Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) (4 page)

“Three hundred and sixty days until she’s back,” Scott told Polly.

Each of them staked their claim to a section of the bus. Biggs and Harvey and John traded shifts driving; Erno and Emily selected adjacent bench seats. Scott shifted around based on wherever seemed to be the quietest place to read at any given time—he was on his second book of King Arthur stories, trying to learn all the ins and outs. Polly taped off two whole rows, named the area Fancylvania, and tried to talk Prince Fi into an official state visit. But the little pixie camped instead atop the ceiling-mounted television—the only spot outside the bathroom where he could be certain not to have to watch it. And everybody avoided the bathroom.

The party bus seemed almost specially designed to give you motion sickness, what with its pulsing neon and disco ball and bad transmission. Every time they hit a bump it played Kool and the Gang for three minutes, and they hadn’t been able to figure out where it was coming from.

“I don’t know this song,” Merle told Scott. “Is it from your generation?”

“I think it’s more from my mom’s,” Scott answered. “Or her mom’s? People play it at weddings, or … parties … or—”

“Or whenever they want to ‘celebrate good times,’ yeah. I sorta picked that up from the lyrics.”

Scott smirked. “I can’t believe I’m asking this, but … have you been born yet?”

“Heh. Later this year, actually. About a month after the fairies take over. If all goes well, I’m thinking of gatecrashing my own baby shower.”

“That’s weird.”

“It is what it is.” Merle shrugged. “In five years I enter kindergarten. In sixteen I graduate high school, in eighteen I invent time travel to the future but not the past. In nineteen years I go so far into the future I pop up as Merlin in the next universe, and in about fourteen billion years you and me have this conversation again.”

“No.” Scott winced. “No, that’s not right. You were trying to invent time travel so you could go back and prevent the invasion, right? If we stop the fairies from invading, you’ll never invent time travel, maybe. The next universe’ll be different.”

“Or maybe I do all of this, every time. Maybe I always fail. Maybe I always say, ‘Maybe I always fail.’ Every twenty-eight billion years I sit on a bus and say that.”

Mick crawled over the back of Merle’s bench and thumped down beside him. “If yeh believed that, yeh wouldn’t be sharin’ this pig’s breakfast with us.”

“If I be
lieved
it, I’d know I don’t have a choice, and I’d be doing it anyway.”

Scott sighed. “This is why I don’t like time-travel stories.”

At fourteen Merle didn’t like time-travel stories either, if only because they never had anything useful to teach him. But he’d read and watched them all.

As a boy he believed that time travel must be possible because it felt possible. Natural, even. When a terrible thing happened, didn’t the human mind keep looking for solutions, even after the thing had passed?
If I could just not have been so loud, I could save them. If I could only have been more brave.

Every new technology seemed to be preparing human minds for the time travel discovery that could only be right around the corner. Instant replays. Undo buttons. Games that let you save your progress and face the boss monster again and again. After his parents were gone, Merle had a lot of time to himself, and he filled it with physics textbooks and books of folklore and crackpot websites. Friends were a distraction. When the past was repaired, he would have all the time in the world for friends.

At his high school graduation, he was a full four inches shorter than the next shortest boy.

The ceremony was watched over by the usual trolls, the same sort of Redcaps that surveilled any gathering of more than twenty humans these days. But after Merle threw his mortarboard in the air with the rest of his class and pushed back through the crowd to find his aunt, he found her standing stiffly beside a tall and stately elf. A sickeningly familiar elf.

“It was a … a
lovely
ceremony,” Aunt Meredith said haltingly, as if she were fighting for breath. “Such a …
orderly
ceremony. The graduates weren’t any problem at all—”

“I am not here as a peacekeeper, lady,” the elf said in that way some of them had, where their voices seemed to come at you from everywhere at once. “I want only to congratulate your nephew. Privately, an’ it please you.”

Aunt Meredith was snuffling. She pulled her fingers across her eyes. “Allergies,” she murmured.

“It’s okay, Tante,” Merle told her. His heart was going sour in him. “I’ll meet you at the el stop.”

Other graduates and their families passed, giving them a wide berth, watching out of the corners of their eyes. Aunt Meredith lingered a moment, uncertain, but when Merle nodded again and jerked his head, she bustled off and left him alone with the fairy.

He was one of those regal, Tolkienesque elves that made you feel fat and unlovely. Six-five, lean, sloe-eyed, with short green mossy hair. A soldier’s haircut. A strange mix of both human and fairy sensibilities: a silk hoodie, leather shorts, wristlet braided from dandelion greens, Converse One Stars. Off duty, obviously—only the pink dragon insignia on his red cap told you he was a captain of the Trooping Fairies of Oberon.

People his aunt’s age and older loved to tell one another how unnatural it all still seemed, even fifteen years on: spotting a centaur waiting to use an ATM, assorted gnomes at Coney Island, the Questing Beast sniffing garbage cans outside the Pick ’N Save. They said it with this tragic air, as if it wasn’t a gift to have memories of the world as it was before. Merle would give everything to be surprised by the sight of an elf under his high school bleachers.

“Do you remember me?” asked the elf.

Merle huffed. “Is that a joke?” He felt faint.

The elf pretended to watch other graduates pass.

“My name is Conor, by the by.”

“Right. Sure it is.”

“I want you to know I took no pleasure from that day. I assayed only to do my duty.”

“Then your duty sucks. You have an evil duty.”

“If that were so, then my glamour would have failed me, and I would have died, and your mother would have lived. My actions were just.”

“Don’t give me that bull. Her gun backfired, is all. Don’t you … don’t you
dare
tell me you won because the universe
wanted
you to.”

The way Conor was glancing around, Merle wondered if he was waiting for all the other humans to clear out. What happened when there were no more witnesses? Maybe then the elf finished what he’d left undone, six years before. At last they were alone, and Conor frowned at his feet.

“You’re being watched, Merle.”

Merle felt a chill. “What, right now?”

“Always.”

Merle hiccuped, nervously. Whenever he’d imagined this scenario, he’d always carried himself with a little more dignity. He hadn’t been wearing a black satin gown, for example.

“They suspect what you’re up to,” Conor continued. “My superiors. They haven’t seen fit to share their suspicions with me, but … I remember seeing you before, Merle.”

“Yeah.
Six years ago June.
I remember that too.”

“No, not six years. Centuries. I observed a dispute over a tower that would not stand, and you were there. And yet you were older, no longer a boy. I think you understand me.”

Merle thought maybe he
did
understand. A thrill ran through him.

“And … you’re telling me this why?”

Conor looked up finally, studied Merle awhile before answering.

“You know, the Fay have always taken human children,” he said. “I might’ve taken
you
that June day. Raised you as my own. You weren’t so old.”

Was that some kind of weird threat?
Merle hiccuped again, felt empty-headed. Darkness creeped like a stain around the edges of his sight.

“I wonder if I did right, leaving you there with your mother and father. I wonder if I could have taken hold of a wheel then, stopped it spinning. What threads might be lost if I had?”

“You talk a lot,” Merle slurred, swaying. “Is it your glamour making me feel like this? You hoping for a mysterious exit? I’m not going to faint, so you’ll just have to look me in the eye and leave.”

“Take care, Merlin,” Conor said. Then Merle drooped, and fade to black.

After a couple of years at university, Merle had a reputation for being obsessive about western European folklore and brilliant at quantum physics, and not much else. It was understood that if you needed an explanation of the Pauli exclusion principle or wanted to know who built Stonehenge, you should get someone to let you into basement lab three, because day or night that’s probably where Merle was.

A couple grad students poked their heads in.

“Hey—Merlin.”

“Yeah, hey—Merlin.”

“What,” said Merle. He didn’t look up from his soldering.

“Hey … how many pookas in a quark?”

“How many …,” Merle repeated idly. Then he turned his head to scowl at them. “How many pookas in a quark? That doesn’t even make sense.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Well … you presumably have a lot of quarks in a pooka, but pookas in a quark? One’s a subatomic particle. The other’s one of the shape-shifting Fay. Don’t you know the difference between physics and fairies?”

“
I
do.” The first grad student scoffed. “I just didn’t think
you
did.”

The other student laughed.

“That’s really funny,” Merle told them. “Come closer and I’ll show you how a soldering iron works.”

“See ya, Merlin.”

“Yeah, see ya, Merlin.”

Professor Strohmer entered as they left. He stood and watched Merle work for a moment before speaking.

“You’re back in the lab already?”

“Not back in it; still in it. Hey, watch the hoses. That’s liquid helium you’re tripping on.”

Strohmer picked the remains of a microwave burrito off an adjacent stool and sat down. “You smell, Merle. And I hope you realize I’m only telling you this because you smell. You need a shower and you need to go to sleep.”

“I have classes.”

“You do have classes. You have my class, for example. And you know as well as I do that you’re going to skip it and hide in here all day with your … chimera.”

Merle clucked his tongue. “What do you mean, chimera?”

“Well …,” the professor began, adjusting his glasses. “It can mean a few things. But I meant ‘something hoped for which is nonetheless impossible.’”

“It’s not impossible. Just … very, very hard.”

“I know what you’re trying to build, Merle. And why. I heard about your parents.”

Merle flinched. “How did you hear that? I never told—”

“I’m sorry. Word gets around. But we’re talking about time travel, Merle. Time travel to the
past
, no less. It’s science fiction. It’s a f … it’s a—”

“
Fairy tale?
” Merle said, turning. “You were gonna say fairy tale, weren’t you.”

“Merle—”

“You notice how members of my generation don’t use that phrase? I wonder why that is.”

“I think I’ve been giving you too much leeway, Merle.”

“Hey—you know what else chimera can mean? It can mean a mythological monster made up of different animal parts. Like a griffin or a sphinx? And I know sphinxes are real, because there’s one LIVING ON TOP OF THE LAUNDROMAT NEAR MY HOUSE.”

“Okay, calm down—”

“I HAVE TO ANSWER RIDDLES TO USE THE CHANGE MACHINE.”

Strohmer got up from the stool. “I’m going to try this again some other time.”

“Wait,” Merle said, and stepped back. “Sit down. I’m sorry. I’m just a little … off. I haven’t slept in two days. But I can’t leave the lab just yet. I’m waiting for something.”

Strohmer had his hands on his hips, watching Merle like he was watching a dog rolling in filth, wondering if he should correct the behavior or just let nature run its course.

“You know I respect your opinion,” Merle added quickly. “Your work with fairy metals is the main reason I chose this school.”

Everyone knew by now that Fay treasure couldn’t be trusted. Maybe some satyr would pay you in gold pieces, more than he should have, even; but if you didn’t go and spend them quickly enough, you’d find you had a purse full of buttercups or some such.

Professor Strohmer had been the first to recognize that those buttercups must have been imbued with a kind of energy when they were changed into gold, and that they released this energy again when they changed back. Other scientists took his research and found a way to stabilize the gold somewhat, so that it held its energy like a battery and only let go a little at a time. Suddenly any mundane thing could be powered by fairy gold, with unpredictable results. Even old guys like Strohmer had to admit that what they were doing might not strictly be science anymore.

Merle had a robot owl that he’d hacked and tinkered with, and this owl had a fairy battery that would keep it running for centuries.

“Those fairy metals have given us a lot of things,” Strohmer reminded him. “We’re going to beat global warming because of fairy metals.”