Page 27 of Magic for Nothing

Dammit, Mary, I thought. She was the one who’d been teaching me to deal with this crap, and where was she now? Back in America, haunting her familiar ground, and staying well clear of this nest of dangerous people with terrible ideas. I would have switched places with her in a second, if only to keep them from catching on.

My fingertips were cooling down. I pulled my hand out of my mouth and stuck my arm out by my side, jumping in a T-shape for a moment before executing a series of flips, timing it so I was hitting the trampoline feet first and bouncing up again. A badly timed landing could result in a concussion (best case) or a broken neck (worse, more common case), but I was pretty confident about things like this, and more, I was showing off.

I knew Leo had reached the trampoline when I heard him say, in a distinctly impressed tone, “Damn, Annie, I didn’t know you could get that kind of height out of this old thing!”

“If this is what you think of as ‘old,’ I volunteer to test all your new equipment,” I said, and stopped flipping, beginning to bleed momentum back into the mat. After I’d dropped enough to feel like it was safe, I stopped bouncing, landing on my knees and turning the last of my kinetic energy into a slide to the side of the trampoline. Leo was standing there, face turned upward to watch me work. He looked impressed.

My cheeks reddened. I didn’t want Leo looking at me that way, like he was a person and I was a person and we were just two people who happened to be in the same place somehow. This wasn’t a coincidental meeting at a coffee shop or a comic book store. This was a Covenant training facility, and his grandfather was in charge of the whole damn thing.

“Here,” he said, offering me his bundle.

It unrolled to reveal a stack of blunt throwing knives. They looked cold-forged, the sort of thing you’d find at a Renaissance Faire “try your luck” stall. I raised my head and eyebrows at the same time, giving him a curious look.

“What do you want me to do with these?”

“Well, that’s a bit up to you,” said Leo. “I’m trying to assess you. Impress me.”

Statements like that have always awakened the part of me that has more competitive urge than sense. I looked around the room, finally focusing on the banners hanging near the ceiling. “Are you using those for anything?”

“Hmm?” Leo looked up. “Those? No, they’re leftover decorations from the last ball we hosted. Why?”

I wanted to say something about the . . . the arrogance, and cruelty of an organization that hunted intelligent beings having balls so casually, but I didn’t. It wouldn’t have fit my cover story. So instead, I filled my hands with knives, and said, “Watch this.”

It took a few minutes of bouncing to build the kind of height I needed. I was going more slowly this time, both to avoid showing off, and because there’s a word for people who bounce full-speed with their hands full of knives. The word is “skewered.” Besides, nothing was attacking me or rushing to break my concentration; for once, I had the luxury of going as fast or as slow as I desired. I bounced while Leo watched with anticipation and Chloe watched with exasperation. And once I had the kind of air I needed, I started throwing knives.

There’s this character from the X-Men. Clarice Ferguson, better known as “Blink.” She teleports and throws energy daggers at people, which means that a lot of the time, she’s drawn flying through the air or falling as she impales things. I’ve done Blink cosplay for four different cons, and I have a pretty good grasp on her style of throwing shit. I jumped and I flung, and one by one, the banners fluttered to the floor, neatly cut away from the rope that held them.

When my hands were empty, I landed on the trampoline in a perfect Spider-Gwen crouch and waited for the reactions. I didn’t have to wait long.

“Holy fuck,” breathed Chloe, finally looking like she was taking an interest in the program. “How did you do that? Can you teach me to do that?”

“Annie,” said Leo, wide-eyed and staring. “What in the world . . . ?”

“I’d do displays of marksmanship between acts some nights,” I said, rolling into a seated position and trying to look shy. “They’d set up the trampoline and hang balloons around the ring, and I’d see how many of them I could break before I ran out of time. I got pretty good. Some nights, they’d fill the balloons with glitter, and the air would sparkle as it fell.”

Details can make or break a story. In this case, the details were taken from real life, from acts I’d seen or participated in when visiting the Campbell Family Carnival. Most of the backstory for “Timpani” came from my friends and acquaintances with the show. The Campbells aren’t technically family—not by blood—but they raised Dad and Aunt Jane, and they’re always happy to see us. I wasn’t the one who’d broken the balloons around their ring, at least not the first time I’d seen it. That image will still be with me for the rest of my life.

“How are you with a bow?” Leo asked, leaning forward, eyes suddenly sharp.

I fought the urge to lean away. He looked too interested, like I had suddenly transformed from a toy into something worth coveting. “Crossbow, good, anything else, not good. You can’t safely draw a bow while you’re bouncing up and down, and I pretty much stick to trapeze and trampoline. Things that keep me as high up as possible.” That’s the only thing I have in common with my sister. Neither of us has ever been happy with our feet on the ground—although for her, high heels will work in a pinch, and for me, it’s always been roller skates.

“All right; we can work with that,” said Leo, and offered his hand to help me down from the trampoline. After a moment’s hesitation, I took it. This was part of the con. I was going to pull it off, or I was going to die trying.

He held on a trifle too long before letting me go, and he was still looking at me with those covetous eyes. Dying trying might still be on the table.

The next wrinkle in my plan came while I was unpacking my things and getting ready to ask where a girl was supposed to go for a shower in this joint. The door to my room opened. Chloe stepped inside. I stopped what I was doing and plastered a smile onto my face, in case she was here to haul me off for some new series of tests I didn’t want to take and couldn’t afford to fail. Instead, she glared, marched to the dead center of the room, and pointed at the floor.

“This,” she said, in a tone that was distinctly shriller than it had been earlier, “is my side of the room. If your filthy things wind up on my side of the room, I’ll have them burned.”

I blinked. “You’re my roommate?”

“No,” she said. “You are going to be my roommate. Temporarily. And you’re never to forget the hierarchy in this room. I was here first. You’re a short-term do-it-yourself project, and I will not yield to you on matters of cleanliness, window positioning, or anything else.”

“Wow.” I blinked again. “You’re super important, aren’t you?”

Now it was Chloe’s turn to blink. “I beg your pardon?”

“I mean, I wouldn’t trust me, if I were you. I’m a stranger from America, with a story that isn’t exactly easy to verify and some really weird skills that only make sense if you believe everything I’ve said. Which I wouldn’t do. So if they’re putting you in here to keep an eye on me while they verify my story, you must be super important.”