chapter Fourteen
When Owen went to talk to Mac, I came along for support. I didn’t think Owen would so much as say a snarky word in his own defense, so he needed backup. I tried to feign interest in the game they started playing before they got down to business, but my attention was more on the gray guy nearby. I couldn’t tell if he was merely standing guard at his assigned post near the park and bookstore or if he was specifically watching us. It was hard to see where his eyes focused when I had to keep my eyes from focusing on him.
“We’ve been breaking the spell on the people we know,” Owen began, “and they’re doing the same for their contacts. But it turns out that some of the leaders of the elf underground are here, and they want to meet with you to discuss strategy.”
Mac made a move on the board before saying, “What’s to discuss? I’ve got a plan.”
Wincing, Owen said, “I think they want to brief you on their plan.”
“Why should we care?” McClusky asked.
“It is their world, and I think they have the majority here, since this seems to be Sylvester’s elf Siberia,” I said.
“I have no idea what they’re planning, but we ought to stay in the loop,” Owen said.
“Won’t a meeting between heads of different factions of prisoners be noticed?” McClusky asked with a scowl.
“It depends on where we meet,” Owen said. “Most of the buildings are uninhabited. They only seem to have bothered finishing the apartments that are actually in use by either captives or guards. That leaves a lot of space that’s just for show on the outside and wide open inside. You can enter at one end of a block and make it all the way down the block in some places. That means people can come in from various doors. It should look less like a meeting then.”
Mac nodded. “Okay, then. Say, tomorrow night at eleven. Tell us where to enter and where to go.”
“You’re leaving that up to him?” McClusky protested.
“Oh, didn’t we tell you, Owen’s evil scheme is to wipe out you and the elf leaders so he can become the grand overlord of these few blocks of fake New York,” I shot back without thinking. As soon as I realized what I’d said, I bit my lip in contrition.
Much to my relief, Mac chuckled. “She’s right. There’s no point in getting silly about this. He wants to get home as much as we do. Pass on the message, son, then let us know where you need us to go. You two will be there, of course.”
“Us?” Owen asked.
“We are outnumbered. I want to have as many wizards there as they have elves.”
*
We went out to dinner, maintaining our usual pattern, though Owen didn’t even try to pretend like he was on a date in a new relationship. As a matter of fact, this was starting to feel normal for me—us in the midst of a crisis and him distracted by it. I totally understood the distraction, but I did find myself looking back with nostalgia at those enchanted days when we hadn’t known what was going on.
“What’s up?” I asked when he was unusually silent and distant for a while.
He smiled wryly. “How much time do you have? I’m just trying to think of a way to deal with this that doesn’t put me in the middle of an elves versus wizards dispute. I’m not even sure where I stand with the elves. They may be more suspicious of me than the wizards are.”
“You might be surprised,” I said. “I put Perdita on the case months ago. There were some initial rumors, but she’s been countering all of them, and when she spreads something, it goes far and wide. She’s got a better reach than CNN.”
“So they probably won’t elect me their new leader—which is good—but they’re not expecting me to try to take over the world.” He sighed then. “But since apparently McClusky does think I’m pulling some grand scheme, the fact that they don’t hate me on sight will look very suspicious.”
“Sorry for butting in earlier, by the way.”
“Don’t worry about it. I don’t think it makes much difference, one way or another. I could get myself killed while pushing his grandmother out of the way of a speeding car, and he’d find it very suspicious that I bruised her.”
If he was making dark jokes, then I figured his funk wasn’t too deep. To prevent him from sinking back, I said, “Do you have any ideas for a meeting location?”
“I’m trying to decide if we should go for a building near the store, where several of us have regular reason to be, or maybe near where one of us lives. Or should we stay entirely away from anything associated with us?”
“We’ll also need to be careful to avoid any space on top of an occupied apartment.”
“I was thinking of finding an empty basement, if there is such a thing.”
“Oh, good thinking. Then there’d be a floor.”
“Are you up for a scouting mission?” he asked with a mischievous smile.
“What do you think?”
We dropped back by the store after dinner so he could check on some things, then we headed toward my place. On the block before we reached my building, Owen glanced around for followers, then led me up the front steps and magicked the front door open. Once we were inside, we found a narrow staircase behind the main stairs, leading down into a basement utility area. Or, where one might have been in a real building. It seemed as though the utilities here were all magical, so there was no need for boiler or furnace. That meant the utility room was one of those blank spaces, and it led into a much larger blank space that filled the basement. “Bingo!” I said.
“This should do the trick,” he agreed. “The windows are even mostly blocked, so light shouldn’t be visible outside. Now we just need to find multiple entry points.”
We determined that the space could be entered directly through the basement apartment entrance under the front steps and from the apartment in the adjacent building, as well as the way we’d come in. Entering from farther down the block required a more complicated route that involved going upstairs and over an occupied apartment before coming down the main stairs where we’d entered. We saved that entrance and another entrance in the middle of the block for ourselves because they were more complicated to explain. Owen made note of the addresses and directions for the other entries so he could give the location to Mac and Earl in the morning.
*
Perdita wasn’t quite her usual chipper self when I stopped by for my morning coffee the next day. “Do you have any idea when we’re getting out of here?” she asked.
“We’re working on some plans,” I told her.
“Good, because I’m ready to go home. I like being your assistant more than I like being a waitress. I bet you like your job better than working in a bookstore, too, huh? Or do you even see the bookstore? What is this like for you, since magic doesn’t work on you? Or does it? I don’t get it. How could they have enchanted you?”
I was surprised it had taken her so long to get around to thinking of that. “I actually got a dose of magic awhile ago. It was an accident. I don’t have much, and it’s fading already, but I’ve been trying to learn to use what I’ve got.”
“Oh, that’s where you were going with all those ‘meetings.’” She made sarcastic air quotes with her fingers. “I just thought you were getting it on with Owen somewhere, since you came back all flushed and excited.”
I restrained a groan. I’d suspected that was what she was thinking. “I was just excited about practicing magic.” I was surprised by how wistful I sounded. Having magic had a lot to do with me being in this mess, though I didn’t know what might have happened if they hadn’t been able to imprison me this way. They might have locked me in an ordinary cell.
“And Owen? I thought magic wasn’t supposed to work on him, either.”
“The same accident that gave me magic restored his powers.”
“I thought he wasn’t evil.”
“He’s not evil. He’s just not harmless. There’s a difference. You haven’t noticed him doing anything bad in the last few weeks, have you?”
“No.” She dragged the word out like she wasn’t sure, and I tried not to sigh in frustration. If her reaction was any indication, Owen would practically have to sacrifice himself saving us all to prove he wasn’t as evil as his parents.
*
Even though my job mostly consisted of pouring coffee and putting baked goods in paper sacks, it was difficult to concentrate when I was thinking of that night’s meeting. Before I left work, I gathered the day-old bakery products that we would have thrown away. I hoped that maybe having some sweets would keep the meeting from getting too rancorous. At least I’d have something to bite on so I’d be less likely to say something I’d regret.
Owen was working late at the store, so I went home by myself and then had to kill hours before it was time for the meeting. I dressed like I was heading over to visit a friend who’d made a late-night breakup distress call and headed out with my bag of cookies and scones soon after ten. That gave me time to be cautious and still get there before everyone else did.
The gray guys had stopped staking out my apartment, and I didn’t notice anyone else following me as I headed down the street. When I reached the right address, I went up the front steps and mimed hitting an apartment buzzer before I magically unlocked the door. That took me a couple of tries. It used to be such a simple spell, but now it left me so drained that I had to pause in the vestibule and eat a cookie before I could make it up the stairs to the empty apartment shell.
Picking my way across the floor was a challenge with next to no light, so I was glad I’d allowed myself plenty of time. After the unlocking spell took so much effort, I didn’t dare try to generate magical light, and a flashlight might have been dangerously obvious. I was incredibly glad to reach the doorway to the stairwell that led to the basement, where I didn’t have to worry about how I walked.
As early as I was, Owen had beaten me. He was waiting in the basement meeting area, a small globe of magical light glowing at his feet. “I wanted to make sure it was still a safe meeting place,” he explained. “I might have been able to call it off if it had been compromised.”
“I just wanted to make sure I could get through the door on my own,” I said.
He immediately looked concerned. “I didn’t think about that.”
“Relax. I was fine. I can still do that much magic. Cookie?” I held the bag out to him.
“You brought refreshments?”
“I’m from the south. We don’t have gatherings without food. I probably should have baked. These are just leftovers from the store.”
At about five minutes before eleven, there was a rustling noise near the basement apartment entrance. Owen doused his magical light, and we both froze, holding our breath. A rectangle of grayish light showed as the door opened, and two figures were silhouetted in the opening. I was pretty sure it was Mac and McClusky, but we stayed quiet until they identified themselves.
The door closed, plunging the room back into darkness, and then a magical glow appeared near the floor, where it wouldn’t be as visible through the windows, which were up near the ceiling. “We’re here,” Mac said.
Owen’s glow relit, and he said, “Good, you found it.”
Mac looked around the empty space. “So, this is what it’s like inside all these buildings?”
“From what we can tell,” Owen said.
“It would be pointless to build an entire city, inside and out, just for show,” I added. “I wonder how much of all this is illusion.”
“But there’s still enough to physically interact with, which tells me that the Elf Lord’s scheme is big enough to make it worthwhile,” Mac said. “Speaking of which, any sign of our elf friends?”
“Not yet, but they’ve still got a few minutes,” Owen said.
McClusky scowled, but before he could say anything about elves, I held out my bakery bag. “Cookie? There are also some scones in there.” He looked at me like I was insane, but Mac reached over and took a square of shortbread from the bag.
We waited a while longer, and then McClusky gestured for the bag and took one of the giant cookies. Mac checked his watch, then shook his head and said, “This is just like them. It’s a power game, you know. They’re showing they have the power position by keeping us waiting.”
I was surprised to see Owen smile ever so slightly as he said, “Okay, you’ve made your point. I’d like to get this over with.”
At that, the shadows shifted and five elves appeared right next to us, as though they’d been standing barely a foot away that whole time. I couldn’t stifle a yelp of surprise, and I wasn’t the only one. McClusky started coughing, having choked on his cookie.
I hadn’t heard or seen the elves come in. Had they been there all along? Earl was there, but I didn’t know the others, and when I got a look at their apparent leader, I forgot about the others. He was in human guise, so he didn’t look like an elf, but he did look otherworldly. All elves seemed to look eternally young, but while Earl looked like he really might be a college student, this guy had the look of a thirty-year-old actor who could still believably play teenagers. That is, sexy, mature-for-their-age teenagers, the types who have steamy affairs with their young, pretty teachers on teen nighttime soaps. He also was perfect casting for the role of dashing young rebel leader, with his intense eyes and catlike grace.
It was a good thing it was so dark and the lights were so far away from me, I thought as I brushed a few beads of sweat off my forehead. I wondered if maybe he was using a charisma spell to maintain the upper hand in the meeting because I normally didn’t react to other men this way, especially not when I was standing right beside Owen.
The elf leader smiled at all of us—though it felt like the smile was mostly directed at me—and said, “Hi, I’m Brad.”
That broke the spell. I bit my tongue before I blurted, “Brad? Seriously? Brad the elf?” He’d have looked right at home in a jaunty beret with a couple of bandoliers over his shoulders. He should have been “Jacques” or maybe “Pierre.” Brad was the star player on the football team, not a resistance movement leader. The rest of us introduced ourselves, using first names only. I wished I’d thought to give myself a cool code name because “Katie” wasn’t any more of a good resistance name than “Brad.”
“Now that you’ve graced us with your presence, I guess we can get started,” Mac said, sarcasm dripping from his words.
Judging by the elves’ body language, I had the feeling Mac was going to face some resistance, and not the kind he was trying to organize. I didn’t know yet if it was the idea of working with wizards or Mac assuming leadership they weren’t on board with, but I recognized a certain degree of wariness in the way they viewed the situation. They weren’t crossing their arms over their chests, or anything else that obvious, but there was something defiant about the way they stood.
“Who are you to decide that you’re in charge?” Brad asked mildly. His tone wasn’t challenging at all, but his eyes might as well have had lasers in them.
“I represent the Council.”
“The Council only governs wizards. We have our own leadership.”
“Your leadership is why we’re here. We all seem to have been caught up in your people’s power struggle.”
“So you admit it is our business.”
Owen took a slight step backward, giving off clear “I’m not with him” signals.
“Would you just listen to my ideas before we start arguing over who’s in charge?” Mac bellowed.
“I am very much interested in hearing your ideas,” Brad said.
“Okay, then,” Mac continued, “I think our priority has to be getting out of here, and the way to do that may be to take them by surprise. History’s full of uprisings where the prisoners attacked their captors.”
“And how many of them were successful?” I couldn’t help but mutter. I could tell from Owen’s face that he was thinking it, but he didn’t dare challenge the Council representative. When Brad gave me an appreciative look, I felt like a kindergartener who’d received a gold star for my drawing.
“It sounds like a good way to get ourselves put back under the spell or to get put in a real prison that’s not as comfortable,” one of the other elves, a pixie-haired woman named Doris, said.
“You want to stay here forever?” Mac asked. “That’s a lot longer for your people than it is for mine. How else do you think you’re going to get out? We have to force them to let us go, and that means forcing them to listen to us. Now, I figure that anyone here that we don’t know is either an illusion or is working for them. The illusions seem to be like the extras in movies. They’re just part of the scenery. They don’t talk, they don’t interact. They just go about their business. Everyone else is probably in on it, working to maintain the illusion. Those are the people we can grab. I’m sure you’ve all got someone in your day-to-day lives who’s like that. If each of us gets one or two, then we’ll have taken out most of their people, and then we can fight back.”
“What do you mean by ‘get’?” Earl asked.
“Not killing, not unless you have to. But immobilize them, certainly, lock them up.”
“They have magic. How can we bind them so they can’t just free themselves?” Earl asked. “We don’t have your fancy silver chains here—unless they left them with you when they brought you here.”
“Don’t you have any binding or memory spells?” Mac asked. “Do to them what they’ve done to us.”
“Have you considered any alternatives?” Brad asked.
I thought Owen would explode. I was pretty sure he was actually twitching. But if he couldn’t talk, I sure could. “We think we’ve discovered the portal they’re using to bring people here. At the very least, we’ve found a way out of the neighborhood that doesn’t loop back on itself.”
All of Brad’s attention turned to me, and I felt I might swoon. “Where is this?” he asked. He knelt and drew on the floor. A map of the prison neighborhood appeared, made of softly glowing lines. It looked like we hadn’t been the only ones surveying our surroundings.
I circled the map, orienting myself, then pointed to the far end. “There. It’s the park on what should be the boundary. If you go up the sidewalk or the street, you’ll loop back, but if you go through that gate, you wind up in a big, park-like space. We couldn’t go too far because a lot of the guards were there, having some kind of meeting.”
“Do you mean the elves wearing gray?” Brad asked.
I glanced at Owen to see if he would speak up, but he remained resolutely silent, even as his jaw clenched so tightly that I thought I could hear his teeth grinding. “Yes, those guards,” I said. “They come and go through that gate at around eight thirty at night, about eighteen to twenty at a time.” I gave Owen another glance and then plunged forward. “We thought maybe we could infiltrate that group and find out what’s on the other side.”
“Unfortunately, it would require illusion for us to look like elves,” Brad said.
“But you are elves,” I protested.
“We’ve tried, but we can’t seem to shed this disguise they’ve given us, perhaps because the spell works on everyone’s perception and is therefore beyond our control. Our elf illusion, were we to don one, would likely be more effective than that of a human’s, but it would be just as much an illusion.”
“What would be the purpose of this little charade?” McClusky asked dismissively.
“We might learn where the portal is, how it’s guarded, perhaps even something of how they’re maintaining this prison,” Brad said with a smile that didn’t seem to have much of a charming effect on the Council wizards. “After all, that information would be necessary for us to take any advantage of the uprising you propose.”
“But this infiltration exposes us to risk,” Mac argued. “We don’t know how they’re identifying each other, but if they spot a plant, then they’ll know we’re on to them. We have to act quickly and decisively to have the advantage. What we need to do is revive every prisoner we can find, set a day and time, and then everyone takes over their guards at once. Then we take a few hostages and head straight for that gateway.”
Brad turned to me. “What do you think of this plan, Katie?”
I gulped. “Me? What does my opinion matter?”
Brad gave me a smile that I was certain had to be magically enhanced. “I nominate you as our leader.”
“I’m in charge here,” Mac insisted.
“We never agreed upon that,” Brad said, his voice silky smooth, the aural equivalent of melted chocolate. “I know you would never agree upon an elf as the leader, so we will compromise. A wizard may lead us, as long as Katie is that wizard.”
I opened my mouth to say that I wasn’t really a wizard, but Owen elbowed me in the side. When I turned to look at him, he shook his head almost imperceptively, and I could have sworn he was fighting back a smile.
Mac sputtered, too irate for words, and glared at Owen and me. Owen maintained an expression of pure innocence. Brad’s smile was even more innocent than that. “Shall we put it to a vote?” he asked with a glance over his shoulder to his people, as if to remind us that the elves had the wizards outnumbered, even if the vote split along those lines.
“Very well,” Mac grumbled. “But you’re making a mistake.”
“Katie’s been MSI’s secret weapon for a while now, so you may be surprised,” Owen said, speaking for the first time in the meeting.
“So, Katie, our fearless leader, what do you think about the prison break plan?” Brad asked.
I gulped and took a couple of deep breaths. I’d never led much of anything in my life, despite Owen’s vote of confidence. I’d never even been an officer in a club when I was in school. I was more likely to be the person who got things done behind the scenes. “I think the uprising should be a last resort,” I said when I trusted myself to speak and sound authoritative instead of like a scared little girl. “There haven’t been that many uprisings that were actually successful. They’ve been more symbolic than anything, something to rally around without doing any practical good. Has any inmate prison uprising ever resulted in the inmates going free for good?” I directed that question at Mac. To be honest, I wasn’t sure of the answer, but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing that was likely to happen.
Mac shrugged grudgingly, but he didn’t speak, so I continued, gaining confidence as I went on. “We’re at even more of a disadvantage because we don’t yet know how to get back home. Information gathering should be our first priority, and we need to know about both sides of the portal. We need to find any fellow prisoners who were taken after we were and see if they know anything more about what Sylvester’s doing. Since people are being sent here for knowing too much, someone’s bound to know something important. For instance, I know there’s an MSI security operative here who was taken after we were, and if I find him again, he may have information.”
“I will spread the word through my people,” Brad said with a nod.
“But be careful about that. Mac was right that we should keep this in separate cells. If they’re smart, they’ll have had at least one plant in among the prisoners, someone we’re likely to trust. If we don’t all know each other, they won’t be able to track all of us down, no matter who they catch. You have warned everyone you’ve awakened about writing down possible memory triggers, right?”
Everyone in the room pulled pieces of paper out of their pockets. “Good,” I said with a nod, suddenly feeling very official. “Then we’ll need to learn about this side of the portal. If you’ve got someone who could infiltrate the gray guards, that would be good. You may need to observe them a while to fit in. Check for magic use to make sure your illusions don’t give you away. We shouldn’t meet too frequently. Earl at the bookstore makes a good information drop point. Do any of you know an elf named Perdita?”
“Everyone knows or knows of Perdita,” Brad said with a fond smile.
“She works at a café near here. I’ll talk to her; she may be able to pass on messages, since she does know everyone, and her position is pretty public. Don’t try to talk to me at the store, though. I suspect the other person working at the coffee shop with me is a guard.” I looked around at the others and said, “So, does it sound like we’ve got a plan to start with?”
Mac was still scowling, but he nodded, and the others all nodded in agreement. Before everyone started to disperse, Owen glanced out the window to check for guards. He returned to us, his expression tense. “No one can leave yet,” he said. “There are gray guards outside, watching the building.”