Tricks for Free

by Seanan McGuire

  Also, they had taken away my magic, and as soon as I got it back, I was going to set all their arrogant asses on fire. No matter how much I’d wished the flames away when they were making my life difficult, they were still mine, and no one got to take them from me. Ever.

  The theme from Mooncake played in the elevator as we rode slowly through the length of the building, reduced to pastel blandness by whatever process is used to create ambient sound. I twitched, unable to calm my nerves. Emily didn’t help. She studied her fingernails, ignoring the rest of us, calm and unruffled and perfect in her iced lilac business attire. She didn’t look like she’d last five minutes in a fight. She didn’t need to. She was a routewitch, and she had her own tricks.

  Belatedly, it occurred to me that an elevator was its own form of transport, a box that moved like a ship on the sea. Could the cables pulling it along be considered a road, if I cocked my head and squinted? She’d already managed to twist her magic enough to use it as a weapon when it was never meant to be. Were we running along a road in the company of a routewitch?

  As if she could hear my thoughts, Emily glanced my way and smiled, stretching her fingers straight before lowering her hand. “When this is over, remember that you asked for it,” she said sweetly.

  The elevator dinged. The doors opened on the large, mirrored room where Colin had conducted my first lessons. Emily motioned toward the opening.

  “After you,” she said.

  Sam shoved her out of the elevator. She stumbled into the center of the room, stopped, and turned to blow us a kiss. That was all the warning we got. It wasn’t enough.

  The elevator doors slammed shut, and we fell.

  Twenty-one

  “Gravity doesn’t play favorites.”

  –Enid Healy

  Locked in an elevator, plummeting to our dooms, which was not exactly the plan

  MEGAN SCREAMED. FERN’S FEET left the ground as she bled off density—the standard sylph response to unexpected stress—and she promptly slammed against the elevator roof. Cylia backed into the corner, pressing her hands flat against the walls and bracing herself. It wasn’t hard to believe that if we hit the ground, she would be the only one of us to miraculously survive. Seeing all her friends die might even be enough bad luck to counterbalance her lack of injury.

  Sam grabbed my wrist with fingers that were once again too long to be human and dusted with a thin covering of fur. I looked up at him, and despite the grim situation we were in, it was almost comforting to see his transformed face. It’s amazing how quickly we can find a new normal.

  “Annie,” he said, voice tight. “What do we do?”

  We were still falling. Physics said we shouldn’t have still been falling. The Public Relations building was five stories from the outside, and the room where Colin had been doing my training had been at least fifteen stories up, and if either of those things were true for the elevator, we would already have hit the ground. Emily could be using routewitch magic to bend the distance the elevator traveled, giving us an extra amount of “down” and letting us gather more speed as we approached terminal velocity. The impact would hurt a lot more this way. But maybe it was a good thing. It gave us more than just farther to fall.

  It gave us time.

  “Boost me up,” I commanded.

  Sam didn’t hesitate. He let go of my wrist and grabbed my waist, hoisting me to the ceiling where Fern bobbed like a frightened blonde balloon. I flashed her a quick, razor-thin smile.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said, pulling two knives out of my shirt. “When I say ‘push,’ push.”

  Fern nodded mutely. The whites showed all the way around her irises, broadcasting her terror to anyone who cared to look. Megan was still screaming—and under it all, the faint, soothing theme from Mooncake continued to play. Right.

  This wasn’t the time for subtlety. Ramming the point of one knife into the lock on the hatch at the top of the elevator, I shoved the other under the edge, pulling it to the side until it nested against the latch that held the whole contraption in place. Most elevator access hatches aren’t designed to prevent people from breaking into them, since most people aren’t tall enough—or don’t have a convenient trapeze-artist boyfriend to offer a boost. I slammed the heel of my hand against the wedged knife, and was rewarded with a popping sound. Grabbing the other knife more firmly, I twisted hard to the left. This time, the pop was louder, and accompanied by a snap.

  “Fern!” I yelled. “Push!”

  The sylph reached around me and shoved. When nothing happened—probably because she weighed virtually nothing, and thus had no leverage behind the motion—she took a breath, shoved again, and fell as she yanked all the density back into her bones.

  I heard her hit the floor with a crunching thump, like a bowling ball dropped on hardwood. I couldn’t look down to see whether she was hurt, or whether she had punched a hole straight through the bottom of the elevator. I was busy levering open the crack she’d created, using both my knives to pry the wood apart. Once the opening was large enough, the knives vanished back into my shirt and I gripped the edge of the hatch, pulling myself onto the top of the elevator.

  It would be difficult to overstate how much more terrifying everything became once I was crouching on top of a metal box, plummeting through a gray-walled chasm, with braided metal cables whipping lightning-fast right next to my face. For a split second, I missed the comfortably mirrored walls of the elevator itself, and the distant, familiar sound of music drained of all power and passion.

  The moment passed. Comfort isn’t worth it when it gets you dead. Poking my head back around the hatch, I held my arms out. “Start passing them up!” I yelled.

  Megan was first. She grabbed hold of the elevator roof until I was pulling Cylia up, and then moved to help me. The wind from our fall whipped her wig away, leaving her hissing, agitated snakes exposed. One of them snapped at my cheek, not quite making contact. I chose to focus on getting Cylia situated on the roof, then turned back to reach for Fern.

  Sam was hoisting her up without visible effort—she had bled off her density again, which was probably a good thing, given the way her left leg was dangling and the visible pain in her face. I grimaced, and swallowed the apology that threatened to rise up and distract us all from the situation at hand. We were still falling. We wouldn’t be falling for much longer. When there’s a fall, there’s always a stop at the end, and I wanted to avoid that if it was humanly possible.

  Cylia gathered Fern to her side, and Sam hoisted himself out of the elevator, joining the rest of us on the roof. He shot me a quizzical look. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t know, that I couldn’t know, that this sort of thing wasn’t what I did. I was supposed to be the useless youngest child, not some sort of messed-up action hero leading her personal A-Team through the gates of hell and into a crisis that didn’t validate parking.

  But this was where we were. This was what we had to do. I took a breath.

  “Grab Megan and Cylia and jump,” I said.

  It wasn’t a complicated plan. I could see Sam check it against our speed of descent, against the shaft around us, and find it flawed but feasible.

  “I love you,” he said, and grabbed Cylia and Megan, one with each hand, before leaping into the air.

  There was an elevator landing bay every ten feet, ledges jutting out into the shaft. I didn’t have time to wait and see whether he’d managed to grab one. I needed to trust him. I needed to trust me. I grabbed Fern by the waist. She barely weighed more than a sack of dried leaves, substantial but airy at the same time, her density all but gone. She slung her arms around my neck, holding on for dear life.

  I jumped.

  Sam had the kind of strength that my human legs could only dream of. He’d also been making his jump when we were almost ten feet higher in the elevator shaft. At her current weight, Fern wasn’t dragging me down, but
neither could she dump her density enough to become truly negative: she could float. She couldn’t fly. My feet left the elevator roof, we curved upward in something between an arc and a prayer, and we were going to fail. We were going to fall again, this time without the elevator to catch us, and while Fern might survive, I was going to die. I was going to be the first Price in generations to end where the mice couldn’t see, with no one to add my deeds to the family record.

  Fern clung to me. I closed my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  Something that felt like a rope—but wasn’t—wrapped around my waist and jerked me to a stop at the apex of my small, human leap. The shock of the stop caused me to let go of Fern, who drifted downward more than she fell, finally grabbing hold of my leg and hanging there while she patiently waited for me to recover.

  “Now I know how Gwen Stacy felt,” I muttered, and looked up.

  Sam was gripping the ledge of the nearest elevator bay with his hands, and holding Megan and Cylia with his remarkably prehensile feet, leaving his tail free to keep me from falling to my doom. He offered me a worried, toothy smile.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t date dead girls.”

  “Probably a good thing,” I said. “My grandmother was worried about my grandfather dating Mary for a while, and that caused problems for years.”

  “Was he?”

  “Hell, no. Mary doesn’t date the living.”

  Megan looked between us, eyes wide and a little frantic. “Uh, hello? Hanging in an elevator shaft? Shouldn’t you be getting us out of here?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  Sam shook his head.

  Megan opened her mouth to object again. There was a terrible crashing, tearing sound below us, accompanied by a billowing wave of dust and smoke and metal particles that slammed upward at a terrifying rate. Sam yanked me closer to the wall. I grabbed hold, tucking my head against my chest and squeezing my eyes tightly closed. Just in time: the worst of the wave flowed over us, ruffling my hair, striking my skin in a dozen places, little stinging specks that would have been so much worse if I hadn’t been prepared.

  Silence followed. When the wave had passed, I cracked an eye open, looking down. Nothing moved. Fern, still clinging to my leg, offered me a wan smile.

  “Is it over?” she asked.

  “That part is,” I said, and looked up. Sam was looking down at me, anxiously, his face showing signs of strain. “Fern, how bad is your leg?”

  “I don’t think it’s broken,” she said.

  “If we pass you up to the ledge, can you stand long enough to pry the doors open?”

  Fern hesitated before nodding. “I think so. But how are we going to get me up there?”

  I smiled. I hoped she would find the expression encouraging. I knew she probably wouldn’t. Oh, well. “I’m going to throw you.”

  Fern blinked slowly. The gloom in the elevator shaft was deep enough that I couldn’t see the fine details of her expression, but I knew her well enough to piece them together in my mind. I waited for her to finish working through the idea, and was rewarded with a smile.

  “Like a whip?” she asked.

  “Like a whip,” I said.

  Her smile turned into a grin.

  Thanks to a certain movie with Ellen Page and Drew Barrymore, the whip is probably the most famous roller derby move in the world, even though it’s relatively infrequent and often ineffective on the track. It looks cool, and that made it the perfect concept to frame a movie around (since “learn to fucking skate, you look like roadkill” is not a good title). Basically, the smallest, lightest skater available—usually the jammer, since she’s the one we need to speed up—joins hands with a line of her peers, who then use their momentum to “whip” her down the track, letting her get the sort of distance that would be otherwise impossible.

  I looked up at Sam. “I need you to swing me,” I said.

  “What?” squeaked Megan. “No!”

  “Are you doing a whip?” asked Cylia, who had been a derby girl longer than I had, and knew what this sort of setup looked like, even when it had become suddenly vertical.

  I nodded.

  “Cool,” said Cylia, as if she weren’t hanging from the foot of a therianthrope monkey in an elevator shaft. I decided I liked her more than I had realized.

  I reached down with both hands. Fern reached up with one, and our hands met, her fingers clasping tight around mine. She let go of my leg with her other hand, and we were two for two, a line dangling down into the dark.

  Sam began to swing his tail, haltingly, like it hurt him to do. It probably did. We were like Rapunzel’s prince climbing up her hair, only we were two women hanging from a monkey’s tail. There was a joke in there somewhere. I wasn’t in the mood to go looking for it just yet. We swung, and I whipped Fern higher and higher, until I ran out of reach and let her go, sending her soaring toward the others. Cylia grabbed for her—

  —and missed, the shorter blonde floating past unhindered. Megan made a panicked squeaking sound. Fern adjusted her density ever so slightly, and dropped back into Cylia’s hands. The loss of momentum and altitude would have been deadly for someone like me, whose mass was fixed. For Fern, it was barely a pause before Cylia was whipping her up again.

  This time, she flew straight and true, grabbing hold of the elevator ledge and hoisting herself up. She winced a little as she put pressure on her left foot, but it held her weight, and kept holding as that weight almost visibly increased, Fern settling deeper and deeper into her position. Once her density was high enough that she didn’t have to worry about being whipped away by the faint wind still blowing from below, Fern wedged her fingers into the crack between the doors designed to keep people from falling into the elevator shaft and began to shove.

  Strength is important. Strength can be the thing that turns the tide. But leverage is based as much on size as it is on strength, and Fern, for all that she was a dainty, delicate-looking little thing, was also a professional athlete, spending every minute she could strapped into her skates and going for the gold. If roller derby were played at the Olympic level, she would have been trying for the team. She would never have qualified—good as our little regional league was, there are other, better skaters out there—but she would have made it farther than most people expected. She was good. She was strong. And at the moment, she had the undeniable density of someone five times her size.

  Fern pushed, and bit by bit, the elevator bay doors responded. They had never been intended to keep people in, after all, only to keep people from falling to their deaths. The doors inched farther and farther open, until she was standing between them, her hands pressed flat against their respective edges, refusing to let them close.

  “Little help here?” she said.

  “On it,” said Sam, and pulled himself into a handstand with the sort of ease that I could only envy. Cylia and Megan, dangling from his feet, appeared to do a slow somersault above me. I was hanging from his tail, and simply found myself hoisted farther out of the hole. Enough farther that I could reach the lip of the ledge.

  Careful not to dislodge Sam’s tail from around my waist, I reached out and grabbed the ledge with both hands, getting a good grip before I angled my body downward. Sam glanced my way, saw what I was doing, and unwrapped his tail from around my waist with an expression of relieved gratitude. Gravity immediately kicked in, my lower body swinging down to slam against the wall in a half-controlled arc. I gritted my teeth, gripped the wall a little tighter, and waited for the impact to stop echoing in my bones. Then, deliberately, I began pulling myself up.

  Megan and Cylia were already on their feet by the time I climbed up to join them. Sam was leaning against one of the elevator bay doors, while Fern leaned against the other. He had his left foot in his hands, and was massaging out the kinks with broad, firm strokes.

  “Remind me not to do that again fo
r at least a year,” he said, grimacing. “I am going to be one big ache tomorrow.”

  “But we’ll have a tomorrow, and that’s what counts,” I said. “Everyone okay?”

  “That was better than zip lining,” said Cylia.

  “My hair threw up,” said Megan.

  I paused. Sadly, that did nothing to dispel the image her words had conjured. “Ew,” I said, finally. “Come on.” I started walking. The others, mercifully, followed, Fern limping.

  Outside the elevator shaft was a standard Lowry corporate hallway: more brightly colored than, say, an accounting firm, with framed cartoon posters on the walls instead of actuarial tables, but otherwise as featureless and emotionless as any other business in the world. I looked around, frowning.

  “I wish my cousin Sarah were here,” I muttered. “She’s our math guru.”

  “Meaning what?” said Cylia.

  “Meaning the building tends to get taller when the people on top want it to, and my on-the-fly math skills aren’t good enough to tell me how far we fell.” According to the plaque next to the elevator, we were on the fifth floor. That should have been the top. We’d fallen a hell of a lot farther than that.

  “Can we take the stairs?” asked Fern.

  “They could be a hundred floors high,” I said. Then I paused. “Wait. No, they can’t.”

  “Please pick one, this is making my head hurt,” said Megan.

  “Emily’s a routewitch. She’s the one doing their distance work. Distance is a constant. How far we fell is how far we have to climb, and we didn’t fall a hundred floors. We fell a long way, but not that long.” I looked at the elevator shaft.