Alistair sat up, Charlie’s soft voice stitched like thin threads into his brain. His legs dangled off the edge of the counter, and blood rushed down to his feet. All the yellow lights in the room had changed. They were now green.
The boy approached him with a hand outstretched. “So you’re a swimmer?”
Alistair kept his hand at his side. “Where am I?”
“You mean you didn’t come here on purpose?” the girl asked.
“So you’re not much of a swimmer,” the boy added, pulling his hand back.
“I was in Chua Ling’s world and I jumped into a hole in a frozen lake,” Alistair told them.
“Ah,” the girl said, finally pocketing the typewriter while tearing the paper like a receipt from a cash register and dropping it on the ground. “And you didn’t wear a spacesuit? Foolish of you.”
“How was I supposed to know where I was going?” Alistair asked.
The boy whistled like he’d seen a pretty woman. “Oh, li’l doggie-paddler. How long has it been since you were on the solid side of things?”
Alistair didn’t have a watch, so he had to guess. “About a day.”
The girl flinched. Her face spoke volumes. This might have been the craziest thing she’d ever heard.
“One day?” the boy said. “One day and you’re already here? Hot damn!”
“I didn’t plan it that way,” Alistair explained. “It kinda happened. Where am I, anyhow? Whose world is this?”
The boy ignored the question, simply shook his head in disbelief and asked the girl, “How far in was Ivan Marinovich when he came to visit?”
The girl pulled the typewriter out of her pocket and tapped away. “Two years,” she said. “And that was unprecedented. This is…”
“Un-stinkin’-believable?” the boy asked.
The girl pointed at the paper on the floor. “And yet, he seems legit. Don’t ask me to explain it, because I can’t. But this doggie-paddler is about as puppy as they come.”
“I’m not a doggie-paddler. My name is Alistair. I’m looking for Fiona Loomis. And … Chua Ling … I guess.”
“Two ladies?” the boy asked. “Aw shucks. Your name shouldn’t be Alistair. It should be Romeo. But I’m sorry to say we don’t know your Juliets.”
“What about someone named Polly Dobson?”
“Well, that’s a name we haven’t heard in a while,” the boy said.
“You know her?” Alistair asked.
“Of her,” the girl said. “Bit of a loose cannon by all reports. Friend of yours?”
Alistair grumbled. “Not at all. I’m trying to find her, though. She might know where Fiona and Chua are.”
“Interesting,” the girl said, her eyes narrowing. “We can’t help you in that department, sadly. Polly Dobson likes to keep moving, as we understand it.”
“Can you at least let me know what’s going on?” Alistair asked. “Who you are? Where I am?”
Smiling, the girl said, “That we can do. I’m Dot. This guy is Chip. We’re both swimmers. You’re in Quadrant 43, where we study figments, assist other swimmers, and, how shall I say this? Where we … put an end to ciphers.”
Ciphers. There was that word again. But before Alistair could ask another question, Chip pressed another button. All the walls and the ceiling began to split, retract, and fold like venetian blinds pulled open. In seconds, the small room was gone, and they were in the middle of an enormous space with arched marble ceilings, stone pillars, and a tile floor. It resembled a natural history museum. Motionless creatures were floating or standing in menacing poses, or trapped in elaborate display cases. Oddities abounded.
“Our lives’ work,” Dot said. “For your safety, for your study, for your entertainment.”
It was, quite simply, breathtaking. Alistair’s mind shifted from Where the heck am I? to What … in the hell … is that? He hopped down from the counter and walked past Dot and Chip and straight to what appeared to be a sea creature, but it wasn’t like any fish, whale, or dolphin he had ever seen. It was perfectly round and covered in bulging eyeballs, spikes, and little translucent fins. It was all body and it was all face.
“The Orbilisk,” Chip said, approaching Alistair from behind. “That cipher was nabbed by a swimmer named Joslyn, who found it terrorizing a world of merpeople. It sees in three hundred and sixty degrees and has venomous spikes. A mean piece of work.”
Alistair could have stared at the Orbilisk and its awful elegance for hours, but the room was brimming with things as strange or stranger. He moved on to the next one, a short, troll-like creature who was the centerpiece of a glassed-in display. The troll had blue skin and wore nothing but a loincloth. He was frozen in place on one foot, head tipped back, arms out wide, performing a joyous dance. In the background, lightning bolts made of foil pummeled a small model of a mud hut village.
“That’s Rimtillious the Rascal,” Dot said. “He could redirect the weather and cause all sorts of trouble. A swimmer named Malik caught him, stuffed him in a sack, and we took care of the rest.”
“Other kids caught these things?” Alistair asked.
Chip nodded. “And that ain’t the half of it. We’re in the cipher business, chief. We research these things, figure out their weaknesses. Some are susceptible to fire, others to things like saliva. Some are big. Some are small. Some change shape. We get the cold hard facts and then we employ bounty hunters. So yes, kids catch these things. But that’s because we send them to catch these things.”
Alistair proceeded to the next creature, and the next, and the next. There was Yabbo DeGobbo, a disgusting blob with big veiny lips and flatulence that caused earthquakes. There was the Horgon, a furry, star-shaped monster that apparently suffocated people in their sleep. There was Tiki-Tiki, who looked like a giant parrot with metallic feathers. According to Chip, when this bird laughed, it caused figments’ brains to explode. All of the creatures were frozen in place, stuffed like hunting trophies.
As Alistair gazed at a giant eight-armed wizard known as Spidrex the Great, he finally broke down. He placed a hand over his face as his chest convulsed, but there was no hiding the tears.
“Come on, ace,” Chip said. “Get a grip. They’re harmless. Most have been out of commission for years.”
“This is what we do,” Dot added. “Our purpose. And we’re good at it.”
“It’s not that,” Alistair said, coughing. “It’s … I saw one of these. It attacked a whole bunch of people. It drove a horn through a boy’s stomach.”
“You haven’t even been here one day,” Dot said, “and you’ve already escaped a cipher? I don’t believe it.”
“They called it the … the Mandrake.”
Chip couldn’t contain himself. He shouted, “The Mandrake! You saw the brother-trucking Mandrake? This is colossal! This is huge!”
“There were these tubes … and this blood … and he was freezing people … and I keep messing up … and it’s always my fault…” Alistair’s voice dissolved into nothing but a sad whimper.
“I don’t know if you realize what you’re telling us,” Chip said. “The Mandrake is pretty much the nastiest of the nasties. Kids have been trying to bag that bugger for ages. Jeez Louise. Last I heard, this wiseass named Hadrian was sacrificing swimmers to the thing.”
“Hadrian was there,” Alistair whispered. “The Mandrake … ran him through.”
Dot crossed herself like a good Catholic. “Well, good riddance to bad rubbish. I never liked that megalomaniacal twit.”
Alistair didn’t like him either, but he suddenly found himself on the defensive, the strength slowly returning to his voice. “But he was a kid,” he said. “A swimmer like us, right? He must have had friends and family back home. If the Mandrake killed him, then what happens? What about them?”
Dot shrugged and said, “Then they probably found him dead in a lake, or maybe the bathtub, next to whatever portal brought him here.”
Chip wagged a finger. “We don’t know that. How could we know that?”
“That’s what the data suggest,” Dot replied. “You see, once a swimmer gets here, there’s pretty much no way to leave, except…” Dot ran her finger across her neck, like she was slitting her own throat.
Chip turned away from Dot, a look of mild disgust on his face. “All of us swimmers are trying to get home,” he explained. “We haven’t found a way yet, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t a way. Unfortunately, some have croaked. We don’t know what happens to ones who croak, because once they croak, well, we don’t see ’em anymore.”
Wiping his eyes, Alistair peered across the room at one of the more fearsome ciphers, a scaly man with the head of a Tyrannosaurus rex. “And do the ciphers … Are they the ones who … cause the swimmers to croak?” he asked.
“Mostly,” Dot answered. “Though maniacs like Hadrian have contributed to the carnage. That’s why we’re not going to lose any sleep over his demise.”
There must have been over two hundred ciphers in the room, an impressive collection. They may have been out of commission, but they certainly still looked fearsome. “If these things are so awful, then why are you sending kids to hunt them?” Alistair asked.
“Two reasons,” Dot said. “First, these ciphers are slaughtering figments, and even though they’re nothing but figments, they don’t deserve to be slaughtered. And second, the more we know about the ciphers, the more we know about Him. The closer we get to Him.”
Alistair didn’t need her to say who the Him was, and Chip and Dot looked at Alistair slightly cockeyed, because his face must have told them something.
“What is it?” Dot asked.
No. He couldn’t tell them. He wasn’t ready. He could barely trust Baxter. How could he trust these two? “Nothing,” Alistair said. “I was thinking about the riddle. What was the right answer?”
Chip chuckled. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“It was a test,” Dot said. “Figments answer one way. Ciphers answer another. Swimmers … well, we could tell you were a swimmer.”
“Is there a right answer?”
Chip chuckled again, but neither he nor Dot said anything.
In place of an answer, a siren went off, bleating like an angry goat. Immediately, Dot grabbed Alistair by the wrist and led him back toward the counter. She was powerful, and he was tired. Even if he had had the strength to fight, he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to wrest himself free. “Where are you taking me?” he asked.
“This isn’t about you,” Dot said.
As they neared the counter, the walls started to form around them. Almost instantly, they were back in the small room filled with the buttons and lights. The buttons were still white. The lights were once again yellow.
“Pulling up a picture,” Chip said as he started tapping buttons.
Dot let go of Alistair’s arm. It didn’t matter, though, because there was nowhere for him to go now. The space was completely enclosed.
“Analyzing,” Dot said as she pulled out her tiny typewriter.
On the countertop where Alistair had rested minutes before, a projected image appeared. It was slightly blurry, but it showed stars and the vast nothingness of outer space. In the middle of the frame was a floating body, arms and legs stretched out like an X.
“Latching on,” Chip said, pressing more buttons. “Drawing it in.”
The image of the body got bigger, as if it were moving closer to them, and as it got bigger, it pulled its hands to its face and its knees to its chest, making itself into a ball.
“Opening the hatch,” Chip said, fingers leaping from button to button. Then a sound—a mechanical flit.
“He’s angry,” Dot said as skinny loops of paper piled up at her feet. “Plenty angry.”
The image disappeared from the counter, and the counter opened up in the middle, like a pair of church doors. A man—now more than an image, now flesh and blood—floated up and out of the opening. The opening snapped shut, became a counter again, and the man, still curled up, fell down onto its surface. Another flit, and the glass shell shot up and around the new captive.
“Human as well, at least by the looks of him,” Chip remarked.
“Vital signs are perfect,” Dot said, typing away. “Blood is pump, pump, pumping.”
Alistair moved closer to the glass to get a better look. “Who is he?”
“Oh, we get swimmers like you all the time,” Dot said. “Though they’re always younger than this guy. And most are smart enough to wear spacesuits. It’s dangerous to be out there for more than a minute or two. You were lucky we pulled you in when we did. So is this character.”
The man was still curled in a ball, but his feet were fidgeting. He wore jeans, sneakers, and a slightly dirty T-shirt. He rolled over onto his back, but his hands still covered his face.
“So he’s another swimmer?” Alistair asked.
“Not necessarily,” Chip said, still at the buttons. “Sometimes a cipher will sneak through, or someone will drop one through a gateway for us, like it’s some cipher laundry chute.”
Alistair took another step closer because he recognized the jeans the man was wearing. They were plain old blue jeans, but he was familiar with the stains, the rips. He took yet another step closer, and the man must have heard him, because he turned his head toward Alistair and pulled his hands away from his face.
Alistair stopped. He stared into the man’s eyes.
“Kyle?” Alistair asked.