“Oh.” Scott winced. “I didn’t know.”
“The largest thing I ever held together with magic is this castle, boy,” said Fray.
“I . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. I can’t keep all this stuff straight.”
“Did I cast a spell. You’re as bad as King Denzil and his cronies. You think I’m some kind of genie—”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Scott interrupted, “but I’m just really confused now! This island is the center of Pretannica!”
“Pretannica?”
“It’s what we’ve been calling this world. Sorry. But if this world is just a bubble, then this island is dead center!”
Fray frowned. “Is it now.”
“You didn’t know?”
She huffed. “I’ve explored a lot of our world, boy, but I’m no cartographer. I don’t have a map of the world’s boundaries—”
“Well, I do,” said Scott, and he rummaged through his backpack.
Fee poked his head up through the grate. “I’m here!” he panted. “I’m . . . what are we talking about?”
Scott slapped the Freeman’s map down on the castle floor. “My friend Merle helped make the Gloria happen,” Scott said, “with his time machines. It was an accident. But that was way over here, in Avalon. Avalon was the center of the Gloria. So why isn’t Avalon the center of Pretannica?”
He thought he’d been doing pretty well but now saw that he’d lost Fray’s attention entirely. She was looking past Scott at something out her window. Scott turned. There were a couple of figures, walking up the beach.
“More of your giants, Fray?” asked Denzil.
But they weren’t. Scott squinted. He could just recognize them—his dad, and Merle. Polly squealed, hopped up and down.
“My giants are in the caverns below for now,” said Fray, “on my orders. But I’ll confess it’s not the figures on the beach that have my attention.”
Scott saw it now too, a distant speck above his father’s head.
“It’s the figure in the sky.”
CHAPTER 18
Emily was in a fishbowl.
That was how she would have described it later, if she’d ever described it later. A big round glass tank above a metal grate, and studded all over the top with retractable needles. At eight points there were holes in the tank for pink rubber gloves, pointing inward, that Freemen could use to maneuver Emily, or hold her still.
The needles connected to some kind of hospital diagnostic machine. The machine went beep, beep, beep.
She felt certain that Erno was in such a tank too. But she hadn’t seen him since they’d arrived here, at the Goodco headquarters, on a man-made island in the middle of Lake Meer.
When the Freemen came again, she retreated into her thoughts. She didn’t have to think about them pushing, prodding, holding her with those pink gloves if she didn’t want to. Instead she plucked at the wires of her headgear and recited pi to 116 places while a hypodermic filled with a familiar pink solution extended slowly toward her neck.
She didn’t notice them leave.
Recently, in that ramshackle row house in London, she had broken Nimue’s enchantment with a four-leaf clover, and it had been like the sun shining inside her mind. This felt more like all the windows frosting over. It dimmed the light, sure, but the frost made such interesting patterns. So intricate and interlocking, like a puzzle. She could stare at them all day. She did.
Suddenly, it became clear that this cage of hers had flaws. She could escape. It was so obvious.
She pushed one of the gloves inside out so that it was pointing away from her tank, and used the opening as a foothold. Stepping up, she snapped the longest needle off the end of its barrel and used this to perforate all the rubber seals that rooted the hypodermics in place. Before long she could rip out the seals and pull all the ends of the needles until she’d dragged that diagnostic machine right up to the tank.
The machine beeped, beeped, beeped.
She perforated the cuff of one of the gloves and ripped it out too. Then she could reach through and remove the faceplate of the machine. With the front off, it beeped louder, as if offended.
It was a simple matter to change the waveform of the beeping to a steady tone, and then change the pitch of that tone. She was just going to have to guess at the resonant frequency of the glass tank, but she knew in her heart that she’d be right as she discharged the capacitors and the machine screamed loud, and high. She pulled her arms back quickly as the fishbowl shattered to pieces all around her.
She jumped clear of the glass and ran to the nearest door, then shrank as she heard approaching footsteps. The door opened before she could act, but it was no mere Freeman standing there.
“Dad!” Emily cried.
Mr. Wilson smiled down at her. He was dressed all in black, dressed for a rescue, and he lifted her high.
“Emily. Emily, I’m so, so sorry. I should have rescued you a long time ago.”
“You were sick,” Emily told him. “The Milk made you sick. You weren’t yourself.”
“Well.” He smiled wider. “I am now. We have to move fast. I have a plan, but we’re running out of time—Nimue’s close to bringing Saxbriton across a rift to Earth.”
“I know,” said Emily, and she realized she did know. How curious.
Mr. Wilson shot a furtive glance around the corner, then carried her into the corridor.
“Erno’s here too,” Emily told him.
“I know. I found him first. He’s safe.”
“Biggs too.”
Mr. Wilson checked around another corner, then turned down it at a run.
“I had a dream that you came to rescue me,” Emily told him. She had to think about that for a second. “I’ve had a couple dreams like that, since they brought me here. But now it’s real. It’s really happening.”
Something nearby was beeping. Faintly, but getting louder.
“What . . . what is that?” Emily asked. “Should we be worried about that?”
Mr. Wilson didn’t answer.
“It’s getting closer . . . or louder. The beeping. Don’t you hear it? Dad?”
She looked up at his face, but the thing carrying her wasn’t Mr. Wilson anymore.
She flinched and came to in the fishbowl. The cold glass cage with its gloves and needles intact, its beeping neighbor sitting unmolested across the linoleum floor.
A woman laughed, somewhere and everywhere—the forced laughter of someone who knows her joke isn’t really all that funny.
CHAPTER 19
It was more than a speck in the sky now, and getting larger fast. As Scott watched, there was a flash of blue that quickly faded.
“I’ve only been on this rock a handful of years, Scott,” said Fray. “I’ve been learning what I could about its doors. I’ve grown sensitive to them. If I concentrate very hard, I can even see the palest shadows of living things on the other side.”
Scott was impressed. He could see the doors themselves, but he couldn’t see that.
“I mention this,” Fray continued, “because for all these years there has rarely been anything living near the western door, by the tapestry, apart from the occasional seabird. But for the last hour, there have been a great many living things by that door, and now something massive approaches. I can feel it pull, like gravity. And now . . . and now an altogether different massive thing descends on my island from the east. Do you see?”
Scott watched it get larger, this dusky pink, flashing thing in the sky.
“Boy . . . what have you idiots led to my doorstep?”
“Told you!” said Merle.
“So you did,” said the queen.
“Not an iceberg,” Merle continued. “Just some kind of illusion, to keep boats away from the island.”
“Apparently.”
John heaved at the rowboat and dragged it a little farther up on the rocks. There wasn’t really anything to tie it to. He looked out at the Titanic and waved, though he doubted th
e crew could see them. It was pretty far away, and were they all invisible now because of the iceberg illusion? If everything went well with Fray, he wouldn’t have the chance to ask them.
As he turned away from the ship, he saw it. The thing in the sky. The pink birdlike shape, the flash of blue as its jaws opened and closed.
“Oh no,” he whispered.
“I SEEEEE YOU!” came a voice, impossibly loud, amplified as if by magic. Of course by magic. Only Morgan le Fay would cast a spell just to make her voice louder, because riding bareback on a fire-breathing dragon wasn’t terrifying enough. She sounded like she might still be mad about them rescuing Queen Elizabeth and then not dying afterward.
John scooped up the queen, quite possibly wounding her dignity in the process, and placed her safely inside his pack.
“Hell,” said Merle. “Hell hell hell.”
“You are my valiant knight,” the queen told him from inside the backpack. “You faced her before, you can do it again.”
“But it’s worse than just a dragon, or just a sorceress,” said John. “My ex-wife worked for Goodco. They sent her to Antarctica to investigate a really large rift down there. They knew it was there, they just couldn’t figure out where it led to. It led to this island. I just showed them how to get Saxbriton to the real world.”
“They’re both real worlds,” said Polly. “This one just has more special effects.”
John turned. “Polly! Wh—? You’re . . . how?” he stammered, his eyes popping at her size, her wings, the fact that she was here at all. “Ha?” he added vaguely.
Fi was here too, with his brothers. They all had new spears from Fray’s armory.
John went down on his knees. “My little girl,” he said. His hands hovered, aching to pick her up. “My surprisingly little girl. I’m afraid I’ll break you. How are you here?”
“In recent times I was not entirely forthcoming with you, John,” said Fi. “About our plans, I mean. It’s a state of affairs that I hope to live long enough to rectify.”
John tried to kiss Polly on the forehead, settled for kissing pretty much all her head and neck.
Polly winced, smiling and wiping her face. “Scott’s here too,” she said. “And Mick.”
“They are?” said John. He looked desperately about for them as the monster in the sky barreled down.
“Finchbriton!” called Fi, and the finch descended and hopped across the rocks to where he stood. “Little bird, would you be my Pegasus?”
They whistled to each other, and Finchbriton took to the air above Fi, beating his wings in a hover until the prince could leap up to grasp one of his talons. Then they rose, heavily, into the wind.
“Polly, get inside the castle!” John shouted, just as Morgan and the dragon came into range. Morgan began raining down concussive blasts, as if they were her own furious thoughts given force and unleashed upon the island. Black rocks exploded and peppered the air. John ran out to meet Saxbriton, thinking he might draw Morgan’s fire, and he caught the edge of a blast that sent him skidding across the jagged ground.
The dragon dove low and spewed like a volcano, spattering the island with hot bile and shooting a jet of blue flame through Fray’s grand window. It shattered horribly, tragically, with a kind of Tinker Bell music that was entirely unsuited. Then Saxbriton pulled up, skimming the peak of the castle as she rose into the air. The course of her wings sent everyone sprawling, sent the pixie brothers’ spears clattering back down to the ground.
“Polly! Merle! You both okay?” called John.
“Polly’s here, she’s okay,” said Scott, who’d only just emerged from underground with Mick in tow. He was too large to have exited the castle at ground level as the pixies had.
“Scott! I wish you’d all just stay inside the castle.”
“I don’t think there’s going to be an inside the castle soon,” said Scott.
“I suppose you’re right,” said John, and he watched Saxbriton bank slowly and turn to strafe them again.
“Can anyone see Fi?” Polly called.
Fi, and Finchbriton, unnoticed by all, rose to meet the returning threat.
“I HATE YOU AAAALLLLLL!” Morgan wailed. “UGLY UGLY UGLY UGLY—”
It was anybody’s guess where she was going with this—they’d never find out. She cut her thought short, having just spotted something small and unlikely in the sky ahead.
“SOME KIND OF LONG-LEGGED SPARROW,” she murmured, her voice still unnaturally loud. Then the bottom half of this strange chimera—was it a pixie?—hurled a spear through her eye.
Her scream was a terrible thing to hear. It wasn’t improved any when Finchbriton set her on fire, but they all got a break after she pitched off the dragon’s back and fell into the sea.
“Ohmygosh,” said Polly.
Saxbriton, on the other hand, continued heedless of Morgan’s mishap. She skated over the top of the castle, just as Fray and Morenwyn appeared on the parapet. They shrieked and ducked, and the dragon raked a corner of the castle as she passed. The whole structure shuddered but held. John ran across her path as she snapped the air with her claws, and took a swipe at her belly before tumbling to avoid the crush. His sword bit deep, and Saxbriton cried out before beating her wings hard for open air again.
Merle was soon at John’s side, limping. “I think she’s still afraid of you,” he said. “It’s like she doesn’t want to land.”
“BRAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!” Morgan screamed, shooting like a rocket out of the ocean. Her head was all blackened like she’d gotten a face full of cartoon dynamite. There was a spear sticking out of her eye. She rose until she was several stories above the surface of the water, then hung there in the air, arms outstretched. Chanting. Fray chanted something of her own, and Morgan was beset by a hundred pecking seabirds.
“AAAHH!” said Morgan as she beat back keening flocks of seagulls. “DO IT, SAXBRITON! THE DOOR! DO IT NOW!”
Meanwhile the dragon had turned again, was reapproaching the island, and her belly glowed blue at the cracks in that familiar way. John looked around him—the island was scattered with people he loved, and it seemed impossible that not one of them would be consumed by the fire that was coming.
“Run!” he shouted. “Run toward her, not away! Scott, grab your sister!”
They did as he said, Merle, Scott, the pixies—Mick in Scott’s backpack, the queen in John’s. They ran frantically, recklessly, toward Saxbriton, and in a second the dragon stifled her fire—these insects were too close now to bake with a wide cone of flames. She’d hit one at best with her jet and waste the rest. Instead she threw her legs wide to slash at them with her claws, flicked her long tail to sweep them off the island.
John dove to avoid a front claw, rolled, hoped the queen was okay back there in his pack, and threw his sword arm high. It caught once more in Saxbriton’s belly, held fast, and John was jerked from where he lay, carried along as the dragon hurtled toward the shattered window of Fray’s castle. On the opposite side of the island, Merle was taken up by one of the beast’s rough talons.
“Here,” Scott told Polly. “Hold on to my jacket!”
“What?” she answered, but when he held her near it, she grabbed hold of his zipper all the same.
He ran, stuttering his feet, trying to time it right. Then he leaped, grabbed, and caught the spear tip of Saxbriton’s devilish tail. He felt one of his shoulders pop. He would have liked to have asked Mick and Polly what they thought of the plan he was hatching—they were along for the ride, after all—but when the time came, all he could do was scream in pain, and that didn’t explain anywhere near as much as he needed it to.
But he wondered: what happened when something tried to get through a rift and it had all these smaller living things holding on to it? What would happen if there weren’t any other little living things on the other side of the rift with which to trade places? Would Saxbriton swap with the whale that Goodco was positioning anyway, leaving John and Merle and Scott and Mick and
Polly and the queen behind? Or would all this added baggage prevent Saxbriton from making the Crossing?
That’s what Scott was hoping for, anyway. He didn’t count on a third possibility—that Saxbriton would cross, and that there would be enough Goodco people in place on the other side for the rest of them to cross too. All of them but Polly, as it turned out.
The pixie princes were running alongside them.
“I can’t hold on!” Polly squeaked.
“Drop and we will catch you!” shouted Denzil.
And she dropped. And they wouldn’t have. But just then Fi, still holding fast to an exhausted Finchbriton, took her hand in his.
Saxbriton brought her wings in close, passed through the ruined window, and skidded to a halt on the opposite end of the castle.
Then there was that weird touchy-stomach sensation of being in a rift, and they were gone.
CHAPTER 20
Scott couldn’t shake a kind of Pinocchio feeling—he had just, for a second, been in the middle of a whale. He wondered if the others had felt it. But now the whale was in Pretannica—in the middle of Fray’s castle, Scott supposed—and he was home.
Home.
Home was cold.
It was cold and full of Freemen with guns, and it had a dragon in it.
At some point he’d let go of Saxbriton’s wicked tail, and now he lay scraped and bruised on the Antarctic ice.
“Mick?” he said.
“Ugh,” said Mick.
“Freeze!” said someone.
Scott squinted up at a man in a fat pink coat with a pink assault rifle. “Is he talking to us?”
“Couldn’t be,” said Mick. “I’m already freezin’.”
“Shut up!” said the Freeman. “Shut up and don’t move or I’ll—”
WHUMP! A long pink tail sliced through the air and knocked the Freeman some sixty feet across the ice.
Scott scrambled to his feet and hustled himself and Mick out of the way. Saxbriton was putting on quite a show, whipping her neck and tail and beating her wings. She was surrounded on all sides by humans in pink coats, and she didn’t seem to like it.