Catalyst

by Sarah Beth Durst

  Zoe interrupted, her voice shaking with nervousness. Please, let me be right! “Aunt Alecia, you said my great-grandfather was a Catalyst. He had the same magic as me.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” She studied Zoe. “Why?”

  “You also said he made the portal.” Zoe’s heart was pattering faster and faster. If she were right . . . If she’d inherited her great-grandfather’s power, all of it . . .

  Harrison immediately grasped what she was thinking. “Wait. You mean to say that Catalysts can make portals? Zoe, could you make a portal here?”

  Everyone turned to look at Zoe, who looked at Aunt Alecia.

  “Exactly what I was wondering,” Zoe said. “Can I?”

  Aunt Alecia’s eyes widened, and she started to smile. “You have the same magic. You should be able to do anything he did. Including make a portal.”

  “Awesome!” Harrison said.

  Pipsqueak began to purr.

   Chapter 20

  ZOE AND HARRISON SAT WITH PIPSQUEAK in front of the shed. Everyone else had gone inside—Surita back to Harrison’s house to tell his parents he’d return soon, and Mom, Dad, and Alex in the house with Aunt Alecia, Kermit, and Buttermouse. It was Aunt Alecia’s idea to give Zoe space to concentrate.

  “You sure you don’t want me to go too?” Harrison asked.

  “Definitely not,” Zoe said. “You have to help me figure out what to do.”

  Aunt Alecia’s instructions had been cryptic and kind of poetic: Open yourself to the magic, welcome it into your heart, and slice the sky. She’d recommended opening the portal within the shed, just inside the doors, so it could be hidden.

  “I’m supposed to have a passive magic,” Zoe said. “No spells or anything. It’s just inside me.” She squirmed as she said it. It still felt weird to think of herself as having any kind of power.

  Next to her, Harrison poked her shoulder. “That means no sparkles. Or saying ‘bibbity-bobbity-boo.’”

  She glared at him. “You’re not helping.”

  “Maybe you’re just supposed to think about magic a lot?” he suggested. “Try focusing on feeling magical.”

  “I don’t feel magical,” Zoe said.

  “But you are magical,” Pipsqueak said. “Accept that.”

  That could be what it meant. She was supposed to accept that she was different from the way she thought she was and that the world was different from what she’d been taught it was too.

  She thought of her mom, how convinced she’d been that her view of the world was right and Aunt Alecia’s was not, and how she was inside right now coming to terms with the fact that she’d been wrong and, even more, that her daughter’s future was going to be different from what she had envisioned for it. She thought of Alex and how he was starting a new adventure in September, even though it wasn’t the adventure he’d originally planned. And she thought of everything that had happened to her and Harrison since the day she found Pipsqueak shivering and alone by the garbage cans—the new journey, the new friends, the new world.

  “I do accept it,” Zoe said.

  Things changed, as Dad had said, and sometimes that was hard, and sometimes it was wonderful.

  “And do you welcome it into your heart?” Harrison said. “Whatever that means. Sounds like a chapter in a super-cheesy self-help book.”

  Zoe thought about it. Really thought. Did she welcome the way her life had changed since she met Pipsqueak? It hadn’t been easy, and it wasn’t going to be—she didn’t know what was going to happen when she started transforming more animals. Aunt Alecia claimed they weren’t that common, but Zoe was bound to find more, especially if they were drawn to her. Next time she might not be as lucky as she had been; people might notice. All that she feared, with reporters and an Internet circus, could still happen, and people might try to take the animals away or keep her from helping them reach Sanctuary. She’d have to be careful.

  But she didn’t wish she’d never met Pipsqueak, and she was happy she’d helped Pipsqueak become who she was meant to be. She didn’t regret any of that. “I’m glad I met you,” she said to her cat.

  Pipsqueak nuzzled the top of Zoe’s head. “Me too.”

  I’m glad I’m a Catalyst, she thought. It brought us all together. Me, Harrison, Pipsqueak, Kermit, Buttermouse. It wasn’t just the animals who had changed. She was different too. Just a few weeks earlier she’d thought all she wanted was for everything to stay the same, and now here she was—at the very center of change. For the first time, she felt as if the world wasn’t just something that happened to her; she happened to the world. Stepping up to the shed, Zoe took a deep breath. “I welcome it.”

  “Now what?” Pipsqueak asked. “How do we slice the sky?”

  The shimmer in New Hampshire had looked as if someone had ripped through the air, Zoe remembered. She glanced at Pipsqueak. “Use your claws.”

  Pipsqueak tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

  “Ooh, yes!” Harrison said.

  Zoe put her hands on Pipsqueak’s closest paw. “I’ll think about magic while you cut the air with your claw. My magic combined with your extraordinary self.”

  She concentrated on all the ways Pipsqueak and the others had changed—and all the ways she’d changed—as Pipsqueak raised her paw, claws extended, and slowly scratched the air within the shed doorway.

  The air began to shimmer in front of them.

  “Whoa,” Harrison said. “You’re doing it!”

  Zoe breathed in and tasted the air of the other world as Pipsqueak kept slicing through the air until the shimmer was as long as she was tall. She lowered her paw, and Zoe exhaled. Laughing, she sprang up and hugged Pipsqueak’s neck. “We did it!”

  “You know what this means,” Harrison said.

  “It means no goodbye,” Zoe said, feeling a smile rise up from inside her.

  Pipsqueak nuzzled the top of her head.

  “Yeah. Any time Pipsqueak or Kermit or Buttermouse want to hide, they can go to Sanctuary. Any time they just want to run around or explore or play, they can go to Sanctuary. Also, any new magical animal we find can go straight to Sanctuary.”

  “And any time we want to visit a magic world . . .” Zoe nodded to the shimmer.

  “Should we make sure it worked?” Harrison asked, grinning at her.

  “We should.” She grinned back. “Tallyho?”

  “Tallyho,” Harrison agreed.

  They climbed on Pipsqueak’s back, and together they walked into the shed and through the shimmer. The backyard and shed and patio vanished around them, replaced by an orchard of apple trees. Zoe guessed it was what their neighborhood would look like without the houses.

  “Is this Sanctuary?” Pipsqueak asked. “Did it work?”

  Breathing in, Zoe tasted flowers in the air.

  “Yep, it worked,” Harrison said, pointing to a unicorn a few yards away.

  “Cool,” Pipsqueak said.

  They marveled at the magic world for a few minutes more, and then Pipsqueak’s stomach rumbled, vibrating her fur. “Do you think your dad has any more of those burgers?”

  “Probably,” Zoe said.

  “Great,” Pipsqueak said. “Let’s go home.”

  And together, they did.

   Acknowledgments

  My first cat was named Fluffy. So was my second cat.

  I named Fluffy Two after Fluffy One because I missed the first Fluffy, because cats are soft, and because I was four. Since then, I haven’t been trusted to name any pets on my own.

  I’ve always loved cats. There’s a photo of me as a baby lying on a blanket while a cat walks around me as if protecting me—that was Barny, a stray calico who used to live in our neighbor’s barn (hence the name) until we started to feed it. I have a huge smile on my face in that photo.

  Growing up, we had other animals too. Labrador retrievers, just like Harrison’s Fibonacci. We also had a barely ridable horse, an anxious guinea pig, and a hive full of bees. I loved all of them (exc
ept for that one bee who stung me), but it was the cats who sat on my lap while I read book after book after book, who slept with me at night, curled up with my many stuffed animals, and who kept my secret when I whispered to them that someday I wanted to be a writer.

  I wrote this book with the help of my current cat, Gwen. She sat on me while I typed, and she napped on the manuscript while I was trying to revise it. Writing can be lonely sometimes—just you and your laptop for many hours. A cat can fix that loneliness.

  Gwen is a beautiful gray cat. She’s as soft as a chinchilla and as sweet as milk chocolate. She’s also a klutz. Once, while she was careening around the house at high speed, she tried to leap from the kitchen counter to the top of our refrigerator, missed, and collided with my face instead. Gave me a black eye. It was very embarrassing, for both of us.

  Cats are worth it, though.

  I’d like to thank Gwen, as well as all the other cats who have been a part of my life—Fluffy, Fluffy, Barny, Mittens, Sawyer, Jezebel, and Perni—for the years of cuddles and purrs.

  I’d also like to thank all the wonderful non-felines who helped bring Zoe and Pipsqueak’s story to life: my phenomenal editor, Anne Hoppe, and my incredible agent, Andrea Somberg, as well as Amanda Acevedo, Lisa DiSarro, Candace Finn, Eleanor Hinkle, Catherine Onder, Frank Radell, Sharismar Rodriguez, Opal Roengchai, Jackie Sassa, John Sellers, Tara Shanahan, Dinah Stevenson, and all the other awesome people at Clarion Books and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. And a special thank you to the fantastic Brandon Dorman for the fabulous art that graces the cover.

  Much love and many thanks to my husband, my children, and all my family and friends—you are each magnificent, awesome, and extraordinary. Even better than a whole pack of talking cats! But please don’t tell Pipsqueak I said that.

  Chapter

  One

  Mina was quiet.

  Every morning, she liked to tuck herself into the corner of their farmhouse kitchen and watch her family storm through: Papa singing off-key as he poured sugar into the pot of oats, Mother yelling at him to add less sugar, Papa yelling back cheerfully that he could add more but not less because he was just that sweet, her older brother, Gaton, stomping in to say he couldn’t find his socks, Papa joking that he’d added them to the morning oats, and the twins waddling in with Gaton’s socks on their hands like puppets.

  And every morning, after her family had whirled tornado-like into the kitchen, Papa would bellow, “Mina! Mina? Is Mina awake? Anyone seen Mina?”

  Giggling, the twins would wave their sock puppets at the corner where she perched quietly on her favorite chair.

  He’d clap his hands to his bearded cheeks dramatically, making the twins giggle even harder. “I thought that was a shadow! No one eats until my little shadow eats.” And then Papa would scoop the biggest, sugariest, best scoop of oatmeal into a bowl and give it to Mina before Gaton could inhale the rest and before the twins could spill any of it on the floor.

  “Love you, Papa,” she’d say.

  “Love you, Mina,” he’d say, and wink.

  She’d always been quiet. She’d been born without a cry on a peaceful night when the stars over their family farm sparkled brighter than usual, or so her mother liked to say. Mina didn’t think that was very likely. She’d been in the next room when the twins were born, and she knew babies were not quiet. Ever. Even when they slept, they made cute, gurgling chirps. But she let Mother tell the story how she wanted. It was probably close enough to true.

  Most mornings, Mina would eat in her favorite corner and listen to her family chatter and laugh. She liked the way the sounds flowed around her. It felt warm, as though her family were tucking a cozy blanket of babble around her, and she loved that they never pushed her to add to the noise.

  But this morning, Mina had news.

  So she finished her oats, carried her bowl to the sink, and stood in front of the table. This was unusual enough that Mother shushed Gaton, the twins quit smearing their breakfast on their cheeks, and Papa scraped his chair across the wood floor as he turned to look at her.

  She liked to think this was one of the secrets about being quiet: when you finally speak, everyone assumes you have something important to say. And I do, she thought.

  “I think my egg is going to hatch soon,” Mina said.

  It was as if she’d dropped a teaspoon of water into a skillet of boiling oil. Everyone popped up and began jabbering at once. From Mother: “Are you sure?” From Gaton: “Are you nervous? Don’t be nervous!” From the twins: “Yay! Yay! Yay, Mina!” From Papa: “We’re so proud of you!”

  She grinned at them all.

  Mina had a storm-beast egg. One in four kids in Alorria was awarded care of one of the country’s precious eggs and tasked with bonding to the unborn creature. For two years, she had devoted three hours a day to her egg, being sure to touch its shell so the growing beast could absorb her thoughts and feelings. If she’d done this correctly, then when it hatched, it would come out as a perfect match for her, and they’d be bonded mind-to-mind and heart-to-heart. She’d be its storm guardian, and it would be her storm beast.

  Storm beasts and their guardians were responsible for making Alorria as perfect as it was. Every day in Alorria, you woke to a blue sky. You felt warm air and a soft breeze. Sometimes you saw a rainbow, but only when the farmers asked for rain on their fields. Wind gusted over the sea, but only when the sailors needed it to sail their boats. Snow fell on the mountain peaks, but never below the tree line. Lightning never struck the ground and was instead harvested from the clouds to power the city’s magnificent machines. And there had never been a tornado or a hurricane. All thanks to the storm beasts and their guardians.

  Soon I’ll be one of them, a real storm guardian! Just thinking that made Mina want to do a little dance. Quietly, of course. She’d been anticipating this day for two years. Longer, really. Long before Gaton got his egg, as soon as Mina had been old enough to read stories about storm guardians, she’d wanted to be one of them—​to be out there, making the world more wonderful.

  She felt as if she’d been waiting for this all twelve years of her life.

  “She’s going to hatch a sun beast,” Gaton declared. He pounded his fist on the breakfast table for emphasis. The bowls rattled, causing the twins to giggle again.

  “Are you willing to bet on that?” Mother asked, a twinkle in her eye. “Three weeks of cleaning the chicken coop without complaining if I win?”

  “And three weeks of not milking the goats if I win,” Gaton countered.

  “Deal.” Mother held out her hand.

  “Deal!” Gaton said. They shook to seal the bet.

  Maybe I shouldn’t hope for a sun beast, just to see Gaton clean the coop. Mina made a soft clucking sound, which one of the twins, Rinna, immediately imitated, twice as loud.

  “Mina isn’t half as lazy as you are,” Mother teased Gaton, as soon as they’d shaken. “She’ll hatch a rain beast for certain.”

  The other twin, Beon, clapped his pudgy hands. “Wind beast! Wind! Wind!”

  All of them turned to study Mina, and Mina tried to not squirm under their gazes. She didn’t like being stared at, even by her family. Even if it was kindly meant, it made her feel like a bug about to be squished. Sensing her discomfort, Beon wrapped his arms around her leg and squeezed. Mina ruffled his hair in thanks.

  “Not wind,” Papa said thoughtfully. “She’s too steady.”

  “Exactly!” Gaton said. “She’s dependable. Her beast will be a sun beast.”

  I do want a sun beast. Sun beasts and their guardians were responsible for maintaining the endless summery temperature in Alorria and for beaming any excess sunlight onto crops to make them grow faster. Gaton had hatched a sun beast three years ago. His beast’s power would be fading soon—​once a storm beast finished growing to full size, it lost its ability to control the weather—​and he’d said several times that he wanted his little sister to take over his work in the local fields.

>   Sometimes Mina thought she’d like spending her days the way Gaton did, out in the fields, drawing in and dispersing the sun’s energy over the crops. Because of the storm beasts and their guardians, everyone in Alorria always had enough to eat. But I also want a rain beast. Or a wind beast. Flying on a wind beast would be amazing! She’d spent hours imagining herself with different kinds of beasts. All of them had a role in making Alorria great. “I’ll be happy with any kind of beast,” Mina said.

  “I wanna snow beast,” Rinna announced. “So I can throw snowballs at Beon all the time.”

  Mina smiled as Beon and Rinna stuck their tongues out at each other. Neither of them had ever so much as seen a snowball, but lately Mother and Papa had been telling the twins lots of tales about the different kinds of storm beasts, in preparation for Mina’s egg hatching.

  Altogether, there were five kinds of storm beasts: sun, rain, wind, snow, and lightning. Any egg could hatch any kind of beast—​how the creature developed depended on the personality of the girl or boy who’d taken care of its egg. What it absorbed from them shaped how it grew. Years ago, Papa had hatched a rain beast, and Gaton had his sun beast.

  Mina thought of her egg upstairs. I can’t wait to meet you! Soon she’d see which of her daydreams were going to come true. Lately, she’d been hoping for a wind beast, because she loved wind days so much—​in fact, today was a wind day: “Shouldn’t we be getting ready?” she asked when they paused for breath.

  “Yes, we should! Good of you to remember,” Papa said, jolted out of his contemplation of Mina’s future. “The wind should start in about twenty minutes.”

  “See?” Gaton said. “She’s responsible. Sun beast.”

  “You do look out for everyone,” Papa said to Mina with a proud smile. “You’re going to be a wonderful guardian.”

  “I hope so,” Mina said softly. With all my heart, I hope he’s right!

  Mother clapped her hands. “Okay, let’s move!”