A/N (s):
GreatKateZonkeyMachine – This is my personal favorite chapter. It's the pivotal turning point in the story that leads to all of the subsequent events, and the idea for this chapter actually ran through my head before any of the rest of it; it was actually my inspiration for Nomansland. As Kahlan rightly states, she did write most of this chapter – but I'll have you know it was my idea!
Kahlan the Dream Spirit – Here's where the plot begins, along with all of the angst and torment Reynie goes through for the next sixteen chapters. Yes, we have a vague idea of the chapter numbers. Oh, and for the record, I wrote the vast majority of this chapter. ;)
-N-O-M-A-N-S-L-A-N-D-
CHAPTER – 2
"Too Comfortable"
or, Moonlit Treachery
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Reynie wasn't used to sleeping in uncomfortable places, per se, though he certainly didn't have much of an animosity towards them. When you went on life-and-death adventures, you couldn't afford to. He'd had to sleep in various places over the past two years—not the least of which being a rope bed in a long-abandoned cabin—and such a lack of routine had conditioned him to sleep on most any strange or uncomfortable surface.
His own current bed was actually quite comfortable itself, and almost nobody would have an objection to spending a night or two sleeping there. Not even Milligan or Kate, who habitually didn't like comfortable beds for being "too comfortable." Milligan stated that a bed which was too comfortable kept you from getting up in the morning and attending to the work that might need to be done; and after all, you could never know when someone might attack or sabotage you. Kate didn't like them because they "suck me inside and might smother me if I'm not careful." Reynie didn't see the sense in this, but it was Kate, and Kate did pretty much whatever she wanted, so on a hard bed she slept.
Reynie saw their point now. When you were trying to wake up, a comfortable bed didn't do you any favors.
"Reynie! Reynie, wake up!" Somebody was poking his nose, over and over again.
"Mm..." he groaned, wanting to know what the big deal was but not caring enough to leave Nod. He rolled over with his nose in the pillow.
There was a shove on his shoulder. "C'mon, Reynie, wake up!"
Reynie opened his eyes just a little bit, to see what it was the voice wanted, and then immediately shut them against the pain in his eyeballs. The imprints of a white light were left on the insides of his eyelids, and he groaned again. Where had that light come from? He couldn't very well wake up if he couldn't see the time...
"Reynard Muldoon Perumal, if you don't wake up this instant, I'm going to open the window and pull all of the blankets off your bed, and it won't bother Sticky because I'll pile them onto his bed."
The annoyed voice was sounding more familiar with every word it said. Who was it? Constance? Or Rhonda? The voice was young, feminine, but it had a bit too much attitude for Rhonda and not quite enough for Constance—
Ah. Of course. He pulled his hand out of the blankets into the cold air (the air was actually cold in the house), shielded his eyes with it, then opened them a bit. He could tell now that the light was coming from Kate's penlight. In the glare he couldn't see its owner, but that didn't matter. What mattered was—
"What in the world possessed you to get up, Kate?" he mumbled, slurring the words so that they came out in a rather hard-to-decipher tone. If Kate hadn't been his best friend and used to his groggy way of speech, she might not have understood him. Actually, if Kate hadn't been Kate she wouldn't have understood him.
"Reynie," she whispered fiercely, "I think something's going on. Something suspicious."
She's her father's daughter, Reynie thought, naturally. Kate was a bit jumpy about Mr. Curtain and his henchmen the Ten Men (though she would never for all the world admit to it), and this was not the first time she'd imagined something suspicious going on. Reynie had come to the scientific conclusion that being cooped up in the temperature-variant house had made her adrenaline search fruitlessly for an outlet.
"Did you come all the way up here from the maze?" Reynie asked with vague amazement.
Between the house front and the stairs, a grid of identical square rooms formed a sort of maze. In darker times, this had been a defense mechanism against intruders; nowadays, some of the rooms were used as lodgings for the Perumals, the Washingtons, and the Wetheralls, but the majority of the rooms were still part of that maze. Reynie, Kate, Sticky, and Constance had once had to navigate the maze as a test of intellect.
"Yes, I did," said Kate impatiently. "So what? Focus, Reynie. I want you to come investigate with me."
"Ugh, but why me?" he grunted. "Why not Sticky?"
"Remember the last time?"
Reynie didn't need any further explanation than that. Kate always needed a person to vent to, and usually this person ended up being Reynie. Once it was Sticky, and he had barely been able to stay awake the next day, not to mention he had a huge bruise on his knee and a stubbed toe where he'd crashed unwittingly into a particularly high stack of books and fallen to the ground, with Kate trying to help him up and nearly yanking his arm out of his socket. Number Two hadn't let them hear the end of that, nor had Milligan. It hadn't ended well, and so now Reynie was the prime target for Kate's midnight antics.
"Then why not Constance?" he asked.
The look she gave him sufficed for an answer.
"Kate," Reynie said, a little bit more awake now but still nowhere near ready to sit up, "it's your imagination. Go back to bed."
"Reynie, I heard something," she said firmly, "and I want to check it out. Come with me or not, but I'm going and there's nothing you can do to stop me."
Reynie groaned. Now she was playing to his conscience. If Kate went out and was right, something would happen to her and it would be entirely Reynie's fault for not "keeping an eye on her" as Milligan said. (Milligan couldn't be around all the time and trusted the sensible Perumals—Reynie included—to watch after her and make sure she at least didn't end up in a full-body cast. Reynie considered this consummately ridiculous, because if anything existed that could put Kate in a full-body cast, he and his adopted mother and grandmother certainly couldn't stop it.) "Kate," he said in a pleading voice, "it's the middle of the night—"
"Actually, it's only eleven forty. Nowhere near midnight."
Kate had her eye on the clock. Of course she did. "Put down the penlight," commanded Reynie.
When the blinding glare subsided, Reynie put his hand down and opened his eyes a bit wider. He could see Kate now, illuminated in the moonlight from the small window of his room. She was standing on the ladder that led to his bunk, her blonde hair unbrushed and pulled into a messy ponytail, her blue eyes in a frenzy. She'd pulled her coat on over a sweater and some jeans. Her penlight was in her hand, aimed down at the floor.
"Okay, now tell me exactly what happened," Reynie said, rubbing his eyes. "And be quiet, don't wake up Sticky."
Her head disappeared for a second as she checked on the sleeping boy below. She popped back up an instant later, with Reynie struggling to keep his eyes open. "He's completely out. It would take Constance standing next to him banging two pots together to wake him."
"Well, since we've tested the idea," Reynie muttered.
Kate proceeded with her story. "I saw some lights outside my window, Reynie,"
"Lights similar to headlights going down the street?"
Kate ignored him. "It looked like Morse Code, but I couldn't tell because I'm out of practice, you know? I probably shouldn't be, but we haven't worked on it for so long and I've always had trouble remembering the difference between O and S –"
"Kate!" Reynie interrupted. "Suspicious activity?" Amazing how even in sleep he could keep on track better than Kate. She didn't mean to go off on a tangent constantly, of course, it was just one of the quirks that Reynie loved about her.
"Oh! Right. Anyway, I saw the lights and then I saw some answering lights from somewhere on the other side of the road. I bet I could've read those if I'd figured out it was Morse Code soon enough, they looked simple, but I didn't figure it out until I was halfway on my way here. Anyhow, I could see that there were lights coming on in one of the houses behind curtains. It was weird."
"Weird. Weird like two cars going in opposite directions."
"They weren't headlights, Reynie! And what about the lights inside that house?"
"Maybe someone was turning on a light to go to the bathroom or something."
"And someone decided to blink them on and off while using it? I don't think so. We ought to go investigate."
Reynie rolled his eyes (thankfully, Kate didn't see). This sounded like just another one of Kate's usual 'I heard a noise and looked out my window; there was a suspicious figure dressed in black and carrying a bag getting into a black car'cases that cropped up every now and again. Only the worst part was, they generally sounded like they could have some validity to them, even though they most likely didn't, resulting in several cups of tea the next morning in an attempt to wake up. "Okay, Kate," he said, taking care to cover the tone with exasperation so that she wouldn't see the concern. "Let me get dressed and I'll come out with you."
Kate nodded, stepped down from the ladder, and slipped noiselessly out of the room. Two seconds later, Reynie was left in bed wondering if it had even happened.
A small tap on the door let him know that it had.
He groaned and sat up on his bed, accidentally hitting his head on the ceiling. "Ow," he said, and reached up. It wasn't forming a knot, but it he'd been getting up any faster it would have. It had also made a rather loud sound that woke Sticky.
"Reynie?" he asked; in his groggy tone it sounding more like "rehree."
"Go back to sleep, Sticky," Reynie whispered, climbing down the latter and heading over to the bureau.
Sticky's eyes were only half open, and they were cloudy with sleep as they blinked, trying to bring Reynie into focus. "Mm-kay…." he mumbled, before his snores began again.
Reynie shivered in the cold December air as he pulled on a sweater and a pair of jeans. The material, having been sitting in the bureau all night, was cold on his skin. Then he slid his feet into his shoes—due to the icy temperatures on this floor he slept in his socks (clean ones, of course)—and grabbed his coat from the post of the bed.
Reynie opened the wooden door and slipped out into the hallway, which was colder than the bedroom if possible. Kate was leaning against the wall, tapping the ground with one foot and flipping the lid on her bucket repeatedly. Her expression didn't change when she saw Reynie. "About time!" she whispered. "I was worried you'd fallen asleep again. Actually, I was just about to come and get you."
Reynie blushed when he thought of what Kate might have unwittingly walked in on had she done that, and was glad he had come out when he did. He was also glad that, in the dark of the hallway, the red of his face wouldn't show quite so much as it would in broad daylight.
"Come on!" Kate grabbed his arm and pulled him off down the hallway at a brisk pace, expertly avoiding stacks of books. Reynie tripped over his own feet but managed to regain his balance and made an honest attempt to keep up. Luckily, when she got to the stairs, Kate let go of his arm in favor of pulling out her penlight again. The small beam of light penetrated the darkness down into the maze (which Kate had memorized the way through). It was nighttime, and since Mr. Benedict was no longer holding tests the mechanisms that turned the lights on in the maze were disabled, so that it would be nearly impossible to find your way through, memorized or not. Reynie was glad for the penlight.
But they weren't going to the front door, like if they were simply going for an outing. Kate took a left where she should have taken a right and went right where forward would have been a better idea, taking them around to the side, to a hidden doorway that could be used to get out of the maze if the front door was compromised. Kate felt around, found the doorhandle (it was inside the door and concealed with a clever piece of rubber), and pulled. The door slid sideways, and a tiny bit of light that was left over from the moon poured in. Reynie shivered as freezing December wind cut in alongside.
Kate didn't seem fazed by the temperature, though Reynie was huddled and trying to keep warm, and continued sneaking outside. He followed. As soon as he was behind her, Kate shut the door and locked it (she knew how it reopened) and then began to edge her way along the side of the large house, making her way to the front. Reynie didn't attribute such measures of stealth as she did, but he did take care to keep out of sight until Kate should give the word, because the last thing he wanted was for a guard to catch them.
The partially-solidified snow crunched beneath Reynie's feet as he walked, though Kate wasn't making a sound. How did she do it? he wondered. She must've been at least five pounds heavier than him. Marveling at her footfalls, he attempted to mimic them by stepping slower and more lightly. This only succeeded in making the crunching sounds longer.
Kate made her way to the corner of the house and poked her head out, observing the front lawn. Reynie stood behind her, shivering and wondering how on earth she wasn't cold. Was Kate affected by weather? She should have been, but maybe it was in her nature not to notice—after all, Kate never complained about anything, she considered it weakness. She was such a strong person... Reynie wondered if she didn't feel more strongly than any of the others, and whether it was harder on her because she never let herself cry (not visibly, anyway). That would be a terrible existence: to forever be oblivious to your own emotions simply because you wanted to remain strong for the collective. He probably wasn't doing her justice, he suspected, but that was how it came across to him. He'd have to ask her about it sometime.
Having resolved to do that, he promptly forgot about it. After all, asking Kate about feelings and emotions was something you didn't do if you wanted to remain at ease with her. She was her father's daughter in that respect.
Reynie gave a humongous yawn. "There's nothing out here, Kate. Let's go inside; we're going to catch pneumon-"
"Reynie!" Kate hissed in reply. She beckoned with her hand. "Look."
Reynie stepped closer, a bit alarmed at the urgency in her tone. He peeked over her head and almost gasped (actually, he would have gasped if Kate hadn't been quicker and covered his mouth at that moment, putting a finger over her lips to signal "quiet!")
Mr. Bane was trotting around from the back of the house, directly towards them. Hopefully he hadn't seen them yet.
"Quick!" Reynie hissed, starting back for the secret entrance. "Do you know what'll happen to us if he catches us out here at this hour?"
Mr. Bane would surely report them the very same instant, and the adults would not be happy. They utterly trusted the guards. Reynie had figured out over the years that trust had to be earned—the hard way—and that the only people he could trust in his life were his best friends, the Perumals, the Benedicts, and the Washingtons. (And Milligan, of course, but Milligan generally went unsaid, seeing as how they lived past dinner every day).
Kate grabbed his wrist. "Don't go back in!" she pleaded. "We haven't investigated anything yet!"
As she said this, a voice in Reynie's mind that he tried to ignore asked quietly What was Mr. Bane doing behind the house? He was supposed to be guarding the front yard tonight. There was no time to debate, so he relented and let her drag him over to crouch behind the shrubbery around the border of the property.
Reynie adjusted a branch with an empty bird's nest on it to get a clearer view; a sparrow feather fluttered onto his shoulder. He watched the smallish man walk briskly over their footprints in the snow, not even troubling to look down at them because he was too busy tossing his radio up and down for entertainment.
That's a bit foolish, Reynie thought. What if it broke?
And sure enough, as if his thoughts had jinxed it, the radio suddenly went up a little too high, and then came down a little too low. It smashed on the ground and the batteries rolled in opposite directions.
There wasn't time for Reynie to notice Mr. Bane's strange lack of surprise or dismay at this, because just then, something warm and hard clapped over his mouth and yanked his head away from his lookout spot. It did not let go.
"Hello, ducky," hissed a nauseatingly familiar voice in his ear. "Did you miss us?"
He kicked out futilely at Crawlings, but the Ten Man laughed softly and pulled out something Reynie couldn't see. "Shouldn't you be snuggled up in bed right now?" Crawlings asked in a low voice. "Well, no worries. I've got another way of putting you to sl—"
Something white and red flailed out of the darkness and collided with the man's head. A split second later, Crawlings was on the ground, a cut bleeding on his bald head over the place where one of his eyebrows was missing, and Kate was standing over him, holding a horseshoe magnet and panting.
"Ten Men," Kate said, the hatred in her voice for the name she spoke as obvious as her bucket.
"But how...?" Reynie faltered, the surprise keeping him from phrasing words accurately. "The guards –"
"Bane was in charge of the front yard tonight," Kate whispered in clipped tones. "I told you there was something up!"
"Mrs. Plugg...?"
"My guess is that Bane took her out back there before he signaled the men."
"But what was the signal?"
"Probably him throwing up his radio and breaking it."
Reynie nodded, gulping. That would make sense.
"C'mon, we'd better get out of here. Where there's one Ten Man there's always –"
"Two," Reynie finished for her.
As if on cue, a number of other black shapes carrying cases that looked like something a businessman might have moved silently towards the house - not two, not three, but four. They wouldn't have been visible if they hadn't been made of denser stuff than the darkness around them, and were therefore just distinguishable from it. Nausea gripped Reynie as he realized that they had all emerged, without so much as a rustle of leaves, from the very ring of bushes that he and Kate were in now.
Two men made their silent way to the front door and pulling out cruel-looking metal objects; Reynie didn't know what they were, and he didn't think he wanted to. The others vanished around the sides of the house. "What are we going to do?" he asked in a small voice.
"Warn them," said Kate. "Are Sticky and Constance at a rendezvous point?"
Even in danger, Kate couldn't resist her secret agent terms. That small fact was a comfort to Reynie; that Kate could use such words made him feel like there was still hope, hope that they could get away. There's no reason we can't, Reynie told himself. We've got the element of surprise, and they lost it.
But there was a problem. "Rendezvous point? They're still asleep!"
Letting out a restrained exclamation of frustration ("You didn't wake them up?" accompanied by a minor expletive or two), Kate stood quickly and made her way back to the hidden door even faster. She had already unlocked it and was sliding it open by the time Reynie managed to catch up. He slipped inside and she pulled it shut. She then ran on.
"Wait! Aren't you going to lock it back?" he asked her, hurrying after.
"There's no time," Kate replied hurriedly, thrusting two objects into his hands. "Here, take my flashlight and my spyglass and go! Get as far away from here as you can."
Reynie, almost in hysterics, pushed the items away. "Are you crazy? I'm not just going to leave you here!"
"You've got to, Reynie – please! I've still got my penlight; I'll need stealth more than anything. I'm going to wake up the others and get them moving towards the cellar."
Before he could argue, she had dashed into the darkness, calling behind her as she went: "And remember, meet us at the Monk Building as soon as it's safe!"
She left Reynie and proceeded swiftly through the maze to the second-floor landing. She considered ringing the emergency bell, but thought better of it: What if the Ten Men heard the alarm and blocked their escape? Her only advantage was surprise—and it wouldn't be very smart to forfeit that.
She slipped through the door like a shadow, casting her penlight around in the darkness. Stepping silently over a pile of old books, Kate moved toward the nearest bedroom, where she knew Rhonda would probably be sound asleep. She had already passed the rooms where Reynie's and Sticky's families were sleeping, but she figured they were in the least danger, being within the maze. Milligan was there too; she'd wake him next, he'd save them—
Then there was the unmistakable sound of glass breaking. It had come from an office room, the door to which was standing open. Kate instantly retreated into a corner and turned off her light. A brawny Ten Man climbed through the window and entered the hallway, almost as quietly as Kate herself, mere feet from her. He clicked open his briefcase, took something out, and proceeded down the hall. Kate waited and then ran swiftly up another flight of stairs.
Why wasn't the alarm going off? she wondered. Had something gone wrong with the security system? She could now hear muffled thumps, below, above, and around her. They were in the house. Now it was a race.
There was nothing for Reynie to do but run. And run he did. He sprinted away from the property, into the thin woods that faced the suburbs, unable to shake his terrible fear for Kate. He knew she'd take the others to a secret tunnel situated beneath a trapdoor somewhere in the center of the maze. His stomach squirmed when he thought of Ama. She was so old, and so slow….Did she have a hope of making it?
If they did make it, which he told himself they must, they'd go through the secret passage and eventually come to another underground tunnel in the house across the street, which led to the Monk Building. They had used that second tunnel when they first came here for Mr. Benedict's tests, Reynie remembered—so long ago...
"Just where is here, anyway?" Kate asked. "Hey Milligan, where are we?"
Without looking back or slowing down, Milligan said, "Right now we're passing under Fifth Street."
It was when Reynie hadn't had much of an idea what he was getting into, that he would soon be involved in a struggle with Mr. Benedict's evil twin Curtain for control of peoples' minds, all over the world. They'd beaten Curtain the last two times in a row, but could they a third time? Reynie didn't know, and it wasn't a pleasant thought.
He made good time, though probably not half so fast as Kate would have, running in the opposite direction of the street, towards a wild thicket of brush and trees. He ran through them, trying not to make noise and failing. He tripped and stumbled, faceplanted in the snow and felt its burn on his bare skin. He picked himself up again, though, because he had to get away. But running got harder as a stitch formed in his side, making every step torture. He flinched at his own frantic footsteps and wished, not for the first time and certainly not the last, that he was as physically able as Kate.
Back in the house it became obvious that people were inside searching for something. There were shouts, angry shouts, the angry shouts of men who can't find what they're looking for. They were not easy, in any sense of the word, for Reynie to hear.
Having traveled about a hundred yards, Reynie decided it was safe to turn on the flashlight. A moment later, he very nearly suffered a heart attack. The Salamander was parked an inch in front of him.
It was empty, and utterly silent. The flashlight beam shone on the dark metal, the armor of the horrible machine that towered over Reynie like a deadly beast, asleep.
"Oh, no," he said to himself. "Oh no, oh no. Not good." Not good.
Reynie collected his wits and moved swiftly away from the great armored vehicle, covering the flashlight with his other hand. It took all his willpower not to sprint wildly again, which would have caused the flashlight beam to swing back and forth, attracting the attention of the Ten Men. When he felt his distance from everything was sufficient, he took out Kate's spyglass and squinted through it at the faraway house to see what the Ten Men were doing.
He couldn't see them in the darkness, not so far away, but he could hear them shouting to each other. They weren't bothering to keep quiet anymore; Reynie refused to think about what that could mean. They were getting angrier, Reynie could tell, and a few of them even seemed to be getting scared of something—what, he didn't know. There wasn't a sign of his friends anywhere.
Now they were slinking out of the house, gathering things up, taking things out of their cases and bags and getting supplies. Reynie was pleased, or as pleased as he could be in this situation, to note that they hadn't captured anyone after all – Kate must have gotten everybody out safely. Surely… He turned around and began to walk away. Taking the spyglass away from his eye and switching off his light, he trained his ears for the sounds of any Ten Men following him. He was distracted at once by a new light behind him...
He turned around, wanting dearly not to look but unable to stop himself. Raising the shaking spyglass back up to his eye, he watched the scene.
They were outside. Little lights were flickering now, like lightning bugs, but worse, because Reynie could see that they were flames, lighters for cigarettes and for birthday candles and anything else you could use a lighter for, and there were matches too, he could tell by the way they burned. And there was even something that looked like a flamethrower, though it was put away. The last man came out the front door pouring liquid behind him. Even at this distance, Reynie's nostrils were stabbed by the smell of gasoline.
The lights went in. Reynie couldn't see it anymore, but he knew what was happening now; he'd seen it plenty of times in illustrations and in books. The flames were beginning to go up around everything, their orange and yellow tongues feeding on the books that must have taken years to accumulate, the clothing that was all the Society had in the world, the spares for Kate's bucket, Constance's poems, Sticky's various accounts and drafts of their adventures, and Reynie's framed newspaper articles. Even Mr. Benedict's journal that he'd given to them before the Duskwort Incident, as it was called. The journal that was their instruction guide, that had led them to his hiding spot, across oceans and through continents, to Therbaakagen and finally to the island that always seemed to be Curtain's hiding place. They'd never know what Kate's lemon-juice scribblings said now.
Now he could see the flames as they rose, coming out of the windows and filling everything with an orange-red light, not yellow-orange like a campfire. The fire was devouring everything, and the men were leaving, they were laughing, because they'd gotten away with it, they'd done what they'd come to do, and how could they, how could they destroy Reynie's only home for as long as he could remember? Who were they that were so heartless?
He fell to his knees. The concept of his entire life going up in flames, everything that Reynie had held dear becoming nothing but a pile of ash, was terrible. It was impossible. It was inconceivable.
It was happening.
He began to sob and shake uncontrollably. Grief such as he had never felt before swelled in him. Everything seemed to be closing in on him, and yet it was like he was peering at it all from farther and farther away…. As he fell on the ground, smothered by shock, the last thought that ran through his mind was There goes another bed.
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