The Apprentices (17 page)

Then there was a larger figure, as tall as a man and shaking with laughter until it broke apart into the air. Then a lithe and feminine shimmer hung a moment in the air, before a breeze took it away. And finally a stout female shape that Jin Lo thought must be the brave Mrs. Hsu seemed to burst into freedom with relief. It vanished against the white sky.

Then there was nothing. The only sound was of the vines squeezing through cracks and wrapping around outcroppings, and the rustle of leaves. The house was gone, and could no longer be haunted. It had been seventeen years since Jin Lo had hidden in the trunk. She might have made a cake with her eggs, if she had not eaten them.

“No more birthdays, no more cakes,” she heard Count Vili say.

Her family was free.

T
he girls’ dormitory was silent and empty as Pip and Tadpole crept up the stairs. The leather soles of Tadpole’s shoes slapped on each wooden step. “You doing a tap dance?” Pip hissed back at him.

“I can’t help it!” Tadpole whispered.

“Put your foot down
soft,
that’s all!”

Tadpole managed to lower the volume of his footsteps, but he still wasn’t silent.

“I should’ve left you at the dance,” Pip whispered.

“And found the building
how
?”

“Shh! Listen!”

They stopped, but if there had been a sound, it had vanished. The building seemed to be empty. They kept on, and Tadpole stopped outside a door on the second floor.

“How do you know this is theirs?” Pip asked.

“Every guy on campus knows which room is Opal’s,” Tadpole whispered. “Not that they’ve been inside it or anything. It’s just, you know, a landmark.” He tried to turn the doorknob. “It’s locked, of course.”

Pip had two thin metal rods in his pocket, one with a hooked end, just for such occasions. He was out of practice, and his fingers felt stubby and clumsy as he slid the first wire into the lock. But it was good to be back, sneaking about in the dark. He felt the satisfying clicks inside the mechanism as he maneuvered the hook. Was there a better feeling in the world? He wasn’t sure.

He turned the knob and it gave easily. Access. That was all he’d ever wanted.
Robin Hood
had given him fame and Sarah Pennington, but it had taken away such deeply pleasurable moments as this.

The room was dim, but there was enough light from outside to reveal that it was a girls’ room, long and narrow. It smelled of flowery perfume. There was a patterned carpet on the floor, and two beds along the long walls, one slept-in and one tightly made up.

Against the far wall were two wooden desks. One had books and papers spread across the surface. A puffy white dress had been tossed over the chair. The other desk was empty and bare.

Pip went to the messy desk. There was a pair of heavy black eyeglasses on the papers, and he looked through them. They seemed to be clear glass, no correction. He picked up a piece of paper and looked at it in the light from the window. It was math problems, with most of the answers marked wrong. At the top, it said
Please see me.

Tadpole whispered, “This is making me nervous. I think we should go.”

“Shh,” Pip said.

“Seriously,” Tadpole said. “I could get expelled.”

“Quiet!”

Pip felt the underside of the desk for anything taped there, but found only the rough, unfinished wood. He checked the drawers and found pens and pencils, ink and erasers and scissors. There was a box of white letter paper embossed at the top with a golden dragon in the shape of a circle.

When he turned, he saw Tadpole dreamily touching the bodice of the puffy white dress. “Something sewn in the seams?” he asked.

Tadpole snatched his hands back guiltily. “Let’s go.”

“Not yet.”

Pip felt under the pillow and mattress of both beds, but without much hope. Janie was clearly gone, and Opal didn’t seem like the type to keep a diary. On her bureau was a picture of a girl, probably Opal, doing a split upside down on a horse. That was impressive. Pip pulled open the top drawer and found soft cotton and silky things, but nothing hidden beneath them.

The next drawer was full of sweaters. Pip’s hands were plunged deep in fuzzy softness when he heard footsteps on the stairs. He pushed the drawer closed, grabbed the terrified Tadpole, and pulled him into the closet. They pushed past the hanging dresses to squeeze into the darkest, farthest corner. Pip reached up to quiet the clacking wooden hangers just as the door opened and light footsteps came into the room.

There was a short silence and then another noise Pip
couldn’t identify. Was there an animal in the room? Did Opal have a cold? Then he realized: She was crying. The strange noise was her half-muffled, choking sobs.

Pip listened for a minute, and when the crying didn’t stop, he started to push out of the closet, past the dresses.

“No!” Tadpole whispered, grabbing his shoulder.

Pip shook his hand off. “Stay here,” he whispered. He stepped out into the room.

“Opal?” he said.

She was sitting at her desk with her face in her hands, and she turned to look at him. “What are you doing here?” she asked, through tears. Was she a little tipsy? Were those cups of punch spiked, the ones the gargoyle had brought?

“Looking for you,” he said.

Opal laughed, but it sounded more like a sob. “No one cares about me.”

“Sure they do.” He wondered where her enormous date was. Far away, he hoped.

Opal sniffed and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “No,” she said. “My father thinks I’m stupid.”

“I doubt that.”

“He really does.”

“What makes you think so?”

She grew silent and very still. Even the sniffing stopped. Her eyes went to the math paper on her desk. “I called him tonight,” she said.

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. He’s gone.”

“What do you mean,
gone
?”

She rubbed her nose again. “I think he went to the island.”

“What island?”

“My mother’s island. I think he took your friend.”

“To an
island
?”

She nodded. “He thinks Janie’s smart.” Her voice broke again.

Pip pulled his chair closer and sat facing Opal. He gave her the clean handkerchief from his jacket pocket. “You’ve got to tell me what you know.”

Opal clutched the handkerchief. “He wishes he had a daughter like Janie.”

“So he just
took
her?”

Opal nodded and wiped her eyes. “He needed help with her experiment.”

“Slow down,” Pip said. “Pretend I know nothing. What experiment?”

“The one she was working on. Taking salt out of salt water.”

“So he took her to an island?”

Opal nodded.

“And the island is where?”

“In Malaya.”

“Ma-
what
?”

“In Southeast Asia. My grandfather is a Malay sultan. My father has a mine on an island there. He got the island when he married my mother, but he keeps it secret.”

“Is it a gold mine?”

Opal shrugged. “How would I know? I’m stupid.” Her
eyes were shiny and wet, her small nose was red, and her hair spilled over her pretty shoulders. She really was a staggeringly lovely girl.

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” Pip said.

She laughed: an appealing little snort. “You don’t know me.”

“I have evidence,” he said. He fluffed the puffy dress hanging on the chair. “First, you chose that stunner of a dress over this one, which would’ve made you look like a marshmallow.”

She smiled a little.

“Second,” he said, “you ditched that big dozy pillock from the dance.”

“I didn’t ditch him,” Opal said.

“No?”

“He’s waiting in the hall.”

Pip’s stomach grew cold, and he stared at Opal, who looked back at him with a runny nose and unsympathetic eyes.

Then she burst into laughter. “I scared you,” she said.

Relief flooded Pip. “That you did,” he said. “See, you’re clever, whatever your dad says.”

Y
ou developed this substance on your own?” Benjamin’s father asked. “Without telling me?”

They were in the apartment above the apothecary shop in Manila. They had joined the floods of people leaving Vietnam, or trying to leave. In Hanoi, they had found a small steamer going to a Catholic mission in Manila and talked their way on board, assuring the priest in charge that they had medical skills to volunteer for the journey, and only needed the passage. They had sweetened the deal with a packet of an extremely effective new painkiller, and finally the priest had nodded them aboard.

The Manila apothecary, Mr. Vinoray, had a shop on Calle Ilang-ilang, near the port. Vinoray knew about the work Benjamin’s father was doing, although his own interest was in the treatment of cancer. He was small and round-faced and bald, and moved silently around the shop and the apartment, where he lived alone. He had gone out, but was returning soon to take Benjamin’s father on a collecting expedition, to gather the local medicinal plants and to see a real ylang-ylang
tree. A steel fan blew street smells in through the window. The smells of Manila were different from those in Vietnam, but the sweltering heat was the same.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” his father asked.

“Because I knew you’d tell me not to do it.”

“Yes, I would have!”

“That’s why I didn’t tell you.”

His father sighed, and pressed his hand to his twitching left eye. “I see.”

“You expect me to take over your work someday,” Benjamin said. “But how can I do that if I don’t
try
things? You made me read Geberus, who said that we have to experiment and perform practical work to attain mastery. So do you believe that or don’t you?”

“I do,” his father said. “But I would rather supervise your experiments, for now. Please explain to me how it works.”

“I based it on one of the clairvoyance powders in the Pharmacopoeia,” Benjamin began. “The ones you said affect the insula in the brain, and increase our awareness of other minds. I knew it would have to be taken in through the stomach. Empathy began as an awareness of other people’s digestion, so we would know how not to poison ourselves. Right?”

“That’s the theory,” his father said, looking uneasy.

“But I changed a few things.”

“All right,” his father said.

“I wanted to create a substance that would let you connect with another person, if you both took it, no matter how far apart you were. It lets you see
as
that other person, through their eyes.” It was the first time he had talked about the powder, and it felt exhilarating to explain it. “It only seems to work in one direction at a time, though. There are
incredible
possibilities, don’t you see?”

“A spying powder,” his father said, his voice full of judgment.

“No!” Benjamin said. “A mental connection powder! An approach to telepathy!”

“You remind me of myself when I was young,” his father said. “When I was so terribly excited about the possibilities. But you have no idea how dangerous it is, this creation of yours. And you’ve brought Janie into it. She’s only a child.”

“She’s sixteen,” Benjamin said stubbornly. The girl he’d seen in the bathroom mirror was no child. But his father was right that there were dangers. Seeing the boy kiss Janie had pierced Benjamin’s heart like a piece of shrapnel, and he hadn’t yet recovered.

“You’re entering another person’s consciousness,” his father said. “This is not a simple thing to do, or without ramifications. It’s not a thing to do lightly.”

“I don’t,” Benjamin said. “I wouldn’t.”

“Has Janie told anyone about it?”

Benjamin hesitated. He didn’t want to tell his father this part. But he had to admit the truth. “I think she’s been using it to spy on someone else.”

His father exhaled and grew very still. Other men might pound the table or stomp about the room, but his father was more frightening when he became utterly motionless. “How do you know?” he asked.

“I made contact with her when she was doing it, so I saw through his eyes instead.”

“Who is it she’s watching?”

“I’m not sure. I think, from what she said, that his name is Magnusson.”

“And why is she watching him?”

“I don’t know!” Benjamin said. “I always said we should take her with us, and not expect her to go back to school like a normal girl. She’s not normal anymore.”

“She had parents. She was fourteen.”

“And she helped us in Nova Zembla!” Benjamin said. “That trip
changed
me, and it changed her, too.”

“Well, she shouldn’t be striking out on her own.”

“But she is. And it’s our fault.”

“And who is this Magnusson?”

“I’m not sure. He has a mine on an island. And he has a Malay keris—a small, delicate one, a knife for a woman. And I think he got Janie kicked out of school. But I lost contact before I learned anything useful.” Benjamin thought again of Janie and the boy in the dark auditorium. He felt his face grow hot, but his father didn’t seem to notice.

“What are the side effects?” his father asked.