Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) (5 page)

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m just saying … maybe this whole crusade of yours is a little misguided? The resistance movement your parents were a part of has all but died out. I know we’ve lost some things, some freedoms, but … have you read the new paper in
Nature
? The average human lifespan has increased by almost five years just since the Fay came! Some believe that a baby born this year may live to two hundred!”

“Yeah, a lot of animals live longer in captivity,” Merle muttered.

The professor exhaled, then slapped his legs and rose from the stool again, looking for his exit strategy.

“Hey, speaking of kids, whatever happened to your toy owl? I remember when you started here, that thing never left your shoulder.”

“He’s helping me with an experiment,” said Merle.

“Well … when he gets back, tell him I said you should both power down for a while.”

“If I did my math right, you can tell him yourself in …” Merle consulted his watch. “Six minutes.”

Merle must have had a look on his face. Strohmer eyed him suspiciously.

“What happens in six minutes?”

And then, suddenly, Archimedes was there. He appeared, flapping, just above their heads. He clasped a golden octagonal ring in his talons.

Strohmer started and tripped over the helium hose in earnest. Merle was short of breath. “Okay. Wow. It worked.” He checked his watch again. “I guess I got the math wrong, though.”

“What just—” Strohmer sputtered. “Where was he?”

The owl landed and held the ring out to Merle.

“Nowhere. He was nowhere. I sent him into the future, one year ago.”

“Why is it always a year?” Scott asked now, on the bus. “Couldn’t you just have sent Archie five minutes into the future?”

“Could,” Merle admitted. “But then I’d never have seen him again. Remember, the earth’s always looping around the sun. In five minutes, the planet and everything on it would have moved five thousand miles to the right, and Archie would’ve popped up in empty space somewhere. Same with your mom. In a year the earth’ll get back around to exactly where it was when she left, and she’ll materialize in the same airport terminal.”

Scott pictured it: his mom appearing suddenly, a little woozy maybe, wearing a bracelet made of fairy gold and wondering where her chauffeur had disappeared to.

Their tire grazed a pothole, and the music started playing again. Tiny spotlights fractured off the mirror ball and swam in schools around the inside of the bus. The unicat chased these around while Finchbriton pecked at the mirrors.

“Here’s what I don’t get,” Scott told Mick. “You say most Fay aren’t spellcasters. Your magic is like really good luck. So how do you turn worthless things into gold?”

“We don’t,” said Mick. “I mean, not deliberately. It’s like … yeh know when you’re walkin’, an’ yeh think yeh see somethin’ valuable on the ground maybe? Silver, or a diamond, or even just a quarter. But then yeh look closer, an’ it’s only a candy wrapper, or a piece o’ glass.”

“Sure.”

“Well, when one o’ the Fay thinks he sees a treasure, he’s almost always right.”

“Hey,” said Erno, and he glanced over at where Harvey was sleeping, then back at Scott. “Hey, your dad’s still driving the bus, right? Because the TV says he’s at a French disco.”

John (or rather Reggie Dwight, or rather two goblins masquerading as Reggie Dwight) was shown exiting a cab and entering the club above the caption “‘Knight’ Out on the Town.” Then they flashed a few clips of Reggie from his movies and music videos, and then they showed the cab-to-club footage again in slow motion.

“What was that?” John called back from the driver’s seat. “You say I’m on the telly?”

“I would never say telly, but yeah.”

“Who’s got the remote?” asked Emily.

“Hey, Fi,” said Scott. “Can you reach the volume?”

“I see no volumes,” Fi answered.

“I got it,” said Polly, and the bus speakers blared with the voice of the entertainment reporter, which had all the artless tenor of a toddler announcing to a crowded room that she has to go tinkle.

“… cameras inside, but sources say he danced the night away with nearly everyone in the club. Vive la différence! Including this American college student studying abroad.”

A redheaded girl tried to keep from grinning before the cameras outside the club. She wore a tiny T-shirt that showed that she was from Colorado, or Wyoming, or just a fan of rectangles. “I asked if I could take his picture with my phone?” she said. “So he took my phone and he put it in his mouth.”

“In his mouth?”

“It was a really small phone. Then he swallowed it? Then he said I could get my pictures back in twenty-four hours. Do you think that means we have a date? I gave him my number, but he didn’t write it down.”

“Did he punch anyone?”

“He punched three people.”

“Tell us about the punching.”

“He punched one guy who asked to be punched ’cause his girlfriend’s a fan? Then he punched a girl I think by accident ’cause of his dancing. Then later he punched a guy who wouldn’t let him cut in the bathroom line.”

“ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” John bellowed from the front of the bus. “Oh my lord.”

Goodco had only targeted John in the first place because they were rubbing out knights—it was nothing personal. But now it was like the goblin impostors were going out of their way to behave badly.

“All the better to make John look like a lunatic if he tries to tell the world what Goodco’s up to,” Emily suggested.

“My career is
over
!”

“Shh!” Erno shushed back.

“Those goblins are ruining my life!”

“
Shhh!
”

The cameras had gone back to Entertainment News Central or whatever they called it. The show’s logo rotated on three big screens, and the anchorwoman stood rigidly in front of them like a pedestal with a smile on it.

“Reggie Dwight’s bad-boy behavior began when he punched Queen Elizabeth II at a horse racing track last November. Fans of Reggie Dwight and royal watchers the world over want to know when the singer-actor and the Queen of England will sit down together and bury the hatchet. Sources close to the queen say that Her Majesty is still upset over Sir Reggie’s unprovoked attack, but officially she’s keeping ‘mum.’ It could be that rambunctious Reggie won’t rest until his queen says ‘good knight.’ Now in celebrity baby news—”

“TURN IT OFF TURN IT OFF TURN IT OFF,” said Prince Fi from atop the TV, where he crouched in a ball with his arms wrapped around his head. Polly did as he asked. Fi sighed and uncurled. “Like the foul wind of a thousand harpies,” he explained, straightening. “Every television is surely swarming with demons too coarse for Pandora’s box.”

“Yeah, it’s a pretty bad show,” Erno agreed.

Despite having no good times to celebrate, they hit another bump.

CHAPTER 3

In Halifax, Polly wrapped John’s head in bandages, save for a bare strip around his eyes that she covered with sunglasses and a thin slit over his mouth. If anyone asked, they were going to say he’d burned himself horribly somehow.

“We could tell people you were looking down the barrel of a flamethrower,” Polly suggested.

“And why would I have done that,” John sighed.

“To see why it wasn’t working. Like in a cartoon.”

“We could say you took a hot omelet to the face,” said Merle.

“Couldn’t it be something a little more … heroic?”

“Are you okay?” Scott asked Emily. She was rubbing her temples. She didn’t look like she’d slept.

“Just a headache,” she answered with a feeble wave. But you couldn’t help but get Scott’s sympathies with the word
headache
. He used to have migraines all the time. Every time he saw magical things, actually, but he’d finally gotten used to them, and his headaches had mostly gone away.

“Weird dreams,” Emily added absently.

They abandoned the party bus and walked down to the water toward a massive white cruise ship that rose like a cathedral from the dock. Harvey carried the unicat, which he was calling Grimalkin in defiance of every other name that had been suggested so far (Pointy, Stabs, Cat Stabbins, Lance, Pierce, Al Gore), in the hope that he’d be able to sneak quietly on board without getting either of them noticed. Mick and Prince Fi played gin rummy in Scott’s backpack.

“Welcome to the
Canadian Diamond Queen
!” said a polo-shirted young woman when they reached the end of the queue. Then she put the brakes on her smile a little bit. Her attention swerved to avoid the giant and the man in bandages and finally parked itself on Merle. Here was someone familiar: a senior citizen, just like the last fifteen passengers she’d admitted. You could see her struggling to find the common thread that bound him to everyone else. Carnies? Circus people?

“Carnies,” Merle told her.

“Uh-huh. Well! Welcome aboard! Make sure to have your picture taken with one of our cast at the top of the gangway!”

“Cast?” asked John. “You don’t mean crew?”

The woman jumped when he spoke. “We … call them cast.”

“Everyone wants to be in show business,” John muttered as he passed. “Did you see how she flinched?” he added when they were out of earshot. “What, just because I burned my face I’m not allowed to speak?”

“You didn’t really burn your face,” Scott reminded him.

“Maybe she expected you to be mute,” said Merle.

Erno said, “Maybe she expected you to cackle about how you’re going to show all those fools, those fools who thought you were mad.”

They entered the ship and plowed past the photographers. “We wrapped my face so I could be anonymous,” John groused. “This isn’t anonymous, this is just a worse kind of famous.”

The inside of the ship looked like a floating Cheesecake Factory. It looked like a huge fancy gift shop. It looked like the tomb of King Hallmark III.

It also looked like Biggs was going to be doing a lot of slouching. The guest areas, with their hallways and cabins, were all narrow and low ceilinged. The rooms themselves were barely larger than the beds, with closets the size of bathrooms and bathrooms the size of closets. But each had a dozen free movies on the TV and chocolates on the pillows and a balcony that overlooked the ocean. Finchbriton met them on one of these balconies.

“There yeh are,” Mick said to him. “Wanna join me under the bed? ’S roomy.”

Mick and Harvey, who both preferred the undersides of beds, were sharing a room with Scott and Erno. Polly was rooming with Emily and Grimalkin. John was with Merle, Biggs was by himself.

“Come to our room, Prince Fi,” said Polly. “I’ll make you a little apartment out of a dresser drawer.”

Fi sighed. “Thank you … no. That would be unseemly. I shall share quarters with the boys.”

Polly hugged her shoulders. “Yeah, you’re … you’re right. Unseemly.”

After a safety drill the ship got under way. And Harvey got immediately seasick.

“Why didn’t you tell us you had trouble with seasickness?” Scott asked through the balcony door during a brief spell in which Harvey had either just finished or was about to commence vomiting onto the balcony below.

“HOW WOULD I KNOW?” Harvey sputtered, shivering. “I’m a pooka! I uthed to live underground. I went through a hole in the univerthe to get to thith turd of a planet. I’ve never thailed an ocean before.”

“Yeah.” Scott tried to sympathize. “Mick told me all about how he just turned up in this world suddenly, in a baby carriage. I guess it must have been a weird surprise for you too. When you made the Crossing, I mean.”

That’s what the Freemen had called it in their secret papers: the Crossing. The Walk Between Worlds—when a person or animal from the shrinking magical land of Pretannica traded places with some other person or animal here.

“Yeah, big thurprize,” Harvey answered. “Didn’t thee it coming.”

“So … how did it happen with you?” Scott asked the pooka. “How did you make the Crossing?”

“I would love to have thith converthation with you? But I’m thuper busy. Thith boat ithn’t going to throw up on itthelf!”

Polly stepped out onto the balcony and plunked down into a plastic lounge chair. Harvey watched her out of the corner of his eye, as if she might weave him a friendship bracelet if he wasn’t vigilant. She watched him back, appraisingly.

“I like your ears,” she said.

“I wish I could thay the thame,” he replied, wobbling.

“I think you must have been a really important fairy back in Pretannica,” she continued, undeterred. “Girls are experts on this kind of thing. Like you must have been a prince or a jack or something.”

Scott stared at his sister. Harvey did, too. “Showth what you know. I wath a
king
. Harvey the First of the Lepusian Kingdom.”

Polly nodded. “In my homeland I was known as Princess Babyfat Von Pumpkinbread. Before I was adopted by
commoners
,” she added, indicating Scott. Harvey gave Scott a sneer.

Scott frowned. “Hey, I was just—”

“Leave uth! Leave uth before I—” shouted Harvey; but he didn’t finish his sentence, unless the remainder was “vomit,” in which case he finished it spectacularly.