Call Forth the Waves (8 page)

“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.”

I couldn’t help but glance at Winnie and Birch. They’d been subject to their own experiments. They’d survived, but come away with more than the injuries Winnie had shown off to her cousin. I wondered what Baba would think about
their
horror stories, considering he had a chapter in hers.

“The last group came up over a month ago, but your father wasn’t with them. That was out of character.”

“Who brought them?” I asked.

The network Baba described sounded like the group that worked with Beryl and Sister Mary Alban. They were step one, with Beryl using her ability to change her face as a way to locate and extract touched children who were in trouble. She often impersonated a madam from the red-light district who would pay for runaways; then she’d pass them down the line to Sister Mary Alban, who could give them refuge at the church where she lived until they could be moved again. My father and whoever took his place as the refugees’ escort were the final step, bringing people safely to the Mile, but there had to be someone in between. Magnus wouldn’t risk face-to-face contact with the sister he couldn’t afford to acknowledge, which meant there was at least one other person who knew my father’s real business, maybe more. If the Mile didn’t have answers for me, then maybe those others did.

“That’s difficult to say,” Baba told me. “With the exception of your father, most of the members of the network who come this far have very particular skills to keep them from being recognized or betrayed. Their faces aren’t always their own, or static. Some of them arrive as men but leave as women. One prefers to remain a literal blank, displaying no distinct features at all. They travel in pairs with a teleporter, so there’s no common starting point. Cyril might know more about it, if you can find him.”

“Cyril?”

“You don’t know your father’s partner?”

I shook my head. My father had never mentioned working with anyone outside of our Show family, except for generic interactions with the Commission’s wardens when he handed over designs and new technology. Of course, given Nagendra’s past and what I knew of Greyor, perhaps there were others tied to the Commission that he trusted.

“They made trips together for years,” Baba said. “Cyril did most of the planning, while your father was more about implementation, but Cyril hasn’t been off the ground in a decade. I imagine some of his papers are still in your father’s workroom.”

“Workroom?” I perked up.

“He stayed here when he visited the Mile, and we’ve kept his room closed up the way he left it. Not much choice on that one; no one else could open the lock. I’ve got a feeling you might be the exception to that rule.”

Klok beeped.

“I like puzzles. May I see the lock?”

“Magnus wasn’t much on people fouling up his things by moving them around, but if you can manage to open the lock, I would assume there’s a very good reason you’re equipped to do so.”

Klok made a series of electronic noises that basically added up to “Yay!” He had never fully grasped the idea of typing out his emotions and didn’t know which words to use.

We gathered our dishes, passing plates and cups down the line to stack at the end so they could be put in the sink. No one had mentioned the possibility of new clothes yet, and I was about to ask when Anise yelped. She dropped out of sight across the table.

“Anise!” I jumped up. We’d had too many scares lately; I was conditioned to respond with the worst in mind. “What happened?”