by Ned Vizzini
“I tried, okay? The plan kind of backfired.”
“What did you do?”
“I had a momentary lapse in judgment. I didn’t have anywhere to go but here. How’d you get rescued?”
“With great difficulty. They were ready to string me up in a public hanging. Ada and Gamary created a disturbance and freed me.”
“When? Just now? While I was at the dance?”
“Time gets fuzzy between our worlds. It depends on the observer. For us, it’s been three days since we sent you back to camp. How long has it been for you?”
“Maybe eight hours?”
“Then you didn’t do the right thing. When you act out of fear, you get left behind.”
“I think it might be better if I stayed behind here, with you guys. I’m better suited to it.”
“That’s not possible, Peregrine,” Ada cuts in.
“Ada, you realize you talk to me more than anybody at camp?”
Leidan comes back. “Another round?” He pours a shot for himself and slams it before I can tell what color it is. Mortin and Gamary are still working on their beers. I haven’t touched my water.
“My brother,” Mortin says as Leidan shuffles away. “So much potential, wasted.” He takes a swig of beer. I wonder whose potential he really thinks is wasted. I look through his upturned drink at the walls and ceiling. Things look sadder when glimpsed through alcohol.
As Mortin chugs, the centaur and his date down the bar finish their bowl, get up, and walk past us. The centaur bumps into Mortin, pitching him forward so he spills all over himself.
“Hey! What’s your problem?”
The centaur stops. His lady friend eyes us from atop his back. “I do not have a problem,” he says. “Do you have a problem?”
“Yeah, I guess I shouldn’t go to mixed bars anymore. It’s better to just drink with men.”
“Be quiet, Mortin!” Gamary says. “It was a mistake—”
“He spilled my drink. He owes me an apology.”
“Mortin,” Ada hisses. “Hiding in plain sight.”
“It’s hopeless! Wherever I go, the world is full of idiots trying to impress their whores.” Mortin spits in the sawdust. It’s an ugly word, in any world. The woman on the centaur gasps. Ada smacks Mortin’s arm. The centaur pulls out a studded stone club.
“Now I will ask you to apologize to my lady friend.”
“Gentlemen, please, we can’t have fighting in here,” Leidan says. “If you can—”
But Mortin stands and faces the centaur, just as the front door opens.
60
“MORTIN ENAW!” A VOICE CALLS. I KNOW its self-satisfaction and cruelty before I even see Officer Tendrile. He’s a little dirty, but his blade and mustache are intact. “Freshly escaped, with all of your compatriots, in one convenient location! Sir with the club, you’ll have to back away. Mortin is my quarry.”
Behind him, fish-creature guards and octopus-man officers march into the bar. “I don’t want anyone to move, and I don’t want anyone to speak. You’re all coming with me—”
Ada jumps up. Mortin darts under the centaur, who swings down at him. The club misses Mortin but catches a batracian guard who got too close. The guard lets out a horrible gurgle as he crumples to the floor. “Murderer!” Officer Tendrile yells, and the other guards start attacking everyone around them, beating the bar’s patrons with spear butts. “You’re all under arrest for collusion with Ophisa!” Gamary kicks a guard away—Ada grabs Leidan—docile alcoholics who were sitting at tables snarl at the police, defending themselves—a chair flies across the room—I duck—to be honest, once I see the chair, a check mark goes off in my head next to barroom brawl, and I know the best thing to do is get out.
“Leidan! Back door!” Mortin yells, clutching my neck as he scrambles past flying bottles and mugs and clumps of sawdust. His brother runs ahead of him and kicks open a second entrance to the Monard. Light streaks in. Outside is an alley and another building; we’re in a city, aboveground.
“Stop them!” Officer Tendrile yells. Someone shoots an arrow; it lands just above the door as Gamary and Ada run out. Mortin tosses me into the alley. I squeeze my eyes in the sun. I’m between two wooden buildings with clotheslines holding laundry ruffling in the wind.
“C’mon!” Ada says, already on Gamary’s back.
“Where’re we going?”
Gamary leans back so I can get on. Mortin says something to Leidan in the doorway before running out in front of a volley of arrows that tear the laundry and thud into the building opposite. He jumps onto Gamary behind me; Gamary takes off down the alley.
I peek back: Leidan is climbing a pipe against the bar’s exterior wall. Two tentacled officers bust out of the doorway; one tosses a spear at Leidan while the other looses an arrow at us. We speed around a corner. The arrow hisses past Mortin. I grip Gamary’s rough hair, screaming in joy and terror.
“Where are we?” I yell.
“Surface Subbenia!” Ada says. “Above the market chambers where you were before!”
It’s a run-down, dirty city, with wagons drawn by centaurs and okapicentaurs with sores on their legs, beggars in the streets, fortune-tellers in ramshackle booths, and homes that look like the ones I saw when Dad dragged us to Colonial Williamsburg, but not as preserved. I look up. Cloudless—a perfect day. There isn’t an extra sun or anything. I’m glad. I can only deal with so much.
“I’m sorry I did that, guys! It was like I couldn’t control myself!” Mortin yells.
“Did what?” Ada asks.
“Said that to that woman!”
“It’s too late now!”
The wind whistles in our ears. Gamary runs faster than I think he knew he could. People point and call for the police and yell, “Isn’t that the escaped prisoner?”
“How did Tendrile know where to find us?” Mortin asks.
“I can’t—huff—hold you three—huff—any longer,” Gamary says. He stumbles past a well and a broken cart propped against an abandoned building. Elsewhere I see piles of burning trash and celate officers knocking on people’s doors, demanding answers. The dark shroud of violence that you’ve seen will continue to befall us, Ada warned. The city has no sidewalks—Gamary gallops on swaths of dying grass. The wind kicks up the smell of waste. Gamary hightails it away from the chaotic citizenry, cresting a hill, and I look down for the first time at the spreading, peaceful countryside of
BENIA
61
GAMARY COLLAPSES OUTSIDE THE CITY limits. We tumble off him onto a road. I keep running.
“Stop!” Mortin calls.
“There are people after us!”
“Nobody’s coming out of Subbenia to get you! Come back here!”
I walk back. Gamary catches his breath, and we all walk next to him. It seems strange to move at a leisurely pace after being in such a death-defying chase, but Mortin explains, “The law here is very provincial. Celates in the city worry about their territory; once you leave it, they couldn’t care less.”
“Even Officer Tendrile?”
“Officer Tendrile would be terrified out here,” Gamary says.
“Of what?”
“Nothing; don’t listen to him,” Mortin says. “What’s there to be terrified of?”
He gestures toward the big deep sky and layered hills in front of us. The countryside surrounding Subbenia requires a word I’ve never used before, but I know from C&C: heath. Like the moors of England, it’s an open landscape of low-growing shrubs, with wind-polished, grassy slopes as far as the eye can see. The road we’re on dips out of sight and pops up again over and over as it stretches toward the horizon. Among the shrubs I see big stones and small huts. There are no trees, no animals, and no farms. A cart approaches in the distance, but other than that, the only movement is the grass bending and swishing in the breeze, throwing up mirages of reflected sheen.
“Welcome to the suburbs,” Ada says.
“No Slip’N Slide?” I joke. Nobody laug
hs.
“Perry, what exactly happened with Anna?” Mortin presses.
I take a deep breath. “I sort of … exposed myself to Anna.”
“Exposed yourself? Exposed what? Your male parts?”
“… Yes.”
Ada looks at me for a minute and then puffs her cheeks out and laughs. She tries to hold it in at first, but then bends over and wraps her arms around her chest—
“It’s not funny! It’s not funnier than my Slip’N Slide joke!”
“Oh man,” Mortin says. “You flashed the princess’s correspondent? Why would you do that?”
“She was saying I wasn’t a man, and I wanted to show her I was! You don’t get it—when I went back to Earth, I had a hair, okay? Ada, could you please stop laughing and cover your ears? I don’t want you to hear this.”
“Too bad!”
“Mortin, I must’ve done something here to make me hit puberty!”
“Or you might’ve just hit puberty.”
“Well. Maybe.”
“Didn’t anybody ever tell you to be patient?”
“Anna did. Before I pulled my pants off.”
“This is why the Appointees don’t approve pants,” Gamary says. “People on Earth are always taking them off and getting in trouble.”
“All right, very funny. What are we gonna do?”
“We’re on the run,” Mortin says. “You may have escaped a bad situation at camp but you’re not in a good one here either. Since you failed to kiss Anna and free the princess, the Appointees have expanded their powers to try and find her. Police can break into people’s homes now. Celates are running wild, killing citizens in the streets. Anyone who questions what’s happening is branded a traitor in league with Ophisa. Subbenia is lost. It’s gone mad. I told my brother to meet us in Upekki. It’s not far from here. There’s a thakerak there, so we can send you back to camp and set things right with Anna. As long as the princess is in Ophisa’s clutches, things will get worse.”
“Upekki’s too far!” Gamary says. “We’ll never make it!”
“Would you rather go back and get killed?”
“We’ll get killed anyway!”
“By who?” I ask. Nobody answers. “Look, you guys aren’t seeing the positive here. We have an adventuring party now! We can free the princess ourselves! Ada, do you still have the figure?”
She hands it to me. I hold it. The princess is more tarnished than when I saw her last. I know it doesn’t make sense—she’s only silver—but she also seems sadder, more hopeless. Time is running out.
62
“GIVE THAT BACK TO ADA,” MORTIN SAYS, “and forget about it. We’re not going on any quest to kill Ophisa and rescue the princess. If anyone could do that, the Appointees already would have. The only way to free the princess is through her correspondent.”
“I wish you’d stop saying that word. I don’t understand about the freaking correspondents.”
“Very few people on Earth do,” Ada says. “We made the important discoveries ourselves, once our universes reconnected, around the time of Marco Polo in your world. Our first explorers stumbled into thakeraks. For reasons we still don’t understand, the thakeraks like to take living beings, codify the position of every single atom in their bodies, and send that information into your universe, where it’s reverse engineered by a corresponding mushroom patch.”
“How did your ‘first explorers’ get back? They weren’t stashing car batteries in the woods, were they?”
“They didn’t get back. They were trapped. Many were killed for being demons or witches. Most were never heard from again. But some assimilated into your cultures.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Why? Earth is a big planet. Lots of hidden spaces. Lots of people who could be convinced that an other normal was a god. The ones who wanted to come back knew that travel had to do with energy, and with mushrooms. They noted where they arrived on Earth and went back to those places to attempt a return. Eventually, three hundred years ago, one traveler hooked up a lightning rod to the clump of mushrooms he’d emerged near when he came to Earth, and got zapped back. Certain mushrooms on Earth need a little kick, and then they act just like thakeraks.”
“What happened when he came back?”
“He emerged just after he left, but his life was radically different. His mother had been alive when he left; when he came back, she had died during childbirth. He was married when he left; when he came back, he’d never met his wife. He’d been dirt poor when he left; when he came back, he was rich. Di- just appeared in his bank account, where it hadn’t been before.”
“Somehow,” Mortin says, “the things he did in your world had great ramifications here. The loss of information that brought our universes back together made them cohere in specific ways. The traveler reported his findings, but no one believed him: they remembered his life as the skewed version that he birthed. So he started doing experiments. He would head to Earth, run in a circle three times, and come back to see if anything was different. He was the first correspondence consultant. Paolo Sulice. A brave and crazy individual.”
“After years of experiments, Sulice figured out the guiding principles of correspondationalism,” Ada says. “Every person in your world has an other normal correspondent in ours, whether it’s an ingress or a highborn. Doing things to a human affects that human’s correspondent, and vice versa. Have you ever woken up with a bruise you couldn’t explain?”
“I thought those were my brother.”
“Nope. Something happened to your correspondent.”
“Who is my correspondent?”
“We can’t tell you. It’s policy.”
Mortin illustrates: “You get punched in the chest, your correspondent gets chest pains; you fall in love, your correspondent meets someone; you grow up, your correspondent gets more mature.”
“Your correspondent dies, you die,” Ada says.
“Paolo Sulice kept at it. He pioneered analysis techniques to determine what causes would have what effects for people willing to travel in the multiverse. He went into business with Sulice Correspondence House, my former employer.”
“You could go in,” Ada says, “and say that you wanted to be rich, and Sulice would run an analysis on you, determine what had to happen to your correspondent on Earth to make them rich, and then go and pull a ‘tweak,’ or small change, to make that happen.”
“So that’s why I’m a ‘tweak’?”
“Yes. Sulice’s work was an unqualified success. It got so popular that the Appointees started regulating it, and now it’s a very specialized field.”
“Dangerous, too,” Mortin says. “But I have a perfect record: never hurt anybody, never killed anybody, made plenty of clients at my company very happy, and no humans were ever the wiser.”
“Until me.”
“Mortin,” Ada says, “I don’t want to hear you talk yourself up when you just said that disgusting thing in the Monard.”
“I said I was sorry. I snapped. I couldn’t control it.”
“Sure you couldn’t.”
“I was stressed.”
“That’s no excuse.”
“I know,” Mortin admits.
“I know too,” I say.
“What?”
“Stress is no excuse to do disgusting things. It’s easy to rationalize in your head, but it’s wrong.”
“Like how?” Ada seems very interested.
“Like you go through life with girls not liking you, with no one noticing you, with people calling you Mini Pecker, and then you get a chance to do something outrageous, and you think, I deserve this—I suffered enough at the hands of my peers and now I’m allowed to do whatever I want. But you’re not. It’s childish.”
We walk in silence for a moment. Then Ada slaps my shoulder. “Maybe that hair’s making you smarter.”
63
WE WALK BAREFOOT DOWN THE PACKED dirt road. The sun has warmed the taut earth; it feels great rad
iating up through my soles. Maybe we’re outlaws, and maybe we’re doomed, and maybe we’ve left behind everything normal in our lives, but we do have the sun and the air and they’re free. I focus on my footsteps. Mortin asks Gamary about his daughter.
“She’s fine,” he says. “She’s better. The fever came with the troubles but now it’s gone. I just have to get back to her.”
The road is sparsely traveled. A few times an hour Gamary yells, “Cart!” and Ada hops onto his back and squints and evaluates someone coming toward us. She has terrific eyes and can see for miles over the hills. She describes the approaching party to Mortin (“two hequets with a cargo of pottery”; “a faun with a knapsack with rugs sticking out”), and Mortin nods okay and then for good measure we all get on the far side of Gamary and walk past the traveler without saying a word. When people approach from behind, Ada hears them with her long ears and performs a similar scouting role, sitting backward on Gamary and reporting to Mortin. In the meantime, she talks to me.
“See the grass? It lives on three inches of rain a year. The whole climate here is hot and dry. Feel.” She reaches off the road to dig up some soil and lets it crumble into my open palm. It has a tangy, unpleasant smell.
“Sulfur?”
“Comes from the runoff of the Ouest Beniss Range.” She nods to the mountains north of us, where Subbenia is—I can still see structures and smoke. “The grasses metabolize it.”
“Cool.” It actually is cool.
“So what’s it like to go to school on Earth? With boys and girls in the same room?”
“It’s … ah … pretty paralyzing and unpleasant.”
“Would you rather have a mentor like Mortin and work with him like I do?”
“Probably.”
“But no one’s allowed to do that on Earth.”
“No, school is like prison. You have to go.”
“And camp?”
“I haven’t been there that long, but it also seems like prison.”