by Mary McCoy
“Two: we could find out that S’ulla never existed, that Isis Archimedes was being chased through the woods by nothing but a scary story.
“Three: you could put her soul in the body of a raven.
“Four: you could split her in half, so that even if S’ulla killed her, at least one part of her would still be alive.
“Five: you could have the ground give way beneath her feet in the nick of time.
“There. Those are five ways you could save Isis Archimedes. Are you happy now?”
Shea and Renata and the girl with the upturned nose gaped at Wallis, who felt ashamed and small. Their friends were going to die any minute, and instead of doing something about it, she was having a fight with a traumatized author who had quite possibly not spoken to another human in twelve years.
“I like the fourth one,” said the girl with the upturned nose.
Twelve years.
“Me too,” said Eurydice Horne.
She’d been here twelve years, thought Wallis. What had happened twelve years ago?
I should have drowned you in Lake So-and-So the summer you were fifteen.
Tania’s words stuck in Wallis’s head, and she felt the beginnings of an idea begin to glom on to it.
“What happened the summer Inge F. Yancey IV came to camp?” she asked.
Eurydice Horne told the story of the treehouse and the trophy and of what Inge F. Yancey IV had done to Beau Krest, and by the time she was done telling it, Wallis knew what they had to do.
She lifted the walkie-talkie to her lips.
“Did you get them all?” she asked.
There was a long silence, then a crackle of static, then Corinne’s voice, weary but strong as ever.
“We’re all here.”
They’d pushed so hard, faced so much—Wallis hoped they could face just a little bit more.
ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS
FIRST 5, THEN 4, THEN 3, THEN 2, THEN 1
From a box seat high up in the theater, Kadie, Cressida, Dora, Vivian, and Kimber pelted the judges with a handful of drywall screws they’d found in the prop room to get their attention. Since Cabin 1’s All-Camp Sport & Follies performance—which seemed like an eternity ago now—the three judges had not budged from their seats in the front row, not even when manure and compost rained down on them from the catwalk, not when Tania and Robin turned on each other, not when Inge F. Yancey IV shot them and the girl with beads in her hair. The theater was almost empty now—just the judges, a handful of stagehands keeping watch, and Inge F. Yancey IV.
After he’d issued his orders for the stagehands to kill all the witnesses, it had been pandemonium. The girls had fled, and the stagehands had scattered off in a dozen different directions after them. Some ran into the secret tunnels and hallways that honeycombed the building, while others took to ceilings, storage cupboards, and the light booth.
Inge F. Yancey IV had come down from the stage and sat in a front-row seat. The stone body of the girl with beads in her hair was still there, all alone, but he would not look at it. He dug a fingernail into his seat’s varnished armrest and scratched at it, picking off the finish, a sullen look on his face.
Kadie was beginning to lose hope that they would attract the attention of the judges without also alerting Inge F. Yancey IV to their presence, when Robin sat down next to her in the box. Kadie hadn’t seen her come in. One minute she wasn’t there, then suddenly she was. That was how Robin seemed to make her entrances and exits.
“Just between you and me, the smart money is on running for your lives,” she whispered to Kadie. “What are you still doing here?”
Kadie looked down to make sure Inge F. Yancey IV hadn’t heard them, but he was still scowling at his armrest and pointedly ignoring the girl he’d killed.
“This isn’t over,” Kadie said.
“You’re waiting around for them to kill you then?”
“No, we’re trying to get their attention,” Dora whispered, discreetly pointing down at the judges in the front row.
Cressida tossed a screw that landed a few inches from the judges’ feet, but they didn’t stir.
“The judges are neutral,” Robin whispered.
“Maybe it’s time someone asked them to pick a side,” Dora said.
A strange look passed over Robin’s face as she reached her hand into the paper bag of drywall screws and plucked one out. She tossed it over the railing and it struck the judge in the black tailored suit and veiled hat on the nose.
“Of the three, I’ve always liked her the least,” Robin muttered.
The judge touched her hand to her face and, at last, looked up. Kadie snaked a hand over the railing and motioned for the judges to come up. The judge with the veiled hat leaned over and whispered something to her colleagues, and then one by one, they rose from their seats and filed out of the theater as silently as they’d entered it. If Inge F. Yancey IV noticed, he did not care.
A moment later, the girls from Cabin 1 and Robin met them in the stairwell leading up to the box seats.
“You have something we need,” Kadie said, by way of a greeting.
The girls of Cabin 2 had been on the run from the stagehands since the beginning. They recognized their traps and knew how to avoid them. The sticklike goth girl and the girl with thousands of freckles had already faced far more terrifying creatures. Likewise, the gritty, wily, and battle-scarred girls of Cabin 5 were not afraid to run interference.
With Wallis’s help, they lured the stagehands with their kill orders from Inge F. Yancey IV across catwalks, down hallways, through secret tunnels, and far away from what the other cabins were doing.
Wallis told the girls from Cabin 4 where Tania was hiding, and they had no trouble locating the cramped storage cupboard behind a wardrobe in the costumes room. Verity swallowed down her anger as she led Addison, Annika, Alix, and Amber into the cupboard. Tania seemed almost pitiful now that she was cornered, weakened, and alone in the dark, but it didn’t change what she’d done to Erin and Addison and the rest of them.
It felt obscene to be standing before this despicable being, asking her to do the very thing she found so despicable. Verity didn’t want to work with Tania, didn’t want to be her ally, even for a few minutes. But when Wallis explained how the story had to end, she knew it was the only way, and when Wallis said she should be the one to ask, Verity knew she was right.
Because of what Erin had told her, Verity understood better than any of the other girls at Camp So-and-So how Tania split people in half, kept half of them at Camp So-and-So and sent the other half back into the world, both the same and not the same as they’d been before. She understood it better than Cressida, who’d lost her best friend to the process, better than Addison, to whom it had actually happened.
She’d seen the tears on Erin’s cheeks when she’d explained how lost and lonely and estranged she felt from herself now that there were two of her. She’d observed the little changes in Erin’s personality, in her smile, in the way she kissed, once she’d been made whole again.
Verity explained to Tania that when she did this to Inge F. Yancey IV, the proportions needed to be significantly different.
When she divided his soul in two, one of them needed to be the sullen, awkward, overlooked boy who’d come to Camp So-and-So twelve years ago, the one who knew himself to be a fraud and a disappointment.
And the other one should be the arrogant, venal man he’d grown into, only with none of the childhood resentments and setbacks spurring him on to ruthlessness.
Verity was not sure there was much good in Inge F. Yancey IV, but even so, it seemed possible that he could be made less dangerous, that his wickedness could be diluted if it was divided.
Tania listened thoughtfully as Verity explained the plan, mindful that she was surrounded by five girls, all of whom disliked her intensely and looked as though they’d rather spit in her face than ask for her help.
“It’ll never work,” Tania said when Verity was done.
Verity understood why she doubted.
Erin had picked up a book of stamps, Addison had taken a button, and Verity knew that Inge F. Yancey IV would never take anything that he knew had come from this place.
“It’ll work,” Verity said. “Wallis thought of that part, too.”
In evil times when darkness threatens day,
One soul among you must hold it at bay.
Inge F. Yancey IV sat in one of the less-soiled theater seats looking ill at ease.
The girl with beads in her hair had known that she would have to face him alone in the end. She just hadn’t imagined that it would happen like this.
But know that you will lose before it’s done.
First five, then four, then three, then two, then one.
She felt like she was suffocating in the raven’s body, like it was squeezing in on her from every side. She wanted to sit beside her stone body—a body she hadn’t particularly appreciated or thought much about when it was still hers—and weep for what she’d lost.
But that was not what she was here to do.
She walked awkwardly across the stage until she reached the stone figure and hopped up onto its folded hands. She was still herself, and looking into a face that was brave and strong and had faced even the worst thing with open eyes made her feel less alone when she opened her beak and spoke from the throat she was still getting used to.
“Mr. Yancey?” she said.
“Who are you?” he asked, looking up from the tops of his knees.
“I’m the girl who died,” she said. The girl you killed, she thought to herself, though she managed to keep her voice neutral.
“Oh,” he said. “Not so dead after all, I guess.”
The girl with beads in her hair narrowed her eyes. She waited for him to summon his gang of stagehands to finish her off, ready to fly up into the rafters if she had to, but Inge F. Yancey only looked over his shoulder, then the other.
When he saw that they were alone, he asked, “Why did you step in front of that bullet? That was a stupid thing to do.”
“Probably,” said the girl with beads in her hair.
“There’s nothing I can do about it, if that’s why you’re still here,” he said.
“That’s not why I’m here,” she said. She had no trouble imagining the petulant, sulky child he must have been not so long ago. “I’m here to tell you that you won.”
Inge F. Yancey IV chuckled bitterly. “And they sent you to make the concession speech? I don’t need you to tell me I’ve won.”
“No one wants to die, Mr. Yancey,” the girl with beads in her hair said. “You don’t have Tania, and we do. We’re prepared to hand her over to you. You call off the stagehands and let us go, we give you Tania, you close the camp, and no one will ever say anything about what happened here.”
Inge F. Yancey IV got up from his seat, cracked his knuckles, and approached the stage, looking like he was about to negotiate with a room full of executives instead of a raven.
“People make a lot of promises they can’t keep when they’re afraid,” he said. “It happens in business all the time. What happens six months from now when your friends are safe at home? What kinds of stories will they feel like telling then?”
The girl with beads in her hair held her ground as he drew nearer, and when she answered, there was steel in her voice.
“We keep our mouths shut because nobody would ever believe us,” she said. “You get everything you want, and the camp gets shut down, so we get something we want, too. And Tania loses everything.”
“What about you? Won’t you still be a raven?”
“I said we got something we wanted, not everything we wanted,” said the girl, looking longingly at her strong, muscled stone arms, at the strands of beads that hung from the ends of her stone braids, before adding, “But then again, why should we? We didn’t win.”
At those words, the three judges came onstage wheeling the All-Camp Sport & Follies trophy behind them. The original trophy had been a champion’s cup, tall and gold with spindly, ornate handles, but with Robin’s assistance, they had drastically altered its appearance.
“What do you say?” asked the girl with beads in her hair. “Do we have a deal?”
Inge F. Yancey IV did not answer. First, he stared. Then, his eyes danced and a pure, childlike smile broke out on his face as he scrambled up from the orchestra pit and raced across the stage to get a better look at the trophy.
It bore a striking resemblance to the design of his treehouse—not the one he and his cabinmates had actually built, but the one that had existed in his mind and occupied a good-sized portion of his daydreaming life for years now. It was all there, from the grand staircase that wound around the trunk to the individual pods connected by rope ladders, seven feet tall and wrought in gold.
The girl with beads in her hair scarcely dared to breathe as she watched him. He circled the trophy, his eyes following the staircase up to the grand entrance hall, and then on each tier that followed, baubles that looked light as soap bubbles but strong as diamonds. He could imagine where the trophy would sit in his office. It was so large, so perfectly rendered, he could almost imagine himself reclining in the pod he’d designed for himself when he was a boy. He knew he would never tire of looking at it.
It was his at last.
He reached up and laid his hand on the trophy, marveling that this thing he’d desired and dreamed about should at last be his.
He can have it, thought the girl with beads in her hair as the spotlight went dark and the doors slammed shut, and from the wings and the ceiling and the trap doors beneath the stage, Inge F. Yancey IV was surrounded.
CABINS
5, 4, 3, 2, AND 1
SURVIVORS, SOUL MATES, HEROES, KILLERS, & WINNERS
[SCENE: The soon-to-be-renamed Inge F. Yancey Young Executives Leadership Camp]
Banishing the stagehands was the first thing Tania did after the camp had been legally disbanded. Some of them she’d sent into the mountains in the north, some to the forests in the east, while some drifted down the long, unnecessarily winding road and into cities. And some of the more mutinous ones did not leave Camp So-and-So at all, not that anyone ever saw them again.
After locating the original contract and charter in the camp director’s abandoned office, Tania and the girls sat down with the more pliable of the two Inge F. Yancey IVs and dissolved it.
As for Inge F. Yancey IV, the one they decided to send back into the world was cruel and ruthless as ever. However, he was too unimaginative to entertain the notion of supernatural help, and too arrogant to have accepted it, even if he believed it was real. He managed his corporate empire without the aid of Tania’s stagehands, and none of his philanthropic notions ever involved the endowment of a summer camp.
However, the end of Yancey Corp.’s entanglements with the supernatural would mark the beginning of a long, slow, expensive collapse. Inge F. Yancey IV remained convinced of his own brilliance and blamed the company’s failures and missteps on the economy, the president, and other inconveniences he’d surely surmount. His rivals in the business world saw it differently and whispered amongst themselves that Inge F. Yancey IV had lost his edge, his sparkle, that untouchable air he’d had about him.
Now they spied weakness and quietly made plans to capture his empire, one piece at a time.
The Inge F. Yancey that would stay behind at Camp So-and-So was sniveling and spiteful, and seemed capable of holding grudges the way that pearl divers held their breath. However, all he wanted to do was draw and build things, and Tania said that he was welcome to stay here and draw and build to his heart’s content. She did not mention that he would not be permitted to leave, but hoped it would be some time before that topic of conversation was broached.
Before any of that happened, though, there were other complications to be sorted out.
When Renata had been evicted from the raven’s body, her spirit had gone hurtling across Lake So
-and-So. The next thing she knew, she was staring down at her body—the old one, the human one. She lifted her hand and ran her fingers over her lank hair, the bumps and imperfections of her complexion, her whole ordinary, disappointing body.
This wasn’t what she’d wanted. At first, she cursed herself for not making her intentions clearer when she’d called out to Robin and asked her to work the magic that would save her friend’s life. The way it had played out in her imagination, the girl with beads in her hair would happily inhabit Renata’s human body, and Renata would go on happily inhabiting the raven. It made so much sense at the time, until she realized that the only person who would be made happy by that scenario was herself.
Inge F. Yancey IV had shot her friend in the hand. Her body had turned to stone, and Renata realized that she’d been naïve to think there was a way to salvage happiness from a thing like that.
“Where is she?” Renata asked, tucking her black hair behind her ears and pushing the bangs out of her eyes.
Wallis showed her on the screens, and together with Shea, the girl with the upturned nose, and Eurydice Horne, they watched as the girl with beads in her hair hopped across the stage, still awkward in the raven’s body, and convinced Inge F. Yancey IV to take the trophy.
Renata thought about her friend stuck in the raven’s body and felt her eyes fill up with tears. Would it have been better if she hadn’t done anything? The girl with beads in her hair had never asked for this. Renata had stepped in and made a choice for her, and now, this was the life she was stuck with. There’d been time. She could have at least asked her what she wanted.
Golden light poured from the trophy as Inge F. Yancey IV wrapped his arms around it, and even though they all knew it was coming, they gasped when, suddenly, there were two of him standing on the stage.
There was something else on Renata’s mind, though.
“Does she hate me?” she asked Wallis, her voice quavering.
Wallis had no idea what the girl with beads in her hair felt in that moment. The screens weren’t magic like that. Some feelings were so big and scary and complicated that all the storyteller could do was guess at them.
