"I figured looking at that can wait till we’re out of here."
Madeleine sighed, and curled against Emily, working hard at not feeling guilty. Unless they’d gambled wrong about the length of the challenge, it looked as if she would have another chance to see Fisher.
How many chances had she stolen from other Sydney Blues?
Chapter Eighteen
The clunk-clack of the latch broke through the refrigerator’s steady hum.
Emily, quickest to react, flung quilts back in time to throw a force punch at the door as it opened. There was a gasp, and Madeleine caught a glimpse of Fisher as he was knocked backward by the impact against his shield.
"Someone not a morning person?" Min said, poking his head cautiously around the side of the doorway.
"What are you–?" Noi began, then stopped. "It’s over."
"The time limit seems to have been dawn," Fisher said, from his new horizontal position on the floor. "They were all gone by the time the sun touched the horizon, but I gave it another half hour."
"I’m sorry!" Emily struggled to her feet. "Did I hurt you?"
"My fault," Fisher said, sitting up. "It would have been sensible to knock first." He moved arms and legs gingerly, then smiled. "Not to mention polite."
"Let’s see if polite works on Nash and Pan," Min said, and rapped on the freezer door. "We should have thought up some kind of secret knock."
"That’d only be useful if none of us were taken," Noi said, and crossed to pull the freezer door open. Worried, Madeleine realised, as they probably should all be.
Nash and Pan did not force punch at the door, or shift on their mattress pile, though they did stir in response to Noi’s urgent shaking. Flushed and lethargic, they were slow to sit up, blinking with confusion.
"Let’s get them to the foyer," Fisher said. "Without an oxygen mask, all we can do is give them space."
Out in the soaring, glass-and-excessive water features foyer, Madeleine found herself analysing the changes to Nash and Pan’s skin tones, struggled with herself for a moment, then accepted. This was part of who she was, and she could only be relieved that the shift she was watching was a return to healthy shades of brown and pink.
"Were any Blues captured?" she asked Fisher, noting that he, too, was returning to a normal colour, though for different reasons. Would he have nightmares about Nash and Pan, a plan almost gone wrong?
"Yes." He met her eyes directly, not cushioning the statement. "From the leader board changes, just over thirty."
"Thirty!" Noi spilled some of the water she was offering Nash. "There were thirty Blues still free in Sydney?"
"In and around it. It was a good decision to let Madeleine warn her parents. At least five dragons were sighted in the Armidale area."
With a news channel unhelpfully broadcasting their location, speculating on whether she was hiding with them, Madeleine had insisted on emailing her Mum and Dad. Thankfully they must have taken her grandmother and gone in time. But thirty other people had paid the price for this hunt.
"So, what now?" Min asked.
"Errol Flynn marathon."
They all stared at Pan, propping himself against the legs of a low chair.
"One of the symptoms of CO2 poisoning is delusions, right?" Min picked up a brochure and used it to fan in Pan’s direction. "More oxygen required."
"If you’d read that brochure you’d know there’s suites with mini-theatres." Pan was working on a wall-to-wall grin. "Not to mention a gym, three swimming pools, spa baths in the suites, huge vats of ice cream, and a chocolatier. We just outsmarted our alien invaders, people! We’ve learned more about what they can’t do, we’ve kept our hides our own, we’ve lived to fight another day. Time to celebrate with some quality swashbuckling and strangely sped-up repartee."
Min wrinkled his nose. "Couldn’t we at least watch something released this century?"
"Without a password to the hotel computer system, chances are we won’t be watching anything at all," Noi said, her eyes giving away the smile she was trying to suppress.
"Some drip always writes their passwords down." Pan waved a hand airily at the glassy grandeur of the foyer. "There’s sure to be an administrative office with some actual paper files, or a post-it note stuck to the bottom of a drawer, or a computer left on when they all ran away in the dust."
"That would be on level two," Nash murmured. He was not recovering as quickly as Pan, but his finely-moulded features had lit with quiet amusement. "A two-day celebration, I think. Today for living, tomorrow a not-fully-surprising birthday, and then we will be serious again."
"Hey, you told them!" Pan only succeeded in looking gratified. "Do I get cake? Can we dress up?"
His enthusiasm bubbled over them, and though they decided partying would need to be postponed until they’d established escape routes, checked for ways to detect and avoid any alarms, and seen to preserving their food supply, it was hard not to enjoy the idea of a 6 star hotel as a hideout.
As they discussed what needed to be done, Madeleine spent her time watching Fisher, who was watching her in return. A silent shared awareness of a first step already taken, of something which had moved on to a question of when.
Later.
Two men fought, the music flaring into dramatic highlights as they danced across the deck of a ship under sail. Madeleine watched with vague interest, studying poses, but most of her attention captured by the warm fingers tangled with her own.
A strange dissonance cut through the music and Fisher’s hand tightened, then let her go. "Spire song."
"Stupid Moths." Pan fumbled for the controls and paused his movie mid swordfight so they could better hear the eerie sound, distant yet penetrating. "What are they up to now?"
"Sending the Greens back to whatever they were doing before the Challenge, I guess." Noi stood and stretched. "Let’s see if we can spot any movement, and finish the movie after dinner. Maybe it will have shut up by then."
After some debate about the wisdom of taking rooms close enough to the ground to be able to shield-jump out the windows, they’d given in to the view and settled into the most palatial suites, high on the Harbour side of the hotel. These not only offered tiny cinemas where a world of movies could be dialled on demand, they could be opened up into a single, enormous apartment by the unlocking of cleverly concealed sliding walls. One floor down from Open Sky, the top floor restaurant, they had plentiful food, carefully planned escape routes, and a number of rules about turning lights on and off at night. An added sense of security had been provided by the discovery of the keys to the fire escapes and elevators, giving them in effect a drawbridge to raise when they went to bed.
It was late afternoon, and sunset crept up while they pitched in to prepare their meal, so they chose a table to best take advantage of the spectacular vista. But despite a view which stretched from Darling Harbour across the sweep of the North Shore, and past the Bridge to glimpses of the Opera House, Madeleine found she didn’t like eating in the restaurant, where the array of empty tables only served to remind her of a city quietly rotting.
"Crimson skies and thunderclouds on the horizon." Noi stared out to toward the headlands, but there was no sign of the navy ships. "I could wish it had rained on them yesterday, but even then I have to think of their hosts, and whether they feel everything the Moths do."
"Yeah." Pan’s smile had faded. "It takes the fun out of planning to smash their faces in."
The pervasive song of the Spire filled every gap in the conversation, eerie and oppressive, but they pressed on, forcing bright chatter, watching the approaching storm as the colour faded from the sky.