Champions of Breakfast

  “I wish I could say yes. But I don’t think it’s gonna work with two people. Your Majesty?”

  “Young man,” answered the queen.

  “I need to get to the Grand Canyon as quickly as possible. Do you think you could call in another favor?”

  CHAPTER 25

  Biggs plucked Emily out of the air like an apple from a tree, and the two of them tumbled to the street as Erno swerved to avoid them. Then Biggs was a cloud of butterflies, and Emily stepped lightly out of this cloud and turned. Then the butterflies were Biggs again. Then the pink lightning came down and struck the big man, struck the golf cart, pockmarked the street.

  Erno held his breath, but he was unharmed—the cart’s rubber wheels insulated him against the lightning. He thought, grimly, that if there was anything left of his sister in that glowing shell, she would have known that.

  Biggs smelled like burned hair. He staggered to his big feet, all his fur sticking off at right angles, then dropped again. He lay in the road as silent children scuffled by him, and didn’t get up.

  Emily turned her attention to Erno. Erno sat in his golf cart.

  “Emily . . . ,” he said. “I . . . I know you won’t hurt me.”

  A little boy passed, trailing cereal puffs. Erno stepped out of the cart. A woman somewhere called the name Ashley again and again, with rising panic. Emily watched Erno, motionless but for her hair (which was in a frenzy), the tips of her toes not quite touching the ground.

  “Look,” Erno went on, “Biggs needs help.” The big man’s chest was (he thought) still rising and falling. “You can . . . help me help him. Let’s get him into this golf cart.”

  The earth rumbled again. The windows of apartment buildings all around them splintered. Car alarms wailed distantly but from every direction.

  Erno stepped closer. “No? You don’t want to help Biggs? Biggs, who carried you when you got dizzy? And got you your first library card? Look. It’s still him, he just needs a haircut. We all need haircuts. And new clothes, and a house where we can start over.”

  He was close enough to touch her now. He did touch her, with a trembling hand, then hugged her—quickly, like his resolve might fail him. Like ripping off a Band-Aid. He squeezed her tight, and still she just stood there—until the pink coursed out of her again, and came between them, and swatted Erno away. It tossed him like he was weightless, like he was nothing, and he caromed off the golf cart with a sharp crack. When he landed, he landed heavily. Dead weight.

  In every cartoon she’d missed out on when she was younger, in every comic book and movie, this was the moment when the mind control would be broken. Having been forced to hurt someone she loved, Emily would blink, shake her head. Then, with the full realization of what she’d done, she would run to Erno’s side, shake her fist at the villain. “It’s over, Nimue,” she’d say. “I’ll never be your puppet again.”

  That didn’t happen here. Instead, Emily daydreamed.

  She pictured a plain gray room, empty save for a chair in the middle. A plain gray chair in an empty room—she’d dreamed of this before.

  After a moment, a girl who looked just like Emily entered and took her seat.

  “You again,” Emily said to the girl.

  “You remember,” said the girl. “That’s good. I was afraid you were too far gone to remember. But then, if you were too far gone, I guess you wouldn’t have found your way in here.”

  “You don’t have your headgear anymore.”

  “I never did.”

  “The last time I saw you, you told me something terrible was going to happen.”

  The girl nodded. “And look at you—you’re something terrible, all right.”

  Silence. A slight warbling hum, as if everything beyond this room were just wind and nothing.

  “That was you in my head in Wilson’s row house in London too, wasn’t it? The last time Nimue stepped in. You got me to touch the four-leaf clover and break her spell, you clever thing. You meddlesome little—”

  “Stop that. You’re talking like her. We don’t talk like that.”

  Emily studied the girl for a moment. She really was a remarkable imitation. In fact, Emily noted, with no small amount of bile, that the girl in the chair was a flawed copy only in the sense that she seemed perfectly, placidly calm. No one who knew Emily would ever mistake her for calm.

  “Who are you?”

  “You don’t know?” the girl said, tilting her head. “I’m the real you. I’m the little sliver of your brain that the Milk never touched. I’m the girl you would have been if you’d never taken the Milk at all—happy, whole.”

  “I’m smarter than you.”

  “In some ways.”

  “So ignorance is bliss, is that what you’re telling me? That I’d be happier being sweet and dumb? That’s disgusting.”

  “There’s more than one kind of intelligence, Emily,” said the girl. “The Milk made you smart, but it could never make you wise. Knowledge without wisdom can only make you miserable. Not that I’m so happy at the moment, of course—you’re killing my brother—”

  “He was never our brother.”

  “See, now, that’s a perfect example. With all your smarts, you only recently figured that out. I’ve always known that he wasn’t our brother—just as I’ve always known that, in every way that mattered, he was.”

  The wind howled, now. The wind sobbed.

  “Is. Not was, is.”

  “There you go.”

  “That noise . . . that’s not the wind, is it?”

  The girl—the other Emily—was close now. Her face was close, though she hadn’t moved from her chair.

  “No,” she said. “That’s not the wind. That’s you. That’s us.”

  Closer. Closer still.

  “I . . . I can’t tell which one of us I am.”

  “Good. That’s good. Go tell that to the world.”

  She woke, sobbing, and saw a street filled with kids. Kids, and a few adults—adults half dressed and holding their bodies tight as they tried to make sense of what they were seeing. Some of these kids walked right past her without a glance. One kid in particular lay motionless by a golf cart.

  “Oh no,” Emily whispered.

  She tried to move, but the pink wouldn’t let her. It filled her veins, tried to harden her heart.

  “No,” Emily growled. “You’re through. You’ve had your fun. Now me.”

  It started with a finger, then her hand. Then a deep breath, and she shook herself loose. She lost her balance, but it was her balance now. She fell on her hands, got up again, rushed to Erno’s side.

  His heart felt weak. Her heart felt weak, too.

  “Hey!” said a man down the street. He moved toward her in sweatpants and slippers. “Kid! Girl! What’s going on, why are all these kids out here?” He crouched by her now. “There’s a . . . bigfoot or something over there,” he added. “Is that boy hurt? Do you want me to call 911?”

  Emily leaned over Erno and put her hands on his chest.

  “Kid . . . ,” said the man. “You know you’re glowing a little? What . . . what is that?”

  Magic, she thought. Isn’t that ridiculous? Magic. She tried to shape it. She tried to tell it what to do.

  Just like in a movie. Just like in a cartoon.

  CHAPTER 26

  They couldn’t land in Philadelphia—it was too close to the maelstrom, and the pilots spotted at least two types of clouds that no one had ever heard of before, so they ended up setting down at McGuire Air Force Base, to the northeast of Goodborough. John and Merle and Mick and the queen were helped down to the tarmac, whereupon John apologized about his helmet.

  “I was, ah . . . sick in that,” he told an airman. “A few times. You should just get rid of it.”

  To say that Mick kissed the ground didn’t even begin to describe his affections.

  “You think air force pilots always feel like that?” asked Merle, staggering. A member of the ground crew had to hold him up. “
It’s like you an’ physics are having a disagreement, and you’re losing.”

  Mick rolled over onto his back and composed a spontaneous ode:

  “O blessed ground, so sound an’ sturdy,

  Spare the air for bat an’ birdie—

  Let them keep those lofty things

  That want not feet, but beating wings.

  An’ to my grave, I’ll gravely swear

  By terra firma, firm an’ fair.”

  “If you are quite finished,” said the queen, unruffled.

  Mick wasn’t finished, and he continued to praise the ground in rhyme and song until he saw that they were being led to a helicopter.

  Emily raced through the streets of Goodborough, pausing intermittently to give exasperated looks over her shoulder.

  “Can’t you guys go any faster?” she said. “The world’s gonna end without us!”

  Biggs loped along, his fur frazzled, the ends split and burned. Erno was still limping, but she swore he was favoring a different leg.

  “Give us a break,” he groaned. “We were dead recently.”

  “Oh, you were never dead.”

  “Pretty sure I was,” said Erno. “Killed by my own sister. Killed with magic.”

  “And then healed with the same magic, so no harm, no foul.”

  A unicorn galloped past, wild of eye. It’s typically hard to read a unicorn’s expression, but this one was as transparently confused as you’d expect a unicorn to be upon finding itself in a blue-collar town in southwestern New Jersey.

  Emily traced its path backward and pointed. “Look! There it is!”

  “It” turned out to be a crowd of people, mostly parents who were screaming and crying and carrying on. And no wonder—they were being held at bay by pink men with guns, and those men were circling an ever-growing multitude of the parents’ children. The mob of them must have filled ten city blocks.

  The sky churned overhead, revealing a void that was black and dead in its center.

  “I don’t think there’s . . . anything we can do here,” said Erno, panting.

  “I wonder. Maybe I can do something with my, you know, magic.”

  “How much do you suppose you have left?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wonder how you’d even measure something like that.”

  “Based on how all my doctor’s appointments at Goodco used to go,” Emily said, “I’m gonna guess ‘pee in a cup.’”

  The ring of parents was like a single, teeming creature, an undulating coral reef of misery. A nearby father was pleading, “Jacob! Jacob, please come back. Come back to Daddy. I’m sorry I yelled, Jacob!” Then he flinched and moved quickly aside as a tall elf, wearing a dress of rose petals, stepped lithely from the pulsating crowd. She paused to admire Emily as if she were a rare flower.

  It made Emily feel creepy, so she moved Erno and Biggs some distance away.

  “I feel like Mr. Wilson would know what to do,” Emily said. “I mean, he’s gone weird in the head, but he obviously knew more about Goodco than anybody. I wish we knew what he was planning.”

  “Yeah,” said Erno. He moved restlessly on the balls of his feet. “All he said was, ‘I have an idea!’ Then he turned his golf cart around and drove back onto Goodco’s island while you were still all pink and floaty.”

  Emily looked vague. “Did I . . . did I collapse the bridge?” she asked.

  “Uh . . . yeah.”

  “It’s so hard to remember. That means Mr. Wilson is stuck on the island. I trapped him there.”

  Erno looked as though he might answer, but they were all distracted by the passage of a dark helicopter overhead, charting a woozy curve through all this fickle weather. Erno squinted.

  “That was an Iroquois,” he said. “U.S. military. Look, there’s a couple more farther off.”

  “Then that’s where we’re going,” said Emily with sudden resolve. “We’re going to find where they land and offer our help. Biggs? Are you feeling up to carrying me? My legs are tired and I can’t remember how to fly.”

  In the helicopter, they huddled as they buzzed a path over the treetops toward Goodborough.

  “I wish I understood what Scott was up to,” John shouted over the wind. “Why the Grand Canyon?”

  “I’ve been wondering that, too,” said Merle.

  “I have an inklin’,” said Mick. “Trust the boy. He’ll save all us miserable so-an’-sos, given half a chance.”

  “Gentlemen,” said the queen. “I think I see our rift.”

  They peered out the open door and through the gaps between buildings and saw a throng of people down below, thousands of bodies clustered around a central point. Children, mostly. Men in pink rubber suits too. And desperate parents, surging at the edges. The bodies had formed an aisle—an empty spoke leading from the center to the fringe—and as they watched, a fresh body walked down that aisle. Something neither child nor Freeman.

  “Did you see that?” said John.

  “That was an elf,” said Mick, squinting. “Just appeared where one o’ the kids’d been standing a second ago. An’ look there—a giant. I think I know that guy.”

  “A dragon or something,” said John, pointing. “Just a little one. There.”

  The helicopter veered away from this scene, toward the spot in the park that Merle had marked on a map. When it set down on the lawn it was followed by another helicopter, and then another. Soldiers or airmen streamed out of these and formed a perimeter. But it appeared they had nothing to defend against—the Freemen either didn’t know about this spot, or didn’t care.

  Merle ambled around, looking down, then up at the line of buildings south of the park, then down again. “Here,” he said.

  “You’re sure?” said John.

  “Sure as I can be. This is just about where I first appeared, fresh from the Middle Ages. This is where King Arthur should have appeared too.” Merle readied his new device—the tiny jalopy of a time machine that he’d thrown together from parts at McMurdo Station.

  “So what’s the plan here?” asked Mick.

  “It was my device that fractured everything apart. It’ll be my device that’ll put all the pieces together again. This is gonna act like a receiver—it’ll close the loop, and both Earth and Pretannica will merge into the single world they were always meant to be.”

  “And then we shall have an elf problem,” said the queen. “Forgive me for saying so, Mick—but Merle, you come from a time that also had a sudden and unexpected influx of the Fay, and it led to hegemony.”

  “It led to what now?” asked Mick.

  “To the Fay taking over everything,” said Merle. “What can we do? They won’t have their big pink dragon this time. Maybe that’ll make a difference.”

  “And maybe it won’t, sir,” said a man in fatigues—one of the soldiers, armed and serious. “Your weird little group has been given free rein until now, but now we wait. The United Nations Security Council is in an emergency meeting, and I have my orders not to let you act until they’ve made their decision.”

  More men stood nearby, menacing without trying to look menacing.

  “Look, soldier—” said John.

  “Marine, sir.”

  “Sorry. Marine. Look at the sky. Feel the air here. This is all going very wrong, and we don’t have a lot of time—”

  “That isn’t your call to make. Sir.”

  “So whose call is it? All those people who’ve been saying I’m crazy these past six months?” said John, stepping forward.

  “My wife likes your albums, sir. Please don’t make me shoot you.”

  “Is that what you’d do,” said Merle, “if I tried to turn this thing on? Shoot me?”

  The marine didn’t answer right away. He grimaced into the howling wind.

  “Those are my orders,” he said.

  “You’d better get to it, then,” said Merle. “I flipped the switch two minutes ago.”

  The marine raised his rifle.

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; “You can’t kill me, you know,” said Merle. “I haven’t even been born yet.”

  “Drop the device!”

  Merle shrugged and tossed it at his feet. “It didn’t work,” he said. “I thought it would work, but it didn’t.”

  The big man lowered his weapon, just as the earth growled and rumbled, as if hungry. As if it could swallow them all up. They toppled onto the grass. The marine looked up at the sky as if for the first time.

  “So . . . so what do we do now?” he asked them. They all found their footing again.

  “Now . . . we try Plan B,” John said.

  “Stormin’ the castle,” said Mick.

  CHAPTER 27

  Emily and Erno and Biggs arrived at the edge of the park just in time to watch two of the three helicopters leave.

  There was a dark gash across the sky. Pink lightning flashed through it, and it flashed inside Emily’s mind as well. For an instant she was back in the fishbowl room, and the fishbowl was shattered. The decoy doll that Mr. Wilson had placed inside was burning, and the whole room, the whole vast room, was charged, firing off impulses like a titanic brain. In the center of the room, a woman was on fire and screaming.

  Emily blinked, and she was back in the park again with another gun in her face.

  “My God, am I tired of guns,” she said.

  The marines who had been left here must have been new recruits. Like many kids, Emily often mistook anyone over sixteen for an adult—but these men were frightened, and when they were frightened they looked like boys playing dress-up.

  “What is that?” said one, meaning Biggs. “What is that?”

  “Big hairy man,” whispered another.

  Emily scowled at them. “This is Brian Macintyre Biggs. He is my nanny and a librarian and his taxes pay your wages, so you will show him respect.”

  Biggs, who had his massive hands in the air, jiggled one of them.

  The marines’ postures seemed to relax, slightly. They were used to being spoken to like this. Not by little girls specifically, but still.

  “Miss,” said the lead man. “It’s not safe to be out tonight. Please, all of you, return to your homes. We are in this park because of a . . .”