Zeke stuffed his face in a pillow and pretended to scream.
“Don’t you ever get tired of quoting?” asked Dinah.
“No,” said Gage, sitting up again. “Like a visit from Deputy Herrera and Deputy Campbell, quoting reminds me there are other people in the world besides only me. And other thoughts besides mine, and other ways of thinking.”
“There are,” agreed Dinah. “Namely, Pepper. Her next assignment. Her punishment: she has to take What-the-Dickens on a tooth run and lose him for good. In the wild. Isn’t that where you were headed?”
“Aren’t you worn out?” asked Gage.
“You tell such a good story,” Dinah said, wheedling.
“You do a pretty good job yourself, you,” said Gage. “Well, come closer. The wind is getting louder, and I don’t want to risk waking Rebecca Ruth up now, not when she’s managed to sleep through our unexpected company.”
Gage put his arms around Zeke and Dinah. If either of them tried to wriggle away again, he’d know it.
So, you do remember where we were?
What-the-Dickens and Pepper were hustling along the corridors of — the colony.
Right: Undertree Common. Northwest Sector, Division B. Good listening.
The skibbereen were heading for the bank. In a hurry. And in states of mind alike in some ways, not alike in others.
The orphan skibberee had lost his grin. The impact of Doctor Ill’s pronouncement was beginning to hit home. Hah, thought What-the-Dickens, hit home. Such as I’ve ever known, for one full night of my life.
But Pepper has been given another chance to earn her right to roam — away from home now and then — and this is good. Since it was my fault she reported in late, I should just be quiet. Let her succeed, and accept my own banishment. So I almost had a home? Let it go. If I can.
No, not if. I must let it go. I will.
Still, What-the-Dickens resented the bossiness of Doctor Ill. Why should the crown have all the say in whether Pepper could become an Agent of Change? Which meant whether she could be a “named” skibberee instead of an anonymous worker-citizen.
To distract himself from his sour ponderings, he asked, “Why are we going to the bank?”
Pepper explained as they hurried along. “Skibbereen — tooth fairies, as they’re called nowadays — don’t steal. Everything is strictly on the up-and-up, no funny business. If we want a tooth, we buy it. We take it and we leave the payment behind.”
“What kind of payment?” asked What-the-Dickens.
“The best kind. Cash,” said Pepper. “Cash is both pretty and portable.”
“But where do you get it?”
“Where do you think? We mine it.”
“You mine it? It comes out of the ground all clean and newly minted?”
“Hardly new,” said Pepper, “but true coin don’t lose its value over time the way, say, baloney does. You see, every colony develops a group of skibbereen called the Scavengers. They’re like diviners who can find water with a forked branch of hickory wood. After scads and scads of years, Scavengers have evolved to be able to smell the presence of metal in the dirt. They go on foraging trips almost every night. Those trips ain’t as dangerous as the trips that we Agents of Change make, for we have to skootch right up close to the dread human creature, whereas Scavengers only go where humans have already been.”
She said we. She thinks of herself as an Agent of Change already. She wants that so badly. “What sorts of places do Scavengers go?” he continued.
“Oh, here, there. Playgrounds, for instance. A lot of spare change grows in the dirt underneath a jungle gym. Used car lots, too. At night Scavengers investigate the latest trade-ins. You’d be amazed how much moola can be found in the cracks between the seat cushions. Also pay phones. Also places with views, what human colonies sometimes calls Lovers’ Lanes. Rich with possibility!”
“But that’s stealing,” said What-the-Dickens. “Isn’t that stealing?”
“Oh, no, not at all,” demurred Pepper. “True, we take the poor lost nickels and quarters and even dollar coins, and we clean them up. But we don’t keep them for good. We give them a nice new home under the pillow of some child who has just lost a tooth. Besides, don’t you know, we pay for the money. We trade something back to humans for all the money we get from them. We’re in the tooth trade. It’s our economy.”
“What do you — do we — give for the money we find?” But was it you or we?
“Later,” said Pepper. “Here’s the bank.”
She stopped before a pair of gates hung in the walls of the corridor. Each gate was made of colored wooden beads strung horizontally on iron rods fixed into a polished wooden frame. “Getting the Gates of Abacus installed was quite an achievement,” said Pepper proudly. “It’s a bit over the top, but this is a temple to currency and we like to keep current. Clea, I’m here for my disbursement.”
A skibberee lurking behind a rank of bright red beads pushed aside a bead to peer at them. Clea the Banker. She sported a pair of fuzzy spectacles fashioned out of pipe cleaners. Perhaps she wore them to make herself appear smart. But she looks ridiculous, thought What-the-Dickens, as he remembered the spectacles on Granny Menace’s mantelpiece. Clea’s glasses were three sizes too large and had no lenses.
“Oooooh,” said Clea, pushing aside several more beads so she could get a better look, “who’s this you got with you, Pepper? A boyfriend?”
“A friend,” said Pepper, “and it’s none of your business.”
“A friend who’s a boy,” said Clea.
“No, I’m a boy who’s a friend,” said What-the-Dickens. “I was a boy first and a friend second.”
“Not the rogue tooth fairy I’ve been hearing about?” Clea was scandalized. She reared back onto her behind, then stood up, took off her glasses and pretended to clean the lenses on her wing tips so she could see him better. “My word! It is! What is he doing here?”
“I got an assignment, Clea. And I’m kinda like in a hurry? I can’t discuss it now. Open up.”
“But Doctor Ill would never assign a rogue tooth fairy to accompany an Agent of Change!” remarked Clea. She hesitated at the latch. “Pepper, are you in cahoots with a bad element? We haven’t had a bank robbery here for one or two or what-comes-next months. Or years. This is terribly irregular. I’ll have to get some confirmation —”
“We’ve met the crown. We’re on assignment,” Pepper advised her briskly. “If you want to be kicked out of your position and be sent back down to the field, Clea, dither away. Be my guest. Maybe that’ll open a position in the bank for my friend here, who’s looking for work, I bet.”
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Clea remarked, though she began to unlatch the gates as she spoke. “If we don’t know your friend’s background, we can’t possibly know what he’s good for. We each have a calling. It would be criminal to send out a homebody Harvester to do the job of an Agent of Change. They’d get all muddled and end up squished flat on some automobile windshield like your common moth.”
“What-the-Dickens doesn’t know his own strength,” said Pepper calmly. “But in any case, Doctor Ill makes those calls, not you, Clea. Will you hurry a bit?”
“Quite right, quite right.” Clea clucked to herself. “I stand corrected. I’m only the banker. Now, what can I get you, Pepper dear?”
Pepper didn’t answer. She led What-the-Dickens through the gates into a chamber luminous with gleam. The three interior walls of the vault (the Gates of Abacus made up the fourth) were built out of silvery metal. Shaped something like columns, they were embedded halfway into the walls. It all looked very rich, as the room was filled with the diffuse glow cast by lightning bugs housed within milkpod globes. A ten-dollar bill lay flat on the floor like a green area carpet.
“Wow,” said What-the-Dickens. “This is grand.”
“It’s the most splendid bank I know of,” said Clea proudly. “Also the only one. We call it the Only National Bank.”
>
Pepper said to What-the-Dickens, “See, these are coin-changers used by human beings. Clea collects the funds that the Scavengers find and she stores them in these stacks. The money slots in at the top. By pushing against one of these levers down here at the bottom, she can get cash out, too — one coin at a time.”
“How many coins do you have here?” asked What-the-Dickens.
Clea clucked. She rubbed her chin. She walked back and forth among the dozen or so columns of glittering coins — copper pennies, pewtery nickels, silvery dimes, rib-edged quarters.
“It’s hard to get an accurate count,” the banker admitted. “Four? Or ninety? Somewhere in there.”
“We can’t stop to figure it out,” said Pepper impatiently. “Besides, math is a myth. Doctor Ill always says so, and he knows. Clea, I just need a standard-issue quarter.”
Clea walked back and forth across the room. She stroked her chin and occasionally took off her spectacles and chewed on the earpiece, which made it damp and disgusting.
“Hmmm,” she said. “Hmmmm. Maybe? — Yes. Yes. This one. I think you’ll find this to your liking, my dear.” Suddenly she bolted forward and threw herself against a lever at the floor level. A bright coin shot out like a metal Frisbee and caught What-the-Dickens in the ankle.
The skibberee examined it. On one side it was imprinted with a human head that seemed to have been severed from its body, for it ended at the neck. Liberty, read the coin. “Liberty for whom?” asked What-the-Dickens. “Not for her: she’s been decapitated.”
“Don’t ask such nosy questions,” said Clea.
“Don’t mind him; he’s a visitor,” said Pepper.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” replied Clea.
What-the-Dickens thought, Afraid of a visitor? Afraid of someone who is your same shape and size and species and — sympathy?
Or maybe not sympathy, he thought, looking at Clea’s curled lip and lowered, calculating eyes.
Pepper lifted the quarter. For a skibberee, a coin like that is about the size of a large pizza. She inserted it vertically into her satchel, which latched closed thanks to some patches of burdock stitched in useful places — a kind of natural Velcro. “All right, Clea,” she said. “I guess we’re off.”
“Pepper,” said Clea. “Look. I want you to be careful, right? Going out in tandem is a risky, risky business. I don’t know if Doctor Ill is punishing you or trusting you — but either way, you take care.”
“It’s not your business to question Doctor Ill,” said Pepper sternly. She blew a little kiss at the banker, who pretended to catch it and then store it in a safe-deposit stack with some precious pennies.
The Gates of Abacus closed with a rattle of beads on rods. “Mind yourself, Pepper,” said Clea.
What-the-Dickens noticed he was given no matching advice.
“Does she have a point?” asked What-the-Dickens. “Is this really safe?”
“Nothing is safe,” said Pepper. “Not in the long run. We can’t be safe and we can’t be certain — but we can be careful, and we will.”
“You’re buzzing around the question,” said What-the-Dickens. He stopped in the corridor. “I mean, why does the boss here have a name like Doctor Ill? Isn’t that a bit, um, contradictory?”
“I told you, we all pick our names from the accidental scriptures,” said Pepper, “but we change them so as not to be guilty of theft. Do the verbal math. Pill minus P is Ill. Get it?”
“Yes, but if you use an abbreviation for Doctor, then Doctor Ill is D.R. I.L.L. Drill.”
“A basic dental term. So?”
“So he chose a nasty-sounding name. Is he a bully?”
“For shame,” said Pepper. “You get thinking like that, and you’ll lose your concentration and something bad will happen to you.”
“I mean, that mouse,” said the orphan skibberee. “In that muzzle and all.”
“You didn’t stand up for me very much,” said What-the-Dickens.
“I don’t know what you mean. Come on, we got a deadline to make.”
“No.” He stopped. “I stood by you, Pepper, at Doctor Ill’s. I persuaded him to give you another chance. You could’ve been a little more — I don’t know — a little less — what’s the word —”
“Just because Clea thought you were a potential bank robber? Hah. She don’t get around much.”
“Well, maybe I am a potential bank robber,” he said stubbornly, itching for a fight. “How do I know? How do you know unless you get to know me?”
“Don’t talk like that!” She was alarmed; he could tell. Against the rules, she all but flew down the corridor toward the exit. Against the rules, he followed in like manner, his lumpen feet battering against the rustic trim that bedecked Undertree Common.
They emerged onto the landing strip — the top of the tree trunk — into a night brightened by a full moon.
“We don’t have time to argue,” said Pepper. “We’re booked for the runway any minute.”
“I’m not going,” said What-the-Dickens.
“Oh, for pity’s sake!”
“Why should I leave without even getting to know what life is really like here? That’s just collaborating in my own banishment.”
“Well, listen. One: I brought you here in the first place to look around, not to make trouble. Another one: You’re overlooking that you’re being allowed to leave. Like it is a given. And, to count out the reasons further, um, five: You owe me. You’re the reason I almost missed out on my license. So quit all this malarkey, will you? Get a grip and let’s get out of here.”
All around the stump, they saw evidence of skibbereen activity. In loose formations, small groups of skibbereen were launching off the runway.
He hesitated. She looked so agitated. And he had no rights here. He was an alien.
“Okay,” he said. “I yield to your common sense. But just show me a little bit more of the colony before we go, since I won’t be coming back. I’d like to be able to picture where you live when I don’t see you anymore.”
“Don’t talk like that!” she cried, horrified.
“Why not?”
“Because — because — skibbereen don’t talk like that.”
Oh, he thought. Oh well. Right. Skibbereen are never seen — not even to each other.
“Look,” she said, caving in a little. “You have a point. Okay, I’ll show you around some. We’re in a holding pattern here anyway. These squadrons are leaving every few minutes; the full moon is a dandy time for them.”
“I thought you didn’t travel in packs,” said What-the-Dickens.
“We Agents of Change don’t,” said Pepper. “Too risky. But those are the overnight delivery boys. They call themselves the Wish Team.”
“What are they delivering?”
“Wishes. What else?”
“Pepper, I just don’t get the commerce of all this. How does it work?”
“Listen up,” said Pepper.
He looked about the place with the eagerness of a cub reporter at his first cafeteria food fight.
“A skibbereen colony is divided into two sections,” said Pepper, as if rattling off a school lesson. “Uppers and lowers. Most of us skibbereen are the lowers — the laborers. You got your Scavengers, remember, I already told you? They hunt for seed money to capitalize the trade. You got your Agents of Change, like me and many others; we’re the solo operators on whom the tooth trade depends. We trade money for teeth. Then you got your Harvesters. They take the teeth we bring in and plant them, and tend them, and harvest them. You still with me?”
“You plant old teeth?”
“I don’t — I’m an Agent of Change. Or I will be once I get my final license. But yes, we skibbereen do.”
“But what do they grow into? More teeth?”
She looked at him in the moonlight. He thought her look was soft and sad. It’s not an easy time for her, he realized. Well, not for me either, but I notice it in her more. Just now.
“I’
ll show you,” she said impulsively. “Follow me. But move it.”
They flew off the stump through a stand of tall grass. In the moonlight the growth stood out as stripes of ivory and sage against luminous black. Riblike, the blades arched above them.
“We double-plant,” explained Pepper. “A whole field sown with teeth would draw attention to itself if it were ever discovered, so we inter-seed teeth with common grasses and weeds. Luckily a tooth grows to maturity in the space of one full-moony night. We harvest just before dawn, so human ramblers, even if they tramped their clod-footed way right through our fields, would never know the industry taking place beneath their hobnails and soccer cleats and stiletto heels.”
“Show me!” What-the-Dickens was thrilled by all this secrecy and productivity. “I’m dying to know.”
Pepper dropped to the ground. “Ladies?” she called. “Girls? Don’t be scared; he’s with me.”
One by one, skibbereen females began to emerge from the forest of grass. They seemed, as a rule, shyer than the others, as if they didn’t want to speak, as if they didn’t like a male in their nursery. “He’s new here,” explained Pepper.
“What is he?” asked one of the less timid ones. “He doesn’t look like a Scavenger.” She bobbed and becked. You might say she looked like a tiny jellyfish, almost invisible in moonlight — insubstantial, and docile, and spineless.
“He’s a mistake,” said Pepper. She spoke without malice, but What-the-Dickens winced. A mistake? “He don’t know what he is,” Pepper continued, as if maybe she guessed at his discomfiture. “Doctor Ill don’t know yet, either. Not a Harvester, though, dear ladies of the plantation, so don’t stew your giddy heads over him. I’m just showing our guest the tooth garden. Won’t be long. Settle down. You can go back to your tasks.”
But the Harvesters hovered in a crowd, unwilling to separate. Murmuring like frightened doves.
Pepper sighed and whispered to her new friend, “They ain’t got much character, poor chuckleheads, but they do give their all to their task.” She pulled aside a decomposing leaf. Three tapered prongs were thrusting up from the ground — slender waxy posts of varying heights and thicknesses. One was about three-and-a-half inches tall and striped around with a pale, ascending blue line. “This one’s about ready, I think,” said Pepper. “Could one of you do the honors?”