by Patricia Bow
It was the shot-put.
Long before the spectacularly messy end of the Watermelon Shot-put event, Amelia realized that winning the trophy was not going to be as easy as she’d expected. As a team, Ike and Simon turned out to be surprisingly sharp, even though they made mistakes. Kevin and Dinisha weren’t so clever at thinking up new ways of solving the challenges, but they hardly ever messed up the running and throwing parts. Those two teams were her main competition, Amelia decided.
It didn’t help a lot, at first, that Ty was faster and stronger than anybody else. He threw his watermelon twice as far as Simon. When it hit the ground it exploded. Pink melon flesh and black seeds sprayed all over. Ty ran around with his fists in the air, like a soccer player at the World Cup, and Oscar took his picture with the other three punks. They had forgotten all about being cool and were jumping up and down and cheering him.
It would have been great, except. Except the challenge said you were supposed to cut the watermelon open before eating the flesh and spitting the seeds at the target.
Simon and Ike must have figured out the trick in that challenge before they started, because when Simon hurled the melon, Ike leaped and caught it just before it hit the ground. He rolled in the sand, but the melon wasn’t even cracked. Then they got busy with the cutting, eating, and spitting.
“So we’re in second place on this one,” Amelia said after the scores were announced. “Never mind, good start.” They were sitting on the grass in the shade of a tree, eating chunks of watermelon.
A few yards away, the other three punks sat or lay with their leather jackets off and their T-shirts tied around their heads against the sun.
Erwin, Jeff, and Xenon. Amelia couldn’t keep them sorted in her mind, except that Erwin was the one with the bleached-blond mohawk and the slashed jeans. They were way too cool to actually take part in these games. They thought Ty had signed up for a joke.
“Second place!” Ty hissed with disappointment. “It would be so much easier if you could just take the Bane. There it is, out in the open for all to see.”
“And guarded,” Amelia reminded him. “And no, you can’t mess with those guys’ minds.”
“I wouldn’t hurt them. I would just make them want to go away and leave it. It would be so easy!” Ty raised his head with a snaky motion and stared at the platform. “And then —”
“No! You can’t mess with people’s minds. It’s wrong.”
“Why wrong?”
“Because it feels awful. I know, I had it done to me once.” She pulled at his arm. “Look at me, Ty.” She thought of something Celeste said sometimes. “I want you,” she said sternly, “to give me your word!”
Ty went very still. “Do not ask.”
“You mean, you won’t.”
“Just do not ask.”
“But you won’t hurt them, right?”
“Does the eagle eat mosquitoes?”
“I don’t know. Does it?” He talked very strange, sometimes. “Anyway, we can’t just take it — that would be stealing. When we win it, you can carry it for me. It looks heavy.”
Ty gave himself a full-body shake. All his chains and zippers clinked. “I almost think there is another dragon here, messing with my mind, making me clumsy and stupid.”
“Why? Cause that’s the only possible reason you could’ve come second?” She laughed and poked his arm. It felt as if it was made of steel rods and leather.
He snorted. “Here, among ardini? Of course I should win! So, I wonder ….” Ty curled in closer on himself and squinted around the crowded field. “Only there can’t be another dragon here, because I would know.”
“Well, that’s a relief!”
“That is, I would know unless … unless that one was very, very good.”
The third event was the Shoe Tree Salvage. Everybody handed over their shoes and sandals, which were hung on hooks tied to the limbs of a huge chestnut tree near the back of the school. Most of the footwear dangled more than twenty feet off the ground. Then everybody had to get their shoes back. You won points for speed, creative thinking, and “economy of means,” which meant getting the job done with the least amount of work. You lost points for getting the wrong shoes.
Simon shook his head as he watched kids trying to climb the tree, or piling up boxes and reaching, or leaping from picnic tables, or throwing apples and baseballs to knock the shoes down.
Some were clever. He had to admit that the Gingrich kids deserved a bonus for their human ladder. Dinisha and Kevin, with their trampoline and garden rake, did almost as well, only losing points for knocking down too many wrong shoes.
But he thought he and Ike should have come first for their clever use of an old long-handled grabber pole borrowed from Wayne Smith, who kept it on display in his King Street hardware store. The thing did just what it was meant to do: plucked the shoes like boxes off a high shelf. No mistakes, no fuss. Only, it took them ten minutes to persuade Wayne to let them borrow it. Too long.
They didn’t even come third. Simon had an inkling of defeat as he watched Amelia walk up to the tree. She smiled at the clumsy action all around her. Then she set her hands on the rough trunk, and then her bare feet, and she swarmed up the tree like a squirrel, or a cat. Like something that lived in trees.
Up she scuttled, while everyone stopped what they were doing and watched, mouths open. When she reached a giant limb five times her height from the ground, she walked along it as if it were a sidewalk. She grinned and waved down at the upturned faces, bent down to unhook her sandals and a pair of laced-together Doc Martens, slung them over her shoulder, and walked back.
“Good thing we still have a ten-point lead,” Ike said as he hoisted Wayne’s grabber onto his shoulder, “if Ammy’s suddenly turned into a super-athlete. Funny, she never used to be good at sports. Remember her on skates, last winter? She never even used to like walking.”
“Yeah, funny. And somehow I never thought one of those guys would want to be part of a scene like this.” He studied Amelia and that punk friend of hers, who were over by the school, picking up a toboggan for the next event.
The punk turned his head then and winked at Simon. Something — maybe the smooth snakiness of the motion, maybe the golden glint of the eye — made Simon think of Mara. He remembered then what Pier had said back at Mr. Manning’s house. How she’d been so sure there was a dragon on the roof. And he’d thought she was jumping at shadows.
“I mean, it’s funny.” Amelia dug another fistful of yellow grease from her tub of cheap margarine and slathered it on the underside of the polyvinyl toboggan. “Y’know, I never climbed a tree before in my life, for gosh sake! And, up on that branch — three, four times I could have fallen off. And I didn’t! It’s like I couldn’t have fallen if I tried!”
“And so?” Ty waved at Erwin, Jeff, and Xenon, who were sitting at the west edge of the field. None of them waved back this time. He frowned.
“I mean, it felt almost like when I was in dragon form back in Mythrin, that time last New Year’s, and I was riding the thermals. Like … like I could do anything. Fly to the moon!” That memory was still so vivid it made her heart thump. “Ty?”
He looked as if he was listening to voices inside himself. Amelia got a fistful of his leather sleeve and yanked him around to face her. “You did it! Didn’t you?”
“Me? How could I make you do that?” He stared at her, unblinking, like a cat. “Maybe you are changing. Maybe sharing Mara’s dream did it.” He pointed his chin at the distant row of punks. “Now tell me, who is that one standing behind my friends over there? Big, grey, dark.”
Changing? “Changing? Into what?”
“Never mind, he is gone. A blink of the eye, and I never saw him go. He moves fast, this new friend!”
“Yeah, well, never mind him. How are we going to get this toboggan down that concrete ramp in the fastest time, without making a noise? I don’t think all the marg in the world will do it.”
Dinisha and Kev
in won the Quiet Toboggan Slide. Instead of using margarine or chicken fat as some did, or (like Ike and Simon) a dozen half-inch dowels to make their toboggan roll down the concrete ramp behind the gym, they floated it down on a stream of water from a hose.
Amelia and Ty came second. Their toboggan wasn’t as quiet, but it almost seemed to fly. The Gingrich kids, who had used marbles, came third. Ike and Simon still held the overall lead with thirty points, but now they were only two points ahead of Amelia’s team. Dinisha’s team was four points behind Amelia’s.
After the Balloon Demolition Derby, Ike and Simon fell to third overall. Team Amelia led with thirty-eight points. The scorekeepers argued over whether Ty’s method of popping the rival teams’ balloons was fair, but in the end they agreed it was. No hands or sharp tools, the challenge said — which ruled out his spiked wristbands. There was nothing in the rules against using teeth.
CHAPTER 13
DUMPLINGS AND DRAGONS
At noon, with the sun hammering down and the smog and humidity thickening, the bugler from the Dukes climbed onto the platform and played the first few bars of “Food, Glorious Food.”
“That is the signal for lunch!” the microphone crackled.
Everybody flopped on the grass or clustered around picnic tables under the trees at the McNairn Avenue edge of the field, where it was not so hot. Bruce from the doughnut shop supervised a dozen volunteers from local restaurants at serving tables under a long awning. There was pizza, hamburgers, grilled panini sandwiches, back bacon with fried green pepper and onions on a bun, beef-and-veg samosas, falafel in a pita, a dozen kinds of dim sum, and buttered corn on the cob.
“This is all right!” Ike said with his mouth full. He added, “Why are you passing food under your arm?”
“I hope nobody else saw that.” Simon looked around at the noisy crowd. He and Ike were sitting side by side on the grass next to the big chestnut tree. Amelia and Ty were the centre of attention at a long, crowded table at the far end of the lunch area, where Ty was impressing everybody by pretending to catch and eat wasps. Or maybe not pretending.
With that to watch, nobody was looking this way. Simon lowered his voice, even so. “Pier’s back there, on my other side.”
Ike leaned back to look behind Simon. He straightened up, shaking his head. “I’ve got news for you, Hammer. Nobody’s there.”
“I am so here.” Pier’s voice came from the empty space between Simon’s left shoulder and the tree. “Please, may I have another of those spicy meat pastries, then? They’re good.”
“But …,” Ike said.
“She’s very good at hiding.” Simon passed back a samosa and it left his fingers and vanished.
“Way cool! Can she teach me that?”
“No,” Pier said from out of the air. “When will you win the Prism Blade? Soon?”
“There are two small events after lunch.” Ike started on his third pan-fried dumpling. “Light digestives, Mr. Manning calls them. Then at two there’s the final event. The Double Mystery Race!”
“Nobody knows what to expect,” Simon told her. “We’ll really have to think fast for that one.”
“Your brains are good, and your heart also,” Pier said. “I know that you will win.”
“Um ….” Simon raised a slice of pizza to his mouth, then set it down. He’d been having so much fun, even when they didn’t win, that he’d almost forgotten what was at stake for Pier. But now that she’d reminded him, something that had been lurking at the back of his mind all day pushed forward and demanded to be heard. “Uh,” he said.
Ike wiped his chin. “Problem?”
“Yeah. What happens if we win?”
“When we win, you mean. Well, that’s easy.” Ike swallowed his mouthful. “Mr. Manning hands us the Hec Manning Trophy and everybody cheers and Dad takes our picture and we take the thing away and then we give it to Pier — right, Pier? — and she goes home happy. And next day they deliver the Spacer 9800 to my place, or maybe yours, and we spend the next month customizing it.” He popped the rest of the dumpling in his mouth.
“It can’t be that easy. Even if we win we won’t get the trophy right away because they have to engrave our names on the base.”
“That is fine,” Pier said. “We have nineteen days, yes? Time to spare.”
“Um.” Simon looked at Ike. “Didn’t you tell Pier about the time difference?”
“No.” Ike stared back at him. “Why me? I thought you would’ve.”
“No, I never did. I, uh, I forgot.”
The air moved behind him. Small patches of grass flattened to his left and then in front. Pier popped into view. Ike choked on his fourth dumpling.
“What did you forget?”
It wasn’t all that hard to explain to Pier about the time difference. Perhaps knowing about the many worlds, and the gates between them, prepared you for other strange things. She listened hard, then nodded. “So there is until tomorrow at noon. That is enough. All you need do is put the trophy in my hands. Two minutes and I am gone.”
“Okay, but ….” How could he make her understand? “Even if we win it, it still won’t belong to us. Not really. It belongs to the whole town. You see? We can’t just give it to you, because that would be like — like stealing it from next year’s winner.”
Pier’s eyes went wide. “Stealing?”
“Yes!” He looked at her hopefully.
“Stealing? What is stealing compared to the death of all my people?”
“Well, I ….” How could he answer that? But he still felt wrong about it. No matter what I do, it’ll be wrong.
Pier looked Simon over, frowning, as if she wasn’t sure who he was, after all. Then she shook her head. “I will do it myself, then.” She turned and was halfway to McNairn Avenue before Simon was able to untangle his legs and get up. “Pier!” he yelled. “Pier! Wait!”
Heads turned. People stared. Simon saw Amelia rolling her eyes, and Ty with his head perked up like a greyhound, and over there near the serving tables, Celeste talking with Mr. Manning, both of them turning and looking as Pier flew at them. Celeste said something and reached out, but Pier dodged and flitted away like a sparrow.
When Simon reached the spot, Celeste caught him by the arm and reeled him in.
“Simon! Who was that girl?”
“Uh ….” He shook his head and tried to see past her.
“She looked a lot like that homeless child we found yesterday. Except for the hair.”
“She … she did, didn’t she?”
“Maybe that was her,” said Ike, at his elbow. “Maybe we should go and look for her.”
Mr. Manning looked at his watch. “Don’t be long. Five minutes and it’s Charades. And then it’s the Synchronized Gum Chew and Spelling Bee!”
Once away from the field and all those people, Pier circled back around the big brick building they called a school, though it looked more like a fortress. She scrunched herself against the wall, too flurried to work her baffle spell. When she was sure nobody was looking, she slipped forward and crawled underneath the platform into the warm, earthy-grassy-smelling dimness behind the vinyl skirting. She found the spot right underneath where the Prism Blade stood disguised, and curled up with her arms wrapped around her knees.
Safe, she thought, for the first time in she couldn’t remember how long. Nothing could harm her here, bathed in this soft, rainbowy glow.
There was a thin gap in front of her where two sheets of vinyl didn’t quite meet. Scraps of colour and blurred movement whisked across the gap. People farther away appeared whole but very small. She caught a glimpse of Simon on the far side of the sandy place, looking back and forth, searching.
Seeing Simon brought her sadness and anger flooding back. She’d thought she could depend on Simon. She’d trusted him.
That will teach me! I cannot trust any of these people, not one. Not even Simon.
Amelia suddenly popped into view in the gap, reeling and clutching at her hear
t as if she was dying.
This must be the game that they call “charades.” Look at them, running around like madmen and making silly faces!
Pier breathed a scornful laugh. What did Amelia know of dying? What did any of them know of real danger — of fire by night, a sudden burst from the black sky. Or worse: by day. Of coming back up the hill in the morning, singing, with a bowl full of wild cloudberries, of getting a whiff of the stink from half a mile away, of dropping the bowl, of running, running, running home. Of crawling through the tall bracken and the mud. Of finding the village. What was left of the village.
Nobody left alive. Nobody but me. Why me? There must be a reason.
“Pier.” Hands pulled at her wrists. She had covered her eyes, uselessly. Simon was trying to fit himself under the platform beside her. Funny Simon, he never knew what to do with his arms and legs.
“I’ve been looking all over!” he said.
“You can go away again, then. I don’t need you.”
“So, how will you get the Prism?”
“I will wait until someone wins it, and then I will take it.”
“Um … how?” He peered at her as if he really wanted to know.
“See, I will follow them. They cannot watch it always. When they aren’t looking, I will take it.”
“I don’t think that’s a very good plan. And how will you get back? By then the gate will be gone. It’s probably gone already.”
“No need to worry. I will find a way.” She had her escape route mapped out. She wasn’t going to tell him what it was, though, or where it was, in case he told dragon-friend Amelia. It seemed she, Pier, was the only one who knew about this other gate, and that was the way it would stay.
And she had the key to the gate. She slid a hand into her pocket and touched it for the hundredth time to make sure it was there: the stone from Mythrin, with its star of dragon’s blood, safely wrapped in a scrap of linen.
