by Mary McCoy
“Are you all right?” Verity asked.
“I think so,” Addison said. “Can we just sit and rest for a second?”
She seemed smaller now, frail and fragile. Verity felt slightly guilty for wishing that it was capable, matter-of-fact Annika she was out here with. Or even Alix or Amber, whose exuberance and giggly good cheer would have at least distracted her. Being with Addison only served to remind her how dangerous and foolhardy this whole adventure was, and that if anything went wrong, she would be on her own and far from anyone who could help her.
Addison seemed to sense Verity’s disappointment because she held out her hand and said, “Help me up. I’m ready,” even though Verity saw her wince as she stood.
“We can rest a little bit longer if you need to,” Verity said.
“No, let’s keep going.”
They trudged forward, slower now, and whispering as they went.
“The button fell off my soul mate’s shirt when we were in the woods yesterday. Ever since I picked it up, this has been happening to me,” Addison confessed.
She was sweating again now, and Verity had to stop every few minutes so Addison could rest.
“Who do you think they are?” Verity asked.
“Our soul mates?”
“Do you think they’re real?”
“It feels real,” Addison said with a shiver.
“It feels real to me, too.”
Verity realized that they could have been anywhere now, and if they didn’t find a way back to their cabin soon, they’d be lost in the woods after dark. She watched Addison, who was leaning against a downed, moss-covered tree, her arms clutched tightly to her chest. Suddenly, though, she loosened her grip and looked up, and her eyes fixed on something across the clearing.
“It’s glowing,” Addison whispered. “Can’t you see it? It’s so beautiful.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Their whole cabin is glowing.”
Even before Verity’s hand came to rest on Addison’s forehead, she could feel the heat radiating from it.
“Come on, let’s go back,” Verity said. “You’re burning up.”
Addison jerked away from her. “I’ve never felt better.”
Verity squinted but still couldn’t see the cabin. Yet Addison staggered to her feet and limped into the clearing.
“Addison, wait!” she called after her, but Addison acted like she hadn’t heard. Without thinking, Verity got up and ran after her. Even with her injured leg, Addison navigated the rough and uneven terrain easily, while Verity lost her balance more than once.
“There you are,” Addison said, when Verity finally caught up. “Now do you see it?”
Verity looked where Addison pointed and gasped. The cabin wasn’t there, and then, it was—just as Addison had said. A soft, golden light emanated from its walls, and when Verity saw it, it was like walking up the driveway to her house after the last day of school before Christmas break, or like the smell of coffee and the tinkle of bells that greeted her when she walked through the door of her favorite bookshop back home.
Verity gulped down deep breaths until the lump in her throat disappeared and the tight feeling in her chest subsided. Then the boy appeared in the door.
It was the same boy they’d seen the day before, the one who had gathered the firewood. He had sun-bleached hair that was probably brown in the wintertime and eyes that were two different colors—one blue, one hazel. Or at least that’s what he looked like to Verity. Whatever it was that Addison saw must have been to her liking, though. Her upturned face was bathed in light from the cabin, and she was smiling.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Addison.”
“My name’s Tad,” the boy said.
What kind of stupid name is Tad? Verity thought, her face twisting into a scowl that she instantly regretted.
Because then, there she was.
She appeared in the doorway next to Tad and squinted out at them.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked. Her voice was a silky alto, rounded at the edges, and Verity loved it at once.
“Two of the girls from the other camp,” Tad said. “Addison and . . .”
“Verity,” she squeaked, her eyes flitting nervously from Addison to Tad to the girl. Verity was too embarrassed to make eye contact with her, but unable to stop looking at her either.
The girl laughed. “You mean you can see us?”
“Uh huh,” Verity said, the syllables barely squeezed out before her throat closed up altogether.
The girl smiled. “Do you know how long it’s been since anyone saw me? Other than these jackasses, I mean.”
Still unable to form words, Verity shook her head, an idiotic grin pasted across her face.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” she said. “That would be just my luck. I haven’t seen anyone new in a year, and when I do, she doesn’t talk.”
Just then, out of the corner of her eye, Verity noticed Addison.
One year, Verity had sung in the middle school chorus, and their director had insisted on rehearsing for an entire morning to prepare for the annual holiday concert. After two hours of being packed on the risers like lunch meat in a warm deli case, the girl next to Verity had gone gray in the face and passed out cold, taking Verity down with her. Verity had split her lip open and couldn’t sing with her stitches, so she had missed the concert and had spent three months in tri-weekly choral practice for nothing. Even after all this time, the memory rankled.
On the bright side, at least now she recognized the telltale signs. So when Addison’s knees buckled underneath her, Verity tore her gaze away from the beautiful girl’s face in time, and caught Addison under the arms.
“Help me,” she said, struggling under Addison’s dead weight.
Tad ran down the cabin steps and helped Verity lay Addison down. He peeled off his camp sweatshirt, folded it neatly, and tucked it underneath Addison’s head.
“She’s burning up,” he said, smoothing back the damp strands of hair that stuck to Addison’s forehead. Had she been conscious, Addison would have perished from delight.
“We should get her back to the cabin,” Verity said.
“No, we need to take her inside now,” Tad said. “Erin, she’s been marked. I have no idea how she walked all the way here like this.”
Erin. Her name was Erin.
The girl knelt by Addison’s side and gasped when she touched Addison’s face. Verity did, too. The fever had spiked, and now Addison seemed to be approaching temperatures that only existed on thermometers for meat, not humans.
“Can you help her?” Verity asked.
“We can,” Erin said, “but—”
“Erin,” Tad said, his voice filled with worry and warning.
“She should know,” Erin said.
“We have to take her inside,” Tad said. “She’s been marked. She’s one of us now.”
“What do you mean ‘one of you’?” Verity asked, clutching Addison protectively to her chest. “What do you mean ‘marked’?”
“We used to be campers here,” the girl said. “Now we’re Tania’s prisoners.”
Tad gave her a look that made Erin correct herself with a sigh.
“Guests, I mean. Guests who can never leave.”
Addison’s skin was so hot to the touch now that Verity could no longer hold onto her.
Tad knelt by Addison’s side and felt her wrist for a pulse. “Erin, we don’t have time for this now. We have to get her inside. It’s getting worse.”
The beautiful girl met Verity’s eyes, waiting for instructions, but all Verity could say was, “Prisoners?”
Tad nodded impatiently. “What do you want us to do?”
“What happens if I won’t let you take her?”
Tad didn’t hesitate. “She’ll waste away and die, probably in the next few minutes.”
Verity would never have believed him if she hadn’t seen Erin nod, seconding his implausible, impossible words.
>
“And if you do take her—is she going to be okay?” she asked feebly, her chin wobbling.
“We’ll take care of her,” Tad said.
It was no choice at all, though Verity acknowledged that she was taking a good deal on faith. Tad picked Addison up in his firewood-hauling arms and carried her inside the glowing cabin. Verity looked after them, but beyond the cabin walls everything disappeared in a golden haze.
“You did the right thing,” Erin said, putting her arm around Verity’s shoulder.
“What happens now? When will she get better? Should I wait for her?” Her voice shook when she spoke.
“Verity.”
The sound of her own name on the girl’s lips was like a soothing balm.
Then she spoke again.
“She’s gone.”
CABIN 5
SURVIVAL
[SCENE: Inside the flaming ring of brambles, the girls of Cabin 5 fight for their lives.]
The brambles resisted their efforts to climb over them or dig under them, or to tunnel through them, but in the end, they could not resist fire.
One girl, a birdwatching enthusiast, took out the binoculars she’d smuggled into camp. Surely it was a mistake, she’d thought, that binoculars were included on the contraband list, and she’d felt no compunction about hiding them inside her sleeping bag. Now, she was glad she’d done so. She disassembled the binoculars and polished the lenses, then bit her lip and focused a ray of sunshine through them.
As she watched a puff of smoke rise up from the thorns, she thought that this was how Archimedes must have felt as his burning glasses reflected the sun’s rays and incinerated the Roman fleet as they approached Syracuse.
But what she felt a moment later, as the entire wall went up in a sheet of flames, as the smoke engulfed them, as the blistering heat closed in around them and the sky was blotted out, I could not say.
A NOTE FROM THE NARRATOR
It is difficult not to marvel at the advances in changeling technology in recent years. The brutalities you tend to read about in fairy stories—infants switched in their cribs for hobgoblins and that sort of thing—have been happily relegated to the past. So primitive. It is hard to believe that anyone ever got away with it, that anyone ever fell for it. And really, it was only ever possible with infants who were still in that most unformed and blob-like of stages.
Today, what is done is much different. When a creature like Tania takes a liking to a human, she might decide to keep that human for herself. One basic principle from the old days does remain, however. You have to send something back. Otherwise, there would be an outcry.
Unlike the old days, it’s now possible to work with humans of any age. Tania can send back the same girl who’d gone to Camp So-and-So—or most of her, anyway.
The girl would look the same, sound the same. She’d mostly even be the same. It is possible to slice out a representative strata of personality, disposition, likes, and dislikes so that you ended up with two almost identical people.
And if you didn’t get the proportions completely right (and you never did), well, people changed. Concerned families were liable to chalk it up to hormones, the influence of new experiences and new friends, and the like.
The best thing was, when someone Tania had adopted angered her or began to bore her, it was easy enough to dispatch him or her because there was a perfectly adequate copy back in the human world. Tania had been at it for decades now, and she had never been caught. No one ever noticed.
My knowledge of this secret procedure might lead you to believe that I am complicit in the creation of these changelings, or that I somehow condone it, but nothing could be further from the truth.
I come by this information honestly.
My hands are clean.
All that I know, I know firsthand.
CABIN 1
THE ALL-CAMP SPORT & FOLLIES
[SCENE: Inside a windmill at the Inge F. Yancey Young Executives Leadership Camp, KADIE has walloped CRESSIDA with a shovel, and CRESSIDA has revealed to KADIE a shocking truth.]
“Of course I was at camp last summer,” Kadie said. “I remember it.”
But even as she spoke the words, she knew they were both true and not true. The faces of last year’s cabinmates, the prime rib at the Welcome Campers dinner, the counselor who taught them show tunes and how to modulate their vibrato—all of it turned to smoke. It was like a spell had been broken, and Kadie knew that none of those memories was real.
“If I wasn’t here, then how do I remember it?” she asked, a tremor in her voice. “And how do you know I wasn’t?”
Cressida, who had by this time recovered from being hit in the leg with a shovel, pulled herself up and knelt beside Kadie.
“This place isn’t what it seems,” she said.
It occurred to Kadie that Cressida was perhaps responsible for this, that her cabinmate was both a spy and a witch.
Inching away from Cressida, she said, “I don’t know who you are or what you’re up to, but stop messing with me. This isn’t funny.”
“I’m not trying to be funny,” Cressida said.
The sunlight that shone through the narrow windows of the windmill lit up her frizzy hair from behind so that she resembled a dandelion on fire.
“I know you weren’t here last year because my best friend was. I was supposed to come, too, but at the last minute I broke my arm and Erin had to go by herself. She felt bad that I couldn’t be there with her, so she promised to write me letters and tell me everything that happened. And she did. She told me about all the people in her cabin and the food and the counselors. She told me about the Inge F. Yancey Young Executives Leadership Camp and the stupid All-Camp Sport & Follies. She was right there in the thick of all of this, and you know what? She never mentioned you once.”
A Note from the Narrator: As it tended to lead to panic and misunderstandings, letter-writing was discouraged at Camp So-and-So. However, since to ban it outright would have attracted suspicion, the camp directors simply allowed no time for it, provided no paper or stamps, and when asked, feigned ignorance about when or where mail was picked up. Cressida’s friend, Erin, was inordinately persistent to have managed to get not just one letter out, but several.
“When camp was over and Erin came back, though, she was a completely different person. She wore different clothes, listened to different music, and hung out with different people, and the weird thing was, nobody else seemed to notice it at all.”
Kadie twisted her lips into a skeptical little bow. “People change, Cressida. Especially over the summer.”
“I know people change, Kadie. But this was different.”
Kadie folded her arms across her chest and glared down at Cressida. “Because she used to be your super-special best friend, and then all of a sudden she wasn’t? That’s what this is all about?”
Cressida reached into the pocket of her shorts and pulled out an envelope that had grown almost silken from being unfolded and refolded so many times. The handwriting on the outside was looping and threadlike, with letters that looked as though they should have vines growing off of them.
“No, because she wrote me this.”
Kadie took the letter from Cressida’s hand and read it, whispering the words aloud.
“If you get this letter, then you know why that should be impossible,” she muttered, then a moment later, “Whatever they sent back in my place, it’s not me. They’re holding me prisoner here.”
When she had finished, she folded the letter up and handed it back to Cressida.
“What’s it supposed to mean?” she asked, still unsure whether Cressida was playing some sort of game with her.
“Don’t you get it?” Cressida asked. “She wrote it to me a month after she got home from camp.”
Nothing about the way Cressida looked at Kadie suggested she was anything but ferociously serious.
“What makes you think she’s here?”
“Because Erin said, ‘They’
re holding me prisoner.’ They. And because I already looked for her everywhere at our camp. And because there’s something strange about this place. And because I don’t think Tania’s really a camper and I don’t think the Inge F. Yancey Young Executives Leadership Camp is really a camp. Do you?”
Kadie took all of this in, chewing nervously at her lip.
“If you’re right,” she said slowly, “then what would happen if Tania’s horse threw her off its back into the mud, and we beat them in steeplechase? Would that be bad?”
Even on her worst day, Kadie was the faster runner, but upon hearing the outcome of the steeplechase event, Cressida shoved Kadie aside and bolted down the stairs. By the time Kadie regained her balance and stumbled down the ladder, Cressida was out of the windmill and halfway down the tulip-lined path. Kadie called after her, and Cressida’s head whipped around. She raised a finger to her lips.
“What’s wrong with you?” she hissed. “Do you want them to know we’re coming?”
“You think they haven’t already noticed we’re gone?” Kadie replied.
“Too late,” Cressida said, a smile pinned to her lips. “Act like nothing’s wrong.”
Kadie looked up to see Tania, Ron, and some of the other Inge F. Yancey campers gathered in a semi-circle at the trailhead, arms folded tightly across their chests. With as innocent and carefree a smile as she could muster, Kadie waved.
Tania tapped her foot impatiently as they approached. “You’re not supposed to go wandering off by yourselves,” she said.
“The grounds here are just so lovely,” Kadie gushed. “We couldn’t help exploring a little bit.”
Ron gave them an easy smile that showed off his immaculate dental work but never quite reached his eyes.
“Well, you’re holding up the luncheon we’ve prepared for you. To celebrate your victory in the steeplechase, I suppose. I mean,” he added with a chuckle, “it was supposed to be the luncheon we prepared to celebrate our victory, but that’s the fun of the All-Camp Sport & Follies, isn’t it?”
