Polly Shulman - The Grimm Legacy

The world was so big that I couldn’t get my bearings. What were all those looming shapes? Which way was the door? Where was Marc? Was that perilously swaying skyscraper Aaron? How would I negotiate all this with no sense of direction?

The green light snapped off and the insane sensation subsided.

“Elizabeth? Are you okay?”

Aaron’s voice sounded strange. I could pick out the individual vibrations. It took me a moment to put them together into words.

“Fine, I guess . . . I’m fine.”

“You sure? You look a little . . .” A huge hand came swooping toward me from overhead.

I ducked frantically. “Hey! What are you doing?”

“Sorry. You’re just so tiny and delicate . . . I wanted to make sure . . . Here, do you fit in this, or should I make you smaller?”

A pneum barreled through the air and stopped beside me. Aaron’s hand held it steady as I slid the door open. It looked crudely made and worn. The plastic was scored with deep scratches, and the felt was battered. Could it possibly protect me as it went banging through the pipes?

Wedging myself in, I pulled the door shut around me, then slid it open again without trouble and eased my head and shoulders out.

“Aaron? I’m going to close this thing. Can you lay it down with the door facedown, just to make sure I can get out?”

“Sure.”

His vast hand! Ugh, with a hangnail on his index finger. He tipped me over with a dizzying lurch, like a Ferris wheel before it really gets started. It wasn’t easy getting the door open—I had to throw my weight back and forth to rock the pneum onto its back—but I managed it and climbed out.

“Time for the pipes?” Aaron said.

I nodded.

“Okay, get in your pneums. I’ll have to take you up to the MER. There’s no direct pipe to the Grimm Collection from here.” He brought his face close to us. “Buckle up,” he said.

We traveled to the MER in Aaron’s pocket, swaying and bumping with each step. “I think I’m going to be sick,” said Marc.

“Please don’t,” I said.

Sarah was on pipe duty in the Main Exam Room.

“Mind if I just get in there for a sec, Sarah? I need to send something downstairs,” said Aaron.

“Sure,” she said. “Actually, while you’re here, could you watch the pipes for me while I run to the ladies’?”

“Of course,” said Aaron. We heard Sarah walk away.

“Send me first, and give me five minutes to get out of the way before you send Elizabeth,” said Marc.

I heard the hiss as Aaron opened the pipe and sent the two pneums of supplies down. Another hiss and a thump as he sent Marc down. Then a long pause—five minutes is forever when you’re in a plastic tube in somebody’s pocket, waiting to go crashing through space.

At last, Aaron’s hand appeared again and pulled me out of his pocket.

The blood rushed to my head. “I’m upside down!” I yelled.

Aaron lifted me to eye level again, holding me so I was lying on my back, and whispered, “I know. You have to start out upside down or you’ll land on your head. The pipes go up before they go down.”

“Oh, great,” I moaned.

“Sorry,” said Aaron. “It’s not my fault, it’s geometry.” He turned me upside down again and pulled the pipe door open. “Well, bye, Elizabeth. Travel safely,” he said, and let go.

Fans of roller coasters and water slides would love traveling by pneumatic tubes. You shoot through the pitch dark, bumping and spinning until you have no idea which way is up—especially if you’ve left your sense of direction in a kuduo. But the worst is when the air pressure suddenly drops away, and so do you, falling with a bone-wrenching thump into a wire basket.

I’m not a fan of roller coasters.

I lay there stunned, facedown, my cheek pressed against the plastic, trying to get used to the light and the silence before I faced the job of rocking the door free. I had just about caught my breath when my pneum lurched.

It was Marc. He slid my door open. “Wasn’t that awesome? Better than snowboarding!” He held out his hand and pulled me out.

“Thanks,” I said, leaning against the edge of the wire basket.

There was something funny about Marc—he looked different. He frowned at me appraisingly. “You’re so tall,” he said.

I laughed. “Yeah, six whole inches,” I said, but I knew what he meant. Aaron had made us both the right size to fit snugly in the pneums, which meant we were exactly the same height. It was weird being the same height as a basketball star. It made me feel impossibly tall.

The pipes rattled ominously overhead. “We better move before we get hit on the head with a pneum,” said Marc.

We climbed out of the basket. Marc gave me a leg up. We might be the same size, but he was still way stronger. We emptied the pneums and stuffed our backpacks with the string, paper clips, and other supplies. Marc tied one end of a length of twine to the basket, tossed the other end off the shelf, and climbed down.

“Come on, Elizabeth,” he called up from the floor.

“Ack. It’s a long way down!” Rope climbing was never my favorite part of gym.

“Loop the rope around one leg and take your weight with your feet,” said Marc. “Good—no, your feet! Not your hands, your feet!”

I scraped my palms pretty badly—it’s amazing how rough a piece of ordinary string can feel when you’re only six inches tall—but I reached the floor without falling. “Where now?” I said.

“Call number I *GC 683.32 G65—this way.”

Dust flew up and resettled at our feet; it was like walking through feathers and packing peanuts. Was the floor always this dusty?

Marc grabbed my elbow as I made yet another wrong turn. “Over here,” he said. He stopped in front of a gray metal locker the height of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.

“Great,” I said. “How are we going to get the door open?”

“Lasso the handle,” said Marc, tying a loop in the string.

He was pretty good at throwing the lasso, but it kept slipping off the handle. “Enough,” I said eventually. “It’s not working.”

“Got any better ideas?” he said. “It’s not like I can fly.”

“Hey,” I said, “what about using some of the objects in here? Like the flying carpet?”

“Huh.” He stuffed the lasso into his backpack. “Not the carpet—we could never get it unrolled, and anyway, it’s on a high shelf—but the Hermes shoes are on a low shelf.”

“The Hermes shoes?”

“You know, the winged sandals. Come on.”

Another long, dizzying walk between the vast cabinets. “Here,” said Marc, tugging me by the elbow. He stopped beside an open tower of shoes. The lowest shelf came to our armpits. I found myself nose to nose with a scuffed ballet slipper the size of a small rowboat, with dozens of others moored beside it. I *GC 391.413 T94 c. 1—c. 12 read the labels. The twelve dancing princesses’ twenty-four dancing shoes.

Marc swung himself easily onto the shelf, shouldering slippers aside. “Come on,” he said.

Maybe I could have pulled myself up when I was still doing ballet, but my arms weren’t strong enough anymore. “What if I wait here?”

“Fine.” Marc piled up some slippers and climbed up two shelves. I heard him moving back and forth up there.

“Found ’em!” He stuck his head over the edge a little farther along. “I’m coming down. Get under cover so I don’t hit you with a shoe,” he called to me.