by Adam Rex
Finally he was falling, and on his way down Fi once again grabbed the hilt of his sword and rode it down the troll’s back as it sliced a ragged line through both slicker and goblin skin.
“AAH!” said the troll. “Stupid! You’re gonna ruin it!”
She shook herself again, dislodging Carpet Nail and sending Fi sprawling into the street and beneath the wheel of an oncoming car, which the pixie prince only narrowly avoided. Meanwhile the tear in the troll’s suit spread like a split seam.
“No! No!”
With the bang of a burst balloon, both skin and clothes flew off in tatters, and the troll was revealed as the shaggy giantess she really was.
Now easily twice as large as she’d been just a moment before, she windmilled her ape arms and roared. Nearly every inch of her was covered in a patchwork of coarse and silken hair, into which were tangled and braided a collection of chicken bones, twigs, dried mushrooms and turnips, rutabagas, teeth. Her black mane coursed with mice. Beady eyes flashed above her big butternut nose.
Fi circled around her and she followed his path, turning her back to the street.
“You think you’re clever?” she asked him. “You’re STUPID STUPID STUPID! It won’t be dawn for HOURS! All I have to do is call for backup!”
Fi crouched near the hedge. “With what phone, fair lady?” he asked her.
She’d crushed her phone. She squinted now at the glittering mess of it.
“RAAA!” she said, and Fi leaped as she tore the entire hedge out by the roots. “Doesn’t matter! I’ll get the Freemen here even if I have to set fire to this whole neighborhood! YEEEEEAAH! WHAT?”
In her fury she’d missed three more pixies (and one pixie-sized girl) rushing across the street with a boxy object on their shoulders between them, like pallbearers late to a funeral. But this boxy thing was more like a cage than a coffin, and it glowed with purple light.
“BUG ZAPPERRR!” Polly called as they rammed the troll’s heel with it. It wasn’t all that much UV light, not really, but half her ankle scabbed over with a stony crust. The troll lurched and kicked the black cage out of the hands of Polly and the pixies, and it skidded down the street.
They started after it. “I thought we all agreed we were gonna yell ‘bug zapper’ when we hit her,” Polly complained to the brothers. “Like for a battle cry.”
“You agreed,” said Fee.
“When the moment came, I just wasn’t feeling it,” said Denzil.
The troll pivoted to follow them, and her petrified heel crackled and crumbled. Fi raced forward and drove his sword into the sole of her good foot, and the troll woman timbered like a tree. The asphalt trembled.
“Whuh,” she moaned, stunned.
The solar panels atop the bug zapper were cracked. But the cage had protected the UV bulb, which still glowed like purple neon. The pixie brothers hefted their weapon again and heaved it against the troll’s eyes. The howl that followed made dogs bark, milk sour, car alarms wail all over the north of London. She was still howling seconds later when she got to her ruined feet, stumbled blindly into the road, and was hit by a newspaper truck.
“Oof. Is she okay?” asked Polly.
“She sleeps. Quickly, to the rift,” said Fi. “She won’t be out for long.”
Despite his earlier impatience, Harvey had not yet moved. Instead he’d watched the whole business with the troll in his rearview mirror as Merlin’s owl perched beside him, still as a statue.
“Archimedeeth,” said the pooka.
The bird didn’t respond.
“Arc-i-mee-deesthh,” Harvey repeated, wrestling with his lisp. “Arc-i-me . . .” He sighed. “Archie.”
The owl’s head swiveled to face him.
“The Utth kids. Erno and Emily,” Harvey told it. “Can you find them?”
CHAPTER 3
The London Zoo was quiet at night. It was so quiet that every little noise carried, and occasionally some shrill howl or guttural growl reached Erno’s and Emily’s ears and lit sparks in the oldest parts of their brains—the caveman parts that implored them to run, climb the nearest tree, escape danger. But they were already in a tree, so that was okay.
Biggs had gotten them up into the tree, of course, along with Erno’s suitcase and the few things of Emily’s that they’d managed to throw into a shopping bag before fleeing the row house they’d been living in. Now they realized that they really should have concentrated on gathering Biggs’s things, since he was the one with the money and credit cards. The poor big man shivered in his pajamas, cradling the unicat in his arms. Erno was reminded of that sign-language gorilla with the pet kitten.
Emily fiddled with her headgear. “What time is it?” she asked, and the question made Erno sad. She couldn’t check the time herself because she was currently clinging to a tree limb with her eyes closed—she wasn’t any more fond of heights now than she had been the last time they’d been forced up a tree. But that wasn’t what bothered Erno.
He could still remember the day, when they were four, when Emily asked why so many people wore watches.
Erno hadn’t paused to consider why she was asking. When you’re four you’re used to fielding a lot of questions, mostly from adults who already knew the answers—they just wanted to see if you did. So, without looking up from his Legos, Erno had answered, “To tell the time.”
“But why don’t they already know the time?”
Now Erno paused. He didn’t understand a question like this one. “I dunno.”
“You know the time, don’t you?” asked Emily. “It’s twelve thirty-four.”
Erno got up and walked into the dining room to check the big cuckoo clock. It took him some time to remember what the hands meant, and by the time he’d figured it out it was technically 12:35, but still.
He rejoined Emily in the living room. “How’d you know that?” he’d asked, even though he’d begun to suspect that this and so many other questions about Emily had the same answer.
“I look at the clock in my brain,” she said. “Don’t you have a brain clock that counts the seconds?”
Erno gave this some thought. “Yes,” he lied. It was the first such lie, the first of many.
Now, in a tree in the London Zoo, Erno understood that Emily had lost her brain clock. Or worse, she’d made the choice to stop counting.
“It’s three fifteen,” he said. By four a.m. they needed to be at the subway entrance at Oxford Circus, because they’d left instructions for Polly and Fi to meet them there. Polly, Fi, or anyone else they trusted who might have happened to ask the mechanical owl Archimedes how to find them. Just to regroup. Just to figure out what their next move ought to be. If no one showed by five, they’d try back every two hours until someone did.
None of them had gotten any sleep.
“Maybe we should get going, then,” Emily said. “We might have to walk the whole way.”
Biggs got them down from the tree, shivering all the while. There was literally no item of Erno’s or Emily’s clothing that would have done him a bit of good. He couldn’t even get one of Erno’s socks over the flippers he called feet.
As they walked back past the bearded pig exhibit to the outer wall of the zoo, Erno told Biggs, “If I see a big blanket or a . . . car cover or something, I’m going to steal it for you.”
“St-stealing’s wrong,” Biggs chattered.
“So is letting a person freeze to death.”
“’S okay,” the big man said. “Be w-warmer soon.”
“Soon as in when the sun comes up?” said Emily. “Or soon meaning in a few days when all your body hair’s grown back and you look like Sasquatch?”
Erno hadn’t planned to mention this himself, but it was true that Biggs hadn’t shaved for more than a day now, and nearly every square inch of his visible skin had a gray, sandpapery look to it. Anyway, Biggs didn’t answer her. He held his tongue as he gathered up the kids and their bags and jumped from the trash can to the signpost and then over the zoo wall.
Emily hauled her own bag and Erno pulled his own suitcase through the park. They were alone here.
“What time is it now?” asked Emily.
“Three nineteen.”
“I did the right thing,” Emily said. It wasn’t exactly a question, but if it went without saying, then she wouldn’t be saying it, Erno thought. “I told Nimue about the row house. I didn’t mean to, but she sneaked into my dreams again. I had to close that rift in the basement while I still could,” she added. “Before Nimue got it, before she took control of my mind again.”
Erno nodded his head. “Yeah . . . ,” he said. “I guess it’s gonna be hard for Scott and John and everybody to get home now.”
“They’ll figure it out. Scott’s very smart. They’ll go visit Fi’s pixie witch—she has rifts back to Earth. Or they’ll get back later, when Nimue opens the big rift to bring her people through.” Emily’s tone was calm, self-assured. But after each calmly self-assured statement she glanced at Erno out of the corner of her eye.
“Can’t really see the elves letting them use their big rift,” Erno said with a kind of vocal shrug, like he didn’t feel too strongly either way about it. Like he expected to be wrong, like he always expected to be wrong.
“Why not? Why would they stop them? I don’t think they’d stop them.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I know I’m right. I had to do what I did, collapsing the rift in the basement. It was the right thing, it was necessary.”
They walked for a minute in silence. Then Biggs, who had been carrying the unicat and quietly rubbing the circulation back into his arms, spoke.
“Forgive you,” he said.
So Emily broke into tears.
It was just Biggs’s way of speaking, but it came out like he was both offering forgiveness and maybe commanding Emily to forgive herself. He scooped her up, and she leaned into his chest.
They were exiting the park now, stepping through city streets. They saw a few people—mostly piles of laundry that turned out to be men curled up in doorways. A boxy truck was stopped at the corner, back door raised, insides lit and filled with newspapers. A man heaved a stack of these papers onto the curb. Then the man turned away, and Erno grabbed one as they passed.
Below the fold there was a headline: SEARCH FOR DWIGHT CONTINUES AS GOODCO QUESTIONED.
Law enforcement continues to investigate the disappearance of film and pop superstar Reggie Dwight after his controversial “summit” with Queen Elizabeth at the British Museum in March. Dwight assaulted Elizabeth II in front of press and onlookers in a self-proclaimed attempt to expose the queen as an impostor.
The incident was complicated by the alleged appearance of a fire-breathing bird and a tiny swordsman. Both bird and swordsman appeared to be allied with Dwight and may have contributed to his escape from the museum. The morning was later marked by eyewitness accounts of a giant in adjacent Russell Square. The so-called giant’s body was allegedly recovered by individuals claiming to be police officers. An official statement from the City of London police denies any knowledge of the giant.
An unconfirmed email message from Reggie Dwight sought to shed light on the actor/singer’s behavior, claiming that the queen has at an unspecified point in the past been replaced by a look-alike under the guidance of the Goodco Cereal Company, makers of such breakfast staples as Honey Frosted Snox and Puftees. The email contained a list of grievances against Goodco, including accusations of unlawful human experimentation and of mind control through the use of an unauthorized chemical additive in Peanut Butter Clobbers. Goodco has marketed Clobbers and other cereals with language suggesting that it increases intelligence via a formula called Intellijuice. An official statement from Goodco calls Intellijuice a “fictional ingredient” on par with Cud cereal’s Chocanilla, Puftees cereal’s Crispity Purplegrape, or Pooberries (from the short-lived Disgustees, which was found by the U.K. Food Standards Agency to contain no berries and only trace amounts of animal waste). “Peanut Butter Clobbers increases intelligence only in the sense that any healthy, delicious breakfast contributes to a person’s ability to concentrate and capacity to learn,” the statement concluded.
The Official Reggie Dwight Fan Club has called for a boycott of all Goodco products, including noncereal products such as Velveteen Cheese Loaf and Kobold Snack Biscuits, and public opinion polls show that a significant minority of consumers are similarly avoiding the Goodco brand. Independent agencies, meanwhile, have issued preliminary reports stating that consuming Peanut Butter Clobbers does raise IQ scores, but they caution that more research is needed.
In spite of these competing and contradictory claims, sales of Peanut Butter Clobbers have outpaced all other breakfast cereals, prompting Goodco to release a limited-edition variety called OOPS! Just Sugar, which contains only the strawberry-flavored Intellijuice pieces.
“Well,” Erno muttered, “at least some people are listening to us.”
He didn’t realize how close they were to the meeting place. He’d been paying more attention to the paper, and he didn’t really know London, after all. There were more people on the streets now, though; more people to stare nakedly at Biggs as he passed in his bare feet and pajamas, clutching a tiny girl in one arm like he might at any moment start climbing buildings and swatting at airplanes. The unicat rested in Emily’s shopping bag.
It was Biggs who first noticed the rabbit-man.
“Harvey,” he said.
It was only Harvey, it seemed, waiting by one of the entrances to the Underground. He had the owl Archimedes on his shoulder and Merle’s watch on his wrist, but no pixie, no Polly. As far as they could tell, anyway—it would be hard to see Fi from here. Harvey gave a little half-wave. Londoners passed him from time to time but didn’t pay him any notice. These people wouldn’t see Harvey until the rabbit-man wanted to be seen.
A sign on the subway entrance said that this station was closed for servicing. Emily frowned at it, and at Harvey.
“I thought Polly and Fi would be with you,” she said.
“Good to thee you too,” said Harvey. “Clever of you to ethcape the row houthe.”
“Polly and Fi must have gone off on their own, then,” said Emily. “If you have the owl, then there’s no way for them to know where to meet us. We need to send Archie back up to St. George’s Avenue to wait for them.”
“Clever of you to collapthe the rift, too,” said Harvey. “You lot are like mothquitoeth—taking a little blood here, a little there. Pethtering Nimue but never doing her any real harm. Mothquitoeth.”
Biggs sniffed the air.
“Mosquitoes carry malaria,” said Erno. “And West Nile virus. Maybe we’re giving her West Nile virus.”
“Run,” said Emily.
“What?” Erno said as he turned to her. She looked wild, terror stricken, a mouse caught in a trap. He didn’t realize what a trapped mouse he was too, until he heard the dull thuds of a dozen tranquilizer darts hitting Biggs at once. Erno dropped to the sidewalk and scanned the rooftops—they were crawling with snipers.
Biggs was still on his feet, but staggering, more concerned with setting Emily down safely than fleeing or defending himself. He whined deep down in his throat, like a dog.
A battery of black-and-pink-clad men quickstepped up the subway stairs now and stood behind Harvey. Freemen, loyal members of the secret society at the heart of Goodco. They all had Tasers at the ready.
“They found me outthide the Goodco plant north of London,” Harvey said, “while Polly and Fi were inthide. They offered me a chanthe to . . . renew my contract with the company. I uthed to deliver Milk-Theven for them, you thee—I delivered a lot of thingth, back and forth acroth the smaller riftth, in the form of a rabbit. I was a hoppy little bunny for Team Nimue.”
“You were never on their team,” Emily said quietly, breathily. “Or ours. You’ve always been for yourself and yourself only.”
“Exthactly. And it wath that attitude that got me
locked up and my glamour milked back in the thixthties. But I’ve theen the error of my wayth. Me an’ Goodco have agreed to let bygonth be bygonth.”
“So what happened to Polly and Fi?” growled Erno. “Did you turn them in, too?”
Harvey glanced at the Freemen. “You know, I wath thuppothed to, but they gave me the thlip. They were thmarter than you three, I gueth.”
Biggs was on the ground now, breathing shallowly. His eyelids fluttered as Emily cradled his head.
“Honethtly, look at you,” said Harvey. “All of you. You’re a meth. You can barely keep from defeating yourthelveth. How’re you gonna beat Nimue?”
Erno clenched his fists—knowing it would be ridiculous to try to fight off twelve Freemen; seriously considering it anyway. “You’re never gonna get your glamour back, you know,” he said. “Mick says you have to be good. Or . . . honorable, at least. You’ll lose it all and never get it back.”
Harvey blew a raspberry. “That’th Mick’th fairy tale, not mine. The univerth don’t care what we do.”
“Bull,” Emily whispered. “You only wish you didn’t believe it.”
Harvey might have flinched, then. “What?”
“You wish you didn’t believe in honor. But you do. You came back to help Mick at the Freemen’s Temple in Goodborough. You let Polly escape, because you like her more than the rest of us. You wish you were half as good as Mick, but you’re too big a coward for that. You’re a bunny rabbit, Harvey, a timid little forest creature. You’re prey, and you’ll always be prey.”
Harvey just glared. Then he huffed. “I’m prey? I’m not the one about to be fitted for a cage.”
“Course not,” Emily told him. “Why would they bother? It took them fifty years, but Goodco finally learned they don’t need to cage you. You’re tame.”
Harvey trembled. “Shut up. Shut your ugly mouth. Will thomeone pleathe shut her up?” he spat, before the Freemen circled around to collect their prisoners.