“Sure,” I said, unclenching my hands and trying to flex away the heat in my fingers, letting it disperse into the morning air. At least we were in Florida. Even the mornings were so warm here that the increase in the ambient heat around me was unlikely to be noticed.
It’s too bad I didn’t get a tendency to freeze things, instead of burning them. I could have gone to work for Disney instead of Lowry, made the big bucks as the most accurate Elsa they would ever have.
(Except I couldn’t have. Consistency is the keyword across face characters at all the Parks that use them, regardless of the parent company: what one Princess Laura does or says or knows must be echoed across all the other Princess Lauras, lest they damage the illusion that they’ve casually wandered out of a cartoon. Sadly, this is why Princess Thistle and her husband, the dashing Prince Corwin, are the only face characters who speak American Sign Language.)
Sophie nodded, clearly having anticipated this outcome when she made her request, and turned to stroll out of the station, trusting me to follow. My coworkers stared as I left in the company of a hiring manager, and the first mutters started before I was out of earshot. Swell. I’d managed to keep myself out of the rumor mill where Fern’s corpse was concerned, but now I was going to get my turn for a completely different reason.
Three spaces outside every Lowryland employee train station and bus stop were reserved for managerial use. This was the first time I’d seen one of them filled. Sophie strolled toward her silver Lexus, pausing at the last moment to beep the doors open, and slid inside.
The interior of the car smelled of leather and cleaning fluid and money. It was like inhaling the inside of a very expensive wallet, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was going to be charged for it. Sophie didn’t say anything, just slid her key into the ignition and started the engine. Eyes watched from all across the station entrance as we pulled away, some jealous that I was getting a ride, others taking in every detail of what they saw so they could repeat it later to anyone who would listen.
“So,” I said finally, desperate to break the silence, “how’re you?”
“They make these cars so they don’t even need a key anymore,” she said. “You use your thumbprint to unlock it. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised. We started using guest thumbprints to key to their tickets three years ago. Did you know, we’ve been sued for our guest information by the federal government six times? They say we have the largest private fingerprint database in the country, and even wanted felons have children who want to ride a roller coaster. We could help them solve a bunch of unsolved crimes.”
“But we haven’t,” I guessed.
“Oh, hell, no. Imagine the headlines. ‘Lowryland destroys family vacation by summoning the FBI.’ Disney would make hay while the sun shone on that one. No, we’ll keep fighting their requests, we’ll keep shoveling money toward the lawyers, and we’ll keep banking on Disney being a bigger, sweeter target. If they’re the ones who allow the government to start arresting guests, our stock will go through the roof overnight. Always stick with the people who seem to care about your privacy.”
I snorted. I couldn’t help myself. Lowryland only “cares” about the privacy of their guests as long as it impacts the bottom line. There are cameras in all the rides and public areas of the Park. There are even more cameras in the company resort hotels. Nothing happens on Lowry property that Lowry doesn’t know about thirty seconds later.
Realization hit me hard on the heels of that thought. My eyes went wide and my spine went stiff, my fingers not even heating up in the face of my shock. Sophie glanced at me and nodded, looking satisfied.
“Good,” she said. “We’re on the same page now—and in case you were worried, there aren’t any microphones in my car. The corporate overlords, long may they reign, will probably be bugging the rank and file long before they get around to bugging management.”
As a member of the rank and file, that probably shouldn’t have been reassuring. Somehow, it was, if only because her need to explain meant that they weren’t doing it yet. “How much did you see?”
“Not nearly as much as I wish we had.” Sophie pulled a sour face. “The cameras in front of the Midsummer Night’s Scream have been down since yesterday morning. A damn squirrel chewed through a wire. One of the electricians found the little bastard hanging off the transformer box, stiff as a board. They were supposed to get the cameras back on last night, and obviously, that didn’t happen.”
“Then how—”
“Ice cream.” Sophie shrugged, turning onto the freeway. “There’s nothing wrong with the cameras there. We have footage of you skating after Miss Conway, and then skating back alone, grabbing Miss Rodriguez, and exiting the Park. So my question for you is this: were you with Miss Conway when she found the body?”
I liked that wording. Sophie wasn’t accusing Fern of murder, just of covering up my part in the victim’s discovery. “What happens if I say yes?”
“I ask how confident you are that Miss Conway is going to stick to her current story, which is that she was by herself when she tripped and fell into the flowerbed, having already told her roommates to return to the apartment. Under normal circumstances, she would have been liable for any damage to the landscaping. Given she found a body that Security somehow missed on their initial sweep, we’re willing to let this one go.”
“Uh, yeah.” In that part of Fairyland, in that sort of flowerbed—surrounded by a low hedge which was often full of birds and the hands of curious children—the odds that our victim would have been discovered by someone under the age of twelve were extremely high. Talk about bad press. “So if I had been there, and if Fern were lying about that part, I would be very confident in her ability to stick to her story. I . . . I knew her before we came here. She and I were sort of in the same situation.”
Sophie nodded thoughtfully. “I understand why you ran.”
“You do?”
“Of course, I do. I wasn’t born yesterday, Mel.” Sophie sighed, shaking her head like this was the sort of burden she would rather push onto someone else’s shoulders, but was nonetheless compelled to carry on her own. “You still won’t tell me what that bastard finally did to make you leave, and that’s fine, I’m not going to push; you have a right to your privacy. That’s something I would never try to take away from you, especially not after what you’ve already been through. If you’d been with Miss Conway when she found that . . . unfortunate soul, the police would have questioned you. They might have taken your picture. I suppose the other thing I have to ask is whether there’s anything out there for them to find that might embarrass the company. Because you’re my friend, we did a shortcut on certain aspects of the hiring process and background check. Was that a mistake?”
“No, ma’am.” If Sophie had set Lowry’s lawyers to digging, the worst thing she could have discovered was that Melody West didn’t technically exist. Since we’d gone to high school together, shared locker rooms and buses and late-night pizza parties, she knew Melody existed. She would have written all that off as nonsense, an artifact of my dropping off the grid for so long. My fingerprints weren’t in any systems except for Lowry’s.
And the Covenant’s. That was what I needed to be worrying about. That, and Fern—and my job. I caught a glimpse of the dashboard clock and yelped.
“Sophie, I’m going to be late!”
“Don’t worry. Your manager has been informed that you’re needed in Public Relations, and your shift is being covered, with no black marks on your record.”
The inside of the car suddenly felt very cold. “I told you, I wasn’t there.”
“I know you did. We’re calling in everyone who closed in Fairyland last night, to make an announcement about what happened and hopefully squash wild speculation.” Sophie’s frown was fleeting. “Gossip is poison.”
“No argument there.”
Sophie sighed. ?
??Do you ever miss high school? The squad? I cheered in college, but it wasn’t the same, was it?”
“You’re doing it again,” I said.
“Doing what?”
“Fishing. You want me to say ‘no, it wasn’t,’ and then you’ll know that not only did I go to college, but I was on a cheer squad while I was there. Or ‘I wouldn’t know,’ and then you know at least one of those things isn’t true. I told you, I can’t—”
“Talk about the past, yes, yes, I know, but you’ll forgive me for being concerned?” Sophie frowned again, harder this time. “If that bastard shows up here, I want to know how hard I need to kick his ass.”
The thought of Sophie kicking Artie’s ass under the assumption that he’d kept me locked in a closet since college would have been funny, if I hadn’t been so sure she’d do it, and equally sure that the stress would make him lose control of both his empathy and his weird incubus mojo. Being whammied into falling hopelessly in love with my cousin probably wouldn’t do anything good for her as a person.
(Artie’s father, my Uncle Ted, is an incubus, which makes Artie a half-incubus, which means he’s been taking longer than normal to get the walking porn soundtrack that is his body chemistry under control. Since incubi are by and large very focused on consent and making sure no one is doing anything they don’t want to do, Artie spends a lot of time locked in his basement, avoiding the sort of girls who might accidentally decide they want to marry him and have his quarter-incubus geek babies. Which is all of them, barring close relatives and people like our Cousin Sarah, whose body chemistry is too far from the mammalian norm for pheromones to work on her. She’s in love with him because she loves him. Weirdo.)
“He’s not going to show up here,” I said.
“But if he does—”
“I will call you so you can come and help kick his ass.” I took a deep breath. “So if I had been there last night, and I had seen the body, I guess I’d want to know what happened.”
“Are you asking me to gossip?”
“No, I’m asking you to help me sleep better at night, and to equip me to help my roommate who is, if you remember, an avatar of fairy-tale goodness and purity for children the world over looking for a little magic in their lives. Unless you want Princess Aspen to start telling kids how to get blood out of velvet.”
Fern probably didn’t know how to get blood out of velvet. I did. I could lead a goddamn master course in getting blood out of any kind of fabric, with a bonus session on getting blood out of hair without washing away all the hairspray. Alas, there isn’t much call for that sort of thing in my current occupation.
Sophie was quiet for a minute or so, thinking it over. Finally, she said, “It looks like there was some sort of altercation, probably toward the end of the evening, fortunately out of sight of any of our younger guests. The victim was a local man named David Wilson. It doesn’t seem to have been an intentional murder; the officer I spoke to said it looked more like an accident that he had been hurt badly enough to bleed out. Just sheer dumb luck.”
“Sheer dumb luck doesn’t usually go around stabbing people.”
“No, but angry kids sometimes do, and all the metal detectors and casual security in the world won’t stop people from smuggling knives into the Park. We can’t get too intrusive, or we’ll lose business. We couldn’t even justify metal detectors to our shareholders until Disney did it without collapsing under the weight of the resulting outrage. Pat-downs and full-body screening are never going to happen, and if you ever tried to quote me on this, I would call you a liar and have you fired on the spot, but I’m glad that they won’t.”
I blinked. “Even with the folks in PR spinning fulltime to keep this out of the papers?”
“Even with ten bodies, I’d be saying this,” said Sophie firmly. “I don’t know if you’ve looked at me recently, but you may have noticed that I am not, in fact, a white person. I am, rather, quite brown.”
“I did notice that,” I said carefully.
“One of my great joys here at Lowryland is walking through the Park and knowing that people from all over the world, from all walks of life, are able to come and enjoy what we’ve created without fear of racial profiling from the cast. We can’t control what the other guests do, and yes, we’ve had a few incidents over the years, but every cast member treats every guest with equal courtesy, at least to their faces.” Sophie’s expression turned hard. “Bring in guards and thorough searches, and that changes. Suddenly it’s the guest with the unfamiliar accent who gets ‘randomly’ selected for further screening. Suddenly it’s the man with the faded gang tattoos who has to walk through the metal detector three times. David Wilson died because someone snuck a knife into the Park. That’s tragic. All my sympathy goes to his family. I will lose a hundred Davids before I let children who look like me—children who look like anyone—start feeling like their skin color means they aren’t allowed to have access to the magic we give to children who look like you.”
I didn’t say anything. Sophie glanced at me and grimaced apologetically.
“Sorry,” she said. “I guess that was sort of heavy.”
“No, I’m glad you said something,” I said. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“You never had to.” We had reached the gates to the back lot. Sophie pulled up to the guard booth and smiled, flashing her ID badge. The man on the other side of the barricade nodded, giving me only a cursory glance before he raised the barricade.
We drove down the winding driveway that connected the gate to the parking lot in silence. Lowryland was designed to look like an entirely different world once guests were inside its borders. What most of them never realized was how much work went into creating—and maintaining—that all-important illusion.
The walls surrounding the Park were higher than anyone realized at a casual glance, built into the environments around rides, concealed behind shop facades and cunningly designed greenery. All told, the lowest point in the Lowryland wall was twelve feet high, and the Park designers were hard at work coming up with ways to bring it up to the otherwise standard fifteen. Only the wrought iron front gates were lower than that, affording a tantalizing view of the entry plaza to the people standing in line every morning or looking over their shoulders every night. Once inside the Park, the rest of the world might as well have been a story told to frighten children.
That included the administrative offices, the management parking, the back lots where the parade floats were stored and maintained, and so very much more. Lowryland had its own suite of generators, much like the carnivals where I’d whiled away my childhood summers, but built on a substantially grander scale. Lowryland had freezers packed with enough food to wait out a zombie apocalypse. People looking for survivalists always focused on the preppers. They should have been looking at the big theme parks, where the roller coasters would keep on rolling long after the lights of Miami had gone dark.
Sophie drove past the first three parking lots, all of which were distant enough from even the employee gates to have their own shuttle system, and around a large building blazoned with the smiling face of Monty Mule and Hilary Hinny, the lovable cartoon scamps upon whose backs Michael Lowry the First had constructed an empire. Her car slid into her reserved slot with what sounded like a satisfied purr, obscuring her name, which had been spray painted onto the concrete when she became important enough to warrant such prime parking.
She looked at me again, expression grim. “Stick to your story, Mel,” she advised. “Once we’re inside, I’m not your friend, I’m the person who has to make sure every employee represents the best face of the company. If you say or do anything that makes my superiors think you might have been there—”
“I won’t let you down,” I said.
Sophie nodded.
“Good,” she said, and got out of the car, leaving me to trail along behind her like a lost duckling, l
ooking for a way back to the safety of the pond.
* * *
The air-conditioning inside the Public Relations building was like a punch to the face after the growing heat outdoors. It didn’t help that PR, out of every department associated with Lowryland, had to “live the Lowry life,” decorating everything in corporate iconography. Gone were the tasteful photographs and colors of the hiring office, replaced by aggressively bright primary shades and even brighter posters blazing out advertisements for the company’s most iconic properties.
It could have been interesting, under the right circumstances, to wander through the halls and see the evolution of Lowry’s style across the decades, from the white-and-gold minimalism of Goldtree and Silvertree to the lush pre-Raphaelite jewel tones of Goblin Market, all the way up to the stark green and silver of Thistle and the gilded pastels of Mooncake.
The three people waiting for us in the lobby sort of killed that idea. They were dressed like PR wonks the world over, in suit jackets, pressed slacks, and pencil skirts (all following strict gender lines, sadly; at least mixing it up a little would have made things interesting). Their accessories were in gaudier colors than the norm, allowing them to blend better with their surroundings, but a bright red pocket square or a chunky green necklace couldn’t change the fact that they were the hard hand of strict formality trying to enforce itself on a fairy-tale wonderland.
There was no sign of Fern. I looked anxiously around, like she might be crammed into a corner somewhere, and clutched my duffel bag against my chest. It was part true concern, part distraction. I couldn’t disguise myself, not with Sophie right there, knowing what I really looked like. But these people didn’t know me. If I wanted to act like I was easily confused and frightened of losing my job, they couldn’t call my bluff.