This Isn't What It Looks Like (21 page)

Then the image fogged over entirely. When the fog cleared, the man in the mirror was gone. In his place, Max-Ernest saw only
himself.

Frustrated and a little bit frightened, Max-Ernest lowered the monocle and walked out into the hallway.

Instinctively, he headed for the vending machine. There was only one chocolate bar left, and for a second he considered leaving
it for later. Then he remembered there would be no later; he had no reason to return to the hospital.

“Hmmgh…”

As he bit into the chocolate bar, Max-Ernest had a startling realization: the reason he recognized the noise the man had been
making was that it was the very noise that he, Max-Ernest, made whenever he ate chocolate.

It wasn’t a ghost that he’d been looking at in the mirror.

It wasn’t an ancestor. It wasn’t anybody from the past.

The man in the mirror was his future self.

T
he Jester didn’t find Cass until he almost tripped over her. She was lying on a bed of pine needles, half awake.

“Oh, there you are!”

The Jester hovered above her, his orange curls blocking the sun.

“Are you all right? I’ve been looking all over.”

Cass forced herself to sit up. “I’m fine. I just had to lie down for a second.”

“It has been more like twenty minutes…. Here, drink.” He offered a cup of water, which she sipped gratefully.

“I’m very glad I found you. You never know how useful an invisible friend is going to be until you’ve had one. I don’t think
I could possibly survive without one now!” The Jester patted Cass’s head. “Braids, am I right?”

“You are very solicitous of this invisible friend of yours.”

Cass and the Jester both looked up, startled.

Anastasia smiled mischievously. “I suppose you can’t be too careful with invisible creatures. Without proper care, they’re
liable to vanish altogether.”

“Invisible creatures?” the Jester sputtered. “What invisible creatures?”

He stood up and took a step away from Cass, studiously avoiding looking in her direction.

“My question exactly. I would simply have dismissed you as crazy had I not seen that sword fly through the air a little while
ago.”

“You did not believe the legend, then?” queried the Jester, recovering.

“I know nothing of legends. I know what I see.”

“Very well. I’ll admit, I invented the legend. But did you not know that I myself am virtually a legend?—a legendary magician,
that is. A master illusionist who can make inanimate objects appear to fly.”

“What you are is a man who talks to invisible creatures and pats their heads.”

“Oh, all right, I confess. I talk to my hand. See—hello, Sir Hand.” He held up his left hand and spoke to it in demonstration.
“It’s a habit I formed when I was a boy. And now if I don’t talk to him, my hand refuses to obey. He won’t juggle or perform
tricks of any kind. Watch—he just sits there….”

He was silent a moment, his hand still.

“Now, if I coax him a little… Oh, go on, Sir Hand. Do a trick for Anastasia. Just a little one—”

His hand quivered in the air for a moment, as if trying to decide what to do. Then in one long, fluid
motion, it picked a flower off a shrub, made the flower disappear and reappear again, and finally presented the flower to
Anastasia.

Anastasia laughed. “Good try, but I will not be diverted by flowers.” She tossed the flower over her shoulder. “Earlier you
were speaking to your right side, not to your left hand.”

“It’s OK,” said Cass loudly. “You can tell her. You’re not fooling her, anyway.”

“So the creature exists!” exclaimed Anastasia, spinning around. “It’s one thing to imagine, another to hear….”

“Yes, I exist.”

“And you are a young girl, if I’m not mistaken?”

Cass bristled, standing. “Not that young—”

“Of course not—I did not mean to offend. It’s just that I imagined some sort of invisible beast. But I am delighted to find
that my savior is human instead. Or are you a fairy or some other? Truth to tell, I did not believe in fairies an hour ago,
but I did not believe in invisible girls, either.”

“Oh, I’m human… er, I think. At least back home I am.”

Not that I’ll ever get
there
again, she thought.

“I am very glad to hear it,” said Anastasia. “Where are you? I should like to shake the hand of
the person who saved my life and the lives of my men.”

“You didn’t shake
my
hand,” grumbled the Jester. “Didn’t
I
save you, too?”

Embarrassed but pleased, Cass reached out to shake Anastasia’s hand. “Here. I’m Cass. Well, Cassandra is my full name. Nice
to meet you—”

Anastasia grasped Cass’s invisible hand between her two larger ones. “Ah, long fingers. Like mine. Good for handling horses
and weapons…”

“And she has ears like mine!” the Jester interjected. “Good for… good for… Must they be good for something?”

“I hear pretty well sometimes,” Cass offered. “But I don’t think it’s ’cause my ears are big and pointy. I think it’s ’cause
I have strong inner ears or something like that.”

“Good hearing does run in the family,” boasted the Jester.

For the second time, Anastasia looked astonished. “You and the invisible girl are family?”

“Why are you surprised?” asked the Jester. “To you I am practically invisible myself.”

“That hardly explains it.”

“Cassandra is my great-great—oh wait. Should I not say…?”

“Oh, I think it’s OK to tell her,” said Cass. “I mean, just a little bit.”

As it turned out, Cass told the story herself, and at great length, filling in details that she had not yet mentioned even
to the Jester. Naturally, Cass worried that she was betraying her vows of secrecy by revealing so much about the Secret and
about the Terces Society, but she figured telling people in the past wasn’t the same as telling people in the present. Besides,
the Jester was the founder of the Terces Society, or would be. If anybody should be allowed to hear mention of the Secret,
it was he. As for Anastasia, Cass felt a kinship with her she couldn’t quite explain.

“I wish I could see what you look like, Cassandra,” said Anastasia. “You are a brave girl to undertake a journey across time.”

“Uh… thanks. But I just look normal, really. Except for the big ears, like the Jester said.”

“Here—” The Jester presented Cass with a scroll.

“What’s this?” asked Cass, unrolling the scroll to reveal a piece of blank parchment.

“I was going to write my letter of resignation to the King on it, but I never got the chance. You may have it.”

“Uh, what for?”

“To draw yourself, of course. This clay should work perfectly.” He handed her a lump of red clay from the ground.

“Yes, please draw, Cassandra,” said Anastasia.

“I don’t know. I’m really bad at drawing. I don’t think I could make it look like me.”

“Well, if it doesn’t, we’ll never know, will we?” the Jester pointed out.

Under pressure, Cass sketched for a few minutes. When she finished, she was distinctly unhappy with the product. Between the
stiff braids and exaggeratedly pointy ears, her drawing had the cartoonish quality of something a cruel classmate might have
scribbled in a notebook and pasted on Cass’s locker. But the adults seemed to like it. At the very least, they were fascinated
by the sight of a drawing that appeared to draw itself.

“Ah, I see you do have the Jester’s ears—but, trust me, they are far more charming on you,” said Anastasia with a sideways
glance at the Jester. “May I keep the drawing?”

“Sure. I mean, if you really want to,” said Cass shyly. “Hey, did you guys hear that?”

“What?”

“That voice.”

“The soldiers must be coming back,” said Anastasia.
“I expected this. Now that they are away, they are questioning what they saw. And they are worrying what will happen to them
if they fail to bring my head to the King. We must go. My men are waiting.”

The Jester smiled. There was no more talk of his being exiled from the group.

“No, don’t worry, it’s not a soldier, it’s—” Cass stopped herself before she said Max-Ernest’s name. Most likely they wouldn’t
recognize it, and if they remembered her mentioning her future-residing friend, they would think she was losing her mind.
And perhaps she was.

But Anastasia had already strode away and was starting to saddle her horse.

“You can go—I’ll catch up,” said Cass to the Jester, feeling faint again.

She leaned against a rock and found herself nodding off. In the distance, she kept hearing Max-Ernest saying her name. Or
was she just imagining it?

“Cass, where did you go?” The Jester patted the air, trying to find her. “I shall not leave without you.”

Max-Ernest would be so disappointed when she came back without the Secret, she thought.
If
she came back.

Cass struggled to keep her eyes open. “I’m right here, but I don’t know for how long. I know this
sounds weird, but I think someone is calling me away. Or maybe I’m just fading out of this world.”

“Nonsense. You look as good as ever—your skin is so clear you are without a blemish.”

“Ha ha.” Cass tried to laugh but couldn’t quite manage it.

The Jester turned serious. “What was it you wanted to tell me earlier? You said it was important.”

“Oh, oh! It was about Lord Pharaoh. And it
is
important. Really important.” Cass sat up straight, summoning all her energy. “He knows about the Secret.”

“
Your
secret?”

“Well, it’s not mine yet. That’s why, after I’m gone, you have to go after him for me.”

“Lord Pharaoh? That awful alchemist? Why would I want to go near him?”

“To find the Secret yourself, of course. And to keep him from learning it. Or from using it if he already knows it. So you
can start the Terces Society like you’re supposed to.”

The Jester looked distressed. “I don’t know. Lord Pharaoh is a very powerful man. I’m just a jester, and not even a proper
jester anymore….”

“Well, I’m sure Anastasia will help. Anyway, you don’t have a choice. History depends on it. Otherwise,
the Midnight Sun will have the Secret instead of you.”

“You are very bossy for an invisible girl, do you know that?”

“Promise me.”

“Very well, I promise.”

“And then when you find the Secret, you have to leave it for me.”

“How do you leave a secret? Do you assume that it has physical properties?”

“You know what I mean. A clue. A message. Just write something and leave it for me so I can find it… in the future.”

“Where? I do not even know where you live. Or rather where you will live.”

Cass thought quickly. The name of her hometown would mean little to him. Even the name of her home country would mean little.

She did her best to identify where she lived using names he would recognize. It was a bit like playing Twenty Questions. Then
she had an inspiration.

“Forget about my house. It’s too iffy. My grandfathers have a fire station. You should leave the message there.”

The Jester looked confused. “A fire station? Is that like a signal fire?”

“No, it’s not actually a fire—it’s for people who put out fires. But that’s beside the point. The fire station isn’t even
a real fire station anymore. My grandfathers have a store in it called The Fire Sale. The problem is, it doesn’t exist yet….”

Cass thought for a second. “What if you made some kind of time capsule or something? You know, like people put under cornerstones?”

“Hm, maybe…” The Jester, it appeared, was not exactly following every word. “What if I left a message under the lodestone?
You would recognize the lodestone if you saw it….”

“OK,” said Cass eagerly. “Where will you leave the lodestone?”

She tried to push herself up farther, but she was too weak and she fell backward. Above her, the Jester was answering her
question, but she couldn’t make out the words.

Again, she heard the voice saying her name.

“Max-Ernest?” she called out impulsively.

And soon, though she tried as hard as she could to keep her eyes open, darkness overcame her.

Will I ever wake up again? she wondered as she fell asleep.

And if I do, when will it be?