The Paper Magician

She turned back only to see the second Thane vanish. She darted from the railing, searching for him, but he had disappeared as easily as the moon on a cloudy night. If only she could put into words how much that scholarship meant to her, regardless of why she received it. The thank-you letter in Mg. Thane’s office couldn’t even come close to covering it. One more reason she couldn’t let him die.

Ceony’s gaze dropped to the ballroom and locked onto Lira, who appeared to be searching for her as well, near the string quartet. She held a small pool of blood in her palm and shook it slightly. A divining spell?

Ceony backed away from Lira’s view, slipping her hand into her bag and counting her thin arsenal. She had something, at least, but what real good would paper animals do against a practiced Excisioner? Folding had never been meant for combat! “I have to get out of here,” she whispered, picking Fennel up beneath his front legs. “I have to get out. Thane, where are you?”

But he didn’t answer. Whatever method he had used to speak to her earlier had been lost.

Swallowing and clutching Fennel to her chest, Ceony hurried across the balcony. Where could she hide? What sort of damage could she do with a mere stack of paper? There was a reason she never wanted to be a Folder!

I need to get out! her mind screamed.

She slowed at the end of the balcony, then stopped altogether. Before her stood a door that she knew wasn’t part of the ballroom—a white door rimmed with scarlet, without knob or handle. Glancing behind her, she saw Lira’s head crowning the top of the stairs that led to the balcony.

Ceony pushed her way through the door and staggered through a puddle of blood.

She gasped and bit her lip to stifle a scream as the door behind her vanished. She had reentered the fleshy chamber of Thane’s heart and stepped right into a river of blood that flowed steadily past her ankles. The loud pulsing of Thane’s heartbeat reverberated through the chamber’s walls: PUM-Pom-poom.

Trying to steady her breathing, Ceony followed the river’s current, her knuckles straining with the closed fists at her sides. The blood flowed higher and higher up her leg until she waded with it above her knees. Almost too deep. She gritted her teeth and tried not to think of being pulled beneath its surface.

She saw another door, but this one made of flesh and veins, pulsing in rhythm with the rest of the room. One with no windows or knobs, no locks or hinges. Just flesh pressed tightly against flesh, like a long, swollen cut that wasn’t meant to heal.

Somehow, Ceony knew she needed to get through it.

Lira’s voice sounded softly above her, no doubt carried on the particles of a spell, for the woman lingered nowhere in sight. Caught up in a vision, somewhere, Ceony hoped. “Not that I’m discontented to leave you trapped in here, dearie,” the voice said, “but I don’t want you stinking up the place. Let’s get this over with, shall we? Swift and quick. I’ll even leave your body in one piece. Maybe two.”

Despite the wet heat of the chamber, gooseflesh pimpled Ceony’s arms. She clutched the strap of her bag and forced air into her lungs, though a flutter broke her breath here and there. She couldn’t fight Lira, not yet. Her best option was to keep going—find the end of Thane’s heart and, hopefully, its exit.

“I need you to fold up, Fennel,” she told the dog, her words nearly inaudible. “Fold yourself up and get into my bag, where it’s safe. Just for a little while.”

The dog quirked its head to one side.

“Go on,” she said, and the dog tucked its head down and its legs in. Ceony pressed against Fennel’s sides gently with her hands until he formed a thick, lopsided pentagon. She carefully wedged the creature into her bag, between sheets of paper.

Taking a deep breath and holding it in her throat, Ceony pushed herself between the fleshy walls of Emery Thane’s heart into the second chamber.





CHAPTER 9



THE WALLS OF THANE’S heart pressed against her on all sides, pulsing with their loud PUM-Pom-poom and drowning out the unnatural light. They squeezed against her, tight and tighter, as if she were being run over by an empty buggy with more and more passengers climbing inside it, making its wheels crush her. It felt like drowning.

Her own muscles tightened as adrenaline surged through her body. She couldn’t breathe. Heat from the walls seeped past her clothes and into her skin, making her too warm, too hot. One would think a heart disconnected from its person as long as this one had been would feel cold, but not Emery Thane’s heart. Emery Thane’s heart defied the physics of everything Ceony had come to know over her nearly two decades of life. Though unless she found a way out, she wouldn’t see her twentieth year!

A tear squeezed through clenched eyelids. She clawed at the walls, trying to shove past them, gasping for air but finding none. She tasted blood on her lips—blood that wasn’t hers. She inched forward, pushing back against the flesh that pushed against her and tugged at her bag. Her head began to pound, her vision blurred—