Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room)

by Ysabeau S. Wilce

  Udo chortled, and my stomach twisted up. He was grinning too much like a fool not to actually have done something incredibly foolish. “Don’t you recognize him, Flora?”

  “It’s too late to play games, Udo. Just tell me.”

  Udo scrunched his face in disappointment. “It’s Springheel Jack, of course! Pigface, Flora, he’s just been all over the CPG for the last two weeks and you don’t even recognize him?”

  Springheel Jack! The cutthroat bunco artist and cat burglar! The leader of the infamous Red Heels gang, which practically controlled the South of the Slot. Only last week the CPG’s front page had trumpeted Springheel Jack’s latest exploit: He’d gotten into a bar fight with the equally infamous Gallus-Meg and gnawed off her ear. Later, when sober, he had returned it to her in a silver locket, accompanied by a gallant note saying that it was not normally his habit to gnaw upon ladies and she must blame his ill manners on too many Pisco Punches. The press had swooned over his gentility, but it didn’t seem to me that a note of apology was much return for having your ear chewed off.

  At the moment, however, Springheel Jack didn’t look particularly aggressive. In fact, he was dribbling like a fountain.

  “Why is he following us?” I asked. “And why is he drooling?”

  “It’s a pretty story; see, the Zu-Zu and I had nipped outside to get some air, you know,” Udo said, “and who should we see but Springheel Jack pissing against the wall. Even though it was dark, I recognized him by his boots instantly.”

  I peered at the floor. Springheel Jack’s footwear was indeed somewhat noticeable—great big sparkly red boots with five-inch heels. Little snake heads sprouted from the toes, but they, too, were droopy and half asleep. In the thin light of the horsecar, the boots glittered like rubies.

  Udo continued, “I played it cool. I just sidled up to him and asked him for a light, and when he leaned over to light my cigarette, aqui!” He brandished the red enamel compact. My heart sunk so low that I swear it fell through the bottom of the car and right onto the road below.

  “You snapperhead!” I added a few choice adjectives to the noun. “What were you thinking?”

  Udo glared at me, puffing. “I was thinking about the bounty on his head, fifty thousand divas, that’s what I was thinking.”

  “Udo told me his plan,” the Zu-Zu interjected. “I thought it an excellent idea and it showed a lot of initiative.”

  I ignored her, because obviously she was a snapperhead, too, and, anyway, who cared what she thought? I said to Udo, “Plan? There was no plan! We discussed the bounty hunting and decided it was a stupid idea—”

  “No, you decided it was a stupid idea,” Udo said hotly. “I thought it was a brilliant idea. And I was right! Look at him, fifty thousand divas on his head, and as easy as pie. If we hadn’t had to run, we wouldn’t even have broken a sweat!”

  “I think it was a brilliant idea, Udo,” the Zu-Zu said. “Never mind her.”

  “With his gang after us, trying to kill us, or worse!” I said, still ignoring her. “What are we going to do now, Sieur Brilliant Plan?”

  Behind Udo, through the glass, I saw the dim shadow of a man, waving something that was much too long and shiny to be his hand. Good rangers know when to act on instinct. I rolled to the floor, flailing at Udo to do the same, just as the window next to me exploded into a slivery halo of glass.

  Eight

  Angry Outlaws. An Ominous Appearance. Udo Makes a Choice.

  I CROUCHED ON THE FLOOR and felt the glass pelt down upon me like little nuggets of razor-sharp rain. The window on the other side of the car cracked, thus leading me to the brilliant conclusion that we were flanked on both sides. That was bad, superbad, but surely it couldn’t get any worse—until I realized that the pop-pop-pop coming from above my head was Udo firing back with the little revolver that he had gotten for his Catorcena, and which I hadn’t realized he was carrying. It can always be worse, said Nini Mo, and usually will be if you wait long enough.

  “Udo!” I yelled, crawling under the seat and grabbing at his twitching feet. The floor of the horsecar was disgusting, sticky with spilled liquids and awash in torn paper. Why couldn’t people take their trash with them?

  “I got one! I think I got one!” Udo dropped back down and broke open the frame of the revolver, spraying empty shells in the air. “Zu—reach in my left breast pocket and hand me some more cartridges.”

  The Zu-Zu had dropped down onto the seat when the shooting started, thus keeping her pristine self above the trash. Now she rolled onto her side, fumbling in the pocket of Udo’s greatcoat, as unperturbed as though she got caught in a firefight every day.

  “What the hell are you doing, Udo?” I hissed.

  “What the hell does it look like? Defending our lives!” He dropped the last cartridge into the cylinder and snapped it closed. Before I could stop him, he bobbed back to his feet, firing wildly Udo’s desire to impress the Zu-Zu was going to get us killed.

  The horsecar, which somehow had kept moving during all the implosions and explosions, suddenly jolted to a halt. The driver’s yelling was punctuated with another shot, then ominous silence.

  I gingerly poked my head up next to Udo’s, expecting any minute to feel the horrible bite of a bullet blowing my head off, but the firing didn’t start up again. Two men in long white trench coats were hauling something thumpy down the front steps: the poor driver. The windshield was liberally sprayed with blood.

  It was time, yet again, to advance in the opposite direction. In other words, to retreat. I looked wildly around to see how to accomplish that action and noticed the emergency door. Reaching up, I twisted the door handle, trying very quietly to jiggle it open. Someone from the front of the car hollered: “Hey! You, in the back! Let Jack go and no one will get hurt.”

  Udo fired again, but this time my whacking arm ruined his aim and the shot disappeared through the roof.

  “FLORA!” Udo shouted, pushing me away and dropping back down. I fell against the emergency door, adding a bruising pain on my side. The Zu-Zu smiled at me. I did not smile back.

  “Come on, kiddies, the game is up!” the outlaw yelled.

  “My game has just started!” Udo shouted back, the snapperhead. I gave up being stealthy and pushed the emergency door hard. It popped open, and the Zu-Zu peered around outside, then nodded encouragingly to me. I motioned with my chin, and she rolled off the seat and slid down into the darkness.

  “Come on, Udo! Hurry!” I hissed.

  Udo gestured toward Springheel Jack, who sat stockstill, oblivious to the ruckus. “I’m not going without him.”

  Something had to be done to give us enough cover to grab Springheel Jack and run. We needed a diversion. Maybe if I could lob a ball of coldfire at the outlaws, that would distract them enough to let us escape. A coldfire ball is easy—I’ve done it many times and never gotten it wrong.

  I whispered, holding out my palm. A bead of coldfire bloomed above my open hand, smaller than I would have liked.

  The coldfire light increased in size until it was about the size of a grapefruit. Cradling it in my hands, I popped up and threw the ball as hard as I could toward the outlaw—who neatly caught it and said, with an evil laugh, “I’ll return this to you, missy.” And then he suggested something that didn’t sound very pleasant.

  Clearly I needed something bigger. Much bigger. But I didn’t know any bigger sigils—well, I knew some bigger sigils in principle, but not in action. What would Nini Mo do? She’d dazzle them with a Scintilla Sigil, or confuse them with an Ambiguity Sigil, or turn them into goats with a Transubstantiation Sigil. But while I knew of these sigils, I did not know their Gramatica.

  The outlaw was advancing down the aisle. My mind had gone blank with terror—surely not a problem Nini Mo ever faced—and a funny taste was growing in the back of my throat, a rotten meaty taste. I swallowed hard, but that just made me gag, and when I opened my mouth to spit, a low ominous noise came out instead, a noise that vibrated my t
eeth and made the hair on the back of my neck tingle. A pale sickly glow began to seep through the car, the kind of light that makes the living look dead and the dead look decomposed. With detached horror, I realized that the glow was coming from me. I stood up and stepped out into the aisle, coldfire writhing like galvanic green ribbons from my outstretched fingertips. The outlaw dropped his gun and screeched.

  “Flora—what are you doing?” Udo asked from somewhere behind me, his voice breaking.

  The Word exploded from my mouth, its glittering coldfire letters whirling in a haze of furious fuliginous blackness, its edges as sharp and black as a Birdie obsidian sacrificial knife. The Word flung down the aisle, making whomp-whomp noises, and caught the outlaw square in the kisser. He screamed, a horrible sound that plunged into my brain like an ice pick in the ear. For a moment his head was separated from his body by a thick line of blackness, and then his head flew upward, buoyant on a spray of blood. He was still screaming, or maybe that was air howling as it escaped from his neck. Whatever the noise, it was horrific.

  A sharp poke pushed me out of my daze. Udo was shoving me toward the emergency door. I crawled over to the door and rolled out, catching myself just before I hit the pavement, where the Zu-Zu waited. Udo prodded at Jack, who staggered out after me. We broke into a tearing run, eager to leave the howling shrieks and screams and the pallid glow of the horsecar as far behind as possible. No one followed.

  Somehow, somewhere, we stopped running. Or rather, Udo and the Zu-Zu stopped, and then I couldn’t run anymore and had to stop, too. In fact, not just stop, but sit down, not just sit down, but collapse, which I did. The curb was dirty and wet, but I didn’t care. I had to get new stays; I was squeezed so tightly into the old ones that my lungs were sucking against each other, and all the blood was bouncing around inside my skull, so that I felt as though I was going to upchuck.

  Udo leaned over, folding his arms around his stomach, gasping. “What ... hell ... Flora ... hell? Your hair ... on fire...” His braids flopped over his bright red face.

  “An Ominous Apparition, followed by an Active Protective Sigil,” the Zu-Zu said. She was barely winded, but her hair, I noticed happily, had become even more disarranged. “Where did you learn all that, Flora?”

  “I didn’t,” I gurgled. “I dunno—”

  “Whatever. I want a coffee,” the Zu-Zu said. “Let’s go to el Mono Real, Udo, and you can get me a coffee.”

  I straightened up and tried to look refreshed and relaxed, as though I invoked Ominous Apparitions, flung forth Active Protective Sigils, and ran pell-mell from killers all the time, no big. What I really wanted to do was expel the contents of my tum and then collapse on the ground in a little pile of goo. “What about Springheel Jack?”

  The outlaw had kept pace with our flight and had stopped with our stop; he didn’t look winded at all, or concerned, or worried. Just blank and drooly.

  “Oh, he can have coffee, too, if he wants,” the Zu-Zu answered. “Come on, Udo. We’re only a block from el Mono Real. I’m perishing.”

  “Ayah, so,” Udo agreed, as though he was actually going to go with the Zu-Zu for coffee, thus leaving me to wait and see if the outlaws caught up with us.

  “Hey! What about Jack’s gang?” I demanded.

  “Are you kidding, Flora? I think at this point they probably know better than to mess with us,” Udo said. “Come on, let’s get coffee.”

  “And what are you going to do about Jack?”

  The Zu-Zu was already drifting down the street, a blot of imperious spookiness who didn’t seem to care if we followed her or not. Udo glanced at her and then back at me, and took two steps in her direction. “Turn him in tomorrow, Flora. Come on.”

  “I have to get home, Udo. I’ve got a curfew, remember, and so do you.”

  ’Don’t be a stick—”

  The Zu-Zu had stopped and turned. “Udo!”

  “Come on, Flora,” Udo said, half-pleadingly.

  “I have to go home, Udo. You can go get coffee, if you want—with your pallid girl and your zombie pard. But I have to go home.”

  Udo stood up straight and said loftily, “Then go. No one is stopping you.”

  And with that, Udo trotted after the Zu-Zu, Springheel Jack close on his heels, leaving me standing alone in the middle of the empty street.

  Nine

  Just in Time. A Handy Map. Bilskinir Baths.

  BY RUNNING—actually more like loping, or maybe even staggering—and then taking a shortcut up Crackpot Hill (via the Straight-up Stairs, which are indeed straight up), I managed to slither in through the mudroom door just as the kitchen clock began to chirp twelve times.

  I was winded, sore, sweaty, and starving, but I was on time.

  The kitchen fire was banked and the lamps doused; the room was dim and dogless, but filled with a delicious smell. In the low glow of the night-light, I saw a row of hand-pies sitting on the sideboard—more of Poppy’s industry, I guessed. In addition to being thrashed, I was ravenous, so I snatched up three pies and stuffed them into my dispatch case before heading up the Below Stairs, making sure to skip the fourth step, which squeaks.

  The parlor was also dim and dogless, but I could see that the bust of St. Stostikaos was empty of Mamma’s hat, indicating she hadn’t returned from Headquarters. Sometimes Mamma is at the Presidio all night. Often this is annoying, but tonight it meant one less parent to sneak by, so I was grateful for her absence.

  Since he’d sobered up and come down out of the Eyrie, Poppy had been sleeping in Mamma’s room, and as I crept by their door, I saw it was closed. He must have gone to bed early and taken the dogs with him—lucky, lucky for me. I crept the rest of the way down the hallway trying to muffle my wheezing, to my bedroom, where I found Valefor lounging in my bed, reading a yellowback, and eating toffee.

  “You are nearly late,” he said, crunching loudly. I closed my bedroom door and locked it. “And you have liver in your hair.” Crunch, crunch.

  “I know, Sieur Bossy Boiler.”

  I felt as though I had just crawled across the entire Arivaipa desert. The thought of collapsing upon the settee and never moving again was blissful, but I had to get clean first. If Poppy smelled the smoke on me, saw the liver or the broken glass in my hair, he’d be mighty suspicious. The Stilskin Puppet Show does not involve pyrotechnics or organ meat.

  I pitched my stays and pinafore on the floor and got my dressing gown out of my wardrobe. “Is Poppy in bed?”

  Crunch, crunch.“Oh, no, he’s gone.”

  “Gone?! Where did he go?” Poppy hadn’t left Crackpot in years. “Did he take the dogs?”

  Crunch, crunch.“He locked them in the stables when he left. I don’t know where he went. You are lucky he’s gone. You stink of smoke, magick ... and failure, so I’m guessing it didn’t go so well.”

  “Go kiss a horse, Valefor,” I said rudely and went to take a bath.

  In the loo I saw that Valefor was right: I was a mess. My hair was matted with liver, sparkly with glass shards. The smell of smoke hung about me like a pall, and my eyes looked like soft-boiled eggs. My teeth were zinging with a galvanic buzz—an aftershock of the Ominous Apparition, I supposed. The hem of my kilt was shredded, and when I pulled off my grimy chemise, I saw I had a livid welt mark around my waist, along with red lines from where my stay-bones had been squeezed into my flesh. All the little pains had merged into one giant throb.

  Lots of rose-smelling soap washed off the liver and smoke. But nothing could erase the smell of failure. Clearly Firemonkey was a dead end. The Horses of Instruction would have to leave the City if they wished to stay ahead of the militia, and how could a man on the run teach me Gramatica?

  And then there was Idden. Blast her! Couldn’t she have run off to be a gambler or a farmer? Something harmless? Well, she had made her bed, and I hoped she enjoyed lying in it; when Mamma found out what Idden had done, she was going to explode—and who knows what that would mean for the rest of us. The more I thought
about Idden, the more I felt like kicking her, which reminded me of someone else I would like to kick: Udo.

  After all we’d been through, how could he leave me in the lurch for that stick girl? She’d just given him a Look and away he went, with not a thought of me, his best friend—me who had just kept him from ending up as some outlaw’s bull’s-eye. Well, fine. If Udo wanted to play it that way, I didn’t need him. I had more important things to think about than Udo, his stupid Chickie, and his zombie outlaw.

  Like the tentacle that had tried to kill me. I had never heard of a tentacle erupting out of a toilet before. Mamma loves to tell the story about how when she was a shavetail lieutenant in Arivaipa Territory, her commanding officer was attacked by fire ants while he was sitting on the pot in the Officers’ Sinks. And last year the CPG had reported on a guy who’d had his hinder bit when a rat popped out of his potty. But that’s completely different than a tentacle. After all, you expect fire ants in the desert. And it’s not unusual to find rats in a sewer, though you hope they will stay there and not pop up in your pot when you are sitting upon it.

  How could a tentacle even get into a potty pipe to begin with? I don’t know much about Califa’s water pipe system, but if it was full of tentacles, surely you’d read about it in the CPG. People would be constantly complaining. There would be editorials published, and questions asked in the Warlord’s Grand Council. That’s what happened after the rat-bite incident—the whole City talked of nothing else. After a lot of hullabaloo, Lord Axacaya promised to take care of the problem, and he did, with an Anti-Rat Sigil or something, and since then the City has been remarkably rat-free.

  I peered over the rim of the tub at the potty. It sits up on a little wooden platform, thronelike. The lid was down, and surely it was only my imagination that, for an instant, it looked as though it was quivering—as though something inside wanted to get out. Was it my imagination? The longer I stared at it, the more the porcelain lid seemed to wiggle.