“Excuse me,” Fironella said, putting on a perfect little doll voice. “We’re giving Wile a test for school, and we’d like to come inside if that’s all right with you.”
The old woman smiled at Fironella. “Well, of course! You know there’s nothing I care more about than my boys’ education.” Vita noticed Loretta’s glasses were strung around her neck rather than on her face. She probably couldn’t see Fironella for the terror she truly was.
Wile’s grandmother opened the door wide and Fironella and Ruckles waltzed inside with Skrillus rolling after them. Vita tried to follow as well but Mazkin served as a veritable wall in front of the open doorway. “We test our students one at a time, Vita,” he said.
She furrowed her brow. “Why would you have us come all the way in here if you test the students one at a time?”
At this Mazkin just crossed his arms. “Rules are rules.” Then he shut the door and left the three children waiting outside on the gray tile.
Rosie and Grover looked just as despondent as Vita felt. Grover and Rafe sat on the ground beside the trash chute, while Rosie stood stock still a few feet behind Vita. Jasmine flew off her shoulder and began whispering in the girl’s ear and the girl relaxed. Vita wished she hadn’t forgotten Melina in her Chamber.
With nothing else to do the girl listened at the door with one of her ears pressed up against it. “You know you can’t take her with you, Wile,” Mazkin’s voice said.
“But why not?” Wile asked meekly.
“Because she’s DEAD,” a voice Vita had never heard before yelled. It sounded something like Wile, only much older. “And you can’t run from me no more.”
Then there was a great deal of crashing and banging. The piano and guitar tune that usually filled this part of Lumaria became ten times louder, and the upright bass went faster and faster until the song didn’t sound very nice at all. Vita couldn’t hear what anyone was saying now.
She felt a hotness in her pocket, pulled out Wile’s compass, and opened it. The needle spun wildly and the compass got hotter and hotter by the minute. She heard a rumbling and felt the floor move under her feet, as if there were an earthquake.
“Vita, what’s happening?” Rosie and Grover both yelled to her over all the noise.
“I don’t know!” she snapped at them. “I don’t know,” she said again, more softly.
Soon the building crumbled apart completely and Vita fell. She couldn’t see what was happening to Rosie, Grover, or any of the monsters. She couldn’t see Wile either—only blackness.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE ROSE THAT TURNED TO ASHES
The girl with no name sat on a high, thick branch of an elm tree with her back against the trunk and her legs crossed out in front of her. She’d had a name, once, but she’d forgotten it long ago. She didn’t remember how old she was either, though she liked to think she was the oldest student at her school. She felt like the oldest.
But it was tough for the girl to be certain of her true age for reasons that were difficult to explain and even harder to remember.
Her tree stood on the edge of a forest. Only a few feet ahead the trees, lush green grass, and vibrant flowers of the forest simply stopped. When the girl squinted her pale eyes a little, the mound of Base beneath her branch began to ooze quickly across the checkered floor below and replaced it with a never-ending plateau of blah. When the Base had spread as far as the girl could see, across miles and miles, she squinted again and the Base was still.
Once the gray-brown Base was in place, it rose into the shapes of mountains, hills, and valleys. Bits of the gray substance jumped into the air like reverse raindrops and clung to the domed ceiling in blue and white patches. Eventually the ceiling was replaced by a perfect blue sky filled with puffy white clouds. The very tips of the mountains below that sky then turned an icy, bluish white. The color spread like a wildfire of paint, shifting from white to pale blue to the brown and green of the trees that lay below the mountains. Blue, pink, and yellow flowers sprouted out of the muddy hills and green grass spread like stains around them. Sapphire blue water filled depressions in the Base and soon lakes and rivers dotted the ever more colorful landscape.
Once she could no longer see an inch of the checkered floor or cement ceiling, the girl leaned back against the trunk of the tree, exhausted. The forest where she rested was still unnamed. She’d have to take care of that before her next lesson with Peebles and Dotted-Line Jack. Naming everything could just be so tiring—even more than it had been to make that mountain range just now.
Speaking of the mountains … she decided the snowy peaks didn’t look quite right. She spread out her hands as though she were throwing invisible confetti on the distant mountains. Suddenly log cabins sprouted like flowers precisely where that confetti would’ve fallen. She pointed at two of the cabins and instantly their windows lit and smoke curled out of their chimneys.
She stood up on the thick branch and took a few careful steps forward to where Melina hung by her tail, asleep, and the long cord slowly twisted into curls and spun the caterpillar in circles. The girl was about to wake her friend when she noticed Pish. The green jay flew toward her tree over the green plains and meadows she’d just created. “Looks good!” he called.
“Thanks, Pish,” she replied.
Melina blinked her long-lashed, yellow-green eyes and yawned. She crawled up onto the branch, over the fabric of the girl’s dress, and curled in her usual spot around the girl’s neck like a scarf. Melina curled her body farther around the girl’s neck so that the caterpillar could look her in the eyes. “Is everything all right, love? You look a bit pale.”
“I always look pale,” the girl replied with a grin.
“When was the last time you ate?” Melina asked, persistent.
She opened her mouth then closed it. “I … I’m not sure. I ate a plum not too long ago, I think…”
Melina’s already large eyes widened. “But … you remember you can’t live off the food in here, right? You need food from your world.”
“This is my world,” the girl replied, confused. She also felt a bit angry, though she wasn’t sure why.
She pulled the two compasses that hung on a silver chain around her neck back and forth. One compass was lovely—the compass’s face was mostly filled by a pink, green, and blue design surrounded by deeper shades of green and blue. About 20% of the compass’s face, the bit surrounding the “S,” remained boring, blank white. It was difficult to tell if her other compass had ever been anything but an eyesore. It had a black cover like the other but bits of the shiny black had burnt away to reveal rusted metal underneath. The compass’s face had a black burn stain in the center as though it had caught fire there. Sooty gray surrounded the stain. The glass was cracked in a shape that reminded her of a snowflake. She’d had both compasses for as long as she could remember.
Melina brushed her furry cheek against the girl’s, pulling her out of her reverie. The caterpillar spoke into her ear, kindly. “This is the world that you’re creating. It’s not the world you come from. Remember that.”
She blinked several times. Of course. She needed to eat in the Mess Hall. She ran both hands through her hair. That was world-building 101. How had she managed to forget? “Okay, we’ll go to the Mess Hall, Melina,” she said. “I’ll just check over my work on the way. That sound good to you, Pish?”
Pish nodded with a ferocity that spun him in a circle. Once he was able to hover relatively still beside the girl’s branch, she jumped from the branch onto his back with Melina still on her shoulders. She struggled to get a decent hold on his feathers before he dashed past the mountains and over the wide blue lake. The green jay swooped down low over a meadow filled with sunflowers and roses. Big, fat rosebushes mingled with the tall, skinny stalks of the sunflowers in a fiery mix of bright yellow and deep crimson.
It was over this meadow that the girl noticed something strange. In the midst of the boisterous colors was a tiny spot of gray. It w
as the sort of stain that had been difficult for her to spot, but now it was practically all she could see.
“Can you see that gray there, over to the right?” she asked Pish and Melina.
Pish squinted his big black eyes. “Oh … I can barely see it. You probably just missed a little bit of Base when you were building before.” There was something false about his typically excited tone.
Melina said nothing, but the girl could feel the caterpillar’s body tense around her shoulders.
This wasn’t good, this spot of gray. Not at all.
“Let’s go down and check it out,” the girl said and tried to keep the fear out of her voice.
Pish landed with unusual lightness in the meadow and the girl hopped off his back to stand beside sunflowers as tall as she was. Melina leapt down and walked beside her in the direction of the nearest rosebush while Pish followed behind. The roses on the bush were larger than those the girl remembered from her own world—as large as her palm. Most were deep red with just the slightest little pinch of pink, just how she liked roses best.
But one rose, the one in the center of the bush, was the very spot of gray the girl had seen from the sky. It was not gray-brown like Base—it was something paler and more brittle. It looked a bit like mud does when it dries into a clump of dirt; only this mud had dried into the shape of a rose.
The girl’s white-yellow brows drew together. What had gone wrong? She stared at the rose and willed it to blush into a true rose like the others, but it did not change. “I can’t fix it,” she said, surprised. She’d never found a single thing in her Dream Chamber that she couldn’t form and shape as she wished with her mind.
“That’s because you’re exhausted and hungry,” Melina insisted. “Let’s get to the Mess Hall.” Pish nodded in agreement.
Still, the girl swallowed and reached out to touch the pale gray rose. The moment her fingers touched it, the rose crumbled into dust. The dust floated away in the breeze onto the surrounding roses and sunflowers. Suddenly, though they were still quite lovely, the flowers became a bit less. Their color wasn’t quite as bright, nor their smell as sweet. The girl’s heartbeat quickened.
“Is everything all right, love?” Melina asked again.
“No,” she whispered, staring at where the gray rose had been. “I don’t think it is.”
• • •
With her orange tray in her hands, the girl turned away from the order window. She blinked several times to chase the dots in front of her eyes away. Adjusting her eyes from the vividness of her Dream Chamber to the din of Moorhouse’s Mess Hall always gave her a headache.
The Mess Hall was relatively deserted. Faylonique, Eerla, and Myeliel sat at a table on the right playing cards. Myeliel was having a handless day and nudged Faylonique with his elbow until she snapped out of her reverie and picked up his cards to play for him.
She was pleased to find both Rosie and Pres sitting at the longest table on the left. Rosie was the first to notice the older girl. “Well hey there, Tink! It’s sure been a while. Hasn’t it, Pres?”
Pres nodded. There was a worried wrinkle between his brows. “It has been a long time … Tink.”
Tink brightened. She could always depend on Rosie to remember her name. “I’ve been busy building.” She pulled her map out of her pocket and took a deep breath. “Wanna see?”
Rosie and Pres nodded and she handed the map over. They pushed their trays aside to make room and Tink noticed the glowing cheese mixed in with Rosie’s bowl of white and the fruit Pres had created to throw in his bowl of brown. She didn’t know why the other students always wasted their world-building energy on making imaginary food to mix with their real food. She took another bite of her brown. It tasted fine to her. Not wonderful by any means, but fine.
The other students spread Tink’s map over the table and both gasped. As with her compass, only a small portion of the map was blank—just a bit at the very top near the edge. Jasmine flew off of Rosie’s shoulder and gave Tink a tiny, playful punch in the shoulder she could barely feel. “My goodness! You’ve gotten so much done!”
Rafe bowed his silver helmet head with a creak. “Mmm, well done, young madam.”
Pres had his finger over the map and Tink’s heart quickened when she noticed he was pointing at the upper left corner, where she knew there was a tiny speck of gray distinct from the green, red, and yellow of Baker’s Meadow. On her compass was the tiniest speck of gray in the middle of a splotch of mustard yellow and dusky red as well, in roughly the same location as it was on the map—far northeast.
“Relax,” Melina whispered in her ear. “That’s why you gave them the map to begin with.”
She nodded and took a few breaths in and out, waiting for Pres to ask. Once he did, the story of the rose that had turned to ash came pouring out. Both children’s eyes were wide by the time she finished speaking, and her heart was back to pounding.
“A little bit of gray shouldn’t hurt anything,” Rosie said. But her copper-flecked eyes wouldn’t meet Tink’s.
Pres looked more relaxed. “She’s right, Tink. I’ve gotten the gray before, and it always goes away.”
“Really?” Tink asked. “What did you do to make it go away?”
Pres touched his hands to his temples like he had a headache. “I’m … nothing, I think. You shouldn’t worry about it. It’ll be fine. Do you—”
“He’s lying,” a voice Tink didn’t recognize cut in.
She looked in the direction of the voice she’d heard and noticed a monster sitting by himself at the long table across the aisle. He was more or less boy-shaped, but was bald and had merely nostrils instead of a nose. He had royal blue skin and alarming red eyes as well. Where his ears should have been were sets of three stitches on each side.
“Is that Myeliel’s new apprentice?” Tink asked. She’d heard that the rabbit-headed monster had recently started working with another teacher but hadn’t seen him yet.
“Yep,” Rosie whispered back. “I think his name’s Crane—he didn’t talk much during our lesson.”
“He seems like a real grump,” Pres contributed.
“I can hear you, you know,” Crane called over. He pointed to where his ears should have been. “Don’t let these fool you.”
Tink rose from the table with her tray and walked over to Crane. He was even creepier-looking up close. “So what was he lying about? Are you not really a grump, because I’ve gotta say, you seem like one so far.”
He gave her a grin with razor sharp teeth that took away her own snarky smile quickly. “No. He was lying when he said your model would be fine. Your world’s started to go Rotten. And you know what they say—one rotten apple spoils the barrel.”
“You’re wrong,” Tink heard Rosie say. She looked behind her to find the other two children had risen from their seats as well.
Jasmine flew over to Tink and fluttered in front of her face. “Don’t listen to him. He’s new—he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
At that Tink turned away from the monster’s table and got rid of her dishes.
“Suit yourself!” Crane called at her back as she and the other children walked back across the aisle toward the order window at the tip of the triangle.
As the two girls walked to the door that led back to the hall they shared, Tink looked woefully at the space between the door and the order window. Once upon a time there had been an old gramophone there, and it had played the most beautiful music she had ever heard. Now the gramophone was gone, and she missed it terribly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE GRAMOPHONE
Tink regretted leaving her Chamber without Melina immediately. This dim hallway was so creepy without her company. She raced to the door to the Mess Hall, hoping one of the other students might be there. But the only person in the Mess Hall was the new teacher, Crane. The monster sat by himself, staring down at the scarred wooden tabletop.
Tink’s body made a quick decision and sat across f
rom Crane before her mind could talk her out of it.
The monster looked up with narrowed red eyes when she sat down. “Hey, I didn’t say—” he began.
“Do you really think my world is going Rotten?” she asked. She’d been wanting to confront him about this since she’d first met him (however long ago that had been).
At this the earless monster relaxed in his seat. “Most definitely. Sorry, kid. Once the gray starts there’s no coming back from it.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Does this mean I won’t be able to win the contest now?”
Crane laughed the ugliest-sounding laugh she had ever heard. “Win the contest? It means you’re trapped here. Forever.”
Her eyes widened. Was he just trying to scare her? He was a monster after all.
When she looked back at him the cruel expression had gone and left something that looked nearly human in its place. He looked almost worried. Not worried about himself, but for someone else. Soon he scrubbed the concern away. “Now if you don’t mind, I was in the middle of something.”
She didn’t know what he could be in the middle of, with no food in front of him and no other monsters to keep him company. After staring at him a few moments longer she gobbled down her brown as quickly as she could, rose, and left.
In the hallway Tink fiddled with the two compasses around her neck. She opened the good compass and found its needle stuck on the “S,” as it always did outside her Dream Chamber. She closed it and opened the burnt up compass, though she wasn’t sure why. That compass’s needle was always stuck on the “S” whether she was in her Chamber or not.
So Tink was very startled indeed when the needle on the burnt compass began to spin.
• • •
All the books in Tink’s treehouse were on the floor: leather-covered and paperback islands on a hardwood sea. The girl had to hop around the books to reach her closet, where she began pulling out princess gowns by the handful and overturning boxes of slippers and sneakers.
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