Rosie was about to lead the monsters into the soda fountain when Vita grabbed her arm. “Wait!” the older girl said. She pulled the crown of cornflowers off her head and was relieved to find that in here the flowers were as fresh and beautiful and real as they’d been when Rosie had given them to her. She pointed to the crown and told Rosie, “Remember when you made this for me? We rode the roller coaster, and the tilt-o-whirl, and drank hot cider, and it was one of the best days I’ve ever had. And remember the spinning stools in the soda fountain, and how we decided that they were kind of like a ride, too? And you made those switches—”
Vita was cut off by a cold, porcelain hand on her arm. With impressive strength, Fironella pulled her away from Rosie. “This is most inappropriate! We test our students individually, and you are interfering.”
Before the doll monster had pulled Vita too far away from Rosie, Vita tossed the cornflower crown to the little girl and she caught it. Rosie put the crown on and with her head held high, she led the monsters into her soda fountain.
For a few minutes the children waited on the cobblestones alone. Rafe stood as a veritable wall around Grover to protect him from any more stinging fairies. Vita looked over at Melina’s ghostly cat eyes. “Do you think she’ll be okay?”
“I don’t know,” Melina replied. “But you’d best look at the stars in the meantime. Remember what Wile said—the sky always stays the same.”
The girl took the caterpillar’s advice and focused upward on the brilliant stars above. She was still looking up when the sound of the sirens faded away and was replaced by neighing. She looked to her left down the street and found Verbena, Sage, and Basil leading a charge of winged horses headed straight for them. Each streetlight grew brighter as the horses passed by. At first Vita was nervous but she relaxed as soon as she could see Sage’s deep blue eyes—they were deep and calm as ever; a lot like Wile’s had been, once.
She felt inspired to look down at her burnt compass, and sure enough, its needle was spinning.
When she looked up Rosie had emerged from the soda fountain and hugged Verbena around her neck while Jasmine fluttered around the winged horse’s head.
Mazkin smiled down at Rosie. “That was definitely a Pass, Rosie. Well done.”
The flying horses took the group back to the Dream Chamber’s entrance and Vita watched as the flowers brightened into full color and the dark fairies lit up as bright as fireflies once again. She leaned into Sage’s soft mane, so glad Rosie had emerged from the soda fountain still looking like herself and not like a monster.
She looked again at Wile’s old compass but found it had stuck once again on the “S”.
In the hallway on the way to the Mess Hall, Vita made sure to stand beside Grover. She whispered in his ear the story of the day she’d come to Tardorian and the black knights had stormed the castle, how the Crusador had nearly bested Rafe in a sword fight but Grover had been able to make Rafe win simply by wishing for it.
“You made that happen, not me,” she finished once they’d returned to their line across the Mess Hall. She took the medal around her neck off and hung it around Grover’s.
Soon enough she could smell a blend of sickly sweet frosting and something rancid. “STOP INTERFERING!” Fironella yelled in Vita’s face. Next to her Grover shivered, but Vita didn’t. Fironella turned to Mazkin. “Can we disqualify her? Please? She’s broken the rules twice now!”
Mazkin scratched at his furry chin. “I seem to remember an old saying about rules. That they’re in the eye of the beholder? No, that’s probably not right. But it applies here. I say Vita’s done nothing wrong.”
The two headmonsters locked gazes for a moment, a wall of steely tension between them. Finally Fironella returned to the head table and took an angry bite of doughnut.
“Grover, you’re next,” Mazkin said. Grover handed the headmonster his map, and while Mazkin looked at it, Grover turned the medal over and over in his hands and a smile creeped across his face. “How extraordinary,” Mazkin murmured, turning the map this way and that.
Fironella sped over to look over his shoulder then pointed a porcelain finger at Vita. “It’s her! She’s helping him cheat somehow.”
“Nonsense,” Mazkin replied without taking his gaze from Grover. “This looks wonderful, my dear boy. You’re nearly there.”
Vita sneaked a peek when Mazkin handed the map back to Grover and saw the bespectacled boy had covered nearly his entire map. He would win the Crossing Cloak by the next integrity test for sure.
As the girl’s stomach began to knot into worry, she heard the twang of a guitar, a silky violin, and a piano melody that was both joyful and melancholy weave into some of the most beautiful music Vita had ever heard. The music filled her head with the image of a cool white beach, filled only with the sounds of the waves and music that seemed to rain down from the clouds.
Vita searched for Crane in the crowd of monsters, but Mazkin caught her eye first. “You’re our last one, dear.”
The girl rummaged in her satchel and pulled out her map. Without an ounce of nervousness she handed the map over.
Mazkin studied the map and his bushy brows rose nearly to the top of his forehead. “My goodness,” he murmured. “Fi, come here,” he said, for the first time without any animosity toward the doll monster.
“It can’t be…” Fironella said, looking over his shoulder.
Mazkin beamed down at Vita in true joy. “Vita, I’m proud to tell you that you have won our world-building contest.”
The crowd of monsters behind Mazkin and Fironella whooped for joy. Dotted-Line Jack tossed his newsboy cap in the air, Eerla clapped so hard her rolls jiggled, and Faylonique tossed bits of her flaking skin into the air like confetti. Rosie and Grover gathered Vita into a hug.
“I-I won?” Vita asked, shocked, after her friends withdrew. “But my world’s not even finished yet.”
“Oh yes it is,” Mazkin said. He handed her map back to her. “See for yourself.”
The girl studied her map and found there wasn’t a bit of white space to be found. At the southern border was a wide white sand beach, called Loretta’s Beach. She checked her good compass and it was a swirl of colors, and none of them were white or gray. The spot of gray was gone from her map as well.
“But I don’t remember doing this part,” she said, pointing to the top of her map.
“World-builders do some of their finest work while their minds are occupied with other things,” Mazkin said.
A smile as wide as Mazkin’s (though far less pointy) spread across Vita’s face. She turned to Melina and cuddled the apparitional caterpillar closer around her neck. “You hear that, Melina? You’re coming home with me! You’re going to be real!”
“Not so fast,” Fironella said. “Your model may have won, but you’ve still got to build it. And you’ve got to go down to Drozlin Proper to do it.” She gave a little laugh. “Let’s just see how pretty your world looks down there.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
RASPER FOREST
Vita wasn’t sure which she preferred—being covered in live bugs or dead ones. It didn’t really matter, she supposed, since her arms and legs were blanketed in an oozing, crawling combination of both. She swatted at another roach that crawled out of the rock wall beside her, but it wriggled its way into her hair.
She took another step down the stairs and hoped she would reach Drozlin soon.
Hours or days or months earlier (it was quite hard to say), Fironella and Mazkin had led Vita and the other children straight from the Mess Hall to the headmonsters’ office, which soon overflowed with monsters all the way into the boys’ hall. Fironella had opened the Drozlin door that stood between her and Mazkin’s desks, glanced back at Vita, and said, “Winners first.”
So now Vita led with the younger children close behind her, followed by a gaggle of monsters. The stairs were uneven and cut too steeply, and there was nothing but misty, foggy air for her to grab onto. That left her cl
inging to the roach-and-spider-infested rock wall the whole way down. Every so often one of the monsters made a wrong step behind them and nearly sent the front half of the procession tumbling down the rail-less stairs.
Vita had tried calling “How much farther?” up to the monsters above, but they either couldn’t hear her over the howling wind, or didn’t care to provide an answer.
She was grateful for Melina around her neck, who continuously whispered to Vita that she should stop a moment, take a deep breath, then keep going. She was grateful as well for Rosie and Grover behind her, who grabbed at her hands when she seemed the least bit unsteady.
After what felt like an eternity, Vita stepped down onto Drozlin’s dirt floor. She thought she had been cold before in her shorts and short-sleeved collared shirt, but now she felt frozen to the bone. She was in a wide field full of dry, cracked dirt and dying grass. In the field she found her army of bird friends waiting for her with four barrels of Base strapped to their backs each. In Drozlin the birds had become gray jays—their wings looked like scaly blades and their black eyes lost their intelligent shine. Harper looked more or less the same since he’d always been gray but he towered even taller than before and had long, sharp claws. Spiral’s rainbow scales had turned to dull stripes and he wheeled slowly through the groups of cluttered gray jays in a confused, erratic pattern.
Melina felt much heavier around Vita’s shoulders and the girl gasped when she glanced at the caterpillar. Instead of peach with lavender patches, Melina was dishwater gray with ink black patches. Her teeth had sharpened and her canines elongated like a saber-toothed cat’s, and her long lashes now seemed spiky as opposed to soft. Her yellow-green eyes remained the same, though their brightness gave Vita a chilly shock in this gray, colorless world.
“Melina … you look all wrong,” the girl whispered. “They all do.”
Melina cuddled closer around Vita and licked her cheek with her now painfully rough tongue. “Try not to think about it, love.” Her voice was deeper now, but still warm and reassuring. “I’m still me.”
The other children looked the same as ever when they followed down the steps behind Vita. They trembled all over—even Rosie in her winter coat—and Vita hugged the children close to her for warmth. She looked over their shoulders at the children’s imaginary friends, and tried not to cower.
Rafe was now made of black metal like the black knights of Antorax, and Jasmine had turned into one of those frightening little fairies from Rosie’s Chamber with the sharpened wings. Rafe and Jasmine’s eyes remained respectively blue and green, however, and they assured the children that they felt like themselves.
In the distance Vita could see the forest of barren trees with those spindly branches that appeared to be trying to catch the wind. Monsters milled around the field in a tangle of red and black eyes and sharp claws. The gray jays wandered between them, all looking befuddled. Finally she found Pish and Posh and rushed toward them.
Pish gave her a lopsided smile. “It’s a bit strange down here, innit? What’d we come here for again?”
“To build over this mess,” Posh answered his brother. “Right, Vita?”
The girl nodded.
Posh puffed up his chest and called to all the birds wandering through the vast field. “This is your captain speaking! Now you remember you do whatever I say, and I say you stand at attention!”
The birds got into a line, disregarding the monsters around them. Posh reached back to twist open one of the barrels of Base on his shoulders and loaded some into his canon. “Where should we start?” he asked Vita.
The girl looked up at the white-gray sky that cracked every so often with lightning. “Let’s start with the sky,” she said.
• • •
World-building was much slower going in Drozlin than it had been in Vita’s Dream Chamber, or at least it felt that way. Building the sky above them had gone okay, and Vita was relieved to be able to look up at Whirlyton’s cotton clouds and cornflower blue sky whenever she got discouraged.
But Drozlin’s ground proved much more resistant to change. Vita had to try several times before she could get decent approximations of Nayera Jungle and Gossamer Fields—the grass kept dying as she built and the rainbow leaves on the trees wilting.
By the time she had a meadow as lovely as Gossamer Fields before her, Ruckles began raking his pronged feet across it and Skrillus burned the green grass with his tires with Fironella riding around on his roof, just as they had during Vita’s inspection with the doll monster.
“Not so pretty now, is it, baby doll?” Ruckles called over to her as he snipped away the flowers with his hedge clipper arms.
Vita rushed over to Mazkin, who stood by the Drozlin stairs with most of the other monsters, observing her work impassively. “Make them stop!” she demanded of the headmonster. “How am I supposed to build if they keep ruining everything?”
Mazkin gave a shrug of his mighty shoulders. “It’s what they do,” he replied.
“Why do you let them?” the girl asked.
“Fironella’s a headmonster too,” Mazkin said gravely.
Melina curled around Vita to look her in the eyes. Her yellow-green cat eyes didn’t seem so alarming with the brightness of the meadow and jungle around them. “The meadow isn’t ruined, Vita,” the caterpillar told her. “So it’s not pristine and perfect. What is? You’ve already made this world much lovelier than it was before, no matter what those monsters do.”
As Melina spoke, something interesting began to happen in the meadow. Each flower Ruckles cut down fell to the ground and grew right back into the grass. The tracks Skrillus left in the grass became railroad ties, which would connect to the rails in Railstown. The Meadow Line, Vita would call it.
“That’s it,” Mazkin murmured beside her. “Keep going.”
From there Vita’s build kept fixing or improving itself every time Ruckles or Skrillus tried to hurt it. When Ruckles cut down branches in Nayera Jungle, they wove themselves into a treehouse. When Skrillus ran over a flock of butterflies, a dozen tinier ones sprang out of his grille mouth.
Vita periodically checked on the other children where they stood huddled near the rock wall as she built, making them blankets and cups of hot cocoa.
On her third visit, Rosie said, “How do we help you, Tink? We want to help.”
So after a look at her map, Vita sent each child off on a gray jay to build some part of Whirlyton. She instinctively sent them away from the forest of reaching trees, which was where Landora would go.
Vita and Melina climbed onto Pish’s back, which felt scaly under her thighs. They led a small fleet of gray jays to the forest. Mazkin had called it Rasper Forest. The closer she got, the more Vita realized she hadn’t been imagining it—the trees really did reach out with branches for arms and twigs for fingers, swaying in the rushing breeze.
“I’m just going to build a clearing over all this, start fresh,” Vita said.
The gray jays obligingly poured Base over the trees and she began to build a stretch of green grass in their place. Despite its simplicity, this bit of building had been the most difficult so far. With each grasping tree that vanished, Vita felt like there were gears grinding in her temples.
She was just starting to think of taking a break when Vita noticed something strange. They’d reached the very center of the forest and instead of shifting into a green plain, the barren trees disappeared and left what looked like the wall of a building painted in layers of candy-bright colors. Using the jolt of her curiosity to keep her going, Vita continued to imagine the trees of the forest away so she could uncover what was hidden underneath.
Finally she stood before a large building that rather reminded Vita of a fortress, aside from the fact that it was made entirely of doughnuts and cupcakes. Vita recognized several monsters floating up around the fortress’s roofs. Dotted-Line Jack held what was unmistakably a ball of Base in his long-fingered hands. The Base became a cupcake with bright pink frosti
ng and rainbow sprinkles, which he placed amongst the thousands of others that made up the fortress’s wall. Vita looked down at the bottom of the wall near the ground and was disgusted to find that the sweets there had become rotten and moldy and were covered in bugs.
“I had so hoped you would never get this far, dear,” a voice that matched the decaying fortress of sweets perfectly said behind Vita. “No other child ever has, not before turning into monsters themselves.”
The girl turned to find Fironella flanked by Ruckles and Skrillus. She wondered if it was possible that they, like Dotted-Line Jack, had ever been children like her. “Those who have the ability to world-build can hide whatever they like, and whoever possesses their compasses can control that ability.” Fironella pulled on the lacy collar of her pink ruffled dress to reveal several silver chains that matched the one on Vita’s own compass.
Vita stared up at Dotted-Line Jack, now building doughnuts. One of the compasses hanging around Fironella’s neck had to be his. “I didn’t know monsters could world-build.”
“Not forever, they can’t,” Fironella said, admiring the sugar-spun windows of her fortress. “But there are always more monsters. As long as the world-building competition continues, Moorhouse will attract more children. None of you can resist the chance to bring your precious Figments back home with you.”
A twisted smile spread across her cracked porcelain face. “Only no one ever makes it home. Your memories begin to drift away until you lose even your own names, and the despair of it all turns you into a monster like me. Or you try to escape; it all ends the same way. With each new monster I get another compass, and use its power to control what’s left of a monster’s world-building ability until there’s nothing left.” She giggled and tossed her chestnut curls. “So you see why I can’t allow you to continue with your building.”
Vita and the Monsters of Moorhouse Page 22
