Tricks for Free

  “No.”

  The word was simple, direct, and changed everything. I looked around again, mentally comparing what I knew of the Park layout to what I knew of the camera array. Fern and I had spent a cheerful week learning the location of most of the hidden cameras before we’d started skating in the Park, using that as a guide to where she could and couldn’t play games with density.

  Like all major theme parks, Lowryland is incredibly focused on guest safety and security, and figured out long ago that cameras were both cheaper and less distracting than security patrols. If you’re in a public area, or more importantly, on a ride, someone is watching. It keeps graffiti and shoplifting under control, and prevents people from doing things they shouldn’t while the rides are in motion. But there are blind spots. Even the most comprehensive camera array in the world can’t be everywhere.

  Most of the rides had cameras on the areas people were able to access easily, preventing kids from slipping under barricades and falling into the artificial deep-sea vents in the Deep-Down, or climbing the conveyor system in Metropolis. But that was as far as they went. Putting cameras on an entire outdoor ride environment didn’t make fiscal sense, and there was no way a guest could get to, say, the back of the Midsummer Night’s Scream without tripping a few of the exterior cameras.

  Unless they could go straight up to avoid the ground cameras entirely, that was.

  “All right,” I said. “Can you pick me up again?”

  Sam didn’t say anything. Only nodded.

  “Okay. See that tree?” I pointed. “Look at the fourth branch up. That’s the only camera aimed at the waiting area. It may not even be on, since the zone is closed, but we don’t want to count on that. I need you to jump from here to the branch right below the camera. That should take us through the blind spot. Can you do that?”

  “I hope so.” Sam sounded uncertain. That was enough to give me pause . . . but when he held out his hand, I still took it, letting him gather me in something that was between a bridal carry and the beginnings of a Fastball Special. He took a step backward, looking assessingly at the branch, and then he leaped.

  Nothing human could have made that jump. Humans can be strong, swift, and athletic, but we don’t have the raw muscle power of our simian cousins. Sam had the strength. Even then, he might not have been able to hit his mark, if he hadn’t spent his entire life training for the trapeze. Everything we are in any given moment is the sum of our experiences and choices up until then, and as we flew through the air with me clinging to his arms, I was temporarily glad that the fire in my fingers had fled. My nerves were so frayed that I would definitely have burned him otherwise.

  He landed on the branch so lightly it barely rocked. I pressed a finger to my lips, signaling him to silence, and pointed to a point on the roller coaster’s environmental shell that was just outside the range of what guests were assumed to be able to reach.

  Florida’s weather, while generally warm, is unpredictable enough that building fully outdoor roller coasters is a gamble. Sure, they look impressive, but there’s always a chance a storm will roll in and shut them down during the busy season, and any exposed track is likely to require triple the maintenance. The Midsummer Night’s Scream was constructed almost entirely inside a plastic and fiberglass “mountain” covered with real soil and real plants, including a blackberry tangle wide and wild enough that it had to be cut back weekly to keep it from getting out of control. The coaster train only emerged into the open air three times during the ride, twice in plain sight of the viewing area. That was enough to keep families mollified, and the controlled ride environment inside the mountain made it substantially easier to control the overall experience. Everyone walked away happy.

  Right now, the mountain was serving a different purpose: cover. Sam leaped from the branch to the point I’d indicated, and then again when I pointed for the second time, into the heart of the blackberry snarl. The landscaping team had a private entrance there, right where the vines grew thickest. They used it for pruning the bushes without affecting what guests saw, since management wanted the Midsummer Night’s Scream to look like an untouchable fairy wilderness.

  That was working in our favor. If there was one place in Lowryland where I knew there wasn’t a camera, it was here.

  Sam put me down as soon as we landed, huffing and puffing again. I took a step backward to give him room, stopping when the briars behind me poked my shoulder. His tail curled and uncurled around his ankle, betraying his anxiety more clearly than anything else about him.

  “What’s wrong?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know.” He gave me a half-panicked look. “I keep trying to go back, and I can’t. It’s like that part of my brain isn’t working anymore.”

  “Okay. We can deal with this. We’re out of range of the cameras, we’re—”

  “How are we going to deal with this?” he snapped. “You can’t even start a fire!”

  I gave him a hurt look. “Sam, I’m trying to help. Please don’t yell at me.”

  “Sorry. I’m—I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to do.” He rubbed his face with one hand. “This has never happened to me before.”

  “Getting stuck?”

  He nodded, face still covered. I realized that he hadn’t looked directly at me since we’d landed here, not even when he was snapping at me.

  Stepping slightly forward—we were in close quarters, but he’d still managed to put distance between us when he put me down—I gently gripped his wrist and tugged. He was stronger than I was. He could have resisted me. He didn’t. Instead, he let me lower his arm, revealing the anxious, almost trapped expression in his eyes.

  “Hey.” I didn’t let go of his wrist. “We’ll fix this.”

  “What if we don’t? What if this is something that happens to fūri eventually, and nobody told me, because my dad is off in China somewhere, and my mom didn’t leave a forwarding address or instructions on where to find him? What if I was supposed to start hiding from people months ago, to keep from being surrounded when the switch snapped?”

  “Okay, breathe. If fūri got stuck in one shape or another, it would have been in my family’s records, and it’s not. Grandpa Thomas wrote about visiting a whole neighborhood of fūri in Hong Kong before he settled in Michigan, and he didn’t say ‘but the grandparents never changed shapes, so I guess they couldn’t,’ and that’s not the sort of detail he would have missed. This isn’t just something that happens.”

  “Then why is it happening now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Why can’t I set things on fire? Something’s wrong. But Sam, if you were going to get stuck, this is the best place in the world to do it. All we have to do is avoid Security. Any guests who see you will think you’re with one of the shows.”

  Sam didn’t look impressed by my logic. He twisted his wrist out of my grip and I let him go, although not without regret. His body language was hunched, closed down, and the anxiety in his eyes was quickly mounting toward a full-blown panic. I had never regretted the difference in our species more. Maybe if I’d been a fūri, I would have known what to do, what the little, difficult to articulate touches were that would let me unlock the door to his fear and let the shadows out.

  Or maybe I did know. I’d been scared for a long time about someone discovering the fire in my fingers, alternately wishing it away and wishing it on everyone else, wishing for an X-Men world where we’d all have weird powers and no one would be different.

  (And knowing that it wouldn’t have changed a damn thing, because we already do live in an X-Men world. Artie is an empath with pheromones that make him endlessly attractive to anyone who likes guys and isn’t a close relative, which is why he spends all his time locked in his basement. Elsie is a persuasive telepath, and her blood makes people horny and possessive. Sarah is . . . Sarah is Sarah. Add in the dead aunts and the dimension-hopping grandmoth
er and we’re already a comic book, and it’s never made anything easier. Not for a second.)

  “Sam.” I reached for him again, this time resting the back of my fingers against his cheek. He closed his eyes, leaning into the touch. Thankfully. I don’t know what I would have done if he’d recoiled from me. “We’ll figure it out.”

  “And if you can’t?”

  “Then we’ll figure out a way to get you safely back to Indiana, and I’ll come for you as soon as I can.”

  His eyes snapped open. “What?”

  He looked so startled that I actually laughed, which could have been the exact wrong thing to do. I hesitated. He didn’t pull away. I risked a smile.

  “What, you think you can get rid of me just because you stopped shaving? Please. My cousin Artie is one of my best friends, and he hasn’t seen the sky without coercion in years. Literally years. If you took him outside at noon and didn’t slather him in sunscreen, he’d probably burst into flames.” I kept smiling. “I’ve never asked you to stay human before I would kiss you, have I? It’ll mean spending a little more time apart, but whatever. It’s not like we don’t know how to do that. I think it’s most of what we’ve done so far.”

  Relief flooded over Sam’s face. His tail wrapped tight around my waist and he pulled me toward him, virtually yanking me into an embrace. I didn’t resist, not then, and not when he started kissing me, hands against the sides of my face, tail tightening as if to make absolutely sure that I knew better than to try going anywhere.

  When he finally pulled back, he rested his forehead against mine and said, “Thank you.”

  “It’s okay,” I assured him. “We’ve been through enough. I’m not letting you go over something this small.”

  “You call this ‘small’?” He held up one long-fingered hand. “This is all of me.”

  “That’s what I said.” I grinned briefly before sobering. “But it’s all of you that we need to get out of here. Lowryland doesn’t allow adults to wear costumes.”

  Sam snorted. “Good thing I’m not wearing a costume, huh?”

  “Yeah.” I turned to look thoughtfully at the maintenance door. “I have an idea. Ever seen Alien?”

  Sam blinked.

  * * *

  It’s technically a violation of, oh, several dozen Lowry Entertainment, Inc. rules to take non-employees into the tunnels under the Park. Punishable by immediate termination, fines, black mark on your record, yadda, yadda, everything is awful. But at the end of the day, they’d have to catch me before they could do anything about it.

  The tunnels leading to Fairyland were largely deserted, since maintenance still happened at night, even when there were closures on Park property. The process of restoring the street to its pre-accident condition would be swift, efficient, and most of all, unseen. Anything that could break the illusion that Lowryland was a magical kingdom where nothing ever went wrong would be concealed from the eyes of our paying guests, because without them, the Park might as well burn.

  I inched in first, looking around to be sure I was alone before beckoning for Sam to join me. The sound of the door closing behind him seemed impossibly loud. I winced, waiting for footsteps to come running in our direction. When they didn’t, I relaxed marginally and pointed upward, indicating the supports and pipes running across the ceiling.

  “Most of those should hold your weight,” I whispered. “If something seems unstable, move on to the next one, and keep moving. As long as you don’t fall . . .”

  “You’d make a hot space marine,” he said, and kissed my cheek before jumping nimbly up to the ceiling, catching hold of the pipes with hands, feet, and tail. He had to pull himself into what was virtually a crawl, rather than dangling with bent knees, but once he was done, he was far enough up that no one was going to see him by mistake. I hoped.

  I blew him a kiss and started walking.

  This wasn’t a tunnel section I was familiar with, but the people in charge of Lowryland’s subterranean layout learned long ago that getting employees lost wasn’t good for anybody. All the thoroughfares are constructed along as simple and straightforward a pattern as possible, and while there aren’t any maps, there are little architectural quirks that can be used for orientation if necessary.

  (As for why there are no maps, well, if a guest did somehow manage to get into the tunnels, we wanted them to get lost. Not permanently, “open a missing persons case” levels of lost, but lost enough that they’d think twice before going through any more forbidden doors. We got one or two kids in the tunnels every season, usually people who’d read about them online and couldn’t wait to see the secret side of Lowryland for themselves. They forgot that some things are secret for a reason.)

  Sam moved like a shadow on the ceiling above me, making my joking Alien comparison a little more unnerving. Every time I caught a glimpse of his tail from the corner of my eye, I would stiffen momentarily, until I remembered it was my boyfriend and not a murderous xenomorph.

  “Definitely a Halloween costume to keep in mind,” I muttered.

  There isn’t much cell signal in the tunnels. Phone calls were right out, but text messages could generally get through. I pulled out my phone as I walked, keying in Cylia’s number before texting a quick request for her to come and pick up me plus a guest—and to bring something with a hood. Hopefully, she’d be curious enough to actually show up, and compassionate enough to bring what I’d asked for. If she wasn’t there when we emerged, we’d figure something out. Figuring something out is sort of what it means to be a Price.

  The unfamiliar tunnels gave way to more familiar ones, and I kept walking. The sound of conversation from up ahead drifted back to greet us. I tensed and kept going as a Metropolis food service crew passed, some of them nodding genially in my direction. I didn’t recognize any of their faces. That didn’t matter. If I was down here, moving with purpose, I was a cast member, and if I was a cast member, I was family. We didn’t all like each other. We still had to stand together against the endless tide of tourists and demands.

  Once they were out of sight behind me, I glanced at the ceiling and flashed Sam a thumbs-up. He returned the gesture, looking relieved. Maybe this was going to work after all.

  “Well, well, well,” said a voice. “If it isn’t Princess Melody. Slumming, your highness?”

  “Hello, Robin,” I said, turning to face her. Don’t let her look up, I thought. Distract her so she doesn’t look up. “What are you doing down here?”

  “Unlike some people, I still have to work for a living,” she snapped. She was in the paper doll primary colors of Chapter and Verse, the exaggerated stitches on the sleeves dyed yellow, which meant she was working somewhere near Aspen and Elm. She wasn’t one of their handmaids. That was a much more flattering costume. That mattered; she knew I lived with Fern, and I wouldn’t have wanted to wind her up before sending her off to spend a shift with my roommate.

  “Oh, right. You weren’t in Fairyland yesterday, since they stopped scheduling us together after we reached the mutually assured destruction stage. I got the day off because I wound up covered in blood after I ran to help our guests—helping people. That’s not something you’d know much about, is it?” I offered her a sugary smile. “I earned this break. Sorry you didn’t.”

  “Seems like you just happen to ‘earn’ everything good, and I don’t earn anything.” Robin took a step forward, back suddenly straight, shoulders suddenly hunched. She wasn’t taller than I am—few women are—but she was a pretty sizable girl. She could do some damage, if she decided she wanted to.

  On some level, I wanted her to try. I hadn’t been in a proper brawl in months. At least when I’d been with the Covenant, and then with the carnival, I’d been able to keep myself in shape, sparring with people and bouncing off the walls. Since coming to Lakeland, I’d been taking my training where I could find it—and where I could find it came with a shamef
ul lack of punching things.

  Plus I knew I could put her down in under a minute if I had to. That was the problem. No matter what the movies say, knocking someone unconscious is a dangerous game. I’d either need to crack her skull without breaking it, or cut off the blood supply to her brain without doing permanent damage. One slip, and I could kill her. Not something to do lightly, and not something to do when I was trying to sneak Sam out unseen. I couldn’t forget the fact that he was clinging to the ceiling above me, and would get involved if he felt he needed to.

  Quick and clean. That was the plan.

  “Maybe if you were nicer to people, people would be nicer to you,” I said.

  “Who’re you to talk? You don’t have any friends, except for the little blonde bubble girl. What, did you steal her from a cult somewhere?”

  “Don’t talk about Fern like that.”

  “I’ll talk about Fern any way I damn well please, and you won’t stop me.” Robin peeled her lips back in a sneer. “She’s a freak, and so are you. Good, honest people shouldn’t have to look at your kind when we’re in a place like Lowryland.”

  “Pretty sure Michael Lowry would say we were the ones he built it for. The ones who needed it, and not the ones who wanted it.”

  “Pretty sure Michael Lowry’s dead,” said Robin, and swung for my face.

  By the time her fist was there, I wasn’t anymore. She overswung and stopped, looking puzzled.

  “Come back here,” she snapped.

  “What, so you can hit me? I don’t think so.”

  She swung again. I dodged again. It would have been funny, if she hadn’t been getting so much more progressively frustrated. It was like sparring with one of my parents, back when I’d been an eight-year-old ball of rage and ambitions, with reflexes that couldn’t quite keep up with what I wanted them to do. They’d always given me a few easy ones to evade before they started really trying to hit me, letting me find my rhythm, letting me feel like I could win.