They’d thrown him into a prison cell with Gruffy. Theron stared out between the bars. When the fire-bearded thugs had moved him to this new cell, he overheard them talking and discovered that he was inside a mountain. If that was true, this room must have been on the other side from where Jimmy broke Theron’s comet stone. The rock walls were blue granite, not red volcano rock. The air was cool. There was moss everywhere, and streaks of water trickled in several places. And the door was totally weird. It was made of overlapping blue steel leaves, and they parted to let you in or out if you had a little silver leaf key.
Theron and Gruffy were in a prison cell with bars made of smooth, white marble, while Pip was in a smaller cage hanging just outside the cell. There was a third cage, almost as small as Pip’s, in the center of the room and right under a trickle of water that dripped down from the ceiling. The three Flickapaws were stuffed inside, wet and miserable, and as tiny as actual kittens now. The flaming beard guys had brought the kitten cage in, muttering about the Flickapaws trying to carry Jayla out of the mountain. The escape would have worked, except Jimmy dumped water on them. Apparently, Flickapaws shrank when watered.
Gruffy and Pip both tried to talk to Theron, but he just kept staring out the bars. He wanted to help Pip and Gruffy. He wanted to help the cats, but Jimmy had taken away his power. He couldn’t help anyone.
Theron looked down at his fist and opened it. He imagined the little silver figure, imagined it flattening and then unfolding over and over again. Nothing happened.
He glanced up at the bars. Gruffy had bitten and pulled at them until he chipped his beak. He had yanked at them until his talons bled. He had rammed them until he knocked himself out.
When he came to, he had said that Lorelei had used her feather, had called to him, but the bars were griffon-proof. They had been strengthened by Jimmy’s silver spider thingie. Regular marble would have shattered under Gruffy’s attack.
The whole mountain shook, and a crack sliced across the ceiling overhead. Dust and small chunks of rock fell as granite ground together. Theron ducked, waiting for the ceiling to fall in, but it didn’t.
Gruffy looked around. The Flickapaws raised their sodden little heads.
“Lorelei has come for the Ink King at last,” Gruffy said, nodding sagely. “Veloran trembles at her approach.” He turned toward Theron. “We will soon be free.”
Theron hated himself for just sitting here, waiting for his sister to rescue him, but what could he do as his ten-year-old self? There were magic cats and griffons in this prison, and they couldn’t get out. He couldn’t open those bars if Gruffy couldn’t.
He thought about Lorelei. She had been alone for a whole year, with no powers and no idea where their parents were. She was so determined that she had pushed her way into the Wishing World. Lore never gave up. She made the impossible happen.
Theron got to his feet and walked to the bars. There was a way out of here. There had to be. He started tapping a beat on his legs as he stared at the bars, at the room, at the sodden little fire kitties. Seven Nation Army was the first song he’d ever learned on the drums where he finally got the beat, and it always helped him think.
“Ho, mighty Mirror Man,” Gruffy said, standing up in response to Theron’s movement. “You have an idea?” Gruffy moved up next to him and towered over him.
“No,” Theron said, and as soon as he said it, the idea came. He smiled. “Actually, yes.” He pulled his shirt off and put his teeth to the collar, making a small tear. He pinched it between his two hands and ripped the shirt in half. “Yes, this.” His gaze fell on Gruffy. “And a feather. Or two.”
Gruffy leaned his head back. “My feathers?”
“Are you sure this will work?” Gruffy asked.
“Sure, I’m sure,” Theron said. “Me and Kaeden played Batman in the backyard this one time. We had a piece of rope, and we made a grappling claw out of it by tying a rock to the end of it, then threw it up into the tree.” He didn’t mention that Kaeden got brained by the rock when it came back down and then wasn’t allowed to play with Theron anymore. Up to that point, the Batman plan had been working just fine.
Theron’s big idea was “potential energy,” which he learned at this spring’s school science fair. Potential energy meant that wood was just wood. It just sat there and did nothing. Until you gave it a spark, then it was fire, and it could do a lot of stuff, like cook your food. Or light the darkness. Or burn down a forest. That was potential energy. It was like Lore. She’d had her Wishing World power locked inside her. It took a year of missing Mom and Dad to make it burst out. Potential energy.
And right now, Theron and Gruffy and Pip were all locked up. Just sitting here, like wood.
What they needed was a spark.
So they were making ropes out of Theron’s shirt. Gruffy had sliced them into neat, even strips with his razor-sharp beak. Before, just a shirt. Now they were rope parts. Potential energy. They had a neat little pile, and that’s when the next part of the rope plan began.
“I have never shed so many feathers.” Gruffy said, picking the last feather from his wing. He had given up twelve feathers to the project. Theron’s shirt didn’t have enough strips to make a rope long enough, but attaching them end-to-end with feathers gave them plenty of length. They made a slit in the shaft of the feather on each end, then threaded the strip of shirt through the slit and tied it off. Shirt—feather—shirt—feather. At first, Theron was worried the feathers would split when they pulled on the rope, but they were unbelievably strong.
“We’ll stick them back in after,” Theron said.
“They do not go back in,” Gruffy said.
“Joking,” Theron said.
“What would your mother say? Your mother say?” Pip asked, hiding a smile. “My son the plucked chicken. The plucked chicken.”
Gruffy glared at him.
Finally, they finished the rope. Theron lashed a chunk of granite that had fallen from the ceiling to the end of the rope.
He let out a breath. Now the hard part. He held his arm outside the bars and began swinging the stone like a sling. He’d gotten pretty good at the Batman grapple claw after days of practice, but that was with a real rope. He winced, waiting for the feather-shirt-string to break, but it held together.
To their right was a torch, stuck in a metal bracket on the wall. It must have been magical, because it didn’t seem affected by the wet room at all. He swung the rope fast and let it fly.
It missed, clacking against the wall.
“No problem,” he said. “Just need to warm up.” He reeled the stone back in.
On the second throw, the rope wrapped around the torch shaft.
“Nice throw! Nice throw!”
“Well done,” Gruffy said.
“Justice League, here I come,” Theron said. Now the tricky part.
He yanked, and the torch jostled, but didn’t come out. Okay. Good. A strong yank should do it. He played out some of the rope, shaking it a little to get the angle right.
Please hold together. Please hold together. Please hold together.
He had to get this right on the first try. If the rope broke, or the torch fell to the floor short of the Flickapaws cage, there was no way he’d be able to wrap the rope around it again.
Theron breathed in and held it.
“You can do it, Mirror Man,” Gruffy said.
Not the Mirror Man, Theron thought. Today I’m just Theron, but I’m going to have to be enough.
He flexed his shoulder in a circle, let out the breath, and took hold of the rope. Then he yanked with all his might.
The torch sprang from the bracket and spun across the room. It slid to a stop under the Flickapaws tiny cage, right under their drooping tails.
“Yeah,” Theron whooped, then grinned at Gruffy. “Instant giant kitties. Just add flame.”
Theron stared at the torch, hoping it would do its magic on the Flickapaws before the dripping cats put it out.
The mountain shook, then quieted, then shook again. Rock dust sifted down from the ceiling. More water trickled into the room through the extra cracks, but the trickle over the Flickapaws had shifted and dripped just to the left of the cage now.
“She is creating,” Gruffy said.
“And giving us a little luck. A little luck,” Pip said, watching the flame, growing now, underneath the Flickapaws.
Good job, Lore. Create away. Just don’t create a pile of rubble out of this mountain.
The kitties began to liven up, their tails swishing over the flame quicker and quicker. Sparks began to fly.
The Flickapaws grew. Their heads flicked back and forth, looking at the cage as though they didn’t even see it. They mewled low in their throats. The torch flared to twice its size. Flames licked up the sides. Water droplets hissed.
“You may wish to stand back,” Gruffy said.
Theron backed up.
“Rrrowrl!” the Flickapaws said, and all the fire kitties became the size of rhinos. The tiny cage split like an aluminum banana.
“Ha ha,” Theron shouted, jumping up and fist pumping the air. “All right, kitties. We let you out, now you let us out.”
All three of the Flickapaws’ heads turned toward the blue leaf door. They sprang, and the leader swatted at it with his huge paw. The door shattered. Blue metallic leaves shot everywhere like someone had thrown a bag of quarters at the wall. The Flickapaws charged out the ragged doorway and disappeared.
Theron ran to the bars. “Hey!” he yelled at them, but their mewls faded away down the hallway. “No!” He gripped the bars with his hands until his knuckles were white. “Hey!”
“Faithless creatures,” Gruffy said.
“What a rip. What a rip,” Pip said. “We free them and they run. Free them and they run.”
Theron shook the bars with all his strength, but only ended up shaking himself. “Rrrrrrrrrrggh!” he shouted, then fell to his knees. He pounded on the floor until he skinned his knuckles, then started to cry.
After a moment, Gruffy descended until he was laying on his belly next to Theron. He cocked his enormous eagle head downward.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Theron said.
“No,” Gruffy said.
“You don’t even know what ‘this’ I’m talking about.”
“No?”
Theron glanced at him, wiped at a tear. “I thought that coming back to the Wishing World would be a grand adventure. That I’d get to see HuggyBug and stop some bad guys and help Lore do the smart thing, whatever that is.”
“But why hurt yourself?”
“Because the clock is ticking, Lore is out there fighting, maybe getting hurt, and Jimmy has all of his bullies to beat her up and I’m . . . I’m useless!”
“What is a clock?” Gruffy asked.
Theron laughed, then snuffled as he wiped his nose. “You don’t know what a clock is,” he murmured to himself. “I want to laugh and yell at you at the same time.”
A little curve appeared at the edge of Gruffy’s beak. “My mother says that.”
Theron wiped his nose again. “You have a mother?”
“Of course.”
“I thought you were, you know, made up,” Theron said.
Gruffy cocked his head. “I do not know what you—”
“Never mind.” He shook his head. “It just seems weird. You’re huge, and you have parents.”
“I am twelve. Griffons do not fly free until they are thirteen.”
“You’re the same age as Lorelei.”
“Of course.”
“Why ‘of course’?”
“It has always been this way.”
“For like, what, a year?”
“For as long as I have known Lorelei.”
“Which is like, what, a year?”
Gruffy glanced at Theron like his Dad did when Theron tried to explain what lattice math was.
“Okay fine,” Theron said, standing up. He wiped his eyes. Gruffy slowly rose to his majestic height and looked down at Theron.
“I’m going to figure another way out of here,” Theron said.
“Of course you will,” Gruffy said. “You are Doolivanti.”
“You can say that twice. You can say that twice,” Pip finally piped up.
“At least we have a rope made out of shirt and griffon feather,” Theron said.
“We do have that,” Gruffy said.
Theron looked around the room, staring at the crack that the shaking had left in their cell, barely the size of his fist. They could try to stuff the feather rope up the crack, but what good would that do?
He let out a breath and turned around. They had a griffon, a human boy, a thin rope and a toucan in a cage. And a crack. And a bunch of new puddles of water on the ground. There wasn’t anything else that . . .
Theron’s gaze fell on the splintered bird cage that the fire kitties had left behind. He looked at the twisted little wires that had made up the bars.
Lore never gave up. She always came up with something.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re going to pick the lock.”