The target of my musings looked at me over the rim of her cup. Her eyes narrowed. “You’re dwelling again,” she accused. “You can’t do that.”
“Can, will, do, watch me,” I said, and sighed. “What flavor do you have tonight?”
“Boysenberry chocolate maple vanilla banana with cookie dough and sprinkles,” she said. “I can tell when you’re changing the subject, you know.”
“Yes, but you go along with it anyway.” I wrinkled my nose. “That is a horrifying concoction.”
“I like it.” Fern took another slurp. “They let me clean out the machines.”
“Couldn’t someone get fired for that?”
Fern shrugged. “If someone got fired for everything that someone could get fired for, there wouldn’t be anyone to keep the Park running, and then the alligators would reclaim the land. Alligators everywhere. As far as the eye can see.”
“Right. Somehow it always ends with alligators for you.”
Fern’s grin displayed remarkably purple teeth. “That’s because alligators are awesome.”
The sound of the Clock of Ages striking one tolled through the Park, low and somehow ominous, like it had never been intended to be heard at this hour. That part was intentional: the engineers who controlled every aspect of Lowryland wanted the Clock of Ages to sound foreboding when it signaled the closing of the gates. Not enough to discourage repeat guests—heavens, no—but enough to put a bit of extra sparkle in their steps as they rushed for the exit. A dismaying percentage of them would be back tomorrow, ready to do the whole thing over again.
A cheer followed the tolling of the clock, rising from benches and cul-de-sacs all around Fairyland. Cast members who’d been hiding until the coast was clear began appearing as if by magic, rushing down the walkways that had been filled with tourists only a little while before. The smell of sweat and sunscreen still hung in the air, only slightly leavened by the layer of cordite left behind by the evening’s fireworks spectacular. Sometimes it amazes me that anyone can fly home after staying to watch the Lowryland fireworks. They should all set off the TSA chemical detectors as soon as they get within twenty yards.
Fern and I stayed where we were, watching the others stream by. She sipped her milkshake. I did the same.
“Have you heard from Megan?” I asked.
“She got here half an hour ago,” said Fern. “She brought the stuff.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.” Fern grinned at me again. “Still feel wiped out?”
“I think I just got my second wind.” I got to my feet, offering her my hand. She grabbed it, laughing, and bounced to her feet.
Together, hand in hand, we ran into the fairy-lit gloom of Lowryland. Like so many guests before us, we left our troubles behind. Unlike so many guests before us, we disposed of our trash in the appropriate receptacles, because we’re not assholes. Fine as that distinction can sometimes be.
* * *
Here’s a secret about Lowryland after dark: yeah, it shuts down hard at one AM, except on those rare and horrifying occasions when the place stays open for twenty-four hours to punish us all for believing in mercy, and no, it’s not possible to slyly turn a roller coaster back on for your own private edification. (Although the engineering teams do most of their testing and repair between the hours of two and six, and they’re always happy to have warm bodies to play sacrificial lamb when they’re messing with the settings.) But—and there’s always a “but” when you’re talking about something like this—that doesn’t mean the place is ever truly empty.
Maintenance happens after closing. Construction happens after closing. Sanitation happens after closing. And while cast members aren’t encouraged to stick around, since there are liability issues to be considered, we’re also not tossed out on our rears if we happen to linger for a while. If we’re willing to deal with the fact that the last bus from cast parking leaves at two, and don’t mind riding in an empty, reportedly haunted train back to housing, we’re free to do whatever pleases us.
According to a few of the cast members who swam downstream after getting booted from Disney, the Great Mouse has stricter rules about what employees can and can’t do after the lights go out. Lowry Entertainment, Inc., however, is aware that they’re the second choice for much of their target market, which means they have to keep their ticket prices just a sliver lower, their rides just a trifle better, and their employees just a bit happier. If being allowed to treat the Park as our private playground once the guests are gone aids in retention and keeps us all from trying to unionize or anything else profit-impacting like that, well, they can turn a few blind eyes.
Megan was waiting outside Lizzie and Laura’s meet-and-greet area, a long brown wig on her head and an athletic bag in her hand, which she held up enticingly while wiggling her hips like the world’s least erotic go-go dancer. It was like being lured by a happy children’s show host. Fern and I raced toward her regardless, Fern falling back at the last second to let me snatch the bag from Megan’s grasp. It was a shallow victory, granted more than earned, and I didn’t care, because the weight of what I held was so familiar that I could cry.
“Bad day?” asked Megan sympathetically.
“Not the worst, not the best,” I said. There was a bench about six feet away. I didn’t feel like going that far, and sat down where I stood, beginning to unlace my shoes. “You?”
“Lots of vomit and sunstroke. It was a vomit-and-sunstroke festival.”
“That’s a bad festival,” said Fern gravely.
Megan just laughed.
It can be easy to forget that gorgons aren’t mammals. The snakes on their heads are a solid clue that they’re not human, but head snakes are so biologically improbable that they don’t flip the “actually a pseudo-reptile wandering around in a vaguely human disguise” switch. Which is, to be fair, not a switch that most people use in their daily lives.
Gorgons are warm-blooded and control their own internal body temperature, but they’re not as susceptible to sunstroke as humans are, and they don’t burn. Even the palest gorgons can sit in the sun for hours without anything to show for it beyond happy snakes. I don’t know where they stand on vomiting, having never hated myself enough to ask, but since Megan regularly fed mice to the snakes on her head, and anything that goes down can come up, I sort of assumed she was capable of vomiting from a dozen mouths at a time. The extrusions of human children probably seemed like amateur hour to her.
Fern and Megan were chatting now, reviewing the minutiae of their days, and while I knew I was being a bad friend by shutting them out, I couldn’t help it. There was so little left in my life that felt like it was normal. This? This was normal.
When I ran from the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, leaving dead bodies and wounded friends and fire in my wake—leaving my life behind me—I’d taken nothing but what was already in my backpack, which had transformed somewhere along the way into a “go bag,” always ready for the next evacuation. That it had happened without my really noticing probably said something about me that I didn’t want to hear. I’d walked away with a couple of changes of clothing, a bunch of knives, a first aid kit, and my skating gear.
Maybe running away from home with a pair of roller skates, kneepads, elbow guards, and a helmet isn’t the sort of reasonable, rational decision that an adult is supposed to make, and if I’d been in a position to pick and choose what I was carrying, I might have taken a few things out. Like the little house Mork and Mindy had built for themselves from scavenged pieces of the carnival itself, Popsicle sticks and ticket stubs and dead weight that I couldn’t find the strength to throw away.
Sometimes planning is a luxury you just don’t get. I’d found myself in Florida with no clean bras and a pair of professional grade roller skates, and while I couldn’t say it was the best tactical decision I’d ever made, it was definitely the choice that was go
ing to save my sanity.
I slipped my skates over my feet and the ache vanished like magic, replaced by a sense of serenity that I was going to pay for in the morning. That was fine. I was assigned to attend the actresses portraying Lizzie and Laura for the rest of the week, which meant I’d be standing mostly still, not catering to endless guest requests or running back and forth between the stockroom and the floor. I could handle a few bruises for the sake of tonight.
It only took a few seconds to do up my laces, my fingers moving on a swift, practiced autopilot that continued as I strapped on my kneepads and elbow guards, protecting my most vulnerable joints from the inevitable impact with something solid, like the ground, or the side of Princess Laura’s Library.
When I finally looked up, Fern was sitting on the bench, lacing her own skates, and Megan was looking at me sympathetically.
“You did have a bad day,” she said.
“That obvious?” I asked, strapping on my helmet. If my joints are susceptible to impact damage, my skull is even more so. One big advantage of roller derby over cheerleading: we’re allowed to wear safety gear.
(Seriously. Cheerleading is not technically considered a sport, even though a competitive cheerleader is definitely an athlete, and anyway, giving us protective gear so we don’t break our necks after leaping from the top of a six-level pyramid would make us less sexy and all that other bullshit. Because nothing says “hot” like “head trauma.”)
“Yeah,” said Megan. “What would you have done if I hadn’t shown up with the skates?”
“I don’t know. Punched a few walls maybe.” Or gone into the swampy, undeveloped fields behind our apartment complex and thrown rocks at alligators. It wasn’t nice, but it was mutually frustrating for me and the gators, and sometimes misery loves company.
Megan shook her head. “I worry about you.”
“I worry about me, too.”
“No, I mean it. Humans aren’t supposed to function in isolation. You’re pack animals. You need the rest of your pack around you to be mentally healthy.”
I paused to give her a narrow-eyed sidelong look. “I can’t decide whether you’re teasing me about some of the things I’ve said about gorgons or not.”
“Naturalism runs both ways,” she said. “If you can play Animal Planet about my species, I can do the same with yours. You have to admit, I’ve had a lot more opportunity to observe wild humans than you’ve had to observe wild gorgons. You’re like beetles. Your god must love you, because he put you everywhere.”
“Jerk,” I said mildly.
“Monkey,” she replied.
I tried not to let my smile falter. She was technically correct—humans are apes, after all—but all the word made me think of was Sam, and how worried he had to be. Thanks to Mary keeping me connected to the situation, I couldn’t even lie to myself and pretend he no longer cared what happened to me. He cared. He might always care. He just couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
A hand tagged my shoulder. I turned to see Fern go darting down a narrow nearby pathway, waving behind herself as she zipped away. “Catch me if you can!” she yelled, voice trailing off as her speed caught up with the sound.
Shooting Megan an only semi-apologetic look, I took off after Fern, and everything else—my day, my situation, the people I missed and my concerns about the people who were missing me—fell away, replaced by the sheer joy of moving.
My sister, Verity, is only really happy when she’s doing something. When we were kids, our parents used to reserve time-outs for the absolute gravest of crimes, because using them for the little things that all children get up to would have been absolute torture for her. So she wrote lines instead, or did math problems concocted by Grandma Angela (an accountant, and an absolute monster where math is concerned), or raked the yard. Making her hold still was never on the table. My brother, Alex, is almost the opposite. He’s an academic, and the reptiles he studies respond best to patience and pretending to be a rock. Time-outs were almost a gift where he was concerned, which meant he didn’t get them either. Instead, he did dishes and sharpened knives and wasn’t allowed to go back to his room, no matter how much he apologized for whatever it was he’d done.
Me, I fell somewhere in the middle. I loved the feeling of motion, the knowledge that I could run as fast as I wanted, jump as high as my legs would carry me, and count on the strength of the body I had built, one training session at a time, to carry me safely to the finish line. I also loved sitting quietly, saving my strength for when I’d need it, reading comic books and watching movies and arguing with my cousin Artie about who’d be in the objectively perfect X-Men lineup. It was a good mix. I got time-outs. I always came out of them swinging.
Skating after spending the entire day at a walking pace was like coming out of a time-out. It was freedom, it was flying, and the only thing that could have made it better would have been a wooden track beneath my wheels and the sound of my teammates grunting as they struggled to keep the opposing team from getting in my way. Fern’s hair was a bright banner against the dark. I skated after her as hard as I could, trusting physics to be on my side.
As a blocker, Fern is one of the best, because everyone looks at her lithe build and assumes that she’s an easy target. They’ll slam into her without slowing down, only to bounce off and eat track when she somehow fails to yield before them. As a jammer, Fern is unrealistically fast, using her lowered density to turn the slightest momentum into terrifying speed. But that’s on the track. The smooth, friendly, predictable track, that she knows like the back of her own hand.
The paths and walkways of Lowryland are different. They’re smooth, sure, because a smooth walkway means less wear and tear on the feet of our guests, which means they stay happy longer and spend more money, but they’re also unpredictable. They bend and twist in strange ways, looping those same guests past stores and little hidden snack bars, encouraging them to buy, buy, buy until their wallets run dry. Fern couldn’t go full tilt without risking running into something she didn’t know was about to loom up in front of her—and, maybe more importantly, she couldn’t lower her density all the way, or the slightest irregularity in the pavement would launch her into the air. The lighter she got, the more chance there was of her becoming airborne.
It is a sad truth of humanity’s casual dominion over the planet that most humans wouldn’t believe they shared the world with another intelligent species if you shoved it in their faces. (Something that has happened, more than once, since the Covenant brought the population of most sapient cryptid species to a point where they could be dismissed as fables. For every devout Bigfoot seeker who gets a show on the SyFy Channel, there are thirty who talk laughingly about that prank their buddy Chuck tried to pull, even though Chuck has sworn since it happened that he wasn’t anywhere near the woods that day. Humans believe what humans want to believe, and mostly what humans want to believe is that their dominion over the Earth will never be challenged. Certainly not by people with snakes instead of hair who can paralyze with a glance, or people who can control their density the way humans control their breathing.) Fern flying into the air wouldn’t necessarily alert the tabloids, but it would mean fishing her out of whatever tree, decorative banner, or ride façade she managed to get snagged on this time.
Better, for me, was Fern’s relative ignorance of Fairyland. Elm and Aspen do their meet-and-greets in Chapter and Verse, on the other side of the Park. That’s where Lowry’s designers crammed the movies that didn’t fit with the dark poeticism of Fairyland, the pastel brilliance of Candyland, the caverns of Deep-Down, or the towering spires of Metropolis. The theming of each area was precisely calibrated to create as immersive an environment as possible, which meant most people only ever managed to memorize the zones where they spent the most time.
I hit the next corner with all the speed I could muster, turning right and striking off down a twisting little path throu
gh a series of equally twisting little trees. During the day, this area was consistently full of children, chasing the “sprites” generated by lights hidden among the branches. It was like watching a supersized version of a bunch of kittens playing with laser pointers, and as long as a few cast members were on hand to keep them from climbing, it was a good, harmless way for the kids to burn off a certain amount of nervous energy. There was something like that in every zone, and I personally thought that Fairyland had the best one, if only because ours didn’t involve water.
The bricks lit up under the pressure from my skates, leaving a sparkling trail behind me that winked out a few seconds later. If we’d been playing hide-and-seek, this would have been a disastrous choice. Since we were playing tag, and more, I knew Fern was cutting a straight line toward the Midsummer Night’s Scream, I kept going, emerging from the twisty little lane right next to the coaster.
Fern, finding herself skating toward me, squeaked and threw her arms out in front of her to ward off a collision. She clearly increased her density at the same time, because she lost speed for no apparent reason. As sometimes happened, the sudden change in momentum took her balance with it, and she toppled over, landing in one of the flowerbeds with a second, somewhat more muffled squeak.
There was nothing muffled about the scream that followed. It was high and piercing, the sort of good, clean sound that cuts through eardrums like a scalpel.
“Fern!” I skated toward where she had fallen as fast as I could, images of injury dancing unbidden in my mind. What if she had broken her arm? What if she had landed on a sprinkler and somehow impaled herself? What if—
“Run!” She popped up, waving her arms in a semaphore of repulsion, like she thought she could physically ward me away. I slowed down, too puzzled to continue skating forward with the same force, but I didn’t brake, allowing the momentum I’d already gathered to keep me moving closer.