Page 37 of Tricks for Free

Eleven

“You can’t do this alone. Nobody can. Nobody should have to.”

–Alice Healy

Lowryland, three weeks and eighteen lessons later, trying to stay awake

MY BREAK FROM WORK only lasted for three days—paid, of course, since I’d been wounded in the course of trying to show the “true Lowry spirit,” and since my new mentor held some undisclosed but apparently terrifying position in the corporate hierarchy—before I was shoved back into the workforce, hands still bandaged to keep the healing damage from freaking out the paying guests.

(I was doing better than poor Cathy. Lowry, Inc. was covering her medical bills, since it was their deep fryer that had experienced a mechanical fault at the exact wrong time. That was the least of her problems. She was going to have a long road to recovery, one that would involve multiple skin grafts to rebuild her face. Every time someone mentioned her in my presence, it was all I could do not to blurt out the location of the last Caladrius-run hospital I knew of in North America. The avian cryptids can heal almost anything, given sufficient time and resources. They could put Cathy’s face back together, or at least back into a shape that wouldn’t hurt every time she tried to open her eyes. Some secrets must be kept. That doesn’t make keeping them any less painful.)

Every morning I got up and went to the PR building, where I spent hours with Colin, studying, reciting, and working my way through the long, slow process of learning to control the gifts I’d never asked my genes to give me. When I was done with that, I would shower, change, and get a ride to the employee gate, usually arriving just in time for my shift to start. Not exactly the sort of schedule that leaves a lot of time for a social life.

Not that my time mattered. I’d been assigned to Fairyland on a permanent basis after telling Emily it was my preference within the Park. Having friends in high places paid some useful dividends, even if half the people I worked with now looked at me like I was a corporate spy, while the other half scurried around in silent terror, having somehow convinced themselves that I’d shoved the unfortunate Cathy into the fryer under the mistaken assumption that she was Robin.

I had never been popular at work, but this was rapidly approaching ridiculous.

And yet.

I hadn’t started a single fire, intentionally or otherwise, since I’d started working with Colin. He’d asked me to pull the heat out of several candles and a handful of bright, spitting sparklers, turning fire into smoke into nothing at all, and I was starting to feel like that was the sort of thing I could learn to enjoy, the point where my body somehow converted the kinetic potential of the world into a beautiful sort of stillness.

If I really tried, I could hold that same stillness under my breastbone, comforting and soothing me when my coworkers left me standing by myself in the middle of a guest-clogged store. I was clinging to that stillness now, as the afternoon parade floated majestically by outside the gift shop. The Goblin Market float was parallel to our window, and Princesses Laura and Lizzie ran wildly from one side to the other, dodging marauding goblins. Every time the music hit a crescendo they would grab one of the large plastic vines that had been provided for their use and swing themselves out over the adoring crowd, waving and blowing kisses before they turned around and did it all again.

Other floats had other princesses and other routines, which meant that Fern was probably enjoying her lunch right about now. The princesses in the parade weren’t the ones who did the meet-and-greets with the guests: their costumes were usually sparklier, less screen-accurate, and designed for a different range of motion. Since only one iteration of each character could be loose in the Park at any given time, the photo princesses were getting a well-deserved break.

The same could be said for those of us working along the parade route. The sidewalks and walkways were clogged with gaping guests, making it virtually impossible for anyone to get into or out of the store. It was probably a safety hazard. As long as it gave us time to fold all these damn shirts, I didn’t care.

That’s what I was doing when the engine blew. I was folding shirts, hands working on autopilot while my mind reviewed Colin’s most recent set of training exercises, my back to the street. There was a loud banging noise, like a nail gun going off, and someone screamed. That first scream was the bellwether for quite a few more. In a matter of seconds, the world was made entirely of screaming.

I dropped the shirt, fingers suddenly nerveless, hands refusing to close. There was no heat, but I whipped around all the same, running toward the window. Half my coworkers were already there. No one shoved or jockeyed for position. We just stood, frozen, terrified, as the Goblin Market float toppled sideways, falling onto the crowded sidewalk.

Several screams cut off abruptly, like the screamers were no longer available for comment. That was enough to break the spell my shock had cast. I ran for the door, pausing only long enough to lean over the counter and grab the first aid kit we kept there for the inevitable staff accidents. I didn’t think individually packaged aspirin and mini-bandages were going to help much, but I had to do something.

The street outside had devolved into pure chaos. People were still screaming, scattering away from the fallen float like it was a giant grenade chucked into their midst. The sound was somehow muted, unable to live up to the impact of that first, ear-splitting cacophony. Babies and young children wailed, clinging to their parents or—more chillingly—sitting abandoned on the curb, with no caretakers in sight.

The float itself was on its side, completely obscuring a long stretch of sidewalk, burying whatever had been there under more than a ton of plastic, papier-mâché, and metal rebar. A red pool was forming along the float’s edge, and despite the theme of the area, I knew it hadn’t come from a pomegranate, full and fine.

One of the curling blackberry vines the actresses playing Laura and Lizzie usually used as handholds while they raced around their float was on fire. I ran toward it, trying to feel the heat, to focus my training on pulling it out of the world. A burning float was one of the only things I could think of that would make this already bad situation genuinely worse.

My hands stayed cold and calm. They were just hands. I stopped in the middle of the street, buffeted on all sides by guests fleeing from the accident, and stared at them. There was no heat. I could feel what was coming off the float, feel it getting stronger as the fire began to spread, but it was all external fire. There was nothing inside me.

Colin’s words about babies and the way they screamed, hurting themselves because they didn’t know any better, flashed through my mind. I knew better now. I knew hurting myself didn’t do me any long-term good. But dammit, I could have done with that lesson kicking in a little later.

“Fuck,” I muttered—a firing offense if any of the fleeing guests felt like reporting me for swearing while wearing an official Lowryland uniform—and started running again, heading for the center of the chaos.

The actress playing Lizzie had been flung free when the float went down. She was sprawled on the concrete about ten feet away from the wheels, one arm bent at an angle that spoke clearly of a bad break, the sort of thing that would require more than just a cast to repair. I stopped next to her, crouching down and feeling for a pulse. She moaned when my fingers pressed against her throat. That was a good sign. Dead people don’t usually make a lot of noise.

“You need to be as still as possible,” I said. Most of the crowd was already past this point, fleeing for places that weren’t at risk of being on fire; the injured actress’s chances of being trampled were low. “You fell hard, and you could have a spinal injury.”

She moaned again. It was difficult to tell for sure whether she could hear me. If she couldn’t, she was unlikely to move, and if she could, she would hopefully listen. I shoved myself back to my feet and ran on toward the float, hissing, “Mary,” under my breath.

“Mary” is a pretty common name. My dead aunt doesn’t appear every time I say it, which is a good thing, given how many Marys I’ve met through cheerleading, roller derby, and being a physical meat creature who walks in the world and has to deal with the consequences of uninspired parents. But she hears it every time a member of the family says her name, and she can choose to come and see what we’re going on about. I ran, and suddenly a white-haired woman was running next to me, her steps making no sound.

“What the hell?” she demanded.

“Float fell,” I replied. There were sirens in the distance, the sound of Lowryland’s emergency teams racing toward us. There’d be no effort to cover this one up. This wasn’t some behind the scenes accident where no guests had been injured. This was a full-on disaster, and everyone was going to get involved.

The trouble with something like this—apart from the loss of life and the therapy that all these children were going to need—came from Lowryland’s design. Like most Florida theme parks, real estate was at a premium, and a space that wasn’t somehow interactive or eye-catching or otherwise keeping our guests engaged was a waste of money. That meant there were very few straight roads within the Park itself. Security staff could come through the backlot and the tunnels, but the emergency vehicles? Those had to travel along one of a limited number of routes, and at this time of day, with the rest of the parade still clogging the street and screaming guests fleeing everywhere, getting through to us was going to be just this side of impossible.