I hadn’t slept much during the night, lying awake and thinking about all the memories I’d miss. I wondered if I would be able to make new memories, or if I’d be a blank slate forever. I had showered off the jungle mud last night, surprised that there’d been no sign of Agent Clarkston’s blue marker on my forehead.
Now it was seven thirty in the morning, and I was dressed in some fresh clothes that I’d found in a closet. They were comfortable and just my size. I sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing my stiff leg. I think most people would have sore muscles after running through the jungle and jumping off a cliff, but it was actually my bone that ached. It got like this sometimes. Falling off the roof and breaking my femur three years ago was one memory that I wouldn’t be sad to lose.
There was a sound outside my door. I sprang to my feet, heart racing. Were they coming to get me already? That wasn’t fair! I deserved two more hours to stare at the empty wall and feel sorry for myself.
The door swung open, and I braced myself to see the face of my soon-to-be memory executioner.
“Avery Lobster?” I cried, my voice cracking.
“Hurry,” she said, one hand plugging her nose. What was that about? Did she always enter a room like that? “We don’t have a lot of time.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m here to break you out,” she said, waving me over to the door. “Unless you want all of your memories scrubbed. And plug your nose!”
I obeyed, staggering toward her. My feet felt like bricks, weighed down by my astonishment. When I got to the doorway, I caught a glimpse of the hallway. Two guards in gray suits were lying still on the floor.
I gasped. “What happened?” My voice sounded funny with my nose plugged.
“They didn’t let me past when I asked nicely,” she said as we moved into the quiet hall.
“Are they . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say dead. It was hard to imagine Avery going full-on assassin.
“Of course not,” she whispered as we stepped past the nearest guard. “I used a boon to knock them out.” She pointed to a stout candle on the floor at the end of the hallway. I could see the little flicker of flame on the wick. “Scented candle,” she explained. “It puts anyone who smells it to sleep.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“My house,” she answered, pausing at the corner to peer around. “Sometimes I use it in my room when I’m having a hard time falling asleep. My parents come in later to blow it out.”
“Your parents know about magic?” I asked, obediently tagging along as she slipped around the corner.
“Yeah,” she replied.
“And they let you keep cool magical items in your bedroom?” I was officially jealous. “For years, I’ve been trying to convince my mom to let me have a Batman throwing star.”
“That’s a terrible idea!” she replied. “You’d put a million holes in the walls.”
“Gee . . . that’s exactly what she said.”
“Listen, it’s not like I get special privileges just because my parents know about magic,” Avery continued. “I got into the apprentice detective program on my own.”
We rounded another corner, and she unplugged her nose. Hoping it was safe, I did the same, sniffing to help my nose feel normal after pinching it so tightly. We reached a closed door at the end of the hallway, and Avery pressed her ear against it.
“Why are you helping me?” I asked quietly.
Without answering, she pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and passed it to me. I unfolded it and read the message written inside, the handwriting small and compact.
The boy is NOT guilty. You can find proof of his innocence at the High Line. Talk to the bird artist.
“I found it in my locker when I got to headquarters this morning,” Avery explained, opening the door she’d been listening through. Beyond, I saw flights of stairs leading upward.
“You have a locker here?” I asked, following Avery up the stairs. The apprentice detective training program was sounding a lot like school. “Who put the note in there?” Our footsteps echoed, and I peered over the railing to see that the stairs continued up and up. The building we were in must have had nearly twenty stories.
“I don’t know,” she answered, taking the note from my hand and stuffing it back into her pocket. “But whoever it was knew that I’d help you.”
“Why?” I asked.
Avery paused on the stairs to look back at me. “Because I believe you’re innocent.”
I felt a flood of relief pass over me. Someone believed me! And now, that “someone” was helping me escape. I took a deep breath. The hopelessness I’d been feeling moments ago vanished entirely.
“How do we get out of here?” I asked.
“Through the front door,” Avery replied as we resumed our climb up the stairs.
“Isn’t there, like, a back door?” I suggested. “Or somewhere less obvious?”
Avery shook her head. “There’s only one way in or out of Magix Headquarters . . . it’s complicated.”
I’d just have to trust that she knew what she was doing. “Are we almost there?”
“We have to make another stop before we leave,” she said.
“What?” I cried. This sounded like the worst escape plan ever. “Shouldn’t we hurry? What if somebody notices those sleeping guards outside my door?”
“If we get lucky,” said Avery, “the scented candle boon will knock out anyone investigating before they think to plug their nose.”
I was glad I’d listened to her strange instructions.
“But even with that candle boon,” Avery went on, “sooner or later, people are going to realize you’ve escaped.”
“Then what are we doing?” I asked, trying to keep my voice under control.
“Look,” she snapped. “You’re currently Magix’s most wanted criminal. And even though I believe you are innocent, it doesn’t change the fact that someone raided that boon church and framed you to take the fall for it. I plan to find out who it was and bring them to justice. But the minute we break out of here, every Magix agent in the organization will be looking for us.” She finally stopped at a door leading out of the stairwell. “We’re going to need some equipment to stay ahead of them.”
She listened at the door before cracking it open and peering out.
“Looks like the coast is clear for the moment,” she whispered. “There’s a boon armory at the end of this hallway. Don’t stop until we reach it.”
“Armory?” I squeaked.
“It’s a room where they store boons that are prepped and ready for agents to take out on missions,” Avery explained.
“I know what an armory is,” I retorted. I’d played enough video games to figure that out. Avery took off running and I followed right behind, regretting the way the door banged shut behind me. Luckily, no one investigated the sound, and we reached the entrance to the armory, breathing heavily.
The door to get in looked like solid metal. There was a little shelf on the wall beside it, but the only thing on the shelf was a blender, like the kind my mom used to make smoothies.
“That’s weird,” I said, but Avery didn’t think so. She stepped right up to the blender and took a deep breath.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Opening the door,” she answered, pushing the blender’s buttons in a specific order like she was entering a code.
“With a blender?”
“It’s a boon,” she told me. “Put in the right code and the door opens.”
“What happens if you put in the wrong code?” I asked.
Avery paused, her finger hovering over the on button. “The blender blades fill the hallway and chop us into tiny bits.”
“Yikes!” I yelped. These Magix people didn’t mess around. “Are you sure you have the right code?”
“Ninety-nine percent sure.” Avery pushed the button.
I flinched, but the blender blades of doom did not come flying at us. Instead
, they began to twirl inside the blender, which seemed to power the huge metal door as it slowly swung open.
“How did you learn that code?” I asked.
“Good detective work,” she replied. “I figured out a lot of things that apprentice detectives aren’t supposed to know—the aliases of several undercover Magix agents, the location of the black site where they hold unstable boons . . .” She pointed at the blender. “That was the director’s own master code. Now that I’m sure it works, we can use the same one to unlock the blender at the front door.”
“There’s another blender?” I croaked.
“Technically, it’s part of the same one,” Avery said, waiting for the door. “A few years back, some agents came across a single blender that had become a magical boon. The people at Magix were able to remove the buttons and install a few of them onto regular blenders, extending the magical effect to all of them.”
“They can do that?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” she answered, leading us into the armory. “Boon manipulation. Magix has an entire department for it, remember?”
I’d seen a lot of armories in video games, but nothing that looked like this. Instead of heavy weaponry hanging on the walls, it was just a bunch of random objects scattered throughout the room.
“How do we know what to take?” I asked, inspecting a rusty teapot next to a velvet coin purse. With determination, Avery moved toward a set of shelves against the back wall, where I saw at least a dozen black top hats.
“Hey,” I said, “those are just like the ones Agents Clarkston and Nguyen were wearing when they found me.”
Avery reached onto the shelf and pulled down one of the hats. “These top hats are standard issue for agents in the field,” she said, trying it on. It looked a little large on her head, falling almost to her eyebrows, but she nodded like she’d found the perfect treasure.
“They have huge storage capacity and come stocked with all the essentials an agent needs for a mission,” she explained.
I took one down from the shelf. “Are they all the same?”
“Each one will hold different boons,” she said. “I’ve memorized some of the standard items, but there will probably be some surprises, too.”
I glanced back at the shelf. “That’s a lot of magic hats.”
“Manipulated boons,” explained Avery. “Like the blender. The hats aren’t actually magic. It’s the hatband—that black ribbon.” She pointed to the wide ribbon tied around the base of the stovetop hat, just above the flat brim. “A whole roll of ribbon turned magical when its owner did something purely good. Magix found it and discovered that anything the ribbon wrapped around hugely increased its storage capacity.”
“And they chose to wrap it around top hats?” I could think of a dozen things more convenient and less conspicuous.
“This was almost two hundred years ago,” Avery said. “Top hats were all the rage back then.”
“Magix has been around that long?”
“Oh yeah,” said Avery. “This organization started clear back in the eighteenth century. But people have known about magic forever.”
“They’ve never updated the hats?” I asked, turning mine over in my hands.
“The ribbons are fused on,” she said. “Peeling them off the hats would cause them to lose their magic.”
I shrugged, finally trying it on. It wasn’t as uncomfortable as I’d thought, but it did make me feel a little top-heavy.
As I turned away from the rack of hats, something familiar caught my eye on one of the shelves. It was the same dirty black sneaker that I’d agreed to wear during the trial last night.
“Hey,” I said, pulling it down. “Should we take this?”
“What is it?” Avery asked.
I tossed her the shoe. “It makes the person wearing it tell the truth,” I answered. “Could be helpful in our search for answers.”
Avery nodded, stuffing the truth shoe into her top hat and moving over to another shelf that was labeled Boon Detectors.
“Knowledge is power. Power is magic,” she recited. “Even though our hats are full of boons, we won’t know how to use any of them unless we have a detector.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a specific type of boon that detects and identifies other boons,” she explained. “It’s how we get the knowledge we need to operate new magical items.”
“I activated the music box without knowledge,” I reminded her.
“No,” she said. “That’s not possible. Somehow you had the knowledge. Maybe the memory was just blocked or something. Add it to the list of things we need to figure out once we escape.”
As I turned my attention to the shelf of boon detectors, Avery reached out and picked up a little pet collar. It was bright red with a silver buckle and a few tiny brass bells. There was a small card tied to the collar, which Avery turned over and began reading out loud.
“Attach this collar around the neck of a living creature, and the animal will become an active detector,” she read. “One use only. The magic will expire when the collar is removed.”
Avery glanced over at me. “Seems too complicated if we have to find an animal.”
I nodded in agreement. “Let’s check out those sunglasses. Or that clock-looking thing.”
But before Avery could put the collar back on the shelf, an alarm blared through the armory. I screamed, grabbing the brim of my top hat to keep it from falling off as I jumped with fright.
“Warning! Warning!” a robotic voice blared through intercom speakers in the ceiling. “Prisoner has escaped! Prisoner has escaped!”
Avery turned to me, her eyes wide. She stuffed the pet collar into her pocket. “Time to run.”
Chapter 8
THURSDAY, MAY 14
7:49 A.M.
NINTH FLOOR, MAGIX HEADQUARTERS
I ran faster than I’d ever run before, my aching leg not even slowing me down with all the adrenaline I was feeling. We left the door to the armory wide open and made for the stairs at the end of the hallway. Avery yanked open the door but reeled backward, bumping into me.
“Toothpaste!” she cried.
“What do you mean, toothpaste?” I leaned past her and peered into the stairwell. It was filling up with something foamy and white. It actually did look like toothpaste—after brushing and spitting.
“It’s a security boon,” Avery explained, quickly shutting the door and heading down a different hallway. “There are pasted toothbrushes positioned along all the interior doors of headquarters. All an agent has to do is flick the bristles, and the doors and stairways fill up with foamy toothpaste. Impossible to get past.”
“So we’re trapped on this floor?” I wailed. As we moved around the corner, I saw a large floor-to-ceiling window on the right. Like all the other windows I’d seen in Magix Headquarters, the glass was frosted and opaque. It let enough light through that I knew it was a sunshiny morning outside, but I couldn’t really see out.
“A window . . . ,” I muttered under my breath. Sure, we were on the ninth floor, but Agent Clarkston had used a magic pillowcase to carry us safely to the bottom of a cliff. Between my new hat and Avery’s, I figured we could find something that would work. I just needed to break the glass first.
I skidded to a halt beside the window, yanking off my top hat. I shoved my hand into the opening, but instead of feeling the top of the hat, my hand kept going. Soon, I was in up to my shoulder, feeling a bunch of random objects at my fingertips. It was like the hat was a giant bag, but I had to select the item I wanted strictly by feel.
“What are you doing?” Avery shrieked, turning back when she realized I wasn’t following.
“I have an idea.” My fingers closed around something that felt like a baseball bat. I whipped it out of the hat, discovering that it was actually one of those carved posts that belonged in a banister along stairs.
“We have no idea what that thing does,” Avery said.
“I don’t
need it to do anything magical,” I replied. “I just need it to be a club.” I stuck the top hat back on my head and, gripping the banister post with both hands, wound up for a mighty baseball swing.
“Mason!” Avery said, her voice suddenly urgent. “The window isn’t—”
I swung with all my strength. The end of my wooden club struck the window with an insane amount of force that could only be described as magical. The frosted glass shattered, and I saw our way out.
But it wasn’t at all what I’d expected.
I leaped back from the broken window, dropping the banister post and gripping my hat in astonishment. This couldn’t be the ninth floor. Based on what I was seeing, it was more like the nine-millionth floor!
The ground was so far away that I thought we must be higher than the clouds. But it didn’t make sense, because I glimpsed other buildings—huge buildings—that rose so high into the sky above that I couldn’t see their tops.
“Where . . . ,” I stammered. “Where are we?”
“I’d say we’re in a city,” said Avery, her voice twinged with annoyance.
“Why’s it so . . . big?”
“It’s not,” she answered. “We’re actually very tiny.”
Just then, a person walked by outside the window. But the pedestrian was giant. Our window was roughly at the level of his hand, and the man’s pinkie fingernail was bigger than a football field!
“Why are we so tiny?” I whispered, my back against the opposite side of the hallway, as far from the open window as I could get.
Avery sighed. “Magix Headquarters is a boon. This entire facility is housed inside a diamond. Someone we call the Doorman is wearing the diamond on a ring. That’s why the front door is our only option. When I put in the right code, it’ll send a signal to the Doorman so he can open a door for us. When his diamond ring makes contact with a regular doorknob, that ordinary door becomes our only way in or out of headquarters.”
“And if we jumped out that window?” I asked, hesitantly pointing at the shattered glass.
“Besides falling for a very long time,” said Avery, “we’d be stuck in the real world as microscopic people.”
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