The metal crate in which they were being carried was just big enough that Erno could turn to look out the narrow opening beside his head, then back again to check on Emily. She seemed unhappy but calm, oddly resigned. As if she’d always expected to end up in a cage eventually. As though she’d been backing into one her whole life.
“I’m sorry, Erno,” she whispered suddenly.
“Sorry … for what? What did you do?”
“I knew this was going to happen. Something like this. I’ve known all along, but I wouldn’t let myself believe it. Did you know,” she continued, “that I did a little research about my ear infection a while back?”
Erno shook his head.
“All the books I checked said it should normally last about six months to a year. Six months to a year, and here I’ve had it since I was a baby.”
Erno nodded, and wondered if she realized her pink ear medicine had been causing the trouble rather than treating it. “Did you ask Mr. Wilson about it?”
“He said I had a special kind of infection. Very rare. He said I’d probably need to use these drops for a long time. I didn’t look into it after that,” Emily said. “I just trusted Dad. I was only five.”
Five, thought Erno.
“I just didn’t think about it. I … didn’t let myself,” she whispered. “I’ve been like this for a long time. It’s like, I suddenly remember that I’ve forgotten something. Something really important. But when I try to concentrate, to recall what the important thing is, it slips away. It slips away, and I forget that I ever remembered that I forgot it, for a while. But I’m facing it now. I’m facing it all, and it’s like I already know everything. Everything. I know it’s not true, of course, but that’s what it feels like.”
“You don’t know everything,” Erno tried to comfort her. “You … don’t know what number I’m thinking of.”
“Seven,” said Emily.
Erno frowned.
“It’s like my mind’s a black hole,” she continued. “All the knowledge of the world just rushes in.”
“Wait,” said Erno. “I’m thinking of another one. Between one and one hundred.”
“Forty-three.”
“That’s … not it,” Erno attempted to say casually.
“Don’t lie.”
“Okay,” Erno admitted. “But how did you know?”
“You wanted a number near the middle because it seemed safer,” Emily explained. “All those other numbers, like padding on either side. But not too near the middle. So something in the forties, because you subconsciously believe anything over fifty is aggressive, and you’re not an aggressive person.”
Erno huffed.
“You chose an odd number,” Emily continued, “because odd numbers seem more ‘random.’ You—”
“Okay, new one!” Erno whispered hotly. “Sixteen!”
Emily paused, delicately.
“Erno, I’m supposed to guess, not—”
“Okay! Yes. I know that. So—you guess.”
“It’s still sixteen, isn’t it.”
Erno sighed. “Yes.”
“The only thing I don’t get is what happened in the tree house,” Emily said with a little frown. “When I blacked out.”
“The magic?”
She scoffed. “There’s no such thing.”
The guards carrying their crate trudged along out of the park, their gaits swaying the crate in a constant tide that was getting Erno a little queasy. He could only imagine what it was doing to Emily. Somewhere, close by, still more soldiers were carrying the unconscious body of Biggs. It had taken ten men to subdue him.
“There’s something else I know,” Emily continued, more softly than before. “I know that … we were brought together and … raised together for the sake of an experiment. To test the Milk-7. I know… I know we’re not really brother and sister.”
Erno turned away from the window. Emily was all folded up, tiny as she could be, her arms hugging her knees to her chest. He reached out and put his hand over hers.
“Sure we are.” He smiled. “Don’t be stupid.”
“This is Biggs’s car?” asked Scott. It didn’t seem possible.
“I’ve theen him get out of it,” said Harvey as he unlocked the door. “It’th like a pop-up book.”
“An’ you have the keys … why?” said Mick.
“I was clothetht to them. We planned to meet at the car. Gueth they didn’t make it. So! I can drop you guyth thomewhere but then I’m driving thtraight through to Mexthico.”
“Wait,” said Scott, “no.”
“Harvey,” Mick began, “those kids need help. That big man who took yeh in needs help. Yeh said before that yeh could smell magic in Em’ly. I was thinkin’…”
Harvey spun around and threw his hands up. “What? That I could track her? Rethcue everyone? After that thtunt I pulled in the park, I’m lucky I thtill have enough glamour to light a candle!”
“Yeh owe these folks. They took yeh in. If you want that glamour back—”
“I gotta live an honorable life? Thweet Danu, are you joking? This ith where magic cometh to die, Mick! Have you theriouthly not figured thith out yet? Glamour doethn’t return, here. I’m… I’m thorry yourth ith gone, but…”
They fell silent, and Mick bowed his head. He thinks it’s gone, too, thought Scott. Mick thinks his magic’s gone for good.
“There’s livin’ well for its own sake,” Mick murmured. “An’ doin’ what’s right. There’s still that.”
Harvey lifted his ears, looked suddenly resolute. “You’ve forgotten what we are. We’re the angelth what didn’t fall all the way. We’re the mere anarchy loothed upon the world,” he told Mick. “You’ve forgotten what I am, anyway. In four thouthand yearth I haven’t never done no one a good deed he didn’t regret.”
“Forget it, Mick,” Scott muttered. “He doesn’t have to. He already saved my life.”
“Lithen to thith one. Thith really the kid you want to hitch your wagon to, Mick? I liked him better when he wath about to die. Thomeone should point a gun at him every day of hith life.”
“Shut it,” said Mick. “Forget what yeh owe that family, but remember what yeh owe me. I broke yeh outta Goodco twice, in seventy-three an’ in eighty-six. Take us where them kids’re being held an’ we’re square, an’ then it’s off to Mexico with you.”
Harvey’s ears sagged again. Then he stepped aside and opened the car door like a valet. “Andale, muchachos.”
The slit window offered Erno and Emily only notions of where they were, and where they might be going. Still, Emily said “Freemen’s Temple” as their cage chattered across the floor of the pitch-black and rumbling cargo van, and when the doors opened, Erno thought she must be right. He saw bits and swatches of that Halloween building again, and their hutch was hauled by soldiers right up to its dark doors. The doors gave way, and then it was candlelight, bits of red and gold, two towering columns, men … in robes? Then hallways, more doors, and a floor in a great dark room where they came finally to rest.
A massive cluster of overhead lights came on at once with a sound like a cough, then grew slowly warmer and brighter as if the room itself were waking. They were on the cold marble of a sunken circular floor that was ringed by six rows of stadium seats—fussily decorated walnut wood seats with black velvet cushions and dark gold trim. A gladiator arena, thought Erno.
“A surgery,” said Emily. And then Erno realized she was right again: more than anything, the room resembled a painting in the Philadelphia art museum of a crowd of spectators watching doctors cut into a dead or sleeping patient. The Gross Clinic, it was called, and it was.
Four doors opened at compass points, and robed figures filed in. Black-hooded mantles, open in front over pink waistcoats, white aprons, and deep red pants. All men. They sat down silently, and in an orderly and practiced manner. Emily’s chest rose and fell rapidly to the shallow breaths and fluttering heartbeat of the tiny animal she was.
“Freemen,” said a voice somewhere. No one had stood, and the room was something of an echo chamber, so it was hard to determine who was speaking. “They say good things come to those who wait.”
“Whoever they are,” said another robe, and there was a murmur of good-natured laughter.
“Indeed,” said another robe, possibly the first again. Now Erno saw him, descending the stadium stairs to stand by the cage. “They. They with their ancient wisdom. The mysterious they who pull the strings. I think, for the sake of argument, that we can agree that they are we?”
Another murmur, one of agreement. “Quite so,” said an anonymous someone.
“They also say, I believe, that one cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. I regret you can’t see much through this cage, but if, on your way to tonight’s ceremony, you choose to peek through its thin windows, you might pay your respects to these two unfortunate eggs we’ll be breaking.”
Erno was pretty sure he’d followed all that. He wished he hadn’t.
“And let us have a round for our Augustus Wilson—”
Emily gasped.
“—who like Launcelot has faltered and fled but like Launcelot has returned to us once more. Gus?”
Mr. Wilson pulled back his hood and rose to acknowledge the light applause. Emily wasn’t watching.
“It’s really him,” whispered Erno. “It’s—”
“I know who it is,” said Emily.
Harvey drove with wild abandon. Harvey drove as if cars, pedestrians, bicycles, and birds were all semi-imaginary figments to be dispersed with curses and constant honking. Harvey drove much like Scott expected him to, really. The fact that Harvey was doing all this with his rabbity head sticking out the window didn’t attract so much attention as the fact that nobody else on the road could see him in the first place.
In fact, when the attention of the other drivers wasn’t focused on the sight of an apparently driverless car, it was focused almost entirely on the one passenger the drivers could see: Scott, who had somehow ended up in the backseat despite being the tallest if you didn’t count Harvey’s ears.
“I should be in the front seat,” he proclaimed quietly.
“Yeh should call shotgun then,” said Mick.
“Don’t even understand how an elf knows about shotgun.”
“MOVE IT!” shouted Harvey between sniffs of his nose. “Don’t the halfwitth in thith town know reckleth driving when they thee it? OUTTA THE WAY, HAMHOCKTH!”
He’d lost Emily’s trail, so they were circling the same block while Harvey tried to sniff it out again.
“You’re not old enough for the front,” Mick argued.
“You’re not big enough,” Scott answered. He mollified himself by imagining Mick wriggling in a big plastic car seat.
“There,” the rabbit-man said finally, pulling in his head. His ears looked like they’d just come out of the dryer. “I think I have her again. Heading eatht.”
“Thought we’d be headed toward Goodco headquarters,” said Scott. “Or even the factory, but … you know where we might be going…”
“The Freemen’s Temple by the train station?” Mick answered. “I was thinkin’ it, too.”
They made another couple turns and then the train station was in view. “Why don’t yeh let us out there, Harvey,” said Mick, so Harvey drove up to the passenger drop-off island west of the station as if Scott and Mick were just any boy and his imaginary friend, running late for a train.
“Hey,” said Harvey as Mick and Scott stumbled from the car. “Hey. Mick.”
Mick turned.
Harvey seemed, for once, pleasantly at a loss for words. “May the road rithe to meet you,” he said finally.
Mick held Harvey’s gaze for a moment, then grunted and turned away.
The station was nearly deserted this time of night. They walked around the edge and turned the corner, and then they could see it: the temple. All gargoyles and arches. The whole structure was a massive gargoyle, crouching over the boulevard.
“Last chance to go to the police,” Scott breathed.
“We are goin’ to the police,” Mick answered, jutting his chin toward the temple. “They’re just inside, waitin’ for us.”
Scott sighed. A last car turned in front of them and then the light was theirs.
“So how are we going to do this? How do we even get in?”
Mick grinned up at him. “Betcha they forgot to lock the door.”
There was a spirited conversation going on in the surgery. Most of the cloaked men had already left the room for the ceremony mentioned earlier, but a new man had joined them. Not a Freeman perhaps. He wasn’t wearing a robe but rather seemed to be dressed for fishing or a safari. A Freeman was just answering some question of his that Erno hadn’t heard.
“He’s … it’s…”
“I think ‘it’ will suffice,” said the new man.
“It’s being held in another part of the temple. Under constant guard. It’s very strong.”
“I have seen the beast in action, and I wholeheartedly agree,” said the new man. “What a find. I will even take him in lieu of payment.”
“They’re talking about Biggs,” Emily whispered.
“I know,” said Erno. “I mean, I figured.”
The new man circled their cage, squinting from a distance through the slits. His hands trembled slightly. But that may have been age rather than nerves, thought Erno. He was pretty old.
“As soon as Haskoll returns he will help me fully sedate and transport the specimen back to the lodge. It’ll be nice to have one that a person can see without rose-colored glasses, wot?”
“But he’s not really Bigfoot,” a Freeman tried to explain. “We think he might be this kid Goodco tested on in the sixties.”
“Indeed. And then this ‘kid’ escaped from Goodco’s West Coast facility and into the northern California woods, where its movements were recorded in the famous Patterson-Gimlin film. There may be no such animal as Bigfoot, gentlemen, but this fellow will do in a pinch, eh? I’m going to display him next to the wet bar.”
All but one of the remaining Freemen took up this debate, which seemed to center on whether their leader would want the Bigfoot or not, and whether their leader’s interests trumped the old man’s. Throughout this, one Freeman stood apart. He just now came to crouch by the cage.
“Hello, kids,” said Mr. Wilson.
Erno called him a name that he hadn’t even realized he knew until that moment. Mr. Wilson cleared his throat.
“Hi, Dad,” whispered Emily.
Erno sighed. “What are you going to do to us?”
“Me? Nothing. I’m not a part of this anymore, Erno.”
“Oh, my mistake—you know what threw me off? The matching outfits.”
“I tried to run away,” Mr. Wilson whispered, and he looked over his shoulder at the others by the door. “I’ll run away again. But they were right on my tail, and it was either come in or be captured.”
Emily was still backed into the corner of the cage, as far from Mr. Wilson’s face as she could be. But still she touched Erno on the hand, a touch that chided, Don’t be mean.
“I’ve been sick,” said Mr. Wilson. “I haven’t been myself—”
“Because you’ve been taking the Milk,” Erno interjected. “And it changed you, right? Poisoned your mind like it’s poisoned Emily’s? Just clear something up for me, because I’m totally confused: does Jekyll turn into Hyde in this example or is it Hyde into Jekyll?”
Mr. Wilson looked down at the floor, then over his shoulder again. “I can’t take back what I’ve done. But you kids should know that I care about you in my own way.”
Emily made a little noise. She’d been crying, silently. “Obviously,” she whimpered. “I already know that.”
Mr. Wilson smiled. “Course you do.”
“Well, I guess I haven’t figured out this new game yet,” said Erno. “So tell me why I should believe anything you say.”
“Because I’ve just unlocked your cage,” Mr. Wilson replied, then he rose quickly and walked away.