Let's Just Take the Whole Thing

The door had no lock. It had no handle either, just a brass plate at hip height, smooth as a coin, with nothing to pick and nothing to turn. I laid my palm on it. The plate warmed, considered me, and let the door swing in.

Inside, pale lamps burned low along the ceiling, left on for whoever was on guard. Every window was shuttered, which was why none of it had shown from outside. Windowless, long and waxed, with rooms opening off both sides, the corridor ran away from us, and our reflections went along the floor beside us, a second party that looked slightly worse than the first.

I wasn’t expecting anything. I looked anyway: for a drawing pinned to a wall, a mug somebody had forgotten, a chair with a dent in it. Something a person had touched for no reason except that he was there.

There was nothing like that. A bench, a rack of polished instruments, and a shelf of record books with their spines in line made up every room off it. There was not a speck of dust anywhere. I checked.

“Far in,” Kou said at my ear, so low it barely reached me. “Straight to the end.”

In the third room a folder lay open under a lamp, the only thing in any of the rooms so far that had been left out of its place. ‘A Study of Objects Disappearing in Rifts,’ said the first page, in a hand so even it might have been printed. Beneath it, in notes: ‘Pulse series continuing. The familiar’s returns show nothing past the opening. Destination undetermined.’ And under that: ‘Next: time the pulses to the rifts as they open.’

Kou read it over my shoulder, and his claws shifted once in my collar. I turned the page, found nothing behind it, and left the folder exactly as it had been.

We went on.

A door on the left, short of the end, was ajar, and the light behind it was a different color.

It was the only warm room in the building. There were two deep reading chairs and a rug, a shelf of novels with cracked spines, a kettle, a quilt. On the wall by the door hung a duty chart headed ‘Research Staff,’ and the night line read ‘On guard,’ with a small brass tag hanging beside it, turned to ‘Present.’

In the bed in the corner, beneath the quilt, a young woman lay on her side with her face to the wall. Her hair was in a ponytail, a practical one, the kind you put up to work and don’t take down. She had slept in it.

“‘On guard,’” Kou murmured, looking from the chart to the bed. “Evidently.”

She worked for my father.

A girl.

I had a theory about my father. I had never said it aloud, not even to Kou. Somewhere before I was old enough to remember, he had wanted a boy and been handed me, and everything since fit that: the committee room, the questions that never got answered, the way he addressed the air beside whichever chair I was in.

And here was a woman asleep in the warmest room of his laboratory, in a bed he presumably paid for, in a building where he presumably spoke to her, which was more than I could say.

It meant nothing. A theory that has held for the whole of one’s life does not fall over for one assistant. I filed her under exceptions.

“We should find Kou-3,” Mori whispered at my collar. “Quickly.”

After that we were quieter still.

We heard it before we saw it: scratching, a thin whistle, something small turning over in straw. The door at the end of the corridor was heavy and not entirely shut.

Shelves of cages ran up both walls, rats on the lower ones, then guinea pigs, then two monkeys who watched us come in with their hands pressed to the bars. In the middle of the room, alone on a table under a lamp, stood one more cage.

In it, hanging upside down from the roof, was a brown bat. He was wide awake. He was staring at us and murmuring to himself, small and flat and unhurried.

“Kou thought he could feel Kit’s aura,” the brown bat said, “but it is one girl and two familiars like Kou.”

Kou went to the table and stopped short of the cage with his ears flat. Then he put out a single pulse, so soft I nearly missed it, a hello. The murmuring stopped for exactly one breath, and started again.

Mori had gone to the cage ahead of both of us. He hooked one claw through the bars at the top and held on.

Kit had been a conversation. This couldn’t be one. A lock like that could be picked, given patience we didn’t have, or broken, given a noise the building would not sleep through.

The cage door had a brass plate, the twin of the one on the front door. I put my palm on it. Nothing. The plate stayed cold. I tried again, in case I had done something wrong, and I hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Not registered,” said Kou, flatly.

I looked at the lock, then at the bat, then at the door we’d come in by.

“Let’s just take the whole thing,” I said.

“That is not a plan,” said Kou.

“It’s a plan with fewer steps.”

The cage was iron, and it did not want to leave the table. I got both hands under it and it rose an inch and sat down again. So, stepping back, I took up the staff in one hand, and called up the small, unglamorous cantrip I’d used on Kathi-1 in the other, and fed it more than it had been built for, and paid for it somewhere behind the eyes, and the iron came up off the table with a groan. Kou and Mori took the spell over from me, one on each side, and the weight went out of it altogether.

“Holding is cheap,” Mori said.

That was when the nearer monkey felt the spell. He screamed. The shriek could have taken the varnish off a door.

“Run for it!” said Kou.

We ran. The cage came after us down the corridor, bumping off the walls. We passed the break room at a run. She was sitting up in the bed with the quilt in both fists, and then the quilt was on the floor, and then we were past. Behind us, bare feet on wax, quick and light.

The front door let us out without comment. I got the staff under me and up on the first try, which would have been a better moment with an audience.

I looked back, and had one. She was in the doorway with the lamplight behind her and one hand on the frame, the ponytail the only thing about her I could make out. She didn’t call out. She didn’t follow. She watched us go.

“Hedge,” Mori said, and was gone toward the wall, low and fast, to fetch the others. Kou took the whole weight of the spell alone. The cage dipped, and came level.

Behind us, one by one, light began to show at the lab’s shuttered windows.