Scorch

by Gina Damico

  He stalked out of the room. Not knowing what else to do, Lex and Driggs followed, leaving LeRoy alone with his weapons and doubts.

  ***

  “Well, I’m a right bloody idiot,” said Broomie, smacking herself in the head that night at the Dungeon. “How could I not have figured that out?”

  Broomie had thoroughly ignored the Juniors when they showed up for work at the Bank earlier that day, but it was all part of the plan. At night, they’d meet in secret at the Dungeon, all the while keeping up the charade that Broomie was just another conceited Junior and Lex and the gang were the weird, shabby outcasts.

  “I knew something felt wrong,” she said. “Our security system is mediocre at best—I should have known that that alone couldn’t stop Zara. Hell, if your techie genius uncle couldn’t keep her out, what made me think that our prancing ninny mayor could? He practically rolled out a second red carpet for the bitch.”

  “But he really didn’t have a choice,” said Elysia.

  “Sure he did,” said Pip. “Zara was scytheless—how hard could it have been to lock her up and alert the authorities?”

  “Maybe she had a crossbow!” an inebriated Ferbus shot back, spraying Pip with Yorick.

  Broomie gently pulled Ferbus’s bottle out of his hands. “Go easy on these, mate,” she said. “They’re a little more potent than the ones you’re used to.”

  “Poppycock!”

  “What I want to know,” said Driggs, restraining Ferbus, “is who tipped off Zara to come to DeMyse in the first place. LeRoy mentioned that someone had told her that he’d be a pushover, which makes sense—she wouldn’t have known that on her own. None of us Juniors had ever met him before.”

  Broomie frowned. “That’s true. But who could it be? Who’d have enough knowledge of the Grimsphere to be able to steer her like that?”

  Lex coughed on her Yorick. After a few moments of hacking, she looked up at the Juniors with watering eyes. “Bone.”

  “But there is no Bone,” said Driggs. “The name was just part of the clue.”

  “Whoever wrote the note, then! Think about it,” she said, her voice phlegmy. “Don’t you think it’s weird that Zara knew exactly how to steal my Damning ability? She never could have thought of that on her own. She must have had outside help.”

  The Juniors’ eyes grew wider as they thought this over.

  Driggs turned to Lex. “What was that thing she said to you when you asked how she knew it would work?”

  Ice ran up Lex’s spine as she recalled Zara’s face that day in her stepfather’s basement. “She said, ‘I have my sources.’” Lex looked around the table. “That’s it. That’s how she found the Loophole. That’s how she knew about Damning. Remember when Uncle Mort said that only a handful of Grims had ever heard of it?”

  Driggs nodded. “Whoever wrote the note must have gotten to her early on, taken advantage of how much she hated her stepfather.” He met Juniors’ shocked faces. “They’ve been coaching her this whole time.”

  It took a moment for that to sink in.

  “Which means we can never hand over the key,” said Lex. “Or the symbols, or the Wrong Book, if we ever find it. It would be dangerous enough in the hands of Zara, but if she’s teamed up with someone even worse . . .”

  A flash of white streaked through her mind. The figure in the woods. The man in the tuxedo—

  The voices of her friends snapped her back. “There must be something we can do,” said Riqo.

  Driggs was thinking. “The neutralizer,” he said. “The thing that can get us past the cabin’s shield. If it’s in the Afterlife in Croak, it could also be in the Afterlife here, and that means we have a chance of grabbing it before Zara does. We have to get into that vault.”

  “How?” said Elysia. “There’s no Wicket here to sneak us in.”

  “And Vern’s a dill,” Broomie said. “Takes his job way too seriously. I’ve got no clout with him.”

  “Guys, chill!” said Ferbus, his glassy eyes suggesting that he was already quite chilled. He flung an arm over Lex’s shoulder. “Lex will think of something. ALWAYS finagling her way into tricksy situations, this one! She’s the bee’s knees, amiright?” he slurred before passing out on the table.

  The Juniors stared at the puddle of drool forming under his cheek. “Bottled Yoricks aren’t for everyone,” Broomie said.

  ***

  Ferbus, though drunk as a skunk, wasn’t wrong. Lex was the bee’s knees, and she did think of something. The solution finally came to her one afternoon while she, Elysia, and Pip were helping Riqo in the community garden.

  “Nothing in this one, either,” Elysia said with a sigh, throwing another heavy book to the ground. They’d brought research with them from the Grotton section of the DeMyse library to look for information about the protective field, but they still hadn’t found anything.

  “Watch the blueberries!” A bare-chested Riqo turned to Pip. “You know, they have always been my favorite,” he said, sweating and digging into the earth with a spade. “I think I will enjoy them even more, now that I see how much they match your eyes.”

  Pip’s blueberry-like eyes widened. Which was quite a feat, seeing as how they’d already stretched to their limit when Riqo took off his shirt. “Thank you!”

  Elysia shot them both a dirty look.

  Lex’s eyes, however, were fixed on something else. “What’s this?” she asked, pointing at a drawing in Riqo’s gardening guide.

  Riqo took the book from her and smiled. “Ah, that is the famed Ficus compos mentis, also known as the Lucidity Plant. Ingest one leaf, and your head will become as clear as a drop of fresh morning dew.”

  Lex stared at it a little harder. “I’ve seen it somewhere before.”

  Riqo laughed and shook his head. “That is quite impossible,” he said. “It has been extinct for many, many years.”

  “Are you questioning my mad botany skills?” Lex joked. “Because I’ll have you know I studied with the finest— What the hell is that?”

  A translucent blob was drifting down the street. It held a vaguely humanoid shape, but no distinctive features could be made out in the blur. It was as if a part of the wavy mirage illusion that surrounded the city of DeMyse had broken off and decided to take an afternoon stroll.

  “Oh, nothing,” said Riqo, grabbing a roll of paper towels and cleaning off his hands. “It is only Morgana.”

  “Huh?”

  “I do not know if that is her real name, but it is what we call her.” Riqo wiped some sweat from his brow. “She is a ghost who has wandered through the desert for centuries. We do not know who made her, or why, or who she was in life, only that she chooses not to interact with us. So we let her be.”

  Elysia sighed. “Must be awful to be a ghost,” she said, shaking her head. “Family dead, friends dead, stuck all alone for eternity on this miserable rock with no way to eat or feel or take part in the life that everyone else shoves in your face all day.” She yanked out a weed. “I’d strand myself in the middle of the desert, too.”

  “Yet even ghosts cannot resist the fabulousness of DeMyse,” said Lex, opening a packet of seeds. “With its dazzling lights and heated pools and endless supply of plastic surg—”

  She froze midsentence, dropping the seeds.

  “That is not where the turnips go,” said Riqo, but Lex didn’t hear him. She’d already grabbed the roll of paper towels and taken off for the Bank.

  ***

  Lex situated herself in the line to the vault, poofing out her hair and ignoring the half of her brain that was telling her how risky and stupid and potentially mortifying this was. She dutifully sucked on the lollipop she’d grabbed from one of the Etceteras’ desks, making sure to smear the cherry red coloring around her lips.

  When she got to the front of the line, the snippy Vault Post guy was there as usual. He took one look at Lex and put his hands on his hips. “I thought I told you, no Juniors allowed in the—”

  “How DARE you
, Vern?” Lex screeched in a high, haughty voice that even she found terrifying. “Don’t you recognize me?”

  “I—what?” Vern’s face crinkled up in confusion. “Who—”

  “HONestly, Vern,” she said with a huff. “I thought we were close, you and I.”

  He squinted, then opened his eyes up wide, then squinted again. “Is that you, Jacqueleen?”

  “Of COURSE it is,” Lex said, who’d never met anyone named Jacqueleen in her life. “Who else would I be?”

  “It’s just—you look so different, I—”

  “You like it?” Lex fluffed her hair and prayed that the paper towels she’d stuffed down her shirt were doing their job. “I had a little work done.”

  “Ohh,” said Vern in a relieved voice, as if this sort of misunderstanding happened all the time in DeMyse. Lex puffed her fake knockers out even farther and gave the lollipop a naughty little lick. Vern, staring intently, reached for the vault door, missed, then reached again and waved her through. “I see. Yes, you look fantastic. Very youthful.”

  “THAT was the POINT,” Lex sang as she sashayed through the door. “Ta!”

  The Afterlife in DeMyse looked the same as it did in Croak— bright, fluffy white stuff everywhere—but instead of presidents, inventors, and other historical figures, the atrium was full of Hollywood icons. John Wayne took the hands of the targets and led them toward the Void while Marilyn Monroe flipped up her dress for the hooting crowds.

  “Crap,” Lex said aloud to no one, her heart deflating. It was way too busy in there to get any decent information. What was she going to do, just walk up to James Dean and ask him to search the Afterlife for some mysterious item she couldn’t even describe?

  “Hey, turdface!”

  Lex’s jaw fell open. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Cordy rode atop her camel with Tut sitting behind her, Kloo biking alongside them, and Poe bringing up the rear, walking with a limp. “There she is, the little fugitive,” Cordy said with a droll grin. “Screwed yourself pretty good this time, huh, Sis?”

  “What are you doing? How did you get here?”

  “I think the bigger question is, where did those new sweater kittens of yours come from?”

  Lex yanked the paper towels out of her hoodie with an impatient grunt. “Why are you here?”

  “Excellent question,” Poe snipped with a frown, massaging his feet.

  “We decided to take another little road trip through the Afterlife,” Cordy said. “As soon as Corpp told us what happened—”

  “Corpp? You saw him?”

  “Concord,” Tut said in a bored voice, smoothing his eyebrows, “tell the peasant not to shout so.”

  Kloo rolled her eyes and gave Lex a reassuring smile. “Yeah, we saw him. He came through the atrium, went into the Void, and hasn’t been seen since. We hear he’s settled down somewhere in the Afterlife version of the Horsehead Nebula, painting up a storm.”

  Lex felt as if five tons of weight had instantly lifted from her shoulders. “So his soul isn’t gone.”

  “Nope,” said Cordy. “Looked pretty happy, from where I was sitting. Which was on a freakin’ camel!” She gave it a big, smacking kiss. “Lex, meet Lumpy.”

  Lex regarded the disenchanted-looking beast. “Hi.”

  Lumpy spit in her face.

  “He likes you!” Cordy cried.

  Lex irritably wiped the mucus from her cheek and turned back to Kloo, the only sane member of the party. “How’s the mood back home?”

  Kloo smiled in the way people smile when they’re trying to hide bad news. “Well, it’s not great. Norwood and Heloise think you’re the devil incarnate. They’ve made it their mission to convince the whole town of it, and from what Wicket tells us, it’s working. The rest of the Grimsphere is starting to buy it too. Except for DeMyse, of course.” She let out a whistle. “You guys are lucky to be here.”

  “Oh, yes,” Poe said to Quoth, who looked ruffled from the trip. “We’re all so lucky to be here.”

  “We wouldn’t have to be, if Sofi hadn’t ratted us out,” Lex said, scowling. “Is she enjoying the Crypt now that she has it all to herself?”

  “Ah, her,” Kloo said with a chuckle. “Well, Wicket said that at first she was pretty bummed that you left her behind. But since she was such a big help in alerting Norwood and Heloise to what you’d done, they—you’re not going to like this—they gave her her job back.”

  “Ugh, of course they did,” Lex said, not even surprised anymore. “And”—her stomach clenched, but she pushed on— “how’s Dora doing?”

  “Better than you’d think,” said Kloo. “She keeps trying to persuade the town that Zara is the bad guy and not you. She constantly yells at Norwood and Heloise, calls them all sorts of names—she’s the only one they’ll back down from. Honestly, I think Corpp’s death has only made her feistier, if such a thing is possible.”

  “Good.” Lex let out a breath. “Good.”

  “Wicket also said—” Cordy started. “She told me that Mom and Dad visited.” She was trying to hide it, but her eyes were pained. “How are they?”

  Lex swallowed. “They’re . . . okay.”

  Cordy folded her arms. “Lex. Don’t lie to me.”

  Lex didn’t know why she ever tried. “Dad’s hanging in there. And Mom is . . .”

  She trailed off. Cordy stared for a moment more, then nodded.

  Lex’s stomach twisted once again. As if she weren’t crammed up to her eyeballs in guilt as it was, Cordy always made her feel worse. She sighed and looked into the Void, wishing there were some way to fix everything she’d done, or at least to stop Zara. They still hadn’t found anything in DeMyse’s books on the neutralizer, or the Wrong Book, or Grotton—

  Wait a minute.

  She squinted even harder into the Void. Why hadn’t she thought of this before?

  Luckily, no one was paying attention to her. “I grow weary of this talk,” announced Tut, digging around in a bag attached to the camel. “Where are my figs?”

  Kloo let out a sigh. “That boy and his figs.”

  “I know,” Cordy said dreamily, staring at his six-pack. “What a tasty slice.”

  Lex had to get out of there, but she didn’t want to panic anyone. “Remind me again why he’s still with you?” she said, inching away from them.

  Cordy glared at her. “Because we are an item,” she said testily. “And I’ll thank you to keep your jealousy to yourself. I’m sorry that you ended up with a weird-eyed freak while I got the leader of the ancient world, but that’s just how the camel spits.” She dug her heels into Lumpy and waved. “We’ll see you around, okay?”

  “We’re leaving?” Poe said, incredulous and bitter. “So soon?”

  “Silence, Mustache,” Tut yelled down to him. “You irk me.”

  Poe scowled and started muttering to himself. “I shall shove him into a vortex, I shall. The one at Mount Rushmore, right up Jefferson’s nose . . .”

  Lex would have comforted him, but she was already halfway to the vault door. Once they’d turned their backs, she bolted. She had to find Uncle Mort.

  ***

  Luckily, she knew where to look. She threw a casual hello to the girl at the hotel’s front desk, flitted up the stairs, and pulled out the keycard Uncle Mort had given her in case of an emergency.

  This was close enough.

  She fit the card into the slot and turned the handle, only to find that the room was a complete mess. Ever since the incident at the Mayor’s Mansion, Uncle Mort had spent the majority of his time in DeMyse holed up in this very room, hacking through firewalls and blocked television channels. He, unlike everyone else in DeMyse, wanted to know what was going on in the outside world. He’d managed to get through to a few media outlets and had even persuaded some poor swiper to smuggle in daily copies of The Obituary.

  Lex stared at the stacks of newspapers as she entered the room. TERROR IN CROAK, one read. NEW MAYOR DEMANDS JUSTICE, screamed another, with a
picture of Norwood looking dashing and heroic. Lex tried to ignore the biggest headline—MANHUNT FOR CRAZED JUNIOR CONTINUES—alongside a small blurred photo of herself, but she knew it would still haunt her dreams for approximately forever.

  Uncle Mort wasn’t there. She stuck her head into the bathroom, but he wasn’t there either. She was just about to leave when a gust of wind billowed out the curtain that had been drawn in front of the balcony.

  Lex crept up to the sliding glass door. It was open, just a crack. Two muffled voices came from the balcony.

  “—but it’s happening,” said Uncle Mort. “I promise you that.”

  “You’re sure?” LeRoy replied.

  Lex frowned. They’d made up already? It had been only a week since that nuclear meltdown at LeRoy’s mansion.

  “Positive,” Uncle Mort replied. “A year, maybe less.”

  “Jesus.” LeRoy let out a long breath. “So soon.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “How can you be so sure?” LeRoy asked. “You haven’t seen it yourself.”

  “One of our dead lost a memory. And I’ve heard other reports. It’s getting bad.”

  “Maybe they’re mistaken. Maybe you’re mistaken.”

  “Roy, I’ve been at this for years. You really think I’d mess up the calculations? Forget to carry a three?”

  “Well, no. You’re the expert, always have been. It’s just—”

  “What?” There was an uncomfortable, accusatory pause. “You’re not gonna wimp out on me, are you?”

  “Mort. Of course not.”

  “Because when the time comes, you can’t hesitate. Not for a second.”

  “Don’t you think I know that? I just think—” LeRoy made a sucking noise through his teeth. “Let’s say we do everything right, follow the plan to the letter. What if it doesn’t work? There are no more chances.”

  “It will work.”

  “Yeah, but we’re getting into some déjà vu territory, man,” said LeRoy. “You said the same thing years ago—”

  “I know what I said. I was wrong then. I’m right now.”