They moved as a group and surveyed the factory floor. Biggs carried Emily, Polly clung to John and gaped at everyone else in turn. Everyone, including Mick. Wait’ll she sees Harvey, thought Scott.
“We should mess this place up,” said Erno.
“Quickly,” urged Merle. “Nimue will send reinforcements before long.”
Merle and the twins knew the factory best, having each taken the tour three or four times. Once again a personal Bigfoot turned out to be a practical thing to have as they directed Biggs to snap conveyors, crush ovens, lift plastic barrels of grain meal over his head, destroy an eyewash station.
“We probably could have left them the eyewash station,” said Scott.
“This is mad,” said John. “Should you be doing this? We should call the police—”
Merle frowned at him. “You haven’t been reading any of my emails, have you?”
“We should find that Milk-7 business,” said Mick. “Flush it down the loo.”
“They’ll just make more,” said Scott. “Won’t they?”
“Maybe not,” said Erno, and his face was crowded with thoughts. “I’m just remembering something this surgeon said in the temple. That Milk-7 was mostly made from the milk of some animal. Crop-milk, he called it. Do you remember, Emily?”
“I was a little out of it,” Emily answered from a dark corner. “Crop-milk is this stuff that just a few kinds of birds produce, to feed their young. Flamingoes and pigeons and doves. They regurgitate it into their babies’ mouths,” she added with growing distaste.
“The surgeon said it came from draco…”
“Draco mythologicus,” Emily remembered, and she made a face. “I’VE BEEN PUTTING DRAGON BARF IN MY EARS FOR TEN YEARS?!”
“Here!” called Mick. “Look! The dairy!”
In a far corner of the factory floor they could just make out a large pair of sliding barn doors that were labeled DAIRY. They slid the doors open, and there it was: Milk-7. A great big tank of it. Merle turned a valve, and gallons upon gallons of the pink stuff came down in a torrent and started painting the floor. Scott noticed Emily looking at it with something like longing. Could anyone ever be willing to be less smart than they already are? he wondered. Even if just a little, even if it would make them happier?
“Wonder how they got it across from the magical world,” said Merle.
“Things wouldn’t be as hard as livin’ creatures,” Mick answered. “They could get great batches o’ the crop-milk across on November Day an’ May Day, I bet. What’s with the lad?”
Erno had his hands over his ears and a look of intense concentration on his face, like he was trying to shut them all out to think. “Something that hunter guy said,” he told them. “About milking dumb animals. It’s reminding me of this clue my foster dad left in his notes.”
“You had his notes?” said Emily.
“Yeah, but I lost them. Thought it had all been for nothing, but if I could just remember…
“‘There’s a short…’”
“No. It was…
“‘There’s a sort of … sorting shorthand
both for magic beast and fairy.
All the sly land on the island,
all the dumb land in the’”
“Dairy,” Erno finished. “It must be, right?”
“It would make sense, separatin’ them like that,” Mick whispered. “Nimue would have no use personally for the magic o’ griffins an’ dragons. She could only steal fairy magic for herself, so she’d keep folk like me an’ Harvey at headquarters on the island. She might keep the animals here, to put their magic in the cereals maybe.”
John flicked on the lights, which stuttered to life from caged and naked bulbs in the ceiling. They looked around them. The dairy was a smaller adjoining building with a now-empty tank and a few metal supply cabinets and an old rusty tractor with broken windows and no engine. And a concrete floor covered in four inches of Milk-7, which they were all currently wading in.
“What are we looking for?” asked Polly. “Animals?”
“There are no animals here,” said Scott.
“Should go,” said Biggs. He scooped up the Utz kids, sending pink goop spattering all over.
“Wait,” said Emily. “Does anyone else think that tractor has awfully good tires for something with no engine?”
It was true; the tires looked brand-new. Black, shiny, a little pink goo on the bottoms but otherwise nice. Biggs set the kids down again and pushed the tractor right over, crumpling its cab and breaking what was left of the windshield. Then he started fishing around in the Milk-7 with his hand.
“Kept me in a bunker,” he told them. “When I was a boy. Underground.” Suddenly he found what he was looking for and yanked at a metal ring in the floor. A cellar door yawned open, and the Milk started oozing down a set of stairs into a dark space below.
Opening the door triggered the lights, and Biggs led them cautiously down the steps into a wide hall lined on either side by cages.
“They’re all empty,” said Erno.
“They’re not,” said Scott.
“Look at them,” John whispered. “Amazing.”
In the largest cage was a griffin. Its tawny, hungry-looking body ended sharply with a raptor’s head and keen eyes that were undimmed by whatever disgraces it had endured here. It stretched back on its leonine haunches and spread its piebald wings and glared.
The griffin shared quarters with a dozen luminous owls and crackling pyrotechnic birds, all of them hemmed in by chicken wire.
In a cage within a cage was the unicat. Beside this an aquarium filled with knotty toads that croaked “OUT OUT OUT OUT” when Biggs grew near.
A third cage held a leopard-bodied creature with a long serpentine neck and head, and slender legs tipped with hooves. It lay on its side, throat fluttering with a hundred distinct voices that whined like a dog pound.
And in a fourth cage…
“Is that a unicorn?” Polly whimpered, drawing close to Scott.
The unicorn pawed at the straw and raised its proud head.
“We have to get it out,” said John. “I can’t stand seeing it like this.”
“This machine,” muttered Merle. He’d approached a grotesque cube of pipes, compressors, pumps, and wires at the end of the hall.
“They use that to get the magic out,” Mick told him. “To store it.”
Merle winced at the hoses and arms and tubes of it with a glimmer of recognition in his eyes.
Biggs ripped the door off the griffin’s cage, then shielded the twins as it hunched low, uncertain, then scrabbled out into the hall and through the cascading pink goo up the stairs, surrounded by a dazzling flock of birds. Everyone pressed close against the sides of the hall to let them pass. There was a great clatter above, then the crash of what must have been a skylight.
“Mr. Wilson has some explaining to do,” Emily said to Erno.
“He’s sick,” Erno answered. “He needs help.”
Next Biggs released the unicat and placed its lean gray body in Scott’s arms. It didn’t protest.
The toads stumped up the stairs (croaking “LIBERTY LIBERTY LIBERTY”), and the leopard-thing slunk out behind them.
Finally, the unicorn. It emerged from its cage, minced through the goop, and then took off at a run, its radiant body ascending effortlessly up the stairs and into the factory darkness. Scott caught his breath, and found he was standing next to his father. They shared a glance.
“It’s time to go,” said Merle. “Seriously.”
They sloshed through the Milk (which seemed to be simmering now, almost boiling, though it felt no hotter against their feet) and up the stairs. Then they followed the unicorn’s trail out the exit into the parking lot.
“That felt good,” shouted Erno. “We’ve ruined all their plans, right?”
“Don’t bet on it,” puffed Merle as he ran. “We slowed them down a little, maybe. They still have their factories in California and Europe.”
They neared the van and Biggs’s car. Harvey and Finchbriton watched them approach. The pooka called, “Did we win?”
Then the factory exploded behind them.
Everyone, even Biggs, was knocked forward. A jagged column of flame and smoke rose from the center of the factory. A rippling flood of hot air blasted through the front doors and started blistering the pink paint right off the dragon over the entrance. Steaming bits of factory and marshmallow shapes rained down everywhere.
“Is everyone all right?” John was shouting. “Is anyone hurt?”
Everyone was fine. They got to their feet and watched the building blaze for a moment, lighting up the sky orange, like a second sun rising in the east.
“Wow,” breathed Erno.
“Yeah,” said Scott. “Wait. Why did it explode? Was that something we did?”
“Beats me,” said Merle.
One of the grain elevators toppled and pretty much smothered the fire.
“Huh.”
“Well,” Scott added finally. “What should I do with this,” he said, meaning the cat.
“Probably just stick it in the bushes somewhere.”
Scott went and stuck it in the bushes, but it followed him back.
“Okay, I guess we’re taking the cat. Should we go?”
They went.
