The Giant's Almanac by Andrew Zurcher (black female authors .txt) 📕

backed towards the door. No one moved to catch her. Payne tossed Fingal his boot, as if to say, Nice work. You let her go.

‘And the diamond signifies what?’ Payne asked. She glanced once, furtively, at the open box where it lay again on one of the jars.

‘I don’t know,’ Padge answered. He was standing near, and Fitz could see what he had been scraping on his leg. It was still there: a thick, black, sticky mess that must have been in the jar where he’d been hiding.

‘It’s the Jack,’ said Dina. ‘Don’t be useless, rabble. I need competition.’

Something pushed at Fitz’s memory, like a bulge beneath a heavy fabric. At first he couldn’t make it out. His mind felt as black and tacky as the sludge on Padge’s legs.

No. I know.

‘The Helix,’ he said, before he knew he was going to say it. ‘It sits on a diamond. The Jack showed me. It turns on a huge diamond.’ Only the day before, in the tall atrium at the centre of the Jackery, the Jack had shown Fitz how to turn the grand helical staircase that served his upper libraries. Rotating an ancient iron crank, he had laughed to see Fitz marvel as the huge machine slowly – by degrees infinitesimal – revolved the double strand of twining steps. And in the core of the machine, at the centre of it all, the gears had swivelled on the dull gleam of a perfectly spherical, giant diamond.

‘The Jack’s Blank Eye,’ said Dina. ‘It won’t be in its socket.’ She was almost at the stairs now, and put her hand out to the wall behind her. In the darkness, her head low, her eyes caverns, she looked dangerous. Leering at the other children, she suddenly shot her head forward on the stem of her neck, goggling with her eyes and lolling her tongue. The motion was deranged, sickening. ‘A little jack-in-the-box for you, my slow-witted friends,’ she said.

‘Dina, don’t –’ began Navy. ‘If Russ is missing, if he’s locked up, he might need us, and we all –’

But Dina had already darted round the corner, and disappeared silently up the stairs.

‘That girl,’ Padge said. He helped Fitz out of the netting.

‘You know, there’s something else,’ said Navy. She had removed the diamond, and was tracing her finger along the concavities of the box’s interior. ‘The setting – the way the wood is carved in the box – it’s a perfect negative image of the fountain in the Commissary, isn’t it?’ She handed the box to Dolly. ‘I mean, isn’t it?’

Dolly scrutinized it, holding the box against the lantern and tilting it back and forth. ‘Maybe,’ she said.

Not one of them stopped to take the lantern as they ran from the cellar. As he brought up the rear, Fitz thought he was probably the only one who needed it; the rest of them seemed to know every inch of every room, every tread of every stair, every corner, every post and porch, every archway, every pebble and blade of grass in the Heresy. As he ran, the burn beginning to open and spread in his chest, the lantern clanking at the end of his wrist, Fitz yearned to know the place as they did, to be one of them and not merely the boy at the back – the boy at the back, struggling to keep up, struggling to imitate their movements, their familiarity with one another, struggling to penetrate the hidden language of understanding, habit and expectation that hung about and passed between them as quick as lightning. From court to court they raced in single file, each in her or his place – Navy at the front, as the cleverest and boldest; Padge behind, as the most senior; Fingal next, as the eldest; then Dolly, the most athletic and resourceful; and last of all Payne, brittle and disaffected, but shrewd and suspicious. She would want to keep the others in sight at all times, thought Fitz. She wouldn’t trust them for a second.

Up ahead, something hard slammed into a piece of heavy oak. As Fitz approached with the lantern, he saw that the piece of heavy oak was a massive, solid door blocking the access to the Commissary, and the thing that had hit it was all of Navy. She was sprawled on the ground, her eyes squeezed shut, rubbing her left knee.

‘It’s locked,’ said Fingal, flatly.

‘We’ll go round the other way,’ said Padge.

‘That will be locked, too,’ said Navy through clenched teeth.

‘I need hardly point out that, while we’re stuck out here, Dina is certainly already inside,’ Payne offered. Standing aside, she took the lantern from Fitz and held it up to peer at a downpipe that connected, four storeys above, to the lead guttering of the Registry.

‘How –’ Fitz began.

‘She climbs the outsides of buildings,’ observed Payne. ‘It’s uncanny. Not even monkeys move as fast as Dina. She’s a real asset, when she’s on your side.’

‘Which is never,’ said Dolly.

‘Quite,’ finished Payne.

‘We’ll go in through the Registry,’ said Navy. Back on her feet, she had been testing her knee. Now she drew a huge key from her coat – iron, half a foot long, each of its teeth an ingot big enough to break a window – and held it out for all to see. ‘Don’t ask,’ she said, almost forestalling their astonishment. ‘I’m a sly one.’

The door to the Registry, heavy and solid, nonetheless opened easily. Navy had gone ahead while the others hid in the shadows, but as they darted through the court’s lamplight, and scurried through the door – like rats down an alley in daylight, thought Fitz – the Jack was nowhere to be seen. Inside, the Registry lay in almost complete darkness, save for the luminous mystery of the half moon, sitting atop the building’s glass dome, swirling down through the waters of its giant cylindrical tank. The curved crystal walls of the Registrar’s pool were not so thick, not so opaque, that the