Chapter 29: Nothing Adds Up

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a Chapter in which a great deal is explained to the people who need it, close this book now. Dear Reader, here is a riddle to carry down the highway. What can be given away without being lost, and is harder to accept than almost anything you can buy? The answer comes in a small box, and the person giving it will say it is nothing.

Igred drove the way he did everything else, which was without a single wasted motion.

The long black sedan took Alder Street at an even twenty-five miles an hour, turned onto the main road at the exact moment the light changed, and settled into a lane with the soft, expensive hum of a machine that had never once been late. Inside, eight children sat in the kind of silence that follows a very long day, on leather seats that had never held so many people in so many states of ruin. A barefoot boy. A scorched scarf. A singed sleeve. A girl still holding a stranger’s jacket because she had forgotten to give it back.

The other two, Pia and Owen, sat quietly and tried to be as invisible as possible. They had never met the other six before today, and they were shy, confused, and afraid in equal measure. Sadly, they lived too far away to simply leave.

Igred looked at them in the rearview mirror for exactly one red light. Then he cleared his throat.

"I would like to be honest with you," he said. "I don’t have a clue what’s going on."

Nobody answered.

"I know that Miss Lotus was in a house that vanished. I know that a man in a gray jacket told me she was in a game, and I know that the game sounds like a scam." The mirror held his calm, bearded face. "That is the sum of what I know. I am a driver. I am not paid to think. I am paid to remember, and to report, and I would like to have something worth reporting."

"It’s a game," said Jaquan. "It’s called the Game of..."

He stopped.

His throat closed on the next word like a hand. The faint mark on his wrist flared white, and he clutched at his scarf and coughed, and nothing came out. Bliss tried next, with her eyes screwed shut, and managed one syllable before her face went the color of paper. Matt opened his mouth, looked at the other two, and closed it again with a very careful click.

"The marks," said Hadjer, quietly, from the corner. Hers had flared too. "We can’t talk about it. Not about the Game. Not to anyone who isn’t in it."

That was the first domino, and it fell in the only direction it could. Igred’s eyes moved, for the first time, to the two boys with nothing on their wrists.

Carter looked out of the window. Carter had, in the course of his life, been questioned by several adults in several uniforms, and had developed a great deal of respect for the policy of saying nothing.

That left Arthur.

"I can talk," said Arthur. He had his head against the glass and his eyes half-closed. "But I’m very tired, and if I tell you now, I’ll get half of it wrong, and you’ll write down the wrong half." He opened one eye. "I’ll tell you all of it, sir. Tomorrow. To whoever is going to need it. Tonight I’d only make it worse."

Igred considered this in silence for the length of a very long block.

"That is reasonable," he said, at last. "I will report what I can. Mr. Lotus has people whose job it is to think, and they are very good at it. They will take what I give them and do the rest." He paused. "I ask only that nobody lies to Miss Lotus’s father about any of it."

"Nobody will," said Arthur, and meant it, and did not say how many things he was leaving out.

"Does that include our parents?" said Bliss.

It came out very small. Everyone looked at her. She had been holding Matt’s jacket against her chest for so long that her arms had gone numb, and her eyes kept moving to the clock on the dashboard, and then away.

"Because we can’t tell them either," she said. "We can’t say anything. And my grandmother calls at four. She called at four, and I didn’t answer, and she is going to be so worried. She’s going to think..." She did not finish.

Igred’s eyes softened in the mirror, by perhaps a quarter of an inch.

"Your family is your own business, Miss Euphoric," he said. "And it is not your fault that you cannot tell them the truth."

That was the second domino. Once the question of telling had been asked, it could not be put away, and the car filled with the quiet sound of eight children counting the people they would have to disappoint.

"My mother is expecting me," said Jaquan, flatly, "and by expecting I mean she has a list of four possible deaths and a fifth for emergencies."

"Mine, too," said Arthur.

Matt shrugged. He was lying across the seat with his bare feet against the window, looking at the ceiling. "Mine don’t worry," he said. "They know I’m okay. I’m always okay." He said it as a fact, like the weather, and nobody mentioned that he had not said it as if it were a good thing.

"I’d call them right now if I had a phone," said Jaquan. "It would have been nice if they’d given ours back before they dropped us on a lawn."

"They didn’t give anything back," said Hadjer. "Whoever ran the Lost & Found must have kept everything for safekeeping."

"More like stealing," muttered Carter. It was the first word he had said since the lawn. It had the flavor of something he had heard before, and not believed then, either.

That was the third domino, and Hadjer felt it fall.

She had been looking at nothing for several blocks. Now she looked at the eight empty hands in the car, at Bliss’s numb arms, at Carter’s thumb working slowly over the place where a cracked phone used to be, and she sat up. A gas station slid by, then a pharmacy, then a very bright building with a glowing sign in the window.

"Igred," she said. "Stop at that phone store."

"Miss?"

"Please. I want to buy phones." She looked around at the seven other faces. "For everyone."

"Everyone?" said Jaquan.

"You need to call people. We have no phones. That store has phones." She said it the way a person says that the sky is up. "It’s simple."

Matt sat up. "I have an account. I can have one delivered by..." He stopped, frowned, and tried again. "But I need a phone to do that, so yes. Hurry up with the phone, please."

"Okay, let’s do it," said Hadjer. "We can at least solve one thing right today."

The store was very bright and nearly empty, and the young man behind the counter looked at the barefoot boy, the burned scarf, and the enormous bearded man in the black coat standing behind a small girl in a school uniform, and sensibly said nothing at all. Igred produced a plain black card. A series of beeps went off. Within ten minutes, they were standing on the pavement in a row, each holding a brand-new phone in a box.

Matt turned his over once and shrugged. "Nice," he said, and put it in his pocket. It was, to him, something like being handed a napkin.

Jaquan held his as though it might bite. "I will probably pay you back," he said, in a voice dripping with sarcasm. The phone cost far more than he could ever repay, and he would not be changing it for a very long time.

"It’s cheap," said Hadjer. "You don’t have to do that." She had not noticed that he was joking.

Bliss said "thank you" four times, and the last one cracked.

Carter had not opened his box.

He was holding it in both hands, as if he were afraid it might spill, and he had not looked at it once since the counter. His old phone, the cracked one with the taped-up back, was in a bin that no longer existed. His thumb ran along the edge of the cardboard, very slowly.

"Can I really keep it?" he said.

He said it so quietly that nobody would have heard it if they had not all been looking.

"Of course," said Hadjer.

She said it the way you say something when it costs you nothing, without looking up from her own box, already thinking about something else. It was the most natural, easy, careless thing in the world. And Carter, who had never in his life been handed a thing like that without a reason, a price, or a catch, stood very still under the shop’s white light and looked at the box in his hands as if it were a miracle. He did not have the faintest idea how he would ever have bought another one himself.

"Thanks," he said, roughly, and turned away so that nobody could see his face.

Arthur watched him go. He looked at his own box, then at Hadjer, then at the box again.

His mother had been saving. She had never said so, but he had seen the jar on the kitchen shelf, the coins stacked in neat little towers, and the bills folded into a crumpled envelope with a number in her careful handwriting. A new phone, because his old one had broken. A new phone, which was over the budget, because the household never really had one. He had felt it every day since: a quiet, sour weight, knowing what it cost her, knowing he could not tell her he did not need it.

Now he could tell her to stop.

He did not say any of it. He put the box into his jacket, took a breath, and when he looked up, Hadjer was looking at him, and she raised one eyebrow, and he looked away.

"Thank you," he said, to the pavement.

"Stop saying thank you," said Hadjer. "It’s embarrassing."

That fourth domino was the one that made noise, because a phone in a hand is a promise that someone will make a call.

After that, it was a little like watching a car full of children put on masks.

Bliss was first, standing in the shadow of the store with the phone pressed to her ear. "Grandma, hi. It’s me. I’m so sorry I missed four. I’m fine, I promise, I’m completely fine." She paused. "I’m at a friend’s. I’m staying there tonight. A friend, Grandma. Yes. A real one." She laughed, a thin, shaky, astonished laugh, and wiped her face with the back of her wrist.

Jaquan told his mother about a group project, and a science fair, and a deadline that did not exist, in a bored voice so smooth that Arthur almost believed him. Arthur told his mother something about a friend’s house and homework and that he would call in the morning, and she said a friend? in a tone he had not heard in a long time, and he did not correct her. Matt did not make a call. He logged in to three accounts in a row, and by the time he looked up, he had booked himself a suite at a hotel across the city. "Refundable," he said. "I can always cancel it if it’s not to my standards."

Pia called her mother and delivered a lie in a flat, practiced voice, as if she had rehearsed it for years. Owen whispered into his phone with his back to everyone, and what he said sounded closer to the truth than a lie should.

Carter held his phone and looked at the screen. There was nobody to call. He did not say so, and nobody asked, and when Arthur’s eyes met his for a moment across the pavement, Carter shrugged and went back to exploring the settings, one thumb at a time, with enormous care.

"We can take the school bus tomorrow," said Jaquan, finishing up. "The magical one. It’ll still run in the morning. It’s the cheapest way home, since we live in different states."

"Which leaves tonight," said Arthur.

That was the fifth domino, and nobody wanted to look at it.

Every one of them had just told somebody a lie that began with I’m at a friend’s. Now they stood on a pavement in the dark, eight children with no real friend’s house to go to. Matt had his hotel, which none of them were going to use, because it had never occurred to Matt to offer it to people with problems like theirs. Bliss had a grandmother who thought she was safe. Jaquan had a mother who thought he was preparing for a science fair. The closest thing any of them had to a plan was an enormous man in a black coat, standing patiently beside a car.

Hadjer was staring across the street.

It was a billboard, high above a shuttered florist’s, for a private zoo. A small, tasteful one, with a lion on the sign and a very long name. Underneath the lion, in much smaller letters, was the word LOTUS.

"Oh," she said. "That’s mine."

"Your zoo," said Jaquan.

"My zoo." She turned. "My father built me a house at the back of it. A whole house. For when I wanted to be near the animals." She looked at Igred, and for the first time that evening, she spoke the way a person speaks who has decided. "Take us there."

Igred was quiet for a moment.

"Miss. Your father expects..."

"He can talk to me tomorrow." She did not raise her voice. "They’re tired, Igred. They’re exhausted. And honestly, he can ask Arthur whatever he wants. Arthur is the only one who can say anything anyway."

That was the sixth domino, and it fell straight back onto the first. Igred looked at the children, one after another, and at the girl with the gray, hollow face who would normally have argued with him about a curfew. He thought, in his slow, careful way, about what he had been told. Arthur can talk. Arthur will talk tomorrow. Everyone else cannot. If so, there was only one place in the whole city where he could keep eight exhausted children, one of whom killed flowers, and still see all of them: behind a wall, at the end of a private road.

He took a long, slow breath. And then, for reasons that had nothing to do with his job, he opened the car door.

"There is a popcorn machine in the house," he said. "It’s there for guests. Pop some corn, go and see the animals, and don’t wake the lions."

The house at the back of the zoo was warm, and small, and unreasonably perfect.

It had a wide porch with a swing, and a kitchen with an enormous popcorn machine, and a hallway lined with doors that opened into narrow, softly lit bedrooms, each with a name on a brass plate that had been put there by a man who had loved his daughter in the only way he had ever known. Beyond the glass at the back, the dark shapes of enclosures stood in rows under the stars.

Bliss, Jaquan and Matt fell onto the beds as though somebody had cut their strings. Pia and Owen took the two nearest rooms with the caution of guests who were not sure they had been invited. Matt, still barefoot, announced that this was a better hotel, that he would cancel the other one, and that he would like the room with the fish tank. Igred put a kettle on, as if he had been born to put kettles on in other people’s kitchens, and sent a short, calm, thorough message to somebody on his new phone.

"You can take a look at the animals, if you want," Hadjer said to Arthur and Carter. She was standing at the glass door, looking out at the dark, and her voice had gone a little careful. "They’re really cute. I’ll stay here."

Carter went first, with the air of a man entering a foreign country. After a moment, Arthur followed. He had the serpent coiled around his wrist, a pale, patient, tired weight, and a half-formed idea at the back of his mind that had not yet decided to become a thought.

He was already ten steps down the gravel path when he noticed that Hadjer was not beside him.

He turned.

She was standing at the threshold of the glass door, at the exact spot where the light from the kitchen ended. She had not moved. The boards under her feet had faded to a pale gray.

"What’s wrong?" said Arthur.

"I can’t," said Hadjer.

"You can’t..."

"Some of them are very small. Some are very weak." She said it flatly, in the voice of someone reading from a card. "If I walk past them, they’ll die. It’s just my passive. It happens when I’m close." She looked past him at the dark enclosures, at the faint, glowing shapes that were bats, or finches, or small and sleeping things. "I only check on them through the cameras. I’ve done it ever since I got it. It’s the main reason I wanted a magical pet. I thought, maybe, a magical one would last."

The words a magical pet did something to Arthur’s half-formed idea. It stopped being half-formed.

He looked down at his wrist.

The serpent was still coiled there, one thin, gray, silent coil around the bone, its head tilted a little toward the house, toward the girl at the door. It had been like that since the lawn. Not struggling, and not attacking. Only holding on, as it had held on all afternoon, to the first person who had been kind enough to catch it. He thought of the girl on the couch. He thought of what she must have said to it, a week ago, in a cold voice: Wait for him. Catch him. He thought of an animal that had waited, and waited, and been forgotten, and was still, somehow, trying its best to follow the order.

Poor thing, he thought. He’s only trying to do his job.

And a magical pet that had been bought with two thousand coins, and lost, and forgotten, was here on his wrist, while the girl who had paid for it stood alone at a door she was not allowed to cross.

He walked back up the path. He bent down, unwound the serpent from his wrist, set it gently on the boards beside Hadjer’s feet, and flicked it, once, on the top of the head, with a finger.

"Your master abandoned you," he said, in a cold, flat voice. "You don’t have to be loyal to her anymore. It’s pathetic. Stay here."

The creature flinched.

It was a very small movement, but Hadjer felt it, the way you feel a draft from a door you did not know was open, and her head snapped up. She gave him a look that could have stripped paint.

"You didn’t have to be that mean," she said.

"I’ll be back," said Arthur, and went down the path without another word.

Hadjer stood on the porch with her arms crossed and looked at what he had left her.

It was not cute. She wanted to be honest about that. It was long and thin and covered in tiny scales, and when it lifted its head, she could see the tips of its fangs pressing against its closed lips, two white curves that did not belong anywhere near a person. Its eyes were a flat, pale, unreadable gold, with a thin black slit in the center, and they were looking at her with an expression she could not name. She did not want to touch it. She did not want to be near it. She was not, to be perfectly clear, a person who liked animals that were not cute, in the sense that nobody had ever let her try.

She did not say anything, because she felt a little bad about having snapped at him. She stood. She waited.

The snake waited too.

It has scales, she thought, absurdly. I couldn’t even pet it. It wouldn’t feel like anything. It would feel like touching a very strange handbag.

And then she looked at its eyes again.

There was something behind the gold. Something under the fear, and under the slit, and under the thin, careful, wary way it held its head, so that nobody could tell whether it was about to strike or about to flee. She knew it. She had seen it, a week before, in a mirror, on the evening she had realized that the girl she had called her friend had been waiting, all that time, to take everything she had away.

It was pain. It was the plain, dull, patient pain of someone who had been loyal to a person who had never once been loyal back.

Funny, she thought. There is nothing about it that I can relate to physically, and yet I know exactly how it feels.

She thought about how nobody came near her, either. She thought about the gray grass, and the flowers that died in the cars, and the small, careful distance between her and every other living thing. She thought about it so hard that she did not notice, until it was done, that she had come closer. That she had crouched. That, without any decision at all, she had put her arms around the creature, scales and fangs and all, and was holding it against her chest.

It went rigid in her arms. Then it went soft.

"It’s okay," she said, into the cold, narrow air. "It’s okay."

It did not die. The boards under her feet did not turn gray. She held it for a long time, and she petted it, awkwardly, with one hand, down its long, cool spine, and the scales felt like nothing she had ever touched. They felt like something that was alive.

"What’s your name?" she said at last.

It looked at her. Then, very slowly, it moved its head from side to side.

"She never gave you one," said Hadjer.

It nodded.

Something sharp and bright went through her, and for a moment she could not speak. When she did, it came out low and fierce.

"Then I will."

She thought for a long moment. She thought of a warm classroom that smelled of dust and linen, and of a teacher with a bandaged face, who had drawn a circle on the board in yellow chalk.

"Ouroboros," she said. "Ouro, for short. It’s a snake that eats its own tail. It’s a symbol of renewal. Our mummy teacher told us about it once." She swallowed. "Let’s start a new beginning."

And as she said it, something locked.

It was not a sound. It was the feeling of a thread being pulled tight between two people, a small, warm, steady pull at the center of her chest. She remembered something she had read in the fine print of the gift, a long time ago: a pet is truly bound to its owner only once it has a name. Lyra had never named it, so it had never been bound to her. Now, very quietly, with no spell and no ceremony, it had bound to Hadjer.

Its colors changed.

The pale, sickly gray went out of its scales like water down a drain. They deepened, all at once, to a warm, glossy green, with a pattern of soft gold along the back and a thin, bright line of blue down each side. Its eyes, those flat, frightened eyes, turned the color of clear amber, and for the first time in a week, they closed. It laid its head on her shoulder, and it breathed.

It was, now that she looked at it properly, kind of cute.

A name is the smallest gift there is, weighing no more than breath;

but some things go their whole lives without one, until their death.

"It’s a little cold."

Hadjer jumped.

Arthur was standing at the foot of the porch steps with a paper bag in his hand and a faint look of apology on his face. He held it up. Inside was popcorn, a little deflated, the kind that had been sitting in a machine for a few minutes too long.

"I thought you’d want some," he said.

She stared at him.

He had been gone for ten minutes. She had assumed he had gone to see the animals, or gone to bed, or run home. She had assumed that was what people did when they had done their kindness and done their meanness and had no reason left to stay.

"Why are you back?" she said.

"Don’t be silly." He climbed the steps, sat down beside her on the boards, and held out the bag. "Why would I leave you alone? You almost got kidnapped today."

She laughed.

It was a real laugh, short and startled and rusty, the first she had managed all day. It rang out over the dark enclosures, and a small shape somewhere stirred in its sleep. Ouro lifted its head and looked at Arthur with its new amber eyes, and, very gently, did not hiss.

And then the laugh left her face.

It went slowly, like light from a window. She looked down at the bag in his hands, and the porch, and the sleeping snake, and she took a long, steady breath.

"You flicked it," she said. "You told it its master abandoned it. You were cold, and cruel, and then you walked off and left it with me. You knew exactly what you were doing, didn’t you?"

Arthur said nothing. He ate a piece of popcorn.

"So I’ll ask once more. Why are you like this to me?"

"Like what?"

"Like this. You help me. You catch snakes for me. You bring me popcorn." She did not look at him. "You don’t do that. It doesn’t suit you, Arthur. You’re lazy. You’re sarcastic. You don’t help people unless there’s something in it for you, and there isn’t anything in it for you." She turned her head, at last, and her dark eyes were very steady. "It doesn’t add up."

"Hadjer..."

"I’ve tried. I have really tried." Her voice was quiet. It was not angry. It was the voice of someone who has done a very long sum and keeps getting the same impossible answer. "I made an archive. Everything you’ve said, everything you’ve done, every place you were when you shouldn’t have been. All of it. I’ve been trying to figure you out since the day you walked into my life."

She held his gaze.

"And I still can’t. So tell me. Why?"

TO BE CONTINUED...