by L. J. Hatton
Not the best first impression.
“Then tell her there’s twenty of us, and let her believe it,” Jermay said.
“Not helpful.”
Birdie had been so skittish since we escaped Nye’s Center. I should have asked Klok to carry her on his back. She would have felt safer with him between her and potential danger.
“It’s been a hectic morning, but that’s the price one pays for a full house,” Baba said. “My guests came a long way to get here, so I thought it prudent to let them refuel before formal introductions. But if you have questions, I’m sure they don’t mind your asking.”
Esther stepped back onto the small metal porch beyond the door, seemingly shocked that he knew we were strangers. She gave the room another sweep, lingering on Klok and Winnie. Especially Winnie, the way someone does when they think they’ve recognized someone but aren’t sure. Esther was old enough that she would have been a grown woman when Winnie was exiled, but her features had to have changed since she was a child.
“You’re certain that everything’s all right?” This time Esther’s voice was more sincere than curious. She was also scared. “Nola?”
“We’re . . .” Nola began, but that was the moment Xerxes decided he’d been left in the satchel in the living room for long enough. He shoved past me with no regard for the fact that human legs had bones in them or that those bones couldn’t bend to accommodate him. The little menace had been decidedly belligerent since our return to the Hollow, and shrinking him had made it worse. All his attitude and anger concentrated into something more potent, and he was looking for a chance to spread his wings.
Which he did.
So close to Esther that if she hadn’t already stepped out, he would have probably drawn blood. The razor edge and tip of one wing sliced clean through the doorframe, then he plopped his deceptively massive self down and started growling.
What can I say? Xerxes has no filter. When he doesn’t like someone, it shows. I think his new power source had left him a bit drunk.
“We’re fine.” Nola tried to scoot Xerxes out of the doorway with her foot, but found him impossible to move.
Mean drunk.
“Have you spoken to Nafiza?” To her credit, Esther didn’t let Xerxes intimidate her. Of course, she had no idea that he could have turned her into human sushi if he’d felt like it. I doubted she even knew what he was. She seemed more the “pretend it’s not there and it can’t hurt you” sort of person.
“Not since yesterday,” Baba said.
“And they arrived . . .”
“A few minutes before you did, as I’m sure you’re aware. I’d offer you a place at the table, but I don’t think there’s one to spare. So if you don’t mind, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
“If you need me, give a shout. Someone’s always close by.”
Esther gave Winnie one last fearful look, set her expression back to its original fake pleasantry, and left.
“Well, that couldn’t have gone any worse.” Nola shut the door and leaned against it, rocking back on her heels with her toes in the air. “I told you that the community wouldn’t tolerate this.”
“Bah!” Baba said. “One woman is hardly the whole community, and she didn’t force her way in brandishing her latest petition of merit, or whatever she’s calling them this week. Esther only thinks she speaks for everyone because she never gives anyone else a chance to say anything. She’s harmless.”
“But what if they aren’t?” Nola launched herself off the door without accounting for the lack of space. She was only able to go a few undramatic inches.
“Maybe you’re right about being invisible,” Anise whispered behind me. “She’s talking about us like we aren’t right here.”
“We don’t know them, Baba. We don’t know that they’re friends. We don’t know that they aren’t dangerous.”
“We are,” I said. “I turned a Commission Center to rubble, and I survived. Birch and I took down the armada docked at another Center that was as far off the ground as this place—and we survived. Winnie destroyed the warden who was torturing us, and Klok survived an attempted dissection. Anise leveled our house to stop the man who stole our sister. We’re survivors, we’re very dangerous, and we’re fugitives, but we are in no way a threat to you or anyone else here.”
“One of you is.”
Another loaded glance at Winnie.
That was when the second neighbor knocked. A man this time, tall and broad, with a crooked nose and dark-blond hair that somehow didn’t match the rest of him. Several people who had been across the street were now strolling past the windows on a circuit. By the third and fourth pass, they completely abandoned the idea of subtlety. Two of them stopped and propped their chins on the windowsill so they could see inside.
And I was still barefoot, wearing one of my father’s old shirts without pants. I’d managed to put that fact out of my head until I realized that all the tiny creeper lights from the living room had migrated to the kitchen and turned themselves into my personal spotlight. I angled myself behind Jermay to block the light from shining through the material of my shirt. The lights moved with me, which is exactly the sort of thing nosy snoopers notice.
I’d done a quick-change at The Show for years, never much minding who was backstage with me, but that was a far different scenario than standing half-naked and gawked at in a stranger’s kitchen.
“It’s Ollie,” Nola told her grandfather. “Ollie, please talk some sense into him. He won’t listen to me.”
“Esther’s worried,” Ollie said curtly. He didn’t hide his surprise at how many of us were stuffed inside the room.
“She usually is.” The things Baba couldn’t flick away with a sharp “bah,” he deflected with pleasantry and good humor. “And, as usual, she has no reason to be. If you’d like to come inside and talk, I’m more than happy to have you over after breakfast.”
“What happened to your door?” Ollie demanded, scowling at the gash that Xerxes had left in the metal.
“I think the better question is ‘What’s happened to your manners?’” Baba hobbled to the windows and pulled the shades. “This is a kitchen, not an interrogation room, and my guests are not criminals. All of you are behaving dreadfully.”
“With reason. How did they get up here? Who escorted them? Did anyone speak for them? Considering yesterday’s declaration, the timing of their arrival is more than coincidental.”
“I don’t believe in coincidence, and the declaration is beside the point. They requested asylum; that’s all that matters.”
“We need to take precautions.”
“Good idea. You take the rabble-rousers and find some precautions you’re comfortable with. I will take my coffee with two sugars and cream, and my eggs with spinach. Everyone wins.” Baba tried to shoo him far enough back that he could shut the door.
“Refugees weren’t Esther’s only concern.” Ollie took a better look at us, stopping at Winnie. “Is she who I think she is?”
“Probably, and it’s no business of yours. If you and the rest of them cannot conduct yourselves civilly, then you are welcome to darken someone else’s door. My blood sugar is too low to deal with this sort of interruption before breakfast!”
Baba turned his head toward Xerxes, who was still on the floor. He’d found something stuck under one of the chairs and was making a lot of noise trying to knock it loose. Baba whistled to get his attention, using a sound cue I’d thought unique to our circus. He never asked anyone for an explanation; he seemed to know what Xerxes was already.
“A little help, if you don’t mind?” he asked. Xerxes trilled, happy to have permission for his bad behavior, and jumped back to his feet. He snapped his wings out to their full span and walked briskly toward Ollie, herding him out the door. Once Ollie was outside, Xerxes spun and kicked the door shut with his back foot. He flicked his feet like he’d just buried something unpleasant.
“Good boy.” Baba petted him on the head.
“Now, who’s hungry?” Baba asked. “I can’t be the only one.”
“He’ll just go around,” Nola said. A second later someone was at the front of the house, knocking on that door. “See? He’ll do that for two minutes, and then he’ll use the key you hid for emergencies. The one you told him how to find. What then? Should we nail the doors shut and glue the windows?”
I thought of reminding her that Bijou was still in the living room and that fire-breathing dragons made great guard dogs, but having him show off and set the house on fire wouldn’t improve anyone’s opinion of us.
“Bah! Let him knock.” The grin on Baba’s face was eerily close to the one that crept across Jermay’s when he was up to no good. It created a disturbing mix of an old man with trickster’s eyes bobbing toward a light switch beside the entrance from the living room. “He can’t very well open the door if the room behind it no longer exists.”
“Winnie, is your grandfather actually insane?” Jermay asked. “Because if he’s about to blow up part of this house, I’d rather take my chances with Esther, Ollie, and the torch-bearing mob.”
“Me, too,” Birch said.
Klok rat-tatted something short that had to be “me, three.”
In my head, I was saying “me, four” while considering the odds of us making it to the Mile’s rim without being caught. So far, Winnie’s assessment of her childhood home was only half-accurate. We didn’t have to worry about Warden Files or the Commission, but at this point, Baba was far more likely to be the bogeyman than Nafiza was.
“Relax,” Winnie told us. She took our silence and blank stares as reason to continue. “He’s just starting a mealtime protocol to make room for the extra bodies at the table. These rooms are modular, like the dining and kitchen compartments on the train. If you need a bigger kitchen, you get it by shrinking the next room over. And since the front door only opens into the living room, all Ollie will see on the other side is a metal wall.”
“Astute as always, Winifred dear.”
“Baba, you can’t!” Nola said. If she’d been a little younger, she would have been jumping up and down.
She seemed as tired of making the complaint as we were of hearing it, and while Baba’s face grew younger as he carried out his plot to thwart the local busybodies, Nola’s aged. She cracked like parched earth broken by the sun and ready to be blown away, exhausted by the constant drain of having to be more mature than her elder.
She took a deep breath and tried to respond more calmly.
“We’ve already had six shorts this month. Two of the rooms upstairs were taken completely off the grid because they kept frying breakers. Do you realize how much power this is going to draw? Because I guarantee you it’s more than the system can handle.”
She looked to us pleadingly, as though we might be able to sway the old man. Maybe she was hoping that Winnie would step in and do exactly that, without her having to ask, but Winnie was high on her grandfather’s acceptance. She nearly tripped over Birch in her rush to be included in his scheming.
“Bah! Those circuits were worn out. The kitchen’s haven’t been used in years. They’re practically brand new.” Baba flipped the switch beside the door. “Winifred, close the circuit, dear.”
The system was set up so that no one could start the sequence by accident, just like on the train. My father didn’t want to accidentally trap someone in a shrinking room because he flipped the wrong switch while looking for a light.
“Don’t. Please,” Nola begged.
Winnie hesitated with her hand poised over the switch on the other side of the room, but only for a moment. Then her face hardened with the same resolve I’d seen the day she commanded Warden Arcineaux to choke the life out of himself.
“That’s the thing about the dead,” she said. “We have a hard time sympathizing with the living.”
She flipped the switch, and the whole house started to shake.
CHAPTER 7
It started with a tremor and tinkling glass. The kitchen light was an industrial octopus of a thing, based on a climber light but fixed in place, with extra arms to hold extra bulbs. The creepers abandoned their posts and fled to higher ground on the kitchen stairs as the different arms of the overhead light clinked against each other and began to flicker.
Dishes rattled from their cabinets. Dev and my sister rushed to catch as many as they could, but plenty fell between the gaps, bouncing or shattering against the floor, depending on what they were made of.
Baba looked completely unrepentant for the mess, barely bothering an “oops” for the trouble.
Beneath our feet, a wave rolled the floor, causing me to stumble into Jermay, him into Birch, and the whole group of us to lose our footing and land on Klok.
Birdie screamed. A sound of primordial terror I was too familiar with. She scrambled into Klok’s lap, wrapped herself around his armored body, and hid her face in his neck, crying, “No, no, no, no, no,” in an endless stream that dissolved quickly into blubbering gibberish. On the ground, this kind of commotion was the hallmark of a Commission raid.
The feeling of destruction was too familiar, dredging up memories of my bedroom being derailed and the night I caused my first earthquake, but the Mile had no ground under it to shake. The Center had shaken like this after Arcineaux sabotaged it; hopefully that didn’t mean the Mile was about to meet a similar end.
Bijou slithered into the kitchen across the ceiling, but it was as unstable as the floor, growing wider as the walls pushed out and thwarting his attempts to make it to the middle of the room. He coasted down to stand beside Xerxes. Both golems snapped into their alert state, ready to expand themselves without permission.
“Don’t even think about it,” I warned.
Bijou sat, but Xerxes chose to keep his own counsel and grew three inches taller, confident that I couldn’t reach him in time to stop him.
“Don’t! You’ll pop the whole house apart at the rivets,” I told him with all the authority I could manage while lying sideways in a heap of tangled limbs.
Xerxes snapped out another couple of inches, then screeched at me and deflated. He lay down with his wings crossed over his head and pretended to sleep.
“Penn?” Jermay called over the noise.
“It’s not me!”
“Could maybe something that is you try to stop it, then? I refuse to be killed by a runaway kitchen!”
“Get off the floor!” Winnie shouted down. She had perched herself on one of the cabinets, with her hands around her mouth for a megaphone.
“I’ll get right on that as soon as I figure out how to stand up!” Jermay shouted back.
Dev climbed onto the table. Nola was anchored with her hands against each side of the kitchen’s stairwell. Baba had found the single corner in the room that wasn’t shaking. They’d all anticipated it. The rest of us were behind the curve and couldn’t move until it was over.
Birdie was still screaming, but now she and Klok were nowhere to be seen. She’d made them both disappear.
Cabinets realigned themselves along the walls; the newly extended floor had wear lines, showing which tiles had been hidden and which had been exposed to dirt, light, and use. Finally, the kitchen table belched itself from a rickety square with four chairs to a long bar with benches on either side.
Belched. Literally, with an angry rumble and a foul-smelling jolt that hinted at unpleasant things decaying out of sight.
“Blech,” Dev said, holding his nose. He hopped down now that the floor had settled. “It smells like something died!”
“Your grandfather’s sanity,” Nola groused. “That was a stupid thing to do!”
“Bah!” Baba said. It was pretty much his answer to everything. “We needed more space. Now we have it. What’s the harm?”
“Ask the invisible child trying not to vomit under the table.”
> “You can see her?” I asked.
Birdie had released Klok back into the visible world, and I could hear her heaving and sobbing under the table, but there wasn’t even a ripple to indicate where she was. The creeper lights streamed out of hiding and relocated to the underside of the table, like they could sense her fears. They shined straight through her onto the floor.
“I see a lot of things,” Nola answered. “Whether I want to or not.”
With the expansion routine finished, the kitchen sat ready to entertain. Pots and pans had placed themselves on the stove, and a toaster oven had emerged from the counter. The fridge opened, allowing arms from the light in the ceiling to forage for the necessary ingredients. The table set itself, producing plates and glasses from sliding doors in the top. Everything was automated with the kind of convenience tech that terrified people on the ground who were afraid unnecessary machines and advancement would attract off-world attention.
“You had to go through this every morning?” Birch asked. One of the creeper lights whirled past his head onto the table in a flurry of spidery legs. It rushed from plate to plate, wiping off the collected dust.
“There were ten of us. We needed the space. But I don’t remember it being that bad.” Winnie gave him a hand up off the floor.
The room had completely changed. Not only could we stand, we could move. I walked to the entry we’d used. Previously, it had been a square arch with no door, only a foot from a pass-through window. Both openings were now blocked by a seamless metal plate. The living room was gone, shunted out of the way to accommodate the larger kitchen.
“Where did it all go?” Jermay asked. “There was furniture in there, shelves, stuff on the walls.”
“It’s no different than the golems when they lose mass. It’s gone, but still there,” I said.
My father had tried to explain it once, but it was over my head. Pocket dimensions and quantum displacement involving equations he used entire notebooks to work out by hand.
