Revolving Door: Volume 3
Chapter 52: Takeoff
“Please! Don't hurt me!” the spy screams when she comes to, straining on her tethers at the windowsill.
With the kerfuffle out of the way, Vesper can see that the girl is no more than that—a youth of schoolgoing age, shuddering with tears as her messy locks fall into her eyes. She has skin and hair about as dark as Marcia's, but her frame is much scrawnier, and her grasp of English is firm even in distress.
Rising from her kneel, Marcia meets Vesper's eye and nods in the direction of the wall. “Orobelle,” she says, in syllables they both understand.
Vesper takes her place beside the captive while the door clicks shut behind her. “Who are you?” she mutters. Now that she can see that their spy is completely unequipped, she doesn't feel any inclination to kick or shout or employ any of the tactics she learned from LTC Clarke.
The girl chokes out her reply. “If I tell you—if I tell you—I'll be in trouble.”
“Aye? In trouble from whom?”
A creak of the door interrupts her, and in strides Marcia, bringing Orobelle and Dorian—and Hong Yi and Adelaide.
The Duchess marches up to their captive, scrutinising her bindings. “State your name and your purpose,” she snaps.
“She says she'll get in trouble if she tells us,” Vesper answers, leaping to her feet. Marcia pushes through the group and crouches in Vesper's place, laying an arm on the girl's shoulder. Then lifting her gaze to Orobelle, she says something—interrogate.
Orobelle frowns at the captive, tucks her hands behind her back, and paces back and forth before her. The spy's huge, tear-stained eyes follow her. “What a terribly unusual spy. And not even a weapon to aid you. Whoever sent you must not think much of your life.”
The spy bows her head and continues to say nothing.
Marcia speaks then—she's sad—and then, from the pocket of her jeans, she hands the duchess a rectangle of paper. Orobelle nods to Dorian, who passes her a translation glass.
She peers over the sheet for a minute, then meets the spy's eye with a flaring of eyes that makes Vesper's blood run cold. “Who is this message from?” she says in a velvet-soft undertone. The spy shakes her head profusely, eyes half-curtained by hair. Orobelle toys with the pendant on her necklace, then flicks the hidden blade out with such force it makes the captive flinch. “I have ways of making you talk.”
“What do you want to know? What do you want? If I say too much—if I say too much, she'll blow me to pieces—”
“‘She?’”
The captive's face contorts. “I can't say more. I can't say more. Please.”
“Alright, then, an easier question. How did you follow us across two worlds? Do you have powers? The power to ghost between universes at the expense of memories?”
The captive freezes. No words leave her lips, but Marcia, with fingers spidered over the girl's arm, murmurs, yes, she does. Orobelle considers her quietly, then the spy, who shrinks back.
“I thought as much,” the Duchess carries on, slinking closer with the blade brandished. “So, this person who sent you. What does she want? Why is she so intent on capturing me?”
Her wide eyes follow the blade. Orobelle jabs it in her direction, and the spy recoils again, words tumbling off her tongue: “She is a god in the making. She will tear down empires and end suffering in her world.”
“Spare me that nonsense!” Orobelle bursts out. “A god, I'm sure. A god wouldn't resort to sending her little serf to drop off cryptic letters in my bed. A god wouldn't need to take hostages. I am more of a god than she, I reckon! Pray tell, where is the hostage she took?”
“I—I don't know,” the spy stammers.
Orobelle squints. “What was that?”
“I don't know. I don't know where the hostage is.”
“Enough lies.”
Orobelle slowly presses the point of the blade against her throat, and the girl freezes, teeth bared, eyes scrunching up—until Hong Yi bursts out, “Orobelle, please don't!”
The duchess relieves the pressure. Vesper cannot see if she has left a mark. “Tell me everything you know about the hostage.”
“That is all I know!” she weeps. “I don't know, I don't know what she did with Freesia—”
From the corner of her eye, Vesper can see Dorian's eyes widening. Orobelle has caught the whiff of an opening, and she leans closer in interest, the machinery clicking behind her eyes, then—
Vesper sees the ropes go slack. She shouts as the misdirection suddenly clarifies itself—there is only a split second between the spy wrenching her hands out of the coils and her entire body winking away into nothingness, leaving Marcia's hand hanging in midair.
Space smooths back into place around the fallen ropes, like skin released from a pinch. Marcia lowers her hand and rises to her feet, gingerly, as if she might disturb it again.
“Light burn me!” screams Orobelle, kicking at the loose coils of rope. “The slippery little worm! We almost had it, the key to our enemy's plans—”
Even as the girl descends into a tantrum, Marcia walks wordlessly to her bed. From under her pillow, she slides out something rectangular—a ring-bound sketchbook. She lifts it up, the cover turned towards Orobelle's eyes, and says something, starting to turn the pages for her.
The duchess falls silent, and the rest of the room follows. Page by page, Marcia reveals the book's contents: maps, sketches, haphazard blocks of text in scratchy pencil.
Vesper remembers how it fell from the intruder's arms to the ground just minutes ago, when she collapsed from the electric shock. If it had remained there, she would surely have snatched it back.
The foresight it must have taken, to know to hide it away…
Marcia hands the book to Orobelle. The Duchess’ face slackens as she begins to scan the text through her lens. Line by line, her surprise morphs to amazement.
Her grip on the book changes. She flips to its covers and presses it shut, handing it to Dorian in both hands. “Protect this. With your life,” she says, then her eyes sweep the gathering. “Return to your rooms. We shall convene about this in the morning.”
*
The paper note that the spy meant to leave is inscribed in careful letters, as if to obscure the writer's identity. In that foreign script that Orobelle has seen once before is written a brief message:
Well done! You have found seven of the eight cores. But here is where I must let you down. For I, your villain, am the last core. Yes, I am your quarry, and you are mine. We are at an impasse now.
I already know my next move. Do you know yours?
Orobelle scarcely knows what to do as she watches everything she knows about her mission thus far turn on its head.
She knows. The villain knows. She knows about her search for the Cores.
And the villain is the eighth of them. No, there will be no eighth in Orobelle's phalanx. Her circle must remain incomplete, for the villain can never join her.
But then this book in her hands, this dog-eared ring-bound volume, rewrites everything yet again. In its pages resides a brand new opening, a secret gate into the fortress.
From before the first rays of sunlight filtered grey through the window dust, Orobelle has sat poring over this priceless tome, rooms traded back with Vesper and Marcia. Dorian meditates behind her, cross-legged on his own bed in shirt and trousers.
So far, the contents of the book have been dominated by a rapturous excess of maps depicting different parts of an island called “Havaiki.” But more interesting than the maps are the notes scattered between them. Somewhere close to the middle of the book, she uncovers a page largely populated with written text.
And among those writings, she spots a list of locations and names:
- future world: [untranslatable]
- steam world: simmons archive new york - by victor riparius
- dead world: russian academy of military sciences - by sanjaya hartono
A list of archives and libraries…and authors, perhaps?
Her villain, Orobelle understands all at once, has been on the hunt for knowledge. Outside of navigational directions and lists of tasks, it seems that she has told her employee little. Still, what the Duchess sees makes her brow furrow. How can this villain know so much about so many worlds? It makes her heart sink with fear. Every war is fought with information. Any strategy can be thwarted with foresight. So she was taught.
If a god this villain were to become, then perhaps these texts are a map to her apotheosis…
“No! It's all drivel,” Orobelle mutters under her breath. Dorian's head briefly turns at the outburst, but he says nothing.
Her eyes return to the list of places. There is a barely-comprehending disjointedness to the scrawls, as if written without looking, and she can make no sense of the first item through her glass. Rendered in a different script from the other two, it seems that the writer did not understand the words she was writing.
But among her entourage, there must surely be someone who recognises the script. That someone is probably Hong Yi.
This is just as well, for he is the very first person who knocks on her door that morning, there to ask about precisely the matter of the book. “Perfect timing, come inside,” she says, waving him in. Dorian opens an eye as he passes. She shifts aside so Hong Yi has a view of the sketchbook page on her desk. “This book is proving a peculiar trove. It appears there is information here about three repositories of knowledge…”
He nods. “I can see that. In fact, I can read it.”
She lifts her head. “All of it?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Then you can tell me what that first one says.”
“Your translation glass doesn't tell you?”
“No, I do not think she understood the words. So the glass cannot unearth its meaning, either.”
He taps his chin. “Yeah, you can kinda tell from her handwriting too,” he replies. “Well, that says ‘Future World’ in English, then ‘the Sect of Multiversal Truth, Dalian - Chen Shanying’ in Chinese.”
“‘Multiverse,’” she murmurs. A chill like the shadow of a stormcloud creeps over her. “The villain is researching cosmogonical matters.”
“Huh. Why do you call her ‘the villain’? Are we sure she's the villain here?”
“That is how she signed her letter off,” Orobelle growls. “I am using her own terminology.”
Hong Yi shrugs. “What a weird thing to call yourself. But, well…” He points out the names of the three worlds. “It sounds like these three texts are in three different universes. This second one is the one we're in now. The third is the one we just left. But that first one…”
While he has been saying this, Orobelle has moved the translation glass down to a diagram drawn beneath the list. It is a rectangle subdivided horizontally into six, each annotated with a name: islands, home, modern, future, steam, dead. She points at steam. “So, this is where we are,” she says. Her fingertip moves right, to dead. “This is the one we just left.” Then her finger moves back left, crossing over steam and coming to rest at future. “That means that the ‘future world’ is the next one along the chain. And these…” Her finger drifts slowly onward, towards the other three rectangles. As she does, a shiver rakes up her back. “There are three more universes beyond it.”
There is silence in the room while the reverberation of the new knowledge settles.
“Twelve universes,” Hong Yi breathes. “At the very least.”
Orobelle pulls her arms around herself. “That is too many.” Then she grimaces. “It does not matter.” She steels her face as she turns to him once more. “I only know one thing: the game has changed. Our villain is a step ahead of us, but we have a chance to get back at her. She does not know we have this book—not yet. I think that this is the best lead we will ever come by to unravel whatever twisted plot we are entangled in. The contents of these ‘documents’ may answer many questions.”
Hong Yi nods solemnly. “I think you're right. How much longer do we have till the villain's rendezvous date?”
Now, Orobelle picks up her pocket watch from among the rest of her stationery. “Fourteen days, in Queendom time,” she says. “But I have observed that time moves about twice as slowly in most worlds. So we have twenty-eight days.”
“Whoa. If there's three documents in three worlds, we'd better hurry.”
“Now you are starting to see sense.”
He sighs, leaning on his left foot. “I think seeing the spy, hearing what she said, watching that whole thing unfold…it's made the whole thing much realer. Before that, I really didn't get why you were pushing us so hard, but now…”
She frowns. “Have I seemed unreasonable?”
“Uh, a little? You do know how sick Marcia was, right? I have never had a fever as high as the one she had, and frankly, I have no idea how she's still alive.”
Orobelle's eyes unfocus. She knows a dozen ways to dismiss him.
This is what you must always do, Orobelle. They say most rulers rule by either love or fear. But the best ruler holds her people by both tethers. Take away their food and clothing, then feed them and clothe them, and they will become your most loyal. They cannot defy their lifegiver. But do not capitulate when they make demands of you. They ask for copper today, and tomorrow, gold. You must always appear to act by your choice alone.
But I do not want to, Mother. Why shouldn't I do what I believe is right?
You cannot rule by instinct, child. You cannot act without forethought, simply because you believe something to be right. Rashness makes idiots of the wise. You hold the script in your hands, and it is called the Diamonds’ Playbook. We have spent centuries planning this glorious insurgence, and you will bring it to its denouement.
“Yes, Marcia has done well,” Orobelle answers carefully. “She caught us the spy that no one else knew was following. She was indispensable at the interrogation. And she is the reason we have this book.”
“She's pretty amazing, yeah.”
Orobelle nods. “Tell the rest we meet here after breakfast. I am starting to form a plan.”
Adelaide manages eventually to fall asleep after slipping back to the room in the wee hours of the morning. She sleeps deeply and unbreakingly, and is woken too many hours later by the sound of the door opening.
By then, the sun is already well above the roofs, casting thin parallelograms of light across the floor.
She flips over in bed and blinks her eyes open. In the doorway stands Felix, a hand on the doorknob. “Good morrow, my dear,” he says. “Did you sleep well?”
She hugs her blanket. “Yeah. Better than I thought I would. There was a spy last night…a ghost like Honourless. I was in the room when Orobelle interrogated her.”
“So I have heard,” he murmurs, then turns to reveal he is carrying a plate of croissants. “Care for some pastries? Orobelle has called a meeting in a few minutes. I didn't want you missing breakfast for it.”
“Oh…thank you.” She finally crawls to sit, lowering her gaze as she takes the plate by the edges. Hong Yi's words repeat in her head. “Um, hey, I…I have been needing to tell you something.”
“Oh?” Felix pauses and turns to her again. He sinks to a kneel at her bedside. “Pray tell.”
Adelaide did not plan much farther than this. She certainly did not plan to have this conversation looking straight into his eyes. “I, yesterday, I…” She begs her brain to give her words for once. “I accidentally read your genes. I'm sorry.”
“I see.” He cocks his head to the side. “Well, I scarcely know how I should feel about that. But I don't think you have anything to apologise for. Unless you discovered some sordid secret of mine. Did you?”
“No…I don't think so.” She shakes her head. “Genes don't reveal quite that much. Um, most I got was that one of your parents has gray eyes, and the other, blue, I think.”
“That is correct.”
“And I can infer that your children would most likely have blue eyes, too, especially if their other parent has them.”
“You have blue eyes,” he murmurs with a smile.
“I… I…” The plate wobbles in her hands. “I…don't know why I said all that.”
“Well, I found it all quite fascinating.” He chuckles. Lifting his index finger, he brushes hair out of her eyes. “I was the one who suggested you change your eyes to blue. How rude of me.”
“I—thought it was—a good suggestion—” she squeaks.
Felix rises to his feet again. “Well, anyhow…I don't half mind that you have read my genes. In fact, I am curious what else you saw. You ought to tell me sometime.”
She crams a croissant into her mouth. Crumbs scatter on her skirt. He laughs, reopening the door. “We meet in five minutes in Orobelle's room. I'll see you there.”
Now they are all gathered, Orobelle begins to wish she had not suggested meeting everyone at the same time. There is room to spare, and everyone finds a seat on the edges of both beds of her room, but the warmth slips from comfortable to barely tolerable within minutes.
“Everyone!” she declares. All chatter fades at once. “For those who are not yet apprised, there has been an incident. Yesterday night, we caught a spy sneaking around in this very room. She divulged that her leader, the one whose threat has gathered us all as a team, is the eighth Core. Our villain has been watching us, and the spy was under her employ. But what she didn't count on was that Marcia would retain one of her things: this.”
For effect, Orobelle lifts up the ring-bound sketchbook for their eyes. Everyone watches as she waves it through the air.
“A book in which the spy has been jotting her navigational notes. I have spent the morning decoding it, and it has precipitated a rather dramatic change of plans. Needless to say, we will not be seeking out the eighth Core, not yet. Rather, this gift of knowledge is what we will pursue—a window, perhaps, into her plans. We now have three documents to find, each with a known location and author. Each one has been of interest to our villain. And each one is located in a different world.”
The chatter, withholding itself till now, finally spills out.
“The first text was authored by Chen Shanying, and is housed in the next world forward—the one that Adelaide and Felix have just arrived from. It lives with the Sect of Multiversal Truth, which appears to be based in a place called Dalian. The second is by a Victor Riparius, and it is held in this very world by the Simmons Archive in New York. The third, authored by Sanjaya Hartono, is in the world we just left, the one where we found Artur. It is with the Russian Academy of Military Sciences, though which city—”
“Moscow,” says Artur.
“Moscow. We have barely any time left before we must make a move against our villain. A little less than a month, in the time of these worlds, to retrieve all three.”
“So let's do all three at the same time,” Vesper says immediately. “I doubt we need a team of eight for every single document.”
“Yes, three concurrent missions is an excellent idea,” Orobelle calls out. “Why don't you tell us which of these you'd like to take on?”
“New York.”
“Good. Who else?”
Felix lifts his hand. “I say I am of most use in the world I know best. And, I reckon my father would have connections with the Archive, he was a frequent traveller to New York.” Vesper rolls her eyes.
“Good, two with the archive, how about Dalian?”
“Me, probably,” Hong Yi answers. “That's my home region, and I'd much rather the future than the past.”
“I'll join you,” Artur says.
“Not Moscow?” asks Hong Yi.
“Not Moscow. No. Irradiated in my world. Completely ruined. Dalian is closer to my city than Moscow.”
Hong Yi's eyebrows rise. “Vladivostok?”
Artur manages to crack a smile. “You know geography.”
Orobelle claps her hands once. “Good! Then—who goes to Moscow?”
“‘Completely irradiated’ Moscow?” asks Hong Yi. “Er…who fancies the risk of dying just by standing there?”
Orobelle fixes her eyes on Honourless. “You have the means to move rapidlly between worlds. You would need the least time there by far.”
“And I could do my research in a different world, perhaps?” she drawls. “I could learn from a different version of it.”
“A sound plan. And you two,” she glances between Adelaide and Marcia. “Adelaide, you know the most by far about your world—the politics, the societies, the state of science and technology…”
“I am a wanted fugitive in my world.”
“In Dalian?”
She pauses to consider. “If I disguise myself and don't bring my phone, they may not be able to find—”
“Then do your teammates a favour and go with them to your world.” Adelaide does not answer; she glances at Hong Yi, who offers an apologetic look. Orobelle whirs to face Marcia. “And you? Your pick. We have two in New York, three in Dalian, one in Moscow…”
Marcia nods slowly. “My familiarity will diminish the farther from my era I move…and none of those places are familiar to me so, strictly speaking, I have a greater chance of being useful in the earliest of these…that is, this world.”
“To New York with you, then.” Finally, Orobelle whirls to face Dorian, who is already awaiting instruction. “You stay with me. We shall keep our place in this city so they have somewhere to return to.”
“Of course! Send your allies to the wasteland while you lounge about doing nothing,” Honourless mutters.
“Hardly nothing, you ingrate! I have far too much to do, for instance, plotting our route back home!”
“How horrible, making more plans. How long do we have?”
“Five days in Duchy time. Ten days anywhere else,” the duchess snaps. “So—to repeat. Honourless, you are taking Vesper, Felix, and Marcia to New York in this world. And Hong Yi, Artur, and Adelaide to Dalian in the next world forward. Then you go to Moscow, one world behind. Do this tomorrow morning. Everyone else—the locations and authors should take you to a cache of information. You have ten days to locate and retrieve a copy of everything you find.”
“Ten days? For everything?” Hong Yi shouts.
“You are Cores, for crying out loud! You will figure it out. Honourless—come to me the instant you are done, and at the ten day mark, you will extract them each from their respective worlds. Again! Five days in the Duchy is ten days in any of these worlds, but not precisely. Be done well before then, if you can. We will come find you.”
There is a feverish mutter through the room as the two trios coalesce. Amid this reorganisation of the crowd, Vesper raises a hand. “I'm noticing two issues here,” she says. “First…Marcia shares no language with either of us.”
“Oh. Yes,” Orobelle answers, her voice briefly faltering before she rebuilds her vigour. “I do have a solution. But it will have to wait until later. What is the second issue?”
“The cage,” Vesper says.
“The Cage,” Felix answers. “We need only detach the planar focus from the top and place it outside.”
Orobelle sighs. “Who is on the cage demolition team?”
The demolition team, consisting of Honourless and Hong Yi, arrives at the Cage to find their work already half done. The “planar focus,” or so Felix called it, hangs by a bent chain link, the gap not quite wide enough to let the next slip out.
“Well, props to her for trying,” says Hong Yi with a shrug.
Rubbing her hands together, Honourless does as she does—leaping into the neighbouring world, then rematerialising halfway into the air, both hands snatching for the lowest ring as she falls so that she dangles from it like a gymnast, the gap in the chain link groaning wider.
Hong Yi nods to her and, grasping her legs, begins to weigh her down. The pair grow heavier and heavier, till Honourless is grunting with the effort of holding on.
Then, with a twang, the half-open chain link snaps. Hong Yi has only a split second to readjust the gravitational pull on Honourless before she can crash and break a bone. They both tumble backwards into the cage bars, grinning.
They stare at the assemblage of metal rings in her hands, and then each other. “I think that should do it,” Hong Yi declares. Honourless does not understand him, but she nods, pointing out the way they came.
The pair return to the hotel to find Orobelle's door tightly locked. She does not admit them even after a knock. While Honourless continues inspecting the gaps, Hong Yi heads up the hall to find Artur, Adelaide, Vesper and Felix in the sitting area, all watching the corridor intently as he arrives.
“Hey, what's going on?” he asks, which brings the conversation to a grinding halt. “Did Orobelle banish y'all from the room?”
Vesper leaps off the couch armrest. “She has business with Marcia,” she says.
The rest look at each other. “Her Grace looked very solemn indeed,” Felix answers. “She wouldn't let us stay.”
Hong Yi paces a loop around the couch and the armchair. “Why does this sound so…spooky? I sure hope it's nothing we should worry about.”
Artur shakes his head. “Marcia must know. She was not scared. But surprised.”
“How did you go with the cage?” Vesper puts in.
“Oh, yeah, all dealt with now. I think the spy had already had a go at it…less work for us.”
They are interrupted by footsteps shuffling towards them from the hallway. Honourless marches straight up to him, holding up her notepad and translation glass. She points out the new sentences on the page as he aligns the glass with his eye and reads, and as he does, his eyes go wide.
A ritual, she writes. She is investing Marcia with the power of her blood.