laughed, a short, flat, strange little laugh, and took off his cap.

"You’re lucky," he said to the whole group, in a voice that had gone very soft. "All of you. Do you understand that? You’re very, very lucky. If I had my way, this would be very different." He glanced up, almost against his will, at something above their heads. "But the show must go on."

The show.

It was a small thing to catch. He had said it kindly, almost sadly, and the monitors had kept walking, and nobody else blinked. But Arthur, who had spent the better part of his life listening to people explain what was not their fault, heard it the way you hear a single wrong note in a song you know.

You’re lucky.

The show must go on.

He lifted his head.

For the first time since the Labyrinth fell, he looked at the sky properly. It was not empty. It had never been empty. High above the clock tower, circling slowly, hung dozens of tiny, silent shapes, no bigger than his thumb, each with a glass eye catching the light. A flock of mechanical hummingbirds, patient as a congregation. He had seen one, once, drifting past the collector’s shoulder in a boarded-up room, and had taken it for a toy. He had had bigger problems then.

There had never been one. There had been an audience.

"He isn’t holding back out of mercy," Arthur said, very quietly.

"What?" said Carter.

"He wants to. He’s furious. Look at him." Arthur’s eyes did not leave the sky. "He hasn’t touched a single one of us. And he keeps telling us we’re lucky. He’s not being kind. He can’t." He swallowed. "Those cameras couldn’t follow us into the Labyrinth. For two minutes, whoever’s watching saw an empty yard, and he’s still smiling for them. Someone’s paying for this, and as long as the cameras are on, he has to play the host."

Jaquan had stopped lying down.

"Then he’s being polite on camera," he said slowly.

"And without the cameras..."

"There’s no show."

"And no show," said Arthur, "means no Stage Two."

It was not a complete plan. It was, if he was honest, barely a thought. But it had the shape of a door, and he had been through enough of them that day to recognize one.

"Everyone," he said, in a low voice. "The cameras. Take out the cameras. Don’t attack the monitors, don’t touch him. Just the birds."

"With what?" whispered Bliss. "Rocks?"

"Anything."

"Hold on," said Jaquan.

He stood.

He did it slowly, with the care of a man getting up from a very comfortable chair, and dusted off his coat. He looked, at that moment, remarkably unbothered, which was his usual, and also remarkably cold, which was not. His scarf had been singed at one end by something he did not mention.

"Don’t," he said. "I’ve got this."

"Jaquan..." said Arthur.

"Two Happy Places can’t share the same patch of space. Mine always loses. I told you that." He turned his head and looked, almost fondly, at the long line of birds glinting overhead. "But look at his. It’s coming apart. For the first time all day, there’s room."

He clapped his hands once.

A man who plays for an audience is never alone with his rage;

he has to keep it smiling, for the sake of the stage.

The smell came first.

It was a good smell, and that was the terrifying part of it. Garlic, butter, hot oil and onions going gold in a pan: the smell of a kitchen at the exact moment a Sunday dinner is about to be served. The air rippled. Above the porch of the abandoned house, the sky folded open like a curtain on a small, bright, tiled room, with steel counters, bare bulbs and the heat of a hundred burners roaring all at once.

Hell Kitchen.

It was tiny. It covered a few hundred yards of sky and not an inch more. The collector’s yard, by reflex, tried to close around it like a painting around a window, and for about four seconds it nearly did. But Jaquan did not need it to last. It was not a fortress. It was a stove.

"Welcome," said Jaquan, in his flattest voice, "to my Happy Place."

The temperature rose.

It did not rise gradually. It jumped, from noon to furnace in the time it took a hummingbird to blink. The nearest bird made a small, startled sound, like a kettle, and its glass eye went white and clouded. Its wings curled. The next one cracked. And then the sky was raining small, hot, ruined shapes, tumbling out of the dark like cinders from a chimney, and each one that hit the ground went out with a tick.

Jaquan did not even sweat. He stood in the middle of the lawn in his winter coat and wool scarf, with his hands in his pockets, and watched the heat roll across the sky in a silent, golden wave. It was the quietest, calmest, most terrible thing any of them had seen all day.

The yard did not survive it. Between one second and the next, the last of the noon sky peeled away like wallpaper, and behind it was the plain evening they had left, with the last light going orange behind the rooftops and a streetlamp flickering on early. The fence was a rusted chain-link line along a cracked sidewalk. The hedge was a hedge. The clock tower was gone, and so was the gray plastic bin, and so was the corkboard, and every one of the collector’s rules went with them without a sound.

They were standing on the front lawn of the abandoned house on Alder Street, where they had started.

"Oh," said Matt, faintly. "That is so cool."

"Yeah, but I’m starting to feel the heat as well," said Hadjer.

"Sorry," said Jaquan. "Radius control’s a work in progress."

"The cameras!" The collector had spun in place. His yard was gone, and the cap in his hands was the only thing left that looked like a costume. "No. No, no, no." His eyes were wide and perfectly round, like a man who has opened a door and found his house on fire. "Do you have any idea what those... Do you know what those cost? You are not allowed to... It is a live feed!"

He took one step toward Jaquan. Behind him, the monitors broke out of their line, and Pia, from the far side of the lawn, shouted something that was lost under the roar of the kitchen.

"Stop," said the collector, to nobody. "Stop it, stop it, I’ll..."

His hand went into his jacket.

The sound of an engine cut him off.

It was a long black sedan, and it came up Alder Street without hurry, the way a hearse does, or a very expensive dinner. It slid through the last frayed edge of the collector’s yard as though through fog, and stopped at the curb with its headlights on the porch. For a moment nothing happened. Then the driver’s door opened, and the car, which had looked a perfectly normal size, seemed to get smaller.

The man who got out was enormous.

He was not fat. He was built the way a door is built, tall and wide and without a single wasted inch, in a plain black coat that stretched across shoulders that had no business belonging to a chauffeur. He wore a driver’s cap, held in his hand out of habit. His beard started at his cheekbones and ended at his belt buckle, parted down the middle like a curtain, and the rest of him was gray at the temples and calm in the eyes. His shoes, which were polished, made no sound on the pavement.

Hadjer’s mouth opened.

"Igred," she said.

"Miss Lotus." He gave a small, correct bow. "It’s twenty past six. Your father tried to reach you twice, and when your phone went dead, he sent me. I was told to wait at the end of the street. I waited." His eyes rose, once, to the porch behind her. "And then the house disappeared."

The temperature of the lawn dropped thirty degrees. Nobody had done it. It simply happened, as if the weather had noticed him.

"Wait," said Jaquan, very quietly, behind Hadjer’s shoulder. "Wait. Am I tripping? Is your driver Igred the Beard?"

"You know him?" said Matt.

"Everyone knows him. He held off a werewolf invasion by himself for nine hours so a whole class could walk out. He did it while drinking a cup of tea, and the tea didn’t spill." Jaquan’s voice was awed and betrayed. "He retired. They gave him a statue. Who the hell uses somebody like that as a driver?"

"Her father," said Carter.

"Her father," said Jaquan, as if the word had a flavor.

Hadjer did not answer. She had known Igred for years. He had driven her to school and back almost every day of them, and in all that time the flowers in his car had never died. She had never asked why. It had never occurred to her, until just now, that this was the first thing anyone should have asked.

Igred looked at her, and it was not the look of a driver. He looked at her hands, her face, her shoes, the singe on her sleeve, the way a man checks a parcel for damage. Then, for the first time, he looked at everything else: the barefoot boy, the burned scarf, the children with their strange gray lunchboxes, the monitors in their yellow belts. The ruined hummingbirds, still ticking as they cooled, lay scattered across the lawn.

And then he looked at the collector, and the collector, who had faced a Labyrinth, a lawn full of children, and a flock of hummingbirds on fire, took half a step back from him as from the edge of a roof.

"Sir," said Igred. "I would prefer to see your hand."

The collector’s hand was still inside his jacket. Slowly, carefully, as though against his will, it came out. It was empty.

"Thank you." Igred crouched, without hurry, and picked up one of the dead birds between two fingers. He turned it over. The glass eye had cracked clean across. "Broadcast equipment," he said. "Pointed at children." He set it down in his palm as though it might still be alive. "I’m going to ask you a few questions. They’re not an invitation to be clever. Did anyone here hurt Miss Lotus?"

"No," said the collector, quickly. "It’s just a game..."

"What kind of game?"

The collector hesitated. His eyes went, for the briefest second, to the gray lunchbox in Hadjer’s hand. "She holds a loan," he said. "Two thousand coins. It stands until the Stage resumes." He winced as he said it, like a man who had no choice but to answer.

"And if she can’t repay it?"

"She would become an employee." The pain on his face deepened.

Igred did not move. Nothing in his face changed, and yet the nearest streetlamp went out.

"Is there anyone else on this lawn," he asked very softly, "who poses a danger to her?"

The collector’s eyes flicked to the monitors behind him, to the eight whistles, the eight tired faces. "Not by my orders," he said.

"That is not an answer I can carry home."

Nobody breathed. On the porch, a loose board creaked in the quiet.

Then Igred sighed, a long, patient, almost regretful sound, and stood. He slid the dead bird into his coat pocket the way a man pockets a receipt.

"Here is what will happen," he said. "I don’t like to fight in front of children, but I can always tell them to close their eyes and make it quick. Or you can come with me quietly, so my boss can send someone more diplomatic to speak with you. But honestly there is no ’or.’ That is what’s going to happen."

For a long moment the collector said nothing. It was not hard to see the arithmetic going on behind his eyes: the dead feed, the burned birds, and the man standing in front of him, a living legend known for the blood that soaked his history. He was the T. rex of our time.

"That is," he said, at last, in a thin voice, "generous."

"It’s practical," said Igred. "You have until I feel less generous, which could be any moment now."

The collector swallowed. When he spoke again, his voice had lost every trace of music, and he did not look at the sky, or the cameras, or the children.

"Everyone," he said, "go. Now."

They all grabbed hold of a rope that hung in the air, and it pulled them back into a hole in space and dragged them away, and they escaped. Igred watched them go without moving a muscle.

"Fine," he said. "Do it the hard way. See if I care."

Igred put his cap on. He did not look at anyone but Hadjer.

"If it’s all the same to everyone," he said, with perfect courtesy, "I’d like to leave quickly. Your father is quite worried. And you’ll need to explain all of this to me, because I will have to report it to him later."

"It was less than a minute," said Hadjer, to no one.

"Told you," said Jaquan, weakly. "He’s a legend."

Nobody laughed. Arthur, on one knee in the grass, had looked down at the lunchbox that had somehow come out with him. Its gray screen was still lit. The number on it had not changed: 2000. And above the number, in small white letters that had not been there before, one line was blinking, patient as a metronome.

STAGE TWO — PAUSED.

Behind him, one by one, in the hands of every child on the lawn, the screens began to glow.

TO BE CONTINUED...