Page 91 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

So she typed, and every half-hour, just before she could finish each graph, a new one shucked down into the glass postbox. None of them were ever exactly the same. The white lines were sometimes jagged, sometimes almost straight. Towards mid-afternoon, one arrived with the lines all over the place, veering wildly right from the top of the graph and right into negative numbers at the bottom, and no sooner had she picked it up than thunder rolled around the sky and snow swirled down, so thick it hid the view of the town and the sea. She looked out at it for a little while to give herself a rest. The whip bruise over the back of her head was blooming a thick ache all around her skull now, even down to her eyebrows.

‘I told you not to stop,’ the desk said. ‘It’s a lock, girl. If you stop then it won’t be bloody locked anymore.’

Nakamura, it turned out, had an especially horrible kind of flu, and so Takiko kept on as the warden’s secretary. The time dragged and then melted in irregular chunks. She typed the coordinates from the graphs into the typewriter, and listened to the parts of whatever mechanism it was attached to turn and click inside the wall beside her. After a while, she made up maths games with the numbers. By the end of three days, she could multiply by twenty seven without straining.

There was never a chance to talk up into the tower room. Every night, the silent night-shift man came to take over, and every morning, he handed over to her just as silently. The warden said he’d hired a deaf man because deaf people couldn’t talk.

But on her fourth morning, there was a crane in the hearth when she came in. The young man, of course, wouldn’t have heard it fall, and the fire had burned right down. Horribly aware that the paper wings were smoking, she waved a cheery good morning to the young man, who smiled and bowed, and mimed how cold it was. She agreed. In the hearth, the crane shifted in the ashes.

Finally, he left.

She snatched the crane out. In handwriting that was even worse than before, it said are you still there?

It made her think of the whispering voice in the solitary confinement shed and she wanted to shriek. She was about to call up the chimney when the warden clattered in with a rush of cold air, stamping snow off his boots and frost off his coat. All she could do was light the fire to show that somebody was there. She flopped hopelessly back into her own chair.

The prison had a small shrine. It was a sorry affair, with a horrible little pottery statue of some kind of fishing god, and Takiko wasn’t religious. But at six that morning, before she had opened the office door to find that the warden had taken to sleeping at his desk, she rang the bell and put a cigarette in the offerings box, because she didn’t have any money left but what she would need to get home. She didn’t say the prayer aloud, in case someone heard. She said in her head, as clearly as she could: Let Mori still be alive.

Being locked up in a tower explained why he hadn’t known what she should look for when he told her to come. He had been remembering forward to a time when he was too isolated and too ill to know much of anything, except, maybe, that the place was Abashiri.

Furious with herself, she clanged the shrine bell again, hard. Probably the fish god would be offended, but that couldn’t be worse than being so generally stupid. She didn’t know now what she’d thought would happen, once Kuroda had Mori. Some gentlemanly confinement with the scientists at Aokigahara; academic questions, perhaps some threats to make him come out with something useful about the Russians, but really, just a stranger sort of da Vinci in a secret workshop.

Idiotic. Kuroda always went too far. She knew it; everyone knew it.

At her desk in the warden’s office, on her left, was a telegraph machine. She had noticed it before, but it had never moved and it made her jump when it bumped to life now. The warden swung around and waited by it to catch the tape. The machine clacked as the code transferred itself into writing. She could see where its keys were inside. The long steel tines they hinged on moved like piano strings. The warden’s expression clouded.

‘There’s been an avalanche,’ he said quietly. ‘They’re evacuating Kabato prison.’ He lifted his eyes. ‘They’re bringing them here.’

She frowned. ‘How many prisoners at Kabato, sir?’

‘Nearly a thousand.’

She looked down at the desk and wondered how she was going to get Mori out with double the number of prisoners and guards. It would be barely possible to move without bumping into someone.

She sat back slightly when she overheard her own thoughts. She hadn’t been aware of deciding to break Mori out. At some point in the last few frozen days, though, the resolution had solidified. If she could get into the Oracle, she wasn’t going to be able to leave him there.

The warden sighed. ‘With any luck, most of them will die on the way.’ He made a small sound and touched the side of his head.

Takiko looked up. ‘Sir, if all that’s coming – maybe you really ought to go home and have some rest? You won’t get any once they arrive.’

She couldn’t credit it at first when he said that she was right, and picked up his coat. As he trudged out, he said to stay until the night-shift man turned up again.

‘And don’t tell a soul about this machine or I’ll put you in the solitary confinement shed,’ he said, and left.

She looked at the patch of air where he had been. She didn’t think he was joking. It seemed to take a long time for his steps to fade away.

At last, though, Takiko stopped typing and went to the wall, where she tapped along the wainscoting. When she finally found it, the hollow place was right by the hearth, about a foot above her head. It was tiny; just a little panel the size of a plate that hinged outward. The panel exposed the wheel of a vault door. She had to shove hard to spin it open, and when it did, she understood why the rest of the wall had sounded so solid. It was solid. A whole section of it, bricks and all, swung just far enough inward for someone to slide through. Inside was a tiny staircase.

Because it was right next to the chimney flue, the steps were warm. She snatched up a lamp and eased the wainscoting door to behind her, but not shut. It had no inside handle. The lamp fluttered in the pitch black. As she climbed the stairs, the air took on the warm smell of dry wood. Something scuffled in the roof.

At the top of the stairs was a door that shone. It was fitted with a clockwork panel the size of a person, and eight different locks, built into mechanisms whose motion was dying down now. She waited for them to stop, then released them all one by one. They were heavy.

When the door opened, there was no daylight in the room beyond. There was an oil lamp, which made the golding of a perpetual evening, and a fireplace just beside her, lit, miserably, with only a few pieces of crumbling coal. What she could make out of the floor was bare. A ladder led up to a tiny loft space up in the tower rafters, where she could just see the coverlet of a neatly made bed.

‘Mori?’ she said quietly.

‘Who?’

The man had been sitting with his back to the hearth, in plain view but very still. He was reading a book, or he had been; now he was looking at her, full of surprised interest. He was old, with a neat beard and warmer clothes than the other prisoners, but he was still wearing red.