The dragon considered. And seemed to buy it. Still ... “And you would help me,” he asked, “on account of the long-standing friendship between us?”
“On account of,” I corrected him, “my enmity with the sprites. I would help anyone if it got back at them.”
His taloned claw shot out and took hold of me. He didn't believe me and was about to squeeze the life out of me, I was sure of it.
But then I realized that he was in the air and we were out of the cave.
Without Emily.
Without Emily.
“What are you doing?” I screamed at him.
“Flying to the island of the sprites,” he told me in his big, booming voice, “to get their magic well from them.”
“You can't do that!” I yelled.
Did he hear me? He had to hear me, but he didn't respond.
Maybe he thought I was talking from a moralistic standpoint. Or that I doubted his strength.
I knew “because you can't abandon my sister” wouldn't be a winning argument.
I told him, “A well doesn't work if it's out of the ground.” Of course, we were talking about a magic well, so was that the same? Oh, wait a sec. I was making the whole thing up. All I had to do was sound reasonable enough to convince the dragon. “A well—any well—draws its strength from the ground. Uproot it, and all you'll have is a lawn decoration.”
The dragon's speed had decreased noticeably.
“What you need to do—” I started.
“—is kill off all the sprites,” he interrupted, “so I can use the well where it is.”
As engaging as that thought was, I'd already calculated that it wouldn't help. “Yes,” I said. “Except ... it's hard to say if the sprites' magic would die with them.”
Annoyed—probably at my constantly saying he was wrong—the dragon blew a tongue of flame into the night air.
“I have a suggestion,” I told him.
Since he didn't throw me down to the earth in exasperation, I continued, speaking in fits and starts as the words came to me, urging him to move quickly, because I didn't want him to have enough time to think about the implausibility of all this.
“What you should do—and I'll help you, since the sprites have been so mean to me and my sister—is bring a whole bunch of your gold—quickly, before it turns bad—to their land, and double it—because magically created gold can't be...”—I still didn't have a word for it—“...de-golded—so you'll be safe from their wily schemes. If we work quietly and secretly, they won't know what we're up to, and you can make several batches of tamper-free gold.”
I saw he was heading toward a mountain. He had stopped believing me, and was about to hurl me at its side. Closer ... closer...
There was a crack in the stone. Maybe he'd flung other annoying people at the same place...
Oh, no, wait. It was his mountain. I'd been too caught up in trying to get him to turn back to realize that he had circled around.
Through that narrow entry he shot, skidding to a stop beyond where Emily still lay snoozing, and he dropped me onto the pile of gold.
Ouch! Don't believe what people say about gold being a “soft” metal.
“There's a flying carpet,” the dragon told me. “Somewhere beneath that.”
After some digging—after quite a bit of digging—we found it, rolled up in a corner.
Not that I've ever seen a flying carpet before, but I'd assumed it would look like an Oriental rug—you know, deep burgundy or midnight-blue, lots of flowers or geometric shapes, an intricate design that desert nomad women had spent years weaving from traditional motifs. This looked like the pink shaggy rug my aunt Kathy has in her guest bathroom. Except bigger. A little bigger. I'm estimating probably three people could sit on it.
The dragon started piling gold on the rug, from edge to edge, to edge to edge—and about as high up as someone sitting. I have no idea what gold was worth on the current exchange, but this looked to be at least ten times the amount Emily had kept in her treasure chest in the pavilion, so I strongly suspected our almost-eighty-eight-thousand-gold-piece fine would be covered.
“Carpet, up,” the dragon commanded. “Follow, and do not lose your cargo.”
The carpet rose off the ground.
This time, I was waiting and watching for the dragon's claw to come at me. “Wait!” I cried.
“NOW WHAT?” he thundered.
“My sister. We can't leave her behind.”
“Of course we can,” he said, picking me up and flying through the crack, back out into the world.
I craned around and saw the carpet tip to fit sideways, and not a single coin fell.
“It costs you nothing to bring my sister!” I screamed over the sound of the wind and the flapping of the dragon's wings. “And you keep my goodwill.”
“I'll keep more of your goodwill,” the dragon said, “if you are dependent on me to see your sister again.”
Okay, so maybe he wasn't as gullible as I'd hoped.
The mountain grew smaller and smaller with each powerful beat of the dragon's wings. And then it was lost in the distance and the darkness of night.
Emily! I'm sorry!
I tried to send my thoughts zinging telepathically to my sister.
Not that there was any reason to believe telepathy worked in this world.
But I had promised I'd stay with her.
Of course, there was no real reason to believe she knew or felt anything anymore. She had slept through all the dragon's earthquake-sized roars, and there was no evidence she would have somehow been aware if I'd been sitting by her side. She didn't know I'd abandoned her.
Still, I did.
It was probably all for the best that the last thing Emily had been conscious of was that I was working on a plan, and that she didn't know it had failed.
I stopped looking behind us, where all I could see was the flying carpet keeping up with us, and turned in the direction the dragon was flying. There was a glow coming over the horizon. It can't be dawn, I thought. Surely it wasn't that late. Besides, this didn't look like dawn. I associated sunrise with pink and mauve and orange, and clouds outlined in light almost too bright to look at.
And this was just white glow.
More like, I realized, light pollution.
We were approaching a big city.
We were flying over water, coming on an island. The dragon had said the sprites lived on an island. But I had pictured meadows and streams and toadstool houses or darling little nestlike homes built into trees, maybe a tiny Dutch-style windmill or two.
Instead, there were skyscrapers. Okay, they were spritesized skyscrapers, which means they looked more like Barbie Does Manhattan than like New York or Tokyo. But since we were in the air, that just made me feel as though I were in an airplane, high above a metropolitan center. Some bored designer at Rasmussem obviously had an untraditional sense of humor and way too much time on his hands, designing something so elaborate that 99 percent of players would never see.
As the dragon lowered, coming in for a landing, we could see sprite-sized sports cars and stretch limos. On the street corners, FLUTTER and DON'T FLUTTER traffic signals guided the pedestrians. Electronic billboards and neon lights announced stores and casinos, live entertainment, hairrelaxing treatments, and—who could have guessed?—karaoke bars. As we got even nearer, I could hear a tiny little voice singing “Achy-Breaky Heart.” So far, nobody had looked up and noticed us blotting out the stars, but that wouldn't last long.
“Where is this magic well?” the dragon demanded.
I'd been expecting to be able to tell the dragon he needed to wait for me on the outskirts of the sprites' settlement. I'd thought I could offer to sneak the gold to the well, but that instead I would find a sprite or two on whom to bestow the gold on behalf of all spritekind, and that this act would send me and Emily back home before the dragon realized I'd betrayed him. But there were no outskirts.
Another plan fallen flat on its face
.
“Where is this magic well?” the dragon repeated. A complication evidently crossed his dragon mind. “How will you know it when you see it?”
Good question.
I had no answer.
Somebody had spotted us. Sprites were beginning to point up at us, their shrill voices complaining.
And then I saw it—a pair of water fountains in front of a building that had signs in the windows flashing LOTTO and SHOES—EXTRA-WIDE SIZES. The sprays of water from the fountains were illuminated by changing colored lights and were timed to spritz into each other, forming a watery arch for customers entering the establishment to walk under.
And that, I figured, was the closest thing to a magic well I was going to find here.
“There!” I shouted to the dragon, pointing.
“Which one is the magical one?”
He was the only one for whom it made a difference. “The one on the right,” I assured him.
“IF YOU ARE DECEIVING ME, YOU WILL SUFFER,” the dragon warned.
Didn't I know that already?
“Carpet!” the dragon commanded. “Into the water!”
The carpet hurtled downward. It was big enough, and heavy enough, and traveling at a great enough speed that when it splashed into the fountain, the ensuing wall of water drenched all the sprites on that city block.
Ooo, and I thought they'd been shrill and complaining before.
Before the dragon could notice that all we had was wet, angry sprites, not twice as much gold, I shouted down at them: “A gift from Grace and Emily Pizzelli—a repayment of our debt to you, as directed by King Rasmussem!”
Except they didn't say, “Oh, well, then, that's that, thank you very much.” And King Rasmussem didn't materialize and say, “Good job, so I'll send you both back home now.” And there was no fizziness and returning to Rasmussem.
It hadn't worked.
My plan hadn't worked.
“WHAT TRICKERY IS THIS?" the dragon roared. He shook me until my brain rattled. Even after he stopped with the shaking, no doubt preferring a still target for when he blasted his dragon breath at me, I couldn't see straight, and my brain continued bouncing off the sides of my skull, making a disconcerting click click click click click sound.
It's alarming to hear your brain clatter around inside your head.
Except it's sort of, I realized, wondering what was taking the dragon so long to finish me off, it's kind of like King Rasmussem’s arcade wheel—the one that showed how much life force Emily and I had left.
But not really, because it was more like a hospital's heart monitor.
And then I heard Ms. Bennett say, “She's back.”
Chapter 23
Playing by the Numbers
IT WAS PROBABLY because I'd been hearing that heart monitor that I had the impression my heart must have stopped and a doctor back at Rasmussem had started to pound my chest.
But then I realized, no, it was just that Mom had thrown herself across me. “Grace!” she cried, her voice muffled against my T-shirt. “Grace! Thank God!”
And it was that, more than Ms. Bennett's words, “She's back,” that told me Emily wasn't with me.
It's not that I'm mentally whining, Mom and Dad always loved Emily best. But Emily had been gone longer, much longer, and I had to believe that if we'd both returned to Rasmussem, Mom was more likely to acknowledge her first.
“I'm all right,” I said, struggling to sit up, to see Emily, even though I knew there was nothing new to see.
Ms. Bennett was in the cubicle, as was Adam, the tech guy. I'd been expecting to see my father, summoned back from California after all this time. But then I realized that, although I'd been away two days in the game, that meant no more than a half hour had passed in the real world. Most likely, Dad was still in his meeting and didn't even know about Emily yet.
I could see Emily on the other couch, motionless. She was the one with the heart monitor attached to her. That was new. Someone at Rasmassem was worried that her condition was deteriorating. Beep ... beep ... beep... Steady. No sign of stress. No sign of waking up. I'd hoped that, maybe, she was right behind me.
Apparently not.
Apparently, the king of the gypsies wasn't going to accept money returned to the sprites on behalf of Emily if Emily wasn't present.
It's not fair! I wanted to shout. She would have been with me if that stupid dragon hadn’t been so stubborn!
Instead, I said, “Okay, I've got it now. Send me back.”
“Are you out of your mind?” my mother demanded.
Well, maybe, but that wasn't what was important.
“It's all set now,” I said. “I understand why the Return Home function wasn't working, and it's working again.”
Ms. Bennett looked skeptical, and that was worse than Mom not believing. “I don't know—” she started.
“There's no time!” I shouted. “I know how to get Emily!”
Mom's fingers were digging into my shoulders. She shook me and shouted right back at me, “I can't lose both of you!” Her voice was ragged, her eyes red, the area between her nose and her lip slick with snot, evidence that she had spent most of the last thirty minutes sobbing, too distressed to worry about appearances. “I can't lose both of you,” she said more calmly, to impress on me that she meant it.
“You don't need to lose either one of us,” I assured her. Assured Ms. Bennett. Assured Adam, although I doubt he really cared all that much. “I need, like, three minutes, tops,” I told them. “I can do this.”
“Grace...” Mom said in a tone that I knew meant no.
“Mom, she was afraid to come home because she thought you and Dad would be angry and disappointed in her. But now she knows that disappointed is better than devastated. She's changed her mind. She wants to come back. All I need to do is fetch the magic carpet, return to the cave, hope the dragon isn't there yet, get Emily, pile on more gold, and talk the sprites into accepting it.”
Mom squinted, trying to concentrate, trying to follow this.
“Never mind,” I said. “The point is I know how to do it, but time is running out.”
“What if something else goes wrong,” Mom asked, “and you get stuck in there again?”
“What if I get run over by a car while I'm on my way to school?” I countered. “What if a plane crashes into our house? You can't protect me against everything, and I can't live life afraid to move.”
“Not the same,” Mom said.
“I can do this,” I repeated.
Mom bit her lip. “Or do you just really, really want to believe you can?”
I hoped it wasn't only wishful thinking, although I knew it might be. I simply said, once more, “I can do it.” She was crying again, her whole body shaking, but since she wasn't actually saying no, I acted as though she'd given permission. I hugged her and said, “Five minutes at the very most. Count to five hundred. Before you get there, I'll be back. Emily and I will be back.” It was so hard to look at her in this much pain that I turned away to Ms. Bennett to tell her, “Don't put me with Emily. Put me where the magic carpet is.”
She was biting her lip, too, but then she reached over to the console, and I quickly lay down.
I heard Adam whisper to her in a warning singsong, “Mr. Kroll isn't going to like this,” and I closed my eyes to pretend that I was already there, that it was already too late for any of us to change her mind.
A butterfly landed on my arm, welcoming me back to the Land of the Golden Butterflies. But I was lying on something cold and wet and lumpy and—Oh! What was that stench?
I opened my eyes and saw that my nose was inches away from a broken laundry basket full of old, crunched-down-heel sneakers. Both the laundry basket and the shoes were sprite-sized. Eww! Who would have thought such pretty little creatures had such stinky feet?
During the three or four minutes I'd spent at Rasmussem, time here had continued, and the sun had come up, casting an early-morning golden glow on my surroundings. On
e thing was certain: although I was outside, I was no longer in the city in front of the pair of water fountains.
But where was I?
I sat up. Beyond the split laundry basket was a rusted doll-sized shopping cart that was minus one wheel and had one smashed-in corner. The cart held a shadeless table lamp, a tarnished wall mirror, and a wall clock with a cracked face and only one hand. And beyond that were bundled-up-and-tied-with-a-string newspapers and magazines and books piled on an ugly couch that had no cushions. And beyond that, a chipped and dented washing machine had been placed on the roof of a sprite limo that had no doors, no seat, and no engine. And beyond that...
What a bunch of junk! I thought.
And with that, I finally put together where I was: a junkyard.
Acres and acres of junkyard.
Wonderful. How would I ever find the magic carpet in all this garbage?
I stood up and found the carpet. That was the cold, wet, lumpy thing I'd been lying on. Apparently, someone had fished it out of the fountain and not realized it was worth drying and saving.
Although now I was chilled and stiff, not to mention wearing soggy clothing, this, finally, was a little bit of luck. I was overdue for luck.
“Carpet,” I ordered, “up.”
Nothing. Could dampness have caused it to experience the magical equivalent of shorting out?
I was trying to wring it like a bulky, cold, nasty washcloth, when a voice like a landslide bellowed, “I knew I shouldn't have trusted you!”
Dropping the rug, I whirled around.
It was the dragon. Of course it was the dragon.
I took a step back. Not that a step back was going to save me from a blast of his fiery breath. Nor would it keep him from grabbing hold of me and squeezing the life out of me with his powerful claw. Or finishing that shake-my-brain-loose action my return to Rasmussem had interrupted. Or how about popping me into his mouth like a salted peanut?
But the fact that I had the time to think up these dire alternatives proved ... well, I'm not sure what it proved, but it proved something.
I took a closer look at the dragon.