Gideon the Ninth

This left #1. (iii) relied on Harrow being so busy doing whatever she was doing that she’d forgotten to come back, though given previous reasoning and the sheer availability of buttons to be tampered with this was a nonstarter. (i) was contingent on either the world’s happiest accident or murder, and if it was murder, what if the murderer was, like, weird, which would make their subsequent marriage to Gideon pretty awkward? Maybe they could just swap friendship bracelets.

In the end, (ii) had the most traction. The paint supplies were all here. She had never seen Harrowhark Nonagesimus’s naked face. With a deep resentment of heart and weariness of soul, Gideon threw on her robe and embarked upon a long, disconsolate day of searching.

Harrow was not in the central atrium, or in the dining room, or in the increasingly clean pit full of industriously scrubbing skeletons. Magnus the Fifth was standing watch over them with a furrowed expression of good-natured bewilderment, right next to his trig and glossy-haired adept, and he managed an “Er—Ninth! Hope you’re enjoying the … room!” before she bolted out of it.

Harrow was not on the long and sun-swept docking bay, its concrete an eye-sizzling white in the sweltering light of morning. Gideon tracked all across it—standing next to the weathered magnetic locks, listening to the churning water far below where the shuttles rested somewhere. Harrow was not on the terrace where Dulcinea Septimus often read, and neither was Dulcinea Septimus, though a few novels sat abandoned beneath a chair. It was lunchtime by the time she had walked the whole eastern wing leading up from a glorious, rotten old staircase to the left of the atrium, terminating in a door with a freshly chiselled plaque marked EIGHTH HOUSE that she backed away from in record time. Gideon went back to the dining hall and brooded over her cheese and bread and decided to give up.

Leave Harrow to her two broken legs and shattered pelvis. Finding her was an impossibly futile task, in an impossibly large and complex area where you could search all day every day for weeks and not exhaust the floor. It was stupid and it made her feel stupid. And it was Nonagesimus’s own fault for being controlling and secretive about every aspect of her whole ghastly little life. She would not thank Gideon even if she had sat her flat ass in a puddle of molten lava, especially not as Gideon would religiously mark each anniversary of the day Harrow destroyed her butt with magma. She washed her hands of the entire scenario.

After she had choked down food and drunk half a jug of water in quick succession, Gideon gave up and resumed the search. She decided on a whim to go bang on the doors of the lift that didn’t work, and then found that the neighbouring water-swollen door could be opened if you applied force. This revealed a cramped staircase, which she followed down until she burst out into a corridor she’d only once explored. It was a broad, low-ceilinged shaft with *** CAUTION *** tape hollering from every door and surface, but there was one door at the end where people had obviously passed: the tape had snapped and fell in limp ribbons to both sides. The door led to another corridor that was cut off midway by a huge old tarpaulin, which someone had tacked to the rafters to serve as a half-hearted barrier. Gideon ducked under the tarpaulin, turned right, and opened a narrow iron door out to a terrace.

She’d been here once before. Fully half of this terrace had crumbled off into the sea. The first time Gideon had seen it, the whole looked so precarious she had consequently gone down with a fit of acrophobia and beat hasty retreat to somewhere less insane. The sky had seemed too wide; the horizon too open; the terrace too much like a total death trap. The landing dock loomed overhead, and so did the opaque, sweeping windows where the Ninth was housed. Looking up was fine. Looking down, still hundreds and hundreds of metres above the sea, made her want to lose her lunch.

Fuelled by the reminder that the only difference between the drillshaft of Drearburh and the broken terrace was that one was fenced and one wasn’t, she ventured up there again. The wind screamed her into the side of the tower. It was crumbled only at the far end, and the part closest to the trunk of Canaan House seemed intact. Stone windbreakers and dry-soiled, extinct gardens trailed off as far as the eye could see around to the other side, rugged with long stretches of empty planter bed and trellis. Gideon took this path. It was not at all clear—some of the big boxy stone structures had collapsed and the rubble never cleared, and there was really not enough structure still left to distract the eye from the bitten-off terrace that had fallen away to its death—but if you travelled around enough, there was a spiralling staircase of wrought iron and brick clasped to the tower’s bosom.