by Sean Easley
I face the path ahead, noting the rises and falls, twists and turns in the road, like the body of an enormous snake wrapped in leafy wood-vines. In the distance I can almost make out where the path splits in two, one of the branches leading to another arch like the one behind me. There are more of them beyond.
Those arches all lead somewhere.
“What is this place?” I ask Queenie as she rubs against my leg.
• • •
That night I ask the Ledger that same question, and it gives me nothing but black scribbles.
13
You Won’t Like What You Find
Check it now!” I call.
Orban runs to the opposite side of the Shadedial Fountain to turn the pump on again. I wait to see whether we’ve managed to finally unclog whatever’s blocking the giant marble boughs from spraying water.
The tree-shaped courtyard fixture went dry two nights ago. Before that, the doors in the African Lobby all bound themselves to one another—people would go in one and come out to the same place. It’s all the latest in what everyone’s calling Nico’s Prank War, which seems to be escalating ever since I found that strange place behind the wall on the sixth floor.
What’s worse, I still have no idea what Nico wants, and Mr. Nagalla keeps showing up to watch each disaster unfold, scribbling notes and lingering like the smell in Chef Silva’s kitchen. At least the Vesima seems to be getting better, little by little. Every night less of the black stuff coats its branches.
I’ve been visiting the vine place too; I think of it as the Nightvine. I haven’t told anyone about it. I probably should, but I want to know more first. After all, I’m the one that the Hotel wants to be in charge.
Orban flips on the fountain pump, and there’s a guttural thump as something clonks its way through the pipes.
“That doesn’t sound good,” he says, raising a bushy eyebrow.
The stone branches sputter, spritzing a quick mist of water. Then the spray holes darken as sludge oozes from the openings. Globs of brown goop dribble from the marble branches into the fountain pool.
I rush over to turn the pump back off.
“I don’t think it’s supposed to do that,” Orban says. “We really should let Maintenance handle this.”
“No need,” I tell him. “I can tackle a little fountain mess.” The more people we involve in solving these issues, the more everyone will talk about how badly I’m failing to keep the Hotel under control. The Hotel has to like me. I’ll make it like me.
I tug on the lever to stop the sludge from flowing, but it doesn’t budge.
Orban chuckles. “My friend, you do not, in any way, ‘have’ this.”
Sev’s voice approaches from the other side. “What is happening here?”
“Just a touch,” I say, pulling harder. “I’ll have it fixed in a sec. It’s all”—tug—“under”—tug—“control.”
I give the lever one last yank, and the fountain’s branches sputter to life, muck exploding everywhere. One particularly impressive glob smacks me in the nose.
“Ack!” I shout, wiping it off before it has a chance to dribble into my mouth. “It’s in my eyes!”
The intermittent stream of sludge from the fountain tree is almost enough to drown out Sev and Orban’s laughter. Almost.
“I am sorry,” Sev chuckles as I clear the mess from my face, “but woo, you like to keep the Laundry Service busy.” He points at my suit, soaked in a spatter of whatever tarry mess Nico has poisoned the fountain with. Ruined, again. Perfect.
• • •
When I get back to my room to change, there’s another suit waiting for me—a replacement for the last one I sullied while rescuing a group of guests who’d been mysteriously transported to the middle of the Kerala wetlands in India. It’s a miracle that no one’s been eaten by a tiger, or a crocodile, or any of the other dangers roaming those swamps. And the elevators are still giving us trouble too.
As I’m buttoning my replacement jacket, for a split second I think I see Nico looking back at me from the mirror. Same pin-striped suit he used to have, Nico’s slick hair, blue flower in his lapel. But when I blink, he’s gone again. I want to believe it’s just my imagination, but part of me knows better. There’s no such thing as coincidence where Nico’s involved.
My attention falls to my nightstand drawer. I could use the sliver. See where it takes me. I could find him and make all this mess stop.
I open the drawer to have another look at it, but . . . Wait. What? No! Where is it? I rifle through the pens and notebooks, but there’s no sign of the sliver that Bee gave me. It couldn’t have just walked away. Then again, I still don’t fully understand how slivers work. Maybe after a while they return to wherever they’re bound. Coins want to return to the person they’re bound to; maybe slivers do too.
A knock comes at my bedroom door. “Hey,” Dad says, standing in the doorway.
I slam the drawer shut and turn to face him. “What’s up?”
“Just checking to see how you’re doing.” He glances at the tarred suit on my bed. “Is something . . . new going on?”
“I’m fine. It’s all good.”
Another thought hits me. What if Oma found the sliver, and Dad’s here to talk to me about it? If they’ve discovered that I’ve been hiding forbidden magics in the Hotel, this won’t be pretty. Dad’s already super sensitive about the Hotel’s safety after his big screw-up all those years ago. Would he report me? What if they find out about the Nightvine?
There’s a moment’s pause—me not looking at him, him not leaving—and I can feel every ounce of our uneasy relationship.
At last, he speaks. “I want to show you something.”
• • •
Guests love traveling the German doors to visit the Alpine mountains, or quaint fairy-tale towns, the castle at Neuschwanstein, even Berlin, where a massive wall was torn down ages ago. But Dad and I don’t go to any of those places. Instead he hails a cab to take us to a dingy little train yard in Frankfurt.
He’s totally about to break the news that Oma found the sliver. He’s brought me here to tell me that the Hotel doesn’t want me, and we’re going to have to go back to Texas, and . . .
“What are we doing here?” I ask, to stop my brain from running away with me.
“Remembering,” he says.
Red, blue, and orange freight cars sit in rows, stacked two and three cars high in places. We weave through the cargo containers toward a cluster of buildings on the far side of the yard. They’re apartments, I think. Only, . . . really, really small apartments. A few doors are propped open, revealing tiny rooms with bunk beds on two walls, littered with plastic bags, threadbare clothes, boxes of food. They remind me of the junk scattered across the Nightvine. There’s a bunch of people hanging around too—men, women, even some kids. Many of the men’s beards have grown long and bushy.
“Everyone forgets them,” Dad says, indicating the people nearby. “They always have.”
Everyone forgets. When Dad was returned to us, he’d been homeless for a long time too. These apartments . . . they must be for people in a similar situation. I can’t imagine how it would feel to be homeless.
He stops next to a picnic table against the back wall and stares out over the park behind the apartments with a distant, muddy expression. I follow his gaze, tracing the lake and woods.
“I lived here,” he says after a long moment. “At least, I think I did. I can’t really remember, but the Old Man found this.”
He hands me a picture. It’s him, sitting at this same picnic table with a bunch of other people. His eyes look tired and he’s dirty, like when he’s worked a full day in the Greenhouse, but he’s actually smiling.
He’s not telling me that I don’t belong in the Hotel. . . . He’s showing me why he doesn’t belong.
“This picture was taken while you were missing,” I say.
It’s unfair to say Dad abandoned us. He left to protect us. What happened during
all those missing years when he was serving Stripe is still a mystery, even to him.
He continues, speaking softly. “I hoped that by coming down here I’d see someone, or something, familiar. But . . .”
“Stripe said you were in Chicago. That’s thousands of miles away.”
“I’m sure Stripe used me in many places,” he says.
I swallow the lump in my throat. Used me. Like Stripe uses the docents. “Can you remember anything?”
Dad runs his hand down the painted white bricks of the shelter. “Not really. I’m not sure I want to. Stripe always leaves something behind.”
That thought sends a shudder through me. I was bound to Stripe too, if only for a few minutes. What if Stripe left something behind in me? That might explain why I’ve been so angry, or why I didn’t tell Agapios about the sliver and the Nightvine. Nico was bound to Stripe for most of his life; to think what that might do to him . . .
Dad studies me, then smiles and says, “You remind me so much of her.”
We continue walking around the shelter. Dad picks through the twigs and sticks on the ground as we go, examining each as though he’s looking for something.
“What was she like?” I ask as we draw near the lake.
He picks up his pace after finding a particularly ugly stick that looks long dead and partially rotten. “She was giving,” he says. “Forgiving. Your mother had a way of showing others who they could be, and not judging them for what they were.”
He pulls one of the Maid Service dusting gloves out of his pocket and slips it on.
I furrow my brow. “Where’d you get that?”
“I picked it up somewhere.”
That’s a lie. Striking gloves are issued only to the Maid Service. “You’re not supposed to have that.”
Dad slips a pin from his pin-sleeve and runs a gloved finger along its length, shaving off a layer of dust. I didn’t realize it was possible to shave binding dust from pins, too. It looks as if he’s done this before; his pin-tip has been sanded to a sharp point.
“Your mom and I used to do this thing,” he says, standing the large, dead branch upright in the ground with dust-sparkling fingers. “We’d come out to a park, just the two of us, take the deadest, ugliest stick we could find, and give it a little something . . . extra.” He releases the branch to stand on its own, like an ugly miniature tree. “Do you have her key?”
I hesitate, and in that moment I hate my hesitation. He’s just my dad, telling me a story about my mom, but sadly it’s more than that. After everything he’s done, I’m afraid to give him Mom’s key. What if what he says is right, and some of Stripe got left behind in him, and giving him the key is a bad idea?
“I’m not asking to take it,” he says, looking away. “Touch the key to the stick.”
I bite my lip, sorry for everything.
I lift Mom’s topscrew to the dead, rotten branch, and a glittering keyhole forms in the wood. A click and a turn, and all the warmth drains out of the key, leaving it icy cold in my hand. The stick shimmers with pearlescent light, and its branches grow to form leaves that bloom and rustle in the wind like on a real, miniature tree.
“It’s the shaping,” I say, marveling at the transformation.
“It’s not.” Dad reaches for the tree as it drives new, miniature roots deep into the earth. As he touches it, the image wavers, revealing the ugly stick beneath. “Shaping changes the nature of a thing—makes it want to be something different. This is another kind of magic.”
“An illusion.”
“Always more than one side to magic. Revealing, and concealing. The magics choose their own nature, you know. That can leave contradictions, quirks, in the way they work.” He draws his hand back, and the false tree returns. “People are like that too. They don’t naturally all fit into the same codes, so I guess it makes sense. Your mom and I followed different rules as well. At first she didn’t like the idea of using her topscrew to craft illusions like this, but once I got her to see the beauty it could add to the ugliness of reality, we started doing this all the time. This is how she hid the Greenhouse from everyone, and how she eventually revealed it to you. But now that she’s stuck in that rotten thing . . .”
I turn the key over, watching the sunlight shine off its surface. Revealing and concealing.
Then it hits me. The warmth I felt from Mom’s key right before I found the Nightvine—it revealed the hidden connection in the hallway. There’s no telling how long that passage had been there, hiding.
“Can the key reveal the memories you forgot?” I ask.
He frowns. “No. Your mother’s key has the power to reveal or conceal only what is already there. My memories . . . they’re gone. Lost altogether, I think. It takes a different kind of magic to find lost things.”
He fingers the illusion, causing it to shimmer and fade. He does that a lot. Lose himself in thought. I never can tell what he’s thinking about. Then he breaks the silence.
“You need to apologize to your sister.”
I turn to face the ducks floating on the lake. “I did apologize,” I say. “Kinda.”
“The apologies you’ve given her are false, like this tree. She deserves a real apology, one that doesn’t involve you trying to make yourself or your actions look like something you’re not. Let her see the rotten sticks underneath, not the illusion that you want everyone to see. Your mom wouldn’t have put up with that kind of fakeness. It stinks, just like the Vesima.”
“But the Vesima’s getting better.”
Dad frowns. He’s right, and I know it. I do need to fix things with Cass—really fix them and not skirt around the issue. I just don’t know how.
“I . . . I’m not good at this stuff either,” he says eventually. “All I can give you is sticks, Son. I don’t have a magic key to make everything look pretty, and I certainly don’t know what to tell you that’ll help make things right. But you have to do better. Don’t be like I was. Don’t let that rot spread.”
“I won’t,” I say, though I’m not sure how to do better. To be better.
I have to try, though.
14
On a Whim and a Dare
Queenie paws forward, her tail wiggling contentedly as we continue our exploration of the Nightvine.
I got a lot done on the gala preparations this morning—invitations confirmed in the Mail Room, Housekeeping has my list of decorations, and I even made corrections to Chef Silva’s dessert menu. I finally feel like I’m beginning to understand all the moving parts, even if I don’t have a solution for them yet. The Ledger of Ways still intimidates me with its magic and its scribbles, too, but I’ll get to figuring it out soon enough.
The wind picks up, pushing me down the vine path as Queenie winds through the junk littering the road ahead. We’ve spent the past week testing the arches, seeing where they lead. Like the Hotel, the Nightvine’s connections stretch all over the globe, but while the Hotel’s doors lead to grand vistas and popular tourist traps, the Nightvine’s lime-colored blossoms always take me to some quiet hideaway or less-trafficked location, like the shelter in Frankfurt. There are so many lost places and missing people. It’s enough to make me worry that I’ll end up lost one day too. And I wonder, is there more the Hotel could be doing to reach them all?
The cat trots ahead to a branch in the path, then up a rise in the road. She’s always waiting for me when I come here through the strange curtain-like veil that separates this place from the Hotel at the arch. She’s like my own personal guide to the Nightvine. There are other cats too, lounging amidst the piles of junk that people have lost over the years. The cats slip through the veils scattered throughout the Nightvine easily, as if this place belongs to them.
Queenie disappears into a cluster of bright buds at the corner of a nearby arch, as if ducking under a curtain. Something about this arch seems familiar. It’s different from the one that brought me from the Hotel—the wood is rougher, more weathered.
I kneel next to th
e yellow-tipped buds and find the place where the vines press under the stones. Wind whistles through the tiny hole, smelling like pine trees and mold.
I poke my finger under the veil and pull, and the stone curtain ripples, lifting to reveal the world beyond it. Sunny, blue sky welcomes me, partially obscured by tall evergreens. The air is warm and humid and thick, not at all like on the vine road.
The strange part is, I recognize this place. Oma brought us here. It’s Roanoke, where Dare’s Door was lost all those years ago—and none but Miss Dare were ever seen or heard from again.
Is the Nightvine road where they went? Could that be the secret that Admiral Dare has kept hidden for four hundred years?
I really should tell Agapios what I’ve found. Then again, maybe this is something the Hotel doesn’t want him to know. After all, it didn’t lead him to the Nightvine—only me.
• • •
“Do you know where Agapios is?” I ask as soon as I round the corner into Sana’s bay. The Motor Pool whirrs and buzzes with the sounds of the artificers working on their machines and statues.
Sana looks up from a stone statue of a strange, long-snouted mammal. She’s wearing her tool-sari—that unique coverall-sari combo with built-in tool belt that she made herself. “Good to see you too, Cam. Did you finally decide to drop in for training?”
“Sorry. No training today,” I tell her. “I’m late to meet with Admiral Dare, and Agapios is nowhere to be found.”
I’m sure a shaping seminar would teach me a lot, but I haven’t had enough time to attend any. Now that I know better what Mom’s key can do, I doubt I’ll even need to bother with the shaping, at least for a while. Two weeks have passed since I realized how useful Mom’s topscrew can be in keeping this place running. The key can fix lots of things—cracks in drywall and cat scratches on doors, malfunctioning elevator lights and creaking hinges and dirty water from faucets. Well, maybe “fix” isn’t quite the word. More like “hide.” And it only works for one problem at a time, so I’ll need to find a quicker way if I ever hope to keep up with Nico’s meddling. But the key should get us through the gala, at least.
