“You’re not going to do anything, are you?”
“No.”
“Good. I’d hate to lose my baby sister.”
“You would?”
“Of course, dummy. You think I want to be here with Mom all by myself? We’d probably kill each other inside a week.”
“I’m sorry about everything. I haven’t been myself today.”
“I think that’s an improvement.”
Aggie laughed, the sound cut off by a sniffle. Sophie slid over beside her and put an arm around her shoulder. “Do you ever think about the future?” Aggie asked. “I mean, what you’re going to be when you grow up?”
“Of course. I’m going to Yale and study psychology—maybe I’ll use you as a case study for my doctorate thesis.”
Aggie glanced over her sister’s shoulder at the ruins of her bedroom. “I don’t know what’s going to become of me. What can I do? I’m not smart like you. I’m not tough like Sylvia. I’m a big fat nothing.”
“Hey, come on, you’re not nothing. You’re not stupid either; you just need to apply yourself. I’ll help tutor you. But, look, you don’t have to be like me or Sylvia or Mom. All that matters is if you’re happy being who you are. If wearing black and dyeing your hair purple and listening to depressing music makes you happy, then we’ll learn to accept it.”
Aggie thought about this and about when she had been at her happiest. All those years with Alejandro and their children had been the happiest moments of her life—at least until she met Akako. The moments when Akako came back from the archives, or that Aggie vanished there to her, when they ran into each other’s arms and kissed, those were the moments she remembered more fondly than any spells she’d ever cast.
She understood then it didn’t matter if she never could use magic again. As long as she had Akako with her, then she would be happy. Even if they were on the streets and had to dig through dumpsters, Aggie could be happy as long as they were together.
“Thank you,” she said to Sophie. She gave her sister a hug. Sophie tried to pull away after a few seconds, but Aggie wouldn’t let her.
Sophie finally managed to wriggle free and said, “We’d better go find Mom before she sends in the National Guard.” But as Sophie stood up, Aggie could see the tears in her eyes.
***
Aggie patted her hair the next morning as she stepped on the bus; to her relief, her hand came back without any stains. She had spent most of last night dyeing her hair back to the more neutral brown she’d seen in old pictures of her. Her mother had gratefully driven her to the drugstore when she emerged from her room to ask for a ride.
Though her hair was back to normal, she still had to wear a black dress that had been in the laundry hamper. There were no nearby stores open late with clothes big enough to fit her and she didn’t have time to sew something herself, so the Goth dress would have to remain until that afternoon, when her mother promised to take her shopping. Her mother had also agreed to buy her a sewing machine and some fabric, no doubt elated Aggie had not killed herself and instead decided to become something closer to normal.
As she squeezed along the aisle of the bus, Aggie’s good mood from the night before evaporated when she didn’t see Akako anywhere. She had tried to call her friend the night before, but Akako’s father had answered the phone and screamed a string of curse words at her in a foreign language before he slammed down the receiver. Aggie wondered if Akako would come to school at all, or if her father had enrolled her in private school, as she’d said yesterday.
As she thought about these things, Glenda’s voice hissed in her ear, “Looks like our curse is working already.”
Aggie turned around to glare at her former friend. “Whatever,” she said. “You have as much magic power as this seat.”
“It must have some magic power to not break under your fat ass.” Snickers accompanied this joke from some of the kids around them.
“I don’t care what you think. You’re not a witch. You can’t even do card tricks.”
“You’d better not tell anyone about our rituals.”
“Oh, please. Your rituals. Like lighting a bunch of candles and saying a bunch of stupid words is so secret.”
“You’d better not say anything.”
“Fine,” Aggie said with a sigh. “It’s not like I care.” She turned around and refused to look back at Glenda for the rest of the bus ride, even when the other kids hit her in the back of the head with spitwads or bits of erasers.
The schedule from Mrs. Strathmore had survived the rampage last night, so that Aggie knew where to find her first class. She waddled down the hall, her slimmed-down bag on her shoulder. A new backpack would be something else to add to her shopping list so she didn’t look so much like a bag lady.
Through her first four hours she didn’t see any sign of Akako. She wanted to ask Mrs. Strathmore if Renee Kim had shown up for school today or if her father had told the school she would be transferring elsewhere, but she didn’t think the administrative assistant would want to see her after yesterday. She did see Sophie in her Earth Sciences class; her sister smiled and nodded to her. Sophie had promised that in time Aggie could hang out with her and her friends, once she “stopped looking so much like a freak.” This Aggie saw as progress.
Emma Earl shuffled into the classroom; she looked no worse for wear despite Glenda’s curse on her. “Are you feeling better today, dear?” Emma asked.
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”
“You certainly look healthier.”
“Yes, I suppose so.” She had thrown away her Goth makeup and borrowed some of Sophie’s instead so she didn’t look pasty and hollow-eyed. She still didn’t look like herself, but at least she was closer.
By lunchtime Aggie still hadn’t seen Akako. If Akako didn’t show up today, then Aggie would have to find a way into that gated community to talk to her. She had to tell Akako nothing else mattered so long as they had each other. Even in this place and in these bodies, their love could endure as it had before. She only hoped Akako hadn’t submerged herself too deeply in this world, that she hadn’t become Renee Kim in mind as well as body.
As she munched on a salad that would do little to fill her up, she heard kids at a nearby table whisper excitedly. From what she gathered, there was a fight in the hallway. Such a thing didn’t interest her, at least until she heard someone say, “The Goth chick is beating the shit out of that little kid.”
Aggie got to her feet and plowed through the crowd of kids. She knew what she would find. Glenda had decided to take out her anger at Aggie by beating up Akako, who was too little to defend herself. She only hoped Glenda hadn’t broken Akako’s head open yet.
Glenda’s friends had formed a circle so no one could interfere with the fight. Aggie used her bulk to push her way through; she found things weren’t as bad as she feared—yet. Glenda had Akako pinned on her stomach, one arm twisted behind her back. Akako’s right eye was bloody and on its way to swelling shut and a trickle of blood flowed from her mouth. Her good eye looked up at Aggie and tears began to form.
“Go back to kindergarten, you little shit,” Glenda said. She twisted Akako’s arm until the little girl cried out in pain.
“Leave her alone!” Aggie shouted.
Glenda looked up at her with a predatory smile. “Well if it isn’t June Cleaver. What do you think you’re going to do, bake me a cake?”
“You want to fight someone, why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”
“Who, you? I’d have to put on two hundred pounds to be your size.” Aggie heard snickers to accompany this as on the bus. Glenda nodded to her followers. “Hold on to her until I finish with her butt buddy.”
The same girls who’d held Aggie’s hand in the circle last night took her arms now. Aggie tried to throw them off, but they kept their grip on her. She couldn’t do anything but watch as Glenda pulled back Akako’s arm again to make her scream. Why hadn’t any teachers come to help?
G
lenda smiled wolfishly again as she took hold of one of Akako’s pigtails; she used it like a handle to smash Akako’s head against the tile floor. When Akako looked up, her face was streaked with blood. Her open eye met Aggie’s to plead with her to help. The other girls kept hold of her arms and dragged her back a few inches. As she looked into Akako’s eye Aggie felt her body grow warm with rage.
She heard a scream, but it took her a moment to realize it hadn’t come from Akako. It came from the girls who held Aggie back. Glenda looked up at her, eyes wide and mouth open in fear. Aggie didn’t understand this until she held out her hand to see it glowed with white light. Her entire body glowed with this light; the heat of a small star radiated from it. The other girls in the coven scattered, as did the rest of the crowd.
“Leave my friend alone,” Aggie said. She took a step towards Glenda. She didn’t need to say this a second time; Glenda bolted towards the front doors without a word.
The glow faded from around Aggie’s body as she knelt down next to Akako. Once her arm had turned back to normal, she helped her friend up from off the floor. Akako stared at her for a moment with her good eye and then collapsed against her with a sob. “You’re back,” Akako said.
Chapter 20
In all his life, Tim Cooper had never worked forty-eight hours straight before. The most he had ever worked was nineteen hours without so much as a nap. That had been in his final year of college, when he had still thought he might get someone at NASA to notice his RAT design. He had finally passed out in the lab until Dr. Edwards found him and helped him back to his dorm.
He didn’t take any pleasure to break his own record. Back in college he had chosen to work those long hours. This time he didn’t have any choice. If he didn’t work, the woman he loved would die. He would do anything to prevent that; he’d go without sleep, food, and a shower. He did have a cup of extremely cold coffee at his workstation along with a glass of water. The guards let him take a bathroom break once an hour, though sometimes he would pass on this as well.
While he worked, he chided himself for being duped so thoroughly. He had been naïve enough to think Harry Ward was a decent man, a man who wanted to help the world progress. As it turned out, Ward was a monster. Tim didn’t know what exactly Ward planned to do with Tim’s invention, but he knew now no good would come of it.
He found out the truth two nights earlier when he was supposed to leave to meet Sylvia for dinner. He opened the door to find Ms. Fielding there with a pair of guards who looked like they could play defensive tackle on the Ramparts. Both of these men carried Uzis that were pointed squarely at Tim’s head.
“Mr. Cooper, we need to talk,” Ms. Fielding said.
“I’m not stealing anything,” Tim said.
“That’s not entirely true.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“When you go home you rob us of your unique talents.” When Ms. Fielding smiled, Tim shivered.
“What do you want?”
“We want you to finish your work.”
“I will. I’m just going home for a few hours. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
Ms. Fielding gestured to the burly men beside her. “Tonight, Mr. Cooper.”
Though he knew it was foolhardy to argue with someone flanked by two men with guns, he couldn’t stop himself from blurting out, “Are you nuts? Where’s Mr. Ward?”
Fielding reached into her jacket to take out a cell phone, which she handed to Tim. His voice came on the line. “Hello, Tim. I assume Ms. Fielding’s told you we would appreciate it if you finish the project as soon as possible.”
“Wait a minute. How do I know this is really Mr. Ward and not a recording or a voice synthesizer?”
Ward—if it were really him—laughed into the phone. “I should have known you’d be too smart to take my word. Hand the phone back to Ms. Fielding, please.”
Tim did as he was told. Ms. Fielding listened to the phone for a moment and then nodded to herself. “Yes, sir.” She tucked the phone back into her pocket before she said, “Mr. Ward will see you in his office.”
“Good. Maybe now we can straighten some things out.”
One of the guards kept the barrel of his Uzi embedded in Tim’s back as they walked to the elevator. Once on board, the guards stood on either side of him at the back of the car while Ms. Fielding stood at the front. He waited for her to punch the button to Ward’s office on the tenth floor. Instead, she opened a cover beneath the emergency phone. He couldn’t see what she typed, but the elevator began to move.
Tim began to fidget as the elevator passed the tenth floor. It went up to the eleventh floor, then the twelfth, and then it stopped suddenly. From what he could tell they weren’t on the twelfth and they weren’t on the fourteenth. Like many buildings, the Fleischman Building didn’t have a designated thirteenth floor for superstitious reasons. “I’m sure you already understand,” Ms. Fielding said as the doors opened.
He didn’t fully understand until he saw Ward behind a glass desk at one end of an otherwise empty floor. This was his second office, a secret office on a secret floor accessible only by him and his lieutenant. Tim thought back to the James Bond movies he had seen where the supervillain built his lair underground or in a volcano or out in space. He hadn’t thought of Ward as that kind of supervillain—until now. The way Ward leaned back in his chair and grinned, he needed only a cat on his lap to complete the illusion.
“So here we are, Mr. Cooper. You wanted your proof. Unless you want to see if I’m wearing a rubber mask.”
“No, that’s fine,” Tim said. The guard poked his Uzi into Tim’s back again, which prompted him to move forward. “I trust you.”
“Irony, that’s a good sign.”
“Why are you keeping me from going home? What do you want?”
“We only want you to finish your work.”
“I was going to finish it this weekend and have it for you on Monday.”
“My teachers always said I wasn’t a very patient boy. I’m still not. No, Mr. Cooper, certain things are already in motion. I want your designs before our scheduled meeting.”
“Why?”
“That’s not important.”
“It is to me. I need to know you aren’t going to use my invention for evil.”
“Evil? That’s such a loaded word. Let’s just say I’m going to use it for my maximum benefit and leave it at that. Now, can I trust you to complete this task or not?”
“What are you going to do, shoot me if I don’t?”
“Of course not. Then I wouldn’t be able to harness your gifts anymore.” Ward came around the desk to sit at its edge. “No, Tim, I have something far more motivational in mind.”
Ward tapped a button on the desk and a screen behind him came to life. Tim gasped when he saw Sylvia on the gun range behind her salon. “What are you going to do to her?”
“Nothing, as long as you cooperate. If not, I make one phone call and a sniper puts a bullet into the lovely Miss Joubert’s brain.”
“You’re bluffing. You don’t really have a sniper watching her. She’s too smart to let someone sneak up on her like that.”
“Are you really going to take that chance, Tim?” Ward reached out to put a hand on Tim’s arm in a fatherly way that at the moment seemed terribly grotesque. “I know how much you love her. I know you desperately want to marry her. Do you really want to risk losing her over something you’ll do anyway?”
Tim stared at the monitor to look for any sign of imperfection in the picture to indicate it was a fake. He couldn’t see anything. The way Sylvia planted her feet and kept her back straight and the way she flipped her hair back over her shoulder were things he had seen her do dozens of times before. If they had hired an actress they had hired a very good one. Could he really risk someone would take her from him?
“All right, I’ll do it. Just leave her alone.”
“I’m sorry, Tim, but I can’t have my sniper stand down until you’ve finished. Then
I’ll call him off and Miss Joubert will be safe.”
Tim wanted to argue, but knew he didn’t have a choice. “Fine,” he said through clenched teeth. The guards had taken him back to his lab and the marathon session began.
Now he had finally completed his designs. He rolled up the schematics and inserted them into a cardboard tube. Then he gathered up all of his discs and portable storage drives. He would dump all of this on Ward’s desk and then hurry out of the building to find Sylvia, so he could hug her and never let her go.
“What’s gotten into you?” he could imagine her asking.
“I love you,” he would say for the rest of their lives.
***
Ward had not given him the access code to the thirteenth floor, but he found Ms. Fielding waited for him. They must have been watching. Of course they would be; they couldn’t risk he might find a clever way to signal for help. Whether they were the same guards or not he couldn’t be sure, but if they weren’t, they were just as big and just as well-armed. “Very good, Mr. Cooper,” Fielding said. “You’re done even quicker than we thought.”
“I’m glad you’re pleased,” Tim said.
“At least you still have your sense of humor,” she said with another of her death’s head smiles that made him cringe.
They said nothing on the ride up the elevator. There was nothing that needed to be said between them. Everything that needed to be said, he would say to Ward. It all boiled down to one thing: he wanted Sylvia out of danger. That was the goal he had worked towards these last forty-eight hours.
The guards allowed him to sag against the rear of the car. He closed his eyes and his thoughts turned to the first time he had met Sylvia. His junior year was over and the RAT prototype ready to begin trials. He went to the bookstore to search for a book on how to obtain a government grant so he could produce a commercial version of the RAT.
He found the section for government regulations in the back of the store easily enough. He picked up a title that might be of interest. As he flipped through the pages, he heard a woman say, “Excuse me, would you mind switching places?”
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 50
