Here's the next installment of our Metallum Nocturne story. If you need to catch up on any of the previous episodes, click here.
Episode Forty-Four
Exhaustion set in by the time she reached the train station. Claire barely made it through the doors before she collapsed on the bench, eyes closing like shutters. She awoke later, shoulder jammed in the corner with the sun almost horizontal. Her mouth tasted like ash as the memories of the trial and Umbra came filtering back. She found she was rumbling through the seventh ward on the way around to the tenth. Claire wondered how many times she'd circled the city asleep.
Her phone had dozens of frantic messages from Dawn and Elle. Claire shot them both an "all clear," letting them know what had happened when she got on the train and promised them answers on the next day after she'd had a chance to shower and properly sleep in her bed.
The closest station to Metallum Nocturne was three blocks away. She put her head down and hurried down the sidewalk with her backpack slung over her shoulder. A prickly feeling formed at the center of her back. She checked the street behind to see a beat-up sedan with tinted windows cruising silently like a shark. As she hurried her pace, the vehicle increased its speed. At the next corner, she spotted a second car with three guys obviously waiting by the way they kept covertly glancing her direction.
Claire kept up her casual demeanor until she passed an alleyway between two apartment buildings. She burst into the narrow space, running at top speed, not bothering to see if they were following. When she hit the other side, she saw the men chasing behind, but they were much further back than anticipated. Claire dodged traffic to make it across the street, sprinting up the sidewalk to come up to the back side of Metallum Nocturne. As she reached the double doors, she spotted the beat-up sedan pulling up to the edge of the property. Claire flipped them the finger before heading inside. She kept the door open a crack to confirm they weren't going to try and assault the Hall.
Once they pulled away, she headed to her room. After a long, steamy shower during which she examined herself for signs of the dark metal and found none, Claire climbed into bed. Sleep came like a hammer, but she startled awake a few times during the night when she felt the cold tip of a shadowy tendril pierce her brain.
Messages from Dawn and Elle were waiting for her in the morning. Rather than explain everything twice, Claire set up a meeting at a bowling alley on the edge of the eleventh. She picked the location because she was sure she could use the maintenance tunnels out of Metallum Nocturne to reach the western streets away from the watchful eyes of the Terrors, who clearly wanted to abduct her. They probably wanted to use her to get to Terrance.
The bowling alley was surprisingly busy for a Thursday morning. A league game had half the lanes filled with older women in tacky shirts laughing and chatting while drinking mimosas. Claire sometimes came to the bowling alley by herself when she wanted to unwind from schoolwork. She laced on her shoes and picked out a ball from the rack when Dawn entered.
"Bowling?" asked Dawn.
"I suck, but it's fun to knock down pins and forget about memorizing the melt modification temperatures of Tyrelle's enchantment sequences."
Dawn bugged out her eyes. "Good point. Do we have to bowl? Or are we talking about whatever the hell is going on with you right now."
"Grab your shoes. There's one more coming."
"My shoes?"
"Ask Danny, the attendant. I bought a year's worth of bowling at the start of school, so you're fine. It's on me."
Dawn looked skeptical. "I'm just supposed to put someone else's shoes on my feet."
"Dawn. Please. As a favor."
By the time she'd gotten her shoes, Elle showed up with a pink bowling bag, wearing long pants and a cute stylized bowling shirt.
"Elle. This is my friend Dawn. And this is Elle, the reporter from the Invictus Times."
Dawn held out her hand. "Thanks for helping Claire look halfway normal, not the monster the Blocks make her out to be."
"I'm doing my journalistic duty. Nothing more," said Elle with a smirk.
"You have your own ball?" asked Claire.
"I bowled league with my mom back in Irvine," said Elle, lifting the bag.
Dawn sniffed the holes of the bowling ball Claire had picked out for her.
"Once again, I just stick my digits in the same place other people have? How do I know if they were picking their nose, or butt?"
"They clean the balls quite thoroughly," said Claire.
Dawn sighed heavily. "You're going to explain what happened to you for three days, right?"
"Let's bowl a round first," said Claire, resetting the board and putting in their names.
For an hour while they threw bowling balls down the lane at the end, Claire forgot about all her problems. Elle was an ace, throwing strike after strike, and racking up a healthy score, while Dawn only threw two balls that made it to the pins and one that went into the lane next to theirs. Claire managed a score of 182, which was one of her better efforts. She relished the time spent with friends as multiple, unstoppable threats loomed on her horizon.
"Okay, that wasn't terrible. It's a good thing I work in a foundry and already don't have nails. That was sort of fun, even if I don't know what I'm doing," said Dawn brightly.
"There's nothing as satisfying as knocking down all the pins," said Claire. "Even if I only do it once or twice a game."
Elle had her hand in her small pink backpack. "Am I here as a reporter or a friend?"
"I'm gonna talk and I'll let you decide what to use," said Claire with a heavy sigh.
"That bad?"
"I trust you and I'm not even sure what's actually usable. It sounds crazy even in my head. They'd probably fire you for trying to print what happened."
For the next hour, Claire patiently explained what had happened in Umbra. The tale took longer than expected because her friends interrupted her to ask questions about things that had occurred which at the time were only minorly strange, but in hindsight seemed patently ridiculous, especially the tentacle people, which delighted Dawn, who was a fan of body horror movies.
"Why?" asked Dawn after a long pause at the end of the explanation. "Why does this Nocturna want you to kill Annette?"
"I think she believes I want that because she's in my head, even now. Quieter than before, but she's there, waiting. Nocturna is a powerful being who's been hiding out in her realm for an eternity and I think she's bored and curious. Everything in her realm is connected to her, so she might not think of 'killing' as a bad thing," said Claire, using air quotes.
Dawn screwed up her face as she recoiled. "Are you?"
"Of course not," said Claire. "I can't take another life to save my own."
"Are you sure about that?" asked Elle, deadpan.
"That was different."
"What was different?" asked Dawn, sitting up.
Claire closed her eyes. "There was a thing in the Undercity."
"A thing?"
Claire explained the trip with Elle, including the killing of her guide, Abe.
"It was self-defense," she said.
"I'm not saying it wasn't," said Elle. "But you killed someone to save me and yourself."
"It's different. Abe was threatening to kill me. Annette is a shit person, but she's not actively trying to murder me. Just ruin my life."
Elle tilted her head. "I'll give you that. And for the record, I would have never thought you could kill Annette, even to save your own skin."
"Thank you, Elle. I needed to hear that."
"So the dark metal just absorbed into your skin?" asked Dawn.
"I watched it happen."
"Are you still, like, bulletproof?" asked Dawn.
Claire shrugged. "I'm not inclined to test it right now."
"Okay, so you're not going to kill Annette," said Elle. "What are you going to do about the trial?"
"From a reporter's perspective, how does it look?" asked Claire hesitantly.
"Terrible. The judge is clearly favoring Annette and I didn't see a dry eye after she took the stand. If they make a decision based on emotions, you're screwed." Elle tapped her pen on her leg. "Oh, and I forgot to mention, I looked up that woman who threw the soda in your face out of curiosity."
"And?"
"It would be hard to prove, but I'm fairly sure that she works for Annette."
"What? Why would she do that?"
"Because your trial isn't about her daughter's death, but her campaign. She was polling in the single digits before Mara's death. She's practically the front-runner now."
"I know this sounds awful, but could Annette have done it?" asked Dawn, ducking her head between her shoulders.
"No," said Claire. "I don't think so. When she accosted me in the bathroom she seemed genuinely heartbroken. She might be a soulless politician but she's not that awful."
"I would agree, but that doesn't make your situation any easier," said Elle. "You need to find out who put your name on that paper."
"If we could get to the original," said Dawn.
Elle jabbed her pen towards the center of the city. "It's in evidence at the station."
"Could we break in?" asked Dawn.
Claire held her hands up. "Dawn. I love that you were willing to think of that for me, but no way am I putting you two in danger for me. Besides, we'd never be able to pull it off. Maybe if we had a few weeks to learn new spells, but I don't have a few weeks. The rescheduled trial date is tomorrow."
"Who was Mara friends with?" asked Elle, resting the pen on her lower lip.
"I have no idea," said Claire. "Other first-years?"
"Always start with the personal," said Elle. "It's not a simple thing to sign for someone to use the foundry, right?"
"Yeah. It's dangerous. You have to pass certain classes before you can even be allowed to work in there with supervision," said Claire.
"Then who would have been willing to do that without actually being there?"
Claire glanced to Dawn, who shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know how to find that out."
"It's a good thing you have a reporter for a friend. I'll do some digging around, but there's one other thing I think you can do, but it would look really bad if you were caught."
"What's that?"
"You need to break into her room and see if you can find anything that points to who might have signed the paper."
Dawn scratched the back of her neck. "Haven't her parents picked up her stuff yet?"
Elle smirked. "Not yet. I confirmed that this morning before I left my apartment by posing as the Blocks' assistant wanting to schedule the pickup. It sounds like they've tried twice before but campaign events have interfered."
"That's fucking brilliant, Elle! I could kiss you right now," said Claire with her head in her hands.
"Just remember. Don't get caught," said Elle. "If you do and it gets out, there's no way you don't lose the case."
