WHEN THE INKY darkness turned to a brilliant pink light, Ji felt nothing but a distant numbness. Not cold, not desperate. Nothing.
Now this is a better afterlife, he thought. At least Roz is going to like the color.
Then a war hammer smashed him in the back.
His body jerked and water gushed from his mouth like a fountain. He gasped and writhed, filling his lungs with beautiful pure air. The war hammer struck again, and he spewed more water and gulped more air—until his vision cleared.
He was kneeling in the tusk deer cage beside the water hole. Roz held him upright with one of her hands like a vise around both his wrists, while her other hand pounded his back.
The tears in her eyes glinted like stars.
“Stop!” he gasped. “Stop hitting me!”
“Oh, thank summer!” she rumbled with a sob of relief. “You’re alive!”
“I won’t be for long”—he coughed wetly—“if you hit me again.”
She glowered at him. “You don’t know how to swim! What were you thinking?”
“That I’d make a better merman,” he grumbled. “What kind of fishboy can’t even breathe underwater?”
She held him as he coughed a few more times. “I’m sure you’re a fine merman.”
“Whoa, Roz!” he said, seeing the ruined bars of his cage, which she’d crushed like cornstalks. “Did you crash through both cages in like two seconds?”
Once Missroz thought you were dying, Nin said, she broke the bars in an eyeblink.
“Wow, Roz,” Ji said, with a final cough. “You really . . . wow.”
Roz blushed. “Don’t make a fuss.”
“Can I thank you for saving my life?”
“You may.”
Touching her forearm felt like touching armadillo-shell boots. “Thank you.”
“Well, they heard that,” Sally yowled from the roof of the next cage. “There are two squads of soldiers, coming fast.”
“And a few guards on horses,” Chibo said, squinting beside her. “At least, they sound like guards on horses.”
“What shall we do?” Roz asked Ji.
He rubbed his stinging eyes. “Sally, stay on the toproofs. Find a path out of here without running into the soldiers. Chibo, climb down and—”
Chibo’s vaporous wings spread from the hump on his back. They glimmered a green so dark that it was barely visible, and he swooped down and landed outside the broken bars of Ji’s cage.
“And what?” he asked calmly, before doing a happy jig. “Did you see that? Did you see? I glided! I glid!”
“They’re almost here!” Sally growled. “I can take them, Ji. Let’s fight. It’s the only honorable—”
“Find us a way out!” he snapped, pushing to his feet with an ease that surprised him, considering he’d almost drowned a minute earlier. “Now!”
“Fine,” she growled. “Jerk.”
“Nin?” he asked, looking around the destroyed cage. “Where are you?”
Here and there, like we said!
“Well, what are you?”
We don’t know, Nin said. We like digging and scouting and we’re mostly in the urn—
“You’re mostly in the urn?” Ji rubbed his face with his palm. “You’re some mind-talking, not-visible thing in an urn.”
We’re some aws! We’re also in the leaves and—
“Can you lift the urn?” Ji asked Roz.
“I’m not entirely sure—” She grabbed the urn, two hundred pounds of dirt in a clay pot, then straightened. “Yes.”
“Good—bring it with us.” Ji looked toward the sound of hoofbeats. “Chibo, start glowing—”
“I can glow!” Chibo fluted.
“—and fly above the soldiers in circles around the zoo—”
“I can fly!”
“—and lead them away from us. Then meet us outside the palace grounds.”
“How’s he supposed to find us again?” Sally asked, her tail lashing. “He can barely see!”
“Right, yeah,” Ji said. “Forget that, Chibo—we’ll save flying for later.”
“This way, fast!” Sally called, and darted across the roofs.
Roz lumbered along below her, moving fast despite her size. “Are you sure you can run?” she asked Ji in a gravelly whisper. “You almost died.”
“I’m okay,” he said, trotting after her. “Actually, I’m better than okay.” His shoulders didn’t ache, his neck didn’t hurt. “For the first time ever. My eyes burn a little, but other’n that I feel kind of . . . great.”
“Maybe mermen heal fast?” Chibo panted, trying to keep up.
“I guess.” Ji grabbed Chibo’s hand to help him along—and almost pulled him off his feet. “Wah! You don’t weigh anything, Chibo!”
“I weigh something.”
“Yeah, like a sack of feathers.”
“Sprites are light,” Chibo informed him. “Also, we fly.”
Ji dragged him after Roz. “And your eyes are green.”
“No way!” Chibo blinked his unearthly emerald eyes. “Really?”
“Green as a new blade of grass,” Ji said, trotting past the last cages of the Menagerie.
They followed Sally down a wide flight of stairs flanked by bugbear statues and terra-cotta warriors. At the bottom of the steps, a fancy promenade stretched in both directions, but Sally stopped halfway down.
“Follow me!” she yipped, bounding over the railing. “Quick, quick!”
When Roz hefted the urn onto the railing, a few clumps of dirt fell out—and crawled back inside. Ji did a double take but couldn’t look closer because Chibo needed help over the railing. A moment later, Sally led them across the hillside and onto a wide cart path that ran between high wooden buildings inside the Forbidden Palace.
“Hide behind that caravan!” she growled. “And shut your faces—there are guards everywhere!”
Roz squeezed between the caravan and the wall, moving slowly to keep the urn from smacking the wheel. When Ji and Chibo crowded in beside her, one of Chibo’s wings poked from his hump and glowed faintly.
Ji elbowed him and the wing vanished.
You all have to be molequiet, Nin announced, but we can still talk. They can’t hear us. We could tell you a story of longsince, if you want. Or how to roast sweetbeets with spicy peppers—
“Shht,” Sally hissed at the urn. “I’m trying to listen.”
Silence fell. A dark cloud drifted away from the moons, and shadows loomed against the wall. Then a squad of soldiers trotted down a street on the other side of the buildings, weapons drawn and armor jangling.
Ji’s breath caught. Roz grabbed his shoulder anxiously, in a painful grip, but he didn’t even flinch. When the soldiers disappeared, he exhaled in relief. Chibo rubbed his bald scalp, Roz removed her hand from Ji’s shoulder—
And two guards on horseback cantered into the cart path.
Plans whirled in Ji’s head. Should he send Sally under the caravan to startle the guards’ horses? Tell Roz to pry open the door and try to hide inside? Or close his eyes and pray that the guards didn’t spot them?
Before he decided, the guards clip-clopped past. Ji took a breath . . . then managed not to shriek when Sally appeared in front of him, hanging upside down by her tail.
“We don’t need to hide,” she purred. “Me and Roz can kick their bums.”
“Roz isn’t fighting,” he whispered.
“Look at her! She’s a battle machine.”
“I am looking,” he told her. “All I see is Roz.”
Sally shifted her big-eyed gaze toward Roz, who was prodding the big ceramic urn curiously, her expression sweet despite looking like a troll. A few papaya seedlings sprouted from the urn’s dirt, and she brushed a leaf aside, her massive four-fingered hand still delicate.
“Okay, yeah.” Sally’s muzzle drew downward. “I guess she’s not really a fighter.”
“But when I look at you,” Ji told her, “I see a battle machine.”
Her huge eyes brightened. “You do?”
“The cutest battle machine in the world.”
She whacked his head with a paw, then cocked her furry ears. “There aren’t any soldiers nearby. What now?”
“We need—” Ji frowned. “The first thing we need is cloaks. We kind of stand out.”
“You don’t,” Chibo fluted. “At least not much.”
“Because he’s half merman,” Sally growled, “and mermen are already half human. So Ji’s only a quarter fishy.”
Roz lifted her gaze from the urn. “That is excellent arithmetic, Sally!”
“I guess three quarters of me can’t breathe under water,” Ji said.
And also can’t swim, Nin added. You looked like a plucked chicken throwing a tantrum in a bathtub.
Chibo burbled a laugh, then asked Ji, “What’s the second thing we need?”
“To get out of the city.”
“What we really need,” Sally said, “is to break the spell and turn human again.”
To turn ogre again! Nin said.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Roz said. “We’re not even truly a troll, hobgoblin, sprite, merman, and . . . whatever Nin is. We’re twisted, we’re incomplete. We cannot live this way.”
“We won’t live at all unless we get out of here,” Ji said. “And we don’t know how to break the spell.”
“But we know who does,” Roz said.
“Who?” Ji asked. “Brace?”
“No. Ti-Lin-Su.”
“The scholar?”
“She’s the world’s leading zozologist,” Roz said. “She knows more about creatures than anyone.”
“Fine,” Ji said. “But first we need to survive. Where can we find cloaks?”
“A laundry?” Chibo suggested.
“Good,” Ji said. “Did you see one?”
“I can barely see you.”
“Oh, right. Uh, did anyone see servants’ quarters or anything?”
Sally pointed a fuzzy finger. “There are a few dingy buildings that way. Sort of huddled together.”
“Sounds like servants to me,” Ji said.