Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener's Bones

Chapter 17

I hope you didn’t find the last line of that previous chapter to be exciting. It was simply a convenient place to end.

You see, chapter breaks are, in a way, like Smedry Talents. They defy time and space. (This alone should be enough to prove to you that traditional Hushlander physics is just a load of unwashed underpants.)

Think about it. By putting in a chapter break, I make the book longer. It takes extra spaces, extra pages. Yet because of those chapter breaks, the book becomes shorter as well. You read it more quickly. Even an unexciting hook, like Australia’s showing up, encourages you to quickly turn the page and keep going.

Space becomes distorted when you read a book. Time has less relevance. In fact, if you look closely, you might be able to see golden dust floating down around you right now. (And if you can’t see it, you’re not trying hard enough. Maybe you need to hit yourself on the head with another big thick fantasy novel.)

“We’re down here!” I yelled up to Australia. Beside me, Bastille looked relieved and slipped her dagger back into its sheath.

“Alcatraz?” Australia asked. “Uh … what are you doing down there?”

“Having a tea party,” I yelled back. “What do you think? We’re trapped!”

“Silly,” she said. “Why’d you go and get trapped?”

I glanced at Bastille. She rolled her eyes. That’s Australia for you.

“We didn’t exactly have a choice,” I called back.

“I climbed a tree once and couldn’t get back down,” Australia said. “I guess it’s kind of the same, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “Look, I need you to find some rope.”

“Uh,” she said. “Where exactly am I going to find something like that?”

“I don’t know!”

“All right then.” She sighed loudly and disappeared.

“She’s hopeless,” Bastille said.

“I’m realizing that. At least she’s still got her soul. I was half afraid that she’d end up in serious trouble.”

“Like getting captured by a member of the Scrivener’s Bones, or perhaps falling down a pit?”

“Something like that,” I said, kneeling down. I wasn’t about to count on Australia to get us out. I’d already been around her long enough to realize that she probably wasn’t going to be of much help.

(Which, incidentally, was why you shouldn’t have been all that excited to see her show up. You still turned the page, didn’t you?)

I opened Bastille’s pack and pulled out the boots with the Grappler’s Glass on the bottom. I activated the glass, then stuck a boot to the side of the wall. As expected, it didn’t stick. They only worked on glass.

“So … maybe we should have you try to break the walls down,” Bastille said. “You’ll probably bury us in stone, but that would be better than sitting around talking about our feelings and that nonsense.”

I glanced over, smiling.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just good to have you back.”

She snorted. “Well? Breaking? Can you do it?”

“I can try,” I said speculatively. “But, well, it seems like a long shot.”

“We’ve never had to depend on one of those before,” she said.

“Good point.” I rested my hands against the wall.

The Dark Talent … beware it.…

The words from the tomb wall returned to my mind. The paper with the inscription sat in my pocket, but I tried not to think about it. Now that I’d begun to understand what my Talent was, it didn’t seem a good time to start second-guessing its nature.

There would be time enough for that later.

I tentatively sent a wave of breaking power into the wall. Cracks twisted away from my palms, moving through the stone. Bits of dust and chips began to fall in on us, but I kept going. The wall groaned.

“Alcatraz!” Bastille said, grabbing my arm and pulling me back.

I stumbled, dazed, away from the wall as a large chunk of stone toppled inward and hit the floor where I had been standing. The soft, springy ground gave way beneath the stone. Kind of like my head would have, had it been in the way. Only that would have involved a lot more blood and a lot more screaming.

I stared at the chunk of stone. Then I glanced up at the wall. It was cracked and broken, and other bits of it seemed ready to fall off too.

“Okay, that was expected,” Bastille said, “but still kind of dumb of us, eh?”

I nodded, stooping over to pick up a Grappler’s Glass boot. If only I could get it to work. I put it up against the wall again, but it refused to stick.

“That’s not going to do anything, Smedry,” Bastille said.

“There’s silicon in the rock. That’s the same thing as glass.”

“True,” Bastille said. “But there isn’t enough to make the Grappler’s Glass stick.”

I tried anyway. I focused on the glass, closing my eyes, treating it like it was a pair of Lenses.

During the months Grandpa Smedry had been training me, I’d learned how to activate stubborn Lenses. There was a trick to it. You had to give them energy. Pour part of yourself into them to make them function.

Come on! I thought to the boot, pressing it to the wall. There’s glass in the wall. Little bits of it. You can stick. You have to stick.

I’d contacted Grandpa Smedry at a much greater distance than I was supposed to be able to. I’d done that by focusing hard on my Courier’s Lenses, giving them an extra boost of power. Could I somehow do the same to this boot?

I thought I felt something. The boot, pulling slightly toward the wall. I focused harder, straining, feeling myself grow tired. Yet I didn’t give up. I continued to push, opening my eyes and staring intently.

The glass on the bottom of the boot began to glow softly. Bastille looked over, shocked.

Come on, I thought again. I felt the boot drawing something from me, taking it out, feeding on it.

When I carefully pulled my hand away, the boot stayed where it was.

“Impossible,” Bastille whispered, walking over.

I wiped my brow, smiling triumphantly.

Bastille reached out with a careful touch, poking the boot. Then she easily pulled it off the wall.

“Hey!” I said. “Did you see what I had to go through to get that to stick?”

She snorted. “It came off easily, Smedry. Do you honestly expect that you’d be able to walk up the wall with it?”

I felt my sense of triumph deflate. She was right. If I had to work that hard to get a single boot to stay in one place, there was no way I’d be able to summon enough effort to get all the way to the top.

“Still,” Bastille said. “That’s pretty amazing. How did you do it?”

I shrugged. “I just shoved a little extra power into the glass.”

Bastille didn’t reply. She stared at the boot, then looked at me. “This is silimatic,” she said. “Technology, not magic. You shouldn’t be able to push it like that. Technology has limits.”

“I think your technology and your magic are more related than people believe, Bastille,” I said.

She nodded slowly. Then she moved quickly, putting the boot back into the pack and zipping it up. “You still have those Windstormer’s Lenses?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

She looked up, meeting my eyes. “I have an idea.”

“Should I be frightened?” I asked.

“Probably,” she said. “The idea’s a little bit strange. Like one you might have come up with, actually.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Get out those Lenses,” she said, throwing her pack over her shoulder.

I did so.

“Now, break the frames.”

I paused, eyeing her.

“Just do it,” she said.

I shrugged, then activated my Talent. The frames fell apart easily.

“Double up the Lenses,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, sliding one over the other.

“Can you do to those Lenses what you did to the boots? Put extra power through them?”

“I should be able to,” I said. “But…”

I trailed off, suddenly coming to understand. If I blew a huge blast of air out of the Lenses, then I would be forced upward—like a fighter jet, with the Lenses being my engine. I looked up at Bastille. “Bastille! That’s absolutely insane.”

“I know,” she said, grimacing. “I’ve been spending way too much time with you Smedrys. But my mother is probably only a few minutes away from death. Are you willing to give it a try?”

I smiled. “Of course I am! It sounds awesome!”

Inclined toward leadership or not, thoughtful or not, uncertain of myself or not, I was still a teenage boy. And you have to admit it really did sound awesome.

Bastille stepped up close to me, putting one arm around my waist, then holding on to my shoulder with the other. “Then I’m going with you,” she said. “Hang on to my waist.”

I nodded, feeling a bit distracted having her so close. For the first time in my life, I realized something.

Girls smell weird.

I started to feel nervous. If I blew with the Lenses too softly, we’d fall back down into the pit. If I blasted too hard, we’d end up smashing into the ceiling. It seemed like a very fine balance.

I lowered my arm, pointing the Lenses straight down by my side, my other arm held tentatively around Bastille’s waist. I took a breath, preparing myself.

“Smedry,” Bastille said, her face inches from mine.

I blinked. Having her right there was suddenly really, really distracting. Plus, she was hanging on rather tightly, with the grip of a person whose strength has been enhanced by a Crystin Fleshstone.

I fumbled for a response, my mind fuzzy. (Girls, you might have noticed, can do things like this to guys. It’s a result of their powerful pheromones. They evolved that way, gaining the ability to make us men fuzzy-headed, so that it would be easier for them to hit us on the heads with hardback fantasy novels and steal our cheese sticks.)

“You okay?” she asked.

“Uh … yeah,” I managed to get out. “What did you want?”

“I just wanted to say thanks.”

“For what?”

“For provoking me,” she said. “For making me think that someone had set me up to fail on purpose. It’s probably not true, but it’s what I needed. If there’s a chance that someone stuck me in that situation intentionally, then I want to figure out who it was and why they did it. It’s a challenge.”

I nodded. That’s Bastille for you. Tell her that she’s wonderful, and she’d sit there and sulk. But hint that she might have a hidden enemy somewhere, and she’d jump to her feet, full of energy.

“You ready?” I asked.

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

I focused on the Lenses—trying to ignore how close Bastille was—and built up Oculatory energy.

Then, holding my breath, I released the power.

We shot from the ground in a lurching burst of wind. Dust and chips of stone blew out beneath us, puffing up the sides of the shaft. We blasted upward, wind tousling my hair, the opening to the pit approaching far too quickly. I cried out, deactivating the Lenses, but we had too much momentum.

We passed the lip of the hole and continued on. I threw up my hands in front of my face as we approached the ceiling. With the Lenses no longer jetting, gravity slowed us. We crested the blast a few inches from the ceiling, then began to plummet downward again.

“Now, kick!” Bastille said, twisting and putting both of her feet against my chest.

“Wha—” I began, but Bastille kicked, throwing me backward and pushing herself the other direction.

We hit the ground on either side of the pit. I rolled, then came to a rest, staring upward. The room spun around me.

We were free. I sat up, holding my head. Across the pit, Bastille was smiling as she jumped to her feet. “I can’t believe that actually worked!”

“You kicked me!” I said with a groan.

“Well, I owed it to you,” she said. “Remember, you kicked me back in Dragonaut. I didn’t want you to feel like I didn’t return the feeling.”

I grimaced. This, by the way, is a pretty good metaphor for my entire relationship with Bastille. I’m thinking of writing a book on the concept. Kicking Your Friends for Fun and Profit.

Suddenly, something occurred to me. “My Lenses!” They lay in shattered pieces on the ground beside the pit. I’d dropped them as I hit. I stood up and rushed over, but it was no use. There wasn’t enough of them left to use.

“Gather up the pieces,” Bastille said. “They can be reforged.”

I sighed. “Yeah, I suppose. This means we’re going to have to face Kiliman without them.”

Bastille fell silent.

I don’t have any offensive Lenses, and Bastille’s only got a close-to-broken dagger. How are we going to fight that creature?

I brushed the pieces of glass into a pouch, then put it into one of my Lens pockets.

“We’re free,” Bastille said, “but we still don’t really know what to do. In fact, we don’t even know how to get to Kiliman.”

“We’ll find a way,” I said, standing up.

She looked at me, then—surprisingly—nodded. “All right then, what do we do?”

“We—”

Suddenly, Australia rushed back into the room. She was puffing from exertion. “All right, I found your rope!”

She held up an empty hand.

“Uh, thanks,” I said. “Is the rope imaginary?”

“No, silly,” she said, laughing. She picked something up between two fingers. “Look!”

“Tripwire,” Bastille said.

“Is that what it is?” Australia said. “I just found it on the ground over there.”

“And how exactly were you going to use that to get us out of the pit?” I asked. “I doubt it’s long enough, and even if it is, it would never have held our weight.”

Australia cocked her head. “That’s why you wanted rope?”

“Sure,” I said. “So that we could climb out of the pit.”

“But you’re already out of the pit.”

“We are now,” I said with exasperation. “But we weren’t at the time. I wanted you to find rope so that we could climb it.”

“Oh!” Australia said. “Well, you should have said so then!”

I stood, stupefied. “You know what, never mind,” I said, taking the length of tripwire. I was about to stuff it in my pocket, then paused, looking at it.

“What?” Bastille asked.

I smiled.

“You have an idea?”

I nodded.

“What is it?”

“Tell you in a minute,” I said. “First, we have to figure out how to get to the center of the library.”

We all looked at one another.

“I’ve been wandering through the hallways all day,” Australia said. “With those ghost things offering me books at every turn. I keep explaining that I hate reading, but they don’t listen. If I hadn’t run across your footprints, Alcatraz, I’d still be lost!”

“Footprints!” I said. “Australia, can you see Kaz’s footprints?”

“Of course.” She tapped the yellow Lenses, my Tracker’s Lenses, which she was still wearing.

“Follow them!”

She nodded, then led us from the room. Only a few feet down the hallway, however, she stopped.

“What?” I asked.

“They end here.”

His Talent, I realized. It’s jumping him about the library, leading him to the center. We’ll never be able to track him.

“That’s it, then,” Bastille said, beginning to sound depressed again. “We’ll never get there in time.”

“No,” I said. “If I’m in charge, then we’re not going to give up.”

She looked taken aback. Then she nodded. “All right. What do we do?”

I stood for a moment, thinking. There had to be a way. Information, lad. Grandpa Smedry’s voice seemed to return to me. More powerful than any sword or gun …

I looked up sharply. “Australia, can you follow my footprints back the way I originally came, before I entered that room with the pit?”

“Sure,” she said.

“Do it, then.”

She led us through cagelike chambers and corridors. In a few minutes, we left the dungeon section of the library and entered the section with the bookshelves. The gold bars I’d discarded on the ground proved that we were back where we’d started. I piled the bars into Bastille’s pack.

No, not because of some great plan to use them. I just figured that if I survived all this, I’d want some gold. (I don’t know if you realize this, but you can totally buy stuff with it.)

“Great,” Bastille said. “We’re back here. I don’t mean to question you, O Great Leader, but we were lost when we were here too. We still don’t know which way to go.”

I reached into a pocket, then pulled out the Discerner’s Lenses. I put them on, then looked at the bookshelves. I smiled.

“What?” Bastille asked.

“They hold every book ever written, right?”

“That’s what the Curators claim.”

“So, they would have gathered them chronologically. When a new book comes out, the Curators get a copy, then put it on their shelves.”

“So?”

“That means,” I said, “that the newer books are going to be at the outer edges of the library. The older the books get, the closer we’ll get to the center. That’s the place where they would have put their first books.”

Bastille opened her mouth slightly, then her eyes widened as she understood. “Alcatraz, that’s brilliant!”

“Must have been that bump to the head,” I said, then pointed down the hallway. “That way. The books get older as they move down the row that direction.”

Bastille and Australia nodded, and we were off.