Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky

by Kwame Mbalia

  I didn’t see what the big deal was about using our powers around the house. We rarely had company—few travelers came to the world of Jinju. According to legend, about two hundred years ago, a shaman was supposed to have finished terraforming our planet with the Dragon Pearl, a mystical orb with the ability to create life. But on the way here, both she and the Pearl had disappeared. I didn’t know if anything in that story was true or not. All I knew was that Jinju had remained poor and neglected by the Dragon Council for generations.

  As I reluctantly let go of sleep that morning, I heard the voice of a stranger in the other room. At first I thought one of the adults was watching a holo show—maybe galactic news from the Pearled Halls—and had the volume turned up too high. We were always getting reports about raids from the Jeweled Worlds and the Space Forces’ heroic efforts to defend us from the marauders, even if Jinju was too far from the border to suffer such attacks. But the sound from our holo unit always came out staticky. No static accompanied this voice.

  It didn’t belong to any of the neighbors, either. I knew everyone who lived within an hour’s scooter ride. And it wasn’t just the unfamiliarity of the voice, deep and smooth, that made me sit up and take notice. No one in our community spoke that formally.

  Were we in trouble with the authorities? Had someone discovered that fox spirits weren’t a myth after all? The stranger’s voice triggered my old childhood fears of our getting caught.

  “You must be misinformed.” That was Mom talking. She sounded tense.

  Now I really started to worry.

  “. . . no mistake,” the voice was saying.

  No mistake what? I had to find out more.

  I slipped out from under the blanket, freezing in place when Bora grunted and flopped over. I bet starship engines made less racket. But if the stranger had heard Bora’s obnoxious noises, he gave no sign of it.

  I risked a touch of Charm to make myself plainer, drabber, harder to see. Foxes can smell each other’s magic—one of my aunties described the sensation as being like a sneeze that won’t come out—but my mom might be distracted enough not to notice.

  “How is this possible?” I heard Mom ask.

  My hackles rose. She was clearly distressed, and I’d never known her to show weakness in front of strangers.

  I tiptoed out of the bedroom and poked my head around the corner. There stood Mom, small but straight-backed. And then came the second surprise. I bit down on a sneeze.

  Mom was using Charm. Not a lot—just enough to cover the patches in her trousers and the wrinkles in her worn shirt, and to restore their color to a richer green. We hadn’t expected visitors, especially anybody important. She wouldn’t have had time to dress up in the fine clothes she saved for special occasions. It figured she’d made an exception for herself to use fox magic, despite the fact that she chastised me whenever I experimented with it.

  The stranger loomed over her. I didn’t smell any Charm on him, but he could have been some other kind of supernatural, like a tiger or a goblin, in disguise. It was often hard to tell. I sniffed more closely, hoping to catch a whiff of emotion. Was he angry? Frustrated? Did he detect Mom’s magic at all? But he held himself under such tight control that I couldn’t get a bead on him.

  His clothes, finely tailored in a burnished-bronze-colored fabric, were all real. What caught my eye was the badge on the breast of his coat. It marked him as an official investigator of the Thousand Worlds, the league to which Jinju belonged. There weren’t literally a thousand planets in the league, but it encompassed many star systems, all answering to the same government. I’d never been off-world myself, although I’d often dreamed of it. This man might have visited dozens of worlds for his job, even the government seat at the Pearled Halls, and I envied him for it.

  More to the point, what was an investigator doing here? I could only think of one thing: Something had happened to my brother, Jun. My heart thumped so loudly I was sure he and Mom would hear it.

  “Your son vanished under mysterious circumstances,” the investigator said. “He is under suspicion of desertion.”

  I gasped involuntarily. Jun? Deserting?

  “That’s impossible!” Mom said vehemently. “My son worked very hard to get into the Space Forces!” I didn’t need my nose to tell me how freaked-out she was.

  I remembered the way Jun’s face had lit up when he’d gotten the letter admitting him to the Academy. It had meant everything to him—he would never run off! I bit the side of my mouth to keep from blurting that out.

  The investigator’s eyes narrowed. “That may be, but people change, especially when they are presented with certain . . . opportunities.”

  “Opportunities . . . ?” Mom swallowed and then asked in a small voice, “What do you mean?”

  “According to his captain’s report, your son left to go in search of the Dragon Pearl.”

  I wasn’t sure which stunned me more: the idea of Jun leaving the Space Forces, or the fact that the Dragon Pearl might actually exist.

  “The Pearl? How . . . ?” my mother asked incredulously. “No one knows where it—”

  “The Dragon Council has made strides in locating it,” the investigator said, rudely cutting her off. “And they would pay handsomely to have it back in their possession. If he found it, your son could have found the temptation irresistible. . . .”

  No. I knew my brother wouldn’t risk his career by trying to cash in an artifact, even one as renowned as the Dragon Pearl.

  Mom’s shoulders slumped. I wanted to tell her not to believe the investigator so readily. There had to be some other explanation.

  “Jun is not here,” she said, drawing herself up again, “and we have not heard from him, either. I’m afraid we can’t help you.”

  The man was not put off. “There is one matter you can assist us with,” he said. “Your son’s last report before he left—it included a message addressed to Min. I believe that’s your daughter?”

  A shock went through me when he said my name.

  “I have been sent here to show it to her. It may offer clues to Jun’s location—or the Pearl’s. Perhaps he wrote it in a code language only she would understand.”

  “Again, I think you have the wrong impression of my son,” Mom said haughtily. “He is an honorable soldier, not a traitor.”

  “So you say. But I am not leaving these premises until I have shown Min the message. Are you not curious to see his last communication?”

  That did the trick.

  “Min!” Mom called.

  Keep reading for a sneak peek at Sal & Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez!

  THERE’S ALL SORTS of bad advice out there about how to deal with bullies. Ignore them. Stand up to them. Tell a teacher, tell a parent, tell your dentist while he’s jamming your teeth back into your face.

  The real way to deal with a bully is to stick a raw chicken in their locker.

  I had my showdown with Yasmany Robles just three days after I had started my new life at Culeco Academy of the Arts, a magnet school in the middle of Miami. To get in, you had to have good grades, pass an interview, and either submit a portfolio (for painting or writing) or audition (for theater or music). You’d think all the effort someone has to go through to get into Culeco would’ve kept out bullies, but I guess not.

  I guess there are just too many of them in the world. If your school only allowed in kids who’d never pick on anyone, you’d have an empty school.

  Whatever. It’s not like I hadn’t learned how to handle bullies back in Connecticut.

  On Wednesday, between fourth and fifth periods, I went to the lockers, along with half a million other kids. I stowed my history book and grabbed math so I could do my homework during lunch, then opened my bag of magic tricks and put on my GOTCHA! stamp ring. We would be doing introductions in my eighth-period theater class, and I thought I could use it to demonstrate some sleight of hand. Magic is kind of my thing.

  I had a minute before I needed to g
o, so I took out my diabetes bag and fished out my glucose meter. I thought I’d be all right until lunch, but I’d started to feel spacey and dreamy at the end of my last class. Blood sugar levels might be falling. Best to check now.

  As I rummaged, I noticed the tall kid next to me struggling to get his locker open. He was as Cuban as they come: brown, built like a track-and-field champ, with a haircut so short you could see the bumpy skin of his scalp beneath what was left of his tiny curls. He’d wrestled with his combination lock yesterday, too, and never figured it out, so he’d had to carry a full backpack of books to his next class. I’d had trouble with my lock on the first day, until I’d figured out you have to squeeze it as you turn the dial.

  And I’m a nice guy. So I said to him, “Hey, man. My lock sucks, too. The trick is to squeeze the top while—”

  That’s all I got out before he punched his locker. The whole hallway grew a little quieter.

  Yasmany—I learned his name later, but why keep you in suspense?—slowly turned to look at me. He scanned me up and down, doing some tough-guy calculations to figure out if he could take me.

  Apparently he thought he could, because he stepped up to me fast, ferocious, chest out, arms wide. He’d been in a lot of fights, judging from his flat-as-a-shamrock nose.

  “Just come back from safari, white boy?” he asked. “I mean, if you even are a boy.”

  Let’s take a second to break down this insult.

  The “safari” crack was because I had on canvas cargo pants and a cargo vest, each with four pockets brimming with gadgets and tricks of the trade. Pretty much all the clothes I own have tons of pockets. I’m ready to perform at any time. You never know when the world is going to need a little magic.

  The “white boy” crack was because—I guess?—to him I looked white. Back when I lived in Connecticut, kids were telling me to “go back to brown town” all the time. But I was in Miami now: new place, new rules about skin color.

  And the “if you are a boy”? I kept my hair pretty long. It gave me a place to hide stuff in the middle of a trick. And to this caveman’s mind, calling someone a girl was an insult.

  Whatever. I tried the My Little Pony approach to handling bullies. “Sorry. Just trying to help.” And I started to walk away.

  He body-blocked me. “You? Wanted to help me? Why would a sandwich like you think I’d need your help?”

  Now I looked him in the eye. “Your locker’s still locked, isn’t it?”

  I probably shouldn’t have said anything. But he called me a sandwich. Some insults you can’t let slide.

  In response, he did what bullies do. He slapped my diabetes bag out of my hands.

  It hit the ground with a glassy crunch. My stomach crunched right along with it.

  That pack contained my insulin, my syringes, my blood-glucose meter, my sharps disposal container (for used needles), my Band-Aids, and a fun-size bag of Skittles. If he broke something important in that pack, I could be in real trouble.

  I knelt down to pick it up, my hands shaking as they reached for the bag. I tried to relax. I closed my eyes, breathed slowly, and remembered what Papi had said to me after Mami died: Fear is your body trying to tell your brain what to do. But the brain is the king of the body. It calls the shots.

  I opened my eyes slowly, the way the good guys in movies do when they’ve just figured out how to beat the villain. I noticed that the bright young scholars of Culeco Academy of the Arts had formed a ring around Yasmany and me. This crowd didn’t seem as bloodthirsty as the ones in my last school had been. In Connecticut, kids hooted like in Planet of the Apes whenever a fight was about to start, jumping up and down and beating on each other in anticipation of someone getting wedgied back to the Stone Age. But these kids looked kind of grim and quiet, like this was some boring school assembly they had to attend.

  Well, from my perspective, it didn’t really matter whether they were enjoying themselves or not. They had me surrounded just the same. I was trapped.

  Wait. No. That’s an excuse, and I don’t lie to myself. I could have pushed my way out of there if I’d wanted to. But now all eyes were on me. I had an audience. And I am a showman.

  Yasmany stretched his fingers wide before he made two fists. “Time to die, little man. Stand up.”

  I stood all right. Got right in his face. “Time to die?” I asked.

  “Time. To. Die,” he repeated.

  “Like the dead chicken in your locker?” I asked.

  “What?”

  See, that’s the real secret of dealing with bullies: Change the game. You thought we were going to fistfight, Mr. Tough Guy, but—surprise!—suddenly we’re talking about murdered poultry.

  “The dead chicken in your locker,” I said, explaining it to the crowd. “That’s the real reason you didn’t want to open it. You didn’t want anybody to see your dead chicken so they wouldn’t know you keep dead chickens in your locker. Because,” I said, turning to face Yasmany again, “what kind of weirdo keeps dead chickens in his locker?”

  “Stop saying ‘dead chicken’!”

  Everybody laughed. That probably would have sent Yasmany into a berserker rage if some girl hadn’t shrieked, “Blood!” She was pointing at Yasmany’s locker.

  “What?” Yasmany asked again. He and everybody else looked at his locker, and yeah, there was watery pink blood leaking from it, the kind you find at the bottom of Styrofoam meat packages. Not a lot, but enough to drip from the bottom of the locker door and pool on the floor. And it only takes a tiny bit of blood to freak people all the way out.

  Not me, though. I mean, I didn’t know SANGRE DE POLLO was going to come dripping out of his locker, but it wasn’t exactly a surprise, either. I could work with it.

  “Open it,” I said to Yasmany. “Unless you’re too…chicken.”

  If he hadn’t been completely bewildered by what was happening, he would have gorilla-rushed me for sure. Instead, he walked over to his locker and tried to undo the lock. Two, four, seven yanks on it, each angrier than the last. Then he punched his locker door again and said, “I can’t open the stupid thing! I keep trying, but I can’t.”

  “Here. Let me.”

  He took a step back to let me through. But not without asking, “What? How you know my combo?”

  His “combo” was still taped to the back of the lock. About as sharp as a bowling ball, this Yasmany.

  I looked at him over my shoulder with spooky eyes and replied, “Fool! I am a magician. I can read your mind.” Then I spun the dial with fast fingers, clock-, then counter-, then clockwise again. I tugged the lock open dramatically and, with a flourish, removed it.

  “You want the honors?” I asked him, stepping aside with a gracious magician’s bow.

  Yasmany—bro had gone full autopilot by now—stepped forward and opened the locker door, every kid behind him on tiptoe, watching, waiting.

  A whole raw chicken, like you get at the grocery store, with bumpy yellow skin and no head, flipped out of his locker, landed on its chicken butt, and went splat.

  Kids scattered, screaming. Adults would be here any second. Yasmany did a 180 and looked around wildly. He didn’t have eyes anymore: just fear. “I didn’t put no dead chicken in my locker!” he yelled. “You gotta believe me!”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  Of course I did. It was I who had put it in there, after all.

  Abracadabra, chicken plucker.