In short order, the lights of Lowryland were so far behind us that they were barely a smudge on the horizon, and Cylia was pulling into an unfamiliar parking lot, in front of a building that was equally unfamiliar but still felt like coming home. It was a big warehouse, the sort that made sense when America did all its own manufacturing—the sort that have been sitting empty or finding new uses over the last thirty years. Some of them turn into storage, or office space, or live-work lofts. Some of them wind up in the hands of dragons looking for a place to start a Nest, or filled with communities of mixed cryptids who’d rather shut the doors with humanity on the outside for a change.
And some of them, the ones that are too oddly shaped or awkwardly located to be good for anything else, wind up getting turned into roller derby venues. A banner stretched across the front of the structure informed anyone who drove by that this was the home of the Lakeland Ladies. A smaller banner underneath gave their website and suggested roller derby would make a fun night out for the family looking for something to do after they’d exhausted the joys of licensed theme parks.
The thought of some of the families I saw wandering through Lowryland stopping in for a night of roller derby was almost enough to bring a smile to my face.
“There’s no practice tonight, but I have a key,” said Cylia, parking right in front of the warehouse. “Either of you got your skates?”
“No,” I said, as “Yes,” said Fern. I turned to look at her.
She shrugged, sheepish. “I always have my skates, and I usually have yours too, just in case,” she said. “I hoped you’d want to skate tonight.”
“Thanks,” I said. The word wasn’t enough. The thought of a real track under my wheels was intensely appealing, enough to make my eyes burn with the beginning of tears. I was so tired. Having something normal would be . . . it would be the world.
But it wouldn’t change the fact that Cylia was here, and shouldn’t have been. I gave her a sidelong look. “How come you have a key?”
“This area is technically zoned as residential. There are two crappy little apartments above the warehouse, and as long as they’re being rented, the space we use for our track is a really big ‘community room,’ and we don’t get torn down by the people who think we’re making a mockery of the tourist trade. Right now, I’m renting one of the apartments.” Cylia’s smile was quick and wry. “I’ve gone from team captain to alternate junior jammer, but hey, at least I have a place to sleep. Sometimes life works out like that.”
“Especially for people who can influence probability,” I said, and promptly regretted it.
Cylia shrugged. “We work with what we have,” she said, and unlocked the door, slipping through it into the dark warehouse on the other side.
Even the smell of Lakeland Ladies warehouse was familiar, sweat and wood oil and WD-40 and bleach and dried beer. I paused at the threshold to take a deep breath, allowing my spine to straighten. Aromatherapy works. It’s just that not everyone finds lavender and roses to be the most soothing things the universe has to offer. Some of us have a different definition of “smells like home.”
There was a clunking sound, and the high overhead lights began flickering on in stages, staggered to reduce their draw on the local power grid. I stayed where I was, watching the familiar, unfamiliar landscape reveal itself one piece at a time.
There was the track, polished wood flat against the ground, more than half-cupped by the bleachers, which were all on rollers in case they needed to be moved in a hurry. The rest of the trackside space was reserved for standing-room tickets, which cost less, and kept the space fluid. There were the closed-up food stalls, probably connected to a makeshift kitchen, where snacks and beer would be peddled during the games themselves—and yes, there was the almost obligate disco ball, dangling from the ceiling like an invitation to better times ahead.
Cylia walked back to where Fern and I waited, and offered me a slightly off-kilter smile, asking, “Are you done being suspicious? Can I get a hug?”
“No, and yes,” I said, and hugged her. “I have no idea why you’re here, but it’s good to see you.”
“She’s here because of me,” said Fern.
I let Cylia go and turned, blinking. “Excuse me?”
Fern looked uncomfortable but held her ground, looking at me levelly as she said, “After you went away, I asked Elsie if she’d tell me if anything happened to you. I was so scared, and no one would really say where you’d gone, and I wanted to help. If there was any possible way, I wanted to help. You’re my best friend.”
“Okay . . .”
“Um.” Fern paused. “Don’t be mad at her, okay?”
“People keep asking me not to be mad.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “It’s starting to piss me off.”
“Elsie called me when you didn’t come home and she said you’d run away because the Covenant of St. George was trying to find you and it wasn’t safe and she was sorry but she didn’t know where you were and maybe you needed a miracle,” said Fern, rapid-fire.
I lowered my hand and stared at her. “What?”
“I knew I had to find you. I knew you’d try to do everything alone if I didn’t, and I knew you’d get hurt. Probably really, really hurt. You’re just human, Annie. You can’t save the world without help.” Fern looked at me earnestly. “Don’t be mad.”
“I . . . but you . . . how did you find me?”
“That would be me.” Cylia raised her left hand. The overhead lights glittered off her wedding ring. “She told me what she needed. She needed you to be safe. She needed to be able to be where you were, and to be in a position to help. As for me, I needed a change and I had an excess of bad built up, so I cashed in my chips and moved across the country to help a friend. I’ve done more for less.”
“An excess of—” I caught myself mid-sentence, but not fast enough to see Cylia’s smile go tight around the edges. Damn. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Me, too,” she said. Her hand dropped back down to her side. “It was a heart attack. Tav was older than me—not quite cradle robbing, but close enough to make some people uncomfortable. That’s how it has to be when your species is on the way out the door, you know? You meet somebody you think you could be happy with, and you grab on with both hands, because there’s every chance in the world that you’re not going to get a second shot at being happy like that. He loved me. God, he loved me. He never let me be the one to spend the luck to keep us safe. He never told me how much he was spending, either. I guess it turned out to be too much, because he was walking out the door, heading for work, and then he was gone—dead before he hit the ground. The sort of big, catastrophic failure that ends everything. But he left me his life insurance, and no debts, and the memory of being loved by someone who cared so much that he was willing to use his heart as collateral against the future. How do you get mad at somebody like that? You don’t.”
All of this must have happened after I’d left for the Covenant. I remembered Cylia’s husband as a smiling figure in the stands on the nights when the Slasher Chicks had skated against the Rose Petals. He’d always worn his wife’s team colors, proud in pink and glorious in green, and he’d cheered louder than anyone when the Rose Petals had pulled off a particularly clever bit of skating. I’d never actually met the man, but he’d seemed like a nice guy, and Cylia had clearly loved him.
Fern looked between us, timid as I’d ever seen her, and said, “After Elsie told me you were in trouble, I asked Cylia if she could find you. If she could take me where you were. She said . . .”
“I said the luck doesn’t work that way, because it doesn’t, but that I could get us to where we’d be able to do you the most good, even if it used up most of what the world owed me for taking Tav away.” Cylia shrugged again, less expansively this time, like she was talking about something easier and more everyday than the death of a spouse. “I grabb
ed. I twisted. And for the next three days, every channel I got was showing a Lowry film, even the ones like CNN, and when I threw my map of the USA across the room, it fell open to Lakeland. So I figured we needed to be here. We got here, this place was open, Lowryland needed a Princess Aspen . . . the luck knew where it wanted us.”
“How did the Covenant ever find you?” I blurted. I felt bad about it immediately, but I didn’t try to take the question back.
Cylia shook her head. “People think we’re thieves. People are always happy to tell the authorities about thieves, even when they don’t trust the authorities either. I don’t steal good luck from people. I can lure free range luck toward myself, but there are consequences. Look at what happened to Tav.”
“Yeah,” I said uncomfortably.
“So someone told the Covenant ‘hey, those people over there, I think they’re witches,’ and one of us got cut open, and someone figured out we weren’t absolutely, perfectly human, and suddenly we were on the public enemy number one list, along with all the other species whose camouflage was too good.” Cylia looked at me with cold, flat eyes. I suddenly wondered how much of my situation she knew about—and how much of it she was planning to hold against me. “If you look human and you’re not human, you’re worse than a manticore. At least a manticore isn’t going to seduce a good Covenant soldier away from the path of righteousness.”
“My family’s human, and we do that all the time,” I said weakly.
“The jury’s still out on that,” said Cylia.
Right. We were getting too far afield from the original topic, and I was getting more and more uncomfortable: it was time to get back to basics. “Fern, you said we needed to talk when I asked you why bad things kept happening near me,” I said. “Why?”
Fern looked at Cylia. Cylia looked back, raising one eyebrow, and shook her head. Fern sighed and turned back to me.
Having watched this little interplay with increasing dubiousness, I asked warily, “What?”
“It’s aftershocks,” said Fern.
“Of what?”
“Of me spending a whole lot of luck so we’d all wind up in the best possible position,” said Cylia.
I stared at her, slow fury building in my gut. “You mean this is . . . you caused this?”
“No,” said Cylia immediately. “This was going to happen, no matter what, just like you were already heading for Florida by the time Fern told me we needed to get you. The accidents have nothing to do with me. But when I bent your luck to put you into proximity of good things—us—that had to be balanced, and the universe is balancing it by putting you into proximity of bad things. It’s only because I started with so much good luck that you’re winding up close enough to help without getting seriously injured. The aftershocks won’t last forever. They’re the cascade effect that always follows a major adjustment. And this isn’t your fault, and it isn’t mine.”
Colin could be an aftershock. Having a teacher drop into my lap when I was in a position to learn and leave, rather than being tied to him for the rest of my life, was almost the definition of luck. Still . . . “Is this going to cost me anything?”
“No.” Cylia looked at me. “I already paid.”
The blankness in her voice made me want to apologize for the world, for things I’d never done and would never dream of doing. I swallowed the impulse, and asked instead, “Do you both skate here?”
“I don’t have time to be on a team, and I don’t want to skate if you’re not skating with me,” said Fern. “We’re the best. Slasher Chicks forever.”
“I don’t have that sort of misplaced loyalty, and a girl needs something to do with her free time,” said Cylia. “I’ve been working on Fern.”
“I am an uncrackable fortress,” said Fern serenely.
I looked at the track. It looked just like every other regulation flat track in the world, smooth and polished and beckoning, and I was so tired. So damn tired. My life kept flipping upside down, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to make it stop.
“Let’s skate,” I said.
Fern smiled.
* * *
The track was smooth as silk beneath my wheels, with none of the cracks or irregularities that could turn skating at Lowryland into the bad kind of adventure. Falling would still hurt, but it would be the good, clean hurt of an impact well earned, and not the slightly offensive hurt of a fall I shouldn’t have taken.
(It’s funny, but pain seems worse when it’s unreasonable. When I broke three ribs falling from the top of a pyramid during cheer practice, I was totally cool with that, but when I broke an arm falling into one of my own pit traps, I was a lot less sanguine.)
Fern, as always, skated like it was an excuse to play keep-away with the laws of physics. There was no one here to put on a show for, and so she was varying her density as she whipped around the track, bleeding it off when she was on the straight stretches, pulling it on when she was zipping around a corner and needed to keep herself from overbalancing. If I hadn’t known what she was doing, I probably wouldn’t have jumped directly to “density manipulation,” but it was easy to tell that she was doing something, which was why she skated straight when we were in the middle of an actual bout.
Cylia was a better skater in many ways. She knew the track. She knew her body and its capabilities. She was taller than Fern, but when the sylph wasn’t tinkering with her mass to gain momentum, Cylia was actually faster, because Cylia knew how to position her body to reduce wind drag. She’d never been in a position to cheat the way Fern could. Her potential cheating was of a more subtle sort—and she never did it on the track. Luck changing without warning was the way derby girls got hurt.
I fell somewhere between them, skill-wise. I had to work harder than Fern, which meant I had a better idea of the actual techniques a good skater used. I couldn’t make myself lighter to avoid a fall, or heavier to keep someone from knocking me over. But Cylia had been skating for a lot longer than I had, and once you get past the base levels of a person’s natural athleticism, practice is what makes perfect. Back home in Portland, we were both jammers, and she was one of the ones I had to look out for when we were skating against each other.
There was no competition on the track tonight. Just three people circling, doing all the stupid and impulsive shit that could get somebody seriously injured during an actual game. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this removed from my troubles, or this close to the girl I’d been for most of my life. I missed her. Almost as much as I missed my mice, and my family, and Sam.
There had been a night—after Verity had returned from her first season on Dance or Die, before she’d left for New York—when I’d come downstairs to make myself a midnight sandwich and found her sitting with Alex at the kitchen table, both holding mugs of cocoa, talking quietly. My older siblings had always been closer to each other than they were to me, capable of opening up when they were alone in a way that enthralled and frightened me. I liked being the baby, but there had been times when I wished my parents would decide to have another baby, so I could be somebody’s Alex, so I could have the kind of friend my siblings seemed to effortlessly be for one another.
“I felt like I was forgetting myself,” Verity had said, eyes on the marshmallows melting in her cocoa, shoulders hunched. She’s been shorter than me since I was twelve, but in that moment, she hadn’t looked short. She’d looked small, beaten down and human, and for the first time, I’d realized that my sister was as mortal as I was.
Alex hadn’t said anything. His eyes had darted toward the stairs, and I’d held my breath, willing him not to notice me. Either he hadn’t, or he’d decided this was something I should hear, because he still hadn’t said anything. He’d just looked back to Verity.
“Being Valerie was easy,” she’d said, spitting the word out like it was bitter. “All I had to do was dance. Valerie didn’t c
are about anything else, and for me to be her, I had to stop caring, too. It was easy, and it was tempting, and if I’d won . . .”
“You didn’t.”
“But if I’d won, I would have kept on being her, because it was easy, and it was fun, and I wasn’t scared. Nothing was trying to eat me. I got to just . . . exist.”
Alex had reached across the table then, putting a hand on her wrist and smiling. “Hey,” he’d said. “You’re always a winner to me, and I like Verity better than Valerie.”
She had raised her head and smiled back, and I had crept back up the stairs to my room without my midnight snack, but with a head full of things that wouldn’t let me go to sleep for hours.
Here, now, skating circles with two people I actually trusted, who actually knew me, I finally understood what Verity had been talking about. I was always Antimony Price, and I always would be. I was also Timpani Brown, Covenant recruit, who had wanted nothing more than to kill the monsters that had killed her family, until she’d found a new carnival, and fallen halfway in love while she was trying not to fall off the trapeze. And I was Melody West, former cheerleader on the run, current employee of Lowryland, sorcerer in training.
Timpani and Melody didn’t have to keep track of who they were. They knew who they were, because they were only one person each. I was all three, under the pressure of remembering who I really was, of holding fast to the core of identity that belonged to me and me alone. It would have been easier if I’d had my mice. Mice never let anybody forget who they really are.
We skated, and the world was simple.
The trouble was going to come when we had to stop.