The Apprentices

by Mailie Meloy

  Opal looked back at him. “Where are you from?”

  “Mars,” he said.

  “Ha. You came all this way to find Janie?”

  “In a spaceship, it’s right quick.”

  “Did someone ask you to come?”

  “What, I need an invitation? It’s just a poxy school dance. Listen, I heard you two had a fight.”

  “Not really.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She didn’t really go home, did she?”

  Opal blushed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You know where she is!”

  “How dare you accuse me!” She glared fiercely at him, and he knew he was right. No one got mad like that unless they were hiding something.

  Then a shadow fell across Pip’s face, blocking the blue lights, and an enormous body loomed beside them. Pip looked up at the towering boy, who held two cups of punch in his oversized fists. “What’s going on?” the monster asked.

  “He’s bothering me,” Opal said.

  The creature handed both cups to her and grabbed Pip’s collar, but the boy in the brown suit yanked Pip out of his grasp. “Dance committee!” Tadpole said. “No fighting!”

  “She knows where Janie is!” Pip said, struggling.

  “I do not!” Opal cried.

  “No ticket, no entry!” Tadpole said, with a forced cheerfulness, dragging Pip toward the gym doors.

  Pip tried to twist free. “Let me go! I’ll buy a ticket!”

  Tadpole shoved him out into the cold night air. “You moron! You idiot! That guy could twist your head off.”

  “But she knows where Janie is!”

  “So what? They’re roommates!” Tadpole was breathing hard from the struggle.

  “But Janie’s in trouble!” Pip said.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “That girl knows!”

  “Well, you can’t just pick a fight with her and her gargoyle date. That’s really dumb, you know?”

  “You got a better idea?”

  They stood glaring at each other in silence. Inside the gym, the bandleader was singing in his saccharine croon, “Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, if you’re young at heart.”

  “How long’ll that thing go on?” Pip asked.

  “The dance? Couple of hours.”

  “Where do Janie and that girl live?”

  “Carleton Hall,” Tadpole said, still winded.

  “Show me their room,” Pip said.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Game of Murder

  By the fireplace in the empty house, Jin Lo broke two eggs into a pot. She had no card from the Party to collect rations, but the cat had led her to a nearby chicken coop, under cover of night. She had spoken quietly to the watchdog, who let her pass, and to the hens, who clucked to themselves but allowed her to gather a handful of warm, fresh eggs. The woman who lived next door had brought her some rice, and Jin Lo cooked that, too. The cat was right that she had to eat. Her wrists looked scrawny as she stirred the pot. She squatted by the fire because she’d lost what cushioning she’d had beneath her bones, and it hurt to sit.

  On the other side of the fire was another pot, simmering gently. It wasn’t food. There was something she was waiting for: a smell that would tell her it was ready. She couldn’t describe the smell to the cat, because she didn’t know what it was yet, but she would know it when it came.

  She picked up her chopsticks and realized she was ravenous. She forced herself to eat slowly, and gave a piece of egg to the cat, who mewed in thanks. Soon her stomach was painfully full, and she set aside the rest of the food for later.

  She had found a small shard of mirrored glass on her walk to the chicken coop, and she studied herself in its narrow reflection. Her black hair was stringy and unwashed. Her eyes were sunken and dull. She went to the neighbor, who led her silently to a bath. Dirt came off Jin Lo’s body in gray sheets, and she had to scrub the bathtub when she was finished. Her hair felt lighter, as if she had halved its weight by washing it. The neighbor brought her a tunic and a pair of pants, and took away her clothes to wash them.

  Jin Lo was startled by the woman’s kindness. But of course the neighbor had been kind from the beginning. Jin Lo just hadn’t gotten around to recognizing it and pointing it out to herself. She had so seldom felt kindness—she didn’t let it through her hard shell to warm her.

  But there had been times with Marcus Burrows and his son when she had felt warmth. The girl, Janie, had wiped the Oil of Mnemosyne from Jin Lo’s wrists when it had given her such terrible memories. The boy, Pip, had brought them hot rolls in a paper bag for breakfast. The men on the Anniken had cheered Jin Lo for catching fish from the boat, and the old cook had brought the first fish off the grill to her.

  And at Count Vili’s house in Luxembourg, where she had rested with Marcus Burrows and his son, they had sat by the fire roasting chestnuts and playing a game in which one person was the detective and one was secretly the murderer, and the suspects made up stories about where they had been at the time of the crime. Count Vili was the best at the game, telling long tales about seeing an arm dripping with blood, hanging out of the dumbwaiter. He said he had seen Jin Lo washing something red off her hands in the pool.

  “Red frosting,” Jin Lo said, because she was not the murderer. “From cake.”

  “There was cake?” Count Vili said. “And no one saved me a piece?”

  “Benjamin made it,” Jin Lo said.

  “Benjamin bakes?” Vili asked.

  “Badly,” Benjamin admitted.

  “Perhaps this was the murder weapon,” Vili said.

  “Poison?” Marcus Burrows, the detective, asked.

  “Eggshell,” Vili said. “Left in the batter. Gets caught in the esophagus.” He drew a fat finger across his throat. “No more birthdays, no more cakes.”

  They went on like that for hours, making things up, casting doubt on each other, becoming sillier. It was the first time Jin Lo had ever seen Marcus Burrows laugh. Benjamin, wrapped in a blanket near the hearth, laughed so hard he could hardly breathe. Count Vili grinned to himself, peeling hot chestnuts.

  That seemed very long ago now. Vili had returned to Luxembourg in disgust after the Japanese fisherman died from the radioactive ash. And Marcus Burrows had become distracted, treating casualties of skirmishes in the jungle. Jin Lo had helped him as long as she could stand it.

  “You heal these men and they fight again,” she had told him, the night she left.

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  “What about your plan?”

  “My primary duty is to heal sickness,” he said, touching his left eye to keep it from twitching. “You may go if you wish. This is my plan, for now.”

  In the end, she didn’t know why she had left Vietnam. It might have been because she couldn’t bear to see, any longer, what human beings were capable of doing to each other. The shrapnel, the bullet wounds, the blood. She had been drawn toward home.

  The cat, curled by the fire, sat up and mewed. Jin Lo gave the green concoction a stir. The smell was the one she’d been waiting for—it still had the fecund stink of undergrowth, but it also had a sharp edge, as if it were just about to burn. She snatched the pot from the fire. Then she uncorked the vial of Quintessence and tapped in three drops. It sizzled and smoked, and let off that glorious smell, the smell of life. It brought back, unbidden, the smell of her baby brother’s skin. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she blinked at the blurry pot. Then she stirred the simmering mixture, and the sweet smell was swallowed up in the smoky green funk.

  She wrapped her hand in her long sleeve, picked up the pot by its wire handle, and carried it outside, the cat dancing at her heels. She tilted the pot to drizzle its contents into the flower beds of dead weeds along the front of the house, then along the side closest to the kind neighbor. She looked up and saw the neighbor watching her through a window, and waved.

 
Then Jin Lo rounded the back of the house, where her mother had kept a small kitchen garden of leeks and onions and leafy green vegetables. It was all dusty weeds now. She fed the green stuff from the pot to the empty garden, then to the beds on the other side of the house, then to the beds along the front gate where the soldiers had come into the yard.

  She went inside the house and gathered her few possessions, tying them up in a handkerchief. The cat followed nervously.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “We have a little time.”

  They went outside and Jin Lo sat cross-legged on the ground, just beyond the gate. The cat climbed into her lap.

  Green shoots first emerged from the winter soil along the front of the house. They unfurled their bright clusters of leaves and grew taller. The ones near the wall of the house climbed up it, twisting around each other for strength, reaching the window and running along the sill, then up the frame. The ones near the front path grew out in all directions like a carpet, covering the small yard. Vines grew across the door, weaving a lattice that was instantly obscured by waxy leaves. Moss climbed up from the ground over the peeling paint, making the walls furry and vibrantly green. The low fence around the house became a hedge. Long-dead bamboo shot up through the thick green web, spearing the eaves of the house as if it would simply push through the roof toward the sky. Then it did push through, with a creak and crack of dry wood.

  A green branch broke through a window with a bright crash, and snaked inside the house. A vine reached the roof, coiling tightly around the chimney.

  Jin Lo watched. The cat mewed.

  A branch came out through the chimney from inside. Long-dead sweet peas wrapped around the walls from the kitchen garden in the back. The house was being swallowed whole. It still had the shape of a house, with a chimney and windows, but the corners were softening. It would soon be a green mound.

  And then she saw it: A shimmering shape escaped from the chimney. It was small, no larger than a fat one-year-old baby, and it danced and dissipated in the air. It vanished like smoke, but it wasn’t smoke.

  Then there was a larger figure, as tall as a man and shaking with laughter until it broke apart into the air. Then a lithe and feminine shimmer hung a moment in the air, before a breeze took it away. And finally a stout female shape that Jin Lo thought must be the brave Mrs. Hsu seemed to burst into freedom with relief. It vanished against the white sky.

  Then there was nothing. The only sound was of the vines squeezing through cracks and wrapping around outcroppings, and the rustle of leaves. The house was gone, and could no longer be haunted. It had been seventeen years since Jin Lo had hidden in the trunk. She might have made a cake with her eggs, if she had not eaten them.

  “No more birthdays, no more cakes,” she heard Count Vili say.

  Her family was free.

  CHAPTER 25

  Breaking and Entering

  The girls’ dormitory was silent and empty as Pip and Tadpole crept up the stairs. The leather soles of Tadpole’s shoes slapped on each wooden step. “You doing a tap dance?” Pip hissed back at him.

  “I can’t help it!” Tadpole whispered.

  “Put your foot down soft, that’s all!”

  Tadpole managed to lower the volume of his footsteps, but he still wasn’t silent.

  “I should’ve left you at the dance,” Pip whispered.

  “And found the building how?”

  “Shh! Listen!”

  They stopped, but if there had been a sound, it had vanished. The building seemed to be empty. They kept on, and Tadpole stopped outside a door on the second floor.

  “How do you know this is theirs?” Pip asked.

  “Every guy on campus knows which room is Opal’s,” Tadpole whispered. “Not that they’ve been inside it or anything. It’s just, you know, a landmark.” He tried to turn the doorknob. “It’s locked, of course.”

  Pip had two thin metal rods in his pocket, one with a hooked end, just for such occasions. He was out of practice, and his fingers felt stubby and clumsy as he slid the first wire into the lock. But it was good to be back, sneaking about in the dark. He felt the satisfying clicks inside the mechanism as he maneuvered the hook. Was there a better feeling in the world? He wasn’t sure.

  He turned the knob and it gave easily. Access. That was all he’d ever wanted. Robin Hood had given him fame and Sarah Pennington, but it had taken away such deeply pleasurable moments as this.

  The room was dim, but there was enough light from outside to reveal that it was a girls’ room, long and narrow. It smelled of flowery perfume. There was a patterned carpet on the floor, and two beds along the long walls, one slept-in and one tightly made up.

  Against the far wall were two wooden desks. One had books and papers spread across the surface. A puffy white dress had been tossed over the chair. The other desk was empty and bare.

  Pip went to the messy desk. There was a pair of heavy black eyeglasses on the papers, and he looked through them. They seemed to be clear glass, no correction. He picked up a piece of paper and looked at it in the light from the window. It was math problems, with most of the answers marked wrong. At the top, it said Please see me.

  Tadpole whispered, “This is making me nervous. I think we should go.”

  “Shh,” Pip said.

  “Seriously,” Tadpole said. “I could get expelled.”

  “Quiet!”

  Pip felt the underside of the desk for anything taped there, but found only the rough, unfinished wood. He checked the drawers and found pens and pencils, ink and erasers and scissors. There was a box of white letter paper embossed at the top with a golden dragon in the shape of a circle.

  When he turned, he saw Tadpole dreamily touching the bodice of the puffy white dress. “Something sewn in the seams?” he asked.

  Tadpole snatched his hands back guiltily. “Let’s go.”

  “Not yet.”

  Pip felt under the pillow and mattress of both beds, but without much hope. Janie was clearly gone, and Opal didn’t seem like the type to keep a diary. On her bureau was a picture of a girl, probably Opal, doing a split upside down on a horse. That was impressive. Pip pulled open the top drawer and found soft cotton and silky things, but nothing hidden beneath them.

  The next drawer was full of sweaters. Pip’s hands were plunged deep in fuzzy softness when he heard footsteps on the stairs. He pushed the drawer closed, grabbed the terrified Tadpole, and pulled him into the closet. They pushed past the hanging dresses to squeeze into the darkest, farthest corner. Pip reached up to quiet the clacking wooden hangers just as the door opened and light footsteps came into the room.

  There was a short silence and then another noise Pip couldn’t identify. Was there an animal in the room? Did Opal have a cold? Then he realized: She was crying. The strange noise was her half-muffled, choking sobs.

  Pip listened for a minute, and when the crying didn’t stop, he started to push out of the closet, past the dresses.

  “No!” Tadpole whispered, grabbing his shoulder.

  Pip shook his hand off. “Stay here,” he whispered. He stepped out into the room.

  “Opal?” he said.

  She was sitting at her desk with her face in her hands, and she turned to look at him. “What are you doing here?” she asked, through tears. Was she a little tipsy? Were those cups of punch spiked, the ones the gargoyle had brought?

  “Looking for you,” he said.

  Opal laughed, but it sounded more like a sob. “No one cares about me.”

  “Sure they do.” He wondered where her enormous date was. Far away, he hoped.

  Opal sniffed and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “No,” she said. “My father thinks I’m stupid.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “He really does.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  She grew silent and very still. Even the sniffing stopped. Her eyes went to the math paper on her desk. “I called him tonight,” she said.

  �
��What did he say?”

  “Nothing. He’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  She rubbed her nose again. “I think he went to the island.”

  “What island?”

  “My mother’s island. I think he took your friend.”

  “To an island?”

  She nodded. “He thinks Janie’s smart.” Her voice broke again.

  Pip pulled his chair closer and sat facing Opal. He gave her the clean handkerchief from his jacket pocket. “You’ve got to tell me what you know.”

  Opal clutched the handkerchief. “He wishes he had a daughter like Janie.”

  “So he just took her?”

  Opal nodded and wiped her eyes. “He needed help with her experiment.”

  “Slow down,” Pip said. “Pretend I know nothing. What experiment?”

  “The one she was working on. Taking salt out of salt water.”

  “So he took her to an island?”

  Opal nodded.

  “And the island is where?”

  “In Malaya.”

  “Ma-what?”

  “In Southeast Asia. My grandfather is a Malay sultan. My father has a mine on an island there. He got the island when he married my mother, but he keeps it secret.”

  “Is it a gold mine?”

  Opal shrugged. “How would I know? I’m stupid.” Her eyes were shiny and wet, her small nose was red, and her hair spilled over her pretty shoulders. She really was a staggeringly lovely girl.

  “I don’t think you’re stupid,” Pip said.

  She laughed: an appealing little snort. “You don’t know me.”

  “I have evidence,” he said. He fluffed the puffy dress hanging on the chair. “First, you chose that stunner of a dress over this one, which would’ve made you look like a marshmallow.”

  She smiled a little.

  “Second,” he said, “you ditched that big dozy pillock from the dance.”

  “I didn’t ditch him,” Opal said.

  “No?”