Conjured (28 page)

He took the briefcase back and set it on the receptionist’s desk, and then he turned the numbers on the combination lock. The lock snapped open. He raised the lid. Inside was the Magician’s box. Instinctively, I shrank back. He lifted it out and then held it out toward me, his palm flat, not touching the clasp. “You might want this, when you find her. We’ve tested it—magic doesn’t penetrate it. It will keep her from turning you into shrubbery.”

Hands shaking, I took it. The metal felt chilled, as if the box had been recently stored in a freezer. I didn’t trust myself to speak. I shoved the box into my front pocket. It bulged, and I felt the corners press against my thigh.

Ahead, I heard voices. Malcolm’s office door swung open. We had to leave now. Smiling weakly at Lou, I pivoted and strode back toward the elevators. Zach walked fast beside me. My heart was beating so loudly that I was certain Lou could hear it.

“Gallo! Harrington!” Lou called after us.

From his office, Malcolm called, “Sir?”

I looked over my shoulder to see Malcolm, the real Malcolm, step into the hallway. I broke into a run as I heard him say, “What the hell—”

An alarm began to sound, and a red light flashed and spun in rhythm with the sirens. I looked back again. Oddly, Lou wasn’t chasing us. He merely watched from the hallway. With one hand, he blocked Malcolm from chasing us as well. I caught a glimpse of Malcolm’s expression:
Fear
, I thought.
Of
me?
For
me? But others were running toward us, and there was no time to puzzle it out.

Zach stabbed the elevator button.

It didn’t open.

Shoving the stairwell door open, I pulled Zach with me. The door slammed behind us and then was pulled open again an instant later. An agent burst into the stairwell.

Zach grabbed me and planted his lips on mine, inhaling my magic with my breath. As the agent lunged for my arm, Zach shot into the air with his arms tight around my waist. We rocketed up the open center of the stairwell. Below us, several agents pounded up the stairs, but we were faster.

At the top, at level five, I yanked the door handle—locked. Zach breathed in more magic, and we slid through the metal door. We turned left, then right … At the end of the hall, the two guards in front of the steel door shouted and drew their guns.

The guns dissolved into water and collapsed on the floor in droplets.

Turning to me, Zach swiftly inhaled magic again, and I felt myself shrink, plummeting toward the floor. The world skewed—the carpet fibers were as thick and high as underbrush in a forest, and the ceiling was impossibly high. I swiveled my
head and saw a beetle, monstrously huge … He’d turned us into beetles.
Clever boy
, I thought. But what about the box? Looking around, I didn’t see it, and Zach was on the move.

Scurrying after him, I wove through the carpet.

Footsteps shook the floor. Looking like mountains in motion, the guards scoured the hallway. A boot landed near me, and I jerked back. The foot lifted, and the carpet fibers were mashed where he’d stepped. I darted forward as fast as my many legs could move.

Up ahead, I saw Zach squeeze beneath the door. I hurried after him, flattened, and slid on my smooth, slick stomach. At the end of the next hall was another door, but this one was flush to the floor. We’d never fit under it.

Zach bumped his head against mine. His legs clicked on the tile floor. And then I felt my body expand like a balloon. Soon I was human again—myself, not Aunt Nicki—and Zach was himself again too. My clothes were restored. I felt my pocket—the box was still there. The box and my clothes must have transformed with me, melding into my exoskeleton. He kissed me again and inhaled deeply. “Extra magic,” he said. “Just in case.”

This door had a palm reader but no guards. We ran through it. The next door required a combination code. We ran through it as well. The fourth door was guarded.

The guards already had their guns drawn.

“Shoot the male,” one instructed. “Don’t hit the female.”

Before I could react, before I could think, the other guard squeezed the trigger. Zach jerked backward, his hand torn out
of mine. The sound echoed and continued to echo, reverberating through the hall and through my bones. And then the bullet clattered to the floor at Zach’s feet. “Bulletproof,” Zach said as he lunged toward me and brushed his lips against mine. An instant later, the guards’ jackets caught fire.

Startled, they dropped their guns. One began pounding the fire on his chest. The other shed his jacket as quickly as possible and stomped on the flames.

We ran forward and through the door into the silver room.

Silver walls. Silver ceiling. Spotless white floor.

I still had no memory of this place, other than from my failed attempt to remember it before. But I’d had visions with silver mirrors and silver walls.

“Dead end,” Zach said. “Knew it was a trap. It was too easy.”

“They
shot
you.” I never, ever wanted to see that again.

“Lou should have stopped us before we even left the third floor. But he didn’t.”

Grabbing his hand, I walked straight toward one of the silver walls. In a vision, I’d walked through a silver wall into a meadow. The Storyteller had been there, knitting a red ribbon on the steps of the wagon.
There
, I thought,
I want to go there
. Behind us, the door burst open and slammed against the wall. Two armed agents ran into the room. But they were too late. Reaching the wall, we melted into it.

I felt coolness wrap around me, as if I were wrapped in chilled towels. It was hard to feel Zach’s hand. It felt swaddled
in wool, distant. My body felt numb. And then I stepped with Zach out of a silver mirror that lay on the ground in the middle of a meadow.

The sky was a startling blue, and the air was light and warm.

“Whoa,” Zach said.

Birds called to each other—so many birds that their calls mashed together in a cacophony louder than screams. They flew in thick batches that looked like swooping clouds against the sky.
Sparrows
, I thought, watching the birds. This was where I’d learned about sparrows.

“‘Flock’ isn’t an adequate word for this many birds.” Zach strained to see them all. “Needs a special name, like bevy of quail, charm of finches, murder of crows, parliament of owls …”

“They’re sparrows.”

“Host of sparrows. I may have made that up, or—”

“Shh,” I said.

The meadow stretched endlessly in all directions. It was coated in delicate wildflowers that swayed and dipped in the breeze. After I’d walked through the silver mirror, I’d waited here by the wagon while the Magician and the Storyteller erected the tent for the show …

Spurred by the memory, I ran forward through the flowers. Only a few yards from where the silver mirror lay, the grass was matted in a broad circle. No flowers grew, and the grass was sickly and yellow, as if it had been blocked from the sun. My heart was thumping so hard it almost hurt. I
knew
this place! I’d been here with the Storyteller and the Magician. Our tent
had been here, near the other tents, and our wagon had been beside it.

“You remember this place,” Zach said. It was more of a statement than a question.

I nodded.

“Do you remember other places?” Zach asked.

I nodded again.

“Then … we need some kind of plan. Maybe you, the Magician, and the Storyteller will have a nice reunion where you share childhood memories. But if the agency didn’t lie … I’d rather not end up chopped to pieces and stuffed in a box.”

I pulled the box out of my pocket and held it in the palm of my hand. The silver winked in the sunlight. “Lou gave me this to use against myself. We can use it trap the Magician.”

“Very poetically appropriate,” Zach said. “How does it work?”

“Open the lid, touch someone with the clasp, and they’re sucked inside. They can’t call for help; sound can’t penetrate it. They can’t use magic to escape; magic can’t penetrate either.”

“And Lou gave it to you. That’s a stroke of luck that tips right over into massively suspicious.”

I slid it back in my pocket. “He also didn’t let Malcolm chase us.”

“He wanted us to escape—or, more accurately, you,” Zach said, and I nodded unhappily. He could be right. They didn’t try to shoot me, only him. “On the plus side, maybe it means no one will try to stop you.”

“Or maybe it means the carnival is a trap.” I scanned the meadow. As far as I could tell, we were alone, except for the sparrows.

“But is it a trap for you, or for him?”

I walked around the outer edge of the matted grass. Suddenly, finding this place didn’t feel so wonderful. “Lou, Malcolm, Aidan … they’re playing a game, but no one ever told me the rules or even let me see the board.”

“Then don’t play,” Zach said. “We can go anywhere. Any world. No one would ever find us. We could invent new lives. Leave our pasts behind.”

Overhead, the birds dipped and swirled in clouds of feathers that cast shadows on the meadow. “You’d be living a lie. I can’t ask you to do that.”

“You’re not asking; I’m offering.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because …” He trailed off, staring at me. “Wait. You’re not quite yourself yet. I was too rushed.” He kissed me lightly, and I felt pressure in my face as my features shifted. My cheekbones subtly rose. My body lengthened minutely. My painted fingernails reverted to my plain unpainted half moons. I ran my fingers over my cheeks and nose. Zach, I realized, had memorized me the way I had memorized Malcolm. “Because when I’m with you, I feel whole,” he said. “Because with you, life doesn’t feel brutish and short. It feels beautiful … and short.”

“I think that makes the most sense of anything I’ve ever heard you say.”

He grinned at me. “So, run away with me? Explore the multiverse?”

The way he said it … I felt the possibilities open in front of me, like morning sun illuminating hidden paths. But I couldn’t. There was too much emptiness still inside me. I shook my head. “I can’t feel whole, even with you. I need answers.” As I said it, I realized how true it was. I’d spent enough time hiding. Before I could run again, I had to know more.

His grin faded, and I wished I’d said a simple yes instead. Above, the sparrows switched directions again, their cries filling the air. The wind blew the grasses and wildflowers sideways, and it blew my hair across my face. I wiped my hair from my eyes.

Zach took a deep breath. “Okay, then, how’s this for a plan: you give me magic before we enter the carnival. I should be able to hold it for a little while, maybe up to half an hour, before I lose it. We find the Magician as quickly as we can, you distract him and I throw magic at him—toss him at you? You touch him with the box, and bam, it’s over.”

“And what if the agency lied, and he isn’t a killer?”

“Then we open the box.”

I considered the plan. “Simple. But effective.”

“Simple plans are best,” Zach said. “Supervillains always have complex plans and end up eaten by their own laser-toting sharks. Come on, let’s do it before I utterly chicken out.” He held out his hand. I took it, and we walked back to where the silver mirror lay, embedded in the earth and surrounded by tall grass and pink-and-white flowers. I thought
of another memory: when I’d fled to Zach’s house, I’d remembered a church with a graveyard. I fixed that image firmly in my head.

Together, we stepped onto the mirror, and we fell straight down into it.

A second later, we crashed onto bare dirt inside a circle of pillars. Six pillars were encased in mirrorlike silver and had been polished to reflect the blazing sun. I stood. Dusting off his knees, Zach stood beside me. On the other side of the pillars were marble statues and granite headstones silhouetted against the bleached-out sky. A church with red doors sat on a hill. Beyond the church and the graveyard was a vast expanse of dusty land.

Yes, this was the place I’d remembered. The carnival came here often. We used to set up our tents in the field of dust by the church.

Inhaling deeply, I imagined I could smell the carnival. Once, in this place, there had been a boy with diamonds knotted in his dreadlocks. He’d come to see the Magician, and he’d given flowers to the contortionist. I remembered they’d smelled sickly sweet, like one of the Magician’s potions. The boy hadn’t been interested in the animals, even the exotic ones from worlds without humans, but he had tried the games. He’d liked the archery test with the arrows that burst into flame and then dispersed as red-winged butterflies, as well as the ball toss into the mermaid’s tank. One hundred points if it landed in the treasure chest without the mermaid catching it. She always caught it. I’d watched the boy all afternoon, like I
was supposed to, until I saw the woman wrapped in scarves watching me.

Like I was supposed to?
I didn’t know where that thought had come from or what it meant. “I think … I want to leave.”

I looked again at the marble statues. One of them was looking back.

Barely breathing, I held out my hand, and Zach took it. Retreating, we walked through a silver pillar. This time, we emerged in the middle of an ancient forest. The silver portal was embedded in a tree trunk. The ground was littered in leaves and dry needles, and the canopy of leaves blocked all but thin tendrils of sun. It was
the
forest, the one from my memory.

I knew all these places.

My memories … the visions … they weren’t lies.

Zach’s breath hissed. “Look up. There’s … quite a view.” His voice was light, but it shook. He pointed toward the tops of the trees.

Houses were nestled in the treetops. Bird men and bird women soared between them, their lithe bodies twisting between the branches. I remembered that the acrobats had performed in those branches, or ones like them. And the boy in the golden shirt had watched them. Later, we had chased him through the woods—the Magician, the Storyteller, and me. The Magician had carried me. I hadn’t been fast enough on my own, and the boy had been fast. We caught him anyway.

“Keep going?” Zach asked.