Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

“No, I’m asking you to help me sleep better at night, and to equip me to help my roommate who is, if you remember, an avatar of fairy-tale goodness and purity for children the world over looking for a little magic in their lives. Unless you want Princess Aspen to start telling kids how to get blood out of velvet.”

Fern probably didn’t know how to get blood out of velvet. I did. I could lead a goddamn master course in getting blood out of any kind of fabric, with a bonus session on getting blood out of hair without washing away all the hairspray. Alas, there isn’t much call for that sort of thing in my current occupation.

Sophie was quiet for a minute or so, thinking it over. Finally, she said, “It looks like there was some sort of altercation, probably toward the end of the evening, fortunately out of sight of any of our younger guests. The victim was a local man named David Wilson. It doesn’t seem to have been an intentional murder; the officer I spoke to said it looked more like an accident that he had been hurt badly enough to bleed out. Just sheer dumb luck.”

“Sheer dumb luck doesn’t usually go around stabbing people.”

“No, but angry kids sometimes do, and all the metal detectors and casual security in the world won’t stop people from smuggling knives into the Park. We can’t get too intrusive, or we’ll lose business. We couldn’t even justify metal detectors to our shareholders until Disney did it without collapsing under the weight of the resulting outrage. Pat-downs and full-body screening are never going to happen, and if you ever tried to quote me on this, I would call you a liar and have you fired on the spot, but I’m glad that they won’t.”

I blinked. “Even with the folks in PR spinning fulltime to keep this out of the papers?”

“Even with ten bodies, I’d be saying this,” said Sophie firmly. “I don’t know if you’ve looked at me recently, but you may have noticed that I am not, in fact, a white person. I am, rather, quite brown.”

“I did notice that,” I said carefully.

“One of my great joys here at Lowryland is walking through the Park and knowing that people from all over the world, from all walks of life, are able to come and enjoy what we’ve created without fear of racial profiling from the cast. We can’t control what the other guests do, and yes, we’ve had a few incidents over the years, but every cast member treats every guest with equal courtesy, at least to their faces.” Sophie’s expression turned hard. “Bring in guards and thorough searches, and that changes. Suddenly it’s the guest with the unfamiliar accent who gets ‘randomly’ selected for further screening. Suddenly it’s the man with the faded gang tattoos who has to walk through the metal detector three times. David Wilson died because someone snuck a knife into the Park. That’s tragic. All my sympathy goes to his family. I will lose a hundred Davids before I let children who look like me—children who look like anyone—start feeling like their skin color means they aren’t allowed to have access to the magic we give to children who look like you.”

I didn’t say anything. Sophie glanced at me and grimaced apologetically.

“Sorry,” she said. “I guess that was sort of heavy.”

“No, I’m glad you said something,” I said. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“You never had to.” We had reached the gates to the back lot. Sophie pulled up to the guard booth and smiled, flashing her ID badge. The man on the other side of the barricade nodded, giving me only a cursory glance before he raised the barricade.

We drove down the winding driveway that connected the gate to the parking lot in silence. Lowryland was designed to look like an entirely different world once guests were inside its borders. What most of them never realized was how much work went into creating—and maintaining—that all-important illusion.

The walls surrounding the Park were higher than anyone realized at a casual glance, built into the environments around rides, concealed behind shop facades and cunningly designed greenery. All told, the lowest point in the Lowryland wall was twelve feet high, and the Park designers were hard at work coming up with ways to bring it up to the otherwise standard fifteen. Only the wrought iron front gates were lower than that, affording a tantalizing view of the entry plaza to the people standing in line every morning or looking over their shoulders every night. Once inside the Park, the rest of the world might as well have been a story told to frighten children.

That included the administrative offices, the management parking, the back lots where the parade floats were stored and maintained, and so very much more. Lowryland had its own suite of generators, much like the carnivals where I’d whiled away my childhood summers, but built on a substantially grander scale. Lowryland had freezers packed with enough food to wait out a zombie apocalypse. People looking for survivalists always focused on the preppers. They should have been looking at the big theme parks, where the roller coasters would keep on rolling long after the lights of Miami had gone dark.

Sophie drove past the first three parking lots, all of which were distant enough from even the employee gates to have their own shuttle system, and around a large building blazoned with the smiling face of Monty Mule and Hilary Hinny, the lovable cartoon scamps upon whose backs Michael Lowry the First had constructed an empire. Her car slid into her reserved slot with what sounded like a satisfied purr, obscuring her name, which had been spray painted onto the concrete when she became important enough to warrant such prime parking.

She looked at me again, expression grim. “Stick to your story, Mel,” she advised. “Once we’re inside, I’m not your friend, I’m the person who has to make sure every employee represents the best face of the company. If you say or do anything that makes my superiors think you might have been there—”

“I won’t let you down,” I said.

Sophie nodded.

“Good,” she said, and got out of the car, leaving me to trail along behind her like a lost duckling, looking for a way back to the safety of the pond.



* * *





The air-conditioning inside the Public Relations building was like a punch to the face after the growing heat outdoors. It didn’t help that PR, out of every department associated with Lowryland, had to “live the Lowry life,” decorating everything in corporate iconography. Gone were the tasteful photographs and colors of the hiring office, replaced by aggressively bright primary shades and even brighter posters blazing out advertisements for the company’s most iconic properties.

It could have been interesting, under the right circumstances, to wander through the halls and see the evolution of Lowry’s style across the decades, from the white-and-gold minimalism of Goldtree and Silvertree to the lush pre-Raphaelite jewel tones of Goblin Market, all the way up to the stark green and silver of Thistle and the gilded pastels of Mooncake.

The three people waiting for us in the lobby sort of killed that idea. They were dressed like PR wonks the world over, in suit jackets, pressed slacks, and pencil skirts (all following strict gender lines, sadly; at least mixing it up a little would have made things interesting). Their accessories were in gaudier colors than the norm, allowing them to blend better with their surroundings, but a bright red pocket square or a chunky green necklace couldn’t change the fact that they were the hard hand of strict formality trying to enforce itself on a fairy-tale wonderland.

There was no sign of Fern. I looked anxiously around, like she might be crammed into a corner somewhere, and clutched my duffel bag against my chest. It was part true concern, part distraction. I couldn’t disguise myself, not with Sophie right there, knowing what I really looked like. But these people didn’t know me. If I wanted to act like I was easily confused and frightened of losing my job, they couldn’t call my bluff.