Tricks for Free

by Seanan McGuire

  I stayed where I was for a good ten minutes, counting the seconds, listening as the sounds outside the wall moved from quick urgency to slow, methodical diligence. They weren’t trying to triage the wounded or rescue the trapped anymore: they were trying to evacuate the remaining guests before they began unearthing the dead. The actress who played Laura in the parades would probably be one of the first bodies removed, since she was only covered by a thin sheet of plastic. I couldn’t even figure out what part of the float it had been, before everything went to pieces.

  And Mary didn’t come back.

  When I couldn’t put it off any longer—not without risking a return appearance of Emily, or worse, the rest of the employees from my shift, who had all seen me running for the float—I turned and trudged toward the door that would take me into the tunnels. Once I was there, I could walk back to the locker room, change out of my uniform, and get my things. I needed to be out of here. I needed to go home.

  The tunnels were dim and smelled like boiled laundry. That was a constant. On hot days, they were actually cooler than the rest of Lowryland, thanks to that easy darkness. Someone could have told me there was an entire colony of bogeymen living peacefully under the Park, and I would have believed them. Given how I was feeling, I would probably have asked for directions. Tea with a quiet, accepting bogey community was about all I was feeling up for.

  People hurried past me, none of them stopping to ask how I was or why there was blood in my hair. I couldn’t blame them. They all looked about as shaken as I felt, and doubtless with far better reason—at least I’d been trained for this sort of thing. They were ordinary people, going about their ordinary business, and now here we were. Everything was falling apart.

  I didn’t realize I had turned away from my own locker room until I was standing in the doorway of a nearly-identical room, looking blankly at a group of women who were encircling one of their own. The one in the middle was sobbing like her heart was broken. Maybe it was. I took a step back.

  My heel hit hard against the concrete floor. Several of the women looked around. One was still wearing Princess Lizzie’s dress, although she had removed the wig, revealing a clean blonde crewcut. Another, in street clothes, raised a hand and pointed at me.

  “You,” she said. “You were corralling the kids after the parade crash. I saw you.”

  The other women started looking around, murmuring. I spotted Fern at the back of the group, and some of the tension left my spine. She was all right. She was here. I wasn’t alone anymore.

  The Princess Lizzie was looking at me expectantly, clinging to the hand of the woman who had pointed me out. I forced myself to nod, and said, “Yeah, that was me. I was working in the gift shop when . . . when whatever happened, happened. Please don’t ask what went wrong with the float. I don’t know. I just knew I had to do something.”

  “Andrea and Marissa,” said the princess. “Are they all right?”

  I looked at her blankly. She looked back, impatient, until she realized that I wasn’t being dense: I didn’t know who she meant.

  “They play Laura and Lizzie on the float,” she said. “Marissa borrowed my wig.” There was a wealth of concern in that sentence, making it clear that she wasn’t just asking after her misplaced possession: she was asking after her friends, the way I would have asked after Fern or Megan if I thought they’d been in the path of danger. The fact that she didn’t have the words to frame her question didn’t change the size of it, or its terrible weight.

  “Oh,” I breathed. The room held its breath. “I . . . Marissa plays Lizzie?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m pretty sure she has a broken arm, so they’re probably taking her to the hospital. She didn’t look like she had any other injuries. She was thrown clear when it went down.” Please don’t ask about Andrea. Please. Please don’t ask—

  “What about Andrea?” asked another princess.

  Dammit. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  The whole group stared at me for a frozen second before they began to wail and keen. It was an unearthly sound, too alien to have come from human throats. I took a step backward, suddenly afraid that they were going to blame me for the whole incident.

  “Come on.”

  Fern was at my elbow in eerie parody of Mary’s earlier appearance. She had managed to change out of her velvet gown while the other princesses were interrogating me, and had it stuffed into a garment bag over her arm. The makeup still smeared on her face was generic enough that no one who saw us would peg her immediately for a fleeing Princess Aspen.

  Her eyes were wide. She looked worried. I shared the sentiment.

  Not trusting my voice and not wanting to attract more attention from the grieving gaggle of actresses, I nodded and took another step back before I turned and fled, alongside Fern, into the relative safety of the tunnel system. Anyone we encountered here would be as focused on getting out of Lowryland as we were.

  Fern knew me well enough to see how upset I was, and didn’t say anything as we walked toward the locker room where my own clothes waited. I flexed my fingers reflexively, chasing away a heat that wasn’t there. It’s not that I enjoyed setting things unpredictably on fire. I didn’t. It was just that it was familiar, something I had grown accustomed to dealing with, and I missed it now that it was gone, the way I sometimes missed a really bad bruise after it had finally finished healing. Yes, a bruise is a bad thing to have. There’s still something soothing about poking it.

  When the door to my locker room came into view ahead of us, I stopped, turning to Fern. “This is the second time something awful has happened while I was right there.”

  “Yeah,” said Fern softly.

  “We need to talk.”

  She winced, and I knew I was on the right track. “Yeah,” she said again. “Okay.”

  I nodded, satisfied with that answer, and the two of us walked the rest of the way to the locker room, where all the other employees from my shift appeared to have already come and gone. The air smelled of sweat and hairspray, and while no one would be foolish enough to damage Lowry property—not if they wanted to keep their jobs—there was a distinct aura of “we grabbed and we ran” about the place, some indefinable quality to the slammed lockers and off-kilter benches that spoke of swift abandonment.

  Fern followed me to my locker, where I stripped out of my smoke-scented, bloodstained uniform. Each piece was like a weight being lifted off my shoulders, taking a slice of the accident away with it. The smell still lingered in my hair. A quick shampoo would deal with that, and I would smell like strawberries and artificial cotton candy instead of a disaster. I couldn’t wait.

  It wasn’t until I tugged my shirt on and reached for my jeans that Fern spoke. “Please don’t be mad at me,” she said.

  I gave her a sidelong look. “Did you do something I should be mad about?”

  “Yes,” she said. “No. I don’t know. But even if I did, please don’t be mad. You’re my best friend. I don’t want you to be mad at me.”

  I paused. There were tears in her eyes, heavy and threatening to fall. She looked small and scared and very young—almost as young as she had on the day I’d joined the Slasher Chicks, when she’d looked at me and seen one more human to stand between her and the rest of the world. I hadn’t seen her smile until the day when I’d asked, in my usual sledgehammer way, whether she knew what a sylph was. She’d been sticking to me like glue ever since, going where I went, doing what I did. Being my friend.

  “Are you the reason I’m in Florida?” I asked, keeping my tone light.

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “But you’re probably the reason I’m here.”

  I looked quickly around. Lowry always said they didn’t have cameras or listening devices in the locker rooms, and enough of us were trained to tattle that it made sense the way people who shoplifted or actually violated Lowry policy
always seemed to get caught the second they stepped backstage. But that didn’t prove the cameras weren’t there. They could easily be hidden behind the mirrors, or built into the walls. We weren’t safe.

  “Later,” I said.

  Fern nodded. “I already called for a ride.”

  “A ride?” I frowned. “Megan’s still on shift, isn’t she?”

  “I didn’t call Megan.” Fern looked at me earnestly. “Will you come? I can explain everything, if you’ll come.”

  We lived together. We worked together. Even so, it was surprising how often we were apart. Our shifts didn’t always coincide. Now that I was training with Colin, I was often out in the mornings, and even before that, there had been a lot of days when I’d get home and Fern would be off doing something else, something outside the house that didn’t involve me. I’d never asked, because I hadn’t wanted to pry.

  Maybe I should have pried.

  “I’ll come,” I said, and finished getting dressed in silence, running a brush through my hair to chase the worst of the smoky smell away before I stuffed my costume into my backpack for washing and turned to face Fern.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  She nodded, and stood, and led me out of Lowryland.

  The tunnels ran all the way back to the employee lot, and beneath it, keeping workers safe during tropical storms and hurricanes—as long as they didn’t flood, anyway. If the tunnels ever lost structural integrity, we could find ourselves with a whole new set of problems. Fern led the way, her hair pale enough to almost serve as a flag through the dim-lit underground space, and I followed, too weary and beat down to question what I was doing. She would lead me to safety, or she would lead me to my doom. Either way, I wouldn’t stop seeing the dead Princess Laura sprawled in the middle of the Lowryland street.

  Being a theme park princess doesn’t come with special powers. It doesn’t even come with special privileges, if Fern was anything to go by. They’re people in pretty dresses, trying to be a huggable face for a beloved childhood character, and no one cares that those dresses weren’t designed to be worn in the Florida heat, or that there are really ten people wearing that same costume over the course of the day, in parades, meet-and-greets, waiting backstage for the current title holder to go on break. The tiara isn’t magic. It still felt wrong for one of the princesses to die on duty, like a compact had been broken.

  Fern walked past the doors we usually used to exit for the tram stops or the train, until we were heading down a narrow stretch of tunnel that I’d never seen before. The ceiling was dismayingly low, and the walls smelled of rust. I paused, frowning, and looked back. Yup. The light was definitely dimmer here.

  “Fern . . .”

  “It’s okay. These are still official tunnels. They just don’t get used much since the tram went in. People used to have to walk all the way to the train whenever they wanted to go home. Can you imagine?”

  It felt like we were walking all the way to the train. “Yes,” I said flatly. Then I paused. “Wait. Didn’t they move the train station when they put the trams in?”

  “They did,” said Fern, and pushed open a narrow, unmarked door, revealing a slice of Florida sky. It was still light, but it wouldn’t be for much longer; the sun was riding low, casting everything in that shade of gold that hundreds of horror movies set in middle America have conditioned me to think of as the color of apocalypse.

  There was a car idling next to the sidewalk, the sort of hefty American muscle car that looked like it could drive through a wall and not really notice. It was painted avocado green, which had to be intended as ironic, since I refused to believe there had ever been a time when someone would find that attractive. Fern trotted toward it, leaving me with no choice but to follow if I wanted all of this to start making sense.

  The window rolled down as we approached, and a familiar face appeared in the opening. She looked a lot like Fern, but with the color balance adjusted until she seemed less like she had spent the last twenty years hiding in a basement from the terror of the sun. Her skin was slightly less pale, accented both by a spray of freckles across the nose and the sort of artful smoky eye that has no business existing outside of a music video. Her hair was dark blonde, and her smile was achingly sad, like she’d been waiting for this moment for a while.

  “Hi,” said Cylia. “You might as well get in.”

  I stared.

  * * *

  Here is a thing I have learned, after spending my life surrounded by ghosts and talking mice and the ever-present threat that some people my great-great-grandparents pissed off will show up and go all Montagues and Capulets on my ass: there is no such thing as a coincidence. Things that look coincidental are almost always tricks or traps, or some combination of the two. When Cylia told me to get in, I took a big step backward, wishing I had a weapon, wishing I hadn’t allowed Colin to extinguish the fire in my fingers, wishing I had anything that could help me out of this.

  “You’re here,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Cylia.

  “You’re in Florida.”

  “Yes,” said Cylia again, and looked at me with a mixture of fondness and frustration. “Do you really want to do this on the sidewalk?”

  I did not. Then again, I didn’t really want to do it anywhere. I wanted to return this entire day to the factory and get a replacement, one with less fire and screaming and unexpected death. “No,” I admitted sullenly.

  “Then get in the car, and we’ll do this at the warehouse.” Cylia Mackie, captain of the Wilsonville Rose Petals, shook her head. “I haven’t killed you up until now. Why would I start?”

  “There are so many reasons I can’t even list them all,” I muttered darkly, and got into the back. A car this old wouldn’t have child locks, and if I was going to bail while the car was in motion, I preferred to do it out the back, where I’d have more opportunity to roll away before she could swerve to hit me.

  Cylia sighed as Fern got into the front passenger seat. “Were you this suspicious of Fern?”

  “. . . no,” I admitted, after a lengthy pause.

  “Maybe you should’ve been. She’s from Portland, too, after all. Wasn’t it a big coincidence that she wound up here right about the same time you did?” Cylia hit the gas. The big muscle car rumbled to life, waking like the beast it was, and rolled down the street. “The air-conditioning doesn’t work, but you won’t be able to hear a damn thing we say if you roll down the windows. It’s your call.”

  “Right.” This was getting confusing. I didn’t like it. “Nice, uh. Nice car.”

  “Isn’t it? Bought it on Craigslist the day I hit town. Well, bought most of it. Poor thing didn’t run. It was missing an ultra-rare engine piece that hasn’t been manufactured since the dawn of the dinosaurs, and it was basically just sucking down garage space for this kid who’d inherited it from his grandfather. And wouldn’t you know it, some collector who didn’t know what he had put that same engine piece on eBay the very next day.” Cylia laughed, less amused than keeping up appearances. “Funny how the world works sometimes.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Funny.”

  Cylia Mackie. Roller derby captain. Personal assistant, of the sort who does all their work over the phone and via email, which meant that her job, at least, could come with her to Florida. And jink. Which meant she could be ally, threat, or both at the same time.

  The jink is a hominid cryptid of unknown evolutionary origin. We know they’re closely related to the mara, and that’s about where our cheat sheets run out. We know that my honorary uncle Al, in Vegas, is a jink, which is why my family’s scant available information is viewed as being incredibly detailed and complete by people who don’t have access to an actual jink. Like many of the more human-appearing cryptids, they’ve survived through secrecy, isolation, and luck. In the case of the jinks, that luck has been more active than it’s been for most. Because
jinks?

  Jinks manipulate luck.

  No one’s sure how they do it, and that includes the jinks themselves, who usually describe the process by shrugging, waving their hands, and asking pointed questions like “How do you breathe?” and “What is the process by which your body turns food into energy?” In short, it’s inborn and indescribable, and after my training with Colin, I had a lot more sympathy for that sort of thing. I couldn’t explain the exact mechanism by which I’d been setting things on fire, and now that I wasn’t doing it anymore, I couldn’t explain the exact thing that had caused me to stop.

  The trouble is, when I set something on fire, I wasn’t removing fire from somewhere else in the world. Fire was an infinitely expanding resource. The same can’t be said for luck. When a jink tweaks their own luck to be better, there’s always bad luck down the line. If that same jink tries to stave off the consequences of their own actions by stealing good luck from someone else, that person will get to enjoy all the karmic balancing of something they never did in the first place.

  Cylia met my eyes in the rearview mirror and said, with perfect calm, “I didn’t.”

  “Didn’t what?”

  Her laugh was low, throaty, and bitter. “Don’t, okay? I’ve been a jink my whole life, and I’ve been around humans my whole life, and I’ve seen the way people look at me when they think I’m getting something I don’t deserve. If your luck’s too good, everyone thinks you stole it. If your luck’s too bad, everyone thinks you earned it. So don’t. I didn’t steal your luck. I’m not the reason you’re here. But you’re the reason I’m here, so if you could stop looking at me like that, I’d really appreciate it.”

  I blinked, sinking back in my seat. “I wasn’t,” I said, and my voice sounded weak and unsure to my own ears, and I had no idea where we were going, but I knew it was going to be a long drive.

  It was clear Cylia knew Lakeland from the way she drove: not with the brash aggression of a tourist or the timidity of a newcomer, but with the calm, assertive speed of someone who’d memorized the location of the speed traps and dangerous intersections. Her great beast of a car cornered like a dream, which was impressive in and of itself, given how big the thing was. The fact that it was ugly couldn’t possibly have impacted its speed, but it felt like it should have, like anything this hideous should have crept along, not raced.