Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

It’s that the trains are always packed, and the air-conditioning is broken about two-thirds of the time, and the upholstery smells like canned meat and old sweat, and there’s no possible way to avoid people touching you, whether they intend to or not. It’s that there are cliques and social groups anyplace there are people, and being on the outside of the majority of them can make the ride pretty damned uncomfortable.

(To be fair to them, it’s not like I’ve exactly gone out of my way to try making friends. To be unfair to them, it’s not like they would have made it easy for me if I had. Most of them don’t even like Fern, and she’s the walking, talking incarnation of a happy meadow filled with butterflies and flowers. Amusement park politics are like academic politics, only more so. The infighting’s so vicious because the stakes are so low.)

Ten minutes after Megan offered us a ride, Fern and I were dressed—within reason—and crammed into her battered Toyota Corolla. I had a purse full of bacon, makeup, and small personal items. Fern had an entire garment bag, which she used as a pillow as she stretched out across the backseat and closed her eyes. That was probably a large part of how she could survive being a morning person: the girl was capable of napping anywhere, even places where it should have been physically impossible to nap.

“Our rear end’s dragging,” muttered Megan, before twisting around and jabbing Fern in the leg. “Hey. You. Lighten up.”

“Sorry, Megan,” mumbled Fern sleepily. The car’s rear end rose six inches as she turned her personal density down, becoming about as substantial as her garment bag.

Megan flashed me a wry sidelong smile, a moment of camaraderie between unlikely roommates. I smiled back, more strained. At least I was trying. That was more than most people would have guessed I’d do. I was trying.

I never wanted my life to be a wacky sitcom about a human girl and her inhuman roommates struggling to get by at what many people consider to be the second-happiest place in the world. I’m not actually sure what I wanted my life to be. Figuring it out never seemed quite as important as living it. I’d been a cheerleader in high school and a roller derby player afterward. I’d taken my share of online courses, but I’d never bothered going to a “real” college. What was the point? The best I could do was get a degree I’d never use, since it’s not like the Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, offers courses in how to be a better cryptozoologist.

(That may be unfair. Olympia is prime Bigfoot country, and if any school in the world is going to offer classes about them, it’s going to be Evergreen. It’s just that those classes would be vilely, violently wrong, and I’d probably have gotten myself expelled for punching a teacher.)

On the rare occasions when I’d tried to imagine where I saw myself in ten years, it had either been on the track with my teammates, scoring points and skinning knees, or traveling with the Campbell side of the extended family, spending my days repairing rides and my nights slinging knives for the amusement of the paying audience. In a way, I guess I wanted what Verity wanted: I wanted a stage. I just wanted one that was smaller than hers, in warehouses and big tents rather than ballrooms, where no one remembered the performers, only the performance.

But I’d never seen myself isolated from my family. I didn’t even have any mice with me. Whatever happened to me here, no one was going to witness or remember it. I was the first member of our family to be without a piece of our institutional memory since Elizabeth Matheson had discovered a colony of Aeslin mice worshipping a chicken in her yard.

Aeslin mice: hyper-religious, hyper-loyal, and totally devoted to my family. Oh, and they talk. Standard protocol says that none of us go anywhere without a mouse, since that way, if anything happens, the mouse might be able to make it back and tell the story. I’d started my journey with a mouse. Mindy, a member of my personal priesthood, had accompanied me to England to make sure that if something happened to me, word would get back to my family. We’d picked up another mouse there, Mork, a member of the colony that stayed behind when my great-great-grandparents quit the Covenant. He was the only English Aeslin I’d met. The rest preferred to stay in hiding, at least until their representative was able to come back and prove that our colony wasn’t a bunch of mouse-eating monsters. It was clever. It was the right way to do things.

The last time I’d seen either Mork or Mindy, I’d been in the process of leaving them with my maybe-boyfriend, Sam, who’d promised to get them to the airport so that they could get back to the rest of my family. According to my dead Aunt Mary, they’d made it. They were fine. That was probably the only reason my mother wasn’t burning the world down to find me.

Being the youngest child in my family has sometimes meant feeling like an afterthought, the kid conceived to be a blood donor to the two that actually mattered. But even when I’d been feeling like that, I never questioned whether my parents loved me, or whether they would charge into the gates of hell to snatch me back if they thought they could get away with it. That was one more reason I needed to stay in hiding. If they knew where to find me, they would come to bring me home, and then . . .

Most tracking spells work better when there’s no interference around the person who’s being tracked. My family lives in a survivalist compound outside of Portland. We’ve always used isolation as one of our greatest strengths. Put me in the building, and it could become an even greater weakness.

Context is everything.

The traffic was heavy around us, cars packed with tourists heading for Lowryland mingling with cars packed with employees heading for Lowryland. Part of why Fern liked to stretch out in the backseat when we got a ride to work was the crowd. When we went bumper to bumper—not an everyday occurrence, but not as rare as I’d like either—people got bored and peered into the cars around them, looking for a karaoke show, or a nose-picker, or an interesting dog. Even out of costume, there was a chance Fern would be recognized. Annual Passholders were notorious for learning to identify individual performers, and they could cause problems when encountered “off the clock.”

(The scariest incident we’d had so far had been at the Target, of all places. Fern and I had been looking at canned goods when a hand clamped down on her arm and someone started dragging her away, pulling her several feet before she’d managed to increase her density to the point where she couldn’t be moved anymore. And then I’d punched the asshole in the gut. He’d fallen over, threatening to call store security and to notify Lowryland about a misbehaving princess. We’d run. When Fern made her security report, she had left me out, claiming that the puncher was a “helpful stranger,” and since it hadn’t happened on Park property, it hadn’t been pursued. But we’d been a lot more careful since then, and we always went shopping in a group.)

The employee turnoff loomed up ahead. Megan tightened her hands on the wheel, an involuntary gesture that broadcast, loudly, how much she didn’t want to take it.

“I could keep driving,” she said, voice light and sincere. “We could head for the coast. Just the three of us, surf, sand . . .”

“Unemployment,” I said. “I need this job. You need your residency.”

“I need a bathroom,” said Fern.

“Fern needs a bathroom,” I said. “Sad but true: we have to go to work.”

“Spoilsport,” said Megan, and made the turn.

The traffic was lighter here. Most Lowryland employees take the train, and the rest of us tend to carpool, since the parking lot is a nightmare wasteland where people have come to blows over the “good” spots. Megan wasn’t parking. She pulled up to the employee drop-off point, where a line had already formed of cast members waiting for the bus that would take them to the backstage entrance to the Park.

“Let the magic begin,” I muttered and opened the door. “See you tonight?”

“Sweet Medusa, I hope not,” said Megan. “You need to sleep, or you’re going to wind up stabbing somebody.”