by Liz Marsham
“Nice one, Ami,” said Zarya. Still trying to think of what she’d say to the illusionist first when she saw her, she clambered down the ladder.
But at the bottom, her words dried up again. She was in a huge, dimly lit basement. The basement was one big room, and it was fully furnished; Zarya could make out a couple of couches and a few sets of tables and chairs. Overlapping woven rugs covered the floor, and posters from Ami’s tours around the world were framed and hung on the walls. Maybe at one point this had been a living room or a game room. But around and on top of the furniture were all kinds of props and memorabilia, stacked up everywhere and making the large room feel cramped and cluttered. It looked a bit like the inside of Ami’s truck, with two differences: Everything was stacked haphazardly in the open instead of being organized into crates, and everything looked … Zarya couldn’t quite put her finger on it …
“Abandoned,” she finally muttered. That was it. In the truck, Ami had clearly been working on everything, tinkering and perfecting. But here were the tricks that she was finished with, or that never worked. An iron tank, an elaborate clockwork dollhouse, fruit made of marble and flowers made of wood, and on and on. Here were the trinkets picked up in her travels, snow globes and ornaments and sculptures and novelty hats, that she had no use for, the kind that were displayed proudly for a year or two and then tossed aside.
Standing amid the castoffs of Ami’s life, Zarya felt a surge of discomfort. A few hours ago in Ami’s truck, Zarya had felt a real connection to the illusionist. But their lives were so different. While Zarya was running cons for small change in the Undercity, Ami had been traveling the world. How many places had Ami been that Zarya had never even heard of?
Maybe we don’t have so much in common after all, Zarya thought. Then she shook herself. Stop talking yourself out of things, Z. She had hung out with Ami, and she liked Ami, and she was pretty sure Ami liked her, too. That was enough.
With new resolve, Zarya strode across the basement and around a corner, where she found a set of stairs leading up. Still lost in thought, she put a foot on the first step … then yanked it back as a huge sword came swinging at her out of the wall.
Shhhhing! Shing! Shing! One after another, curved blades sliced down from hidden grooves in the walls and ceiling and began swinging back and forth over the steps. Zarya’s eyes widened as, within seconds, twenty blades blocked her path to the top of the stairs. There was no break in the pattern, no safe way to dart by.
She was stuck.
11
In Which There Are Bolts from the Blue
Zarya’s mind raced. Ami comes down here a lot to drop stuff off, she thought. Think like her. I know I wouldn’t want to have to deal with a sword storm every time I put something away. So there must be an easy way to turn it off.
Zarya poked around at the bottom of the stairs for a few minutes, looking for a switch, a lever, a button. Anything to stop the blades, which continued to swoosh back and forth. Then she sighed. Ami doesn’t live down here, genius, she berated herself. There is an easy way to turn this trap off. And it’s at the top of the stairs.
But Zarya knew there must be some way past from this side. What, she invited me all this way just for me to get stuck in the basement? Nah. There’s gotta be something.… She went back to studying the blades. Say Ami comes in through the trapdoor sometimes. She’s not gonna do an acrobatics routine through these knives, jumping around like Piper when she’s had too much sugar, just to get up to the bathroom. That’s not her style. And why risk getting cut at all?
Hey, maybe that’s it!
Zarya reached into her pocket and pulled out the piece of parchment Ami had given her. Gingerly, she held it out over the bottom step.
Slice! On its next pass, the first blade chopped the paper neatly in two. Zarya dropped the half still in her hand with a muffled yelp. “Okay,” she breathed. “Definitely real blades. Definitely real, sharp blades.”
Then she replayed what she had just said. I’m assuming too much, she realized. There is definitely one real blade. That’s all I know for sure. She peered closely at the rest of the blades. It was hard to tell since they were moving, but were they less shiny than the first one? And was there something slightly less … swoopy about the way they were swooping?
She looked around at the nearby stacks of memorabilia. She didn’t want to risk wrecking anything sentimental or valuable, but … there. Balanced on the top of one pile was a familiar sight—a cheap, plastic novelty wand with MAGI MALL written down its length. Zarya snatched it up and returned to the bottom of the stairs.
Waiting for the first blade to pass again, she took a deep breath. “Ugh, I hope I’m right about this,” she said. “And if I’m not, Ami, I’ll buy you a new wand.” Swish. The sharp blade swung past. Zarya stretched her arm forward over the bottom steps, thrusting the wand directly into the path of the second blade.
Clunk. The blade hit the wand and rebounded backward, juddering to a halt. This second sword wasn’t sharp, and it weighed almost nothing at all!
“Yesssss!” Zarya hissed in triumph. Then she remembered the danger and snatched her arm back—barely in time. She felt the breeze of the sharp first blade on her fingertips.
But now she knew the secret. Jumping to the safe space where the second blade had swung, she stuck the wand out to intersect the third blade. Clunk. Another fake. Stepping up again, she checked the fourth blade. Clunk. And the fifth. Clunk. She was starting to chuckle, but she had to check each one just to be sure. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk. Zarya worked her way up the stairs, leaving a trail of blunt, hollow swords dangling behind her.
At the top of the steps, she swung the door wide, a triumphant smile on her face, half expecting Ami to be there waiting for her. But there was no one … and nothing. She was standing at the bottom of a wide, tall, nearly empty silo. A spiral staircase, its railing decorated with strings of white lights, wound around the inside wall of the space to a hatch in the ceiling about forty feet up. Long metal poles and planks of wood leaned against the wall near the door she had just come through, and paint spattered the floor.
Zarya realized she was standing in the tower she had noticed from the outside, the one topped by the pyramid. She crossed the room to the paint splatters. Clearly, something huge had been laid out on the floor in here. Zarya raised her eyebrows as she had a thought. Did Ami build this room ’cause she needed a space to work out one of her tricks? Were all the strange rooms I saw from the outside built the way they were so specific tricks could fit inside them? Does Ami think of an illusion and then design the perfect room to make it in? Zarya shook her head. That’s weird … but pretty great, actually.
FWOOM. Zarya’s head snapped up, her train of thought broken. That sounded like an explosion, and it came from the room right above her. Quickly she crossed to the steps and bounded up them.
FWOOM again, followed by CRASH. Something was definitely going on up there. Maybe Ami was in trouble! Zarya took stock as she sprinted up the last few stairs. She had no powers, sure. But she was still her, and she could outsmart anyone dumb enough to mess with her friend.
Zarya reached the hatch and pushed it open a few inches, peeking cautiously through. She could see Ami’s booted feet a little ways in front of her, facing something deeper in the room. From what Zarya could tell, Ami’s feet were in a ready stance, her right foot back and braced against the floor.
Carefully, Zarya pushed the hatch open another inch, just in time to see a flash of blue light, accompanied by another FWOOM. Was Ami being attacked? Or was she attacking someone else with some kind of energy weapon? Running out of patience, Zarya shoved the hatch open and stuck her head all the way through.
Then she froze. She was near one corner of the inside of a pyramid that went up about fifty feet, and it was as full as the room below had been empty. A complex system of pulleys, ropes, winches, bars, and moving platforms filled the narrowing space above. Curtains, like the ones Ami used in her act, were hung fro
m some of the bars, while others held reflective panels and others supported stage lights. A row of seats was set up against the wall next to Zarya’s head, and a bank of control panels stretched away down the wall in front of her. Spare curtains, parts of lights, strangely shaped mirrors, and other odds and ends were scattered around the room, resting on the empty seats and piled against the walls. Zarya figured this was how Ami tested the sight lines for her stage act, to make sure the mechanisms for her tricks stayed safely invisible.
Right now, Ami was the only other person in the room. She was wearing her full stage outfit, facing bottles of fizzy star water dangling from ropes in the middle of the room. As Zarya watched, Ami raised her hand and concentrated.
FWOOM. A bolt of blue energy shot out of Ami’s hand and smashed into the bottle on the left. It exploded, pieces clinking to the ground to join a growing pile of broken glass.
Ami nodded, then muttered, “Okay, but what if I…” She raised her hand again.
SHWIP. This time a coil of blue light extended from her hand, unraveling across the room to loop around the bottle. Ami jerked her hand backward and the loop tightened, cracking the bottle in half.
This time Ami laughed out loud. “Now this is amazing,” she said.
Zarya stared. It wasn’t shaped like a bow and arrows, but she would know that blue energy anywhere. Arkayna, Piper, Em—they were all right. And Zarya was so, so wrong.
Amileth had stolen Zarya’s magic.
12
In Which Zarya Throws Shade (and Several Other Things)
Zarya’s face felt hot, and her hands shook. She felt sick. No, she felt angry.
No, that wasn’t it, either. Well, it was part of it, but not all of it.
She felt embarrassed.
Here she was, jumping through hoops to find someone she had just met, wondering if she needed to hurry to make a good impression, planning out what she was going to say. And the whole time Ami had been here, playing with Zarya’s stolen power.
On top of all that, Zarya had ditched her real friends, and had gotten mad at them for telling her what was clearly the truth. How was she going to face them? What was she going to say to Arkayna? When she thought about what she had said to Arkayna …
SKKKKSSSSH. Zarya snapped back to the present as Ami whipped her hand from left to right, sending out a barrage of blue energy spikes that smashed one bottle after another.
“Enough,” Zarya snarled. Her hands clenched, and she looked down in surprise to see that she was still holding the plastic wand. Without thinking, she pulled back her fist and hurled the wand toward the nearest control panel.
The plastic clanked against a switch, flipping it to the side, and Ami leapt back in surprise as the long pipe holding up the bottles rocketed toward the ground with a clatter. Then the illusionist whirled around to face Zarya.
“Oh! You—you got here so fast!” the elf girl stammered.
A part of Zarya’s mind noted that, in another context, this was exactly the reaction she had been hoping for. But all that was ruined now.
“You didn’t think I’d come looking for my magic?” challenged Zarya. Warily, she began edging toward the controls.
“Of course I did, I just thought…” Ami raised her hands to her head and looked distraught.
Zarya narrowed her eyes. “So you did know! You did this on purpose!”
“No! I mean, yes, I knew it was yours, but…” Ami reached a hand out. “Zarya, I swear, I—”
“Keep your hands down,” Zarya hissed, ducking.
Ami froze, shocked. “Zarya, I’m not going to … Just listen.” She dropped her hand and took a step forward.
“Stop.” Zarya put a hand up in warning. With the other, she groped along the wall beside her for the nearest bank of controls.
“Wait, don’t touch those,” Ami said, a new tension in her voice. “You don’t know what they are.”
“I don’t know what you are.” Zarya’s hand came to rest on a large lever.
“That’s not fair!” Ami retorted. Zarya watched in alarm as her eyes began to flicker with blue sparks. Ami raised a hand, finger pointed accusingly at Zarya. Were those blue sparks on her fingertips?
Panicking, Zarya shoved the lever down. Ropes attached to one side of a wooden platform, suspended halfway up the far wall, went slack, and the platform swung down toward Amileth.
Ami spun and thrust her hands out, and a sheet of crackling blue light shot from her splayed fingertips. The platform smashed into the blue energy, the force of it shoving Ami back a few inches. The sheet of blue cracked apart and dissolved, but it had done its job. Ami spun to face Zarya again, her eyes now fully glowing blue.
Zarya reached for the next lever.
“Don’t,” warned Ami. Her clenched fists glowed.
I have to keep her off-balance, Zarya thought. Keep her from attacking me. She pulled the lever.
A heavy metal pulley dropped from the top of the room, right toward Ami’s head. But again, Ami was ready. She swung a hand, and a blue bolt caught the pulley in mid-drop, sending it careening into a tangle of ropes.
“Stop it,” Ami demanded, stomping toward Zarya. “Why are you doing this?”
“Why am I doing this?” Zarya almost laughed as she reached for the next lever. “Look at you!”
“Look at…” Ami repeated, glancing down at her hands. She saw the crackles of blue and stopped dead. “Oh.” Then she caught a glimpse of herself in a nearby mirror, and her glowing blue eyes went wide. “OH.”
Immediately she backed away from Zarya, hands falling to her sides. The light in her eyes went out, replaced by a look of alarm. “I didn’t know. Zarya, I didn’t know. Why would I attack you,” she continued, and now she looked imploring, “when I have so many questions?”
13
In Which Everything Comes So Close to Going Right
Zarya kept her hand on the lever. “You … didn’t know you were shooting scary sparks out of your eyes?”
“No,” said Ami emphatically. “How would I? This is all totally new to me!”
“And totally mine.”
“I know.” Ami slumped to her knees, her shoulders falling. “I mean, I know now. I didn’t turn the footlights off for a while after you’d left, and then … well, there was a hum, so I knew something had been stored in there, but I didn’t know what it was. And I didn’t expect it to go into me.” She looked up, a hint of accusation in her eyes. “You didn’t tell me you had magic!”
Chagrined, Zarya finally let her hand fall. “It’s not something I’m supposed to talk about,” she admitted. “And, for the record, I don’t use it to make angry eye sparks.”
Ami chuckled. “Fair enough. So what do you use it for?” Seeing Zarya’s hesitation, she shrugged. “I’ve told you quite a few secrets tonight. And besides, if you tell me, it might help me figure out how to get the magic back into you.”
Zarya gasped. She wasn’t even sure where to start. “First of all,” she said after a moment of sputtering. “You don’t know how to give my magic back?!”
“This has never happened before!” Ami protested. “I have some ideas we could try, though.”
“I bet you do. But, okay, you do want to give it back, right?”
“Of course I do!”
“Then why didn’t you come find me right away?” Zarya demanded.
It was Ami’s turn to hesitate. “I, um,” she started. She took a deep breath and tried again. “You have to understand. I always wondered what it would be like to have magic. And I thought, well … I don’t know what you use the power for, so I hoped you wouldn’t notice for a few hours. I was going to experiment tonight and then track you down in the morning. You’re the princess. I figured you wouldn’t be hard to find.” Ami’s eyes brightened. “Oh, I didn’t think of that until just now. Does magic run in your family? Does Princess Arkayna have it, too?”
Zarya squirmed. “It’s not … that kind of magic.”
Ami leaned forward eagerl
y. “What do you mean? What kind is it?”
“It’s … uh, well, you were experimenting with it. What do you think?”
Letting out a laugh, Ami got to her feet. “Smooth deflection, Princess.”
Zarya blushed. Ami motioned her closer, and she went to stand with the illusionist in the middle of the room.
“Watch this,” Ami said. She held up a hand, and a thin blue rope of energy unfurled from one finger. She made a lashing motion, and the energy whipped toward a control panel, neatly pressing one button. Above them, a stage light went out.
“The whip is pretty cool, sure,” Zarya said.
“Wait.” Ami closed her fist, dissipating the energy. Zarya watched as Ami opened her hand again, but this time nothing happened.
“Still getting the hang of—” Zarya teased. But her quip dried up as Ami made another lashing motion with her empty hand, and across the room Zarya heard the click of the same button as before. She squinted as the stage light came back on. “Whooooooooa,” she whispered, impressed. “How did you—”
“I have no idea,” Ami said. “But I can decide whether or not the whip is visible. Do you know what this means for the act?”
“Wait, the act? What does this have to do with the act?” Zarya took a wary step away from her. “I thought you wanted to give the magic back.”
Ami nodded enthusiastically. “I do! I will! But then you should definitely come with me! I already knew we would make a good team, but now? Zarya, with my craftsmanship and your magic, we will be the greatest show in Gemina!”
Zarya relaxed, letting her breath out in relief. Then she shook her head sadly. “Ami, I can’t. I have this … it’s sort of a job, I guess. It means a lot to me, and I can’t just walk away from it.”
“What, being a princess? Your sister has all the princess duties covered, I can tell. Take a vacation! Make a career change!” Impulsively, Ami grabbed Zarya’s hands and pulled her closer. “Come with me.”
