Seeing the boy as Vale’s prisoner gave me a swell of victory, but Ridge and I had the assignment of taking down the pirate-talking man. I raised my single hand as though I knew karate, and spun in a rapid circle, scanning all four corners for the man we despised.
“His dad’s not here,” Tina said.
I relaxed my ninja stance as Ridge took a step closer to the girls. “In case you guys happened to miss that,” he said, a smile on his face, “I was a shark. An actual shark.” He nodded. “Pretty cool.”
“It would have been cooler if you’d fit through the hole in the roof,” I muttered, turning back to our prisoner.
Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dim light of the car, I noticed something new about him. The boy had grown a full beard since I’d seen him on Mount Rushmore. I wondered what wish he had made to give him this new distinguished look.
“Where’s your dad?” I demanded. I didn’t like the idea of that cruel man out on his own.
“He’s not going to answer right now,” Vale said, tying off a strip of cloth around Thackary’s mouth. His wrists were already tied together in front of him.
“Where’s his genie?” I asked, knowing that she had to be close by.
“Right here,” said Tina, holding up a glass pickle jar. “Shut away for now.”
I felt much more confident knowing that Thackary was unable to access his genie. I stared down at the boy who the Universe had described as a very bad person. “It’s over, Thackary,” I said.
He made a sequence of grunts and groans, but nothing was intelligible with the gag in his mouth.
I grinned at Tina. “One step closer to completing my quest,” I said. “Now we’ve just got to keep him locked up for . . .” I did the math. “About four more days.”
The boy made some more sounds in an attempt to talk, but we weren’t going to take such a foolish risk with a dangerous Wishmaker like him, even if Tina was holding his genie in a jar.
On his knees in the hot boxcar, Thackary looked up at me. The sunlight angled in from above, and I saw that his right eye was bright yellow. Just like Tina and me. He must have accepted the same consequence at Mount Rushmore. It gave me a twinge of satisfaction to see that Thackary also had to endure the crazy eye.
The boy made a gesture with his bound hands. He wasn’t reckless enough to try to strip off the gag. Vale made it obvious that she would be on him before he could get it. He held one hand in front of him, using his other hand to draw something on the palm.
“I think he’s trying to tell us that his palms are itchy,” Ridge said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I replied. “I think he’s offering to read our palms and tell the future. Probably a trick.”
“Or,” said Tina, “he wants to write us a message since we won’t allow him to speak.”
The boy made a few more strained speaking sounds, his eyes casting desperately around the boxcar. Then he scrambled forward, using his bound hands to grasp a small piece of coal that must have tumbled into the boxcar with our arrival.
Hunched over the dirty floor, Thackary Anderthon began scraping a message. I watched the letters appear, but I couldn’t actually read it because of my consequence. When he was finished writing, the boy rocked back on his heels and let us have a clear look.
Tina and Vale shared a look of confusion. Ridge scratched his head, jaw slightly agape.
“What?” I said. “What does it say?”
Ridge pointed to the coal-scribed letters on the floor and read them aloud.
“‘I am NOT Thackary Anderthon!’”