Chapter 5 - Allie’s Lab
The overnight mystic tides regularly washed across the land, bringing fresh, renewed magic to all the creatures of Wünder. It was all I needed to regenerate my power core and recover from my sudden bizarre malady.
I was relieved to note that Allie was not in my loft when I awoke.
Chez was though.
The purple cat was lounging on the corner of my bed, licking one paw. When he noticed me stir, he shot me another big, yellow wide-eyed prompting look. “Sooo…the plan didn’t work, huh?”
Groaning, I swung my legs over the side of the bed to sit up. I tilted my head at the faint clinking from the apartment beneath mine. “She’s still here?”
Chez purred. “I guess she felt guilty for poisoning you.”
I stared at the wooden floor panels. “She’s a fool. She should have escaped when she had the chance.”
Then again, there was no place in Wünder she could go where I couldn’t track her down. Truth be told, I hadn’t been on that kind of hunt in a while. Maybe I should have let her run.
It wasn’t that taking lives ever made me feel anything. Not guilt. Not remorse. Not pleasure. It was just something I did. A finite order of steps.
I clutched at my chest—heavy today, and took several staggered deep breaths.
Perhaps I was also simply fooling myself. Perhaps Allie’s heart wasn’t a coeur at all. It was just an ordinary lump of worthless rock. And it was weighing me down.
A vision—a flash of large shadows looming over me accompanying an echo of screaming sent an unexpected twinge to my chest.
No. My gut told me I was right.
This heart held power.
This stolen heart in my chest was going to save me.
It had to save me.
I glanced up at the piles of books and papers on my desk to think back to my research. “Hey, Chez,” I started. “Do you remember that odd heart a few decades ago in Ironhaven? Everyone thought it was empty too.”
“Oh, yeah, that. People said it’s because the lady was in some kind of accident and lost her memories.” Chez shot me a look. “Do you think maybe that’s the same case here?”
“Maybe.” I nodded.
“And when the lady did recover her memories, her Heartfire ember eventually came alive, right?” Chez asked.
I folded my hands together in deep thought. “The Queen scooped her up before word could spread, before anyone could figure it out. The sorcerer who claimed her has been long dead but…”
“The Duchess,” Chez piped up.
“Yes.” I nodded. The Duchess would have been involved in any heart harvesting across the land since even before I could remember. “If the Duchess can confirm the story, all we need to do is make sure the Queen doesn’t catch this girl’s scent until we can find a way to recover her memories,” I proposed.
“She’s a clever one, this.” Chez gave me an eerie grin. “Last night, she told me she’d already been brainstorming a solution for that same thing all week. She reckons what she’s building downstairs is the trick to getting back her memories and finding her way home.”
I gave Chez an even glare. “I’m not letting that girl leave Wünder.”
“Well, you don’t have to tell her that,” Chez pointed out. “All I’m saying is that since her goals are aligned with yours for the moment, perhaps it is in your best interests to help her with her mission. And if she succeeds, then you’ll get what you want too.”
I rubbed my chin in thought. “I suppose.”
“Sooner rather than later. Like before Allie finds any more increasingly creative ways to escape. Or before either of you manage to kill the other.” Chez’s mischievous grin was bright yellow.
I glared at the cat. “This isn’t funny, Chez.”
“Agree to disagree, my friend,” Chez bid before turning on his paws to leave. “Well, I suppose I should report back to the Duchess that the Queen of Hearts’s most notorious assassin himself wasn’t in fact assassinated last night.”
Chez yowled, jumping away and out the door before I could kick him.
Although I trusted Chez well enough not to betray my confidence, the Duchess was perhaps the only other being on Wünder with whom this information was safe. She was like me in more ways than one.
I blew out an already exasperated breath before I stood up and made my way across my loft and down the spiral staircase.
I was of half a mind to reconsider and hit the books again, looking for another option, but I was already literally working against the clock.
My pocket watch indicated it was almost time to bring Allie’s rations, but I wasn’t particularly inclined to do her any favors.
Ducking my head as I descended the stairs, my eyes easily adjusted to the dim light.
Flickering gas lamps and the warm, amber glow of bulbs casting long shadows across the room, the storage studio beneath my loft seemed to have transformed into some kind of mad laboratory.
Set against the internal gears and cogs of the clock tower and walls lined with copper pipes and brass fixtures, the massive oak work table, which dominated the center of the small room, was cluttered with a small pile of papers, glassware, and some haphazardly arranged unidentifiable apparatus.
Allie had somehow collected an assortment of oddities, including smaller, intricately designed but broken-looking timepieces.
One side of the glassed-in clock tower mechanism was filled with chalky scribbles of complex equations, formulas, and sketches of a device, wherein several renditions of this device had been smudged or partially erased, mixed with elegant cursive and hurried scrawls.
I gawked. What the hell had she done to the place?
The entire room was filled with a constant low hum of machinery amidst the hollow ticking of the clock tower. A faint scent of oil and metal hung in the air.
Allie was busy—moving about the room with purpose, adjusting dials on a little rusty metal box, a machine of some type. Pencil in her hand, she scribbled something down on a half-crumpled scrap of paper on the table. Her lab coat was stained with various substances.
“What the hell is all this?”
Not startled by my proclamation in the least, she glanced up and incorrectly assumed that I was gesturing to the huge glass wall of scribbles and sketches. “I’m eliminating possibilities.”
“No.” I cleared my throat to amend. “What the hell is all this? Where did you find all this stuff?”
Her attention was still trained on the metal box as it softly whirred. “When was the last time you ventured downstairs? You didn’t know that all eight stories below us in this creepy clock tower are a veritable gold mine of spare parts?”
I narrowed my eyes in mocking. “Everything I need is in my loft upstairs. Why would I waste my time going downstairs?”
“So much for pride in ownership,” she mumbled.
I sniffed haughtily. “I don’t own this clock tower. I merely live here.”
She still barely looked up from reading her graphs, her tone as haggard as my own. “Why are you even down here? Look, if you’ve come to yell at me again, why not just write me a note? I promise I’ll read it with a screamingly loud tone in my head.”
Frowning, I couldn’t seem to phrase in my head what I wanted to put across. I needed to help her? I wanted to help her? We needed to help each other? Every way I thought to say it sounded preposterous.
I pursed my lips. “I’m…looking for something.”
“What? Attention? Still feverish?” She gestured offhand toward the messy single cot. “There’s a blanket.”
I followed her with an indignant gaze as she walked around me to peer out the tinted windows. Did she even forget that she was the reason I had succumbed to a staggering fever last night and nearly died? “Let me get this straight. I don’t even get any sympathy?”
“Sympathy?”
“You tried to kill me last night!”
She rolled her eyes. “That was an accident.” She looked me up and down and I belatedly realized I was standing in front of her workspace. “Can you—get out of the way, please?”
Annoyed I wasn’t making any headway, I shot her another frown. Her entire aura was shooing me away. It was highly disconcerting. Normally, women couldn’t get enough of my company. I had to remind myself again that, for whatever reason, my spells didn’t work on Allie. I had to think of another way to get through to her. I clenched my fists in frustration.
Hearing my exasperated breath, perhaps the guilt finally caught up to her. “Look,” Allie paused. “I am grateful that you saved my life and…let’s suppose I was sorry for last night. But I have work to do. Needing to find a way home and whatnot.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here. It occurred to me—”
“It occurred to you…or Chez?” she interrupted with a knowing tone.
“Either way,” I pressed, “it seems that our goals are aligned, and I believe it would be to our mutual benefit if we worked together.”
Allie nodded as she pushed past me again. “Yeah, Chez totally thought of that.”
I spun around to where she’d gone. “Whatever. The point is you would like to recover your memories. And I—” I broke off. There was no point explaining the entire situation to her, nor exposing the fact that whatever she remembered, whatever we discovered, she was still my prisoner. “Have a slightly related problem,” I finished. “Therefore I have a proposal: I would be willing to offer you my help if you would be willing to cooperate with me. No doubt you must already realize that having the assistance of the most powerful sorcerer in the land would be to your benefit.”
Allie’s gaze was critical, clearly still suspicious. But after a moment, she conceded, “Fine. I guess two heads are always better than one.”
Puzzled at her turn of phrase, I made a face. Since say, for example, the creature you were fighting had two heads instead of one, your chances of prevailing would in fact be smaller. But I dismissed my query.
I cast a glance at the plethora of odd equipment Allie had set up on the work table. “So what exactly are you doing here?”
Allie’s hazel eyes lit up. “I’m building a frequency detector. It compares the vibrations of one object against another. It’s simple physics.”
I wasn’t expecting the depth of her answer. Her passion for her work was immediately clear in her voice, in her mere posture. “I thought you couldn’t remember who you are. How do you know how to do all this?”
Allie shrugged, shoving her hands in the pockets of her lab coat. “I don’t know. All of this stuff just seems to come easily to me.”
I studied the wall of scribbles. “What kind of science is this?”
Her gaze followed mine. “Well, it looks like I dabble in many fields: materials science, mechanical engineering, chemistry…but it seems I specialize particularly in quantum physics and string theory.”
I must have given her a blank look so she felt the need to elaborate—quite pointedly.
“Portals,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Other dimensions. And I believe your world is one within which I have been inadvertently sucked into, somehow, for some reason.”
I blinked, almost in ridicule. She had been saying as much. “Another world?”
“Yes.”
I couldn’t help making another face. “That sounds…”
“Mad?” she supplied. “Probably.” There was a slight twinkle in her eye. “I have an idea. Let’s do an experiment.”
“An experiment?”
She nodded. “Yes. If we use the classic scientific method, we start with an observation. A question. Then we state our hypothesis. Then we do the procedure and analyze the data to formulate our conclusions.” Her eyebrows rose in a prompt. “So let’s suppose that everything from the same dimension vibrates with the same frequency—or at least they’re supposed to.”
She picked up one of the gadgets from the mess on the table. It was a long reed attached to a small bulb that glowed yellow at its end. She started pointing it around the room—for no reason that I could see since nothing was happening.
Wide-eyed, I wove away when she turned the stick toward me. “What are you doing?” I snapped one hand up as a reflex, ready to do a counterspell.
She chided, “Relax.”
I looked from the stick to her and back. As far as I could see, still nothing had changed and nothing was happening. “What? Was something supposed to happen?”
She bit her lip before she turned the stick inward to point at herself.
My eyes widened when the bulb at the end began to glow a smoky green hue.
Allie seemed to release the breath she was holding before hastily setting the stick back down on the table. The light in the bulb fizzled out in a puff of smoke.
Her tone sombered at her conclusion. “Figured.” She took a deep breath and began again, “Under certain conditions, empty space might contain vibratory discrepancies. These are spots where the barriers between places are thinner. I have a feeling if I test the hollow in the tree leading to Tulgey Woods, I’ll find the same thing.” She drew another wooden stick from a pile beside her as if to start again. “That means all I need to do is find an intersect, a convergence significant enough—a tunnel, a doorway if you will.” Her eyes shone with determination. “And once I do, I’m sure I’ll find a portal that leads all the way home. It’s the only plausible explanation.”
The light in her eyes dimmed as she finished as though she was spent from her tirade. Her shoulders slumping, Allie braced one hand against the table.
From my magical perception, Allie’s aura flickered and dimmed.
Was she getting sick now too? Curling my fingers, I cast a spell and a thin veil of fog covered Allie for a moment so I could assess her physical condition.
I frowned again. She was fatigued, dehydrated. She must have soldiered on through the night. Perhaps with doing all of this work, she was as exhausted as I was.
“Here.” I snapped my fingers to conjure a glass of water. “You look tired. You should probably lie down.”
“Did you poison this?” Allie eyed the glass in my hand. “Why are you suddenly being so nice to me?”
I rolled my eyes. “Cut the crap. Just drink it.”
Her lips curled in a pout of protest but she took the glass from me, took a big swig, paused for a moment as if to make sure she didn’t keel over straight away, and then swallowed. “Thank you.”
Fidgeting in my stance, I cleared my throat. “You should rest.”
“I’m fine. I just need to take deep breaths.” Then her eyes narrowed in suspicion as she straightened up again. “You’re not still trying to seduce me, are you?”
I wrinkled my nose in disdain. “Trust me. I’m definitely not.”
“Well, good.” She nodded approval before shrugging offhandedly. “I don’t think I can fall in love anyway. At least not like normal people do.”
I mocked, “Are you not ‘normal people’?”
“I’m a genius.” Her answer seemed like a reflex response.
Her response fell into the silence as I kept her gaze but she didn’t seem to want to look away.
A faint keening caught my ears.
I almost ignored it. But in the next moment, a tiny fragment of a spark flared from the work table.
Eyes widening, I didn’t stop to think before I lunged to grab Allie and hauled us both to the floor as a flash of light accompanied a BOOM!
I cocooned her in my arms as we landed on the floor with a hard thump.
Scrap paper, sawdust, and shards of glass pattered down like rain for a few long moments.
When the only sound around us had reverted to the lone ticking of my clock, Allie met my just-as-stunned gaze through the lingering smoke as she panted beneath me. None too casually, she blew her disheveled hair out of her face. “Holy crap, that was close.”
I pushed up on my arms above her. “What the hell was that?” I yelled in her face. “Are you working with explosives down here? Do you realize what could have happened if that had blown up in your face? What else are you even working on?”
Sitting up to dust herself off, Allie made a face. “Those were probably just the volatile chemicals I mixed by accident. What is the big deal? All experiments come with their own set of risks.”
Rage nearly burst out of my chest. The stupid, stubborn girl didn’t even realize what could have happened!
I jumped to straighten up with a growl. “This is totally unacceptable.”
I waved one hand, and in a blink, the condition of the cramped studio returned to its original state. A dusty boiler sat across a modest but neatly made bed in the sparsely furnished space, amidst the backdrop of the inner workings of the giant timepiece visibly moving in a mechanic rhythm in tune to the hollow echoes of the ticking clock, and all of Allie’s scribblings and whatever equipment she had lugged in there disappeared.
Allie threw up her arms in indignant complaint. “What the—? Where’s all my stuff?”
I moved to stalk away.
She called out after me, “Hey! I thought we agreed we were going to cooperate with each other?”
“By that, I meant I will come up with a plan and you will follow my instructions,” I corrected. “Did you forget I needed you alive?” I gave her another glare. “I can’t have you toying around with any of this dangerous science nonsense. I forbid it.”
“You forbid it?” Allie echoed in incredulity. “You’re such a jerk!”
Ignoring her attempt to give chase, I whirled on my heel and apparated away with a poof.