Chapter 28
“Ready,” Martinelli murmured.
Peter scrambled up Martinelli’s back and stood gingerly on his shoulders in the dark, bracing himself on the wall.
It was cool to the touch, the spellwork on it prickling his fingertips.
He reached up for the spot that during dinner he’d noticed was shimmering in a slightly different way than the rest of the wall and voila—no wall there, only magic.
He ran his hand against the area, trying to figure out how large it was.
Martinelli’s legs buckled. Peter hastily got down. “OK?”
Martinelli nodded, then said under his breath as they retreated to the cots and the whisper-obscuring fan, “You’re heavier than you look. Well?”
“Definitely something there. Larger than an air vent. I think it’s a laundry or garbage chute.”
“Big enough?”
“Yeah.” Peter was slimmer than Martinelli, but he was certain they both could crawl through—if they could unwork the spell there, a meshlike pattern clearly intended to let air in while keeping prisoners from getting out.
“There’s something in the way, but it feels like that metal replacement spell.
You know, the one Gregorian was working on a while back but could never make as strong as steel. ”
Martinelli rubbed his chin. “Two leaves ought to be enough to remove it, don’t you think?”
He nodded. That was the trouble—they only had one. How were they going to get their hands on another?
They sat in silence for a moment. Then Martinelli said, “You saw Mae?”
Peter gave a start. He’d told Martinelli that Mae thought he was dead, but that was arguably the second-most important revelation about her.
“Yes,” he said, “and she loves you. She deeply regrets leaving.”
Martinelli closed his eyes. He took several ragged breaths. “We’re getting out of here if it’s the last thing I do.”
“Any ideas about acquiring that other leaf?” Peter said. “Short of making Morse think he needs to give me another test, because I doubt my heart would survive a second one.”
“Well, we’ve got to steal it, don’t we? Not from Morse,” Martinelli added quickly, seeing Peter’s expression. “The other guy. Red Coat.”
“Oh yeah? How?”
“That’s where my bright idea taps out. Your turn, whippersnapper.”
Peter stifled a groan. Steal a leaf without tipping off the wizard—or the cameras—that they’d done it. In two days or less. Sure. Simplicity itself.
“Ready,” Ella murmured.
Beatrix took a deep breath—deeper than she normally could, because instead of a corset, she was wearing a man’s undershirt with three red leaves sewn into the front.
Instead of heels and a dress, she had on men’s boots, trousers and a shirt.
Ella had procured them for her because trying to move around noiselessly in women’s attire was a fool’s errand.
Now the clothing she wore was as invisible as the rest of her. She grabbed Ella’s arm. “Ready.”
On the fifth try, Ella’s spell caught and they teleported out of her apartment, winking back into solidity in front of the checkpoint outside the vice president’s official residence.
“Hello, Wizard Anderson,” Ella said in her Frederick voice (or was that now her actual voice?) to the guard sitting inside the first magical barrier. It was a largely see-through bubble of a spell, glinting in the sun and big enough for perhaps half a dozen people to stand in at one time.
“Afternoon, sir!” Anderson said.
He detached a device about the size and shape of an oversized flashlight from his hip and touched it to the barrier.
A hole in the shielding large enough to walk through promptly opened up.
It was an impressive magical innovation that Beatrix could not properly admire because she had to focus on matching Ella step for step as they walked through.
The moment Anderson removed the device, the hole snapped shut. He turned to Ella with a grin, hand out. Ella reached into her coat and extracted her brother’s ID with a flourish, a little ta-da of a performance.
The wizard gave an appreciative guffaw. “Whole thing is silly, I know. I mean, who else could you be?”
“Better safe than sorry, eh?” Ella said, and Beatrix had to fight the dangerous urge to laugh from sheer nerves and the momentary absurdity of the situation.
The guard touched his device to a spot where the bubble barrier connected with a larger domed barrier arching over the mansion property.
She and Ella walked through, setting off along the circular path to the house, a white brick building with an impressive tower.
When they reached it, the door swung open before Ella could raise her fist to knock.
Morse.
Beatrix’s blood roared in her ears. Only when Ella nudged her did she recollect that she had to go in first.
“We’re leaving in ten minutes?” Ella asked as Beatrix edged inside.
“Yes. Where have you been?”
Morse’s question had a sharp-elbow quality to it, no trace of deference in the tone. Beatrix put ten feet between them. One wrong move—brushing into him, sneezing—would be the end.
“Went to the Radcliffe yesterday to read up on my father’s speeches about the growing hostilities,” Ella was saying, stepping inside. “Stayed too late and fell asleep there by accident.”
Ella actually had gone to the Radcliffe, the city’s sprawling twenty-four-hour library, and made sure librarians noticed her before teleporting out from a secluded spot. Beatrix looked at Morse to see how he would take it. He said nothing, which seemed to be his default state.
“I’ll be in the sitting room, then,” Ella said curtly, gesturing to it, giving Beatrix a moment to slip in first. There they waited until the man on whose orders Peter had been kidnapped, Lydia nearly killed, Rosemarie sent to parts unknown and Beatrix falsely arrested strolled in.
A blandly handsome man, Vice President Draden. He glanced at the person he thought was his son, the child he apparently valued far more than his daughter, with an indifferent expression.
“Still coming?” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well.”
“Thank you for your trust in me, Father. It means a great deal to me.”
Halfway through this pseudo-heartfelt declaration, Draden walked past, fixed a slightly off-kilter photograph of himself with the president, and strode back out with a tossed off “come along, then.” Perhaps he was upset about his son’s crimes after all and disliked having him around?
But as Beatrix followed Ella out, it struck her: There had been no censure in the way Draden spoke to his “son”—no emotion at all. It was the complete absence of caring.
She shivered as she stepped into the warm June air.
They walked back down the path to the checkpoint, Ella hanging back several paces from Morse, Draden and his detail of two Secret Service agents—one wizard, one typic. Beatrix stepped into the checkpoint beside her, keeping an eye on Morse, standing just a few feet to her right.
“Good afternoon, sir,” the guard said to Draden, still respectfully but with a wariness that had not been there when he thought he was chatting with Frederick.
Draden did not acknowledge him. Beatrix took soft, shallow breaths as Morse shifted, bringing himself even closer.
The moment they were out of the checkpoint, the wizard agent teleported away with the vice president and the other Secret Service man.
Ella took Morse’s arm—Beatrix clung more tightly to her; this was it—and the green lawn blinked out, the world reforming around them as endless sand, scrub and gorgeous blue sky.
The temperature was at least ten degrees higher here.
Morse set off behind them. As she turned, she saw for the first time out of dreamside the exterior of the military complex that Peter fled ten months earlier—and to which she urgently hoped he’d been dragged back.
It looked out of place here: gray, squat, ugly. She walked with Ella to the entrance, the door held open by a uniformed soldier, and scooted in first to avoid having the door shut in her face. They were in a vestibule of sorts, the vice president flanked by Morse and one of the agents.
Then she saw the security setup. Her heart spasmed.
The other Secret Service agent was standing inside a shield barrier similar to the one around the vice-presidential checkpoint, putting items from his pocket onto a conveyor belt and talking to one of the guards—a typic—as a wizard guard performed the spell that reversed conventionally cast invisibility.
That was all fine. What wasn’t: The floor lit up around the three men’s feet.
Every time someone moved, it made a bip sound.
Oh, no.
Ella stretched and gave a soft groan: “Oh, my back.” Beatrix exhaled and squeezed her arm, trying to communicate that she’d got the message. Piggyback, right—that was the way through.
Then the guard started patting the agent down, including his back, and panic got its pincers into her. This was her only chance to get in, and she couldn’t see how to get past the checkpoint.
Too late to figure out a knitting workaround—it would take hours, if not days.
She watched the agent pick up his possessions and pass through the archway into the rest of the building, the vice president take his turn with Morse—Morse eyeing the guards as if they might be a threat—and the other agent step in, and she still had no idea what to do.
Ella, hand in front of her mouth, muttered, “Stay?”
No, no. Beatrix looked one more time at the setup and boosted herself onto Ella’s back, trying to hold on without choking her.
“All right, sir, step forward,” one of the guards said.
Ella managed to do so, though Beatrix could tell it was a struggle to walk naturally.
When they stopped at the conveyor belt, Beatrix scrambled onto it, Ella going into a fairly realistic coughing fit that covered up the noise.
Beatrix stood with her feet on the static metal lip on either side of the moving belt, wanting to gasp air but making herself sip it instead.
“So I empty my pockets? Leaves, too?” Ella asked.