by Brian Olsen
I shrug. “Easy enough to agree to that. I don’t have any magic anymore.”
“Great! It’s settled!” Nate takes a deep breath. “Now does anybody have a spell to keep Alisa’s mom from murdering us all once you let her out of the never-ending library?”
Fourteen
“Yelling later!” Alisa yells. “Magic now!”
“Quiet!” her mother yells back. “The museum is still open!”
Mr. Liefer, the only one of us brave or stupid enough to come between them, calmly says, “Mrs. Green, listen to your daughter. She’s right. We should cast this spell immediately. You’d better go upstairs and close early.”
Mrs. Green glowers at him. “I don’t need you telling me how to do my job or how to handle my daughter, Mr. Liefer.”
“Mom.” Alisa takes a calming breath. “I know you’re mad at me, and I understand why, but we have to do this now, before the Common King—”
Mrs. Green holds up a hand. “Lives are at stake. Fine, all right. I’m going.” She heads for the hall, pointing back at her daughter as she leaves. “But that is the last time you have a magical adventure without telling your parents, and that is my final word on that!”
Everybody else has been in motion while mother and daughter argued, clearing space in the center of the basement room I first woke up in. It doesn’t take long for us to move aside all the folded-up cots and rolled sleeping bags.
Ihsan peeks into a cardboard box filled with old museum brochures, then brushes dust from his hands. “Are we really in America?”
“We really are,” I answer. “Not what you expected?”
He shrugs. “A cellar’s a cellar.”
Mrs. Wollard fusses with her cardigan. “I don’t like this at all. Being so far from home.”
“I can take you right back,” Zane promises. “Once we’re done.”
I close the lid on the box of brochures Ihsan looked at. “Just remember, don’t go looking for clues as to where exactly we are.”
He nods seriously. “So the nightmare girl can’t find you through our dreams. We remember.”
“Nate!” Mr. Liefer yells. “Control this animal, please?”
Yasu is running happily around the center of the room, snuffling everybody and generally getting in the way. Nate slaps his thighs. “Come on, Yasu! Let’s leave the magic people be.” The baku trots over to Nate, who grabs a fistful of fur and walks him down the hall to the other room.
Mr. Liefer puts a weary hand to his forehead. “Why doesn’t everyone who isn’t a logomancer give the rest of us a little space to work? This won’t be easy and we could do without any distractions.”
Mr. Montgomery and Mrs. Deng take the hint and head out into the hall, but I stand there for an awkward moment before a pointed cough from Mr. Ambrose reminds me that I’m no longer a member of the magic-users club. I don’t know if Mrs. Green has gotten rid of all the museum patrons yet, so instead of going upstairs I follow the parents into the opposite room. Nate’s sitting at the folding table, petting Yasu’s back. The rest of us stand around a little awkwardly before taking seats as well. I’m sure everyone feels like I do, at loose ends, wanting to help but knowing we can’t.
A chirp comes from Mrs. Deng’s bag, and she fishes around in it for a moment before producing her phone. She peers at the screen from behind her big glasses, frowning.
“Everything all right, Meihui?” Mr. Montgomery asks.
“My husband. Checking on us.” She types a quick reply before putting the phone down on the table. “It’s frustrating for him. I can’t tell him where we are or what we’re doing in case Jasmine checks his dreams. He understands but it makes the worry worse.”
“Why isn’t he here?” I ask.
Mr. Montgomery taps the table lightly. “Chris.”
His tone tells me to shut up, so I do, although I don’t get what’s wrong with my question. Mrs. Montgomery isn’t here because she wants to watch over their other kid. But Lily’s an only child, so I don’t get why Mr. Deng isn’t with them. Both of Alisa’s parents are here.
“It’s all right, John.” Mrs. Deng shifts in her seat to face me. “I took Lily into hiding because we agreed, as a family, that it was too dangerous for her to be out in the open. But we knew the king might find us. That he might…” She shakes her head, cutting herself off. “It’s dangerous, either way. Out there or in here. If Mr. Deng and I are together, there’s a greater chance of Lily losing us both. My daughter is strong and smart and capable of great things, with or without magic. I believe – I know – that even if the worst happens, she will make it through this. I won’t leave her an orphan when she does.”
“Right.” I lay my hands flat on the table. “Right.” I swallow down the little lump in my throat. “Right. That makes sense. Sure.”
“Oh! Oh, Chris.” She slides her hand along the table towards me, not quite reaching. “Oh, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have put it like that. I didn’t mean to upset you. But you’re not… Your mother will…” She slides her hand back. “I’m very sorry.”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Deng.” I manage to smile at her. “I’m all right.”
Mr. Montgomery coughs. “I hear you’re thinking of leaving us, Meihui. You and Lily.”
“Maybe. Maybe.” She adjusts her glasses. “I’ll wait and see how this magic spell they’re casting goes. But the others who have left, or the ones who never hid in the first place, they’re all right. Mrs. Winarski. Andy’s friend. Your wife and your other son are safe, John, yes?”
He nods. “So far.”
“So far, so far.” Mrs. Deng sighs. “That’s the best we can hope for from life, isn’t it? Being safe “so far?” Maybe it’s safe for Lily out in the open now.”
“Maybe,” Nate says. “Maybe not. We don’t know what King Clone will do if this works.”
“Yes, of course. I said we’ll wait and see.” She picks up her phone and looks at the screen. “But even if this goes badly. Maybe especially then. If the king is going to change the world, and Lily and my husband and I will go back to those old lives we don’t remember, there are people we want to see first. To say goodbye to them, before—” She looks up from her phone sharply. “What I mean is—”
“Before they disappear,” Mr. Montgomery says. “Like Nate and I will, if the Moment breaks.”
She tightens her grip on her phone. “Yes. I’m sorry, John.”
“So stay.” Nate scratches Yasu’s head more vigorously. “Stay, Mrs. Deng, and make sure that doesn’t happen, instead of giving up and running away.”
“Nate.” Mr. Montgomery’s voice carries that familiar warning tone.
“Sorry,” his son mumbles.
“No, no, I’m sorry.” Mrs. Deng puts her phone back in her bag and stands up. “And nothing’s decided yet. Maybe I’ll go see if Mrs. Green needs any help upstairs, before I find a way to put a third foot in my mouth.”
Nate waits for her to leave the room before bursting out with, “People shouldn’t be leaving! I don’t care what Mrs. Deng thinks, we’re safer together.”
“Were you being safe,” his father replies, “when you ran off to London without telling me?”
Nate pushes Yasu’s trunk away. “We couldn’t wait. We don’t know when the anti-Chris is gonna turn Earth into Planet Monster.”
“Who said anything about waiting? You snuck away, alone, without a single adult.”
“I don’t mean any disrespect, Mr. Montgomery,” I say, “but from what I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t seem like the adults have been moving all that quickly when it comes to deciding what to do.”
“Exactly!” Nate scoots his chair towards his father. “Dad, if we had waited for you all to make a decision, we’d be sitting here right now listening to you argue with Mr. Liefer about exactly who’s going where when. So we went on our own, we did what we needed to do, and we got it done!”
Mr. Montgomery slaps his hand down on the table, hard. I jump in my seat. His face looks thoughtful and
calm but I can tell he’s seething.
“You two are my responsibility,” he says softly. “You will not leave the museum without my permission again. Is that clear?”
Nate half-rises from his chair. “Dad—”
“Nate. I remember being seventeen. You think you know everything, and adults know nothing. But we know something you don’t. We know what it means to have lives depending on us. If we argue about our decisions, it’s because we understand, to a painful degree, exactly how much depends on us choosing correctly. You need to trust us. You need to trust me. Do you trust me?”
Nate sits back down. “Yeah. Yes, Dad.”
Mr. Montgomery turns to me. “Chris?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. You kids bore the weight of all this on your own for too long. But you’re not alone in it anymore.” He stands up, takes a step towards the hall, then stops. Without looking back at us, he says, “Our family is not going to fade away, Nate. This world will not forget us. I promise you that.”
He heads out and up the stairs.
Nate and I sit in silence for a second. Yasu plops down at my feet and rolls over, so I scratch his feline belly.
“Anti-Chris?” I say.
Nate grins. “It just came to me.”
“I like it.”
“What about ‘King Clone?’”
“Meh.”
He sighs. “Everything’s so screwed, dude.”
“I know.”
“Even if this spell works, and we let Mirror Universe Goateed You know it worked, he might set all the magical creatures loose anyway. Just to be a dick.”
“I know.”
“And if he doesn’t, he’ll look for another way to break the Moment.”
“I know.”
“So what do we do?”
“One thing at a time, I guess.”
“Does ‘Mirror Universe Goateed You’ work?”
“Too clunky. And he doesn’t have a goatee.”
“Yeah.”
Nate slides off his chair to sit on the ground near my feet. He scratches Yasu’s head. Yasu wraps his trunk around Nate’s wrist.
“My dad’s wrong,” he says.
“About us going to London?”
“No. Well, yeah, maybe about that, too. But I meant about the world forgetting us.” He leans down, resting his head on Yasu’s. “It’ll forget us. The world forgets so easily.” He rubs Yasu’s back. “So easily.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it does.” I slide off my chair and put my arm around him. “But he’s wrong about something else.” I scratch Yasu’s ear. “That we don’t know what it’s like to have lives depending on us.”
Heavy footsteps storm out of the other room. “Damn it!” Mr. Liefer pounds his way up the stairs. “Damn it!” The door to the museum opens then slams shut.
Alisa appears in the entranceway. She looks down at us, petting an ecstatically oblivious Yasu.
“We’re not strong enough.” She wraps her hands around her necklace. “It didn’t work.”
Fifteen
I step out of Zane’s shadow portal and into my living room. It’s after sunset and the room is dark. Even the lights on the cable box are out. Must have been unplugged. I flick on the lamp next to the sofa.
The last time I was here the room was a mess. Spilled pizza rolls all over the floor. Now it’s all neat and tidy. Vacuumed and dusted, even.
“Somebody’s been here.” I touch a pile of magazines, neatly stacked on the coffee table. “Somebody cleaned up.”
“Probably your mom.” Zane says this without much feeling. Whatever warmth might have resparked between us during our adventure in London has gone cold again. “Common King could have gotten her in and out during the day without us seeing. We’ve been spread pretty thin. Easy to slip by.”
“Yeah.”
Andy rests his hand on my shoulder. It’s just the three of us on this little mission. Zane to get us here, Andy as our adult chaperone. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get your stuff.”
I head for the entrance hall. “I’ll just be a sec.”
“I’ll come with you.”
Zane drops down on the couch and leans back, folding his hands behind his head. “Zane’s magic taxi service will wait here.”
As I lead Andy up the stairs, I say, “Thanks for coming with us.”
“I don’t mind. Always happy to get out of that basement for a while.”
“Yeah.”
I peek into my parents’ bedroom. It’s immaculate. The hall bathroom is the same.
I open my bedroom door.
It’s clean, too.
My desk has been tidied. Books in a neat pile. My bed’s been made.
I left it a disaster. Clothes all over the floor. I cross the room to my dresser and pull open the drawers one by one. Full. Everything laundered and folded. I open the closet. Shirts and pants hanging.
Tears fill my eyes. My legs give out. I collapse to the ground and bury my face in my hands.
Andy’s next to me. He puts his arm around my shoulder.
“It’s hard,” he says. “I know it’s hard, being back here.”
“She cleaned,” I manage to choke out. “She cleaned my room.”
“Oh.” He moves his hand to the back of my neck and squeezes. “Oh. Wow.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know.” He rubs my back. “I don’t know.”
I take a deep breath and get a hold of myself. Andy drops his hand.
“Thanks for being nice to me.” I wipe my face with my sleeve.
“Of course.”
“I don’t deserve it, Andy. Not from you.”
“Chris. Look at me.”
I do. Andy’s beautiful face, covered in burn scars. Scars I gave him. Not the Common King. Me.
The first time I saw him after I hurt him was downstairs, right here in my house. He was so angry. I think if it weren’t for Liefer he would have killed me. But since I got separated from the Common King, he hasn’t said so much as an unkind word.
He smiles at me. God, he’s still beautiful, scars or not. Those blue eyes.
“I forgive you.”
I look away. He grabs my chin and makes me look at him again.
“I forgive you,” he repeats.
“Because of the split? Because he and I are two people now?”
“No. I forgave you before that.”
“Because it wasn’t him who…I mean, he was in my head but I was myself when I—”
“I know, Chris, I know. And I forgive you anyway.”
“But…” My shoulders slump. “Why?”
He pulls his head back a little, still smiling. “Why?” He sighs. “Because I’m not an angry person and it was exhausting being angry all the time.” He leans back, resting his palms on the rug. “Because life’s too short. Because I have a boyfriend who still loves me. Because I remember what a good kid you always were, and I have a better idea now of what you were going through. Because…well, because I want to, I guess. I forgive you because I want to forgive you.”
“I don’t deserve forgiveness.”
“Maybe not.” His smile drops but his eyes stay kind. “I’m not saying you’re not responsible for what you did to me, Chris. I’m saying I forgive you for it.”
We sit in silence for a moment.
“Can I hug you?” I ask quietly. “Is that okay?”
He laughs. “Bring it in.”
So I do. It’s a little awkward with the way we’re sitting on the floor but whatever. We wrap our arms around each other and he slaps my back.
Damn, he smells amazing. It’s not even cologne or deodorant, I don’t think. Just a naturally sexy, manly smell.
We break apart and I get up. “I guess I should get this over with.”
He stands. “You need help?”
“Nah. Just gotta find my bag.”
He sits on my bed. Andy hugged me and now he’s on my bed. If I could travel back in time and tell th
e me from six months ago that one day soon Andy Palakiko would come to my bedroom, hug me, and then sit on my bed, he’d slap my face and call me a liar.
I root around in my closet and dig out the big duffel bag I use for vacations. I throw it on the bed next to Andy and start going through my drawers.
“You really helped me, you know,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“What you taught me, in drama class. It helped me. Saved my life, even.”
“Huh. That’s a nice thing for a teacher to hear. How so?”
I take a bunch of socks out of a drawer and drop them into the bag. “What you taught us about how to communicate intention through your words, even if your character’s dialogue doesn’t match what your character wants. It’s so much like how logomancy works. Communicating a complex intention to the world, saying only one word. It helped me understand.”
He nods, grinning, and the bed bounces underneath him. “Yes! I felt the same way. Wow, that’s cool that you made that connection, too.” He scrunches his nose and lifts his hip up, takes out his phone and looks at the screen. “Sorry.” He texts a message, then puts the phone away. “Andre checking in.”
Andre is his boyfriend. He experienced the Moment too, though he’s not a logomancer. I drop some underwear into the bag. “How’s he doing with all this?”
“He’s been incredible. He went into hiding with us, until we moved to the museum. Didn’t want to leave me alone while I was still so angry. Honestly, he’s the one who reminded me who I really am, helped me let go and forgive.”
“Wow. I guess I should be thanking him.”
Andy laughs. “I’ll tell him you said that. I wish, back at the start of all this, I hadn’t listened to Mr. Liefer when he told us we had to keep it secret from our loved ones. Would have made it easier to have Andre there with me.”
I rifle through my t-shirt drawer, looking for good ones. Oh, and I gotta remember sweatpants. That basement is cold. “You’re lucky to have somebody who understands.”
“Yeah.” He’s quiet for a second, then, “Can I ask you something?”
I hold up a t-shirt I got on vacation in Iceland. It’s got holes but I like it so I’m taking it. “Sure.”