by L. J. Hatton
I couldn’t help but glance at Winnie and Birch. They’d been subject to their own experiments. They’d survived, but come away with more than the injuries Winnie had shown off to her cousin. I wondered what Baba would think about their horror stories, considering he had a chapter in hers.
“The last group came up over a month ago, but your father wasn’t with them. That was out of character.”
“Who brought them?” I asked.
The network Baba described sounded like the group that worked with Beryl and Sister Mary Alban. They were step one, with Beryl using her ability to change her face as a way to locate and extract touched children who were in trouble. She often impersonated a madam from the red-light district who would pay for runaways; then she’d pass them down the line to Sister Mary Alban, who could give them refuge at the church where she lived until they could be moved again. My father and whoever took his place as the refugees’ escort were the final step, bringing people safely to the Mile, but there had to be someone in between. Magnus wouldn’t risk face-to-face contact with the sister he couldn’t afford to acknowledge, which meant there was at least one other person who knew my father’s real business, maybe more. If the Mile didn’t have answers for me, then maybe those others did.
“That’s difficult to say,” Baba told me. “With the exception of your father, most of the members of the network who come this far have very particular skills to keep them from being recognized or betrayed. Their faces aren’t always their own, or static. Some of them arrive as men but leave as women. One prefers to remain a literal blank, displaying no distinct features at all. They travel in pairs with a teleporter, so there’s no common starting point. Cyril might know more about it, if you can find him.”
“Cyril?”
“You don’t know your father’s partner?”
I shook my head. My father had never mentioned working with anyone outside of our Show family, except for generic interactions with the Commission’s wardens when he handed over designs and new technology. Of course, given Nagendra’s past and what I knew of Greyor, perhaps there were others tied to the Commission that he trusted.
“They made trips together for years,” Baba said. “Cyril did most of the planning, while your father was more about implementation, but Cyril hasn’t been off the ground in a decade. I imagine some of his papers are still in your father’s workroom.”
“Workroom?” I perked up.
“He stayed here when he visited the Mile, and we’ve kept his room closed up the way he left it. Not much choice on that one; no one else could open the lock. I’ve got a feeling you might be the exception to that rule.”
Klok beeped.
“I like puzzles. May I see the lock?”
“Magnus wasn’t much on people fouling up his things by moving them around, but if you can manage to open the lock, I would assume there’s a very good reason you’re equipped to do so.”
Klok made a series of electronic noises that basically added up to “Yay!” He had never fully grasped the idea of typing out his emotions and didn’t know which words to use.
We gathered our dishes, passing plates and cups down the line to stack at the end so they could be put in the sink. No one had mentioned the possibility of new clothes yet, and I was about to ask when Anise yelped. She dropped out of sight across the table.
“Anise!” I jumped up. We’d had too many scares lately; I was conditioned to respond with the worst in mind. “What happened?”
“The bench broke,” she said, confused. “Were we too heavy?”
“It didn’t break,” Birch said. “It’s gone.”
I stood on my toes for a better look at their side of the table. A section of the bench had vanished out from under her.
“Hey!”
Winnie’s head disappeared from sight. Birch gasped and fell beside her.
“What’s going on?” he yipped.
“Cascading failure!” Nola shouted. “Everyone up before the room completely reverts!”
But she was too slow. The bench slid open and let her fall through. Klok hit the floor with a rumble.
My section and Jermay’s zipped together, throwing us into each other so hard and so fast that we knocked skulls before being dumped on the ground. There was no time to recover; the floor was shifting like it was made of tectonic plates, and the wall tiles were shrinking at the same time, closing in on us like a car crusher. One of Anise’s feet slid right into my chin. Winnie and Birch crashed on top of her.
And then things really got out of hand.
CHAPTER 8
“Is it over?” Birdie asked timidly. Her reflexes had saved her from most of the kitchen’s meltdown. She and Dev were in the stairwell, clinging to Xerxes and Bijou. The golems, in turn, had raised their wings as shields against flying debris, keeping the kids out of the line of fire. The rest of us weren’t so lucky.
There was food everywhere. Eggs on the walls. Soggy toast impaled by the ceiling light. The floor was covered in paste made from cooled oatmeal and spilled water. The bench seats had absorbed their extensions, once again becoming four lightweight chairs, and somehow, miraculously, Baba was still seated on his and wearing an expression that said this was the most excitement he’d had in a long time.
Everything had shrunk back to its previous size and shape except for the table, which now extended from one side of the room to the other and had Klok pinned to the wall. Anyone else, it would have killed, but his beetle-black armor kept him safe.
The whole house was dark. I tried to access the wiring with my touch, but it was quiet. I had no way to put power back into a dead system.
“The living room’s back,” Jermay announced. “And by the way—ow!”
“Very convincing,” I said. “What happened?”
“When the units lose power, they revert to their default configuration,” Nola said.
“Someone cut the power?”
“We blew the breakers,” she said. “If we’re lucky, it only affected the house and not the whole grid. And I am not cleaning this up! I’m taking a shower while we still have hot water!”
I would have settled for a water hose and a plastic pool. Not only was I stuck with just my father’s nightshirt to wear, but I smelled like a day-old special from a cheap diner. A mixture of butter and molasses had pooled on my right side, soaked through, and stuck the shirt to my skin, which was worse than the smell.
I patted the pocket to make sure my memory chip was still there.
“Winnie, no offense, but your definition of sanctuary sucks,” Jermay growled. He’d also landed in the sticky mess and couldn’t get his left pant leg to let go of his calf. “Somebody move so I can get off the floor!”
A string of words rat-tatted across Klok’s screen so fast that they became one endless grating wail. I could only pick out a word here and there when the screen froze to buffer.
“Klok! Language!” Anise scolded.
He blanked his screen, replacing his rant with: “I am not apologetic. My response was appropriately impolite. I find syrup in my hair unpleasant, and I believe that compromising the power supply will compound the issue of mistrust with Baba-grandfather’s neighbors. This will not make them accept our presence, and they will say their own appropriately rude things for the inconvenience. There is also a table jabbing me in the chest, and I would prefer it not be there.”
The Klok version of a hissy fit.
I grasped the nearest table leg and thought small thoughts. “Shrink,” I told the mechanism in the table. I tried to remember what the original table had looked like so hopefully it would translate; otherwise, there was a chance it might react like my glass of water. Boiling the table was possibly the only thing that could make our situation worse.
The table wobbled toward the center of the room, allowing Klok to slip out, then vibrated in place for a few seconds before shooting through the wall and into the living room. It hit its maximum length and snapped back into a perfectly deceptive square
of cheap metal that matched the chairs.
Baba still hadn’t moved.
“Thank you,” Klok typed, oblivious. He stepped through the hole in the wall and tried to bend the sharper pieces into something less dangerous.
Anise took Birdie by the hand.
“Let’s get you away from this mess before something else decides to punch through a wall. I think Nola had the right idea about the shower, and you’re going to be next in line. Scoot.”
For myself, I needed several breaths of fresh air. I could feel the disruptions in the kitchen churning in my stomach, making me queasy. Broken machinery physically hurt. As soon as I was able to work my way free of the human knot on the floor, I crawled for the door.
“Wait!” Jermay called. “What about the mess?”
“You’re a magician. Make it disappear.” I gave him my most charming grin.
He could consider the cleanup an apology.
A few neighbors were still doing the circuit walk across the street, but Esther, Ollie, and the rest of the brave ones had gone. I stood on the porch in my horrendous, sticky pajamas, and I breathed in until the upper-atmospheric cold burned inside my body. It cleared my head and proved I was alive.
There were no birds at this altitude, no insects, only the eerie stillness of a ghost ship on the ocean floor. Everything was suspended in the currents, being whittled away by time because nothing else could touch or change it. The air tasted of rain that hadn’t yet formed clouds.
I stepped off the porch onto a sad, gasping patch of grass. The people across the street stopped their farce of a jog to watch me spin handfuls of vapor in my palm, separating gas from liquid. The water drew itself into a ball that I burst to wash my hands; the air sat solid, sugar-white in cubes. I tipped my hand, and they poured back into the atmosphere.
Not a natural occurrence, this was the pull of someone like Vesper playing cat’s cradle with her element. Whoever she was, she kept the Mile ensconced in constant fog so that it would blend away into the sky if anyone on the ground looked up, but no one did that much anymore. They were afraid of what they might see. More Medusae. The start of another Great Illusion. Something worse.
None of them realized that “worse” had already happened. The Commission let people like Nye and Arcineaux run experiments on innocents. They locked up children and tortured them with devices like the hound collars, because a gifted child was no longer considered human. They took others like Jermay who had no abilities beyond the natural and made them suffer, too. There was an entire reality that most people overlooked or willfully ignored because doing so made it easier to sleep at night.
They could call themselves normal, and normal people couldn’t possibly be in danger.
I could see how living apart from all of that would appeal to those who called the Mile home.
“Thank you.”
An unfamiliar voice startled me out of my solitude, drawing my attention to a woman all in black, cloaked in a shawl that tucked her into the clouds, leaving her edges blurred and otherworldly. Winnie’s bogeyman didn’t merely look like Death, she moved like it, too. Her eyes had the shape and color of Anise’s, and for a second I thought Iva Roma had returned from the grave a second time. Though why she would have come back carrying a large cardboard box, I didn’t know.
“Why are you thanking me?” I asked. “What did I do?”
“You told her it wasn’t my fault. Thank you.”
She set the box down and turned away.
“Wait.” I put a hand on her arm. She felt awfully solid to be a ghoul. “Your name’s Nafiza, isn’t it? Winnie said—”
“Exactly,” she said. “The red will belong to Winifred’s mother when she’s that age. That’s the whole reason I put it in. I thought she wanted it, but she didn’t, until you told her it wasn’t my fault.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Did I get the order wrong?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t understand.”
Her face turned frustrated, with a deepening wince. She was trying to tell me something, but it wasn’t coming through.
“One, two, three, not three, one, two,” she said. “Better?”
“That’s the order?”
“Yes, and you don’t have to thank me for the scarf. Long hair can be cumbersome.”
“Scarf? I . . . I don’t . . . do you mean in the box?”
I flipped the lid open warily. Inside were neatly folded stacks of clothes, each set inside a paper bag. The one on top held a red shirt and a pair of dark pants.
“Yes! The box comes next,” she said happily. “I give you the box. You open the box. You use the clothes. That’s the order.”
Despite Winnie’s insistence that the woman was mentally ill, this didn’t feel like crazy to me. This felt like something else.
I took another look at her face. Her eyes had been brown before, but now they were darkening toward black from corner to corner, the way mine did when the Celestine was in full force, and the way Winnie’s had when she turned on Warden Arcineaux. Nafiza had been touched, and from her apparent age, she wasn’t born that way. She was like my father. Whatever was keeping her from communicating had to be tied to her abilities.
“Is this the red you meant? These clothes belonged to Winnie’s mom?” I asked.
“Not now, of course. When she’s Winifred’s age, yes.”
“She was Winnie’s age years ago,” I said.
“Out of order?”
“I think so.”
She was mixing up timelines. The past was overlapping the present so that she couldn’t get a handle on what happened when. What she meant to say was that the clothes had belonged to Winnie’s mother, but now that Winnie was the same age, she could wear them, too. Why Nafiza had kept things belonging to Winnie’s mother was a different puzzle.
I picked up another sack. This one had a blue flannel shirt and jeans with a pair of boy’s sneakers.
“They used to match, but he changed his eyes,” Nafiza said.
“Jermay?”
“If you insist.”
The blue squares on the shirt were precisely the shade that once sparkled in Jermay’s eyes. Nafiza was right. They’d changed like the rest of him.
The next bag had another pair of jeans and a light purple sweatshirt, the perfect size to fit me. They’d been tied together with a soft flowered scarf. I looped the scarf around my hair to get it out of the way.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I told you that you didn’t have to,” she said.
“Right—long hair is cumbersome.”
It sounded like the future was mixed in with the other timelines, too. Was it even possible for someone to see the future?
“Fair trade,” she said.
“Trade? What is it you want in return?”
I stepped into the jeans and pulled them up under my nightshirt, happy to finally have something on my legs to block the chill. They fit perfectly.
“I gathered those yesterday because you arrive tomorrow and need them,” Nafiza said.
“We got here today.”
“Yesterday, it was tomorrow, but they switched places and made it now. The order is never easy to see.”
Her eyes kept fluctuating between black and brown. I’d never seen anything like it. When they were brown with the usual white on either side of the irises, her voice was an even, normal speaking tone. When they were overlaid with solid black, chronological confusion reigned.
“You said these were a trade. For what?” I asked.
“Repairs.”
“We just broke Baba’s house, so I’m not sure I’m the right person to fix much of anything.”
“Tomorrow you did repairs, but needed these yesterday.” Nafiza paused to reconsider what she’d said. “Yesterday tomorrow, I mean. Tomorrow’s yesterday. There used to be a word for that.”
“Today,” I told her.
“Today is now. Today is now,” she said, shak
ing her head. She definitely wasn’t crazy. She sounded more like someone with a brain injury. Her mind was fine. She understood me, and she knew what she wanted to say in return, but there was a glitch along the route to her mouth. “Stones can’t fly, so they fall, but not today. Today is now and that is later. You’ll make repairs tomorrow.”
“Okay. Well, thanks for the clothes.” We were well past awkward in this encounter, and I was afraid she’d get more frustrated if she felt like she needed to keep talking. I didn’t know how to end it other than to leave. I put Winnie’s and Jermay’s bags of clothes back in the box and picked it up.
“Charity should be given, not taken,” Nafiza said.
My father used to say that. He believed that we should make our own way, no matter what. Giving things to others was fine, so long as we didn’t take anything. Taking things was a sign of trust, and putting trust in strangers was too risky. It also put you into someone’s debt, and you never knew what kind of favor they might ask in return. I had a greater understanding of that particular fear now than I ever did growing up, but my father’s way of doing things had proved questionable at best.
We needed clothes. Nafiza brought us clothes. I was keeping the clothes, charity or not. That was the order, and it was my decision.
“Thank you,” I said again.
“You say that now,” Nafiza scoffed. “Flying too close to the sun will get you burned.”
“Good to know.”
“It’s a star.” She pointed at the sun, cupped her hands, then moved them apart with a whooshing noise, miming an explosion. “Stars aren’t so special. The universe is full of them.”
“Yes, it is,” I said, not quite sure which statement I was agreeing with.
“It’s a star.” This time, she pointed to the purple sweatshirt in the box. She made another explosion.
Curious, despite the fact that curiosity never does me any favors, I unfolded the shirt. It was emblazoned with a shooting star on the front.
Winnie got her mom’s clothes. Jermay’s matched his eyes. Mine came emblazoned with a shooting star. Nafiza hadn’t found us cast-off clothes; she’d seen us clearly enough to mark us.
