But none of the Harvesters wanted to oblige.
“Very well, I’ll do it myself,” said Pepper. “Really.” She reached down and snapped the narrow cylinder at its base. “I think this is done. See?”
She held it up. What-the-Dickens didn’t recognize it.
“It’s a birthday candle, for a birthday cake, silly,” said Pepper. “Humans always blow on candles and make wishes on their birthdays, but the wishes only come true if they are made on one of our candles.” Her voice was full of pride.
“Really? Wishes?” What-the-Dickens got all excited.
“Hey, wait,” said Pepper. “I can see it on your face. Forget it. Tooth fairies don’t get to wish. We’re the Agents of Change, remember? We don’t change ourselves. Ain’t in the program! No wishing allowed.”
“But I could wish to find my family!” he said.
“You might find that they were all dead,” said Pepper frankly. “Anyway, you can’t wish; it’s not done. We work in the service of others, not ourselves.”
At his hangdog look, Pepper took mercy. “Come on, now. Pay attention, okay? I’ll review it for you. Scavengers collect the investment money. Agents of Change take each tooth and replace it with a coin. Free the tooth! Ha, ha. Then Harvesters plant the gathered teeth and tend the garden and reap the results on a full-moon night. Finally, the Wish Team flies our candles to the nearest stores or candle factories, or sometimes even to private homes, where we substitute one of ours for a commercially made candle. Most of our chores are done between midnight and dawn, because that’s when the most humans are asleep. We call this the Wishing Hour.”
“Joy,” said What-the-Dickens, without much joy.
“Let’s go,” she said. “You’ll feel better when we get to work. I always do.”
They left the field of candles and made their way back through the grassy forest, on foot this time. “What about predators?” he said.
“Luckily,” said Pepper, “we have few natural enemies in the wild. Sure, you have to watch out for the occasional nearsighted owl, who might mistake you for an airborne mouse. Then, of course, there’s the dangerous deadly human.”
“The ones we give wishes to?” He was aghast.
“You bet. Humans would pen us in cages and sell us as pets as soon as look at us, if they discovered us. The beasts. That’s what they do. And human pets — like dogs and cats — are treacherous, like their owners. Probably goldfish would be, too, if goldfish could manage to get loose and roam the earth. They’d be schools of shiny assassins, I’m told. Vicious little creatures.”
“But — giving wishes to humans — if it’s so dangerous —”
“As a small, defenseless species goes, we make out all right.” Pepper sounded offhand, but proud. “Cats are nocturnal, true, so that’s an ongoing cause for alarm. But our only serious natural enemy is ourselves.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“The separate colonies of skibbereen ain’t always able to live in peace and tranquility. Sometimes there are raids, and the occasional Harvester or Scavenger gets carried off. I’ve known bank robberies you wouldn’t believe. Now and again, an outright attack. An invasion. There’s a belligerent colony high up in a big old pine over near Pilot’s Knob, called Sequoia Heights. Division D. You wouldn’t want to mess around with them slobs, believe me.”
“Does Undertree Common go on raids and attacks, too?”
“Depends on what the crown tells us to do. It ain’t my business to decide on all that, is it? I’m an Agent of Change, or I will be if we ever get launched tonight. Let Doctor Ill decide whose Liberty is worth defending and whose Liberty is worth trespassing against.”
“Why does he get to make all the decisions?”
“Oh, I didn’t finish my little outline, did I?” They were nearing the runway on top of the stump, so Pepper dropped her voice, out of respect or, perhaps, caution.
“You see,” she continued, “all that I described — the Scavengers, the Agents of Change, the Harvesters, and the Wish Team — that’s us. We’re lowers. The workers, that is. Anyone who is differentiated — well, you might say talented — they’re uppers. Like Doctor Ill, and Old Flossie, et cetera. And Silviana the Entertainment Industry, and so on. Clea the Banker. Not many of them, but they have harder work to do because they have to make it up themselves. The rest of us, we’re more or less decided.”
“What decides you — I mean us?”
“Instinct. And ‘instinct breeds specialization.’ They drill it into you in nursery school. I’m specialized to be a worker. An Agent of Change, who gets a dandy private name, is the highest I can hope to go. But uppers are specialized to be special. Look, uppers don’t work unless they have something to grind against, and that’s us: the lowers.”
What-the-Dickens shook his head. It was all too confusing, mostly because he couldn’t find himself in the scheme of things. “I don’t know what I am, or what I was meant to be. A Harvester or an Agent of Change, a Scavenger or a member of the Wish Team.”
“Nothing’s better than being an Agent of Change,” she said, forgetting for a moment to curb her excitement about it. “We get the most freedom, that is, within respectable limits. Look, are your wings unfurled? Let’s stop yapping and get going. This is going to be a busy night.”
But just when they turned to register with the stump mistress and to queue up for takeoff, a bunch of Wish Teamers cut the line and demanded priority clearance. And got it. “They think they’re so smart,” whispered Pepper, “but their brains are all in their bums. That’s what gives them enough bottom, so to speak, to be able to haul a load of candles without being blown off course.” Sure enough, the Wish Team fellows seemed broad of beam, fundamentally suited to carry the candles laced onto their backs with cords of knotted grass.
“I’m not built like that, either,” said What-the-Dickens, “so I guess I’m not meant to be a member of the delivery services.”
“Maybe you’re a mutant,” said Pepper cheerfully. “Another, I mean, if you believe the legend of the First Fairy. Now, your wings responding well enough?”
He looked at Pepper as she flexed her pair. Little specks of light ran in coded sequence along the tips, occasionally diverting along capillary routes back toward her shoulder blades. “How does all that work?” he marveled.
“Beats me,” she said. “I’m not the brightest lightning bug in the storm cloud, you know. But our wings is our public access communications network. As whales sing headlines across the ocean depths, or elephants thump the news against dusty savannas, or songbirds twitter the daily gossip from tree to tree, we skibbereen receive information from Central Command through our wings. It’s a kind of telegraphic system, I guess. We pick up changes in our assignments. Predator sightings, weather updates. That sort of thing.”
“I can feel tingling, but I thought it was just pins and needles. It doesn’t mean anything to me. How do you learn to read it?”
“You just can,” she said. “Don’t you do anything by instinct?”
“Ask questions?” he said, not as a joke. “Does that qualify?”
“Well, stop asking,” she replied. “We’re being signaled out for departure. Good luck, friend.”
Old Flossie squinted at the moon, counted on her fingers several times — one, one — one, one — counted What-the-Dickens and Pepper — one-one — and gave up. “Higher math,” she muttered. “Twists my noggin into pretzels something dreadful. Math is a myth. Okay, you-all over there. Oh, it’s Pepper. And What’s-His-Name.”
“What-the-Dickens,” he corrected her.
“Whatever-the-Dickens. So this is good-bye, then,” said Old Flossie. “I’m not much for sentiment, but I wish you the best. You’re not a spy, we decided that, so you’re just a raw nerve. Here’s my parting advice to you, since you come unequipped with sense of any sort. Keep hidden. Got that? And if you’re ever caught, go to your grave with our secret on your lips. Squealing is forbidden. You are forbidden. Got it?”
>
“What if I’m tortured?”
“Ask no questions,” barked Old Flossie, out of habit, and continued, “and don’t answer any, either.”
He nodded, catching her murmured remark to herself as she turned away, “And don’t come back, fellow, if you know what’s good for you.”
“Ready for countdown,” said Pepper, positioning herself.
“Three,” said Old Flossie, “four, six, go on, get outta here.”
Pepper tucked her head down to correct against possible wind shear, and What-the-Dickens tried to do the same. There was still so much to learn. First and foremost, though, was the basic matter of whether he was even capable of learning anything.
“Go, I said,” shouted Old Flossie. So they did.
“Well, it’s a good thing you got that birthday cake, isn’t it?” said Dinah, when Gage had paused to go to the bathroom. “We can put that birthday candle in it and see if it’s one of the wishing ones.” She rummaged around in the fireplace and found it.
“I certainly don’t believe in wishes,” said Zeke. “I hardly believe in the cake, at this point.”
“Hah,” said Dinah. “What would Rebecca Ruth wish for, I wonder?”
“Better cake, I bet.”
Gage came back. “I haven’t been able to lull you to sleep, I see,” he said.
“When are you coming into this story?” asked Dinah.
“You just don’t let go, do you?” he answered her. “Oh, well, I guess there’s nothing to do but move on. The next bit’s about me. A little.”
Carefully watching Pepper launch into the west, What-the-Dickens picked up a few more tips about skibbereen aerial maneuvers. Bit by bit, his flying skills were improving. He saw how much energy he’d spent floundering, pumping those fragile wings like a butterfly in a tornado. Now he could harness the wind a little better, coast a little longer, and conserve his energy.
The moon throbbed like candleglow behind very thin clouds — it kept its shape as a heavenly coin, but the light melted out in skirts all around it.
Suddenly the language of the night — the way winds never stop, really, even on the stillest of still evenings — came clear to the orphan skibberee. The world was constantly talking to itself, in remarks and replies, in choruses and antiphons. What was the noise a tree could make but the noise a wind made in it? And with his wings, What-the-Dickens himself shaped a slender hollow in the night. He was a reed whispering its own small testimony to the world, and about it.
He might have talked to Pepper — she was that near — but she seemed disinclined to chatter, and he couldn’t blame her. Even dreading his eventual good-bye to Pepper — maybe because that good-bye hadn’t happened yet — this evening’s flight was the best example of happiness he’d come across yet. The world below was purple and crumpled, broken up into clumps of houses and trees, fields and barns. The air aloft was shot with bevels of warm and cold. It smelled of earth and nothing else. The stars were mostly hidden; the moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. It was pretty.
All too soon Pepper flicked one wing tip, signaling her intention to descend into society. What-the-Dickens followed, gracelessly, but not without a certain oomph.
He still couldn’t figure out how Pepper’s wings informed her about her position and destination. Maybe his wings weren’t wired right . . . or maybe they were wired for a different task entirely.
He thought, I wouldn’t have known to begin to sink right here, over this simple unrenovated farmhouse. Its pleasant boxy shape, its lack of architectural gewgaw, its softly steaming chimney — it says nothing to me that the houses farther down the road don’t also say.
But there Pepper was headed, and so he was headed there, too. Sticking close to her. Until. Until.
Nearer the earth, the winds were stronger — why was that? The skibbereen went back to flying en pointe, as it were, with a certain amount of attitude. The traditional angelic pose: leading with your right shoulder, your nose, and your brow, and letting your legs trail along for the ride rather than pumping them.
The skibbereen whipped once around the house. Pepper, apparently, was looking for a way to enter. She was flummoxed though, and wagged a finger, indicating that they regroup on top of a mailbox by the road. “This stinks,” said Pepper. “I’m supposed to say good-bye to you here, then slip inside and do my work alone. But the place is sealed up tighter than Croesus’s safe-deposit box. What gives? It’s the rare farmhouse that don’t leave a window open a crack, even in the bitterest winter. Farmers like fresh air.”
“Maybe they’re not farmers. Who are we looking for?”
“Who am I looking for,” Pepper corrected him, a bit sternly. “This is our sad farewell, but let’s make it snappy. I got to find a way in.”
“I’ll stay till I can’t any longer,” he said. “If you argue, you’re wasting your own time, and you don’t have that much of it left. We both don’t,” he finished. “I mean, you and me together. Now, tell me the contact information.”
“You don’t have any of this on your roster?” Pepper shook her head sadly. “They posted the details all across the colony network. There’s something radically busted with your reception, buddy.”
“There’s something wrong,” he agreed, “but let’s not obsess about me. Who is our client?”
“It’s a boy kid,” she said, “named Gage. Gage Tavenner. He’s had a pesky little incisor waiting to come out for weeks. Our best information says he fell backward off his chair at breakfast and knocked out the little beauty at last. So my job is to nip in there, nab the goods, pay the tribute, and get out. Once I can find a way in, that is.”
“We’ll manage it,” he said, liking the sound of that hopefulness.
“Now you listen to me, What-the-Dickens,” said Pepper. “Butt out. I can’t afford to be late getting back. My whole license depends on executing this maneuver in a timely fashion, and — wait; what’s that?”
She screwed up her forehead as if listening to a wireless. “Incoming . . .” she whispered, and made a shhh-ing gesture.
What-the-Dickens saw her wings flick in sequins of slightly different colors — first, silvery beads like rain on a spiderweb; next, silver interspersed with a smoky yellow; and then silver accented with a mouthwash blue. “Oh, great,” she moaned. “I might’ve guessed.”
“What?” he said. “What?”
“They have it in for me,” she said. “Always did, you know! Think I’m too — oh, I don’t know. Opinionated. Loud. Not classy enough. Common. Now getta load of this: they’ve doubled my assignment. They’re claiming a dental emergency. Nearby, a tooth from someone named Lee Gangster. What a name! I gotta wrap this job up fast and get way out to Gangsterland. And what am I supposed to use for tribute? I only brought one coin.”
“Maybe I was supposed to bring one,” said What-the-Dickens.
“Maybe you were,” she snapped. “Maybe they were telling you so on your wing set, and you didn’t read your instructions.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, first things first. Gotta get this one over with. Ought to be a walk in the park once I get in. How to crack the site, though?”
“Look,” said What-the-Dickens. Pepper turned, but she didn’t see what he had seen — the flick of shadowy grey — something — disappearing off the back porch and into — a hatch? A small door? “Follow me,” he said.
He led her around the side of the house, and they examined what they had previously overlooked. “What is it?” asked What-the-Dickens.
“It’s called a cat flap,” said Pepper. “And call me a genius, but where there’s a cat flap there is usually a cat.”
“There was,” he said. “I saw the last bit of one disappear inside. It was indistinct in the shadows. But I know it’s in there.”
“From bad to worse,” she groaned. “This is a trap. They’ve set me an im possible task. They don’t want me to come back alive.”
“Pepper,” he said, and tugged at h
er wing so hard that she yelped. “I’ll come in with you. If the cat sniffs you out, I’ll distract it. I know cats. Firsthand, and from the beginning. Use the help you have on hand. Me. Come on, let’s go.”
He pushed ahead of her, breathing hard — surprised at himself — and leaned on the small door. “Are you coming?” he said over his shoulder, and Pepper followed without speaking.
The house was orderly to a fault. The rooms were strict in their arrangements: chairs lined up along the wall of the dining room like soldiers, spaced evenly apart. In the moonlight the table surfaces gleamed like lakes of mahogany. No books anywhere; books were such dreadful dust collectors. On the wallpapered walls a few browned photographs of pinched-looking relatives hung in oval frames. They looked like portals from beyond the grave. It seemed even dead folk could still manage to disapprove.
Sane. Antiseptic. The wrong type of peculiar.
“Does your radar tell you exactly where the tooth is?” asked What-the-Dickens in a hush. “I’m not picking up a thing.”
“No. You got to apply a certain amount of common sense, which in your case, I’m realizing, ain’t all that common. A human don’t usually sleep in a dining room — let’s check out the kitchen. Farmhouses of a certain age often got a spare bedroom off the kitchen, for a farm maid to use, or a granny who needs to sleep nearer the stove for warmth. Or an extra kid. Stick close, you hear me?”
He nodded. They achieved the kitchen, an homage to sterility and order, from its squares of red-and-white linoleum to its Agway farm calendar, a blue ink slash striking out those days of the month already lived into submission and buried in memory: even yesterday.
“There’s no bedroom off here,” said What-the-Dickens.
“No cat, either,” said Pepper. “Cats often hug the stove light, too. Are you sure you saw something entering?”