Lena gently folded back the kit’s gill. “Oh, my. He has a stagnala leech!” She hurried to get a pair of tweezers and in no time had removed the parasite. Almost instantly, the little kit perked up and spoke to Ling.
Ling smiled. “He says he feels much better and he’s hungry,” she told Lena.
Lena fixed Radu his dinner, and when he was done, she kissed his nose and put him to bed in a crate lined with marsh grass by the lavaplace. “There, bibic. There, my sweet boy. Sleep now.”
She turned to Ling “You saved him,” she said. “I have something for you. A gift. To say thank you. All I have to do is find it,” she said.
“Lena, it’s okay, really,” Ling said. “You’ve done so much for me, for all of us. I’m glad I could help you out.”
“No, I insist. It’s a game the goggs play. A word game. You’re an omni and omnis like words,” Lena said. She took down a box from a shelf, and started rifling through it. She pulled out a dress, a coat, a mixing bowl, a necklace, and an eggbeater. “I’ve seen them playing this when they have picnics on the riverbank.” She dug some more. Out came a bicycle horn. A brass lantern. A plastic dinosaur. “One got really mad once when he lost—I saw him. He chucked the game into the river. That’s how I got it. Where is it?”
She got up, leaving the mess she’d made, and took down another box. A raincoat came out of it. A trumpet. A steering wheel. As she pulled out more stuff, Neela remembered the difficulties she and Sera had in keeping their illusio spells going.
She got up and started to sort through the things Lena was strewing around. She picked up a dress and a tunic. A bolt of cloth. A jacket. Some jewelry. A messenger bag. A packet of fishhooks. There were possibilities here. That cloth—it was just the right color. And that dress—how would it look with the sleeves cut off? Neela started to feel tingly and excited, as she always did when she had fabric in her hands and ideas in her head.
“Ah, here it is!” Lena declared, after she’d dumped out her tenth box.
She handed a little plastic sack to Ling, who opened it, then tipped the bag upside down. Dozens of small white plastic tiles, all with black terragogg letters on them, poured out on the table.
“So cool! Thank you, Lena!” she said, and immediately started making human words with the tiles.
Neela, who was still bent over the piles of junk, straightened and pointed to the things she’d found. “Lena, can I buy these from you?” They still had some currensea left from the coins the duca had given them.
“Buy them? Why?”
“We need disguises, Sera and I. There’s a bounty on our heads. I was thinking I could use this stuff to turn us into swashbucklers,” Neela said hopefully. “Sera’s already hacked her hair off, so we’re halfway there.”
“No,” Lena said firmly.
“Please, Lena. We’ll pay you well,” Neela said. “We can’t go around the way we are. Someone will recognize us.”
“I mean, I won’t sell them to you. Just take them. And then stop the bad men. The ones who came here today. Stop them from hurting people.”
Lena looked at Neela, then looked away. But not before Neela had seen the fire in her eyes. Lena was shy and awkward and not very tactful. She was better with catfish than people, but she was also kind and brave. Very brave. If the death riders had found them here, she would have paid a high price.
“We’ll do everything we can,” said Neela, swallowing the lump that had risen in her throat. “Could I borrow some scissors, a needle, and some thread?”
Lena nodded. As she opened a drawer to get them, Serafina said, “I’m tired, everyone. I’m going to turn in.”
“I’m right behind you,” Ling said.
Serafina and Ling said their good nights. Lena went outside to settle her catfish down for the night, then went to bed herself. And Neela stayed up, working into the small hours by lava light in Lena’s kitchen.
She was battered and bruised. She felt heartbroken and lost and scared of what lay ahead. And yet, alone at her work, with cloth in her hands, and a sense of purpose in her heart, she felt something else, too.
For a few hours, she felt wildly, defiantly happy.
“HALF A LEAGUE to the river’s mouth, max,” Ling said, squinting against the bright rays of the noontime sun.
“Two leagues past the Maiden’s Leap, in the waters of the Malacostraca. Follow the bones. Those are the landmarks Vr?ja gave me, but we haven’t seen any of them yet,” Serafina said anxiously.
She and Ling were consulting Ling’s map again.
“The landmarks probably only start in the Olt,” Ling said.
“Does this water make me look fat?” Neela asked.
Ling looked at her over the top of the map. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I feel like a whale! It’s so hard to float in water without any salt in it,” said Neela.
“Death riders could appear at any moment and you’re worried about how you look? This isn’t a beauty contest!”