by L. J. Hatton
“It’s magic.”
Calling it that was easier than trying to understand it.
Twenty minutes later, things had calmed. The house was still. The knocking had stopped. Most importantly, Birdie was functional, seated at the table, and eating her breakfast—the first meal she’d sat still for since we reached the Hollow. Before Baba’s house, she’d reverted to her old habit of snatching food and running with it, nibbling hastily in the shadows, wherever she could find a space small enough that no one could follow her or force her out.
She still wasn’t completely visible—the blocked doorway to the living room and one corner of the stove were lightly etched across her skin and clothes where they showed through—but she was with us. All forward motion counts, as my father was fond of saying.
Of course, he only moved forward to avoid the things chasing him.
We’d eaten at tables like this on the train. Me and Jermay sitting together on one side, Anise and Birdie on the other. Everyone else scattered around us wherever they found a space when Mother Jesek signaled that a meal was ready. It felt familiar and homey, and it felt safe. All that was missing were bowls filled eight inches above the rim with food and Smolly slapping Squint’s hands away because he always managed to fill his plate with nothing but potatoes before she could stop him. Nagendra would have been seated near my father at the head of the table, and if the atmosphere was right, he would have blurted a random recitation from a play he’d learned at university because to him it fit the setting and the mood. I could hear his voice, precise, clear, and as enthralling as any of the snakes he considered his children. But now, when I thought of Nagendra, he was wearing the black polo shirt from the dossier photo in Warden Nye’s computer file. He was smiling, proud to have the Commission’s ankh embroidered on his chest. I’d never been afraid of the man who walked with serpents and had so many tattoos that his blood had likely turned to ink, but the younger version of him made me shiver. He was proof of how easily someone could fall for the propaganda, even someone as intelligent as Nagendra.
That thought changed the familiarity of the room and the table into something counterfeit. The people were wrong, merely arranging themselves to look like friends and family. There was no easy, empty chatter about the day to come. We were ragged and beaten strays taken in off the street.
The kitchen suddenly had more in common with the dining room in Nye’s Center than it did the train.
“Aren’t you hungry?” Baba asked politely. I still hadn’t figured out if the man’s blindness was a farce or if he had another means of telling who was where and doing what.
“Sorry,” I said. “Just thinking.”
I scooped some jam onto a piece of toast and shoved it in my mouth, thankful that the gooey sweetness gave me an excuse to chew long enough that no more questions came my way.
“I’ll tell you what I’m thinking,” Jermay leaned in close to whisper. “I’m thinking that I haven’t seen or heard a single animal up here, and I’m highly suspicious of things that look like bacon when there aren’t any animals involved. Especially when it won’t stay still long enough for me to stab it.”
He chased a fried strip around his plate with his fork, somehow managing to have it outrun him.
“It’s making a break for it! Shields up!” He propped his toast on the edge of the plate for a wall and smashed the bacon into it, before causing it to fall dramatically back onto his plate. “Phew. Crisis averted. I think it’s safely dead now, but I’d better eat it to make sure.”
He piled a little bit of everything onto his toast as a sandwich and ripped it in half with his teeth. His “you’re welcome” came out sounding like “ew elk’s comb.”
I nearly snorted my own food out of my nose. At least he wasn’t a fake. I could always count on Jermay to do something ridiculous to lift me out of a bad mood.
I held my hands out spokesmodel-style and put on my ringmaster voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Jermay Baán, the Human Goat! Possessing the face of a human boy and an insatiable appetite, there’s nothing this marvel of nature can’t or won’t eat! Let’s give him a round of applause.”
Anise and the others clapped and whistled, laughing while they stomped their feet like an enthusiastic Show crowd.
“Your act needs work, goat-boy.” Winnie threw him a napkin so he could wipe his face. “To really pull it off, you should at least munch on a couple of old cans.”
“Or a stinky shoe!” Birdie suggested with a giggle that started the table on a quest to suggest the most disgusting things Jermay should try to digest.
He didn’t take the joke as well as I’d expected.
“I’m not the one who’s eaten half the food on the table in one go. Save your garbage for the weed. I bet he couldn’t tell the difference between scrambled eggs and fertilizer.”
Where had that come from?
Jermay’s personality turned in an instant, costing him the natural light that usually marked his countenance. His impish grin hardened into a tense line.
This wasn’t even anger. When Jermay was angry, his eyes sparked, giving them an ethereal appearance. Now they were dark and hard as flint, fixated on Birch. Everything about Jermay went cold.
Across the table, Birch wilted. If there’d been any plants in the room, they would have done the same.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. He had multiple plates of food in front of him, mostly empty, with only crumbs for evidence of his appetite. “I didn’t realize I’d taken so much. I forgot to eat again.”
“How does someone forget to eat?” Nola asked.
“He’s still on Commission time,” Jermay said nastily.
At the Center, bells went off during the day to signal shift changes and meals. They’d regulated Birch’s life for as long as he could remember, so much so that, without them, he lost track of time. He didn’t know where to be or what to do. He was learning to run his own life, but with the exception of the few meals we had together in the Hollow, he’d forget that he could fix his own food whenever he wanted it. After a couple of missed meals, he’d be starving and eat anything offered to him.
“You can take the boy out of the Center, but I guess the Center never leaves the boy,” Jermay said.
“Jermay!” Anise snapped. “That is beyond enough. You’re making an idiot out of yourself, and you’re insulting our hosts. What would Magnus say if he could hear you? What would your father say?”
“Zavel’s dead, and Magnus probably is, too, so I’m guessing they wouldn’t have much to say about anything. But if they could talk, I’d think they’d be more concerned with you taking in a warden’s lapdog than my objecting to his being here.”
“He’s not your enemy, Jermay,” I said.
“My father is dead! Can you honestly tell me that the warden who hunted us down and locked us up had nothing to do with that? Who else would have known to raid the Hollow?”
“That’s not my fault!” Birch insisted. He’d stopped eating. He was looking down at his hands in his lap, worrying his napkin like he had at the Center when things made him nervous. It was how he dealt with people he knew could hurt him.
“Nye raised you! I’ve seen what you can do. You could have stopped him, but instead you played the loyal pet, running around free in your Commission silvers like one of them!”
“So what does that make me?” I asked Jermay. “Birch wasn’t Nye’s pet—that’s what he called me. He dressed me up like a doll he could show off in front of the other wardens. I may not have been free to leave the Center, but I wasn’t in a cell, either. Birch couldn’t do any more to stop Warden Nye than I could.”
“Then maybe you should have tried harder.”
I’d heard of words being a slap in the face, but that was the first time I understood the saying. He knocked the air out of me without ever laying a finger on me.
“Wait . . . I didn’t mean that,” he said, sinking in his seat. “I didn’t mean any of it. I don’t . . . I don’t know
what’s wrong with me.”
“In my opinion, you are behaving very much like a young man who has recently lost his father,” Baba said gently.
“And they just lost Evie. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be taking this out on any of you. Even you.” Jermay looked at Birch, he looked at me, but mostly he looked ashamed.
The cold shadows fled his face, allowing the color to return, but his eyes never regained their sparkle. When I’d found Jermay at the Center, he’d been wounded and isolated for weeks. I’d thought his injuries were the worst of it, but maybe I should have focused more on what I couldn’t see. Even without Zavel’s death, the mental toll had to be enormous.
“I feel like I’m in the wrong body. Nothing’s real,” he said.
I could sympathize with that part, at least. We’d left the Hollow so fast that I still hadn’t processed my own loss. I knew there was a dark moment coming, but my brain hadn’t yet decided if Evie’s death was real or another nightmare I’d wake from, screaming.
No one knew what to do after Jermay’s outburst. We all might have sat there in silence for the rest of the day if something hadn’t started tapping on my arm, breaking the tension.
One of the creeper lights from under the table had rolled out of hiding. It poked me again and flashed its lantern face. Creepers weren’t supposed to be programmed for communication, but I’d had one speak to me before. Its intent dropped straight into my head, masquerading as one of my own thoughts.
“It knows you’re sad,” I said for it, since it didn’t have a voice. “It wants to do a trick to cheer you up, Jermay.”
I drummed my hands on the table. The creeper copied it. I did it again, and another light joined in. They danced around the edge, twirling together and enticing their friends to come play. A pair of climbing lights swung from the fixture in the ceiling, keeping tempo with the whole troupe.
The size of Baba’s lights made them unique. Most creepers were over a foot tall, but these were small enough to crawl onto a person. They broke off into groups and crawled up our arms, tickling with their tiny spiderlike legs until the darkness of the last several minutes was replaced with laughter. When they were done, they rolled back under the table and turned off.
A few dancing lights wouldn’t fix anyone’s hurt feelings or stop their grief, but they could serve as a pleasant distraction. More forward motion to keep us running ahead of our ghosts.
“Is this kind of drama normal where you come from?” Nola asked.
“We were raised in a freak show,” I told her. “Normal’s relative.”
And overrated. And impossible. Normal was an imaginary friend I’d grown out of.
“Do it again!” Dev cheered.
I always loved kids’ reactions. Adults were too busy looking for an angle and trying to unravel the science behind the magic. They were so distracted by searching for gears, and wires, and secret hatches that they missed the performance. Being clever became more important than being entertained. Kids never did that, and a carnie girl never disappointed someone who wanted to be entertained.
Dev was seated beside Birdie, on the same side as Anise. Throughout breakfast, he’d been sneaking bits of food off his plate and flinging them under the table like he was feeding a puppy. And since neither Xerxes nor Bijou were anywhere to be seen in the room, I had a pretty good idea who he was passing treats to. The golems didn’t have to eat, but they’d both been acting strangely since our escape. Nothing they did would have surprised me.
I whistled a cue for Bijou. Sure enough, he galloped out from under the table wearing a crown of yellowish egg that had fallen on his head. The mini-dragon got a running start and threw himself into the air so that he could reach the top of the table. He sat down facing me, the picture of innocence with his clawed hands crossed in front of him and his big eyes blinking over his downturned snout.
“This is gross,” I told him, picking at the eggs.
He shook himself, flinging cold food in every direction.
“And this is worse,” Winnie said. “Eww. Bad dragon.”
Bijou dropped onto his stomach and hid under his wings. Roughly translated, it was an apology.
“What does he do?” Dev asked.
“Up!” I ordered.
Bijou snapped to attention, sitting on his hind legs with his mouth open in anticipation of being lit. I reached out with the last part of Evie I had left—her gift for wielding fire. Invisible coils stretched from my fingers through the room, seeking out the hottest points. They found the stove, stole the flame, and left it shining in my palm. I blew it gently into Bijou’s snout. A fog of rising smoke wafted from his nostrils.
“He breathes fire?” Dev asked.
I don’t care what they look like or where they come from, every kid has the same expression programmed somewhere in their brain, one that only comes out at times of extreme surprise and excitement. It’s the look of total awesomeness overload.
“He couldn’t call himself much of a dragon if he didn’t,” I said.
Dev’s eyes went wider and wider, threatening to fill the top half of his face. He leaned in closer and cracked his mouth open, but stopped breathing.
“Is this safe?” Nola asked.
“Bijou knows what he’s doing,” I assured her. “He’s an artist.”
I took a piece of bread from the platter and held it up.
“Sign your name,” I instructed.
Normally, this would have been done when he was nine feet tall and capable of scoring metal sheeting. The kitchen version involved toast.
A slim fire jet shot from Bijou’s mouth. He twitched his head up and down and side to side, scorching the bread without burning through it or hitting my hands. When he was done, there was a perfect image of a diamond left behind.
Dev exploded into applause, shouting: “Do another one!”
A few minutes later, we had diamond toast and castle toast. Cars and planes and rocket ships. Monster toast and even a fairly good rendition of The Show’s train. Bijou was very proud of himself, which is probably why he got carried away and torched the curtains. The nosy neighbors must have loved seeing flames in the window.
I flicked my wrist and dragged enough water from the sink spout to put out the fire.
“That’s a remarkable gift, young lady,” Baba said.
“Sometimes it’s more terrifying than remarkable,” I replied. My hands were growing hotter than they should have been, like they did in the dreams where I burned up from the inside and exploded. I wrapped them around my glass of cold water, hoping they would cool down.
Heat is energy, I told myself. Energy can be discharged.
In my mind, I pushed the heat away. I pictured it going out of me and into the glass, wave by wave, until my skin returned to normal.
“Um . . . Penn?” Jermay asked.
I opened my eyes, not having realized they were closed in the first place, and found him staring at me. So were Winnie and Birch and everyone else.
The glass of water in my hands was boiling.
I set it down quickly and threw my napkin over it, but I couldn’t hide what they’d already seen. Anise took that as her cue to change the subject.
“This place is amazing,” she said. “How long did it take to build?”
With the curtains burned away, her view was of the window. It was a horizontal pane that had formed with the kitchen expansion and looked out over the Mile. Baba’s house was near the edge of the neighborhood, and the view stretched all the way to the city ledge and the blue skies beyond. From this angle, it looked like the ocean.
“No one built the Mile,” Baba said. “It was more a happy accident. Like Venice.”
“As in Italy?”
He nodded.
“Both cities came to be by virtue of necessity. With Venice, hundreds of refugees set out to sea in whatever vessels they had at their disposal. They stuck together and eventually combined their little boats into something larger and more formidable. Their boats became
homes connected by canals for roads, and—” He stopped and grinned. He looked like Dev watching Bijou in action. “Forgive me. I tend to ramble on about the subjects that interest me. Before coming here, I was a guide at a large museum. My tours started near an information plaque about Venice; I’ve got it memorized. My point was that this community was founded as a makeshift refuge. We had the advantage of your father building us the pods that became the foundations of our homes. Oh, and we don’t have to deal with rising tides. That’s definitely a plus.”
“And you’ve been here since the Brick Street riots?” Anise asked.
“Some of us have been here longer, and thank goodness for it. We’d hoped to return once the commotion died down below, but after Brick Street, it wasn’t safe. There was a huge influx of people the week of the riots, almost faster than we could handle. We pooled our resources, and with some modifications, we were able to build the city as you see it. Living up here took some getting used to, but we’ve managed.”
“Baba—” The word felt strange in my mouth, but he’d insisted we call him that.
I’d never had a grandfather. Our family tree stopped and started with my father. He never spoke of his parents or my mother’s or the life they’d lived before The Show. I never knew he had a sister until I met Sister Mary Alban, and he was so secretive that I didn’t know where he was born. Had I not known my mother died shortly after giving birth to me, I could have accepted that Iva the robot was the real Iva Roma.
“Did you know our father well?”
“Very. He was here quite often in the beginning, bringing us news of the ground and helping us with our equipment. In more recent years, he still came regularly with supplies and refugees.”
“Refugees?”
“Mainly children that he and his network had managed to acquire before the shadier wardens could take them into custody, though there’s been a disturbing uptick in the number of adults lately—especially men. They’ve been the subject of experiments on the ground and have some of the most horrific stories to tell.”