Page 7 of Tricks for Free

But I’d never seen myself isolated from my family. I didn’t even have any mice with me. Whatever happened to me here, no one was going to witness or remember it. I was the first member of our family to be without a piece of our institutional memory since Elizabeth Matheson had discovered a colony of Aeslin mice worshipping a chicken in her yard.

Aeslin mice: hyper-religious, hyper-loyal, and totally devoted to my family. Oh, and they talk. Standard protocol says that none of us go anywhere without a mouse, since that way, if anything happens, the mouse might be able to make it back and tell the story. I’d started my journey with a mouse. Mindy, a member of my personal priesthood, had accompanied me to England to make sure that if something happened to me, word would get back to my family. We’d picked up another mouse there, Mork, a member of the colony that stayed behind when my great-great-grandparents quit the Covenant. He was the only English Aeslin I’d met. The rest preferred to stay in hiding, at least until their representative was able to come back and prove that our colony wasn’t a bunch of mouse-eating monsters. It was clever. It was the right way to do things.

The last time I’d seen either Mork or Mindy, I’d been in the process of leaving them with my maybe-boyfriend, Sam, who’d promised to get them to the airport so that they could get back to the rest of my family. According to my dead Aunt Mary, they’d made it. They were fine. That was probably the only reason my mother wasn’t burning the world down to find me.

Being the youngest child in my family has sometimes meant feeling like an afterthought, the kid conceived to be a blood donor to the two that actually mattered. But even when I’d been feeling like that, I never questioned whether my parents loved me, or whether they would charge into the gates of hell to snatch me back if they thought they could get away with it. That was one more reason I needed to stay in hiding. If they knew where to find me, they would come to bring me home, and then . . .

Most tracking spells work better when there’s no interference around the person who’s being tracked. My family lives in a survivalist compound outside of Portland. We’ve always used isolation as one of our greatest strengths. Put me in the building, and it could become an even greater weakness.

Context is everything.

The traffic was heavy around us, cars packed with tourists heading for Lowryland mingling with cars packed with employees heading for Lowryland. Part of why Fern liked to stretch out in the backseat when we got a ride to work was the crowd. When we went bumper to bumper—not an everyday occurrence, but not as rare as I’d like either—people got bored and peered into the cars around them, looking for a karaoke show, or a nose-picker, or an interesting dog. Even out of costume, there was a chance Fern would be recognized. Annual Passholders were notorious for learning to identify individual performers, and they could cause problems when encountered “off the clock.”

(The scariest incident we’d had so far had been at the Target, of all places. Fern and I had been looking at canned goods when a hand clamped down on her arm and someone started dragging her away, pulling her several feet before she’d managed to increase her density to the point where she couldn’t be moved anymore. And then I’d punched the asshole in the gut. He’d fallen over, threatening to call store security and to notify Lowryland about a misbehaving princess. We’d run. When Fern made her security report, she had left me out, claiming that the puncher was a “helpful stranger,” and since it hadn’t happened on Park property, it hadn’t been pursued. But we’d been a lot more careful since then, and we always went shopping in a group.)

The employee turnoff loomed up ahead. Megan tightened her hands on the wheel, an involuntary gesture that broadcast, loudly, how much she didn’t want to take it.

“I could keep driving,” she said, voice light and sincere. “We could head for the coast. Just the three of us, surf, sand . . .”

“Unemployment,” I said. “I need this job. You need your residency.”

“I need a bathroom,” said Fern.

“Fern needs a bathroom,” I said. “Sad but true: we have to go to work.”

“Spoilsport,” said Megan, and made the turn.

The traffic was lighter here. Most Lowryland employees take the train, and the rest of us tend to carpool, since the parking lot is a nightmare wasteland where people have come to blows over the “good” spots. Megan wasn’t parking. She pulled up to the employee drop-off point, where a line had already formed of cast members waiting for the bus that would take them to the backstage entrance to the Park.

“Let the magic begin,” I muttered and opened the door. “See you tonight?”

“Sweet Medusa, I hope not,” said Megan. “You need to sleep, or you’re going to wind up stabbing somebody.”

“Only if they deserve it,” I said.

Megan was laughing as I closed the door. Fern and I turned to wave before joining the line. In the distance, the bright lights of Lowryland were warming up for another day, splitting the sky into candy-colored segments, like something out of someone else’s dream. Not mine. Never mine.

Clutching the strap of my purse, I shoved my misery and loneliness down as far as it would go. Time to go to work.

Three

“We all have to do things we don’t want to do in this life. For example, right now, I have to keep not shooting you.”

–Jane Harrington-Price

Lowryland

WE SEPARATED AS SOON as we were on Park property, Fern heading for the dressing room to join the rest of the face characters in preening, primping, and getting ready to face their public. Not a job I envy, or one I would aspire to, even if I fit the requirements for any of the Park’s many featured characters—I’m too broad-shouldered and chesty to be a princess, too bitter and sarcastic to be a Fairy, and too tall in general to be shoved into a complicated costume that looks like something out of a child’s nightmare. My Price genes may have gotten me into this mess in the first place, but at least those same genes are keeping me from being crammed into a cloth-and-plastic Goblin suit. There are small mercies everywhere.

I took the underground route into the heart of Lowryland. Most guests never realize that everywhere they walk, they’re walking over more Lowryland. A complicated maze of tunnels and corridors runs from a point fifty yards outside the visible Park boundary, all the way under the Park itself, sometimes stacked two and three deep, so that it’s possible to just keep going down, into an endless warren of laundry rooms, storage, and intra-Park transit tunnels.

(Do I know for sure that there’s a colony of hidebehinds living under Lowryland? No. I do not. Am I pretty damn convinced that it has to be down there somewhere? Yes. Yes, I am. Because hidebehinds are smart, and they like it when other people do their work for them.)

The sound of laughter, conversation, and the occasional groan drifted out to meet me as I approached my assigned dressing room. I stood up straighter, pulling the veil of Melody West, grateful ex-cheerleader fleeing from a dubious past, down over myself. Then I stepped inside.

There are people who say you never really escape from high school, you just keep finding it in different forms, over and over again, until it finally kills you. Those people are assholes, and should not be allowed in polite company. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Entering that locker room was like falling down a dark tunnel to the first time I’d been Melody, when she’d been a lie I told the world to keep them from figuring out that I was a lot more Wednesday Addams than Marilyn Munster—not that Marilyn was a good option either, since being Marilyn implied living in a world where monsters were real, and that wasn’t something I was allowed to share with my classmates.

They got to be ignorant. They got to walk in the world thinking humanity was in charge of everything, the peak of the evolutionary ladder and rulers of all we surveyed. Turns out, ignorance often comes with an exciting, unexpected side effect: cruelty. To people who think they’re the best the world has to offer, kindness is an afterthought and an unnecessary one at that.