- 2 -
"Hey, Road—or whatever your name is—can you hear me? I need your help!"
"Stupid Tyki, what did you do this time?"
"I'm… stuck."
There was no other word to accurately describe his humiliating state – Tyki Mikk was stuck upside-down in the Ark's library. The lower half of his body sank into the floor of the room above the library, and he couldn't feel anything up to his hips while the upper half protruded from an ornamental rotunda ceiling. Both of his hands were free, but no matter how hard he tried to concentrate, he couldn't pull his legs out, and his palms and fingers kept sinking through the fanciful mosaic into what felt like a bottomless quagmire. By the time Road found him, Tyki had stayed immobilized and bored out of his mind for about two hours, and his condition was not improving. He has counted three hundred and sixty-five black squares on the library floor, and he started counting book spines on the shelves out of sheer desperation.
To make matters worse, he was craving a cigarette.
"Stuck?" There was a giggle behind his back, and Road's amused face appeared upside-down before his eyes. "I see. Your Noah abilities got you in trouble."
"Did you really expect me to figure everything out by the end of the first week?"
Road playfully ran her fingers through his hair. "You shouldn't try to figure it out. Your previous experiences as a human cannot prepare you to be a Noah. What you should be doing is remembering." She pressed a finger to his temple. "Your mind and your body remember who you truly are. You are the Noah of Pleasure. Your touch bestows pleasure or brings pain and destruction, but you must choose to touch the object first."
"Choose to touch? Do you think I chose to be stuck in a library ceiling for two damn hours?"
"You think like a human, and humans are pathetic. So, listen closely. I will only teach you once." Road yanked at his hair. "Close your eyes, let go of your thoughts. Using your Noah abilities is like breathing or walking. You don't need to think about doing it all the time. Your body will do it for you. Imagine…"
Listening to Road's voice, Tyki closed his eyes and imagined that he was lying on his back in a pool of still, pellucid water. There was darkness all around him, swallowing time and sound. His body was weightless, his breathing shallow, and his heart was barely beating. He was drifting away into the nothingness on the edge of his mind, and though he couldn't see his body, he felt that his limbs began to pass through solid matter.
And then something stirred in the darkness—a quiver of a shadow darker than the night, a glimmer of a distant star on a piece of broken glass. Tyki wasn't alone in the darkness. He gasped in surprise and opened his eyes just in time to hear the swish of air in his ears and realize that he was plummeting downward.
Tyki landed on something large and warm and alive. On closer examination, it turned out to be a mountain of a man with muscly arms and a wide, clueless face framed in a mop of unruly black hair. When Tyki fell on him from the ceiling, his features became contorted with rage.
"You hurt Skinn. You will pay!" he shouted, struggling to push Tyki off him. Tyki dodged a hand that attempted to grab him by the collar of his shirt and jumped to a safe distance from the man with white eyes without pupils.
"Who's that creep?"
"No one important, just Skinn. He always gets lost when he's looking for candy." Road licked her lips. She was standing beside him on one leg with her arms folded behind her head. "He's a special kind of idiot."
"What did you just say?"
"Nothing, dear. I said that you hold a special place in the Earl's heart."
Skinn's face broke into a grin, and he unclenched his fists. "You think so?"
"Here, catch this." Road threw him a blue lollipop.
Tyki watched a grown man devour the candy like it was the last he'd ever get. "What's wrong with him?"
"The transformation left him a little… simple-minded. He's like a baby until he gets angry, and it doesn't take much to make him angry. It's a heavy burden to be one of God's chosen children," Road added with a wicked smile, "but for him, it's a tragedy."
They headed for the door.
"It gets pretty lonely here sometimes, since there are just the four of us on this huge ship. Well, five, if you count Lero," Road went on. "Shipwrecks are inhabited by ghosts."
"There's someone in this circus I haven't met?"
"Yes, I forgot to mention her. If you see a black cat sleeping in the Earl's favorite chair, don't chuck her out. That's Lulu Bell."
"Does the cat also talk?"
"Of course, she talks. She is a Noah with special powers of shapeshifting and the Earl's favorite pet." Road wiped tears of laughter from her eyes. "See, Tikie? We are going to have so much fun together."
For the next few days, the only dubious sort of fun for Tyki was preparing Road's homework and reading books in the library. Road left for the boarding school, and without her to intercede on Tyki's behalf, the Earl derived sadistic pleasure from forcing Tyki to memorize different types of Innocence and the powers they possessed. Studious activities under the watchful eye of a strict mentor never held any attraction for him, but the Earl, in a soft voice which foreshadowed a storm, explained to him that attendance was not optional.
"What's the difference between an Accommodator and an Exorcist?" The Earl's sinister face popped into view behind his shoulder.
"Well," Tyki replied with a sheepish smile, "they're kind of the same thing."
"Wrong! An Exorcist is at a much more advanced stage of synchronization with his Innocence. Do you have a death wish, boy?"
"Give me a break, Earl. Aren't you the one who's always saying how all-powerful we, the descendants of Noah, are compared to the rest of humanity?"
"Not a single war in the history of this world was won with the weapon of complacency."
Day after day, Tyki kept waking up only to discover that he wasn't trapped in a nightmare, and barring a miraculous awakening, the only remaining sensible course of action for him was to attempt another escape.
A persistent thought that he had to get off the Ark kept nagging Tyki from his waking moments till his head hit a comfortable pillow after a day of rigorous training or reading or running trivial errands for the Earl. He had to buy the Earl's favorite tea from a shop in China or help him prepare a magical ointment for his sore joints although it seemed to him implausible that the creator of golems and mechanical Akuma suffered from common ailments rather than from bouts of loneliness.
But getting off the Ark was not an easy feat because Tyki was a prisoner on the Ark, at least for the time being. The Earl made up an excuse that something went wrong during his awakening and his memories were so weak that he would be like a newborn walking into a world full of new dangers, but Tyki could have sworn that the Earl wanted to keep him close as his personal errand boy.
The Ark was labyrinthine: many doors opened into small rooms without exits or did not open at all; there were solid walls behind some doors or bottomless pits, and the rest of the doors never led to the same place twice. A city-garden hanging in the vast emptiness of an artificial sky, the Ark mocked and teased Tyki with its many bastions of mysteries that withstood the probing and prodding of cleverer minds than his. And yet, stranger than the seemingly nonsensical layout of the Ark and more breathtaking than the view from its tallest tower was a feeling of nostalgia that washed over Tyki whenever he paused to take a break from his tasks. It wasn't a memory—only an elusive feeling—that he walked these streets and gardens many times in the past.
The Earl struck the tabletop in front of Tyki with his umbrella. "Are you daydreaming again, my boy?"
"I wish you'd stop calling me that."
"It's not a good time to be distracted! What's the easiest way to kill an exorcist?"
"By destroying his anti-Akuma weapon that is made up of his Innocence."
Tyki's best bet was to bribe Skinn with delicious candy he would procure from the kitchens on the lower levels of the Ark. The Earl's mechanical Akuma servants lived and worked there, and Tyki quickly caught onto a neat perk of being a Noah: the Akuma were bound to follow his orders. If Tyki had to guess, there was a failsafe for an unlikely situation when an Akuma received contradictory orders from the Noah clan and from its creator, the Earl, but if he were careful, he could avoid putting his theory to the test.
"So, you were paying attention to my lessons. Without his Innocence, an exorcist is just a regular human."
Tyki nodded, biting back a clever remark.
The first part of his plan was the simplest. Tyki went to the kitchen and ordered an Akuma to prepare a plate of chocolate pastry. While the pastry was still warm, he headed to Skinn's rainbow room on the first level of the Ark.
"All of this is for me?" Skinn's eyes lit up at the sight of sweets, and he lunged forward to grab one of the pastries from the plate.
Tyki adroitly stepped to the side and hid the plate behind his back. "Not so fast, Skinn. I need you to do something for me first."
"What do you want?"
"I need to know where I can find an exit to London."
"Is that the place where Road goes to school?"
"Yes, I suppose."
Skinn managed a lopsided grin. "I get it now. You miss Road."
"What gave you that idea?" Tyki blurted out, appalled. Skinn wasn't merely an idiot; he was a dangerous kind of idiot.
"You don't need to worry because your secret is safe with me."
Tyki came to his senses. He wasted precious time arguing with a simple-minded and petulant child. It didn't matter what Skinn believed because soon he would escape the Ark and leave the Earl and the girl in purple stockings in the hazy nightmares of the past.
"You got me there. But don't get too excited, Skinn. If you mention this conversation to anyone, I'll rip your heart out of your chest with your ribs still intact." He shoved the plate of pastry into Skinn's hands. "Now, tell me where the exit is."
The second step in Tyki's plan required more elaborate scheming. Even if he managed to escape the Ark, an insurmountable obstacle prevented him from returning to his casual routine because the stigma on his forehead and the amber-colored eyes were a dead giveaway that he was a Noah. He might convince Momo and Clark that he got a suntan and some tattoos, but the Earl would find him with a blindfold on. He had no choice but to entrust his fate to a whim of chance. The Earl was a powerful sorcerer, and sorcerers were rumored to be slaves to predictable habits of hoarding magical trinkets. If Tyki could locate the Earl's stash of magical items, he might find something in it that could change his appearance.
Tyki couldn't ask Road because she would see through his lies, but fortune favored him at first and he managed to get the answer without her help. The Earl's stash was in the same place where Lero was created, and Lero was a neurotic little thing starved for attention. It took a couple of subtle observations about the hard work he did for the Earl, and Lero was prattling on and on about his master's study behind the secret room with the Piano.
"But," Lero added with an ominous twinkle in his eyes, "nobody besides the Earl and Road know where the Piano room is. And even if someone else knew where it was, he'd never open it without the Earl's key, lero."
Tyki's heart sank. He was on the verge of utter failure.
He found help where he least expected it: in the Earl's favorite cat, Lulu Bell. Lulu Bell was the solitary and enigmatic creature on the Ark. She was sometimes seen strolling about the Ark in her favorite ruse of a black cat with lush fur, green eyes, and a tiny bell around her neck. And like many cats, she was full of life and mischief; she stole balls of woolen thread from the Earl and other small items and played with them to her heart's content. Lulu Bell left these items all over the place—cats never returned their playthings after they grew bored of them.
The Earl called Tyki to his bedside one morning or evening—it was hard to tell the precise time on the Ark—and asked him whether he had seen his reading glasses.
Tyki made a helpless gesture. "Your cat probably took them and chewed them up."
"Then you wouldn't mind fetching them for me," the Earl said peevishly. "I have another pair here somewhere, but I forgot where I put it."
If Road told him that serving the Earl meant searching for his misplaced possessions, Tyki would have turned down the job on the spot and told her to hire a butler.
His newly discovered skills to control Akuma came in handy in fulfilling a what would otherwise be an onerous task, considering the sheer size of the Ark. Tyki ordered a dozen Akuma to turn the Ark upside down in search of the Earl's reading glasses while he shamelessly twiddled his thumbs for a few hours. An Akuma that looked like a jester interrupted his idle pastime.
"I found it! I found it! It was one of mistress Lulu Bell's playthings," it explained with glee as it handed him a pair of ordinary-looking spectacles. "I'm so glad to be of service to my master."
Tyki dismissed the Akuma and twirled the Earl's prized possession in his hands. The spectacles caught his attention because the glass surface appeared opaque on the outside. Wondering why the Earl sent him to look for such a useless thing, Tyki tried them on and caught his reflection in a nearby window. The opaqueness did not dull his vision, but it covered up the stigma and the vivid, sinister color of his eyes. Tyki refused to believe his luck until he slipped on the wondrous glasses in front of a mirror, and the mirror threw back an ordinary human face with thin stubble and disheveled hair.
If Tyki talked to Road before leaving, he would feel foolish for going through all this trouble to steal the Earl's reading glasses, which had no magical properties to speak of and few uses apart from concealing a memorable mole under Tyki's left eye. An awakened Noah could revert to his human appearance on a whim, and when Tyki put on the Earl's glasses, he called on his inner powers unthinkingly and with the same natural effort it took to draw a breath.
