“We can’t,” Four said, her skin pale. “Can we?”
They were looking to me for answers. I felt all knotted up inside. Part of me wanted to back away into the library to escape their questioning eyes.
The Power’s voice echoed in my mind. Don’t let them screw around further. The faster she wraps this up, the better our shot of closing the rift.
“Alpha might . . .” I struggled to put together the right words. “She says she’ll die anyway. The trolls will turn on her. If they do, they’ll have a replacement alpha ready. But if she dies before then and the trolls lose their alpha without warning, then it’ll, um”—I recalled the stuttering repeats on the television—“it’ll confuse and weaken them. At least temporarily. I’m not saying we should do it, just that that’s . . . That’s why . . .”
“It’s a mental connection.” Torrance leaned against the desk Tara was sitting on, head down. She stared at the phone in her hand with unfocused eyes. Her glasses rested on the tip of her nose. I couldn’t tell whether she’d been listening.
“Sorry?” Four said.
“If only the trolls in the house responded to Alpha’s moods, they could be picking up on her body language or pheromones—but trolls across the entire region were suddenly more agitated, all at the precise same moment. It’s a mental connection. Killing her would sever that connection.”
Red cocked her head. “Could we sever it another way?”
“With time and proper equipment, we could experiment and perhaps find a sophisticated means of suppressing the mechanism. But I’m thinking of a cruder approach.” Torrance tore her eyes away from her phone. She looked almost excited. “What about an artificial coma?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“I have everything we need to safely—”
A yell from the main hall interrupted Torrance. “They’re crossing the hedge!”
Other yells and footsteps followed, then a screeching sound and the clatter of metal.
“Gotta go.” Tara slipped off the table and toward the doorway. Two books dropped to the floor in her wake. She walked with a limp—no doubt from the fight earlier—but I hadn’t heard her so much as whimper. “Hector? Hector! Has anyone seen my brother?” Her voice faded into the ruckus.
Four knelt to pick up the books, casting a worried look at the hall.
“I’m going to see what’s happening,” Torrance said.
“Me too.” I pushed the last of my sandwich into my mouth and stepped closer. I doubted I could help; if the trolls were nearby enough for me to use my knife, we had bigger problems than I’d thought. But I refused to twiddle my thumbs waiting for Torrance’s return. Her idea could work, and I needed to know more.
“The rest of you should stay back,” Torrance said. “People here don’t really know what to make of you.”
In the main library hall, a large group—the non-fighters, based on the number of children—was gathering near the office we’d just left, like they were trying to stay out of the way.
Everyone else was mobilizing. The sheriff and two women leaned over a table, sorting through potential weapons—“We really need that extra steel to arrive already,” Torrance said—while others were pulling bookcases into place to block the doors.
“You mean it about the coma, right?” I asked. “It’s not a way to get us to help you kill her?”
“What? No! Jesus.” She shook her head vigorously. “If the coma doesn’t work, I’ll have to report in, but trust me: I want it to work.”
I let the words sink in as I studied people who were double-checking the boards safeguarding the windows. I wanted to trust Torrance. Knowing just how much the MGA had lied, though, I felt like I should be smarter, more skeptical. I didn’t want to be that eager, naive girl the Powers and Neven thought I was.
“Think of it this way,” Torrance said. “To make this work, we’ll need to get up close and risk Tara’s life. If I wanted to kill Alpha, there’d be easier ways.”
I’d never heard something so ominous meant as comfort. I couldn’t argue with the logic, though.
Torrance lightly touched my shoulder. “Let’s give it a try.”
I nodded.
“I need to find Tara’s dad. He’s a nurse; we’ll need the expertise to deal with Alpha safely.” We reached the weaponry table, and the sheriff waved us over.
“You’re the expert, right?” The sheriff took a bent golf club from the table and eyed Torrance. “You know why those creatures’re doing this?”
“Doing what? Attacking?”
“Attacking the library. So far they’ve only shown interest when they’ve seen people going inside, and they’d get distracted soon after. Right now, they’re coming from all directions, like this is an organized attack—how smart are they, really? They communicating using goddamn Bluetooth?”
If the trolls were determined to get in, the library wouldn’t hold. Trolls rose back up every time someone took them down; the humans on our end would stay dead.
Why did they want to get in? Did they know I was here? I hadn’t thought they held grudges. Alpha might be less inclined to forgive and forget, though. Even if she wasn’t consciously sending trolls after me, there seemed to be enough simmering rage or fear for them to pick up on.
A couple of children were crying nearby, near a wall littered with posters and announcements—an author reading, volunteer tutoring, superheroes proclaiming the power of books, and more. Tara sat right below a poster announcing some sort of Dickens festival. She crouched beside a young boy, running her hand soothingly through his hair. Had to be her little brother.
I jogged over. “Hey. I’m the one from the shed.”
She nodded. “Don’t you still have that phone?”
I took it from my pocket and handed it to her. Her index finger grazed mine. I noticed that more than I probably should’ve. “How’s your ankle?” I asked.
“Swollen. But it’s nothing serious.” She peered at me through her eyelashes, the same inquisitive look she’d had in the shed. “You’re the one from this dimension, right?”
I nodded, trying to think of a light-yet-funny response.
Tara was already continuing. “Two other versions of you, dating two other versions of me. That’s more than a little weird.”
Maybe she’d noticed our fingers touching, too. “Definitely weird,” I agreed. “Even after the day I’ve had.”
“I probably don’t want to ask, huh?” A grin slanted across her face.
“Well, your life’s not so normal right now, either,” I said.
“That,” she said, “is very true.”
“Are you OK?”
Tara considered that. “You know, I think I am. I don’t understand how, though. I mean—I do homework and draw things and look after Hector. That’s it. That’s my life, normally. But somehow I’m not freaking out? Maybe that’ll come later.”
“Maybe you’re just a natural.”
She laughed. “I should’ve been born in that world of Alpha’s, then.”
“Technically, you were.”
“Oh, yeah. True. Man, it’s bizarre to think there’s some Tara Ávila out there who spends her days killing trolls. And another who’s making out with her fluorescent-haired girlfriend.”
I nodded vigorously. “Same. Same. Do you, um.” I tried to sound casual. “In this world, do you also like . . .?”
Why was I asking, anyway? Would Tara think I—? I went back and forth a half-dozen times, but in the end, I just stood there, gangly and awkward, neither taking the question back nor saying the actual word.
Coward, I thought.
Tara finished the sentence for me: “Do I like girls?”
“Yeah,” I said, relieved. “Do you? Did you know before all this?”
I shouldn’t be asking, but who else could I ask? Not many people had experienced learning that, in another world, they were gay as hell. There was no protocol for this situation, no guidance counselor, no online advice column.
&
nbsp; “Yeah. I’ve been out since I was, like, twelve. To my family, anyway. The rest of the world will need to wait till I get out of this place for college. Why? You didn’t know?”
“Oh. I’m not—I—” I should’ve seen that question coming. I probably looked bright red. There was no way to salvage this without either protesting too much or having the first person I came out to be a stranger from half a state away.
(“Come out”? Was I calling it that already? That sounded so final, like I knew there was something to come out about, like I knew I’d be doing it more in the future, like . . .)
“You said earlier you were willing to talk to Alpha,” I said abruptly. There. The reason I’d actually approached Tara. “Did you mean that? Do you know the risks?”
Tara glanced at the boy by her side. “I know enough.”
She was probably right. From the way she’d defended herself on the street, it couldn’t have been the first time she’d faced trolls.
“I thought you said the plan wouldn’t work?” she asked.
“Not long-term. But we might not need long-term.”
“Ah. You want me to help . . .” Another glance at the boy. “To help put her to sleep.”
“We need to get close, and you can probably get closer than anyone,” I said, even as guilt nagged at me. Tara had already risked her life for us. And this was supposed to be our fight, my fight, not hers.
“My dad is out there. I can’t leave Hector alone. Especially now.” She looked around the library with a visible sense of dread. From my left came a faint, metallic scratching, like claws raking the metal sheets blocking the windows. “It’s too dangerous.”
“That,” I said, “is where I come in.”
First, we needed to test my theory.
The ladder to the roof creaked dangerously under my weight. The moment I stuck my head out the open hatch, wind rushed at me so fiercely I had to squeeze my eyes almost closed to see.
Three men and two women stood around the edges of the roof. Most of them were keeping an eye on the grounds and shouting updates into their phones; the guy I’d seen on the way in was kneeling by the ledge, rifle aimed at the ground below.
One of the women whirled at hearing us climb up. Her hands went to her rifle.
“It’s safe, it’s safe,” I said hurriedly.
I clambered out onto the gravel and helped pull up Four, who’d climbed up after me. The others had stayed in the library. Between helping Torrance and Tara nail down the specifics of the plan, distracting the kids, and helping secure the building, there was plenty to do.
One or two hundred yards away, Neven’s silhouette stood out sharply against the dark-pink sky. She flew in languid circles. I waved with an exaggerated motion, but couldn’t tell whether she saw.
“You first,” I told Four.
If the trolls were here for me, I could draw them away from the library. Maybe we could do even better than that, though. If trolls couldn’t distinguish between us, we could split up and scatter them.
As Four walked to the edge of the roof, I zipped my coat up to my chin against the cold. I could hear engines, occasional gunfire, yells, unidentifiable thumps, and constant scratching, grinding sounds, but from where I stood in the center of the roof, I couldn’t see a thing.
Four stopped at the ledge and cautiously leaned over to peer at the trolls.
“A couple of them saw me,” she reported. “They’re not reacting, I think?”
Gravel crunched underfoot as I joined her. On the lawn, people worked together to prop up metal sheets, while on the street past the hedge, a woman with a fiercely bleeding leg was pulling herself into a pickup truck. Her good leg snapped out to kick away an approaching troll.
The trolls were strewn all over. A handful rushing along the top of the hedge. A few on the lawn, searching the steel barriers for gaps. There, on the street; there, fighting near the tree log—
A screech like stone along a blackboard tore through the noise. My shoulders snapped to my ears.
“What the—?” a woman standing on Four’s other side said.
I whirled toward where the screech had come from. Two trolls crept along the hedge, their bodies small and tense and fast. Their necks craned up. They stared directly at me as they moved.
Another screech, now to my right—where a handful of trolls dashed forward, toward the library, toward us. Toward me.
“That answers that,” I said. Unwillingly, I took a step back.
“What’s happening all of a sudden?” The woman yanked the rifle off her shoulders and aimed. Across the roof, a man yelled frantic updates into his phone.
Several trolls rushed around the corner of the library, heads up, eyes searching until they settled on me. They sped up.
“They don’t like me much,” I told the woman as a half-hearted answer. “Four—”
“Yeah. You should go.” The trolls were suddenly so energized we’d be overrun within minutes. I had to draw them away.
“Keep an eye on Dr. Torrance for me,” I said.
“Huh?”
“In case she tells the MGA. They might take shortcuts with Alpha.”
Her eyes widened as my meaning sank in.
The same concern might’ve occurred to Red or Rainbow by now, but it didn’t surprise me that Four hadn’t considered it. Suspicion didn’t suit her.
“I’ll try to keep them busy long enough. Good luck.”
“You too.”
I breathed in deep, then turned. “Neven!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
A few years ago, our neighbor’s dog gave birth to a litter of puppies.
Every day after school, I’d run over to visit. I could spend hours watching the puppies nap and suckle and bumble about while I sipped at my neighbor’s homemade hot cocoa. After a few weeks, the dogs reached the perfect puppy stage: soft-furred, floppy-eared, and curious-minded about the world beyond their mom’s milk.
In particular, a soft red ball. I remembered holding it up, puppies all around and atop my feet. I moved the ball left and their heads turned left. I moved the ball right and their heads turned right. I moved the ball up, and they craned their necks until they almost fell over. I stepped back, and they eagerly stumbled closer without ever taking their eyes off the ball.
That was what the trolls reminded me of when Neven and I sheared overhead. Except this time, not as cute.
As we flew, I sat up straight to make myself visible. Below us, trolls followed without hesitation. They broke away from their assault on the library one at a time. Others came running down the street from farther away.
“One more go-round,” I yelled at Neven, who obliged and circled the library again to hook any trolls that might’ve missed us. A couple seemed distracted, fighting or trying to get into the library, but I only counted four or five stragglers total, down from—what? Forty? The humans in the library outnumbered the trolls at this point. People were safe for now, which meant Torrance and the others could put the plan in motion.
Neven and I might be able to help with that. “Can you get to Tara’s house?” I called.
We flew slowly across town, regularly dipping low to reignite the trolls’ interest. Trolls emerged from all kinds of places—broken windows, shrubbery, underneath cars—to join the group following us. Some clambered up trees or rooftops to try to leap at us; Neven would either swerve out of the way or knock them aside with her tail. My muscles hurt from the way I hunched over Neven’s neck, bracing myself against the wind and cold while she dipped and swerved and rose like a slow-motion roller coaster.
Nausea crept up on me as we reached Tara’s street. I’d died here. Was it that spot on the asphalt? Or in that backyard, over there?
Neven dove to give the trolls a good view of me on her back. For a moment, watching Tara’s house as we flew past, I wanted to call out to Alpha. I gripped Neven’s neck, sweat pooling between my gloves and hands, and let the moment pass.
We flew out of town with at least ei
ghty trolls trailing us. A few had given up, either tired or distracted or choosing to stay with Alpha, but most stayed on our heels with vicious determination. Bulging bug eyes gleamed in the dusk, never once looking away, never once blinking.
I was safe up here, circling the fields outside the town. Even when the trolls pressed into one another until they merged into misshapen forms as tall as me, they had no chance of reaching us. The biggest danger lay in Neven’s wings cramping up before Torrance could execute the plan. I tried to cling to that optimism, but my reptile brain felt more like lying facedown and screaming into the floor.
Half the trolls had been pacing the fields, mirroring our flight path from the ground, while the other half had sat tense and still, their eyes tracking our every movement.
For the first time, their focus faltered. At least a dozen trolls turned their heads westward. Automatically, I looked in the same direction. There was little to see—grassy hills, an empty road, a billboard advertising the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon, and scattered trees that eventually turned into a forest. I couldn’t hear anything, either. The sound of the soaring wind and Neven’s wings beating the air drowned out anything else.
Fear twisted in my gut as two trolls started in the direction of the road. If the trolls were giving up on me . . .
At the horizon, light flared on the asphalt. The silhouette of a box truck appeared atop the hill, then came barreling toward Damford.
The trolls who’d gone to investigate looked from the truck to me, as though considering the situation. Then they set off, leaving paths of bent grass in their wake. More trolls followed.
I understood trolls losing interest in chasing me, but why would a truck a hundred yards away intrigue them this much?
The trolls sprinted toward the road. The front trolls weaved together, merging into hulking shapes thudding through the grass. They looked over their shoulders, as though making sure I was watching.
“Oh no,” I whispered as the truth dawned on me. “Neven! Get down there!”
The first trolls reached the asphalt right as the truck approached. A last sprint—then one troll threw itself into the truck’s path. The truck swerved. One wheel dipped into the grass beside the road. It almost, almost looked like the driver could course-correct—
The Art of Saving the World Page 19
