Ambassador

by William Alexander

  “Isn’t number twenty-three the one about ghost pirates?” he said to himself. “Or else disappearing family members. That would make more sense.” She probably wrote it to let him know she was over at Frankie’s house, but he knew that already.

  He fixed himself some cereal as a late lunch. This was a sorry meal after the greasy magnificence of his breakfast—the last meal his father had cooked in this kitchen before leaving to run errands, get arrested, and get deported.

  Gabe shut the door on that thought and finished his cereal.

  He heard the plaintive scratching noises of unhappy pets and brought food dishes up to his room. All three pets expressed their unhappiness to him when he got there. Garuda’s complaints were the most subtle. He stood and stared with silent reproach. The fox and the bird were both louder.

  “Sorry, everyone,” said Gabe. He checked his closet for the Envoy and found only an empty aquarium. “The Envoy isn’t here, which means that it’s probably in the basement, which means that the basement might still be filled with hazardous physics. So you all have to stay here.”

  Sir Toby tried to make a break for it anyway when Gabe left the room. Gabe gently nudged the fox back with his toe and shut the door. He hated keeping them confined. He hated the whole idea of confinement.

  Gabe went all the way downstairs to find the Envoy.

  The wire frame in the basement had grown larger and more complicated since that morning. Red sparks constantly exploded from it, and most of those sparks joined a spiraling vortex of dust motes that fell through the dryer’s open door and disappeared there.

  The Envoy scooted around the whole mess, working furiously.

  “Not done yet?” Gabe asked, stating the obvious.

  The Envoy made a mouth.

  “No,” it said. “Not done. And I don’t understand the problem! The black hole should have completely dissipated by now. It should have ejected all the substance it had absorbed already—except for your entangled particles, because we sent those elsewhere. But it hasn’t collapsed. It won’t collapse. Nothing I do will make it collapse. It’s as though something is working against me, deliberately keeping this open. I don’t like that idea.”

  Gabe didn’t like that idea either. “How dangerous is it?”

  “I have it contained to the clothes dryer,” the Envoy said. “The rest of the house should be safe.”

  This wasn’t actually an answer. “Should be?” Gabe pressed.

  “Should be,” said the Envoy. It scooted quickly back and forth. Red sparks flew.

  Gabe sat on the steps to watch warily. “My parents are getting deported,” he said, his voice flat and gray in his own ears.

  The Envoy stopped working, clearly unsure how to respond. “I’m so very sorry!” it said. “Sympathies. Condolences. This is terrible.”

  “I also dreamed about the Embassy this morning,” Gabe went on, his voice still flat and gray.

  “That part is good news,” the Envoy said cautiously. “Though I’m sorry that I’ve been unable to prepare you for your arrival in advance. Protocol does get testy about that.”

  “I noticed,” said Gabe.

  The conversation ended when red sparks burst from every joint of the wire frame at once.

  The Envoy sputtered something in a different language and a different voice. It sounded like creative cursing.

  “We’ll have to talk later,” it said, using Mom’s voice again. “I should focus on my struggle with this appliance to keep it from killing us.”

  Gabe climbed down from the staircase and carefully approached to get a closer look at the misbehaving contraption. Then everything went wrong.

  The dryer imploded. The frame around it collapsed. Sparks appeared and disappeared again, just as quickly.

  The Envoy scrambled away from the chaotic mess. It shouted something, but Gabe couldn’t hear through the sudden rush of air. The Envoy’s mouth reached out like a hand. Gabe took it, and the two of them raced up the basement stairs while the basement behind them ceased to exist.

  Gabe realized that the pets were all upstairs, trapped in his bedroom. Every single one of Dad’s emergency plans demanded a quick exit in case of fire or poltergeist or any other circumstance in which the house itself had become dangerous. They didn’t have an emergency plan for black holes in the basement, but the principle was the same: Get out. Get out now. Let firefighters fight their way into the burning house to rescue pets. Let exorcists fight their way into a haunted house. Get out.

  Gabe hated that rule. He still followed it.

  The Envoy tugged him toward the kitchen door. Gabe let go of its hand-mouth to grab both cane sword and vajra hammer from the table. That was not part of the emergency plan, but they were right there, and grabbing them didn’t slow him down. Then he grabbed his jump bag from the coat hook on the way out. That was part of the plan. He noticed that Lupe’s bag was already gone.

  Gabe and the Envoy made it as far as a tree in the very back of the backyard, beside the fence. The boy braced himself against the far side of that tree. The Envoy wrapped itself around the trunk. Behind them the foundation and first floor of the duplex collapsed in on itself. It did so silently. Air that would have carried sound was sucked into the vortex along with the house. Gabe heard nothing but wind, howling and furious, rushing into the yard to fill up the suddenly empty space.

  The vortex compressed, collapsed, and vanished. The top half of the house fell into the hole where the rest of it used to be. Gabe felt the impact through his feet and legs more than he heard it happen.

  The wind subsided. Gabe came out from behind the tree trunk, breathing hard, grateful that the air around him held still long enough to be breathable.

  The second floor of his house stuck up from a hole in the ground. Gabe could see his bedroom window. He saw Zora tap her beak against the glass. He dropped the jump bag, ran across the yard, and yanked open the window sash to rescue his pets.

  Zora hopped onto his head and clung there with her claws. She made several chirrupy noises of alarm.

  Garuda sat on the bookshelf near the window. The shelf still stood, though all the books had fallen out. The lizard looked intrigued by recent events, but not especially alarmed. Gabe caught him up and held him. Then he called for Sir Toby. He couldn’t see the fox, but the bedroom door was still shut so he had to be in there somewhere.

  It felt bizarre to peer into his second-floor bedroom while standing on the ground, as though he had suddenly grown very tall. He stuck his head farther inside, and smelled smoke. “Of course,” he said. “Of course there’s smoke.”

  “I also smell smoke,” said the Envoy beside him. “Broken wiring may have ignited insulation in the walls. The insulation is very old and made out of flammable paper. Not at all sensible. I noticed that hazard while crawling between walls yesterday.”

  “Sir Toby is still in my room.” Gabe wanted to go back in. He wasn’t supposed to go back in. It was expressly against the emergency plan to go back inside. He almost went in anyway.

  “Stop,” the Envoy insisted. “I’m less fragile than you.” It climbed through the window like a slinky in reverse, found the fox underneath Gabe’s bed, and herded him out from under the blankets. Sir Toby yip-barked, angry at being herded. Then the fox saw Gabe through the open window and made a running jump in his direction.

  Gabe caught Sir Toby, tucked him under his other arm, and backed away from the wreckage. The Envoy oozed out and followed him.

  Thick, dark smoke began to billow through every open window. They stood by the tree and watched the house burn. Zora chirped from the top of Gabe’s head.

  “The kitchen is gone,” Gabe whispered. “Dad’s spice rack is gone. He’s really proud of that spice collection.”

  “I’m very sorry for the loss,” said the Envoy.

  “What just happened, exactly?” Gabe asked, still too astonished to be upset. “How did this happen?”

  “The disaster triggered when you approached the cl
othes dryer,” said the Envoy. It shifted colors from pale purple to dark indigo-blue, like the sky when the sun is almost entirely gone. Its voice was cold, colder than Gabe had ever heard his mother’s voice before. “Someone just tried to kill you, Ambassador. Someone tried to assassinate you. And they knew enough about the entanglement process to sabotage it. Only one of your own colleagues could have done this. And they might already know that they have not succeeded. We need to get you away from this place.”

  Sirens wailed in the distance, growing louder.

  Gabe hoisted up the backpack and pets. He tucked the vajra hammer through a belt loop and the cane sword under one arm. Zora remained perched on his head.

  “Follow me,” he said, and set out for Frankie’s house.

  10

  Gabe cut through alleyways and the rocket-scorched lawn of Frankie’s backyard. He found the spare key under the fake rock in the garden and let himself in through the kitchen door. The Envoy followed behind him.

  The kitchen looked shiny and new—or at least parts of it did, like the stainless steel fridge and the glass tiles on the wall behind the counter. It was much bigger than the one at Gabe’s place—the one that used to be at his place, when it still existed, which was just fifteen minutes ago. That kitchen must be even smaller now, compressed to a tiny point of condensed mass. Or else maybe it was bigger now, its molecules expelled from the collapse of the black hole and scattered to the winds, covering the whole city. Either way, it was gone.

  Gabe dropped his backpack, put the fox and the iguana on the floor, set the hammer and cane on the kitchen table beside a pile of textbooks, and then closed all the doors to keep the pets from escaping the kitchen. Zora made a flying circuit of the room and then perched back on the top of Gabe’s head. Fox and iguana claws made clackety clackety noises against the floor tiles while they explored.

  Gabe sat down on a kitchen chair, hard. He couldn’t think straight. His head was spinning, and the centrifugal force flung coherent thought out his ears.

  The Envoy tapped Gabe’s knee. “We should probably keep moving,” it said, gentle but insistent.

  “Where?” asked Gabe. Emergency plans ended here. If home burns, grab your jump bag and get to Frankie’s house. Home had burned. The top half of it did, anyway. And now Gabe had made it to Frankie’s house.

  “I don’t know where,” said the Envoy. “But there’s a chance that our attackers can track the energy signature of your newly entangled particles and find us here.”

  “That’s bad,” said Gabe.

  “Yes,” the Envoy agreed.

  “So what happens if they find us?” Gabe asked. “Can they send other small black holes after us?”

  “No. Your entanglement is complete. But I don’t know what else they might do. And they must be nearby, closer even than the ships in the asteroid belt. We should be moving. We should make it more difficult for them to find you.”

  Gabe didn’t move. He didn’t feel like he could. He needed to keep sitting down. He also needed a drink of water. The pets were heavy, and he’d run all the way there. He was supposed to stay there. The plans said so. Dad said so. Frankie’s mother had said so.

  “Give me a sec to think about this,” he said, or at least started to say.

  Foodsteps thudded against stairs. That must be Lupe, Gabe thought. Frankie’s mom doesn’t make any noise when she moves through the house. Frankie’s mom is more like a ninja than a pirate.

  He expected his sister to burst into the kitchen the way she usually burst into a room, but he didn’t expect her to do it through a secret door in the kitchen wall. One of the wooden panels swung open, and his sister thundered through.

  “Mom?” she called. “I thought I heard Mom . . .”

  The Envoy scootched under the table and out of sight.

  “Mom’s not here,” said Gabe. “She’s in jail. No, not jail. A detention center. They’ll let her out soon. But not Dad. Why didn’t you come? Why are you hiding out in a secret room? And how is there a secret room in Frankie’s house? He can’t keep any secrets, not to save his own life or anyone else’s. He would have told me about a secret room!”

  Gabe didn’t think anything could surprise him. Several unexpected and unsettling things had happened today already. But he didn’t know how to handle the existence of secret doors and hidden staircases in his best friend’s kitchen. This was like finding out that his sister was Zorro and Batman, both of them at once, and always had been.

  “That’s why Frankie doesn’t know,” Lupe told him. “This isn’t a playroom. This is history. Frankie’s mom didn’t want him to wreck the place or break the door. And he probably would have.”

  Gabe admitted that Frankie probably would have broken the door.

  “And I didn’t go with you to the detention center because I would have been detained, dumbass.” She shook her head. “Mom and Dad never wanted to worry your poor, innocent little brain, but it’s absolutely stupid that we’ve never talked about this. We made plans for it, along with all of Dad’s ridiculous poltergeist plans, but we’ve never just talked about it. Not with you.”

  Dots connected inside Gabe’s innocent brain. He resented the word dumbass, but he swallowed that resentment and let himself begin to understand.

  “You weren’t born here,” he said. Lupe had been tiny when Mom and Dad moved north. Gabe knew that already, but he hadn’t ever thought about it. It was just one of the many ways he considered his sister more interesting than himself. She had a more concrete connection to family history than he did. She was actually from the legendary city of their parents, a place Gabe himself had never been.

  “Nope,” she said. “I wasn’t. I don’t remember living anywhere else, but I’m not actually from here. You are. That makes all the difference. That’s why I’m hiding.” She said it like this was his fault. Then she saw the look on his face and softened her own. “How are they?”

  “I only saw Dad,” said Gabe. He relayed their conversation, almost word for word, while trying not to think much about any of those words. They sat in silence when he was done.

  Sir Toby tried to climb through the secret door. Lupe stopped him with her toe.

  “Go take a peek,” she said, gesturing up the tiny spiral stairs.

  Gabe took Zora off his head, set her on the table, and went up.

  The stairs were rough, without paint or lacquer, like stairs going down to an unfinished basement. They creaked under Gabe’s feet as he cautiously climbed. At the top he found a room. It was small. The whitewashed plaster walls were oddly shaped, as though otherwise unused corners of the house had been stuck together and tucked away. There were no windows. A small bed took up most of the space.

  Gabe crept back down the narrow stairs. He gave Lupe a look filled with large question marks.

  “Underground Railroad stop,” she explained. “The chimney still has a mark advertising this as a safe house. Most of the railroad ran east of the Great Lakes, but a few lines still came through here. A lot of people who weren’t slaves anymore slept in that room. Frankie’s family used it again to help refugees from El Salvador and Honduras. Canada offered asylum, but the US usually didn’t, so they needed to sneak their way north. Frankie’s mom used to help drive that route in the eighties when she was barely older than I am. She doesn’t do that much anymore, but she still takes people in. Remember Sophia?”

  Gabe did, but only barely. “Exchange student,” he said. “Lived here for a bit. Used to babysit me and Frankie. You were friends, right?”

  “She wasn’t an exchange student,” said Lupe. “She left Honduras and walked here by herself. She passed dried-up bodies in the Arizona desert—people who died of thirst or were shot by rednecks and dumped by the roadside. She stayed here when she got this far. Sophia told me what she was running from. She told me what happened to her brothers. But I’m not going to tell you any of it.”

  She shut the wall panel. It looked ordinary now. Gabe found it odd that the secret p
lace sat so comfortably next to shiny new kitchen appliances. History hadn’t ended. It wasn’t over. It just overlapped with now.

  Lupe held out her hand to Zora.

  “Meow!” said the bird. She pooped on the table and then hopped onto the outstretched hand. Lupe stroked the feathers of her neck. Gabe fetched a paper towel to clean the poop.

  “Wait a sec,” said Lupe. “Why did you bring all the pets with you? You should have left them at the house.”

  “The house burned down,” Gabe told her.

  “What?”

  “It burned down.”

  “I heard you, but what? What did you do? Did you pick the worst possible day to build another stupid rocket?”

  A black hole ate it, Gabe thought. Aliens tried to assassinate me with physics.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” he said aloud. “But I saved your sword. And the pets.”

  “Stupid!” she yelled at him. “Save yourself first. Leave the pets for the firefighters. That’s the plan, remember? We just went through all the plans this morning!”

  Gabe ignored the insult and said nothing.

  Lupe took up the hammer of wisdom and truth as if she wanted to find more spiders—or as if she suddenly considered Gabe to be a spider. She whacked the pile of textbooks on the table.

  “Are those from summer school?” Gabe asked, hoping to deflect attention away from himself.

  “Yes,” she said. “I went to class this morning. Mother will be so very proud.”

  Gabe watched her quietly boil. He connected more dots. “What happened last year? Why did you start failing classes all of a sudden?”

  Lupe glared at him. “That doesn’t matter.”

  “What happened?” Gabe asked again, his voice low and relentless.

  “That absolutely does not matter,” she insisted. “We’ve got worse to worry about than my academic record.”

  Much worse, Gabe silently agreed, but he took the hammer of wisdom and truth away from his sister and waved it at her. “Tell me.”

  She took back the hammer and gave the books a few more frustrated whacks.