Queen of Frost Read online

  So. That’s what she had to do. Get Felix and Eli away from the Envoys long enough for them to slip off to the copter.

  She just wished she could think of some way to do that.

  The queen stepped into Ember’s space, forcing her attention. She was still a strange and beautiful woman, even angry as she was, all pale skin and dark hair and blue edges. Atalanta as carved from ice. “You have an hour,” she said, low enough that the words almost got lost in the rumble of the machines.

  “I can’t fix your machines,” Ember tried once more, without any hope that it would be that simple but unable to resist. “There’s nothing wrong with them. The wall is melting!”

  The queen frowned, then turned toward her Envoys and nodded, a single commanding nod.

  The man holding Eli jammed his knife into Eli’s side.

  “No!” Ember yelped and took a step toward him, but the queen grabbed her shirt and yanked her back.

  “I’m not playing, devushka,” she said. “You have an hour.”

  Blood stained the fabric of Eli’s shirt. He tried to double over, but the Envoy’s grip on his arms, the twist of his hands, forced him to remain upright. Ember’s eyes burned with tears.

  She yanked herself free of the queen’s grip and turned toward the machines before the tears could fall in the queen’s view.

  I’m sorry, Eli, she thought, hard enough that she hoped he could at least sense it in the air around them. I’m going to get us out of here.

  Whatever it took, she was going to get them all free.

  The machines, monstrous as they were, were at least a soothing sight, well-made and sensible. She walked down them, watching pistons and belts until her sobs were under control, struggling to come up with something she could do, a plan.

  It took her only a few minutes of looking over the roomful of machines to realize that she had no chance of understanding them, much less of a chance of fixing them. Buried inside the guts of one of the smallest, Ember felt her eyes fill and her throat close.

  There was nothing she could do with these machines.

  But she had to do something.

  They had to get out of there.

  A few of the machines had switches attached to them that powered down the whole thing when flipped. Ember flipped a switch on one of them and crawled underneath it to escape the queen’s gaze.

  It was better under the machine — the coils of metal, the gears and belts, the cooling warmth of kinetic energy and friction, made sense to her. Even though she knew there was nothing wrong with the machines, even though she knew that, even if there had been, it would be well outside of her own abilities to fix it, just being surrounded by things that made sense to her, away from the prying eyes of the queen and the horrifying view of Eli bleeding and Felix panicking, protected by innumerable tons of metal, was soothing. It helped to focus her thoughts and allowed her to think.

  They had to get away from the Envoys. If they could do that, if there weren’t knives threatening to snatch away her friends’ lives, they would be okay. Ember could handle herself in a fight, Eli even wounded wouldn’t back down, Felix knew how to dodge tails, and they’d be evenly matched. Three against three — or two, really, because Ember doubted the queen would insert herself into a physical brawl.

  Those were decent odds.

  It was the knives that were the problem.

  Was there some way she could surprise the Envoys long enough for Felix and Eli to get out of range of their weapons? Something she could do to give her friends an advantage, even if momentary?

  Once again, she wished she could talk to them, even for a moment. Just a few words, a warning to be ready. Eli would understand. If Eli could get free, maybe together they could get Felix away safe.

  Ember touched the stilled machine above her. These were the only weapons she had. If there was some way to use the machines to distract the Envoys…

  It came to her then. It wasn’t a great plan, or even a good one, but it was the only thing she’d thought of yet. It wouldn’t work for more than a moment, and Felix and Eli wouldn’t have any warning, but they were smart, and Eli at least ought to know that Ember was trying to get them free. He’d be ready.

  She wiggled around in the guts of this machine. She didn’t understand electricity all that well, but she could see how delicate all the internal workings of the machines were, could trace the electrical wires back to their source.

  Ember squirmed her way out from underneath this machine and followed the wires back to a slightly smaller one that was running especially fast, producing the electricity that powered the one beside it. She allowed herself one quick glance toward the queen, who was watching her with pursed lips, then toward her friends, still hooded.

  She didn’t look at the blood smearing down Eli’s side.

  They’d have one chance, and the boys would have to be quick without any warning, but it was the best she could do.

  Ember made her way around the side of the electricity machine. Belts and gears whirred, pistons pumped. For a single moment, she let herself appreciate the properly working order of the whole thing. Then she closed her eyes tight against the light, hoping that would force her eyes to adjust to the darkness before it happened. With her fingertips, she groped around a bit of the metal plating, found a loose bolt, and, squinting open only one eye so as not to lose too much of that adjustment to darkness, dropped it into the gears.

  The gears ground to a halt, and the lights in the room flashed off.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Movement. Feet shuffling, voices yelling. Ember darted out from between the machines. The darkness was almost complete, the only light coming from the closed door into the hallway, where presumably a torch still flickered, and even prepared for it, she was momentarily blinded by it.

  No matter. She knew where the Envoys were standing, and even without being able to see too well, she could make out the motion from the shadows that suggested Eli and Felix had indeed noticed and taken advantage of their sudden distraction.

  She launched herself at the Envoy holding Eli, who was a step closer than the other. He stumbled backwards, unprepared for her attack, and she wrenched the knife out of his hands before he could regain his balance.

  “Eli,” she hissed.

  “Here,” he answered, his voice tight with pain.

  She pulled the hood off his head and sliced through the rope binding his hands. “Run!”

  He staggered forward, one hand at his wounded side, out of reach of the Envoy.

  She turned toward the other to find Felix already out of his bonds and yanking the hood off his own head. His Envoy was doubled over a step behind him, one hand over his face and the other wrapped around his middle.

  So. The Frost boy could put up a fight. In any other circumstance, Ember might have to take a moment to be impressed — as it was, now was not the time.

  Felix grabbed her arm. In the other hand, he held his own captor’s knife. Both of them took off after Eli.

  “They’re running!” the queen screeched. “Don’t let them get away!”

  They caught up to Eli, and even in the dark, Ember could see pain lacing every inch of him, from the sweat on his brow to the uncertain placement of his feet. She grabbed his arm and pulled it around her shoulders. He winced but leaned a little of his weight against her, allowing her to pull him along faster than he could run on his own.

  Footsteps pounded behind them. Only one set for now, probably the Envoy who’d had Eli, but she didn’t doubt that the other would join him soon. She glanced at Felix. “We need to lose the tail. Get to the copter.”

  Felix half-grinned. “Follow me.”

  He led them through the machines, weaving in and out between them like he did on the streets when they were dodging a tail. The lights hadn’t come back on — Ember wasn’t sure if they would, if she’d condemned all of Frost to the dim world of only natural light and fires.

  The thought pinged like regret inside her — sh
e shook it off before that could stop her feet.

  Felix took a sharp left, bringing them full around one of the machines so they were nearly back to where they’d started, but the Envoys were still chasing them, following their trail instead of trying to cut them off. Only the queen stood between them and the door out of the room, and stood she did, with her spine straight and her eyes flaming.

  “Felix, isn’t it?” the queen said, her voice low and soothing, her eyes fixed on him as the person mostly likely susceptible to her words. “You’re Dmitri’s son.”

  Felix froze, suddenly blocking their way almost as effectively as the queen was. He’d never been anything but profoundly worshipful of the queen, and now Ember could see the fear and confusion and uncertainty play across his face.

  The Envoys had stopped running after them and were now coming up slow and quiet like they hoped the queen would be sufficient distraction for them to jump them from behind.

  “What are you doing, Felix? It isn’t right for you to throw in your lot with these dangerous outworlders.” The queen held out a hand toward him. “I think you want to be home now. You would be if your Dusk friends would just cooperate.”

  The Envoys were closing in. Ember tightened her grip on the knife. She didn’t want to fight, and certainly not with a knife, but she would if she had to.

  But if the queen turned Felix on them, it would go from three against three to four against two, and one of those four would be her friend. The Frost boy she’d trusted, the one she liked in a way that was different even than the way she liked Eli.

  Perhaps, she even liked him in a way she could never like Eli.

  Could she put her hands on him, hurt him, even in a fight? She wasn’t sure.

  Felix tore his eyes off the queen, met Ember’s, and something in his expression changed, solidified. That switch Ember had seen toggled off and on before disappeared, and Ember understood.

  He was with her. He wasn’t a Frost boy, one of the queen’s people, anymore.

  And, if that expression wasn’t enough to prove it, a moment later, he whirled back to the queen and punched her in the nose.

  * * *

  Ember didn’t recognize this part of Frost, but Felix moved confidently through the darkened streets, so she followed him. Eli was growing heavier and heavier at her side, but he only nodded when she asked if he was okay, if he could keep going.

  They’d come out of the machine room into what, from the domed roofs and colorful, faded bricks, looked to be somewhere in the old city, though currently the cathedral wasn’t visible in the narrow, twisting streets. The lights on the street were all out, and the hum of a crowd was just audible over the pounding of their feet.

  “Felix,” Ember gasped after a couple of blocks. “I think we’ve lost them.”

  He slowed but didn’t look at her. His jaw was set, his eyes staring straight forward, as if looking around would reveal to him what he’d done.

  She wanted to reach out to him. Take his hand. Maybe pull him into her arms. Tell him that he’d done the right thing. That he wasn’t the queen’s property, not a doll, not one of her playthings. He had every right to choose who he sided with and let that choice be known in no uncertain terms.

  That he’d saved them. Striking the queen, making his choice so inarguably known, so uncontestably decided, wasn’t wrong.

  But Ember didn’t have a free hand to offer him — one was holding up Eli, the other was wrapped around a knife turning rusty with dried blood.

  Later, she promised herself. Once they were over the wall, out of the queen’s grip. Once Eli didn’t need her to lean on, she’d reach out to Felix and tell him every one of those things.

  For now, they needed to get to the copter.

  “Where are we?” she asked at last as their run slowed to a walk, their escape turned to seeking a destination.

  Felix looked around a little, though not at Ember or Eli, squinting through the dark at one unlit electric light. “The old city. The cathedral’s this way.”

  He started forward again, not running anymore to avoid attracting attention, but with a firmness and direction to his pace that suggested he knew exactly where they were and how to get to where they were going.

  Ember, unfamiliar with the old city beyond the path from the Queen’s Line to the cathedral, was happy enough to follow.

  “Hold on, Eli,” she whispered. “We’ll get to the copter, and then we’ll be free.”

  “I’m fine,” Eli gritted out, but his face was pale and his skin was clammy.

  Ember held him a little tighter and picked up their pace.

  They met a crowd after the third turn. Much like the people at the trolley accident, everyone looked confused and frightened, speaking over each other or sobbing softly to themselves. “Where’s the queen? Why has her magic failed?” they asked.

  Ember couldn’t see any dolls in the crowd — a first for an assortment of Frost citizens. Had they all gone mad like the trolley driver and the others she’d deactivated? Had they all slipped through the wall and out into the desert beyond?

  One woman noticed them first and shrieked above the sounds of the others. “Outworlders!”

  Ember froze. The word, usually a neutral one coming from a Frost citizen, was spoken like a slur — sharp and angry and afraid.

  The crowd turned toward them, pressed in with sudden and unusual aggression, the veneer of friendly disinterest gone. “You!” someone else yelled. “You’ve ruined our city!”

  “You’ve destroyed our queen!”

  “Nothing’s wrong with the queen,” Ember tried. “She’s fine. It’s the machine that broke!”

  But no one was listening to her. They pressed in, and the tone of their hums were growing from afraid to enraged.

  Ember had never actually been in a serious fight. She could hold her own against one opponent, and she had always kept a knife nearby if she was leaving her house because of the risk of being attacked in the streets, but once she’d gotten in a few good licks and pulled out a knife, every person who’d tried to attack her before had realized she wasn’t going to be the easy pickings they’d hoped for and left her alone without any need for her to put her knife anywhere serious.

  But people of Dusk didn’t trust each other enough to gang up on a single person, and everyone knew everyone else’s reputation. After a few broken noses, shallow knife cuts, and Eli’s insistence that Ember was his, Ember’s reputation was well-known enough that she didn’t get into many scraps, and for the most part, she was left alone.

  So looking at a crowd of people with murder in their panicking eyes was more than Ember knew what to do with.

  She readjusted her grip on her knife and tried to think through the descending panic. Arms, legs, sides were all places a knife could go and do enough damage to halt a person in their tracks without necessarily killing them.

  She’d never wished more for dolls. At least she knew how to handle dolls.

  Eli shifted, too, pulling away from Ember’s hold and straightening. His breath hitched, and pain was written in the tightness of his jaw, but Ember recognized the stubbornness in his face.

  Neither of them was going to go down without a fight. They were Dusk folk, after all — too stubborn to die.

  Felix stepped a little to one side, so he was standing directly in front of Ember and Eli, his arms spread in a stance as much protective as pleading. “Just let us go,” he said, and his voice was strangely level, the only hint of fear coming from the way his fingers had closed into fists. “We’re leaving, and we won’t bother you again.”

  “Traitor!”

  And with that declaration, the mob descended.

  Ember didn’t have time to be careful about where her knife hit — people came at her fast and furious, and she had to move equally fast. They were out to kill her and Eli and Felix. She couldn’t allow herself to be shy about trying to kill them back.

  She jammed the knife into whatever part she could reach of the man who
first came at her, his hands in fists and raised for a strike. It was his forearm as it came down at her face, and the knife took the brunt of his force. He howled in pain and rage and tore his arm away, the motion opening the wound up further and spraying Ember’s face and chest with blood. He staggered back a step, still screaming, and looked down at the wound.

  “Dirty bitch!”

  She was about to answer, to ask him to stop, leave her and her friends alone, when someone else struck her from the side.

  The pain of the blow was startling, a fist across her left cheek making her gasp for her next breath. She whirled around, jabbing blindly with her knife, and felt the metal meet skin once more.

  This time, it hit the person’s neck.

  The attacker, a woman, gagged, open-mouthed and unable to pull in air. Ember pulled away, horrified, her whole body going numb, the realization of what she’d just done catching up with her as the woman dropped to her knees, one hand at her sliced-open throat.

  She bumped against another person and started to turn on them, too, but it was Eli. He grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the dying woman, toward an open path out of the mob. “Run!” he hissed at her. “I’ll watch our backs.”

  She didn’t need to be told twice.

  She caught up to Felix in a couple of strides, where he’d already broken through the mob, and sprinted after him. Eli took up the rear, watching their backs as he’d promised, but the mob, for all its anger, didn’t seem especially interested in following. One person yelled that they were getting away, but maybe more people were as stunned by the woman dying in front of them as Ember was, or maybe they, like many men in Dusk, weren’t interested in anyone who fought back.

  It didn’t matter. Whatever the reason, Ember was just glad that the mob didn’t follow.

  They wove through the streets, blinded by darkness and panic, dodging around people whenever they could and shoving past them whenever they couldn’t. Mostly the people they met outside that initial mob were too caught up in their own fear to notice or care about the outworlders and the Frost boy running for their lives covered in their own or others’ blood, and Ember said a grateful prayer to Mother Atalanta for that, for the fact that they weren’t stopped again.