by Mary McCoy
Trust me.
Renata did. She had suspected, but now she was convinced.
“You’re the knight,” she said, fixing her black eyes on the counselor-in-training.
“Beware! The Knave who only speaks in lies. Beware! The Knight who plots out your demise,” Robin said with a nod. “I think it went a little something like that.”
The girl with beads in her hair wasn’t sure what to feel now, but her mind honed in on one point.
“You can only tell us the truth,” she said.
Robin nodded.
“Why did you send us on the quest in the first place?” asked the girl with beads in her hair, puzzled. If it had all been for her own amusement, Robin certainly didn’t seem to be enjoying herself very much.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” Robin said. “Not like this, anyway.”
“But you did mean for it to happen in some way,” Renata said. “Why?”
“Because I’m the stage manager,” Robin said, almost like she was trying to remind herself of the fact.
“Stage manager of what?” asked the girl with beads in her hair. “This isn’t a play.”
“But it is,” Robin said, walking up the steps to Cabin 5. “We put it on every year.”
“And we’re the . . . actors?” Renata asked.
Robin nodded, then paused at the threshold to Cabin 5.
“It works best with humans,” she said. “They can be managed, but they never do exactly what you expect them to. Keeps the stories fresh.”
Robin disappeared inside the cabin, unconcerned about the stability of the load-bearing beams. The girl with beads in her hair was dumbfounded, then furious. Their actions had all been choreographed from the beginning, all for the amusement of some backward, forest-dwelling creatures with nothing better to do.
“Haven’t you heard of television? Or books?” she called after Robin.
A moment later, Robin reappeared in the doorway, brushing soot from her shorts.
“Is it always like this?” Renata asked.
Robin frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
Robin pursed her lips and seemed, for a moment, unwilling to answer. At last she relented.
“No,” she said. “Nobody dies during my productions. At least nobody ever has before. I believe I have some kind of sabotage on my hands. Or mutiny.”
Not for the first time during this conversation, the girl with beads in her hair stifled the urge to scream. The way Robin was going on about it, you’d think she was the one who was suffering.
“I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” Robin said. She walked down the steps and went back to circling the area around the cabin. “I know you don’t like me very much right now. I know you blame me, but you have to believe me. I never intended for any of you to get hurt. Not Megan or Pam or Oscar or anyone . . .”
Robin looked around at the clearing where the five cabins stood, and she considered what she knew about the current whereabouts and well-being of each cabin.
A Note from the Narrator: Which, to her knowledge, was as follows: Cabin 1 was in Tania’s clutches at the Inge F. Yancey Young Executives Leadership Camp. Cabin 2 was on the run from Abigail, or rather, from the crew of stagehands who manufactured her traps, none of whom seemed to be following their notes anymore. She hadn’t heard from Cabin 4 in hours, and Cabin 5 was presumed dead.
As the girl with beads in her hair watched Robin, she realized that she felt more committed to the quest than ever. To Robin, this was just about cleaning up a mess and sorting out her mutinous crew, but in truth, the girl with beads in her hair realized that what was at stake was nothing less than all of their lives. Everything Robin had written in the prophecy had come true, even the parts she couldn’t possibly have controlled. Robin hadn’t known what she was writing, hadn’t taken it all that seriously, but it didn’t matter. The prophecy had taken on a life of its own, and it was real. Five of them were lost, but the rest were still out there, and if the girl with beads in her hair didn’t try to save them, who would?
“We’re coming with you,” said the girl with beads in her hair.
Robin may have been telling the truth, but she couldn’t be trusted to act in their best interests. The girl with beads in her hair and Renata would keep an eye on her. Together, they would make this right. They would save the rest of the girls at Camp So-and-So and face whatever darkness lay ahead because, deep down, the girl with beads in her hair knew there was more at the root of this than a few rebellious stagehands.
She didn’t think Robin would argue with her, and she didn’t. After all, who else did she have to help her clean up this mess?
But once again, Renata saw things in a different way, and arrived at a different conclusion that was no less correct. She cleared her throat.
“I’m not coming with you,” she said. Her voice trembled as she spoke.
“Why? Where will you go?” asked the girl with beads in her hair, even though she already knew the answer.
“I promised the others I’d come back, no matter what,” Renata said.
Doubt tugged at the girl with beads in her hair, and she began to wonder if she was making the right decision. Renata’s way made sense. Maybe they should stick together, especially now that they knew what was happening, and exactly how bad things could get.
The girl with beads in her hair was about to change her mind, about to tell Renata that she was going back to the cave with her, but Renata kept talking.
“The prophecy said we were supposed to go into the cave and free someone. It’s the part of the quest we missed, and it’s my fault. I have to go back and fix it so you can finish. If I don’t, I have a feeling that nothing is going to turn out the way it’s supposed to.”
It was what the prophecy said would happen, thought the girl with beads in her hair. First five, then four, then three, then two, then one.
It was what always happened in stories like this. The hero started off surrounded by friends who helped out, who stepped up and were heroic at different moments along the way, but in the end, when things were darkest and most uncertain, the hero always ended up alone.
In evil times when darkness threatens day,
One soul among you must hold it at bay.
It had flashed across her mind when she tackled Robin and pinned her to the ground. I’m the soul. She’s the darkness. Now, the girl with beads in her hair realized what that meant.
She was supposed to be the hero of this story.
Immediately, she knew she didn’t want it. Renata would make a better hero. She’d been cursed into the body of a bird, and she turned around and commanded a raven army to put out a terrifying inferno. She was braver and smarter, and the girl with beads in her hair didn’t want to finish this quest without her.
She felt like she might cry again, but instead she held out her hand to Renata and said, “There is a world above and a world below and a world between, and in all of them, always, you are my friend.”
It was the next-to-last line of the third book in the Isis Archimedes series, the one everybody liked best. After infiltrating S’ulla’s armies as a soldier and spy, Isis Archimedes is captured and thrown in prison. There, she meets Melchior, who tells her the truth about her parentage and reveals that she comes from a long line of realm-walkers. Melchior doesn’t know the magics himself, not properly, but he teaches Isis a bastard form, more dangerous and unstable than he lets on. Together, they harness the magics to open a portal and break out of prison; however, the portal ruptures, and the book ends when Melchior throws himself into it, sealing himself inside and saving two worlds in the process.
Renata croaked down the sob in her throat and gave Isis’s reply, the last line of the book: “And nothing, not even the walls between worlds, can keep us apart for long.”
“Good luck,” said the girl with beads in her hair.
“You too.”
With that, Renata spread her wings and
rose up through the treetops. The girl with beads in her hair kept her eyes on the sky until Renata vanished into the smoke.
The girl with beads in her hair stumbled across the clearing, tripping over piles of smoldering rubble, her vision blurred with tears. A few yards away, she saw that Robin had dropped to her knees and was sifting through the dirt with her fingers.
Before the girl with beads in her hair had a chance to wonder why, she realized that the ground beneath her feet was suddenly, inexplicably gone.
CABIN 4
SOUL MATES
[SCENE: VERITY stands outside a possibly enchanted cabin with her soul mate, ERIN, who is as lovely in person as she is from afar. They are alone, and at last they are talking.]
Once Tad had carried Addison through the glowing door, Verity was left alone with the beautiful girl. At first, she found this almost as alarming as the events that had just unfolded.
It had all happened so fast. One moment, Addison was running toward the cabin, her face bathed in light. The next, Tad and Erin were telling her that Addison had been marked by someone named Tania, whatever that meant, and that she was going to die unless Verity let them take her.
It hadn’t been hard to believe this might happen. Nobody else seemed to have noticed it, but Verity had watched Addison’s steady decline. And then there was the terrifying turn for the worse she’d taken in front of the soul mates’ cabin, her face completely drained of color, her skin so hot Verity could hardly bear to touch it.
“Where is he taking her?” Verity asked. She started to go up the stairs, but Erin positioned herself in front of the cabin door.
“You can’t go in there,” Erin said, putting a hand on each of Verity’s shoulders. Verity’s skin tingled at the girl’s touch, and the feeling spread down her arms and up the back of her neck.
“But—”
“I promise, your friend isn’t going to die,” Erin said. “But Tad’s taking her somewhere you can’t go. Please trust me.”
It was crazy, but the solid feel of Erin’s hands on her shoulders, the way she looked Verity right in the eye when she spoke, the even calm of her voice made Verity believe her.
“I trust you,” she said, hoping for Addison’s sake that she wouldn’t regret it.
“Do you need to sit down?” Erin asked. “You look like you’re about to be sick.”
Great, thought Verity. She thinks I look sick.
“Where’s everybody else?” Verity asked, forcing herself to look less unwell.
“What do you mean, ‘everybody else’?”
Erin stepped out of the cabin doorway and took a seat on the steps, leaving enough room for Verity.
“Before, when we were all watching you, there were five of you,” Verity said, almost immediately wishing she could take it back. Why, yes, that’s what I saw earlier when my friends and I were creepily spying on you.
However, that wasn’t the part of Verity’s revelation that Erin latched on to.
“When you were all watching us? How many of you are there?”
“There are five of us, too,” Verity confessed. “Addison and I got separated from the rest of them in the woods.”
“Then shouldn’t the others have found you by now?”
It was a valid point. There was no good reason why they should have gotten separated in the woods in the first place, and even if there were, there was no explanation for why they had not immediately found one another. Annika, Alix, and Amber had followed the trail to the soul mates’ cabin once, had even been pulled to it, and certainly should have found their way here by now. What if something had happened to them?
Verity decided to take Erin up on her offer to sit down. She was feeling light-headed, a condition that was not improved when Erin’s leg brushed against hers as she sat down next to her on the cabin step.
“Where did they go?” Verity asked.
“Robin’s crew probably diverted them off the path,” Erin said, then added, “Oh, wait. I forgot, you have no idea what that means.”
“The counselor-in-training?”
“Counselor-in-training. Stage manager. She gives herself a lot of different titles,” Erin said, a disgusted tone in her voice. “Mostly, though, she’s Tania’s flunky.”
“I don’t know who that is either,” Verity said, though it was only partly true. She’d heard Erin and Tad say that name before. Whoever Tania was, Verity was beginning to realize she was behind what had happened to Addison, to all of them.
Erin gestured toward the woods, then back to the cabin, then up to the sky.
“All of this is hers,” Erin said. “It’s her show. We’re just here to do her bidding, to keep her and her people entertained.”
As she said this, a strong gust of wind rattled the tree branches, and dust blew up and circled their ankles. Verity could have sworn she smelled smoke.
A different girl might have taken this as a cue to seek shelter or run back into the woods to look for her friends, but Verity stayed where she was on the cabin steps. This was partly because in the woods she’d be alone, and here she wasn’t, and partly because of the way that Erin’s leg brushed against hers every so often in a way that might have been accidental or not.
“How did you get here?” asked Verity, who felt like she had frogs in her stomach and jackrabbits in her knees each time their legs touched.
“The same thing that happened to everybody else. They caught me.”
“Like, with a net?”
When Erin didn’t answer right away, Verity cringed. Nearly everything she said sounded idiotic in her own ears. Erin was smart, and she said what was on her mind; Verity could tell that about her immediately. She felt sure that at any moment, Erin was going to decide she was tired of talking to Verity and follow Tad and Addison inside the cabin. Verity braced herself, but it didn’t happen. Erin stayed where she was.
“It doesn’t really matter what they use,” Erin said. “They might offer you a drink or a pretty necklace or an extra blanket. It doesn’t matter to them if you don’t know what you’re agreeing to. If you reach out and take it, you’re marked. You’re their prisoner.”
“What did you take?”
“Stamps,” Erin said. “I really needed to send a letter. I’d promised my best friend I would—she was supposed to be here with me, but she broke her arm and couldn’t come. Anyhow, one day my stamps went missing, and then the next day, I found a sheet of stamps on my pillow. I thought that whoever took them was squaring things up, so I peeled one off the sheet, stuck it on my letter, and mailed it to my friend. When I think about it now, I don’t even think I said anything important in it. The names of people in my cabin. Where they were from. What they were like. What we did all day. Boring stories about a bunch of people she didn’t know. And that’s why I’m here now.”
“Addison took a button,” Verity said, unsure whether this was betraying a confidence. “It fell off of Tad’s shirt.”
Erin wrinkled her nose. “That’s weird. Why would she want a button?”
The cabin wasn’t any bigger than theirs. It seemed strange to Verity that they hadn’t heard a sound coming from inside since Tad had carried Addison in her arms through the door. Verity looked over her shoulder, but beyond the door frame, it was completely dark.
“Erin, what’s happening to her now?” Verity asked, with a sharp intake of breath.
Erin went quiet, staring intently at the tops of her shoes. After a long silence, she said, “You’re the first person I’ve told this to.”
Erin trailed off and was silent another long minute.
“And you seem really cool, and I’m worried that . . . I don’t know if you’ll believe me. I don’t know what you’ll think when I tell you.”
The chorus of frogs rose up in Verity’s throat, and though she was afraid to open her mouth, the pressure was such that she knew keeping it closed would not remain an option much longer.
“Youseemreallycooltoo,” she said, before squeezing her eyes closed,
afraid to see the look on Erin’s face.
Verity felt the back of Erin’s hand brush against her leg as she wrapped her hands around her knees. Slowly, Verity opened her eyes, and she saw that Erin had leaned forward and was resting one of her perfect cheekbones on her perfect knees. Verity leaned forward and wrapped her hands around her own knees. Their fingers touched.
Her voice more confident now, Verity said, “You can tell me.”
“This camp is one big set. Tania, Ron, Robin, and all of their minions. Some of them pretend to be campers or counselors. Some of them just sit back and watch.
“Before camp starts, they find out all about us, and then, they set the stage and plop us down in the middle of whatever little stories they’ve made up. They wind us up, sit back, and watch to see where we go.”
“Are they watching us now?” Verity asked, twisting to look up into the tree line, which was perfectly still. The sun was low on the horizon—there were still a few hours of daylight, but the sun would be setting soon.
“Someone’s always watching,” Erin said. “Somewhere.”
From the very first time she’d seen her, Verity had known that Erin and the soul mates weren’t ordinary campers, and yet, she always found herself thinking about her that way, pushing the uncomfortable truths to the side so she could think of Erin as a girl she liked. But Erin knew things, things she couldn’t have picked up in a couple of days at Camp So-and-So.
“How long have you been here?” Verity asked, then wished she hadn’t. Erin’s dark eyes filled up with tears. She blinked them back, but one slid down her cheek and dripped onto her knee.
“That’s the part I’m not sure how to explain,” she said. “It happened last summer. Apparently, it happens all the time. They find a camper they like and decide to keep him or her around. It’s the same thing that just happened to your friend, Addison. It’s what happened to Tad and all the other guys, too. Of course, they can’t just steal us. People would notice. Our parents would notice. So instead, they carve out a little piece of you and send the rest of you on your way. You’re not the same person you were, but then again, you’re not not yourself either.”