“Something wrong with my father?”
He shook his head. “No, that was him that called. It … one of the kids is gone.”
“Missing?” But she knew that wasn’t what he meant. “Lukas, what happened?” She stood and dusted off her chest and knees, headed toward the radio.
“They were on their way up to the farms. There was a crowd heading down. One of the kids went over the rails—”
“Fell?”
“Twenty levels,” Lukas said.
Juliette couldn’t believe this. She grabbed the radio and pressed a palm against the wall, suddenly dizzy. “Who was it?”
“He didn’t say.”
Before she squeezed the mic, she saw that the set had been left on channel 17 from the last time she’d called Jimmy. Her dad must’ve been using Walker’s new portable. “Dad? Do you read me?”
She waited. Lukas held out his canteen, but Juliette waved him away.
“Jules? Can I get back to you? Something else has just come up.”
Her father sounded shaken. There was a lot of static in the line. “I need to know what’s going on,” she told him.
“Hold on. Elise—”
Juliette covered her mouth.
“—we’ve lost Elise. Jimmy went looking for her. Baby, we had a problem coming up. There was a crowd heading down. An angry crowd. They knew who I had with me. And Marcus went over the rails. I’m sorry—”
Juliette felt Lukas’s hand on her shoulder. She wiped her eyes. “Is he—?”
“I haven’t made my way down yet to check. Rickson got hurt in the scuffle. I’m tending to him. Hannah and Miles and the baby are fine. We’re at Supply right now. Look, I really need to go. We can’t find Elise, and Jimmy took off after her. Someone said they saw her heading up. I don’t want you to do anything, but I thought you’d want to know about the boy.”
Her hand trembled as she squeezed the mic. “I’m coming down. You’re at Supply on one-ten?”
There was a long pause. She knew he was debating whether or not to argue with her about heading that way. The radio popped as he gave up without a fight.
“I’m at one-ten, yeah. I’m heading down to see about the boy. I’ll leave Rickson and the others here. I told Jimmy to bring Elise back here once he finds her.”
“Don’t leave them there,” Juliette said. She didn’t know whom they could trust, where they might be safe. “Take them with you. Dad, get them back to Mechanical. Get them home.” Juliette wiped her forehead. The entire thing was a mistake. Bringing them over was a mistake.
“Are you sure?” her father asked. “The crowd we ran into. I think they were heading that way.”
28
Elise was lost in the bizarre. She had heard someone call it that, and it was the right name for the place, a place of crowds beyond imagining, a land so wildly strange that its name barely did it justice.
How she found herself there was a bit bewildering. Her puppy had disappeared in a great confrontation of strangers – more people than she thought could exist at one time – and she had chased up the steps after it. One person after another had pointed helpfully upward. A woman in yellow said she saw a man with a dog heading toward the bizarre. Elise had gone up ten levels until she’d reached landing one-hundred.
There had been two men on the landing blowing smoke from their noses. They had said someone just passed through with a dog. They had waved her inside.
Level one-hundred in her home was a scary wasteland of narrow passages and empty rooms scattered with trash and debris and rats. Here it was all of that but full of people and animals and everyone shouting and singing. It was a place of bright colors and awful smells, of people breathing smoke in and out, smoke they held in their fingers and kept going with small sparks of fire. There were men who wore paint on their faces. A woman dressed all in red with a tail and horns who had waved Elise inside a tent, but Elise had turned and ran.
She ran from one fright to another until she was completely lost. There were knees everywhere to bump into. No longer looking for Puppy, now she just wanted out. She crawled beneath a busy counter and cried, but that got her nowhere. It did give her a terribly close view of a fat and hairless animal that made noises like Rickson snoring, though. This animal was led right by her with a rope around its neck. Elise dried her eyes and pulled her book out, looked through pictures until she could name it a pig. Naming things always helped. They weren’t nearly so scary after that.