Chapter 106: The Curator's Bizarre Adventure
Two days earlier.
In a cave on the sea cliff.
The Curator was in leg irons and handcuffs, lying at the cave mouth, letting the ocean wind come in off the water. He had stopped fighting the restraints two days ago. The drop from the cave to the ground below was several hundred feet. There was nowhere to go.
Before the expedition, he had imagined what the island might hold. The things Jules Verne had described. Ancient ruins. Species that had no analog in any living taxonomy. Natural formations that predated the concept of geology.
What he had actually gotten was being arrested as a spy within six hours of arrival, assigned to plow fields with a wooden implement sized for someone a hundred times smaller, and housed in a cave where seabirds had strong opinions about the available surfaces.
The bread they gave him was the size of his palm. He got three of them per meal. He was, technically, not starving.
He was thinking about Rango.
Specifically, he was thinking that if Rango appeared in this cave right now, he would promote him to Security Director immediately. Full dental. Whatever the budget allowed. He would sort it out when they got back.
If Rango didn't come, the Curator was making peace with the likelihood that his professional legacy would be the xenomorph documentation he'd gotten on camera before the floor gave way, which was not how he'd imagined his career ending but was, objectively, significant.
The footsteps were light. Finger-sized light, the specific sound of someone who weighed almost nothing navigating stone.
He turned.
Not Rango.
Princess Mary. In the court dress she'd been wearing the three previous times she'd come to the cave, usually accompanied by General Edward, who used the visits as an opportunity to remind the Curator of his status in the Little People Country's social hierarchy.
The Curator had no warm feelings toward General Edward.
"You keep mentioning someone named Rango," Princess Mary said, studying him with genuine curiosity. "Who is he to you?"
"My most reliable employee," the Curator said. "And if you're here with Edward again, I want to tell you in advance that when Rango does arrive, I'm going to ask him to have a conversation with that man."
"I'm not here with Edward," she said.
She reached into the pocket of the court dress and produced a key. Small, finger-sized, but the right shape for the lock on the cage that contained the handcuff key.
"I'm here to help you escape," she said. "If you'll take me with you."
The Curator looked at the key.
At her.
"Why?" he said.
Princess Mary looked at the ocean through the cave mouth. The specific expression of someone who has made a decision they've been building toward for a long time and has arrived at the moment of saying it out loud.
"Edward's family has commanded the kingdom's military for three generations," she said. "The position is hereditary. The entire armed force of the Little People Country answers to him. My father has to negotiate with him carefully." She paused. "When I was ten years old, Edward went to my father and asked for the betrothal. From that day until now, I have not left the Royal Palace except as Edward's accessory."
The Curator had noticed the power structure when he'd first been brought before the King. A hereditary military command that outweighed the monarchy in practical terms was the specific political arrangement that produced exactly the situation she was describing.
"You want to leave," he said.
"I want to go where you live," she said. "I want to see what's out there." She met his eyes. "I've spent my entire life inside walls that weren't my choice. I'm done."
The Curator had spent forty years building a museum. He understood the specific feeling of someone who had been living in a space that belonged to their work rather than their life, and who had decided the arrangement needed to change.
He looked at the key.
"You're willing to give up everything to get out," he said. "What do I have to hesitate about."
He took the cage apart, retrieved the handcuff key, and unlocked the restraints methodically.
"The guards?" he said.
"Handled," she said. "Just walk out."
They did.
The guards on both sides of the cave entrance found reasons to look at the ocean while the Curator navigated the opening — too small for him, requiring the specific indignity of crawling on his stomach — and emerged into the sea cliff air.
He put Princess Mary in his palm and ran.
The cliff path ran along the edge of the island's elevated geography, the Dark Forest visible below them on one side, the ocean on the other.
Princess Mary was explaining the plan.
The Curator was listening to the plan.
The plan involved an abandoned wooden boat at the base of the cliff, left by a previous giant, which they would use to sail to another island for resupply and eventual rescue.
The Curator stopped walking.
"A wooden boat," he said.
"Yes," she said. "It's quite sturdy. I checked."
"We would be on open ocean," he said. "In a wooden boat. With no navigation equipment, no radio, no fresh water supply beyond what we could carry, no—"
"There are islands nearby," she said, with the specific confidence of someone whose geographic knowledge of the region was limited to what was visible from the Royal Palace's upper windows.
The Curator looked at her.
She looked back at him with the expression of someone who had committed to this plan and was not going to be talked out of it by practical considerations.
He was going to explain, carefully, that the correct approach was to find concealment, establish a signal pattern that Jones or Rango would recognize, and wait for extraction.
The bell rang.
From the distant city — a single bell, clear across the cliff air.
Princess Mary's expression went through five states in approximately two seconds.
"One bell," she said. "Foreign incursion."
Second bell.
"Enemy repelled." She exhaled.
Third bell.
"Victory celebration." She started to move. "Now. This is the moment — everyone's attention is on the celebration, we can—"
Fourth bell.
She stopped.
Her face went the specific pale of someone who has received information that overrides every other calculation they were running.
"The Royal Palace," she said. "Fire. My father is still inside."
The Curator looked at the smoke rising above the city. The specific column of it, the color and volume indicating something that had gotten past the point of easy containment.
He was quiet for a moment.
"The boat plan," he said.
"We can do it another—"
"Let's go put out the fire," he said.
She stared at him. "You want to escape."
"Very much," he said. "But I'm not willing to watch your father die in there and then have you carry that for the rest of your life." He looked at the city. "Let's go."
The Little People Country's fire response was technically impressive for its scale — organized bucket lines, coordinated evacuation, the specific disciplined response of a city that had protocols and followed them.
The problem was the ratio.
The fire at the Royal Palace was not a finger-sized fire. It was a building-sized fire, and the finger-sized bucket lines were moving finger-sized amounts of water against it, and the math did not work in their favor.
The King was on the roof.
The Curator had spent enough time in the kingdom to understand that a monarch standing on a burning roof shouting "Long live the Little People Country" at the crowd below was communicating something specific about the situation's trajectory.
He reached the Palace in the time it took the crowd to register that the giant they'd imprisoned was running toward the fire rather than away from the island.
He took off his shoe.
He used it as a bucket — the moat was beside the Palace, and a shoe held considerably more water than anything the Little People Country's fire brigade was working with — and poured it on the source.
Three times.
Four.
The fire went out.
The crowd was quiet in the specific way of crowds that have just watched something happen that they don't have a framework for yet.
The King, alive and unsinged on the roof, looked at the Curator with the expression of a man updating his assessment of a situation comprehensively.
He pardoned the Curator's crimes on the spot.
He began discussing a title of nobility.
Princess Mary climbed from the Curator's palm to his shoulder and kissed his cheek. The specific warmth of someone expressing genuine gratitude rather than performing it.
"Thank you," she said. "You're my hero."
The Curator was a man who had spent his professional life surrounded by history — by the accumulated record of extraordinary things that had happened to other people, preserved and displayed for public understanding. He had never been inside the extraordinary thing himself.
He was inside it now.
The two days that followed were the specific two days of someone who has accidentally become a figure of significance in a community that was not his own. The Little People Country's hospitality was comprehensive and the Curator accepted it with the grace of someone who had spent forty years managing donor relationships and knew how to be a good guest.
Princess Mary's company was the part he hadn't accounted for.
She asked questions about the outside world with the specific hunger of someone who had spent their whole life reading about things they'd never seen and had finally found someone who had seen them. He answered honestly, which meant he talked about the museum, about New York, about the collection and what it meant to spend a life in proximity to everything that had ever been discovered and brought back.
She listened the way people listened when they were building something from the information rather than just receiving it.
He didn't examine this too closely.
On the third evening, General Edward made his move.
A man whose family had held military command for three generations, who had watched his prisoner become a hero and his fiancée develop an obvious attachment to that hero, had reached the limit of what his particular character could absorb.
He took the King.
He sent soldiers for Princess Mary and the Curator.
And so there was the scene that was currently happening — the Curator running through a city built to knee-height, Princess Mary on his collar guiding him toward the exit, General Edward's soldiers behind them, and the Curator devoting a significant portion of his available cognitive resources to shouting at the sky.
"Rango!" he called, for the third time in as many minutes. "Come save me!"
The sky did not immediately answer.
The soldiers were getting closer.
Princess Mary pointed left.
The Curator went left.
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