by L. J. Hatton
The gargoyle-warden’s voice. And I had no way to hide myself or flinch away. I expected hands to snatch me up, but no one touched me. I opened my eyes enough to know that I was near a light.
There was a stream of harsh, meaningless sounds, followed by more angry shouts of “Stop her!”
“Bring her down!” the warden repeated. The last syllables were overtaken by that same garbled oddity before the loop replayed itself. I tried to think of Anise, but could only picture her moving backward, away from me. The harmonized exchange I’d shared with the electric fence was gone.
“Stop her!” The voices.
“Bring her down!”
I’d been condemned to an existence of mere seconds, in which each iteration was marked by a gap of gibberish before it began all over.
“Stop her!”
“Bring her down!”
“Go on!”
The pattern changed abruptly, and the new voice was mine—the authoritative one I adopted for The Show. I was hearing myself urge Wren farther up the hill so that I could make my stand alone.
What was happening?
I directed all of my strength to my eyes, prying them open. The light was still there, stark and hot as cinders blown across my face. I blinked and found my hand—palm down, with the fingers bent, still covered in dirt.
Another blink, and I knew what lay beneath my fingers was blue, thicker than grass, and tall enough that it touched my nose. I was lying on someone’s rug.
I’d landed in a cluttered room. Boxes were stacked on the floor and most of the furniture was still covered with muslin from being freshly moved. I’d been deposited beneath a side table next to a couch. The table was draped with a cloth that reached almost to the ground, but gave me about a foot of clear view.
“What have you done, Magnus?” someone whispered, and the loop replayed again. “What is she?”
This voice chilled me, even more than the gargoyle’s had. Wherever I was, I was in the presence of the warden who had taken the train.
He spoke so easily, sitting with his back to me, unaware of my presence and facing a screen that took up his entire wall. The image was of those final moments on the hill atop the fence line. He’d frozen the playback on a frame of my face, which was odd to see without color and streaked with electrical chaos.
“And what were you up to, pet? Why go there?”
The warden clicked his remote and the screen dissolved, leaving a life-size holographic projection. Color seeped back into it as he rotated the frozen frame with a swipe of his fingers. When it stopped, he stood up, face-to-face with the gargoyle.
The warden was taller by several inches. He had blue unit patches on his shoulder, while the gargoyle had maroon ones, and he very clearly hated the other man.
I still couldn’t stand up. I’d progressed to moving my arms and legs, but with the efficiency of someone trying to swim without water.
I heard a sort of defective buzz, then static.
“Yes?” the warden called into thin air.
I dragged myself a few inches closer, moving the muslin by a fraction, but the coat objected to the movement, spitting heat along its seams until I had to put my hands over my mouth to stop the sob. A jolt near my knee triggered a spasm that sent my leg kicking dangerously close to the table’s leg.
“I found them.” A voice came through an intercom. “You’ll want to come down here.”
Evie’s unnoticeable. His voice was distorted by popping feedback through the intercom system, but I knew it too well. All the anger and indignation came back twice as strong as it had been in the moment I’d seen him with his hands on my sister. Had I not been weighed down by my father’s insufferable contraption, I would have given myself away.
“Five minutes,” the warden said sternly. He chucked his remote at his desk, through the gargoyle’s holographic head, and left the room.
Carefully, with one arm wrapped around my ribs, I used the table leg to pull myself into the open. This time, shocks hit my arms, causing them to shake. I bit my cheek, but I didn’t make a sound.
The chronicle of my previous escape had gone into motion when the warden threw his remote. It ran in reverse, so that everyone on the hill charged backward down, and the mound itself sifted through a sieve into the ground. The guard towers shook themselves into place, against gravity. I took the remote and started the recording moving forward again. It had backed up to well before the quakes, so that everything was static, except for the wind. Unlike the screen, the hologram had no sound.
The warden had said it would take five minutes to reach the unnoticeable’s position, so I had at least ten, if he was coming back. They’d be minutes well spent if that recording caught any secrets that would teach me how to make my abilities cooperate again, and I needed the time to find some indication of where I was. If this office was somewhere I’d been before, it was a subconscious memory.
The boxes on the desk were mostly supplies like paper fasteners and tape, nothing interesting or useful, not even a photograph or a nameplate to prove the man was more than a monster who’d crawled out of my nightmares. He had a box filled with Show memorabilia—tickets and fliers, an empty, flattened soda cup—him studying his target, or maybe a trophy. Near the bottom of that box, things got creepy when I found a poster of The Show troupe all together. My sisters’ faces had been circled with colored pens corresponding to their abilities. Red for Evie, blue for Nim, green for Anise, and purple for Vesper, all matching the auras I’d seen around the colored hounds. He’d outlined me head-to-toe in a halo of gold.
I glanced up at the security recording to see how much time I had left. The first earthquake had just hit. Holographic debris fell and disappeared as it passed out of frame.
What would I unpack first in a new office? I asked myself. There were no file cabinets. The only computer I could see was disassembled and in a chair.
A warden would need files and reports. This one was actively tracking me and my family, which meant he was in contact with local law enforcement. Some of that he could do on his phone, but he had to have a tablet, or at least a document reader that he could use to keep up with things until his office had been set up.
I scanned the room for anything that didn’t look like a sealed box.
On the replay, the gargoyle had just emerged from the main building. Guard tower lights were tracking escapees, but with the image in three dimensions, those lights did more than brighten the room I was in. They crisscrossed, highlighting sections at random.
“Jackpot.”
A chair on the far wall had the muslin peeled back. There was a pile of small notebooks and a coffee cup on the table beside it. A leather bag was propped against the leg, and poking out was a slim plastic-and-glass tablet.
PASSWORD, the screen prompted when I turned it on.
I flipped open the top notebook on the off-chance that he kept his passwords written down, but there were only scribblings about chromosomal tripling and genetic studies on fraternal twins. I knew twins were used in a lot of studies because they were natural control pairs, but I didn’t even want to think about what the Commission wanted with them.
I snapped the book shut and moved on. Below the notebooks was a file with detailed images of the Medusae put through different filters for x-rays and infrared light, world maps with color-coded markings, then more notes written in a language I didn’t understand.
I went back to the tablet and entered MEDUSAE, thinking that was a logical password for a warden, but it didn’t work.
What else was the warden involved with?
I tried THE SHOW, and MAGNUS. I cringed as I typed both PENN and PENELOPE, but neither of those worked, either.
I glanced back at the replay. Fire was falling from the sky, destroying everything in its path, and so real that I flinched away from a meteorite that passed harmlessly throu
gh the floor. Then I was running for the fence. I hadn’t noticed the current take point on my hair, but the short strands reached skyward, oscillating as power jumped from one to another. My eyes were rimmed in light, but devoid of it across the lenses. Electricity from the fence enveloped my arms and hands, giving me wings. Actual wings. I raised my hand, mimicking the hologram, so I was palm-to-palm with myself.
Maybe . . .
C-E-L-E-S-T-I-N-E. I entered the word that the warden shouldn’t have known, but did.
I tapped “Enter” and the screen flashed to one filled with icons. I wanted to scream, but bottled it for later fuel. Now was not the time to fall apart, and me causing a barely natural disaster in the warden’s office wouldn’t go unnoticed.
I swiped through what felt like thousands of icons, but didn’t recognize a quarter of them. I did, however, recognize a stylized Medusae jellyfish. I selected it out of curiosity and found an interactive re-creation with measurements of its size and density. I couldn’t decipher the chemical equations, but I assumed they were biological compounds. The next page was a list of lakes and rivers, with more equations. H2O was the only one I knew.
I closed the tab and ran through another three pages of mystery apps before I found another familiar one. At the bottom of the page was an icon in the shape of the Commission ankh. I pressed it and the screen filled with pop-up photos, each labeled with a person’s name. I thought it was a watch list, but couldn’t find an entry on my father. I recognized Nagendra’s real name, but this man had a beard, and dark hair that brushed his shoulders. I tapped it anyway.
The picture sprouted tabs along the right with labeled subfolders: medical tests, psych evaluations, genetic profile, background, aliases, and a tab for Brick Street. The top tab was for “Images,” which I chose. The picture that opened was definitely Nagendra, tattoos, piercings, bald head, and all. Other images in the folder showed him in stages between the beard and the sideshow; the Commission had been tracking him for two decades, if not longer.
I went back to that first picture, but couldn’t reconcile it with the man I knew, especially once I looked past the young face and realized Nagendra was wearing a black shirt embroidered with an ankh.
I started to scroll down and read the next tab, but I was out of time. Outside the door, someone was pressing buttons on a keypad. I dropped the tablet into the warden’s bag and scurried to the underside of the table where I’d first landed. Hopefully, he’d leave again, soon, and in the meantime I could stay hidden and hope he said something that would tell me where I was, and better yet, how to get out.
CHAPTER 20
The warden was carrying a large wooden crate with the help of Evie’s unnoticeable. They shoved several other boxes carelessly off the desk to make room for it; the one that landed nearest to me spilled out hundreds of photographs taken at The Show. My sisters. My father. Jermay. Me. Winnie, Birdie, and Klok. Some of them were years old.
“The men who crated these didn’t realize what they had. They were misclassified. I’m sorry, sir,” the unnoticeable said. “They look like the machines I saw before, and they’re mostly intact, but—”
“Mostly?” The warden startled. He’d been staring, nearly salivating, at the crate, as though it concealed the wisdom of the ancients tied together with a bow of eternal life.
“They’re heavy, but too small,” the unnoticeable said.
Something clattered as the unnoticeable lifted it from the box. He stretched a mechanical wing to its limit, allowing the overhead lights to strike the rows of jeweled scales set into the underside.
Bijou?
No, no, no, no, no. He couldn’t have Bijou. Bijou was with Klok, and Klok should have been with Jermay.
The only way the warden could have him was if the others had been caught, and they wouldn’t have been taken without a fight—especially not Klok. Yet there was no question that it was my father’s dragon.
“This has to be a builder’s model,” the unnoticeable said.
The tension in the warden’s face eased, and he began to nod his head as he tested the joints of Bijou’s wing. The golem was inert, but I didn’t know if it was damaged or if Klok had pulled his power source before capture.
It had to be a capture; I refused to entertain the alternative.
“And the other one was larger, barely fitting in the tents,” the unnoticeable continued.
Hope fluttered—a damp flint not quite able to spark a fire. Very few golems were larger than Bijou, and I doubted the warden would be making a fuss over a giant scorpion. He lifted Xerxes from the crate and set him on the desk.
“Many things concerning Magnus Roma seem one way, when they are, in fact, another. Change your perspective, and the impossible becomes rather ordinary.”
The warden brushed his gloved hand along Xerxes’ head until he found the switch that would activate him. Xerxes came to life snapping and shaking his wings. Golems always returned to the same mood they powered down from; the fight must have been vicious before he was deactivated.
The unnoticeable leapt back, and Xerxes turned his fury on the warden.
I knew what was coming. I may have even smiled a bit. Xerxes hated to be handled, and when he was unhappy with someone or something, he’d make that displeasure known by chomping off a chunk of whatever it was and spitting it out.
The warden had Xerxes in both hands, at arm’s length. Xerxes reared his head back and struck, clamping his beak down on the man’s wrist.
The warden didn’t so much as flinch.
“None of that, now,” he scolded. Scolded! He plopped the gryphon back on the desk, and gave his hand a cursory check. The glove was ripped, but there was no wound or blood to be seen. “Forgot who you were dealing with, didn’t you?”
He patted Xerxes’ head, with that same near-conspiring smirk he’d worn in the Caravan, and Xerxes, in turn, screeched and shook his wings.
“If there’s some trick to returning them to their former size, I can’t find it,” the unnoticeable said. “And they both seem to have fallen off their peak, power-wise.”
“The girl said she landed in the river. No doubt these were damaged at the same time as Magnus’s coat, otherwise our encounter in the woods would have gone quite differently.”
“Our specialists say they had to stop dissection on the train units when they realized they couldn’t reassemble them.”
Dissection?
My stomach sank. They were methodically destroying everything my father had built: my family, The Show, and now his golems. Chopping them into pieces small enough for their cramped, clouded minds to understand.
But there was hope. There was Xerxes.
If I could get to him, then I might not have to risk my father’s traveling calamity sending me somewhere worse. If Xerxes could fly, so could I.
I needed a distraction.
“But how?” I whispered, barely breathing the words into the fibers of the sofa I had leaned against.
I closed my fist around Sister Mary Alban’s medallion. That’s all I had: my wits and my hands and a broken medallion.
“What do I do?” The words were a breath I couldn’t hold anymore.
I worried the necklace like the protective talisman I wished it was, tracing the edges with my thumb—only it didn’t feel like my medallion. The shape was wrong. I opened my fist.
Bless that nameless scavenger and his sister, Lizzie, too.
The stringing spider I’d hung around my neck was waking up in response to the words I’d whispered, trying to interpret my musings as a command it could follow. I clamped my other hand on top of it and tucked it closer to my body so it couldn’t jump.
Stringers were notoriously skittish, and if startled, one could cause a ruckus big enough to stop traffic. When Nim was bored she used to hide them in Vesper’s wigs so the poor things would come alive during rehearsals, c
ausing Vesper to flail about screaming until she’d managed to disentangle them.
All I had to do was wait for my shot.
“That’s the Roma girl?” the unnoticeable asked. He’d lost interest in the golems and was staring at the holographic image of my electric wings. It occurred to me that he must have been the warden’s personal assistant to ask questions so casually in his presence. “Can they all do that?”
“It’s entirely possible that ‘all,’ in this case, is a singular designation.” The warden stretched a hand toward my wingtip.
“Surely she’s not the last one.” My heart clinched. He couldn’t mean I was the last Roma girl. I refused to accept that.
“I’m more concerned with the prospect of her being the first,” the warden said, nodding to the recording. “This is something I’ve never seen before.”
“Are they evolving?”
“I think this may be more nurture than nature.” Now both men were occupied with my doppelganger.
I opened my hands to find the stringer in a ball. Two taps on its back, and it flipped open. The spider dropped from my palm to the floor, its tiny legs in constant motion, even when it was standing in one place.
“Get Xerxes,” I said.
It tiptoed across the floor on pinpoint legs, then scaled the desk. Xerxes spied it, and slunk down into an extended crouch. He slid one paw out.
“Don’t pounce,” I whispered, fingers crossed. “Don’t—”
The spider jumped; Xerxes swatted it. It leapt onto his shoulder, and Xerxes went berserk, clawing at his own head to get it off. He crashed across the desk in a frenzy, ramming headfirst into the warden’s back.
“What—”
My distraction was lost.
The warden reached over and slapped the switch on Xerxes’ neck, ignoring what should have been another bone-crushing bite. The man had absolutely no reaction to pain. He also had no blood. His wrist should have been gushing beneath his glove.
The warden slid his hand beneath Xerxes’ inert head, emerging with the spider pinched by one leg. Another leg stretched up and gave a tiny jolt to the warden’s thumb, so he’d let go. Once it landed, it made a beeline for me, only to run past and slip out beneath the door. I’d officially lost the element of surprise.
