Ticker

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Authors: Lisa Mantchev
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voice to his worries. Inwardly, I agreed this would be a most inopportune time and place to suffer an attack and issued my Ticker a severe warning.
    Just in time, too, as I reached the third stair from the bottom and it gave way under my weight, unceremoniously dumping me into the lower corridor. Terrified that the least bit of noise would summon the Unseen, I did my best to muffle my squeak of alarm.
    “Are you all right?” Nic asked as he picked me up off the floor.
    I nodded, but I’d scraped the flesh on both palms, and pain radiated from both knees. My flashlight had rolled a few feet away; only when we recovered it did we notice that the lanterns along the next wall had been smashed. The Beetles in this corridor had beendeactivated as well. They littered the floor, some of them crushed by boot heels, leaving smears of copperslip oil on the stones. The one nearest my shoe struggled to rise on shaky legs. With a flick of his wings, he began walking in erratic circles.
    I carefully stepped over him and dimmed the flashlight to its lowest setting. The resultant darkness was an inky cloak, forcing us to make our way in a single-file procession, with each of us holding on to the person in front and behind. By the time we reached the end of the hallway, a hundred or more Beetles climbed the walls, scuttling with bent legs and broken antennae to their programmed stone quadrant. One ill-timed sneeze, and the Unseen would reappear.
    Luckily enough, the final gate I encountered was no longer fastened. The lock had been forced, the iron lattice roughly pushed to one side. I squeezed Nic’s hand, using the same series of dots and dashes that I would with the RiPA.
    THEY ARE HERE - PROCEED WITH CAUTION
    Nic relayed the message to Sebastian who, in turn, passed it to Violet. The catacombs were as still as a tomb, but if I’d been expecting cobwebs, a fetid stench, or a skeleton rattling his bones, I was disappointed. Invisible heating vents pumped clean air into the room, maintaining the appropriate temperature and humidity for preserving paper documentation. Set few and far between, ox-eye windows transmitted the meager aboveground light, transforming it into something curious and thin and green. Throughout the room, papers and ledgers filled bookcases, cabinets, and tables. The knowledge of generations surrounded us, seeping into the stones and brushing over our skin so that the hairs on the back of my neck prickled up.
    The dead were with us, even if their bones resided elsewhere.
    NIC AND I GO LEFT - V AND S GO RIGHT
    We separated, picking careful paths and sticking to the shadows. My eyes adjusted to the lack of light, but I still thought with longing of the Starshine goggles sitting on my desk at home. Of course, a MAG wouldn’t come amiss now either, especially when I recognized the outline of a man’s head just before me. I knew by the way that Nic tensed up that he’d seen him as well. Pixii charged, I crept up behind our quarry. With a leap, I discharged everything I had into his neck with a burst of light and the accompanying muffled pop!
    Except the Pixii wasn’t designed to work on marble, so the bust of Malachi Baynard, one of Industria’s founding scientists, wasn’t at all perturbed by such an attack. I had no chance to recover my wits before a scuffle broke out to our right. Someone shoved Violet aside, and multiple dark figures suddenly dipped and ducked between the stacks. We gave chase, though pursued and pursuers alike moved in near silence. Papers took to the air like geese leaving a mill pond and then fell with whispers. A shelf started to fall, and Nic rushed to stabilize it. A thick ledger toppled off a podium, but I caught it before it could hit the floor. When I turned around, Sebastian had one of the burglars cornered, the tip of his short sword pressed to the soft skin of his opponent’s throat. Violet sat upon the back of another, twisting his arms behind him until he whimpered. That left a

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