The Paper Magician

She backed into the wall and pounded the side of her fist on it. Nothing changed. Before a second tear could fall, she scooped Fennel off the floor and screamed “Let me out!” so loudly that her own eardrums rattled. “Emery Thane, let me go!”


The office faded into shadow, then into nothingness. The sleepy thrum of PUM-Pom-poom beat against her at all sides, a pale imitation of her own heart’s frantic rhythm. One more chamber, she thought, grasping onto the shreds of calm that came with the words. One more chamber left.

But the darkness of the third chamber hadn’t finished with Ceony yet. Instead of the red walls, the river of blood, and the tight valve that would take her to the fourth chamber, Ceony found herself in an unfamiliar city, the twilight sky overcast, and shrill police whistles sounding all around her.





CHAPTER 12



CEONY HAD NEVER SEEN this city before.

A narrow street of wet cobblestone stretched before her, its gutters packed with hard snow several days old and mottled with mud. The overcast sky made everything blue and gray—it seemed to be evening, near twilight, but the cloud cover hid the sun so completely Ceony couldn’t be sure. A breath fogged before her mouth. Fennel backed up and sandwiched himself between Ceony’s legs as blood pulsed up and down her neck. Brick walls, dark brick walls, loomed two stories up on either side of her. One broke into an archway, unlike any architecture Ceony had even seen in London. The narrow road ended behind her in a set of cement stairs that led around some sort of office building. The other side ended in another brick wall where one building had backed too far into its neighbors.

Police whistles buzzed like banshees around her, shrill and high, bouncing off the bricks. Ceony covered her ears and closed her eyes. She didn’t want to be here. Let me go, let me go, let me go.

But she couldn’t will the scene away. Its chill looped under her fingers and snuck up her clothes, burned the inside of her nose. The whistles grew louder, followed by the heavy stampede of standard-regulation military boots.

Ceony ran.

She ran with Fennel yapping behind her, and she stopped only long enough to scoop up the dog to protect his paper feet from the wet ground. She dodged through the brick arch to another street, its cobbles split and sparse. Her foot came down in a murky puddle that splashed ice water up her skirt, soaking her stockings. The whistles multiplied between buildings—a bank with dark windows, a restaurant with shutters drawn—and attacked her from all directions. They drowned out the quiet PUM-Pom-poom that should have filled the silence between her misty breaths.

Taking a sharp turn at the next intersection, Ceony ran into two police officers and phased through them. She stumbled on the slick stone and fell, twisting midair to keep Fennel from the wet street—an action that slammed her hip into the road and sent a crunching pain through her tailbone and leg. Ceony yelped.

Fennel squirmed in her arms and whined a papery whine, then chomped onto some of Ceony’s matted hair and tugged on it like he would a rope toy.

Ceony winced, but picked herself up, swiping away mud that clung to her side. She ground her teeth and blinked in an effort not to cry. More policemen—and now two soldiers from the army—ran down the road toward her. She closed her eyes and squeezed Fennel in her arms as they phased through her.

None of this was real. Not real to her. But she didn’t feel it that way. No matter how much she reminded herself that these were Thane’s memories, she couldn’t feel the unrealness of any of it.

Blowing hair from her face, Ceony watched the policemen run up the street, shouting to one another in incoherent words, blowing their whistles with pursed lips and puffed cheeks. Hounds chasing down a fox. But who was the fox?

“Emery,” she whispered. She broke into a run, her right hip protesting with every other step. It promised her a good bruise in the morning, if it wasn’t morning already.

Her bag tugged on her, seeming to weigh five times what it should. She switched shoulders awkwardly as she ran, still balancing Fennel in her arms. Her legs moved swifter than they would have if this were the real world. Dark buildings, sleeping beggars, and half-melted snow piles passed her in blurs of dull colors.

She reached the policemen as their chief—a man with a thick mustache—directed them with sweeping motions of his arm. The band split into three and took different paths deeper into the city.

A small paper glider, similar in style to the one Ceony had ridden to the coast on, sailed through the air, passed her nose, and prodded the police chief once in the arm before flopping to the ground.

Ceony stared at it wide-eyed and reached for it, but the chief snatched it first. Standing on her toes, she read it over his shoulder, instantly recognizing the perfectly spaced letters of Emery’s handwriting, though his name didn’t sign the page.