by Mailie Meloy
“Tell her she won’t look like a boy, and she’ll be even more beautiful with short hair,” Janie said.
Pip made a face. “You think that’ll work?”
“You got Rocco to finance the film,” Janie said. “You can get Evie to cut off her hair.”
Janie’s father leaned forward in his chair and lowered his voice. “I still don’t understand how you got Rocco to cough up so much money,” he said.
Pip looked to Benjamin, who shrugged. They might as well tell the truth. They had to start sometime.
Pip said quickly, “I just told him I knew that the coppers were after him, and his best friend was dead, so he might be looking for a change.”
“But how did you know all that?” Mrs. Scott asked.
Benjamin studied his fingernails.
“Word gets around,” Pip said. “I told him I was a thief once, a bloody good one, but I still got myself nabbed sometimes. And there’s nothing worse than being locked up. It just kills your soul. So I told him that what saved my life was finding this other thing I wanted to do, making movies. And I thought it could save Rocco, too. It was a real business he could invest in, but it had plenty of risk and danger and excitement just like his current work. I offered to make some introductions. I said I was going to be in a film that had real possibilities—brilliant screenwriters.”
Mrs. Scott laughed. “Flatterer.”
“But that the script needed some work.”
“Oh, here we go,” Mr. Scott said.
“And the budget was too low for what these brilliant writers wanted to do.”
“So—are we laundering mob money?” Mrs. Scott asked.
“Don’t think of it that way,” Pip said. “You’re making art!”
“The crew all knew who Rocco was,” Mrs. Scott said. “I think they’re a little afraid of him.”
“He’s not a bad guy, really,” Pip said. “And he got us a permit to film at the Trevi Fountain. He’s very connected, and he understands business. It’s going to be a good thing all around.”
Mr. Scott nodded. “All right,” he said. “Go work your magic and get us the haircut.”
Pip pushed himself out of his chair and headed off to Evie’s dressing room.
• • •
Rocco had returned the Pharmacopoeia to Benjamin as part of the deal with Pip, and Benjamin had offered to make Doyle a new filter, but the magician didn’t want one. Doyle said he was going to live in such a way that people wouldn’t think terrible thoughts about him. It would be an experiment, and the only way to monitor his progress was to know what people were thinking. He was going to consider his ability a gift and not a curse. If it didn’t work out, he would take a rain check on that filter. For now, he just wanted to go home.
He bought passage to New York on an Italian ocean liner, the SS Cristoforo Colombo, and said he was going to rediscover America. A sister ship, the Andrea Doria, was leaving earlier, but Doyle had a bad feeling about that one. He took a train to Genoa to meet the ship, to set out on his voyage of discovery.
Benjamin and Janie had been back to the Trevi Fountain one warm Roman night, with the streetlights all softened in the foggy air, and the horses leaping, and the pool of water lit from below. They had each tossed a coin in, to make sure they’d come back to the city. Then Benjamin took the little gold death’s head from his pocket and rolled it between his fingers.
The charm had set them on their course, and started everything that had happened, when the magician stole it and then dropped it back into Benjamin’s hand. It had taken them to Rome, and to the After-room. It was supposed to remind you that you were going to die someday, but Benjamin didn’t need to be reminded of that. He threw the little skull into the fountain, and it dropped with a tiny splash into the glowing pool at the horses’ feet.
Chapter 63
The Brig
Boy, am I happy to see you!” Ned Maddox told the two officers on the patrol boat, grinning like an idiot.
The squids were nervous and young, and seemed taken aback by his cheerfulness.
“I didn’t know who you were!” Ned said. “Sorry to lead you on a chase like that. I’ve been hoping to run into you guys—I’ve got this cargo that’s a pain in my ass.”
So they went together back to the aircraft carrier Ulysses, and Ned turned over the useless uranium, and his debriefing began.
He was taken to a small office where a bullet-headed intelligence officer named Richardson made careful notes as they talked. Richardson wanted to know when, exactly, Ned Maddox was taken prisoner, and why he hadn’t sent word to the navy of his movements, and what the uranium barrels had to do with the hunt for the missing bomb.
“I found them when I was looking for the bomb,” he said.
“Found them how?”
“I ran into these pirates who had them.”
“Pirates?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And can we contact them?”
“I’m afraid I lost track of them, sir.”
“And why didn’t you send word?”
“I didn’t think it was secure to transmit by radio.”
“And where did the pirates get the uranium?”
“From a British subject named Danby. I think he was a spy.”
Richardson made a note in his file. “We’re aware of Danby,” he said. “Where is he now?”
“He went overboard,” Ned said. “His mind seemed altered, I think.”
“Altered?”
“Yes, sir.”
“There were reports of a woman who might know Danby,” Richardson said. “A Chinese national. A source puts her in the telegraph office in Hangzhou not long ago.”
“Oh?” Ned tried to control his breathing. Don’t sweat. Don’t show surprise.
“We know she sent a telegraph to Rome,” Richardson said. “But the ticker tape is missing. Do you think she might be in league with this Danby?”
“I couldn’t say, sir.”
Richardson eyed him with cold blue eyes. Ned looked steadily back. Breathe in, breathe out. He hadn’t thought he would have to answer direct questions about Jin Lo.
“So this Danby,” Richardson said, after a while. “He had the uranium. But he was after the shell?”
“Yes, sir,” Ned said.
“Do you know where it is?”
“I don’t,” he said, which was more or less true. He had not taken bearings.
Richardson made another note in the file, then closed it and stood up.
Ned thought he’d done as well as he could. He’d kept his story consistent, hadn’t betrayed his nervousness, hadn’t indicated any knowledge of Jin Lo. But then two burly sailors came into the room, and at a nod from Richardson they transferred him to the brig. So maybe it hadn’t gone so well.
The brig had been scrubbed, like everything on a navy ship, but it still retained a faint smell of vomit, from drunken seamen sleeping off binges ashore. The floor was steel, and the cot narrow. The bars on the door formed a grid, with holes about four inches square, just big enough for a man’s fist.
The two sailors left Ned there with Richardson.
“I’ve told you everything I know,” Ned said.
“Not about the Chinese girl. Our patrol says they saw a girl on the boat with you, from a distance.”
“But they searched the boat,” Ned said.
“I think you know something,” Richardson said. “I just don’t know what it is.”
“I only want to get my discharge papers and move on with my life,” Ned said.
“Yeah, I’ll bet you do,” Richardson said. “I’m putting you on a plane to Guam, and then to Hawaii, to face a court-martial.”
Court-martial! He had given his life to the navy, and now they were going to put him on trial, and discharge him or lock him away. “I h
aven’t done anything wrong,” he said. And in his heart, he believed it was true.
“You left your post without leave,” Richardson said. “We’ll start with that. And you lost your boat.”
“The pirates took it.”
“Right. The pirates.”
Richardson shut the barred door of Ned’s cell with a clank and walked away.
Ned sat alone in the vomit-smelling cell, then untucked his shirt and found the hard glass vial Jin Lo had sewn into the hem. He ripped open the stitches with his teeth, pushed the vial out, and pulled loose the tiny cork. Then he hesitated. If his personality did make him a peacock, or a penguin, then he would be stuck.
But he had a feeling he would become something that flew. He was betting everything on that possibility. He drank the liquid down. It tasted bitter, like tea strained through moss.
At first nothing happened.
But then he started to feel light-headed. His head was shrinking, his skull growing thin and fragile. His skin prickled all over, and then feathers burst out of his arms and his chest as he stared down. His feet grew hard and bony, long talons emerging from his toenails. His hands were replaced by wing tips, and he dropped the vial with a clink to the steel floor of the brig. His shoulders narrowed, but they felt very strong. His body tipped forward, and he found himself much closer to the floor than he had been before. He looked down at his chest, on which light feathers grew, dappled with horizontal black bars.
He held out his wings to see them better, and joy surged in his chest. He was a peregrine falcon. The fastest bird on earth. Jin Lo’s mate.
But he was distressingly big.
He considered the grid of bars on his cell, and stuck his beaked head out through one of the holes. Both folded wings wouldn’t fit through at once, so he eased his left shoulder through, then scrabbled at the steel floor with his talons to try to push himself forward. He felt claustrophobic, caught in a snare. He remembered Jin Lo’s story of the cormorant, enslaved by the fisherman, with a ring around its neck. His falcon’s heart began to beat faster.
Calm down, he told himself. Jin Lo had warned him that fear made the stuff wear off more quickly. He got his talons around one of the bars and pushed. He had some leverage now, in spite of the awkward angle. With his left wing nearly free, the right shoulder popped through, painfully. Then the rest of his body followed it.
He was in the passageway, surrounded by the other cells, all empty. He took three quick steps, talons clicking noisily on the steel floor, then spread his wings, hoping to lift off—
And fell flat on his face.
He remembered his brief stint in pilot training, and how quickly he had washed out. He’d never had the knack for flight. But he wouldn’t wash out now. He tried again, and fell again, but his wings caught a little air and he understood how they should move. One more time, he took the three launching steps. And this time he lifted, and sailed two feet off the floor.
Then he was in a new corridor. Left or right? He wasn’t sure. He let his bird’s brain take over—sky, air—and turned left. He heard footsteps coming toward him and pressed himself against the bulkhead to one side. He watched two sailors clomp past him in their heavy, navy-issue boots, which now seemed enormous.
As soon as they were past, he skipped into flight. He was getting better at the takeoff. He was up a deck, down a passageway, and up another deck before he heard more men coming. This time he perched on an exposed pipe in the ceiling while they passed beneath him. They didn’t look up, and he resisted the temptation to let loose a white nitrogen-rich stream on their heads.
Up another deck, and now he could smell fresh air, close by. An alarm sounded—had someone found his cell empty? He turned a corner and saw sunlight ahead, a blinding bright rectangle, some kind of hatch. He aimed himself at it. But just as he reached it, the door slammed shut. He hit the steel plate with a thud, and it knocked him to the ground. The corridor went dark.
He woke to the sound of the alarm again and looked down at his feathered belly, his taloned feet, and remembered: He was a falcon. But he didn’t feel fierce or ruthless. His head hurt. He was hungry, and had a vague hankering for the rats he knew were hiding in the shadows. The idea of tearing a rat apart, all fur and bones, turned the part of his stomach that was still human, but was thrilling to his falcon brain. He struggled to his feet and shook his head to clear it. Then he looked up at the sealed door he’d drilled his head into. Freedom was on the other side.
He would have to find another hatchway. He flew back the way he had come, willing himself toward the fresh air, ignoring the pull of the rats on his mind and the blare of the alarm. He banked down a corridor that seemed promising, and flew smack into a young seaman, with another behind him.
The man he’d hit cried out in surprise, and the other threw his jacket over Ned’s head. The world grew dark again. He tried to attack with his feet, but the canvas jacket was all around him. He was being carried like a bundle of laundry. His captors’ voices were excited, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. Would they tether him on deck as a mascot? He thought of the unlucky cormorant with the ring around its neck. He tried to fight his way free, but was only pinned more tightly.
“A peregrine, sir!” he heard the boy say. “He got stuck on board!”
The voice, resonating inside the boy’s ribs, was bright and eager—still a teenager, probably. With quick reflexes.
And then the jacket was off, and the boy hurled Ned from the rail of the ship. The world turned very bright all at once, and the sea came up surprisingly fast. Ned did some ineffectual backward-pedaling with his feet, but some part of his brain also made him spread his wings, and he caught the air just as the wet spray hit him in the face. He rose off the ocean’s surface, back up to the level of the carrier’s deck.
“Look at that!” cried his rescuer. “Lookit him go!”
Others had gathered at the rail, watching. Ned spotted Richardson’s wind-reddened cheeks, his bullet head tilted up to stare. Would he put it all together? Ned found that his falcon’s brain didn’t care.
“Wouldn’t it be something to fly?” the kid said. “To see everything?”
And it was. It was something. Ned flew higher and higher, up over the carrier, over the whole fleet. The wind was in his feathers, the ocean vast and blue below. So he’d washed out of pilot training—so what? This was the way to fly. He circled over the carrier, a victory lap, and then caught a thermal air current, warm and lifting, and headed north.
Chapter 64
A Screening
Janie’s parents held an advance screening of their movie at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor. A red carpet was rolled out beneath the lights of the marquee, and the Scotts invited their colleagues and students from the university to a black-tie reception in the lobby. The Doyle twins arrived, Nat in his white tuxedo and Valentina in the robin’s-egg blue dress she’d worn to the dance, with their parents in tow.
Janie was wearing her yellow dress from the dance, and it was disorienting to be in the clothes they’d all worn months ago, before Benjamin told her that he’d contacted his father. Clothes from another life. She looked around for her parents—her mother would want to see the Doyles—and saw them on the other side of the lobby.
“Don’t worry, we’ll go say hello,” Mrs. Doyle said, taking her husband’s arm and heading off.
Janie felt shy with the twins, their friendship not yet re-established.
“Our uncle said he saw you in Rome,” Valentina said.
Janie had been through so much with the magician, but didn’t know what to say about it. And she wished she didn’t feel so awkward and they could just pick up where they’d been before. “He did,” she said.
“That’s so weird,” Valentina said.
“It was,” Janie agreed.
“When are you coming back to school?” Nat asked.
“Your parents don’t want to move to Hollywood?” Valentina asked.
Janie shook her head. “They miss their students. They want to finish out their teaching contract, and they say they’ll write their next project here.”
“This kid has been trying to get in touch with you,” Nat said. “He has a science team in Ohio and he’s looking for other schools to have meetings and competitions with. He wondered if we have a science team. His name is Sergei Shiskin.”
“Sergei!” Janie said, remembering the lonely Russian boy from her school in London, and how desperately he had wanted friends.
“Do you know him?” Valentina asked.
“We do,” Janie said. Sergei’s father, a Soviet diplomat, had defected to the United States, and the last she’d heard, they were living in Florida. “He’s really nice.”
“So would you join a science team?” Nat asked.
“If you guys were doing it,” Benjamin said.
“We’ll get it started,” Valentina said.
Everything was just starting to feel normal again, when Doyle the Magnificent came up the red carpet in his full magician’s tails and top hat. A woman in turquoise sequins like a sparkling mermaid walked beside him. “May I present my lovely assistant, April,” Doyle said, sweeping off the hat.
“I’ve never been to a movie premiere,” April said, glittering in the lights and gazing around the lobby.
“That’s the only reason she took me back,” Doyle said. “But you have to start somewhere, right?”
“April’s so good at getting sawed in half,” Valentina said. “Way better than I was.”
“I’m not sure that’s a compliment,” April said with a sweet smile. “May you develop other skills.”
“How was the Atlantic crossing?” Benjamin asked Doyle.
“Excellent!” Doyle said. “I mean—terrible. Rough seas. I was seasick the whole time, just turned myself inside out. I had a steward who brought me consommé every day and was full of self-righteous advice. Wouldn’t let me order a brandy. I loathed him. But by the time I staggered off the ship, I hadn’t had a drink in a week. The worst of the cravings were over and I felt awfully good. So I kept it up, I stopped drinking. I might be the only person ever to dry out on an ocean liner. And you’d be surprised how much friendlier people have become. So the experiment is going well!”