Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) (28 page)

Of course nobody volunteered anything. They glanced at one another, trying to decipher the situation. Maybe this was a surprise team-building exercise.

“Come on, come on. The longer you string this out, the worse it’ll be for you.”

Polly moved closer to these people in lab coats, under the pretext of giving them a closer look at her. But what she was really doing was getting closer to that hamster cage.

“I don’t understand, ma’am,” said one of the scientists as he watched Polly. “Is she a test subject?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut
up
,” said Ms. Aleister. And while she had everyone’s attention like that for a moment, Polly stretched out her sleeve and released Prince Fi onto the table with his brothers. Then she walked swiftly away. “Girl!” Ms. Aleister continued. “Anni … Ann … What was your name again?”

“Anastasia de la Taco.”

“Just point to your daddy’s girlfriend so we can fire her and leave.”

“What’s this?” Polly asked, picking up the first thing she could get ahold of. Which turned out to be a beaker, and Ms. Aleister told her so. “I can make it stay over my mouth,” Polly said, and she held it there with suction.

“Little girl—”

“How many things can I stick to my face?” Polly tested her question by circling the lab, snatching objects at random and affixing them, or trying to affix them, to her cheeks and forehead. A metal washer. Litmus paper. A cell phone, a test tube, a public-radio coffee mug. Some clattered to the floor, or even broke. “My mom says I have ‘combination skin.’”

The manticore seemed to chuckle, gruffly.

“Seize the girl,” said Ms. Aleister, and you could sort of tell it wasn’t the first time she’d said it.

Polly had maneuvered her way to the Milk-7 tank, however, and as the scientists moved on her, she spun the spigot. The goopy pink stuff spilled out onto the floor.

“Pretty!” she squealed. “Strawberry! Food fight!” Then she kicked a spray of the Milk at the advancing researchers. They recoiled as if vampires before holy water. Then Polly moved to an adjacent refrigerator and grabbed a test tube of something yellow. “Ooh, what’s this?”

“It’s an antidote for children who’ve grown extra fingers and toes,” said a scientist. “Please put it down.”

Polly poured the liquid into the pink milk. “What do yellow and pink make?” she asked, then frowned. The answer, apparently, was lightning.

Now the adults were really panicking. A jet of steam rose from where Polly had mixed the chemicals, and some kind of detector started beeping. Ceiling sprinklers activated, and the lights in the room turned red. Everyone rushed for the door as a serious-looking barricade began to slide down in front of it.

“Girl!” shouted Ms. Aleister. “Hurry!”

But Polly made no attempt to escape the room. The emergency door slid into place with a thump and a hiss, and now there was two inches of steel between her and the adults, apart from a little window bricked up with Plexiglas. They stared at her through the little window, the scientists and Ms. Aleister, shouting silently. Polly found some tape and covered it over with a piece of notebook paper.

Before long Polly found a set of keys, and when the elf was free he kissed Polly’s hand while struggling to keep his gown closed in the back. He thanked her graciously while Fi heaved open a hatch on the hamster cage and lowered a string of rubber bands down to his brothers.

The elf appeared to be about to say something as Polly tried key after key in the lock of the manticore’s cage, but he checked himself. He nonetheless urged her not to release the ronopolisk.

“I would sooner face a cockatrice, a basilisk, and a catoblepas all at once than fight one ronopolisk,” he insisted.

“You’re making up words,” Polly told him. The door of the manticore’s cage clicked open, and the devil beast rubbed against Polly’s shoulder as it passed.

“Human girl,” it purred. “Though I am hungry, I shan’t eat you.” He said it like it was a pretty big compliment.

“Thanks.”

The sprinklers were cleansing the room and sending the toxic mess down a drain in the middle. The manticore hunched and looked as miserable as any wet cat. Fi introduced Polly to his brothers.

“Denzil, Fo, and Fee, this is the Lady Polly Esther Doe.” The princes bowed deeply.

“This was a gallant rescue, brother, Lady Polly,” said Denzil, the oldest. “But I fear while we pixies might clinch our escape, those larger than we are doomed.”

“I will be proud to die fighting,” said the elf, “and will relish destroying as much of this infernal apothecary as I can.”

But Fi was watching Polly, and Polly was peering at the refrigerator where she had found the yellow test tube.

“You are thinking,” said Fi. “You are hatching plans. I know this because my stomach hurts.”

“Goodco did all kinds of weird experiments on kids, I hear,” said Polly. “That’s what made Biggs big and hairy—some chemical they invented. But he said something once, when we were on the cruise—he said the chemical didn’t make everyone big and hairy, just the boys.”

“So it did not work on the girls,” said Fi.

“No,” said Polly, “it made them
smaller
.”

“That does not follow. Just because—”

“That’s why I’m going to drink some of the same chemical Biggs drank, and I’ll get to be the size of a pixie!”

The sprinklers had stopped. The red light had extinguished. Polly crossed back to the fridge.

“You cannot do this!” Fi insisted. “I believe it to be dangerous.” But Fi was trapped on a counter, far from Polly. “Brothers,” he said, “help me.”

Polly heaved the fridge open again and began pushing around little racks of test tubes. “Emily is always going on about how Goodco doesn’t know about any big rifts,” she said. “Right? Except that one in Antarctica, but nothing ever goes in or out of it. They don’t know where it connects to in Pretannica. That’s why the rift in Mr. Wilson’s house is so special—regular-sized people can go through it. But if Goodco can’t usually send regular-sized people through rifts, then how’d they get the Queen of England through?”

“Nimue forced
her
way through,” Fi reminded her. “With witchcraft.”

“Yeah, and it nearly killed her, it was so hard. So of
course
they shrank the queen down to tiny size to get her through one of the small rifts. Duh.” Polly uncorked a vial of something clear and fizzy.

“Please remember, if you drink the potion that grows finger and toes, that you’ve already flushed the antidote,” says Fi.

Polly swallowed a bit of the liquid. Just a bit. It didn’t have a flavor, per se. It tasted a little like the smell of a new raincoat? Or like anger? It was hard to explain. Anyway, she otherwise tried to report that nothing had happened, but nothing happened. She’d entirely lost her voice.

“A most heartrending tragedy,” said Fee.

Polly scrambled for an antidote and swallowed something blue, and her voice returned—albeit hoarse and squeaky like she’d been sucking helium and screaming.

The emergency gate was starting to come up. “
I need more time!
” Polly squealed.

Fi sighed and asked elf and manticore to take him and his brothers to the gate. The manticore and elf braced their hands and paws on metal handles and strained to keep it closed, while Fi jabbed with his sword at any hands that appeared under the gate from the other side.

“An elf and pixies and a manticore fighting as brothers,” said the elf. “What a rare death.”

“A good death,” growled the manticore. “I am old. I had cubs I will never again see. I am ready to die with blood in my teeth.”

Polly twisted every sample around in its container, trying to make sense of their labels. “Just another minute!” she squawked.

The elf smirked down at Fi. “Who gives the orders here, pigsie? She is but a human girl.”

“Yet see what she has done today,” Fi answered. “Is she not something?”

“Fi!” Polly shouted. “I drank another one and something went pop! Can you look?” She hiked up her shirt in the back.

“You have tiny wings.”

“I HAVE TINY WINGS? I wonder if I can flap them! Are they moving now? What about now? I don’t know which muscles to push.”

“We’ll find you the antidote,” says Fi.

“No we won’t. Oh, listen! My voice is going back down.”

“Polly, hurry!”

“She is
something
,” said the elf.

“The pixies have a story,” Fi continued. “You would not know it. But we say that the Spirit, the Spirit that made all things, and who separated good from evil, is reborn from time to time into a mortal person. And that this person cannot help but be remarkable. Remarkable, but not necessarily good.”

“An old story,” Denzil agreed as heavy-heeled footsteps thundered up to the gate. “The mortal Spirit must decide, as each of us does in turn, what is right and what is wrong. And in this way good and evil is redefined, and the world remade. But the story says the Spirit is born into a pixie, brother.”

Fo said, “You don’t think this girl is—”

Fi shook his head, and laughed, and speared a scientist’s hand. “I think it’s a story. You know I do not hold with such things, brothers. If anything, I think we might all be born with a little Spirit in us, pixie and human and elf alike, and we are each the bumbling makers of our own folly. But still and all, the girl—she might be remarkable, might she not?”

“Everyone?” said Polly. They turned to see a two-foot-tall girl, blanketed by her own clothes. “I found it, didn’t I? Just a little bit more.”

Fi and his brothers rushed to her as she sipped a little bit more of the liquid she’d found. When they’d traipsed through folds of pants and jacket, they found a pixie-sized seven-year-old, pulling a vastly oversized shirt around her. Fi passed her his topcoat, and she ducked down under the shirt collar with it. When she came up again, they saw that it made a fine little dress.

The elf and manticore were tiring. The gate was coming up by inches.

“I wish we could help you more,” Polly told them.

“You’ve done more than you know,” said the elf. “You’re a changeling, aren’t you, girl? A little agent of sacred chaos. I am your servant.”

“Then you might lift us to that air vent,” said Fi. “We are ready to leave.”

“We’re all going to leave this place,” growled the manticore. “We are all of us going to leave this place, one way or another.”

CHAPTER 31

Merle and John stood in the velvety bedroom chamber, over the tiny canopy bed in which slept the tiny Queen of England. She wore a tiny nightgown. They’d fashioned her a tiny pair of slippers.

“No wonder they made the queen on the Clobbers box look like Mick,” said Merle. “They’re the same height.”

“She looks good otherwise though, right?” asked John. “Well rested.”

“I bet they’ve had her asleep ever since she came here. An enchanted sleep.”

John massaged his jaw. “Do you think we have to kiss her?”

“I don’t think there’s any ‘we’ about it. Knight of the Realm, seems like your duty.”

“I’m … going to try the forehead first and work my way inward,” said John. He leaned in.

“Now if you feel yourself about to punch her,” said Merle, “just step back and count to ten.”

“Shh.”

John kissed her little forehead and straightened again. Nothing happened immediately, so he was just thinking,
All right, cheek then
, when she woke and trained her eyes on his.

“You’re that pop star we knighted,” she said creakily. Her throat was probably pretty dry. “I thought you were too young, but my advisers thought it would be good for public relations. You appear rather larger than I remember.”

“We have a lot to explain to you, Your Majesty,” said John. “And not a lot of time. But first and foremost, it is fundamentally important that you get inside this backpack.”

Scott and Mick sat on the cold floor of a little bell-shaped cell high above the ground. There was nothing for light but a single cross-slit hole in the wall and a tiny torchlit window in the door. Just enough to see the occasional dim shape that you’d mistaken for a stone suddenly lift itself up from its torpor, shuffle a few inches, and die.

“Prison sucks,” said Scott. “They make it look like fun on TV, but it secretly sucks.”

“Try to at least have a sense o’ pride abou’ it,” said Mick. “Yeh’re a prisoner o’ the
Tower o’ London
. There’s none more famous jail.”

“Alcatraz.”

“No sense o’ history,” Mick grumbled.

In a way, Scott did not so much mind the dim light—it concealed his red eyes. In the darkness Scott wished to be comforted. He wanted, not to put too fine a point on it, his mommy. He would never admit as much to Mick, however, so instead he said, “Eleven months until Mom comes back.”

“So ’tis.”

“No matter … no matter what happened, whether we won or lost, I thought at least I’d be there when she reappeared. But now maybe—”

“We’ll be there, lad. Somehow. I always escape my cages, ’ventually.”

“You know,” said Scott, “in Arthurian stories they got thrown in cells like this all the time. Arthur and Lancelot and the rest.”