Page 21 of Tricks for Free

They held. They might be impossible, but that was no excuse for them to be structurally unsound. The walls were concrete, and the handrails had been bolted solidly into place, preventing accidents. The stairs themselves were gridded metal, the kind I’d encountered in a hundred gyms and auditoriums, and walking down them was dismayingly like walking back into my own past, descending the risers at some unfamiliar school’s athletic field, ready to throw myself back into the fray.

Emily’s steps echoed behind me, delicate tap, tap, taps as her heels impacted with the metal. I’d seen dozens of teen queens and derby spectators get their heels caught in stairs like these, sending them sprawling and suddenly shoeless, like Cinderella fleeing from the ball. Thinking of Emily eating stair was even better than the mall Goth thing, at least where it came to keeping me from freaking out. And keeping me from freaking out was essential. I wasn’t sure how real this basement was, but I was damn sure I didn’t want to be in it if it suddenly decided that being on fire was more fun than the alternative.

The stairs went on for a hell of a lot longer than was safe or possible in Florida, until they ended at a door. I looked over my shoulder to Emily. She nodded, smiling encouragingly, which was terrifying. Once again, it occurred to me that maybe going into a strange, potentially nonexistent room with a routewitch I didn’t know was a terrible idea.

That didn’t matter. It was go with Emily or run from Lowryland, and I was so tired of running. Sitting still was killing me, a little bit at a time, but my family didn’t raise me to run. I was a Price. I needed ground. I needed someplace to stand.

I opened the door.

There was a shock when my fingers closed around the doorknob, like static arcing through the metal. It wasn’t enough to hurt, barely enough to sting, and when it passed, I was looking at a conference room. Not just any conference room: judging by the view out the wide picture window, a conference room on one of the top floors of a building. Maybe the one I’d started out in. Maybe not. A large oak table dominated the room, and a buffet was set up along one wall, the smell of food earning a growl from my under-served stomach. I ignored it. I had bigger things to worry about.

Like oh, say, the people. Four of them were sitting around the conference table and one was standing at the end, next to the sort of bar graph that absolutely meant we were interrupting something. All of them had turned to look at the door when it opened, which meant all five were now looking directly at me. I had never felt so small, or so grubby, in my life.

Emily planted her hands between my shoulders and pushed me into the room. “Look what I found,” she said, voice loud enough to carry all the way to the man with the bar graph. I didn’t recognize him. I didn’t recognize any of these people. I could see that they were all management, or whatever comes after management, the people who manage the managers. To them, I was nothing, an utterly replaceable gear in their perfect clockwork.

Or at least I had been, right up until now. They turned the full force of their regard on me as I stumbled into their conference room, and I’d never wished for anonymity so much in my life.

“Emily?” The man next to the bar graph put his pointer down on the table with a soft tap. “Who’s this?”

“Her name is Melody West, and she’s a junior cast member, mostly working in the Fairyland zone,” said Emily. “She’s been trained for all zones of the Park, shows a marked preference for themed retail, and does not enjoy working in Lowry’s Welcoming World. Of the five guest complaints she’s received since starting her tenure, three were received in the Welcoming World.”

“Five?” asked one of the women. “That seems excessive.”

It wasn’t excessive. Guests come to Lowryland for a magical experience that doesn’t cost as much as Disney World, and some of them are primed to complain from the second they reach the Park and realize they’re not miraculously going to have the whole place to themselves. Guests who’ve gone into full entitlement mode will make complaints against cast members because we didn’t throw everyone else out of the store to give them the full princess experience they’ve been dreaming of since they were five. Honestly, the only reason we didn’t all receive a hundred complaints a day was because making a complaint required going to see Guest Relations in the Hall of Records, and that took effort. People who want to complain about the color of the pavement aren’t usually into making an effort.

“It’s not,” said Emily. “It’s actually below the average for someone of her tenure and temperament.”

“Have you brought her here to have her memory erased?” asked the man by the bar graph. I looked at him again, more alarmed this time. He looked calmly back at me. “Did you see something you shouldn’t have seen, Miss West?”

“No one’s erasing anyone’s memory, thanks,” I said. The fire was trying to surge back into my fingertips. I folded them against my palms, trying to stop the heat from spreading. “I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing, and I’m happy to keep things that way, so if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way.”

One of the women was sitting up straighter, her eyes fixed on my hands. Shit. “I can see fire through your fingers,” she said. “Sorcerer. Emily, you’ve found us a sorcerer.”

“It’s not polite to trespass on someone else’s territory,” said the man, picking up his pointer again. That tap when he had put it down: that had been wood touching wood, not metal. His pointer was made of polished, old-fashioned wood. There’s a word for a pointer made of wood, in some circles.

People call them wands.

I took a step backward, narrowly missing a collision with Emily. “I didn’t mean to trespass on anyone’s territory, and I’m not here looking for trouble,” I said quickly. The door we’d come in through was clearly magical, and going back through it might not take me anywhere near where I’d started. Someone might even close it while I was inside, stranding me in that liminal room full of concrete and stairs. “I just needed a job. Lowryland seemed like a good fit for my skills.”

“She’s untrained,” said Emily triumphantly. “Powerful, yes, but with no idea how to use it. She’s been getting lessons from a ghost.”

All five of them looked at me again. I squirmed, torn between the desire to explain myself and the desire to flee.

Based on the view out the window, we were at least seven floors away from the ground. Fleeing was not going to end well for me. “She knew the last member of our family to have any magic at all,” I said, making my voice curt and hard, like I was getting ready to fight with my sister. “She didn’t have any of her own, but she can at least tell me how he managed not to set everything on fire all the time.”

“Fascinating.” Another of the men stood, walking carefully toward me. “What was your name again?”

“Melody West.” I’d been Melody for eight hours a day, every day, for four years, and longer on practice and game days, when I had sometimes been Melody for twelve to sixteen hours at a stretch. I tried to summon the smell of freshly-cut grass and sweat, the sound of the crowds roaring for our football team, which was never the best in our school district, but tried really hard, every day. I was Melody because I had been Melody long enough for her to belong to me, body and soul.

The man frowned, tilting his head and squinting. “That’s not the only name you’ve used, but it belongs to you,” he said.

“And you’re a trainspotter,” I said, recognizing the way he was looking at me, like someone nearsighted trying to read a schedule board. “How the hell is a routewitch working with a trainspotter and a sorcerer,” I nodded toward the man with the pointer, “in a Lowryland conference room? This feels like the setup to a bad joke.”

“In a way, it is,” said the sorcerer. He pointed his wand at me. “Welcome to the Lowryland cabal. Please tell me, in small words, why I should let you live.”

Seven

“Ain’t no party like a pity party, because a pity party only ends when you bury the bastards who made you feel sorry for yourself.”