Strangeworlds Travel Agency

by L. D. Lapinski

  She remembered last year, when her mom was working late all the time and was getting only a few hours of sleep every night. But her mom had still turned up to Parents’ Evening and had told Flick she was proud of her as they walked home in the driving rain. And her dad had sat bolt upright at her last keyboard recital, though he’d fallen asleep on the bus on the way home and Flick had to shake him so they wouldn’t miss their stop.

  And the last time she was sick, her mom and dad took it in turns to stay with her when she felt hot and cold and shaky, and there had always been someone next to her bed when she’d needed a hand to hold. And even Freddy had crawled in, and had given her hand a sympathetic chew before he was taken away.…

  She was going to see them again. No Thieves were going to stop her.

  She curled her hands into fists and felt her skin tingle. Some sort of electricity or power was running through her bones, catching at her breath, making her joints ache and her muscles twitch with a drive she couldn’t ignore.

  Resolve can be a powerful weapon. And resolve, when wrapped in righteous ferocity and fear, can cut through the impossible. It makes mothers lift cars off their babies, it makes athletes break world records, and it was about to make Felicity Hudson change the nature of magic forever.

  Jonathan felt as if he had spent days lifting suitcase lids before finding a Strangeworlds one he could use. It was lime green and lifted easily from the rack, dragging a lot of cobwebs and spider corpses with it.

  Jonathan had also found the other suitcase he was looking for. This one was iron-gray, trimmed in white. He put it to one side, to take with him. The idea he’d had in the apothecary’s shop was growing.

  He undid the latches of the green case and stepped inside. He kept a tight hold of the gray case as he stepped out again, blinking quickly to get his bearings.

  And then, he froze.

  He was in an opulent room dripping with lush furnishings, gold, and diamonds. There was a U-shaped table in the center, heaped up with exotic-looking fruits and other foods, and candles glowed here and there among the treats. And the occupants of the room—two dozen very tall, very beautiful people with blue-green faces—were turned toward Jonathan in surprise. The fae.

  There was a smash as someone dropped something.

  Jonathan gave a very nervous smile that was more teeth than anything else. “Ah, do excuse me,” he said. “Apologies for the interruption…”

  One of the fae-people stood up, looking from Jonathan to her companions as though wondering if she was seeing things.

  Jonathan plowed on, “I’m not planning on hanging around—don’t mind me. I’m merely looking for another suitcase?” He lifted the one he held. “I believe there will be one somewhere… around… here.…”

  The faces continued to stare.

  “I’m from the Strangeworlds Society?” he tried. “My name…” He paused, uneasy about handing over his name to beings he wasn’t entirely sure meant well.

  One of the beings turned and muttered something to another. Another moved his hand lazily toward his golden cutlery.

  There was nothing for it.

  “My name’s Mercator,” Jonathan said, giving away his name like a gift. “Please. I need your help.”

  Faces lit up in recognition, and several of the pointy-eared fae chattered excitedly. The one who was standing said something, and Jonathan caught the word “luggage.”

  “Luggage? Do you have a suitcase?” Jonathan asked. He stepped forward, pleading. “I am trying to get back to the City of Five Lights. My friend is in danger.”

  The standing fae-woman walked over. “We can show you. We owe your family a favor.” She opened a door to the outside, leading the way into a dark garden. “And then our bargain is complete.” She strode out and Jonathan jogged after her. The night air was cool, and she walked quickly over the grass between great ornamental flower beds.

  “You owe us a favor? Who gave you the case?” Jonathan panted as he struggled to keep up.

  The fae-woman looked at him. “The one who gave us custody of the luggage was a woman of your species named Elara Mercator. She gave us an escape route.”

  Jonathan stopped dead on the path. “Escape?”

  The woman nodded.

  We want a way out of this world… Lute’s words swam around Jonathan’s mind. He glanced down at the gray suitcase in his hand. “Is this world in danger?” he asked.

  The woman seemed unsurprised at his question. “All worlds are in danger, young one. The balance of schism and magic is perilous. The Strangeworlders have always known this.” She did not smile.

  “Balance,” Jonathan repeated. He thought of the vanishing streets in Five Lights. The disappeared settlement from the mountainside. The struggle to grow plants in Coral City. The changing attitude of Tam and his tribe of children.

  And he thought of Flick. Her magic. Her powers. Her skill.

  Something had changed in the multiverse.

  Something huge.

  Was the answer to it all at Five Lights? Was Tristyan right? Was there really a massive schism? And could it have caused all of these bizarre happenings?

  The fae-woman stopped at what looked like a summerhouse and opened the door. Inside was a veritable mountain of shining objects, clothes, swords and—in the midst of it—a battered cream-and-brown suitcase.

  “Thank you.” Jonathan’s knees almost buckled in relief. “Oh, thank you.” He picked up the case and felt like hugging it tight.

  “Do you know where it leads?” she asked him.

  He nodded. “If my map is correct, it leads to Five Lights.”

  The woman shook her head. “That place is treacherous. You must value your friend a great deal.”

  Jonathan tightened his grip on the suitcase in his arms. “I… suppose I do.”

  “I wish you luck, young Mercator. Five Lights is a world wounded. It will need healing, if it is not too late.”

  Jonathan put the suitcase down. “All roads lead to the city,” he said to himself. He lifted the lid. “I am coming for you, Felicity.”

  * * *

  The ball of fear inside Flick seemed to grow spines of anger. This was unfair. It was

  So.

  MASSIVELY.

  Unfair.

  She didn’t deserve this. She had never done anything so bad as to deserve this.

  Stay here, forever?

  That… that was wrong.

  Flick gritted her teeth. She stood, without really thinking about it, her limbs starting to shake with the furious unfairness and anger at it all. Her blood vessels felt like they were charged with electricity, every blood cell fizzing with energy, anger, and enough fear to make tears start to run down her face.

  “I…,” Flick forced out between her teeth, “I… am not… staying… here.”

  Her vision blurred, and the whole room seemed to shift around her. It was as though the air darkened, and her own body started to emit a light of its own.

  She gasped, anger and fear boiling under her skin.

  I am not staying here.

  She punched at the wall.

  The wall should have battered the skin from her knuckles.

  Instead, it moved.

  In an instant, the wall was no longer there—not in Flick’s mind, anyway. There was only the fierce burn inside her, the light she could barely contain battering against her skin. Her hands splayed out against where the wall had been, her pink and purple chipped nail polish glittering like sparks in the darkness.

  It wasn’t fair.

  I am not staying here.

  Her anger was stronger than her prison. Her resolve was unstoppable. It pressed against the walls, pushing them outward, bending them, contorting them, until—

  The world around her shattered like glass. Her sight cracked as though she’d punched a mirror. Cracks and shards of the world bit into Flick’s mind and she staggered. A hurricane of magic swirled around her. She raised her head again, fighting her way through the flyin
g bits of matter like she was walking through a flock of silently screaming birds. Pain ached in every joint of her body, and each breath seemed to take an age. The cutting shards of the world splintered away into nothingness, but there was something coming forward like an ocean, rushing up to catch her, though too fast, much too fast.

  Hitting water at high speed, Flick had once read, was like hitting tarmac.

  She threw a hand out.

  And the very threads of the multiverse parted for her like blades of grass.

  The multiverse lurched around Flick. She thrust her arm out farther, trying to hold on to it. The broken shards of magic sliced against her skin, though they didn’t hurt her body—they hurt something deeper, something hidden away and unknown. Something that Flick hadn’t even known existed until it threatened to make her fold up in pain.

  She felt a dark swell of energy, like adrenaline without the nausea, begin to surge in her chest. It ran through her blood vessels, powering something inside her she hadn’t known existed, like an internal machine she had started up and had no idea how to turn off.

  She could only try to steer it.

  Schisms are bridges between worlds. And these bridges cross over an unseen space of pure nothingness. To attempt to go into this dead space, to break into the emptiness, would lead to the hungry darkness eating every single drop of magic from your life.

  If you were to try to step through it, the schism would help itself to every single drop of magic from you.…

  No one can step from one world to another without using a suitcase or bottled magic.

  No one ever had.

  Not before now.

  A curl of dark energy, like the fingertip of her own shadow, reached out from inside Flick and brushed against another world.

  And then gripped, tight.

  Flick felt a wrenching around her belly like she’d been lassoed. She almost let go of the shadow-hold she had on the world ahead of her, but something told her not to. Flick shut her eyes in terror. If she’d kept them open, she would have experienced something similar to what the suitcases went through when they were pulled through after their travelers.

  And then…

  The Waiting Room folded like an origami sculpture. It collapsed at the edges, the walls of the space falling inward into nothing, vanishing as though someone had pressed “delete.” The center of the space bulged and swelled, curving outward as it scrunched up like discarded paper. The tiny world gave a last heave, pushing out its occupants like toothpaste from a tube.

  And a schism—a brand-new, shining, terrible schism—tore open in the City of Five Lights.

  Flick opened her eyes to see the pavement racing up to meet her and caught herself just short of face-planting. The other occupants of the room tumbled after her, including the Receptionist, who was letting out a very impressive stream of swear words as she tried to simultaneously keep her hair in place and avoid cracking her head open on the cobblestones.

  Flick stumbled upright, her vision swimming and her arms and legs feeling cold—as though there was no blood in them. Pins and needles started up her calves, and she stamped her feet, trying to get them working again.

  She turned and looked behind her.

  There was nothing there.

  Even though Flick couldn’t see schisms without one of Jonathan’s lenses, she somehow knew there was nothing to see. The schism she had created and escaped through, was gone. Closed up, healed by magical energy. Flick supposed it must have taken it from the collapsing Waiting Room.

  She’d created a schism.

  Now who’s not particularly magical, eh? she thought, seconds before a colossal headache clocked into her temple. A cramp started in her right foot, and she flexed her toes quickly, limping over to where Darilyn and Greysen were lying on the ground.

  A faint shimmering, silver glow surrounded the two Quicksparks. They were staring in shock at one another as their wrinkles disappeared, their skin smoothed out, and their hair ran through with color, erasing the gray. Fifty years disappeared, and they became a young couple again.

  Flick shook her head in disbelief. “What’s happening to you?”

  “We weren’t old when we went in there.” Darilyn raised her hands and watched the backs of them smoothing out, the dark spots vanishing. “That place took life from us, to keep itself going.”

  Living in a world you don’t belong to drains your life-force away. At first you simply feel tired, but then ill and, eventually, it’s thought that you would die long before your time.

  Darilyn looked at her hands again and then back up to Flick. “What did you do?”

  Flick shook her head. “I don’t know. I… broke out. I think.”

  “But you can’t,” Darilyn said. “What are you?”

  Flick didn’t know what to say. The frightening feeling of not knowing who or what she was came rushing back, stealing her breath and making her knees suddenly give way. She sat down hard on the pavement, looking at her hands, the feeling of what she had done like a dark echo on her skin.

  * * *

  Half a mile away, at the same moment Felicity reentered the world, Jonathan toppled into the big square in Five Lights. He had his map book under his arm, the spare small, gray suitcase from the Station in his hand, and he was so pale he might have been mistaken for a sheet of paper, puffed up and with a smudge of a face drawn on.

  “Oh, I’m here.” He smiled in faint delight at the sight of the place. “It worked. That’s good.” Ignoring the queasy feeling it gave him, he pushed the suitcase from the fae world back where it came from. Then sat back a moment, his head swimming, his vision blurring into a soup of red and black spots that told him in no circumstances was he to stand up again for the next few minutes.

  * * *

  Greysen and Darilyn wanted to go straight back to their emporium, to see what was left of it. Flick elected to go with them, thinking there was a small hope at least that Jonathan would still be there. The Custodians walked unsteadily, holding tight to each other’s hands. Darilyn kept touching her husband’s dark hair as if worried it might turn white again.

  The Receptionist walked alongside Flick, looking dazed and confused, as though Five Lights was completely alien to her. It seemed she had nowhere to go.

  “Will you be all right?” Flick asked kindly.

  The Receptionist gave a sad smile. “I suppose I’ll have to see if I still have a home. What about you?”

  Flick groaned. “I need to find Jonathan. The boy I came here with. Hopefully he’ll still be at the emporium. Or close by.”

  The unsteady caravan of people wove across one of the city squares and down an unfamiliar street. Flick was about to ask if they were going the right way, when Darilyn pushed a leaning bit of fencing to one side and stepped out onto Spectre Street. Right beside Quickspark’s Travel Emporium.

  Flick followed them inside, but quickly stopped when she saw the shop was empty. “He’s not here.”

  “Don’t fret yet,” Greysen said, his youthful face still looking like it belonged to someone else. “He might be in the back.”

  “I hope so.” Flick swallowed nervously. “If he’s not, I’m stuck. He’s got the suitcase with him—”

  “Ah, suitcase. Yes, you are that girl.” A voice the color of a coffin lining came from behind Flick.

  She turned around and looked up, up at two Thieves sweeping out from the back of the emporium, their red cloaks swirling.

  The Receptionist gasped and darted backward out of the open door. Greysen and Darilyn stepped quickly forward to Flick’s defense. The two Thieves swept in front of them with all the menace of a raised sword.

  Flick met Darilyn’s eyes.

  Flick shook her head. She didn’t need anyone getting hurt on her behalf.

  She took a step backward.

  “Don’t even think about running, child,” the taller Thief said. He looked from the Quicksparks to their companion. “I’ll deal with these two. You go ahead to the Overseer wi
th the girl. She will be very surprised to know we found her here.”

  “Yes, Hid.” The Thief in front of Flick gave a smirk. “I do hope I don’t have to drag you, little girl.”

  “You’re not taking me anywhere,” Flick said, wishing her voice wasn’t so quivery.

  Hid looked over his shoulder and grinned. “My colleague Swype is not opposed to violence, Strangeworlder, so I would cooperate to avoid giving them the opportunity to practice on you.” Hid looked back at Greysen and Darilyn. “Now then, you two. We can have a pleasant little chat, and you can tell me where you’ve hidden the rest of your suitcases.”

  Flick daren’t look back at the two Custodians being marched into the back of their empty shop. She peered up into the dark red hood of the Thief in front of her.

  Swype pushed their hood back to reveal white-gray hair and a smirking, pointed face. “Why don’t you save me some trouble, and follow me?”

  The Thief didn’t touch her, but they didn’t have to. Swype directed Flick through the streets with the smallest words and sounds from the back of their throat as the two of them walked into one of the busier areas of Five Lights.

  The other shoppers gave them a wide berth.

  Flick’s emotions swung from exhausted to frustrated like a pendulum. She’d escaped from one place only to be kidnapped again almost instantly. She balled her hands into fists in her pockets and tried to think of how to get away from this Thief.

  She risked glancing up at Swype. They were one of the palest people she had ever seen, as though they were on the verge of disappearing altogether. Their eyes looked as though someone had washed all the pigment away from a once-brown iris. They gave the impression they were older than they seemed, although their face was fairly free of lines and wrinkles. It was more like they felt old, like something overused and worn-out.

  “Stop here,” Swype said, halting in front of a blank stretch of brick.