She would have rolled her nonexistent eyes if not for the sickening lurch somewhere in the region of her nonexistent stomach. Arxium, she thought just as she fell from the air and stumbled into a glass table displaying a small ballerina sculpture and a vase of fresh flowers. The vase wobbled, fell, and shattered. “Dammit,” Ridley hissed, gripping the arm of a couch as her head spun. Mayor Madson must have gifted his good friend Alastair Davenport some of his special ‘air freshener’ and now Ridley was suffering the consequences because her gas mask was sitting useless in her backpack instead of on her face.
She held her breath as the frightening sensation of her throat beginning to close threatened to overwhelm her. Her thoughts spun wildly. With the precious moments she had left before Aura Tower security arrived, should she get the gas mask out of her bag and put it on, or should she continue holding her breath and see if she could perform a conjuration without passing out?
Conjuration, she decided, lifting her hands. The quicker she got out of here the better. She clawed hastily at the air, pulling magic from it instead of using her own. As Malachi had discovered in the wastelands after they’d woken on the wrong side of the wall, arxium didn’t affect their ability to pull magic from the environment, probably because that magic didn’t come from within them. Normal conjurations were still possible.
Still holding her breath, Ridley let go of the couch and slid to the floor beside the broken glass and damp flowers. She began the conjuration. Dizziness made her hands swim oddly in front of her, but she managed to keep her fingers moving correctly. It was a precise and detailed dance through the magic that hung in front of her, a series of movements that required a level of concentration she could barely sustain. But then it was done, and she hadn’t passed out, and she was hurriedly pushing the magic at the floor as her lungs screamed louder and louder for air.
A crack appeared in the floor. The tiles folded swiftly down and back in on themselves—as did every other layer of material between this apartment and the one below it—creating a roughly square-shaped hole. With lungs threatening to explode, Ridley skidded forward on her butt and dropped into it.
She hit the floor feet first, then staggered sideways and landed clumsily, painfully, on her right side, narrowly missing the corner of a dining room table. She sucked in a great gasp of fresh air. Well, not fresh, but arxium-free, which felt like the same thing right now. She looked up, her chest heaving. The ceiling unfolded itself and melded back into place, and the last thing Ridley saw of the Aura Tower penthouse was Lilah’s shocked face peering down at her.
“Crap,” Ridley whispered. She had no time to breathe through her remaining nausea. No time to steady her spinning head. No time to decide on her next move. Lilah was probably racing to tell security which way she’d gone right at this moment. At the very least, though, Ridley had to stop and get the gas mask on. It was useless sitting in her backpack.
Sick and sweaty and dizzy, she fought with the zip until she managed to get it open and retrieve the mask. With shaking fingers, she pulled it on, fumbling with the straps until she managed to click them together at the back of her head. She took a breath, hoping she’d put the mask on correctly. She pulled the backpack onto her shoulders once more and began the conjuration again.
By the time she’d dropped down another two floors—terrifying two children in a playroom on one of them—she was feeling steady enough to use her own magic. She let it rise from her skin and managed to become air again. The weight of her backpack and the discomfort of the mask vanished instantly. She swooped away, beneath a door, past an elevator—which had just opened to allow two people out and another three in—through a gap to the stairs no one in their right mind ever used, and then plunging down the center of the stairwell all the way to the ground floor.
She aimed for the grand entrance and flew straight toward it. She wouldn’t have noticed the people she sped past if some quiet yet insistent voice-that-wasn’t-a-voice hadn’t seemed to say, Look now. Look now, look NOW! She whirled back around, the swirling air in her wake lifting the edge of a man’s coat as he strode past her with a slight limp. It was Mayor Madson.
Aside from the limp, Jude Madson appeared to have recovered from the injuries he’d sustained a few weeks before when Malachi hurled multiple fireballs at him. Without a second’s hesitation, Ridley followed him. Lilah wasn’t going to help, so she’d have to get a whole lot closer to the mayor to discover anything useful. Even if he didn’t personally know Archer’s whereabouts, there was a good chance that he would, at some point, meet up with or contact someone who did. If Ridley followed him for a few hours, she might discover enough to find Archer. Failing that, she could to turn to riskier methods.
She hovered nearby as the mayor signed in at the security desk—a process Ridley generally skipped, seeing as how she usually entered this building unseen—and then waited as the man behind the desk placed a call. He nodded politely at the mayor, whose grumpy expression didn’t change a fraction as he strode past the desk and through the retractable glass turnstile. Ridley flew over it.
She followed the mayor into an elevator, her nerves a little on edge once the doors closed and she was inside the small space alone with him. She missed which button he pressed, so she was surprised when the elevator began to move down instead of up. After several painfully slow moments of listening to the mayor’s heavy breathing, the elevator doors slid open again.
The mayor walked as briskly as his limp would allow, and Ridley followed at a distance of several paces. This was a part of Aura Tower she had never known existed: A maze of passages and office doors and something that might have been the security control room she’d imagined earlier.
She was trying to imagine who Mayor Madson could possibly be meeting down here when he stopped in front of a closed door with a keypad set into the wall beside it. He poked the numbers aggressively with one pudgy finger. Ridley heard a quiet click, then the mayor turned the handle and pushed the door open. He limped forward, stopped at the head of a large rectangular table, and gripped the back of the chair. The rooms’ occupants—some standing, some sitting—grew quiet. “Where is he?” the mayor growled.
Ridley’s insides lurched in hopeful anticipation. He couldn’t possibly be asking about Archer, could he? No way was life ever that easy.
A woman sitting a few seats away said, “Late. Something came up. But he said he’ll be here soon.”
Not Archer then. As the door began to swing closed, Ridley’s invisible heart beat out an agitated rhythm. She’d planned to follow the mayor inside, but instinct made her hesitate. If this was a meeting of the Shadow Society—and it was entirely possible, of course, that it wasn’t—then there would probably be some form of anti-elemental security. Arxium in the air, perhaps. She had a gas mask on, but would it work properly if it was invisible just like the rest of her? Probably, since the rest of her still seemed to work the same, and it wasn’t as though anything else she wore disappeared when she became air. And most of the elementals at the reserve had escaped wearing gas masks. Still, she hadn’t tested this one, and she wasn’t keen to do so in the midst of a possible Shadow Society meeting.
The door clicked shut, cutting off the mayor’s irritated response. Still in her air form, Ridley spun around, looking for a panel on the wall or ceiling that might lead to a ventilation duct. Bingo, she thought, spotting a metal grille above her. Surely the room the mayor had disappeared into would have a similar air vent she could spy through. There were no windows below ground, so there had to be some way to ventilate the rooms down here.