Inside the Shadow City

by Kirsten Miller

  She paused as if expecting an answer, and I desperately wanted to respond. I searched for something witty to say, but with so many eyes trained in my direction, my brain was barren. Instead, I stood there mutely. It wasn’t my finest moment.

  “Oh well,” the Princess continued. “Keep your fashion secrets to yourself. Listen, there’s something we want to talk to you about. We’ve been keeping an eye on you lately, and well, we think you’re damaging our school’s reputation. I mean, really, squid girl, when are you going to go on a diet? Don’t you know that fatties like you make the rest of us look bad?”

  As Sidonia hurled her best insults at me, I noticed Kiki Strike standing at the edge of the crowd. It was the first time I had seen her in days. Unlike the other girls, who appeared riveted by the spectacle—some watching with amusement, others in sheer horror—Kiki paid no attention as she calmly jotted something down in her little black notebook. She glanced up at me briefly as she ripped the page out and folded it neatly. I saw Kiki hand the note to one of The Five, whisper in her ear, and disappear into the crowd.

  The note was quickly passed to Sidonia, her friend practically drooling with excitement.

  “Someone just gave this to me. She said it’s some juicy information about Squidie here.”

  Sidonia hastily unfolded the note and held it up for both of us to read. “Let’s take a look, shall we?”

  Written on the page were three terse sentences.

  You’re wasting your time. She’s not the one you’re after.

  Have a look in your best friend’s handbag.

  Sidonia’s jaw dropped and her precious dimples fled. Her professionally manicured hand crumpled the note into a tight ball.

  “Who wrote this?” she shrieked.

  “That girl over there,” stammered her frightened friend, pointing to an empty spot in the crowd. The sea of girls parted to avoid the finger. “I mean. She was there. She gave that to me.”

  “Who was there?” demanded Sidonia.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Are you blind and stupid? What did she look like?”

  “I didn’t get a good look at her, Sidonia, but I think she might have been really short.”

  “Just shut up. You’re completely worthless,” snarled the Princess as she pushed the girl aside. “Naomi! Get over here now!”

  The Princess snatched Naomi’s handbag and dumped everything inside it onto the grass. She spread the contents around with her foot, and then bent down to pick up a coin purse. There, inside, was the pink diamond ring.

  “I—I have no idea how it got there, Sidonia,” stammered Naomi, a hot red flush spreading across her entire body. “That weird-looking girl must have slipped it into my bag.”

  The Princess’s eyes narrowed, and she spoke in a carefully controlled voice. “What do you mean, ‘weird-looking’?”

  “She’s got white hair, and she’s as pale as a ghost. I think I’ve seen her before. She’s really creepy.”

  “Let’s go,” Sidonia said, jerking Naomi roughly by the arm. “I’m not done with you yet!” she stopped to shout in my face before forcing her way through the crowd to a silver Bentley that was waiting for her outside the school gates.

  After the Princess’s departure, the crowd splintered into a dozen little groups as girls turned to their friends to marvel over what had happened. Thankfully, I was no longer the main attraction—everyone was taking guesses at the contents of the note and the identity of its mysterious author. I passed through the chattering mob and made my way to the safety of the street. I walked for blocks before I could think clearly. All I knew was that something miraculous had happened—and that Kiki Strike was responsible.

  • • •

  Night fell long before I reached Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a few blocks north of my home. True darkness is rare in Manhattan, which at night remains in a state of permanent twilight. But set back from the street, away from the lights of passing cars, the cathedral squatted in the shadow of a massive wall that circled both the church and its graveyard. The entire block had the appearance of a medieval fortress, its upper reaches barely visible against the starless sky.

  Whenever I passed by on my way home from school, the gates of the cathedral were always locked, allowing only a tantalizing glimpse of a cemetery teeming with moss-covered tombstones and marble monuments to the dead. As usual, I slowed my stride, and tried to peer through the gloom. What looked like a ghostly face peeked out from behind a tall tree just to the left of the entrance. I almost shrieked and started to run, but it only took a few steps before my curiosity conquered my fear of the dark. I turned back toward the church, trying to convince myself that I hadn’t seen anything that couldn’t be explained by an eighth-grade science book.

  The gates opened at my halfhearted touch. As I approached the tree, I was unnerved to see the face reappear, sporting a very unholy grin.

  “Hello,” it said, and I jumped backward, stumbling over a tiny gravestone. The face laughed, and I realized it was attached to a small girl, her hair tucked beneath the hood of a black jacket. “A little late for church, aren’t you?” asked Kiki Strike, stepping out from behind the tree and pulling back her hood.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked stupidly.

  “Waiting for you.”

  “Oh,” I responded, finding it difficult to concentrate. I couldn’t help thinking that she didn’t look quite real. Up close, her skin was too pale, and her features too carefully crafted. She was, at the same time, both very pretty and extremely odd-looking. I asked the only question that popped into my head. “Why did you steal the ring?”

  Kiki raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t you learn anything today? It’s not polite to accuse people of crimes they didn’t commit.”

  “So it was true about Naomi?”

  “Of course it was. When a story’s that good it’s got to be true.”

  “But how did you know that the ring was in Naomi’s handbag?”

  “I know a lot of things,” Kiki said matter-of-factly.

  “About The Five?”

  “Among others,” she replied in a slightly taunting tone.

  “What are you getting at?” I demanded. “Are you saying you know something about me?”

  For a moment she was quiet. Her pale eyes wandered across my face as if she were searching for something she’d seen before.

  “Let’s see. I know you’re short on friends. I also know you’re a little strange. And I figure you must be pretty bored, or you wouldn’t have spent so much time following me around. But I know a few other things that make me think you might be very interesting.”

  I couldn’t tell whether I should be frightened or flattered. No one had ever found me interesting before.

  “Is that good or bad?” I asked.

  “That, Miss Fishbein, is entirely up to you.”

  She handed me a slip of paper and then headed for the street, leaving me in front of the empty church, still thinking of all the questions I should have asked.

  Halfway to the gates, Kiki turned and waved good-bye, her hand cupped in a familiar fashion. As far as I knew, only a small group of people shared the same style of wave. And since I was fairly sure that Kiki Strike wasn’t a member of the British royal family, there was only one conclusion to reach. The shock hit me like a thundering wildebeest. Kiki Strike was the creature that had crawled out of the hole in front of my house. I wasn’t the only person who had seen the Shadow City. She had gotten there first. For a moment, it seemed as if everything I had worked for had been stolen from me. Then I looked down at the piece of paper I was holding. Café des Amis, Saturday, 09:00, it said. I had been invited to breakfast.

  • • •

  Kiki Strike sat at a small outside table with the gossip section of the New York Post spread out in front of her. An enormous bowl of café au lait held the paper in place as a cold April breeze tried to blow it into the street. A green felt beret sat atop her he
ad at a cocky tilt, and the starched collar of a khaki uniform peeked over the paper.

  “You’re late,” she snapped as I approached, not bothering to look up. “If you’re going to work with me, you’ll have to learn to be on time.”

  “Who said we were going to be working together?” I shot back.

  “How else do you expect to find the Shadow City?” she asked nonchalantly, licking her finger to turn a page.

  “You’ve found another entrance, haven’t you?”

  Kiki looked up, her eyes glistening dangerously, like icebergs at sunset.

  “We’ve got a lot to do today,” she said, ignoring the question and standing up. She was wearing a Girl Scout uniform, complete with a sash covered entirely—front and back—with badges.

  “You’re a Girl Scout?” I scoffed. “Shouldn’t you have outgrown that sort of thing by now?”

  “Maybe, but the Marines wouldn’t take me.” She tossed a bag over the table to me. “Guess what,” she said. “Today you’re a Girl Scout, too. We’re going incognito.”

  “No way. I have to wear one of those?” Two years earlier, I had left the Girl Scouts in disgrace after sharing an illustrated edition of A Man’s Body with my fellow troops. I had hoped to never see another Girl Scout uniform as long as I lived.

  Kiki glared at me. “You’ll wear it if you’re coming with me,” she said.

  Ten minutes later, I emerged from the bathroom of the café wearing a polyester uniform that rubbed uncomfortably in all the wrong places. A waitress smiled down at me.

  “Aren’t you just the cutest! I was a Girl Scout, too, when I was little.”

  “I’m not in the Girl Scouts, I’m undercover,” I snarled back at her.

  “Oh, isn’t that just perfect!” She beamed. I resisted the urge to give her a good kick and stomped out to the street, where Kiki was waiting. She looked me over and straightened my collar.

  “Not bad.” She grinned. “You look good in a uniform, but we’re going to have to work on your posture.”

  • • •

  Our first stop was a Girl Scout meeting in the basement of a ramshackle church in Morningside Heights, its ancient steeple leaning ominously toward a row of little houses across the street. In the basement, which smelled of mold and mothballs, the meeting had already begun. An unremarkable group of girls sat Indian-style in a circle on the cold, concrete floor. A couple of them shifted to make room for us.

  “You’re just in time, Kiki,” said a plump, pleasant-looking woman dressed in an ill-fitting Scout leader uniform. “Luz Lopez is just about to share her latest project with us. Let’s all give her a hand.”

  The Girl Scouts clapped obediently, and a sullen girl with long curly hair pulled back tightly from her face rose from their midst. She walked briskly to the front of the room and stopped in front of a table covered with a tattered sheet. With an unexpected flourish, she snapped the sheet from the table, revealing a small electronic device. Speaking quickly but carefully, the girl addressed the crowd.

  “The invention you see has been put to the test and has proven highly successful in the field. My mother keeps a small patch of flowers in front of our building. For the last few months, someone has been wrecking her garden. Personally, I couldn’t care less about plants, but my mother was very upset. The evidence speaks for itself, I think.”

  Luz retrieved a handful of Polaroids from the pocket of her uniform and passed them out to the group. Each picture showed a different view of the sad remains of a little garden. Mangled tulips were strewn across the sidewalk, their bulbs squashed into pulp. Dozens of dainty, brightly colored pansies lay dying on the windshields of nearby cars, and a clump of sweet peas dangled from the limb of a tree.

  “I always suspected Mrs. Gonzalez, one of our neighbors. She’s never liked my mother, and she’s always saying rude things to my sisters. But I didn’t have any proof, and my mother was too polite to accuse Mrs. Gonzalez. I tried staking out the garden, but the damage appeared to occur in the hours after my curfew, and my mother wouldn’t let me stay outside to watch.

  “That’s when I had my stroke of genius. I found an old baby monitor in the trash outside my building, and with a few adjustments, I was able to convert it into the apparatus you see before you—a short-range bugging device.”

  Luz picked up the baby monitor and held it up for everyone to see.

  “Mrs. Gonzalez likes to talk—a lot. From what I had observed, when she wasn’t destroying other people’s gardens, she was usually sitting on her big butt in her kitchen, gossiping with her friends. I knew that if I could hide my bug inside her kitchen, I’d hear her bragging about what she’d done to my mother’s flowers.

  “So I started hanging around with Mrs. Gonzalez’s daughter, Rosie. Nobody else will talk to her since she always got her fingers in her nose. After a few days, I invited myself over to Rosie’s house for some arroz con leche. While I was there, I planted my device under her kitchen sink. Then all I had to do was tune my scanner to the right frequency and wait for Mrs. Gonzalez to confess her crimes.”

  “Luz!” the horrified Scout leader broke in. “You can’t bug people’s homes! Are you aware that you’ve committed a felony? The Girl Scouts do not condone illegal activities!”

  “The Girl Scouts,” replied Luz, filled with righteous indignation, “believe in truth, justice, and the American way. Which part of that did I violate? In my opinion, nothing could be less American than destroying other people’s gardens.”

  Kiki leaned over to me.

  “We have our first recruit,” she whispered, reaching into her backpack and pulling out a golden envelope with Luz’s name inscribed on the front.

  “Recruit?” I asked.

  HOW TO KNOW IF SOMEONE’S EAVESDROPPING

  So you think that the very personal conversation you just had with your friend Petunia will always stay between the two of you? How can you be sure that there wasn’t a third person quietly listening in as you spilled your deepest, darkest secrets?

  There are countless ways to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations, and many don’t cost much more than the average taco platter. Fortunately, spying on other people tends to be illegal in most countries. But if your foe is desperate to listen, breaking the law may not be her biggest concern. That doesn’t mean you have to make it easy for her. Learn to be wary of the following tools:

  Stethoscopes

  A devious criminal can use an ordinary stethoscope to listen to conversations through walls and doors. However, unless your enemies happen to be members of the medical community, they may find it difficult to get their hands on one. Unfortunately, a reasonable alternative can be crafted from a funnel (or the top of a plastic soda bottle) and some rubber tubing.

  Voice-Activated Tape Recorders

  The shelves of your local office supply store are stacked high with cheap versions of this low-tech spying device. Some can be as small as a box of matches and are easy to hide in a pocket, a handbag, or a bra.

  Cordless Phones

  Always think twice before spilling your secrets over a cordless phone. If it’s not digital, anyone with a police scanner can listen in. (In fact, many sick individuals stay up-to-date on the latest gossip by eavesdropping on their neighbors’ conversations.)

  Baby Monitors

  Some of the best “bugging” devices available, these cheerful-looking contraptions can be used for evil purposes. If you’re sitting within range, a baby monitor will broadcast whatever you say over the airwaves, where your conversations can be picked up by police scanners or other baby monitors.

  Conference Calling

  Say someone wants to listen in on a conversation between you and a friend. If they have conference (or three-way) calling, they can place a call to your phone and wait for you to answer. Once you say hello, they can simply speed dial your friend’s number. You may both assume that the other person placed the call, and the sneaky third person can sit back and quietly listen to the conversation.
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  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Bank Street Irregulars

  Some people, I’ve found, are almost bursting at the seams with the desire to let you get to know them better. Ask one innocent question, and within ten minutes, you’ll learn that their beloved pet Chihuahua suffers from halitosis, that their grandfather once wrestled an alligator, and that they secretly dream of being a Las Vegas showgirl. As entertaining as these people may be, experience has taught me that those who say the most are often those who know the least. Quiet people keep their secrets to themselves. That’s what makes them interesting—and generally worth the wait.

  I suppose it goes without saying that Kiki Strike was not a talker. In fact, on that first day we spent together, she didn’t say much at all, and I have to admit I was a little surprised. We shared at least one secret that demanded discussion, and I was anxious to hear what she knew about the Shadow City. But although it was clear that Kiki had a plan, she didn’t choose to reveal it. I found myself following silently alongside her as she marched down Amsterdam Avenue, her eyes darting into alleys and doorways as if she were patrolling the street.

  That’s not to say that I didn’t insist on being let in on her plan the minute we left Luz. But Kiki simply arched an eyebrow and broke into a Cheshire Cat–like grin. Have a little patience, she told me, and refused to say another word. In the long silence that followed, I studied my pale companion and realized that I knew nothing about her—apart from the fact that she knew things she had no business knowing. I suspected she was well on her way to becoming truly dangerous, and the only thought that offered any comfort was the thought that I might not be in it alone for long.

  After our encounter with Luz Lopez, we made a brief visit to another Girl Scout meeting, this one held in a dark, wood-paneled classroom on the campus of Columbia University. The blinds were pulled, and the flames of a dozen Bunsen burners lit the room. Surrounding each flame were three or four girls wearing black leather aprons and protective goggles, which lent them the appearance of giant, wingless insects.