13 DAYS. 21 HOURS. 48 MINUTES.
Her bare skin glowed under the shaft of morning light that landed solely on her. She was radiant. She made me shine bright. Just some drab girl from floor zero with no prospects and no money to her name, but when I was with her, I was someone. Not another nameless face the shadows didn’t show, but a person. A hope.
Today we needed to find some answers, not another breadcrumb. Hopefully Red would help us find it.
“You’re staring,” she mumbled from beneath hair and duvets and pillows.
“Yeah, I guess I am.” I moved the hair from her face. “Want dessert for breakfast?”
She crawled up to sitting and smiled brighter, her eyes dancing in the light. “Of course I do.” She pointed to a radio on the wall.
I got out of bed and ordered a dessert spread to be brought up to the princess’s chamber, where we lay in bed and giggled excitedly, neither of us wanting the electricity to end.
We both yanked on robes before a servant knocked on the door, and I’d never felt more ridiculous, wearing a fancy robe with lace all down the sides and white fur from who knew what animal. But the servant said nothing—didn’t even look my way—before he turned on his heels and left.
“Guess it wasn’t a big deal. Probably could’ve answered the door naked.”
Meena laughed again, a sound I was becoming more and more used to every day. “They’re well trained, but I promise they gossip like children in the servants’ quarters.”
“Will people not say something about finding a nobody in bed with the princess?”
Meena shrugged as I spread the plates out on the bed. “Probably, but it’s fine. No one really cares that much.”
Spoken with experience, it sounded like, but I didn’t say anything. It was a stupid thing to be jealous of. I should be focused on giving her more time rather than on changing the time she had already spent.
I turned to ask her about Red, but she held out a hand as she swallowed a small pecan pie. “No, don’t. I know that face. It’s your let’s-get-some-stuff-done face. Can we just enjoy breakfast in bed for a little while before we have to face the day?” She grabbed my hand and looked at me with pleading eyes. “I’m not ready for it to be over.”
I got back into bed, wrapped the duvet around our legs, and we ate the largest selection of desserts I’d ever seen for breakfast—a concept unheard of in my life until this point. But I figured what the hell, sounded like something I’d want to do one day before I died too.
By the look of childish glee on her face as she bit into some kind of pastry, I’d hit the nail on the head. “I have never had sugar for breakfast before,” she mumbled around white powder. Swallowing, she continued, “It’s always, ‘Jemeena, you should eat well. Your health matters. Everything you do should exude grace and elegance.’”
“And here I am living a life covered in grease and dirt every day.”
“Sounds genuinely blessed.” She cringed, realizing her mistake. “Sorry, I know your life isn’t great on floor zero, I just meant?—”
“It’s okay. I know what you meant. It’s a privilege to have found something in life that makes me feel complete.” Only, I didn’t know if I was talking about engineering anymore.
13 DAYS. 18 HOURS. 42 MINUTES.
IoN whizzed above my head as I strolled us outside, happy to be on another adventure, no matter how critical. We did stay holed up in a dank garage most of the time, and it was no adventure, unless you counted searching for business as our X on the map. Somehow, I didn’t think that would be half as interesting as this.
“So, we need to find Red, right?” I asked, my hands fiddling with the material of the skirt I’d chosen for the day. “And given they’re likely involved in black-market dealings, they probably aren’t from up here?”
Meena shrugged in her wheelchair as I pushed her forward. “You know, I’m not entirely sure about that. Sometimes, the best position to run an illegal enterprise from is right under everyone’s nose.”
“There is genius in that,” IoN said quietly. “And I think this will likely be more complicated than we think.”
IoN hadn’t questioned why I didn’t come back to our room last night, and for that I was thankful, but he seemed distant, focused. Maybe this had his cogs turning more than I originally thought.
“But they would have better access to customers and areas of trade, surely?” I argued. But I knew nothing about living on higher floors, and although Prago City was different from home, it still ran with the same basic principles. “Surely being a little freer would be better for their sanity?”
IoN settled in Meena’s arms as he did his best to whisper, “But they would have larger clients up here, customers with more money to spend. You are thinking of a small operation, like Green. But what if it is not small at all?”
“That’s a concerning thought,” Meena said.
“So where do we start?” I asked once the nearest elevator tube was in sight. “Down or here?”
“We are more likely to get information from those below us, I think,” IoN surmised. “They have needs easier to be filled, such as money or status.”
“IoN is right.” Meena didn’t seem happy about it, though. “I can probably just pay people to give us the right information, but if we try that up here, the favors I would owe would be far greater and more difficult to accomplish.”
“We don’t have time for difficult.” I found a tube going down and soon we were in a familiar, albeit more colorful, area of town.
The sunlight didn’t quite reach this far, but artificial light bounced off the colorful rock that every building was made from, so it wasn’t dingy. It was like a rainbow in the dark. While we didn’t have the colors, we could definitely use a system like this back home. Something to bounce a light off so the beam could illuminate an entire street.
Meena was looking up when I came back to the here and now. “What was your genius mind thinking of?”
“Huh?”
“Whenever you’re thinking about new things you could invent or getting ideas, you get this wistful look on your face, like you’re somewhere else entirely. I was just wondering what it was you were thinking of?”
“The way they’ve bounced light off the reflective stone is a good way to illuminate dark areas without using too much artificial light we can’t afford. If I could use something like mirrors but cheaper, I could light up the lower levels.” I looked sheepishly at the floor, my idea probably not one worth explaining to the princess, but it just tumbled out of me.
“Cheap materials? Maybe you could buff up sheet metal? You could probably find some in the scrapyard.”
“Then if I angled everything right, I could use specular reflection to bounce the beams off each building.”
“I love your mind,” Meena said before turning back to the street in front of her with a deep breath. “You’re going to do great things one day, and I hope I played a part in that. Even if that’s just showing you new places that inspire you.”
“Stop it,” I scolded. “I am going to save you.” Because I didn’t know what would happen if I couldn’t. I started this journey understanding that it probably wouldn’t happen, but she swept me up in her waves, and now I was riding them with as much foolish hope as she was. “You’re going to live long enough to watch me try.”
IoN shook his head at me before he turned to face the street. I moved my hands back to the handles of the wheelchair Meena really didn’t want to be in, but with her condition worsening we didn’t have a choice.
The tissues she shoved into her handbag were covered in red splotches—she tried to hide them, but I noticed. I always noticed. Her coughing fits were getting longer, and she was struggling to walk more than a few yards without getting out of breath. It would be hard to hide her condition at this point, and I was sure the public had photographs and the papers were talking about it.
She was dutifully ignoring it all—the gossip, the talk as we strolled by, and the glaring eyes that didn’t know how to be polite, even in polite society—and her strength never wavered. At least not in public.
“There’s probably some kind of information hub, right?” she asked, a little out of her depth down here.
“If it’s anything like home, there will probably be a market square we might be able to glean some information from.”
A passerby had clearly overheard us and looked us up and down. He’d gotten out of the elevator beside us and looked like he knew where he was going. “You looking for the market?”
I nodded, a hopefully nondescript look on my face.
“It’s over by Pally’s to the east. That’s the nearest one, anyway.” He walked away, not even staying long enough for a thank you.
“He just . . . gave us the information,” Meena said incredulously.
“Well, yeah, why wouldn’t he help?”
“But he gained nothing?”
I chuckled, trying not to sound too condescending. “When you have nothing to give, people have nothing to gain.”
IoN’s crackly voice further explained, “Not every social interaction has to be a bargaining chip, Princess.”
“There’s always a price.” The smoke exiting a house we passed forced her to stop talking and take a moment to splutter her breath back. When she could breathe freely, she said, “No one wants anything to do with you if they don’t gain anything from it.”
That reminded me a lot of Phyllis, but I didn’t dare say that. She wouldn’t appreciate it. Meena was not Phyllis’s biggest fan.
Eventually, we found the market square, which looked similar to the one back home, except, as with everything in this city, the square was more colorful. Bright blues gleamed off a smithy, pinks and purples glinted off a bakery on the corner, and I was pretty sure that specific shade of orange on the dress shop was hard to come by in Palatina.
“So, where did you want to start?” Meena asked.
I looked around at the various open shops and the people wandering in and out of them and cringed. I wheeled her around a few corners until I found an alley with shabby-looking shops whose only sign that they were establishments at all were the wooden boards barely hanging on over the door. “Here.”
We walked past what I thought might have been an elderly woman selling her handmade pottery and an older black-haired man selling scraps and nothing of much use, but it was the young gentleman sitting on the front step of a small shop with fancy metalwork in the window that caught me off guard. He was an unusually large size for a lower floor and of a curiously young age for someone with his own shop.
“You make all of them?” I asked.
“I sure do.” He stood and dusted himself off. “My dad made them, and he taught me how so I could follow in his footsteps.” He gestured to the shop around the doorway he was standing in. “This was his shop.”
Meena looked at me with an unreadable look on her face before turning back to the man and smiling sweetly. “I’d love to look around.”
He frowned and stopped suddenly. “I’m afraid I don’t have wheelchair access. I’m so sorry.” He looked genuinely apologetic for a moment until Meena stood and straightened her dress.
“Not to worry. I can walk. It’s just a lung issue.” She sounded so blasé about her condition, the one killing her, the one we were hundreds of miles from home to find an impossible cure for. “Can we come inside and have a look?”
Who could say no to those beautiful eyes? I knew I couldn’t. It seemed he couldn’t either because we were soon gestured inside with a sweeping arm.
IoN stayed in my arms in silence, knowing better than to speak around others, but his eye lights were on, so he was taking stock of our surroundings and conversations. He might have some input later.
The small back-alley shop was quaint, cleaner than I expected, and littered with metal sculptures on every available surface. They ranged from animals to little families and images you’d find in any populated place, but it was the abstract ones that caught my eye. There weren’t many, but the ones that he had on display were so curious and weird that I couldn’t help but stop and stare at the twisting angles and spinning circles.
Meena slowly walked around, feigning interest until she stood in front of him, arms crossed below her chest. “You have such an interesting collection here.”
“Thank you.” He looked her up and down, taking in her dress and the jewelry she didn’t bother to hide. “Sorry for asking, but who are you?”
“Nobody,” she responded vaguely. “I’m interested in how this works?”
“How what works, ma’am?”
She gestured widely to the shop around her. “All of this. How do you keep the customers coming in when you sell things that aren’t of necessity. It’s not like people have the funds down here.”
He shrugged, avoiding her piercing gaze. “I get by.”
“But it would be easier on a higher level, no?”
His eyes snapped to her, assessing, calculating. “Sure, but I have no status, no prospects, so why would I even try?”
“Could you not apply to the Creative Guild Grant for moving assistance?” I asked, knowing they had that here, since it was where Palatina got the idea in the first place. Rich people liked art and unnecessary shit, so they paid to have those creators on easier-to-access levels. “I’m sure you’d get through the selection process with pieces like this.” I gestured to the stunningly intricate sand gazelle he must have seen on a trip outside of the city—larger animals like that didn’t venture close to people often.
He shrugged. “This is my home. Why would I want to move?”
I choked the snark down as I took a second look around. The wood of the shelves was of good quality—clean, polished, new—and the colored windows had three layers to keep the heat out, something most people on lower levels couldn’t afford. In addition, he wore finer clothes than I would expect for someone of his social status.
Someone was paying him to stay here.
I’d bet good money that someone was connected in some way to the black market—and possibly to Red.
“Do you take information requests?” I raised an eyebrow as I sealed the lock on the front door and flipped the sign to closed.
He eyed me suspiciously, his gaze darting to the bolt I’d just locked. “For the right price and an assurance of safety.”
“We’re not going to hurt you,” Meena said. “We’re not those kinds of people. We just have some questions we can’t ask more official channels.” She opened her purse and showed him the small handful of gold inside. “We can pay whatever you want. There’s plenty more where that came from.”
“If you ever wanted a transfer to a different city and a higher level, or just up the levels here, she could probably make that happen.”
His hands stopped fiddling. “Really?”
“Yes.” She knew we had him. We had found what he wanted. “If you want a free ride to Palatina, I can take you back with us.” She shrugged. “It’s not a problem.”
“And we can get you the official paperwork once there.” I looked at Meena, who probably didn’t think of that factor, and tried to look reassuring.
“You really are important.” He took a second look at her, an I-knew-it look on his boyish features. “I recognize you, but I can’t think from where.”
Quickly moving him on, I asked, “So, we’re looking for someone, but we’re pretty sure they won’t want to be found.”
“You gonna get them in trouble?” he asked.
“No,” Meena said. “If anything, I need their help, and keeping them in business helps me more than snitching does.”
“Who you looking for?”
“Red.”
Before the single syllable had even left her lips, he threw himself toward the windows and shut the blinds. “Are you insane?” he hissed. “Do you have any idea what that nutjob would do to me if they ever knew I’d ratted on them?” His eyes were crazed, his hands clenched into fists.
“So a worthy trade for a new life, an easy escape, and more money than you would ever earn here.” My lips upturned as I leaned against the wall.
Meena didn’t look so calm, but that was okay. I held his attention for now.
“Besides, aren’t you sick of it?” I looked at the floor, at the blinded windows, and back at the wooden door I was sure led to a bedroom or a workshop. Maybe both. “This is the only chance you’ll ever get.”
He followed my gaze, evaluating his circumstance, then his shoulders slumped in defeat as his eyes shifted to his feet. “And you’re sure you can get me out of the city safely?”
“I’ll escort you to the dirigible myself,” Meena said, confidence lacing her tone—confidence I knew she didn’t feel. “Immediately, if that’s what it takes.”
He held his hands up. “No, no. Morning would be better. I have some things to take care of if I’m going to leave the city.”
Meena handed him a pouch of gold, her face full of subtle pride. “Then consider this a down payment. You can have as much as a new life costs when we get you to the ship.”
I got the feeling more money was on the ship or possibly back at the palace. Either way, we were about to get our information. Red. Potentially holding a black-market cure for Meena’s time issue. This could work.
We stared at him expectantly.
He whispered, “She has a warehouse below the old church building, but she doesn’t deal with business there herself. I’ve never actually met her, just Lorcan, her associate. But be careful.” He looked at the way Meena leaned on me for support, then back at me with questioning eyebrows. “What do you want with Red anyway?”
“The less you know,” Meena answered before I could, “the better.”
I gestured widely to the shop and to his clothes. “What operation does she have you running here?”
He smirked as he met my eyes. “The less you know the better.”
I didn’t know enough about Prago City—I didn’t know anything, actually—so I didn’t know where to take us next after leaving the alley. He said underneath the old church building, but I had no idea where that was. Guess I could go back and ask him, but I didn’t want to arouse any more suspicion than needed.
We used him.
Manipulated him.
Offered him everything he could dream of and more, and now there was a very real possibility of peril for us all. Whoever this Red was, she was dangerous. I didn’t want Meena anywhere near her.
Especially now that she couldn’t walk more than a few meters without getting out of breath and would have to remain in the wheelchair. It was a vulnerability anyone could exploit.
“I really don’t think we should?—”
“I’m going.” She held tighter to IoN, as though prepared to take him hostage.
“Go without some guards.” I looked down at her with a raised eyebrow. “I wouldn’t have left you behind.” My hands tightened on the handles as I squinted under the rising sun. “But you can’t run away and anything could happen, so we should take some undercover guards or something.”
Her gloved hand reached behind her shoulder and rested on mine. “Of course. If it’ll rest your mind.”
“It will.”
“Back up we go, then.”
We spent an hour or so having some food and rest while Meena arranged for two undercover guards to join us. She also put less fine clothes on after all the looks we got this morning. I, however, put my regular clothes back on, shifting comfortably under the familiar fabric that rested in all the right places, tied where I was used to it tying, and moved exactly as expected after having worn them for years prior.
The guards in question were dressed down, looking somewhat comfortable, but their hair was still gelled in the style of the higher levels and they held themselves a little stiffer.
“Lose the hair gel, and slouch a bit but not too much.”
They looked at me like I’d stolen the sun, but Meena agreed, a slight curling of the corner of her lips you’d only catch if you knew what to look for.
They ruffled their hair and dropped their shoulders forward, then looked at me for approval.
“That’s better.” I looked across their bodies, checking for weapons, but I didn’t notice any. “Follow us closely, but don’t draw attention to yourselves.”
They still looked at me like I was a stranger, like I had no right to give them orders, and I guess I didn’t, but this was Meena’s safety we were talking about and I wasn’t about to hold back for the sake of social propriety.
“And,” I continued, “don’t talk to anyone about this. If someone asks here in the palace, just say you were escorting the princess around town.”
Their eyebrows pinched together, but they nodded nonetheless.
“To be clear,” the one with the weird mustache said, “we’re here to protect the princess.” He looked at her like she hung the sun, as though she was the most important person in his world, and maybe she was.
“Then we’re in agreement.”