Page 81 of Tricks for Free

Outside the elevator shaft was a standard Lowry corporate hallway: more brightly colored than, say, an accounting firm, with framed cartoon posters on the walls instead of actuarial tables, but otherwise as featureless and emotionless as any other business in the world. I looked around, frowning.

“I wish my cousin Sarah were here,” I muttered. “She’s our math guru.”

“Meaning what?” said Cylia.

“Meaning the building tends to get taller when the people on top want it to, and my on-the-fly math skills aren’t good enough to tell me how far we fell.” According to the plaque next to the elevator, we were on the fifth floor. That should have been the top. We’d fallen a hell of a lot farther than that.

“Can we take the stairs?” asked Fern.

“They could be a hundred floors high,” I said. Then I paused. “Wait. No, they can’t.”

“Please pick one, this is making my head hurt,” said Megan.

“Emily’s a routewitch. She’s the one doing their distance work. Distance is a constant. How far we fell is how far we have to climb, and we didn’t fall a hundred floors. We fell a long way, but not that long.” I looked at the elevator shaft.

Sam followed my gaze, and shook his head. “No. I might be able to climb to the top. I could probably even carry one of you. But I can’t carry everyone, and I’m not leaving all our backup behind. Not going to happen.”

“I thought you were letting me lead this,” I said.

“Only as long as I’m also keeping you alive,” he replied firmly. “Keeping you alive is the most important thing I’m doing right now.”

“I’m touched, really,” said Cylia. Her tone was dry, but her expression was sympathetic. “Although I care more about my own skin than the monkey seems to, he’s not entirely wrong. We’re not doing anything that ups our chance of being slaughtered.”

“Do they know we’re still alive?” asked Megan. “If I’d dropped an elevator on somebody, I’d figure they were dead.” Her snakes were standing on end, tongues flicking constantly. That, more than anything else, told me how much rage was behind her calm exterior. Megan was a medical resident who just happened to be a gorgon. She’d never been thrown down an elevator shaft before. She was pissed.

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

Megan nodded. “Then we take the stairs.” She looked around at the rest of us, neutral expression melting into a scowl that Medusa herself would have admired. “Nobody drops me down a hole.”

I smiled.

Twenty-two

“Tired is for after the battle ends. Tired is for winners. Losers get to sleep a lot longer, and they don’t wake up again.”

–Jane Harrington-Price

Climbing up a lot of stairs

THE STAIRS DID NOT go on forever. That would have been impossible. If routewitches had been able to extend mundane stairways past the limit of the Earth’s gravity, like some Phineas and Ferb nightmare science adventure, they would have found a way to boost the space program decades ago. Roads crisscrossing the solar system, distances that planet-bound routewitches could only dream of . . . oh, they would never have let us stay within the grasp of gravity. No matter how much they enjoyed using it as a weapon.

The stairs did, however, go on for a long, long time. Cylia, Fern, and I were all used to skating for hours, and while we weren’t exactly thrilled by the climb, we managed with relative ease once Fern figured out the exact balance she needed to strike between density and injury. I took point, a knife in each hand and fingers aching for fire. Cylia was close behind me, ready to pull me out of the way if something loomed.

Sam brought up the middle, Megan slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She wasn’t protesting. The gorgon was in reasonably good shape, but she was also a med grad student, and this sort of thing wasn’t part of her daily rounds at the hospital. Letting her walk would have slowed us down considerably, and Sam didn’t seem to have a problem carrying her.

Fern finished our procession, stepping light—so light that she frequently launched herself several feet into the air, landing on a higher step as gently as a feather drifting back to earth. She was moving slower than any of the rest of us but still keeping pace through the sheer dint of taking the steps so many at a time.

Every time we reached a landing we would stop, tensing, while I cracked the door open and looked through. For the past eight floors, what I’d seen on the other side was the same hallway. The exact same hallway. Emily could bend space and distort distance, but routewitches can’t actually create what isn’t there. The strange other-space I had walked through the first time I’d come to this building had been the creation of one of the other magic-users. That was worrisome. Of the members of the Lowryland cabal, the only ones I was absolutely sure of were Emily, Colin the sorcerer, and Joshua the trainspotter. The others were a nebulous mass of faces and ill-defined abilities.

Belatedly, I realized that should have been another warning sign. Yes, I was Colin’s student. Yes, it was reasonable that he was my primary contact with the rest of the cabal. But when I’d joined my roller derby team, there had been a big mixer for me and the rest of the fresh meat, so we could understand what we were getting ourselves into. When I’d joined the cheerleading squad, we had all gone out for pizza to get to know each other, because the people in charge understood that without the pom-poms and spirit fingers, most of us would never have been friends. Even my employment as a low-level Lowryland cast member had started with team building exercises.

If the cabal had really wanted me as a member of their team, they would have treated me like a member of the team, not shunted me into a corner where Colin could keep an eye on me. I had been so blinded by the possibility of getting myself under control that I hadn’t paid attention to the parts of the narrative that didn’t fit, the ones designed to keep me on the outside and out of the way.

Saying this was all my fault would have been sheer arrogance, untrue, and unhelpful. These people had been spinning their spells and doing their damage long before I’d come on the scene. But I’d made them stronger, whether I’d intended to or not, and I had been a part of the damage they’d done since I’d agreed to let them have access to me. I needed to fix this.

We were approaching another landing. I motioned for the others to stop, eased the door open, and peeked through the crack into the wood-and-mirrors training room. We were here. We were finally, after so many stairs, here.

I looked over my shoulder and nodded. Sam put Megan down. She stepped forward, joining Cylia at my back, and reached for her sunglasses. She didn’t remove them—not yet—but with her hand on the frame, she was armed and dangerous.