CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Gunner’s Last Laugh
The Gunner was up to his neck in water that was filling the hole he had dug in the gravel spit. Now that he had moved the skeleton of the girl from where it had been blocking the outflow at the base of the water tank, he was definitely feeling a small current moving past his ankles.
He held his breath and submerged himself. Sure enough, water was moving through a low arch that came up to just below his knees. He closed his hands on the flaking bars that blocked it. They moved. He stood up and hacked at them with his boots. He kicked and kicked at the ancient metalwork. As he did so, he thought of the Walker’s sneering face and imagined his boot was pounding into the center of it. It allowed him to rise above the exhaustion that was sucking at him just long enough to make a space he might have a chance to crawl through. He reached down again and confirmed that this was so.
He scrambled carefully to the top of his hole and gathered up the bundle of heart stones wrapped in his cape. He pulled out his matchbox and lit a final match. The skeleton of the young girl gleamed whitely back at him. He had arranged the scraps of her dress over her as decently as he could, and he had covered her face. He looked at the long hair and thought of Edie. He remembered how pale and shaky she had been when she was separated from her heart stone, how the life seemed to drain from her and be replaced by an enormous, all-pervasive fear. The match guttered out, and he thought how scared Edie would be if she were left in a dark place like this, without even her warning stone for comfort.
He paused for a moment to reach into the scrabble of sea-glass in the bundle and picked one at random. He reached for the skeleton and found a shred of dress by touch alone. He tore a piece off and wrapped the heart stone tightly inside it, so no light would blaze out if the Walker were to appear. He wrapped it in several layers, because the main point of all the digging he’d done was to make sure that if the Walker used his mirrors to come back here, the absence of warning lights might make it impossible for him to ever get out again. The Gunner reckoned if he couldn’t see into the mirrors, he might just be stuck here forever.
He reached into the skeleton and placed the tight parcel of cloth where he thought her small heart would once have beaten.
“Sleep easy, little ’un,” he said. “He can’t hurt you no more.”
He grasped the bundle and dropped back into the hole with a splash. Even though he knew he could move underwater without needing to breathe, he didn’t actually feel that he could. He knew this was because there was a gap between what he was—a bronze statue— and what he had been made to represent—a man. The man side that had been instilled by the maker would go through all the agonies of drowning, even though he, as a statue, wouldn’t die. Although, since he was sure it was nearly midnight, that was going to be something of a technicality, as he was about to die as a statue for entirely different reasons.
He was going to do it anyway, he decided, since the point was to get the heart stones that the Walker so clearly valued out of his clutches forever.
“He who laughs last, mate,” he said into the darkness. “He who laughs bloody last . . .”
He grasped his helmet in one hand, the bundle of heart stones in the other, and took a deep breath. He ducked below the surface and pushed himself into the narrow water duct.
He kept his eyes open, but he might as well have closed them. The jagged shards of bar he had kicked out from the crumbling stonework rasped against the gravel in the pipe. As he pushed himself deeper into the pipe, the gravel spill thinned out, and he was crawling over a water-smoothed layer of slime on top of something that gave way as he moved on it.
As he pushed forward, he felt the acid burn of oxygen starvation scorching up from his lungs and tightening across his throat and gullet. His eyes bulged and his mouth began to strain against itself, the automatic reflex to breathe fighting the willpower he was using not to do so.
His teeth ground together, and he pushed blindly on. He knew in the part of his brain that was not occupied by the horror of the searing lack of oxygen that he was crawling away to die like a rat in a hole, but the fact that he was hiding the Walker’s precious stash of glass gave the otherwise futile gesture a point. He held on to that thought as his willpower finally gave in to the inevitable, and he reflexively opened his mouth and breathed in water.
And as he did so, he squirmed around and made his screaming body face the unseen sky above the ground, so that he would not die facedown, but looking upward. After all, since this was the last choice he was going to make, he wanted to look toward a place where maybe a happier ending than the lonely death that would come for him at midnight was possible.