Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

—and missed, the shorter blonde floating past unhindered. Megan made a panicked squeaking sound. Fern adjusted her density ever so slightly, and dropped back into Cylia’s hands. The loss of momentum and altitude would have been deadly for someone like me, whose mass was fixed. For Fern, it was barely a pause before Cylia was whipping her up again.

This time, she flew straight and true, grabbing hold of the elevator ledge and hoisting herself up. She winced a little as she put pressure on her left foot, but it held her weight, and kept holding as that weight almost visibly increased, Fern settling deeper and deeper into her position. Once her density was high enough that she didn’t have to worry about being whipped away by the faint wind still blowing from below, Fern wedged her fingers into the crack between the doors designed to keep people from falling into the elevator shaft and began to shove.

Strength is important. Strength can be the thing that turns the tide. But leverage is based as much on size as it is on strength, and Fern, for all that she was a dainty, delicate-looking little thing, was also a professional athlete, spending every minute she could strapped into her skates and going for the gold. If roller derby were played at the Olympic level, she would have been trying for the team. She would never have qualified—good as our little regional league was, there are other, better skaters out there—but she would have made it farther than most people expected. She was good. She was strong. And at the moment, she had the undeniable density of someone five times her size.

Fern pushed, and bit by bit, the elevator bay doors responded. They had never been intended to keep people in, after all, only to keep people from falling to their deaths. The doors inched farther and farther open, until she was standing between them, her hands pressed flat against their respective edges, refusing to let them close.

“Little help here?” she said.

“On it,” said Sam, and pulled himself into a handstand with the sort of ease that I could only envy. Cylia and Megan, dangling from his feet, appeared to do a slow somersault above me. I was hanging from his tail, and simply found myself hoisted farther out of the hole. Enough farther that I could reach the lip of the ledge.

Careful not to dislodge Sam’s tail from around my waist, I reached out and grabbed the ledge with both hands, getting a good grip before I angled my body downward. Sam glanced my way, saw what I was doing, and unwrapped his tail from around my waist with an expression of relieved gratitude. Gravity immediately kicked in, my lower body swinging down to slam against the wall in a half-controlled arc. I gritted my teeth, gripped the wall a little tighter, and waited for the impact to stop echoing in my bones. Then, deliberately, I began pulling myself up.

Megan and Cylia were already on their feet by the time I climbed up to join them. Sam was leaning against one of the elevator bay doors, while Fern leaned against the other. He had his left foot in his hands, and was massaging out the kinks with broad, firm strokes.

“Remind me not to do that again for at least a year,” he said, grimacing. “I am going to be one big ache tomorrow.”

“But we’ll have a tomorrow, and that’s what counts,” I said. “Everyone okay?”

“That was better than zip lining,” said Cylia.

“My hair threw up,” said Megan.

I paused. Sadly, that did nothing to dispel the image her words had conjured. “Ew,” I said, finally. “Come on.” I started walking. The others, mercifully, followed, Fern limping.

Outside the elevator shaft was a standard Lowry corporate hallway: more brightly colored than, say, an accounting firm, with framed cartoon posters on the walls instead of actuarial tables, but otherwise as featureless and emotionless as any other business in the world. I looked around, frowning.

“I wish my cousin Sarah were here,” I muttered. “She’s our math guru.”

“Meaning what?” said Cylia.

“Meaning the building tends to get taller when the people on top want it to, and my on-the-fly math skills aren’t good enough to tell me how far we fell.” According to the plaque next to the elevator, we were on the fifth floor. That should have been the top. We’d fallen a hell of a lot farther than that.

“Can we take the stairs?” asked Fern.

“They could be a hundred floors high,” I said. Then I paused. “Wait. No, they can’t.”

“Please pick one, this is making my head hurt,” said Megan.

“Emily’s a routewitch. She’s the one doing their distance work. Distance is a constant. How far we fell is how far we have to climb, and we didn’t fall a hundred floors. We fell a long way, but not that long.” I looked at the elevator shaft.

Sam followed my gaze, and shook his head. “No. I might be able to climb to the top. I could probably even carry one of you. But I can’t carry everyone, and I’m not leaving all our backup behind. Not going to happen.”

“I thought you were letting me lead this,” I said.

“Only as long as I’m also keeping you alive,” he replied firmly. “Keeping you alive is the most important thing I’m doing right now.”

“I’m touched, really,” said Cylia. Her tone was dry, but her expression was sympathetic. “Although I care more about my own skin than the monkey seems to, he’s not entirely wrong. We’re not doing anything that ups our chance of being slaughtered.”

“Do they know we’re still alive?” asked Megan. “If I’d dropped an elevator on somebody, I’d figure they were dead.” Her snakes were standing on end, tongues flicking constantly. That, more than anything else, told me how much rage was behind her calm exterior. Megan was a medical resident who just happened to be a gorgon. She’d never been thrown down an elevator shaft before. She was pissed.

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

Megan nodded. “Then we take the stairs.” She looked around at the rest of us, neutral expression melting into a scowl that Medusa herself would have admired. “Nobody drops me down a hole.”

I smiled.





Twenty-two


“Tired is for after the battle ends. Tired is for winners. Losers get to sleep a lot longer, and they don’t wake up again.”

–Jane Harrington-Price

Climbing up a lot of stairs

THE STAIRS DID NOT go on forever. That would have been impossible. If routewitches had been able to extend mundane stairways past the limit of the Earth’s gravity, like some Phineas and Ferb nightmare science adventure, they would have found a way to boost the space program decades ago. Roads crisscrossing the solar system, distances that planet-bound routewitches could only dream of . . . oh, they would never have let us stay within the grasp of gravity. No matter how much they enjoyed using it as a weapon.

The stairs did, however, go on for a long, long time. Cylia, Fern, and I were all used to skating for hours, and while we weren’t exactly thrilled by the climb, we managed with relative ease once Fern figured out the exact balance she needed to strike between density and injury. I took point, a knife in each hand and fingers aching for fire. Cylia was close behind me, ready to pull me out of the way if something loomed.

Sam brought up the middle, Megan slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She wasn’t protesting. The gorgon was in reasonably good shape, but she was also a med grad student, and this sort of thing wasn’t part of her daily rounds at the hospital. Letting her walk would have slowed us down considerably, and Sam didn’t seem to have a problem carrying her.