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The Caliph didn’t respond. Instead he sat down on a chest directly across from the barred door of her cell. Straightening his shoulders, he set his hands calmly on his robed knees and stared straight ahead, his mask glinting in the low candlelight. The ticking noise sounded in Prue’s ears, like a winding clock.
“What’s your name?” tried Prue again. “Are you one of the Wildwood bandits? Jack? Eamon?”
Nothing.
“Right, vow of silence.” Prue crossed her arms and stared at her feet, at the tattered canvas of her Keds.
The ship bucked in the current of the river; the boards moaned under the pressure, and Prue could hear shouting from the sailors on deck. The hatch door opened suddenly and a voice called in: “Underway!”
The Caliph on the chest did not move; he only stared straight ahead.
The hatch door closed and Prue lay back on her cot, staring at the ceiling. The ticking was there, in her mind, sounding to her from some strange source inside the Caliph.
She waited. The night poured on, like a thick syrup. Somewhere, distantly, an explosion sounded.
CHAPTER 16
The Undisputed Therapeutic
Benefits of Singing
It was not often that Desdemona Mudrak missed the Ukraine. To her, memories of that place conjured up dusty, potholed roads, disused warehouses, and brusque state employees. They brought to mind bad television, barely received by throwback TV sets in cold living rooms, and empty shelves in grocery stores. She’d grown up fairly well off, by former Soviet satellite standards, the only daughter of a self-employed florist and his wife. Her mother spent summers busily canning whatever food they produced at their modest dacha in the country and storing it in the two refrigerators that occupied their small kitchen.
But looking out over the Industrial Wastes, here in liberated, wealthy America, she found herself longing for the days of her childhood in Kiev. The smokestacks and chemical silos that she was now looking over dwarfed, by grimness standards, any similar landscape she imagined from her childhood; it seemed ironic to her that she should come here to escape the bleakness of her home country, only to arrive in a land of such emptiness as to make the industrial squalor of the world she’d left look like Disneyland. And it was all on display, every blinking light and pall of smoke, from the top floor of Titan Tower, where Desdemona was standing, etching a sad face on the windowpane with her finger.
“Whatcha doin’ there, honey?” asked Brad Wigman, sitting at his desk and absently shuffling through the day’s progress reports.
“Nothing,” she replied. “I am to doing nothing.”
“Well, why don’t you to fetch me a cup of coffee? I’ve got my hands full with these reports.”
Desdemona frowned; it was an unfortunate downside of being at the mercy of the Chief Titan, now that her home and business had been destroyed and her boyfriend was completely missing in action, presumed insane: She was little more than a personal assistant to Bradley Wigman, Titan of Shipping. “You have secretary for such things,” said Desdemona.
“It’s late, Dessie,” said Wigman. “She’s got a home to go to. A job she needs to rest up for. Which is more than you could say for some people in this room.” He looked up, scanning the large, windowed office. “I’m only seeing the two of us in here. And I have a job. And a home.”
Desdemona rolled her eyes and stalked away from the window. As she passed the bookcase on the north wall, she ran her hand along the fake spines that populated its shelves. She knew what the folly hid: a secret room, a panic room—the creation of a powerful and paranoid man. Which was understandable, considering the rise in industrial sabotage the Wastes had experienced over the last several months. The man couldn’t be too careful. However, at present, the room was performing an altogether different function. “Shall I bring the captives some drinking or food?”
“Sure,” he said. “While you’re at it. I think there’s some snack mix in the break room. And they’ll likely need more water.”
“Consider it achieved,” said Desdemona. She wandered through the maze of decorative pedestals in the large space, each displaying some sort of prize or commemorative statuette honoring the Chief Titan. Opening the gigantic brass doors at the far end of the room took some doing, for a woman of Desdemona’s frame, but soon she was out in the lobby, making her way toward the small alcove that served as the break room for the staff. She nodded to the two hulking stevedores who stood guard at the main elevator doors. She poured a bowlful of snack mix, grabbed a few bottles of water (emblazoned, strangely, with Mr. Wigman’s chin-dominant and smiling face) and a bottle of Lemony Zip for herself. She sipped at the soda while the espresso machine gurgled its brackish liquid into a small cup.
Her arms full, she delivered the coffee to Mr. Wigman, who received it with barely a mumble. Without looking up from his papers, Brad shot the coffee back with a jerk of his head and held out the emptied cup to Desdemona. She took it with an annoyed frown and set it on the desk. Wigman seemed not to notice. Then she was off to the fake bookcase. She scanned the titles on the shelf, the very picture of an eager bibliophile, until she found the one she was looking for: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. She hooked her finger to the top of the spine, and pulling it back, she heard a loud click and a whirring noise. The bookcase rolled sideways, by an unseen mechanism, to reveal a small, pale-green room with two cowering individuals inside.
“Hello,” said Desdemona. “I’ve broughten you some snack mix.”
The old man barely moved; his shoulders were hunched over as he sat in his plastic chair, and his unseeing wooden eyes, which had struck Desdemona as decidedly creepy the first time she’d seen them, stared at the floor. Across from him sat the girl, Martha. She was holding a book in her hands. She nodded to Desdemona wearily as if to say, Whatever.
Desdemona set the bowl of snack mix and the two bottles of water on the floor. “What is it you are reading now?” she asked. She’d tried this before, to make conversation with the two prisoners, to varying degrees of success. In a sense, they’d been housemates these last few months: Desdemona had been occupying one of the temporary housing units on the lower floors. She, too, was homeless, in a manner of speaking. And so, she’d tried to remain friendly in her role as guardian to the two captives—though she suspected it was a doomed task.
Martha glared at her. She still wore the goggles on her forehead, despite her changed circumstances. Desdemona suspected it was some form of mental tic.
“What do you care?” said the girl.
“Who is it?” asked the old man, Carol, apparently having woken from some sort of trance.
“Who do you think?” said Martha.
Desdemona gamely played up her thick Slavic accent: “Yeess, hoo to think it eeez?”
