Chapter 20: The Second Bowl

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a story where the villain is unmasked by page three, close this book now. Dear Reader, the girl on the couch was about to tell a true story about herself, and it was not the kind anyone wanted to hear. Arthur would not have gotten there without a sedative, and without a great deal of his own bad manners.

Carter’s house had been nobody’s for nine years, and it still had the furniture to prove it.

The windows were boarded from the inside. A single lamp hung on a cable from the ceiling. A plaid couch, left behind by the last owners, sagged against the front wall. A mattress sat on the floor under a blanket folded very neatly, the corners tucked like a hospital bed. There was a camp stove, a shelf of canned soup, and a backpack by the door with the name torn off the front.

On the wall above the stove, someone had pinned a calendar. Every day since April had a single pencil line through it.

In the square, standing over a sleeping girl and a paper boat of cooling fries, Hadjer had gone through the options. The Academy was out, because Voss would ask why a cadet was carrying a drugged girl through his halls. Arthur’s house was out, because his mother’s garage was no place for a stranger. A hospital was out, because hospitals write things down.

That left the house at the end of Alder Street, the one nobody had claimed in nine years.

It was half past five by the time they got her there, Carter and Arthur taking an arm each and Hadjer walking a careful distance ahead of all three, and the light in the street had turned the color of weak tea.

Hadjer saw the envelopes stacked on the counter. They were unopened, and each one had a county seal in the corner.

"Don’t," said Carter, from the doorway.

"I wasn’t going to."

"Good." He set Lyra’s bag on the floor, very gently, as if it were the only thing in the room that could still break. "I ran from the group home in April. Nobody’s looking for me yet. This is where I’ve been since."

"You live here," Hadjer said. "Alone."

"Yeah."

Nobody said anything else. Arthur, who had spent the whole afternoon in a state of permanent interest, found that for once he had nothing to add. The silence was not uncomfortable.

On the couch, Lyra breathed slow and even. Carter fetched the blanket from his mattress, put two fingers to her throat, then a thumb to her eyelid, and pulled the blanket up to her chin.

"She’s out until midnight," he said. "Whatever was meant for Hadjer was effective. Good thing Hadjer didn’t drink it."

"Good," said Arthur.

He looked at the front window. The boards left a single gap the width of a hand. Through it he could see Alder Street, empty and orange, and the dead streetlamp at the corner. Somewhere behind them, a gray car had pulled away from a curb without hurry. Someone had watched the whole thing happen.

"Carter," Arthur said quietly. "I need you on the porch with my body. And keep Hadjer away from the couch for ten minutes."

"You want me to babysit your body."

"I want to use my ghost half on Lyra while she’s still groggy. Her Will is low. I need to see what she saw."

Carter’s eyes narrowed. "The part where you’re not all in your body?"

"Keep your voice down, you idiot."

"I’m not stupid, Specter. You’re smarter than a twelve-year-old should be, and you’ve got that girl thinking everything’s a plot." His jaw tightened. "I won’t tell her. But I’m not doing this for nothing. We need to start earning coins after this."

"Stop whispering," said Hadjer, from the kitchen, without turning around. "I can hear you both breathing."

"Hadjer," said Arthur brightly. "Check the back gate for tracks. Carter and I will take the front."

She turned and gave him a long, flat look. He had been on the receiving end of a lot of Hadjer’s looks. This one said you are being strange, and then, more quietly, and I am going to watch you.

She went out the back door.

Arthur and Carter stepped onto the porch. Carter propped the front door open with a loose brick, just wide enough for a boy to slip through, and said nothing about why. He didn’t have to. Arthur could float, and Arthur could possess, and there was a third thing he could not do, not yet, which was walk through a closed door.

Arthur stepped out of his skin the way you step out of a wet coat.

It was not difficult. It never was, once he had decided.

Somewhere behind his ribs, a line of text appeared.

[PROXY ME — PASSIVE ENGAGED.]

His body blinked twice on the porch and smiled. Proxy Me was the passive that let something else steer his body while he was away, and the something else had opinions.

"Dandelions," it said to nobody, "are just stars that got tired of being up there."

Carter took one step back. "That’s not you."

"It’s me," said the body warmly. "It’s just the me who has nothing to hide."

A body left behind can smile

and fool the ones who stay a while.

Arthur was already drifting toward the gap in the door. He slipped through it sideways and the dim, close air of the house closed around him.

Possession, in the dry language of the Academy handbook, depends on the target’s Will. Arthur had always thought of it as a door that opens from the inside, if the person behind it is tired enough.

Lyra was very tired. The sedative had cracked her open and let the fog in.

He slid in beside her and found the room at the back of her head. It was dim, and everything in it had the soft edges of a photograph left in the sun.

He saw a glass desk, and a teacup with a chipped rim. He saw a red pen lying across a ledger, open to a column of numbers, each one ending in a zero. A hand with a ring on its middle finger, a flat stone catching the light, tapped the column twice.

A card slid across the desk. On it, in neat black print, was one word he could not quite hold. It began with STAGE, and then slipped away like wet paper.

The figure at the desk was hard to see. It wore a costume, or a mask, or both. Arthur could not tell whether it was a man or a woman, and the voice that came out of it had been filtered until it sounded like a radio left on in another room.

"You can’t cash a cautious dream."

Then the room tilted, and the memory went soft at the edges.

Arthur hung in the dark and considered it. A ledger. A red pen. Coins counted in tens. Somebody who knew exactly how many coins the Academy kept moving, because the Academy was where all of them came from. Academy quests paid in coin. Faculty docked it in fines. Only a few people in the whole Academy had the kind of access that let them stamp a column and call it a game.

He already had a list. Voss had the ledgers and the fines. Frank Abernathy Jr. taught how to get a job, and what was the Game of Life if not a very long job interview? Dr. Nox Elor had a whole unlife of paperwork behind him.

Every name had a reason, and every reason was a guess. The figure at the desk was too careful to be any of them. A careful person was the worst kind to be looking for.

A teacher, Arthur thought, and felt the old pleasure of a puzzle clicking into place. It’s a teacher. I just need to know which one.

Lyra’s fingers twitched against the blanket.

Possession began to slip.

Out on the porch, Carter had gone very still.

The body was crouched beside the steps, turning a dandelion over in its fingers. It was explaining, with great seriousness, that boats were just houses that had given up. A coffee can of mint stood on the porch rail, the only green thing in the whole yard, and Carter looked at the body the way a man looks at a stove that might be on.

"He’s okay," Carter said. "He’s just thinking outside the box, to solve our problem."

Hadjer had come around the side of the house. She had heard the porch talking, and it was a voice she knew.

"No," she said. "Usually he’s weird in a useful way."

The body looked up and beamed at her, tooth by tooth, as if the joke had been written for her personally. "You haven’t had a dandelion," it said. "You have too much mint."

Hadjer looked at the coffee can on the rail. It had been upright when she left. It was drooping now, the way every green thing did when she came near. Is he making fun of my passive? He had never done that before.

Weirder than usual. She filed that. Then she filed something worse: did they drug him too?

Inside, the couch creaked.

Arthur felt it the way you feel a stair you forgot was there. Lyra’s breath caught and changed rhythm. Her Will, which had been lying face-down in the pillow, sat up. Carter had said midnight. It was barely six. Arthur understood, too late, that a mind crowded by another mind does not sleep well.

Possession broke. Arthur came out of her like a splinter.

Lyra was Awakened. Iron, Glamour, under contract. She could see ghosts. And there was no time to float for the door, because she was already opening her eyes.

He had perhaps one second. So he did not run. He called.

It felt like pulling a thread from the back of his skull: a warm tug, a cold flash, air folding open like paper.

[PROXY ME — ACTIVE.]

A boy with his face, his clothes and his half-smile stepped out of the air beside the lamp, with dust on his knees and his hands in his pockets. Arthur slid into him the way a hand goes into a glove. It was the only kind of Possession that never failed, because the clone had only his Will to argue with.

Lyra looked at the ceiling. Then she looked at the lamp. Then, slowly, she found the boy standing beside it.

She did not see a ghost. She saw a solid, tired boy, and she had no reason to think there was a thing behind his eyes that had been somewhere else a moment ago.

"You’re the one," Lyra said, in a voice like broken glass dipped in honey. "The one Hadjer hired to help her."

"She didn’t hire me," said Arthur.

"You turned her from a naive kid into whatever the hell that was." Lyra pushed herself up on one elbow, and the blanket slid off her shoulder. "Must be nice. Having money. I’d buy the whole street if I could. How much does she pay you?"

Arthur laughed. It came out louder than he meant it to.

"Nothing," he said. "I have my reasons to help her."

The true reason sat in his chest like a stone he was not going to hand over. Hadjer was the only girl he had met in this city who seemed to be his type, and he had, as people say, zinged too. It was personal. He was not going to tell Lyra that, not while she was lying on a couch under a sedative and a stranger’s blanket.

"Are you doing this to be a hero or something?" Lyra said. Then, with real indignation: "Then you should help me. I’m more in need than her."

"I couldn’t care less," said Arthur.

Lyra laughed, a short, startled sound, like a tray dropped in another room. "Of course you don’t."

She lay back down. For a while she looked at the boarded window and its one gap of light, which had gone from gold to orange. Then, for reasons she probably could not have explained, she began to talk.

"Do you know most poor kids don’t even realize they’re poor?"

Arthur said nothing. Lyra did not seem to need him to.

"My first year of elementary school, somebody thought it was a good idea to take us on a field trip to the poor side of California. To help the needy." She smiled at the ceiling. "It was where we used to live. Can you imagine my shock when they drove us back there? So embarrassing."

She swallowed.

"My plan was simple. Make sure nobody found out. Horrible plan. Everyone there knew me. And that dumb teacher thought it’d be a good idea if I helped hand out the soup."

She closed her eyes for a moment.

"The first person in line recognized me instantly. She started squeezing my cheeks. The teacher asked if I knew her, and she said, ’Oh, she’s my neighbor. Isn’t she pretty? I was thinking of getting a second bowl for her. I usually do.’"

Lyra’s voice went very quiet.

"And she did. Every time. I just never knew where the soup came from. You don’t care when you’re hungry."

She opened her eyes.

"All the kids knew I was poor by the bus ride back. I could hear the whispers. They tried to keep them quiet, but it was the loudest sound I’d ever heard. I went home and cried to my father."

She went on, slower.

"He felt ashamed that I felt like that. So he begged his brothers to let him have the house they inherited from Grandma and Grandpa. They gave it to him out of pity. We moved somewhere less rundown, and I switched schools. I was so happy."

Then she looked straight at Arthur.

"But then I met Hadjer. That’s when I found out why I was poor now."

The lamp on its cable swung, very slightly, though there was no wind in the room. On Lyra’s wrist, beneath the cuff of the gray sweatshirt, the mark began to flicker, slow and patient, like a light blinking in the dark.

On the porch, the body stopped mid-sentence. Through the gap in the boards, Arthur heard Hadjer’s voice go quiet and sharp.

Lyra smiled, a small, bright, awful smile.

"You want to know why?"

TO BE CONTINUED...