Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) (43 page)

"Huh?”

Nini Mo has extended her hand to me; I take it and she pulls me up. Her skin is warm and the rich dirt smell of patchouli drifts from her. "I only made the dare up, baby doll. I never actually did it!”

"But what about
Nini Mo vs. the Ice Weasels?”

"Oh, baby doll, lies all. Infamous lies. I never actually did any of those sportive tricks that they ascribe to me. Horse hoo, completely. Did you think they were all true? You and Tiny Doom—so gullible both!”

Now I am stunned with disappointment. I
had
thought the Coyote Queen yellowbacks were true. Embellished and exaggerated, yes, but otherwise true. She is saying they were lies? My great plan is based on a lie? If Nini Mo couldn’t escape from death, how could I? No wonder I am still dead.

Nini Mo sees my disappointment. She slips her arm around my shoulders and squeezes. "Don’t look so long in the face. You got to keep the truth safe behind a bodyguard of lies. I know how much mystique matters. The Coyote Queen books were just my cover; you know, they were flash. I couldn’t hardly let everyone know what I was really up to, now, could I?”

“But how could they all be lies?”

“The secret center is true, baby doll. Cut the crap and the rest is good. It’s like sleight of hand. Pretend to give into the embrace and then hit ’em as hard as you can. Like you did with Axacaya. Ah, I wish I had seen the look on his face—thinking he was so sweet, but he fell for an old trick: the lure and the drop. He should have expected that a kiss from a Haðraaða would be a real knockout!” She laughs, and I do, too, because now that I think about it, it really had been quite funny.

Nini cuts our laughter short. “Now, darling, I’d love to chat longer, but you got to get back, baby doll. You’ve been gone long enough as it is, but I want to have a few words before you go.”

She turns me until I face her directly. She isn’t smiling anymore. Her eyes are the exact color of dark chocolate, and her skin the color of strong coffee thinned slightly with condensed milk.

“Do you still wanna be a ranger?” she asks.

I start to say, yes of course, and then stop. Do I still want to be a ranger? Suddenly I do not know.

“Fun sneaking around being all important, no?” Nini says. “Not so fun being thrown into an oubliette to die, or getting shot at, or kicking people in the head and breaking their necks, hmm?”

“I don’t think I’d make a very good ranger,” I say. “I kinda messed everything up.”

"Hmmm?”

"Well, I let Axacaya sucker me totally, and I left Tiny Doom to the ghoul, and I never noticed that Idden was tailing me, and I killed Axila Aguila. I didn’t mean to, but I did.”

Nini waves her hand. "All a ranger cares about, Flora, is getting the job done. A ranger will lie, steal, cheat, kill—whatever it takes to complete the mission. That’s all that matters. The rest does not signify. You freed the Loliga, and saved the City. You got the job done.”

"But I put Poppy in danger, and Idden, too. I let Axacaya attack our house. I was totally gullible.”

"Ayah, you were gullible, but I’ll warrant you won’t be in the future, ayah?”

I say fervently, "No fear of that. But, Poppy, and Idden, and Udo—”

Nini Mo presses her fingers to my lips, cutting me off. "You aren’t the Queen of the World, responsible for everyone else. Let them have their own Wills.”

"But—”

The fingers press harder, painfully. "Listen to me, Flora. Even the Goddess Califa ain’t infallible; elsewise why would she have created such a fallible world? Don’t flatter yourself that you are better than she. That’ll come back to bite you for sure.”

"But—”

"No
buts!”
Nini cries. "You and your mamma—always arguing! No argument! You gotta go back, or you’re gonna have to stay here, and that is not part of the plan. I wish we had more time; it’s a drag to hit and run like this, but there it is.”

Behind us steam is rising from the pool’s surface, the water bubbles. Nini is still talking. “You got sand, dolly Your mamma had sand; you take after her, and I am proud to have you as a namesake. Don’t give up on being a ranger, Nyana. The time is coming when Califa—when the Waking World—is going to need girls with sand. Anyway, it’s too late.”

“What do you mean it’s too late? Because I’m dead?”

“No, silly girl. It’s too late to back down now. You know too much. You’ve seen too much.”

All the friendliness suddenly drains from Nini Mo’s face and is replaced with a look I know only too well. Duty and determination. A little wiggle of fear slithers through me.

“You have to finish what you start, Nyana,” Nini Mo says. “Magick is a game, ayah so, but it’s a game with very real consequences. It’s a game you don’t want to lose. You’ve been meddling, not only in the Current, but in the City’s affairs. You have made claims—claims to being a ranger, claims to being a Haðraaða—”

“I am a Haðraaða,” I say dolefully.

“Maybe so, but don’t claim what you can’t hold. Do you understand? It’s your Will to choose, but choices have consequences. Do you understand?”

I nod, though I do not fully understand. But I do understand the look on her face. It’s a look that says,
I will be very unhappy if you do not agree with me.
I have the strong feeling that making Nini Mo very unhappy would not be a good idea.

"You are with us or against us. Ayah so?”

"I am with you,” I answer fervently, for how could I ever be against Nini Mo?

She is smiling again, her face open and bright. "Well, then, I’m glad that’s settled! Now, let’s see ... I guess I should send you off with a few words of wisdom—you know, from a dead ranger to a living one. Um ... What can I say?” Nini purses her lips and rolls her eyes, considering. Then she laughs. "Of course! The best advice I was ever given, now I pass on to you. Never pass up a chance to pee. Adios, baby doll!”

"Wait—” I grab her hand and hold on. "What do I do?”

"The best you can, baby doll. The best you can!”

And with that, Nini Mo yanks from my grip and gives me a good hard shove. I wheel backward and fall into the pool. The water is slick and warm. When I bob to the surface, paddling, Nini Mo is leaning over the edge, splashing at me.

She cries, “Also, you should eat chocolate every day! And always wash your face before you go to bed! And never trust a fish—”

The water begins to churn around me, and it is boiling hot. I open my mouth to scream and the scalding water roars down my throat, scorching me into silence. The pain is excruciating. The edges of my vision begin to char. Distantly, I hear Nini Mo still yelling advice. A wave of fire rises up over me and burns me into blackness.

I
N THE TIME BETWEEN
when Nini Mo pushed me into the pool in the Cloakroom of the Abyss and when I awoke, alive, in my own bed at Crackpot Hall, lots of exciting things happened. Before, I would have been wild at being cut out of all the fun, left out of the adventure. Now, I didn’t really mind. I’d had enough excitement.

Udo, brimming with heroics, was more than happy to tell me what I had missed. With dramatic detail he related how he had fished me from the Cold Plunge and then dumped me into the Hot Plunge, which had, just as planned, shocked my frozen heart back to life. Then he bundled me out of Bilskinir Baths as they had collapsed around us—a final collapse into absolute rubble. I missed this daring hair’s breadth escape, being alive but not yet conscious, and also burning up with fever. Then, even more heroically, Udo (with some help from Sieur Caballo, who had apparently followed our flight to Bilskinir and loitered around, hoping we would reappear) had fought his way through fire, flooding, alarms, debris, and looters, to Crackpot Hall. There he delivered me to Poppy, who thankfully had not been killed in the fight with the Quetzals.

The chaos was due to one final upheaval, which dropped the China Basin back into the Bay, flattened dozens of buildings, most of them South of the Slot, where architecture tends to be makeshift and rickety, and realigned the Navy Yard shoreline. I missed all that and the small tidal wave that luckily did not do too much damage, although it washed away part of the Pacifica Playa and, unfortunately, some of the people who had taken refuge there. I missed every water source in the City suddenly spewing forth spoiled squid-meat sludge. And Mamma declaring martial law and ordering looters to be shot on sight, putting the militia on fire detail. And the previously mentioned fires, alarms, and everything else. These calamities were great, but they were not complete, nor permanent. The City was spared total destruction.

And Lord Axacaya, having somehow recovered from Udo’s head-bopping and my Zombie Powder, had escaped from the Bilskinir Baths himself and was taking all the credit for this miracle. Well, he was welcome to it, as far as I was concerned.

While all these exciting things were happening, I lay in my bed, burning up with a fever that almost killed me a second and final time. After a week, the fever broke, and I had no energy to do anything but lie in bed with the windows wide open, trying to stay cool. I still felt hot, as though the heat from the boiling water was lodged in my bones, still flickered in my veins. My death seemed distant and dreamlike, as though it had happened ages ago, or to someone else entirely. I could barely remember the details—the Loliga, the kakodæmon, Nini Mo.

Poppy brought me iced tea, and ice cream, bubble drinks, and cold watermelon. He opened all the windows in Crackpot so a breeze would blow through my room, and refilled my ice pack when it melted. He asked how I was feeling and if I wanted another pillow. But he didn’t say anything at all about what happened—the attack by the Quetzals, or our discovery I was only half a Fyrdraaca, or how Udo had brought me home half dead.

And I didn’t bring up any of this stuff, either. I didn’t think much about it, not about being an idiot regarding Axacaya, or about how Mamma had lied to me all my life, or about how I was the Head of the House Haðraaða, or how I had freed the Loliga, or had finally met Nini Mo. I lay on my bed, empty.

Mamma came in and out—she was superbusy with the martial law and everything—bringing me candy, yellowbacks, fruit, flowers, newspapers. Her weskit was already strained across her belly, and her face was puffy—from the baby, I guessed. She didn’t say anything about anything, either, and whether this was because she was avoiding subjects or didn’t actually know what I had been up to, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t tell whether Poppy had told her everything or nothing. Before, I had thought that when I saw Mamma I would not be able to contain myself, that I would burst with righteous anger and indignation. But I guess dying had sucked all the anger and indignation right out of me, because when I looked at her, I didn’t feel a thing.

Not one tiny thing.

Udo, still full of heroic puffery, had apparently forgotten about his disgraceful behavior with Springheel Jack’s boots, or his infatuation with the Zu-Zu. He didn’t mention our kisses or his proposal we go steady But he brought me flowers, and yellowbacks, and more flowers, and a giant box of bacon-bit truffles (my favorite kind and hideously expensive—how it must have hurt to dig so deep into his wallet...). While I theoretically appreciated the effort, I rather wished he’d leave me alone.

Valefor popped in when no one else was looking and regaled me with a long whine about the damage Crackpot Hall had sustained during the Upheaval—a long list of cracks, sinks, buckles, and topples. When I closed my eyes, his whine became a buzz that was almost soothing. Also soothing, the heavy weight of Pig in my arms, and Flynn lying across my feet.

And once I woke up to see a parrot perched on my windowsill, staring at me. It fluttered away when I roused enough to lob a boot at it. Axacaya, I knew, checking up on me. After that I made Val close and lock the windows.

Even Idden came to see me once, sneaking in through the bolt-hole when everyone else was in bed. She and her comrades had escaped the Quetzals somehow—she was vague on the details—but with Axacaya the Crowned Hero, the City was too hot for the IE. They were temporarily relocating to another locale—she was vague on those details, too—but she would be in touch later. “It isn’t over yet,” she said ominously, and I just nodded, because as far as I was concerned, it was all over. I was done. I had had enough excitement to last me a thousand years. Despite what I had told Nini Mo, all my desire to be a ranger, to be a hero, to be anything at all, had been frozen and burned away.

I just wanted to be left alone.

T
HIS ALL ENDED
when Poppy came in one morning, pulled open my curtains, whacked the bed door, and said, “Get up!” When I didn’t, only rolled over and put my face to the wall, he whacked the door again and again until I sprang out of bed, full of rage.

“What do you want!? Leave me alone!”

"Breakfast is in ten minutes, Flora,” Poppy said. "It’s time to get up. You’ve only got a week of holiday left and we are way behind in your studies. It’s time to get back to real life. You’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Before I could reply using Tiny Doom’s favorite word, he had set my stack of clean laundry on my settee and left. I knew that if I went back to bed, he’d just come back in and make a lot more noise, and if I locked the door to keep him out, he’d just pound on that. And anyway, I discovered that for the first time in a long time, I was hungry. A delicious smell of bacon was wafting in the air, and my stomach rumbled. So I put on Tiny Doom’s buckskin jacket over my nightgown and went downstairs.

In the kitchen, Poppy was flipping sourdough pancakes. I could tell that he recognized the jacket, but he made no comment. Valefor sat at the kitchen table, guzzling hot chocolate. He looked up at me as I came in, and smiled a cocoa-rimmed smile.

"What are you doing here?” I asked.

"Hotspur said I could come down, Flora Segunda—”

"Don’t call me that!” I sat down at the table and poured myself some coffee.

Valefor looked surprised. "But it’s your name.”

"No, it’s not. My name is Nyana, not Flora.”