Chapter Thirty-Three
Sunbeams blazed across the room, lighting up the corners. Dian reached out with a shaking hand to touch the nearest jar.
‘I felt you,’ Dian whispered. ‘But I couldn’t, at the same time. It made no sense to me.’ They turned to look at Frida, stricken. ‘Now I understand.’
These were Dian’s friends, the ones they’d come looking for.
Frida understood, and it ripped the breath from her lungs.
The dragonflies were just like the ones she’d seen on the clifftops of Melody, skimming delightedly along the glossy sheen of Lucky’s scales.
They were the source, she realised, of the endless fluttering on the edges of her senses.
It was their wings, brushing against the glass.
Quickly, she scanned the room. She counted fifteen dragonflies in total, that she could see at least. Fifteen trapped dragonflies.
Tears streamed down Dian’s cheeks as they ran their fingers over the jars, trying to figure out a way to free them. ‘Aneo,’ they said helplessly, identifying them one by one. ‘Lifith. Prea. Dawe. Allix . . .’
Frida could hear the dragonflies’ high buzz of panic, like captive bees.
Not words, just terror. That’s what she heard, spilling out of those lamps, out of the tiny holes someone had made in the glass to ensure the dragonflies lived long enough to be of use.
How long could they live inside those jars?
She didn’t understand, the picture before her not computing.
If these dragonflies had just been rescued, why hadn’t the keepers here released them yet?
‘Help me!’ Dian was begging, choking on their tears. ‘Help.’
Frida was frozen, taking in the room. There were long antique wooden tables, lined up in rows.
On every table, there was evidence of experiments in various stages of completion.
But if this was a laboratory, why would they keep rescued animals here?
As she stood there, it was hard not to acknowledge that the dragonflies had been spread around the room, strategically positioned so that the experiments might be lit by the blessing of their sunlight.
She had a terrible thought. Did someone put them outside during the day, to charge up their wings, like a living solar panel?
But no! Why would Henry Gladstone have dragonfly lamps, if not to release them?
Sir Joshua would never have allowed them to be kept trapped and tortured like this, unless they had literally just been rescued.
They must only be waiting for the go-ahead to let them go, or at least to move them to a bigger enclosure.
She knew, from bitter experience, how much bureaucracy went along with wild animal releases.
In a trance, she took in the piles of neatly coiled wires.
The copper tubing, the rows of stoppered glass jars.
The air pumps and microscopes, the huge contraption in one corner she couldn’t even begin to guess at.
Jars wrapped in metal foil, tongs, pestle and mortars, scalpels.
Everything a well-resourced scientist could want.
‘Help them, Frida!’ Moth’s threads vibrated like taut fabric. The shout brought her back to herself with a thud. The spider was bristling on the wall before her, staring at her with his eight pitch-black eyes, righteous in his fury.
‘Yes,’ she said, not quite hearing herself. ‘Yes, of course.’
She hurried over to where Dian was already struggling with the first jar.
With the two of them working together, it wasn’t long before they’d unwound the wires.
Grabbing a scalpel, she cut into the wax and levered off the cork with a satisfying pop.
Dian gave a shaky exhalation, their whole body sinking back as the trapped dragonfly gave a weeeeee of delight and rushed for freedom.
The grateful hum of their wings brushed her mind, blazing like golden ink poured into her brain.
It was quick work to do the others, and soon the room was alight with the buzzing of wings, and the swooping, plunging, sweeping flight of fifteen overjoyed Jurassic insects.
‘YesyesyesYESYESYES!’
Frida sighted a small window, high in the wall. Lunging for it, she scaled a table, sending bottles and wires clattering to the floor, and thrust it open. The summer night drifted in with the full moon, and the dragonflies sailed out, one by one, with shouts of buzzing glee.
‘Fly quickly, my dear friends!’ Dian called, their voice rough with emotion, raw and vulnerable. ‘The world is yours again.’
For a second, the dragonflies blazed across the sky in answer, the whizzing golden fire of shooting stars.
Then they were gone, zipping into the trees.
When Frida turned back to the room, now almost wholly dark apart from a faint steely light coming from a row of glass bottles in one corner, she could still hear the dragonflies’ ecstasy, ringing through her ears, and the imprint of their freedom against the backs of her eyelids.
It was an antidote to the terrible backwards hum that inhabited this place.
‘Dian!’ she said, slipping down off the table. ‘We did it. They’re free!’
Dian was standing very still on the other side of the room.
They turned towards her, very slowly, spine ramrod straight.
The expression they wore was unlike any she’d seen before; not when the fairies had forced Dian to come with her, not at the sight of the dragon without her wings, not even at the LEZ, when they’d seemed to have a storm raging in their very bones, had they looked like this.
It sent an arrow of fear, spearing straight into her heart.
Their eyes had scrunched up; their cheeks leached the sickly shade of a dead tree.
They looked as if they’d shrunk in on themselves, several sizes smaller, and may never regrow.
Their trembling, which had lifted briefly in the rush to help the dragonflies, was back now, running through the elegant curves of their body.
‘What is it?’ Frida whispered, taking a faltering step towards them. The sickening feeling coming back in a rush, making her stomach revolt.
Dian didn’t answer. They just stared at her, devastation etched across their forehead, the flare of their fine-boned nostrils, the pale curve of their lips.
Even their dark irises had dulled to something chalky.
When they stepped aside, Frida saw what it was that had made them look like they’d taken two steps out of this world never to come back again.
Her entire world narrowed to that line of glass jars behind Dian.
There were six of them in total. Smaller than the jars that had been used to contain the dragonflies, but not dissimilar in shape.
They were connected by coils of wire to another bigger jar, which stood on a shelf behind.
Empty, except for the fact that it shone with a steely silver light: raw and cold.
As soon as Frida looked, it seemed to burrow into her.
She knew immediately that the light coming from this jar was the wards.
This is how they looked. This was what they were made of.
Not an invisible electric current, but this strange light.
She knew because just a glance made her want to be sick all over the floor, driving stabbing pains through her heart so sharp she had to blink back tears.
And each of the warded jars in front contained a single object.
She took them in, one by one. Her brain locked into a frozen surreal panic, because it felt as though she was looking at the scene from above, as if it were happening to someone else.
The first jar contained an eyeball, which she knew instantly belonged to a thunderbird, the pupil made of mist and lightning, shifting and twinkling in the gloom.
The second: a phoenix tail feather, turquoise as the sky.
The third, a great, fleshy lump – red as the tapestries on the walls.
A lung, she realised with a jolt of horror.
It still pumped. Her hand found her throat.
Could it be the lung of a sooweel? Old tales claimed that a giant sooweel’s breath was one of the most powerful substances on earth.
The fourth item was a grey stump which made her shudder, all veiny and withered.
A siren’s vocal cord perhaps, or a manticore’s tongue?
She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know.
The fifth was a hoof, pure white and covered in delicate ridges.
She presumed, at some point, it had been attached to a pegasus.
And the sixth, the one at the very end?
That was the one that turned her world upside down.