Mela raised her ring to her lips. “Clio? We are surrounded by people. Please advise,” she said calmly.
No answer.
“What are we supposed to do? Lie here until nightfall?” Nia asked. As if in response, Thalia’s stomach growled loudly.
“I’m starved,” she moaned.
“Shush,” the rest of us said at the same time, also too loudly it turned out, because suddenly, a flashlight appeared beside Thalia, the skirt of the Great Bed lifted, and there was one of the museum’s security guards, scowling at us.
“What are you lot up to?” he said, and we scurried out the other side, like bugs scattering in a sudden light.
“Run!” Thalia said, and we followed past mothers pushing babies in strollers, and past a class of art students sketching a dress. Nia leaped over a bench, and Mela took a little tumble, righting herself at once, her long braid sailing behind her. We were faster than the guard, who we could hear chattering away into a walkie-talkie.
Thalia led us straight to the library. We pounded up the spiral iron stairs, making a horrific racket as we went, and we didn’t stop until we were at Clio’s door, hammering at it to let us in.
The door, however, remained stubbornly closed. And before we could decide on our next move, we found ourselves blocked by the security guard and one of his friends.
“Game over,” the breathless guard said, smirking and obviously proud of his catch.
“Out with you,” his companion said. She took me by the wrist, squeezing way harder than necessary, and led me down the stairs first. Behind me, Thalia began to shout, “Oh no, we won’t go!” again and again at the top of her voice. She was, as usual, making a scene.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched a young man taking a video of us with his cell phone. He was laughing as he held it up, and chanting along with Thalia’s “Oh no, we won’t go” song. Nia noticed too, and the next thing I knew, he was swearing at his phone, saying, “Deleted? I deleted it?”
“Thanks,” I said to Nia just as she closed her app, the one she’d rigged to work as a kódikas. She’d confused him somehow, caused him to misuse the tech that made the phone work. Good thing, too. The last thing we needed was to be subjects of a viral video. How would I explain it to my mom? Or to Clio, for that matter?
We were led in the world’s most embarrassing parade (Thalia stopped chanting once Mela elbowed her, hard) through the lobby and out of the building, the guards pushing us one by one through the revolving door.
“Cheers, loves,” Thalia said to the guards.
“Now what?” Mela asked, scowling at Thalia.
“Clio?” I said into my bracelet. “We have a problem.”
“I know, that’s why I summoned you all in the first place,” came Clio’s voice, clear and crisp around us. We huddled together away from the building’s entrance.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“Come out to Bethnal Green. The V and A has a sister museum there. The Museum of Childhood. There was an incident here this morning. You are needed immediately.”
“Okay. Right. We’ll be there in a sec. Um, over and out. Ten four,” I rambled into my bracelet.
Nia faced Thalia. “Get us to where we need to go, London girl.”
Thalia clapped her hands and rubbed them together. “Lucky for you lot I still have this,” she said, and waved a little yellow card that she’d produced from her pocket. “Transportation card. Good for bus, rail, underground,” she said, sounding like a voiceover on a commercial. Then she added, “I don’t intend to walk all the way to East London.”
We marched half a block before it hit me—I was freezing. My uniform skort and thin polo shirt weren’t cutting it. My teeth chattered, too.
“I can’t do this,” I said weakly. The others were rubbing their arms, too. Something cold touched my nose. A flurry. “Is it . . . is it . . . snowing?” I shouted. I’d never seen snow before.
“We’ll catch our deaths,” Mela said.
“No, we won’t!” Thalia said, and led us straight into a tourist shop. “Sale section,” she muttered, stopping before a wall of the tackiest scarves and hoodies and gloves imaginable.
Each and every one had a picture of a winking Prince Harry.
“I’d rather freeze,” Nia said, and started heading for the door.
Thalia dug her hand deep into a pocket. “It’s a clearance sale for a reason,” she said as she pulled out a soft bill. “Twenty quid gets us each a souvenir and a bit of warmth.” Then she plucked four hoodies off the rack. “Besides, Harry is quite fit for a ginger, don’t you think?” she asked, tugging at one of her own red locks.
She paid for the hoodies and I swear the cashier was trying to hold back her laugh.
Nia, Mela, and I turned ours inside out before putting them on.
Thalia did not.
The snow picked up. I tried hard not to let it distract me. Thalia led us back onto the sidewalk and south of the museum, and we followed her like ducklings.
It took me a moment for it to sink in—I was in London.
Flipping London. Me, a Florida girl who had never even seen snow. I mean, I’d been there before, but never outside of the museum. It had been like stopping in an airport—just because you flew through Miami International Airport didn’t mean you’d actually been to Miami. I took a deep breath and smelled diesel and roasted chestnuts.
The red double-decker buses, the black gates with gold-painted details, the bright white rowhomes with their black-and-white-tiled front porches—all of it seemed like a movie come to life.
The streets were crowded with pedestrians. A harried mom ran over my foot with a stroller. A street performer, painted entirely in silver, seemed to levitate with only a cane for support. Another performer beat on a plastic bucket to a rhythm in his head. Three little kids zoomed past on scooters, and every so often, a giant red bus would blow by, the people inside looking like apparitions—here one moment, gone the next.
Thalia turned a hard left and stopped before the entrance of what looked like a small shopping center. A gate outside, with wrought-iron letters, read “South Kensington and Metropolitan and District Railways.” She gave us a wink and entered. Left and right were tunnels leading down, and underneath my feet, the ground was rumbling.
Thalia stood before a colorful map with lines leading in every direction.
“They look like neurons,” Nia said. “I love them.”
“Subway?” I asked. I thought of the Metrorail and shuddered. At least these trains weren’t up in the air.
Thalia shook her head. “Not a subway. Welcome to the Tube.” She ran her fingers along a blue “neuron” and then a red one. “Piccadilly to the Central line,” she muttered to herself, then peeled away from the map. We followed her down the stairs and through a turnstile, with Thalia sliding her card through the machine once for each of us.
Underground now, the Tube was hot and oppressive. We pulled off our Prince Harry hoodies and waited for our train in silence. A couple folks looked at us oddly, and I realized that we were still in uniform, the patches on our polo shirts reading MIAMI PALMS MIDDLE in big yellow letters. We looked like kids who had gotten lost during a transatlantic field trip.
When the train arrived, we got on and sat together. The only other person on the train was a woman in a pink suit and running shoes. She gave us a little smile, then dug through her briefcase for a pen and notebook. Her hair was disheveled, and her mascara had run a bit. We must have been staring, because she giggled and said, “I keep missing my stop. Don’t know what’s come over me.”
The train rumbled along through the tunnel peacefully, stopping every so often. A singsong voice would announce, “Mind the gap between the train and the platform’s edge,” at each stop, and soon, Nia and I were repeating it in British accents, prompting Thalia to mutter something about “Americans.”
“Careful, or we’ll dump all your tea into the nearest body of water,” Nia said, and Mela actually giggled
.
It was all very pleasant until the feathers.
They were tiny orange feathers and were, suddenly, everywhere.
“Not again,” Thalia said. “It was a wild-goose chase the last time we saw feathers.”
Mela started coughing at once. “I think I snorted one. It’s up my nose!” she yelled.
“Where are they coming from?” Nia asked, rooting around in her pocket for a tissue to give to Mela.
“There,” Thalia said, pointing at three robins that were darting back and forth in the train.
The woman who was sitting across from us tsked, pointed her finger, and said, “They aren’t bothering anyone, poor things.” The notebook was now open on her lap, and it looked as if she’d tried to write the same sentence three times, scratching out each attempt.
The birds kept darting back and forth, back and forth, and each time, they’d get closer to us. We sat even closer together.
Were they just some unfortunate robins, trapped inside the train car, or were they . . . something else? After a while, they quit flittering about and perched on the seat beside the woman, as if they were her tiny pets. They looked like small, puffed-up toys, their sharp little beaks opening and closing as if they were out of breath. Their eyes were little black beads, and the orange feathers on their chests were the color of the sunset. One of them slipped into the woman’s briefcase for a moment, then hopped out again.
Maybe they were just regular robins.
Whatever they were, we didn’t take our eyes off them.
That’s how we noticed the teeth.
Thalia screamed and Mela buried her face into her knees.
One of the birds made a low, rumbly sound. It was as un-birdlike a sound as I’d ever heard. Another snapped its beak open and shut, the noise it made like a ruler clapping on a desk.
“Did those birds just . . . growl at us?” Nia asked in a whisper. At this point, I was too terrified to say anything at all.
“And why do they have human teeth?” Thalia said, shutting her eyes tightly.
The automated voice on the train speakers called out, “The next station is Bethnal Green.”
Then, as if on cue, the birds began to sing. They warbled softly, trilling long, pretty notes. Mela lifted her head, tears having run down her face in rivulets. Thalia and Nia cocked their heads to one side, listening. I listened too, and my heart seemed to beat faster.
Almost as if I were very far away, I heard a voice repeating “Bethnal Green, next station, Bethnal Green, next station,” but even as the train slowed, the birds got louder, drowning other sounds until the birdsong was all I could hear.
Scratch that. All I could hear was the siren song.
And that’s when I snapped out of it.
“Girls,” I said, clapping my hands in front of their faces. When that didn’t work, I put my hands over Nia’s ears. She blinked, then understanding dawned on her face. She did the same to Thalia, who then pulled Mela’s headphones from around her neck and put them over Mela’s ears.
The train rolled to a stop. The doors slid open. Our hands still over our ears, the four of us rose and made to leave.
But the sirens sang a little louder, lifted into the air, and hovered before the woman with the notebook.
Whatever they told her, she took the direction well, because she was on her feet and blocking the door, her pen in her hand the way a person might hold a knife.
“Ma’am, you need to move. Like, now,” Nia said.
Then the birds dive-bombed us.
“Get off!” Mela shouted. The woman laughed, but her eyes were glazed over, and I had a suspicion she wouldn’t remember any of this later. The door began to close.
The sign outside the train read “Bethnal Green.” This was our stop. The other muses needed us. Or maybe we needed them a little more at the moment.
The woman adjusted the grip on her pen. Then I remembered her notebook. Slowly, I put my hand around her fist, both our hands controlling the pen now. I concentrated on my skin, the way you can sometimes feel your own pulse if you’re still enough. Then I felt it. The buzzing sensation. My kódikas. And I’d made it happen on purpose!
“I don’t know what you’re writing,” I said to her, looking into her glassy eyes, “but I bet it’s going to be awesome.” My eyes pricked, my scalp tingled, and the woman’s eyes dropped to her notebook. “Such a great idea. I know you can do it,” I urged her. “Why don’t you sit down now, right this minute, and get to it?” My fingers went numb, but I could feel her grip loosen.
The birds sang more loudly, but the woman shook her head, sat down, and picked up her notebook, writing in penmanship that was really nice and flowy. She was so lost in thought that when a big gloppy drop of bird poop landed on her sleeve she just glanced at it and kept writing.
Nia had shoved her foot between the doors, and we worked together to pull them open again. I watched as the robins descended on the woman’s briefcase. They flew up, the bag’s strap between their teeth. The birds disappeared into the dark tunnel ahead of the train, the briefcase trailing behind them like the tail of a kite.
“I hope an oncoming train splatters you!” Mela shouted into the darkness, then she wiped her eyes.
“What was in the bag?” I wondered.
“Pink-suit lady just got mugged by birds and she didn’t even say ‘hey,’” commented Nia.
“That was fun,” Thalia said, without even a hint of a smile. “Let’s go.” We followed her out of the tunnel and into the light of Bethnal Green.
Chapter 21
Toy Tragedy
The V and A Museum of Childhood was in shambles. The skylights in the domed roof above had shattered, and as we walked in, our feet crunched over the glass. There was no other sound except for the insistent wailing of a woman down in the café. Huddled around her were the other muses—Paola, Etoro, Tomiko, Elnaz, and there, her hands on the woman’s shoulders, was Clio.
She spotted us at once, stared at our Prince Harry hoodies for a moment, and beckoned us over with a flick of her head.
“This is bad,” Mela was saying, and Thalia nodded her head over and over again.
The woman continued to cry, and now I could make out what she was saying. “I was here before sunrise, to get ahead of things, when they came. B-birds. But, but, like, human-birds. With wings and t-t-teeth,” she was saying. “And there was a woman with them. She wore pink head to toe, even her trainers, and she had a blank look in her eyes.”
Thalia gasped.
“Pink,” Mela said.
“And running shoes,” Nia added.
“It’s got to be the same lady from the train,” I said. We stopped and took in the wreckage of the museum.
Two floors’ worth of glass cases were turned over, shattered, toys everywhere. There was a giant dollhouse on its side, all the tiny furniture and tiny people on the ground like victims of a terrible earthquake. I spotted beheaded stuffed animals, puppets tangled up in their strings, and a pair of really creepy cello-playing monkeys turned upside down and dangling from the outstretched hand of a statue.
It was . . . a very big mess.
Clio brought us into the circle around the woman, and when we approached, the woman sobbed even harder. “Oh, the children,” she said, and pointed at us. “This is their museum. And look at it now.”
The woman broke down completely, sobbing and hiccupping.
Paola stroked the woman’s hair and began to hum a song I remembered from childhood—“De colores, de colores se visten los campos en la primavera”—and on and on, a song about colors in the springtime, and about love and hope. Soon, the woman stopped crying.
“Sharon,” Clio said, addressing the woman, “we are an investigatory team from the V and A.”
Sharon’s eyes grew wide. “Oh. That’s good,” she said, sniffing loudly.
“Did the burglars see you, Sharon?” Clio asked.
“Burglars?” Sharon said.
“Burglars in costumes, yes
,” Clio said, and Sharon seemed relieved to think that no, she hadn’t lost her mind, that nothing otherworldly had happened.
Sharon shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. I was hiding behind the espresso machine over there,” she said, pointing toward the café.
“Good. You were safe. What did they take?” Clio asked. Sharon lifted a shaky hand and pointed at a case on the third floor. The sign above read “Toys of the Eighties.”
“They spent a lot of time there. Valuable pieces inside. Not sure what’s gone missing. Stuff sells for a lot on eBay,” Sharon said, rambling on a bit, but at least she wasn’t panicking anymore.
Clio looked pointedly at Etoro and Paola, who had quit humming by then. Etoro pulled her wheelchair a little closer. “Fancy a cup of tea?” she asked Sharon, who nodded vigorously.
Paola clapped her hands. “Delicioso,” she said, and led the way to the kitchen, Etoro and Sharon behind her.
“The rest of you, follow me,” Clio said, and the Muse Squad, plus Tomiko and Elnaz, chased after her.
We walked gingerly over the broken glass, sidestepping all kinds of old and interesting toys. Only last year, I’d cleaned out most of my toys, making a huge donate pile of old baby dolls in the middle of the living room. My mom had looked at the pile, blinked a few times to keep tears away, and then helped me put them all into bags.
The truth was, I missed some of those toys.
The Toys of the Eighties case was smashed open. I spotted an old video game console. My brothers would each give an eye for that. A Cabbage Patch doll with its scrunched-up little face and yarn hair was on the floor. Thalia picked it up and gave it a hug before putting it down again. There were some action figures here and there—plastic muscle-men in colorful leotards. Cracked in half was the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, the sight of which brought Nia to her knees.
“Noooooo!” she said, and cradled the two halves. “MONSTERS!”
“Monsters indeed,” Clio said. “We know what they broke. But what did they take?”
Elnaz circled the broken toys. “They’ve already stolen a curse from the stores back at the headquarters. What could they have wanted from all this?” She gestured to the playthings.
The Cassandra Curse Page 14