Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

Reason number one, and the main source of any mental stability I currently have: Fern. AKA, “the only person at Lowryland who could blow my cover at any moment if she chose to, but who has blessedly chosen not to.” AKA, “one of the girls I used to skate with on the Slasher Chicks roller derby team back in Portland.” AKA, “one of the few close friends I’ve ever had who wasn’t related to me, and thank God for that.”

Fern is a sylph, a humanoid cryptid capable of controlling her personal density. She’s always short, skinny, and colored like a porcelain Bo Peep figure, all milky skin, golden hair, and vast blue eyes. It’s just that sometimes she’s light enough for a stiff breeze to carry away—literally—and other times, she’s denser than tungsten. Watching her deal with people trying to shove her out of the way on the train to work is one of my life’s small joys. As to why she’s in Florida instead of Portland, where I left her, I have yet to get a straight answer. And, honestly, I don’t much care. I know she’s not reporting on me to the family. That’s all I need to know.

(As for how I know . . . that’s another story, and involves my dead Aunt Mary, who checks in on me weekly. I have a weird family.)

Without Fern, I wouldn’t have survived my first week with the company. Without Fern, I definitely wouldn’t be in one of the nicer apartments—and yes, our tiny, cabbage-scented place was considered one of the nicer options available. Fern had spotted me across the quad during housing registration for new hires, and had come bounding over to grab me by the elbow and announce me as her long-prophesized second roommate, awaited and adored. I’d been too surprised to fight, and she’d dragged me home with her, where I was given my own room and added to the lease.

As for why I got my own room when I was the third person to come into the apartment, enter exhibit B: Megan. Short for “Magaere,” because that’s a name that modern people give to their children. Not that Megan’s parents are modern. Megan’s parents are Pliny’s gorgons, which makes Megan a Pliny’s gorgon, which means I couldn’t room with her unless I wanted to be in constant danger of being temporarily paralyzed. Not my idea of a party.

(Fern didn’t have the same concerns. Something about the way sylph density works—or doesn’t—protects them from the gaze of the gorgon. Just one more mystery of science that we may never have the opportunity or the equipment to solve.)

Currently, Megan was wigless, letting the snakes atop her head breathe freely. Their tongues constantly scented the air, assessing their environment. Like all gorgon “hair,” they looked like perfectly ordinary serpents, if I ignored the fact that their bodies ended at a humanoid scalp instead of in a snaky tail. (Gorgon X-rays are fascinating.) They were colored like delicate rattlesnakes in shades of dark brown verging on black and the very palest of peach. They were beautiful, as was the woman they were attached to, who was sipping from a mug of coffee with her eyes half-lidded behind her smoked glasses.

One of the snakes yawned, showing its fangs. Beautiful and dangerous.

“How did you sleep?” asked Fern blithely. Of the three of us, she was the only morning person. Megan and I were united in our hatred of her before noon. We were united in loving her the rest of the time, so it worked out.

“Not long enough,” I said, splashing coffee into my cup. It was thick and black, brewed triple-strength, just the way I liked it. Just the way all three of us liked it.

“Word,” muttered Megan.

“What’s your shift today?” I asked, dumping sugar into my coffee.

The snakes on her head coiled into a striking position, responding to the change in her mood. “Noon to midnight,” she said glumly. “I’m going to be a corpse tomorrow.”

“Sucks,” I agreed sympathetically.

I was a general employee, going where I was told and filling whatever positions needed to be filled. I could work a register, monitor a gate, set up a parade route, or help guests get to where they were going. Fern, with her delicate build, perfect features, and already cartoon-worthy voice, was what we called a “face character,” one of the people who got to put on a fancy costume and spend the day embodying one of Lowry’s cartoon creations—in her case, Princess Aspen from Goldtree and Silvertree, that 1989 masterpiece of soft-focus pseudo-feminism in a fairy-tale coating.

(The girl who played Elm was human, and shared her apartment with two other face character performers, and thought Fern was out of her mind for continuing to associate with riffraff like me. It takes all kinds to make a properly annoying world.)

Megan, on the other hand, was something elevated and rare, and wouldn’t have been in general housing at all if she hadn’t requested to be placed with Fern. Megan was a medical graduate student doing her residency at the Lowryland Hospital—which was, yes, a fully accredited and functional facility, with the necessary equipment for everything from delivering a baby to performing organ transplants and other major surgical procedures. Getting a position there was supposed to be difficult bordering on impossible, and no one could figure out how Megan had been able to get in, since she didn’t come from an affluent family with a history of training on Lowry property. No one in her family tree was a millionaire, or possessed of much political capital, or even human. I would have been willing to bet she was the first cryptid ever to be accepted into the program.

That was probably part of how she’d been able to get in. Gorgon communities like the one she comes from always need doctors, and so do the dragons, the wadjet, and the other cryptids who look like mammals but are really reptiles or therapsids. Once she’d qualified for Lowry, it would have been easy to hire someone like my Uncle Al to give her application the push it needed to rise to the top of the heap.

As the only nonhuman in the program, though, she couldn’t stay with the other residents without running the risk of blowing her cover and winding up in a biology lab. Hence her staying in the sticks with us, and dealing with the chaos of three competing schedules in one house.

Three competing . . . wait. “Okay, why are we all up?” I asked, lowering my mug. “I’m supposed to be to work at eight. Did I oversleep again?” I didn’t look at the clock. If I was late, I was late, and nothing was going to change that. I was going to finish my coffee before I went off to get disciplined.

“My mom called this morning,” said Megan.

“Her mother called at four o’clock, is what she means to say,” said Fern. “She doesn’t understand that we can’t be fully nocturnal here.”

“That, or she’s punishing me for being a fussy baby.” Megan yawned, wider than a human would have been capable of yawning, until my own jaw ached in sympathy. “I love my family, but I would swallow my own feet for a nap.”

“So take one,” I said.

She shook her head. “Can’t. If I sleep now, I’ll sleep through the start of my shift. Besides, if I’m up, I can give the two of you a ride to work.”

I perked up. “Have I mentioned recently that you’re a brilliant, talented doctor who’s going to revolutionize the field of medicine?”

Megan’s hair hissed at me.



* * *





It’s not that the train between employee housing and the park is unreliable. Like most things in Lowryland, it runs with a precision that would make a watchmaker weep. It’s not that it’s expensive. A monthly train pass is included with our employment, and can be used to get on either at the employee parking lot or at any of the six housing stops.