Peter Lerangis - The Curse of the King

I reached for the pack, but Wendel pulled it away. She opened my canvas sack and removed the basketball-sized Loculus of Flight. “Nice …” she said.

“A world globe,” I blurted. “We have to … paint the countries onto—”

“What the …?” Officer Wendel’s hand had hit the invisible second Loculus.

“It’s nothing!” Cass blurted out.

“Literally,” Aly added.

Wendel tried to wriggle the Loculus out. “Is this glass?”

“A special kind of glass,” Dad said. “So clear I’ll bet you can’t see it!”

“Wow …” Wendel said. She lifted her hands high, holding up … absolutely nothing. Nothing that the human eye could see, that is. “I can feel it, but I can’t—”

“I am not crazy stop treating me like I’m crazy, I saw them, I tell you—they were floating like birds!” Mrs. Pimm’s voice was rising to a shriek—and I remembered where I’d heard her voice and seen her face.

An open window, a dim light. She had been staring at us as the Shadows from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus lifted us through the streets. She’d been one of the only people who’d noticed the flurries of darkness, the fact that we were being borne down the street in the invisible arms of Artemisia’s minions.

I darted toward the door and looked out.

Yiiiii! The Chihuahua saw me first. He wriggled out of her arms and skittered down the hallway toward me, baring his teeth.

“There—those are the wicked children!” Now Mrs. Pimm was heading our way, followed by two burly cops. “They were floating above the ground … talking to spirits! Come back here, Yappy! ”

I sprang back into the room as Yappy clattered inside, yapping away.

Officer Wendel let go of the backpack. She and Gomez surrounded Yappy, reaching for his collar. Mrs. Pimm began lashing at them with her cane. Two other cops grabbed at her shoulders.

“Where’s the Loculus?” Aly whispered.

There.

I couldn’t see it, but I saw a perfectly rounded indentation in the sack on the table—a logical place where an invisible sphere might be resting. Shoving my hand toward the air above it, I felt a cool, round surface.

Now I could see the Loculus. Which meant I was invisible. “Got it!”

Aly sidled close to me. I reached out and grabbed her hand. Just before she disappeared, Cass reached for her, too.

Dad stood there against the wall, looking confused. Now Cass and Aly both had hands on the Loculus, so I let go of Aly and reached toward Dad with my free hand. “If you touch us,” I said softly, “the power transfers.”

He flinched when I took his arm. But it was nothing like the looks on the faces of Mrs. Pimm and the group of police officers. Their jaws were nearly scraping the floor. A cup of coffee lay in a puddle below them.

I could hear Yappy heading for the entrance as fast as his little legs could carry him.

We followed after him, but we didn’t rush.

Even the NYPD can’t stop something they can’t see.

DAD’S DISGUISE WASa porkpie hat and a fake, glued-on mustache that made him sneeze. Aly’s hair, colored blond with cheap spray-on hair color bought at Penn Station, was bunched into a baseball cap. Cass wore a hoodie and a fake scar on his cheek, and I opted for thick sunglasses, which were now hurting my nose.

Dad and Aly sat on one side of a narrow table, Cass and I on the other. We were the only ones in our little train compartment, which made our disguises kind of ridiculous. At least I thought so.

None of us had been able to sleep. Now the countryside was aglow with the first hints of the morning sun. “We are two hundred forty-nine miles into Pennsylvania, fifty-four point three miles from the Ohio border,” Cass announced.

“Thank you, Mr. GPS,” Aly said.

“Seriously, how can you do that?” I asked. “The angle of the sun?”

“No,” Cass replied, gesturing out the window toward a narrow post that zoomed by. “The mile markers.”

Dad covered his mouth. “Ahh-haaaa-choo!”

“Guys, maybe we can take off the disguises?” Aly said. “I’ve been checking news sites, feeds, social media, and there’s nothing about us.”

“What if we’re America’s Most Wanted?” Cass asked. “What if our pictures are in every post office from here to Paducah?”

Wincing, Dad pulled off his mustache. “Cass, let’s examine that word— wanted . The best way to predict how people will act is knowing what they want . One thing the New York police don’t want is the press to know that four people vanished from under their noses.”

“‘Tonight’s headline: Twerp perps pop from cops! Details at eleven!’” Cass said.

Aly pulled back her newly blond hair into a scrunchie. “When we get to Chicago, I’m washing out this disgusting color.”

“Your hair was blue before this,” Cass remarked.

Aly stuck out her tongue.

“I think it looks nice,” I said, quickly adding, “not that blue wasn’t nice. It was. So was the orange.”

Aly just stared at me bewildered, like I’d just said something in Sanskrit. I turned away. Sometimes I should just keep my mouth shut.

Cass cracked up. “Maybe she can borrow the red coloring from your skin.”

“Once we’re in Chicago, Aly, you’re getting on a plane to Los Angeles,” Dad said. “To see your mom.”

“What am I going to tell her?” Aly asked.

“The truth,” Dad replied. “She has to know everything. And she has to keep what happened to you a secret—”

“She won’t do that!” Aly said. “I mean—I vanished for weeks. She’s going to open a federal investigation!”

Dad shook his head. “Not when she realizes what’s at stake. That there’s still a hope of curing you kids. Our job now is to create an airtight alibi, which we all will use. It has to explain why three kids disappeared and then slipped back weeks later, all at the same time. We have to somehow contain this. People in our hometown are going to ask questions. Yours, too, Aly.”

“So … um …” Cass said uneasily. “How do I figure into these snalp?”

“Snalp?” Dad said.

“ Plans ,” I translated. “It’s Backwardish. Remember? He uses it when he’s feeling silly. Or nervous.”

“Or deracs,” Cass added.

Dad looked him straight in the eyes. He knew about Cass’s background. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine what Cass was thinking. Mainly because I don’t know what’s it’s like to have two parents in jail on a robbery conviction. What I did know was that he’d be sent back to child services until he was eighteen. Which meant, under our circumstances, forever.

“Of course I have plans,” Dad said. “Don’t you y-worr … wy-orr …”

“Yrrow?” Cass said. “As in, worry ?”

Dad was already scribbling on a sheet of legal paper. “Exactly,” he said.

“Okay then, I won’t,” Cass said, looking very, very worried.

* * *

“Next station stop, Chicago, Illinois!”

As the conductor’s voice echoed in the train car, the sun burned through the window. Aly and Cass had fallen asleep, and I was almost there, too.

Dad’s eyes were bloodshot as he put the final touches on the list we’d been working on for hours. I read it for about the hundredth time.

“Um,” I said.

Aly sighed. “Complicated.”

“Out of our minds,” Cass added.

“I think we can make it work,” Dad said with a deep breath.

“I like the ‘hardened street tough’ part,” Cass said.

“Now for your story, Aly,” Dad went on. “We need something your mom can jump on board with.”

“Mom and I are no strangers to alibis,” Aly said. “I’ve been working with covert government groups for a long time. We can say I was on a CIA project. Much less complicated than your epic lie.”