Champions of Breakfast

by Adam Rex

  Nigel did as he was told, and the other airman stopped the second pistol under his shoe.

  “Let’s talk, mate,” said Nigel. “Nobody’s done anythi—”

  “Shut up! Shut up! All of you—” he said, waving his gun at the people near the front of the cabin behind him, the people who had been helping Queen Elizabeth with her video hookup. “Get to the rear of the plane! I want everybody together!”

  “He’s a Freeman,” John whispered. “Look at his pin.”

  Everyone was in the back now. Everyone, Scott noted, except the queen. He’d lost track of her.

  “I don’t care what you are,” said Nigel to his fellow airman. “First and foremost you are an officer of the Royal Air Force, and your loyalty is to—”

  The airman raised his pistol even with Nigel’s head, his arm trembling.

  “My loyalty . . . my loyalty is to the Lady of the Lake.”

  “His mind isn’t his own,” said Mick. “Bet yeh all the Freemen eat plenty o’ Goodco cereal. Sure an’ he’s one o’ Nimue’s sugar zombies, now.”

  “Where our Lady leads . . . we must follow.”

  That made Scott remember the Tower of London, and the ravens—poor creatures, bound by a common spell, forced to follow and find Titania’s court whenever it vanished.

  He’d noticed that his mind had a stupid tendency to wander during mortal danger—it was why he’d never be a decent action hero.

  “I’m sorry, Nigel,” said the airman. “You’ve never acted against my lady.” Then he frowned. “But you never joined the Freemen when I asked you to either, so maybe you deserve this. I don’t know, whatever. I’m crashing all of us into the ocean.”

  “Any ideas?” said Scott.

  “I have plenty o’ glamour these days,” whispered Mick. “That’ll protect us.”

  “Protect us,” said Merle, “or just protect you? Maybe your glamour’ll make the bullet bounce off your big metal zipper and hit me in the head.”

  Mick winced and shrugged.

  “You could maybe do something,” Scott said to Haskoll. “If you decided to. You could take his gun away from him.”

  “Not unless it’s magical. I tried to explain that on the ice—I only seem to be able to touch magical things. I couldn’t keep my grip on your hand ’cause you’re barely a changeling.”

  “Talkin’ to your imaginary friend?” asked Mick.

  “You’re my imaginary friend. I have imaginary enemies now.”

  Merle jumped in his seat, like he’d been goosed. He coughed nervously.

  The airman with the gun was crying. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” he said. “I’m going to shoot my way into the cockpit and kill the pilots and point us at the sea. I . . . I’ll try to make it quick.”

  Scott noticed a red slip of something appear by his foot. The red merrow’s cap John had told him about—the thing that could make a person torpedo through the water, just by thinking about it. John had slid it backward, under his seat. Scott clamped it between his sneakers and lifted it as inconspicuously as possible into his hand.

  What was the plan here? Was he supposed to give it to Mick? Was its magic useful somehow? Then, with a start, Scott realized it was only a life preserver. If Scott survived the crash, he might be able to use this cap to whisk him to land. His heart went soft in him. His father didn’t own two caps.

  What they really needed was the magic of the tower, Scott thought. He needed to be able to whisk himself away and have everyone he loved follow safely behind. He needed Polly in the same universe and his mother back from the void, by his side. He needed his dad—a living dad, a dad who wasn’t always trying to sacrifice himself for Scott’s sake, or for Polly’s. He needed Merle and the pixies and he needed King Arthur and his magical sword to finally appear like he was supposed to and save the day.

  Oh, thought Scott as the Arthur question drifted through his mind. Oh. So maybe that’s the problem.

  “Oh, airman,” said a voice, the queen’s voice. Scott still couldn’t see where she was.

  The airman couldn’t either. He waved his gun, squinting at all the faces.

  “There’s a tradition when you meet the queen, or king,” said Elizabeth. Her voice wasn’t so far away from Scott, but it was on the move. “Like so many of the old traditions,” she continued, “it isn’t observed as often as it once was, but it is said that one mustn’t show their back in the presence of royalty. I expect you’ve forgotten this, airman, if ever you knew it.”

  “Your . . . Majesty—” said the airman.

  “Hush. I’m not finished. It can be quite amusing, everyone walking backward out of rooms all the time—but there is a point to it. Most possibly assume the point is one of old-fashioned respect, but I rather think it’s about personal safety.”

  Elizabeth appeared in the aisle now from between two seats, several feet behind the man with the gun.

  “You keep an eye on her, because the queen must be watched. The queen is dangerous.”

  The airman pivoted, turned to step toward her, but his shoelaces were tied together. He dropped like a felled tree at her feet.

  “Don’t turn your back on the queen, airman,” she said, before waving Merle’s wand in his face.

  COMMERCIAL BREAK

  CHAPTER 23

  Everything was pink.

  Behind her eyes, inside her eyes; filling the cracks of her mind, pooling in the fissures.

  Emily sailed through the air in the arms of a monster and couldn’t remember what she’d been thinking about. Harvey, maybe? Her mind had gone to commercial.

  The monster also carried a man she’d once thought of as her father and a boy she’d once considered her brother. It was a very capable monster. It landed feet-first on the roof of a car, crumpling the frame, and rolled onto the hood. The tight knot of bodies came apart, and Erno and Mr. Wilson tumbled to the pavement. They were a bit battered, but they picked themselves up all the same.

  Emily was not battered. The pink had coursed out of her, surrounded her, protected her.

  The monster (Biggs. His name is Biggs.) rose and stared at her. He looked weary—weary in his body, weary in his soul. Erno and Mr. Wilson stared at her too, with something like interest.

  “You’re flying,” Erno told her.

  Oh. So she was.

  It didn’t feel like flying. It felt like she was being held aloft, but she couldn’t see the wires.

  “Your eyes are pink,” Erno added.

  “They were always pink,” she said.

  “Not the pupils.”

  “Still shooting at us,” said Biggs, and that was true. They had the cover of the car, and of the other cars around them in this parking lot, but bullets were chipping the asphalt, shattering windows, cracking taillights all around them. It didn’t seem like such a big deal suddenly.

  “Something’s happened,” Erno said, and he screwed up his face, trying to get a grip on this something.

  “The spell’s been cast,” said Mr. Wilson. “The Lady of the Lake is drafting her army, and it’s us.”

  Emily drifted over their heads, toward the bridge that spanned the lake and stretched into town.

  “Emily, hold up!” said Erno, and he loped after her. Biggs and Mr. Wilson followed, and Erno looked over his shoulder at them. “What do you mean, it’s us? I’m not joining Nimue’s army.”

  “Are you having trouble thinking?” asked Mr. Wilson. “Are you having trouble even caring? We’ve all been feeding ourselves Milk-Seven, or just Goodco cereals, for years. You used to eat Puftees every morning.”

  Biggs could have caught Emily easily; instead he shuffled his feet as though snarled by misery.

  Erno rattled his head, tried to clear his mind. Emily had already made it to the entrance of the bridge. Beyond the water lay Goodborough. The lights of the fogbound town looked like a kind of fairy kingdom to him now. They cast a dull pumpkin glow on the underside of a low cloud and pierced the belly of it here and there with spires like s
pear points.

  “Forget it, Erno,” said Mr. Wilson. “Forget it.” He sagged, and tried to hoist a heavy hand onto Erno’s shoulder. “Let her go. It’s over.”

  “OH MY GOD SHUT UP!” Erno answered. “This is all your fault, you don’t get to decide when it’s over. There! Golf cart!”

  There was a fleet of white golf carts at the edge of the lot. Erno tumbled into the first of these, pressed the starter, and with an electric whir, he scooted toward the bridge. After a moment he glanced in the mirror and was relieved to see that Biggs and Mr. Wilson had climbed into the next two carts and were close behind.

  Up ahead, in the night air, Emily shone like a pink lantern through the fog. She’d be swallowed up, save for a faint shimmer in the mist, and Erno would almost lose her. But the fog would roil and there she’d be again, a barefoot girl in the sky, reflected in the slick surface of the bridge below.

  “Emily!”

  She was nearly across now, and a bridge cable snapped. The bundled metal of it just gave up, lashed backward from its mooring and cut spirals through the fog. Then another cable snapped, and the masonry of the bridge itself began to crumble.

  It was the noise of it all that reached Erno first—the Star Wars sounds of the metal cables trilling with all that pent-up tension, the fog-muffled grind of a thousand tons of stone cracking loose and falling into the lake. He turned his head and saw Mr. Wilson drop off the edge, golf cart and all. Just like that—no scream, no famous last words. The bridge just dropped out from under him, and he was gone.

  “Emily,” Erno whispered. “What did you do?”

  Biggs was all right—he and Erno managed to urge their carts just ahead of the destruction and entered Goodborough as the last of the bridge decayed and tumbled into the water.

  The road curved, sharply, and Erno turned into a skid, lost control, tipped the cart. Biggs screeched to a halt beside him and got out.

  “Mr. Wilson,” said the shaggy giant.

  “I know,” Erno said, breathing hard as he crawled free of the golf cart. Biggs picked it up and put it right again.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s . . . ,” Erno began. But it wasn’t okay. He didn’t know what it was. Mr. Wilson, gone again. Gone for good.

  “The file said he was my dad,” Erno told Biggs. “My real dad. The file said my mom died when I was born and he . . . gave up. Gave me up, I mean.”

  “Nimue lies,” said Biggs, and the big man put a loose hand on Erno’s shoulder.

  “Yeah,” said Erno. He pressed his palms into his eyes—he wanted to sleep. “Yeah. Where’s Emily?” he added. Now they were surrounded by the stores and buildings of the lakefront, and he couldn’t see her anymore. “Wait, is that . . .”

  There was a girl walking in the middle of the road, a block away. She was in a nightgown, but she wasn’t glowing. Or floating.

  “Someone else,” said Biggs. “Emily’s gone.”

  “She’s not gone. Come on, that’s the cereal talking.”

  Biggs looked like he was about to just sit down in the road.

  “No, please, get up. Get in the cart—I’ll drive it,” Erno said. He pulled at Biggs’s hairy arm.

  He got the man up, finally, and he wheeled the cart down the block with Biggs hanging out the back. The girl in the nightgown was barefoot and shivering, her face a blank.

  “Hey,” Erno said to her over the whir of the motor. “Hey, um. I’m Erno.”

  But she didn’t give any indication that she could tell he was there. She began to make a shuffling left turn, and when Erno peered down that block he saw the figures of more children, maybe a teenager in his boxers and a T-shirt, all doddering in the same direction. And the pale pink light of his sister, vanishing into the fog.

  There was a tremble in the earth. Erno had never felt a tremor before, and the city boy in him took it for the rattle of a passing truck. But it was almost four in the morning, and the streets were deserted but for sleepwalkers.

  “We can catch her,” Erno said.

  He jerked the wheel right and left, threading a path between the children—a boy in airplane pajamas, twins walking hand-in-hand with running noses, a girl with a stuffed rabbit in her hands, absently tearing it to pieces. Its foot dropped as Erno passed, but he left it in the street—didn’t seem like good luck, tonight.

  And now the fog swirled, and Emily was visible again, pink, pale against an indigo sky that sagged with lumps of dark cloud. Clouds like Erno had never seen—black marshmallows, sinking like dying balloons. The ground shook again, and lightning flashed pink—pink lightning—and for a moment Erno saw something colossal in the distance. The rift. He shouldn’t have been able to see it, but there it was, all the sky bent around it.

  The rising wind stung his eyes as he narrowed the gap between the cart and the pink specter of his sister hovering ahead.

  “Biggs?”

  The big man didn’t need much urging this time. With Emily in sight he climbed atop the speeding golf cart and braced himself against the rush of air that whipped his fur all around him. The light of her neared, and grew stronger, much stronger, and Emily turned her head.

  “Uh . . . ,” said Erno.

  Then Biggs leaped off the top of the golf cart, and wrapped Emily in his arms.

  CHAPTER 24

  The plane set down in Los Angeles and didn’t bother taxiing up to the terminal. Instead it came to a halt on another runway, far out from any buildings or passenger planes, but alongside three sleek black jets that looked like Batman’s private fleet.

  “Blackbirds.” John whistled as he squinted out the window at them. “They’re not messing around. These’ll get us to New Jersey in . . . I don’t know, an hour.”

  “Why three?” asked Mick.

  “Well, I think they normally only carry two people. The pilot and somebody else.”

  They all disembarked down a staircase to the tarmac. Scott glanced at the queen, who appeared to be speaking to someone’s tablet computer. He caught a glimpse of the President of the United States on the screen, looking grave.

  Elizabeth broke off and addressed them.

  “It’s dire,” she said. “Millions of children missing or marching in the streets. Millions more being confined like mad dogs by their frightened families. And adults too—in the streets, or behaving strangely.”

  “Adults who eat children’s cereal?” said John.

  “Probably,” Merle said. “But Goodco makes more than cereal. They make Velveteen Cheese Loaf. Belasco Hot Sauce. You know Kobold Snacks? With the commercials where all the gnomes live underground in a cookie mine? That’s Goodco too.”

  “There are already some ten thousand children gathered at a particular spot in Goodborough, New Jersey,” the queen continued. “And a small army of armed Freemen there as well.”

  “Guarding the new rift, certainly.”

  “No doubt. But law enforcement is reluctant, for the children’s sake, to move in and spark a firefight. Meanwhile, New Jersey is having some strange weather, and more than the customary number of earthquakes. And those phenomena seem to be spreading.”

  Merle frowned. “That doesn’t sound right. Why would that be?”

  “’S like the spell isn’t stable,” said Mick. “Like maybe we weakened Nimue just enough that she can’t keep it under control.”

  John looked back and forth. “So what does that mean?”

  There was a moment of silence.

  Merle said, “When I was a kid, my mom and dad told me all about the day the elves appeared. They never mentioned the weather or earthquakes. This is different.”

  “Well, that’s good!” John announced. “Right? That means we made a difference after all! Your future isn’t just going to play out all over again.”

  “Could be good,” Mick allowed. “Whole thing could come apart like a wet napkin. Or it could come apart like an A-bomb.”

  They fell into an uneasy silence again.

  Scott, for his part, had been
silent all along—he had his nose in maps. He looked at all the known rifts on Earth, compared those to the ones he knew in Pretannica, traced paths with his finger, circled spots with a pen.

  “What’re you doing there?” Merle asked finally.

  “The lad thinks he’s figured somethin’ out,” Mick told Merle. “So far that’s all I’ve been able t’ get out o’ him.”

  “Shhh!” Scott hissed, waving his hand. “Can’t concentrate!”

  “So let us help,” said Merle. “What’s this about?”

  “I . . . think I’ve thought of a way to bring the worlds back together.”

  Merle shook his head and pulled something from the pocket of his robe. “This is how we’re merging the worlds again,” he said.

  “What is that?” Mick said, wincing at it. “Ham radio?”

  Merle clucked his tongue. “It’s—it’s not as elegant as I’d like, I admit that, but I didn’t have much time, or the best tools to work with—”

  “It’s a new time device,” said Scott.

  It was another octagonal ring, about twice the size of the one that had taken Scott’s mom into the future. It had one of Mick’s gold coins at each corner, and a mess of circuits and capacitors sticking every which way.

  “Not quite,” said Merle. “It’s not precise enough for that. But look . . . if it was my device that split the worlds, then it’ll be my device that brings them back together again. This little toaster will establish a tachyon sync with the chronological event horizon of the Gloria—”

  “Okay,” said Scott, “whatever. I hope it works. But if it doesn’t—”

  “It will.”

  “If it doesn’t,” said Scott, “then I have a plan too. I need that hat,” he added, turning about. “Where’s that red hat?”

  “The merrow’s cap?” asked Mick. “’S in your pocket.”

  Scott reached back and felt the silky ear of the cap hanging out of the hip pocket of his jeans. “I’m about to try something really crazy and dumb,” he said.

  “Sounds abou’ right,” said the leprechaun. “Want some company?”