Philippa Fisher and the Fairy's Promise (4 page)

At the far end of the room, a small woman was walking through a door that hadn’t existed a moment ago. As it closed behind her it promptly disappeared again, and she looked around the room. Her eyes fell on the fairies before her; each one quickly looked up and smiled, then got straight back to his or her work. She responded with a sharp nod and walked briskly down the aisle that ran along the center of the room. Well, the
sort of
aisle. Like everything else, it didn’t have a floor. I concentrated on not looking down. When I did, my insides seemed to slip away down into the nothingness below.

She seemed to hold the whole room in her power, even though she was quite small. She was probably only a little taller than me, with a very round, small face, pinched-in cheeks, gray hair cut short and neat. She wore a cotton suit with the jacket buttoned all the way up to her neck and huge gold bangles on both wrists that jangled as she made her way toward us.

As she reached us, I heard Daisy take a sharp breath. “Good afternoon, FGRaincl —”

“Come with me,” the woman said tightly. She was about to turn on her heel when she spotted me. “Who is this?” she asked, scornfully looking me up and down as though I’d blown in like a piece of trash off the street.

“I’m her cousin!” I burst out without thinking.

“She’s new to the department!” Daisy said at the exact same moment.

The woman narrowed her eyes and turned them first on Daisy, and then on me. Without saying a word, she slowly raised one eyebrow so high it
looked
like a question mark.

“Cousin?” the woman said eventually.

Daisy forced out a heavy laugh. “That was just a little joke, FGRaincloud,” she said. “She’s spent a bit too much time on Earth. She likes to call everyone her cousin. Don’t you . . .
Tulip
?” she asked, staring at me fiercely and quickly nodding her head behind her supervisor’s back.

I flashed the woman what I hoped was a broad, relaxed smile. I think it probably looked like someone who had been asked to bare her teeth while being tortured.

“I’m sorry, Effigy Raincloud,” I said, wondering why she had such a strange name but trying to say it with confidence anyway. “I should have known better than to make such a silly joke. Daisy’s right. I have obviously spent
far
too much time on Earth.”

Daisy’s supervisor gave me a strange look, before Daisy quickly went on. “Tulip”— I guessed that was me —“is new to ALD. Her previous supervisor’s just left. She asked me to look after her,” she said so boldly and smoothly, I almost believed her myself.

Her supervisor gave me another look. “Right. Well, we’ll see about that,” she said briskly. “Now then, there’s the matter of your unauthorized Earth visit.”

“I know,” Daisy replied. “I’m so sorry I forgot to ask, but I wanted to do some background research on my current client list — so I can work more efficiently.”

Daisy’s supervisor stared at her again. “Oh,” she said in the same clipped way she seemed to say everything. “I see. And you can prove this, can you?”

“Oh, yes, absolutely,” Daisy replied, reaching for her MagiCell. “I’ll get it all printed out and show you right now. . . .”

Her supervisor waved a hand in a kind of resigned dismissal. “That won’t be necessary,” she said. “But don’t let me catch you going off on any more research trips without getting my permission first.”

“No, I won’t,” Daisy said, relief through her words. “I really am sorry.”

Her supervisor waved a hand again. “Right, enough of that,” she said. “Now, you can get back to work. You’ve plenty to catch up on.” She looked at me. “And I want Tulip’s documents please, preferably with an explanation as to why I haven’t heard about the transfer.”

“Yes, FGRaincloud,” Daisy said. “I’ll do it right away.”

A moment later, her supervisor had turned and disappeared back down the aisle. At the end of the room, she clicked her fingers and a door once again appeared out of nowhere. She opened the door, walked through it, closed it behind her, and was gone.

“How did she do
that
?” I asked, staring into the blankness that had been a door seconds earlier.

“What?” Daisy asked.

“That thing with the door.”

“What thing?”

“What thing?”
I repeated incredulously. “The door — it wasn’t there, and then it was, and now it’s gone again!”

Daisy shrugged. “That’s how things work up here,” she said. “You don’t think too hard about things like that; you just do them.”

“But how? I mean, could
I
do them too?”

Daisy pointed at the space below us, the nothingness we were hovering above. “It’s like that,” she said. “You’re not thinking about it; you’re just doing it. It’s easy!”

I looked down, took in the huge complete emptiness underneath me — and promised myself I
definitely
wouldn’t think about it.

“I’d say you got off quite lightly there,” I said to change the subject.

“I know! I can’t believe it. FGRaincloud must have other things on her mind. She often does, which is a good thing. She comes across as totally efficient, but luckily she’s the complete opposite. As long as there’s something more important preoccupying her, she usually forgets why she’s even mad at you!”

“So — what are we going to do about my documents?” I asked.

Daisy shook her head. “We should get away with it for now. She’s moved on to the next thing and will forget about us for a day or so. We’ll easily have time to figure out how to get you back to Earth by the time she remembers about that.”

“Oh, well, that’s good,” I said, not sure I meant it. I mean, of course I wanted to get back to Earth. I didn’t want to be stuck up here forever. But — well, I wouldn’t mind spending a
bit
of time here. I was at ATC! I was actually in the middle of Fairy Godmother headquarters!

Except that I couldn’t enjoy it. Not when my mom was in trouble. Somehow we had to try to get more details about the really bad thing that was going to happen to her. We had to
stop
it!

“Come on,” Daisy said, breaking into my thoughts and knowing exactly what I was thinking. “Let’s get to my desk. We’ve got work to do.”

We sat in front of Daisy’s computer. The computer looked similar to our computer at home. The weird thing was how you got it to work. You had to speak to it, and it would respond with pictures and patterns and lines and lines of text.

Daisy said that if you really knew what you were doing, you just had to
think
about what you wanted to know and it would come up with answers. I still hadn’t quite gotten my head around this whole think-it-can-happen-and-hey-presto-it-
can
-happen idea yet, so I stuck to saying things out loud.

“Where am I?” I asked, just for fun.

The screen burst into light, a thousand colors spilling across it, spreading and weaving into every space in swirling, dancing loops and lines. Through the colors, three big letters emerged:
ATC
.

OK, I knew that.

“Who am I?” I asked. The screen went blank.

I turned to Daisy, trying not to be too freaked out. Did I still exist, or, now that I was at ATC, had I been wiped off the face of the earth forever, with no way back?

Daisy glanced at the screen. “That’s good,” she said.

“What? How can it be good?”

“It can only tell you what’s already in its program. It’s not programmed to recognize humans up here. If it doesn’t know you, that means it’s unlikely anyone realizes there’s a human up here — yet.”

“Yet?”

Daisy paused. “Well, it will catch on eventually,” she said. “Any changes in the atmosphere gradually seep through and need to be identified and categorized.”

Changes in the atmosphere? Identified? Categorized?
“Daisy, you haven’t actually made me feel a whole lot better.”

“Look, trust me,” she said. “If the computer doesn’t know who you are, all it means is that we’ve got longer to plan a way of getting you out of here before we land ourselves in any more trouble.”

“OK,” I said.

“Good. Now, let me think. We need to find out what’s happening with your mom first, and worry about the rest later.”

Daisy was right. That was all that mattered right now. Finding out what was going to happen to Mom — and figuring out how we could stop it.

Daisy shut her eyes and sat in silence for a moment. The computer seemed to be waiting. I waited, too. What was she thinking? Was she asking the computer a question? Would it know the answer this time?

I looked at the screen. A small word was emerging in the center of the screen.

YES.

I stared at the word. Yes? Yes what?

YES, I WILL KNOW THE ANSWER THIS TIME.

Whoa! The computer had heard my thoughts! It was answering me!

Daisy gave me a quick nudge. “Stop thinking things,” she said. “Your thoughts are getting in the way.”

Stop thinking things? How was I supposed to do that?

JUST DO IT
, the computer replied.

OK, this was getting spooky now. I had to stop thinking. I tried to do something Mom had once taught me when she came back from a meditation and yoga weekend. You imagine that your mind is like the sky, and if any thoughts come into it, you think of them as clouds floating slowly across it. Mom had spent a week doing it every day until she decided that she needed to spend
more
time thinking, not less. She thought it might make her brain lazy.

I shut my eyes and concentrated on the image for a while, and it must have worked, because when I opened them again, something was happening on the screen. Daisy was staring straight at it, as if she were looking into its eyes, holding a conversation with it. In reply, pictures were forming on the screen.

They were quite blurry to begin with, but then they became sharper and clearer — and as they did so, I gasped and clapped a hand over my mouth. It was the cottage my family and I were staying in! The computer was showing a series of pictures: the garden, the kitchen . . . my mom and dad!

“Daisy — look!” I cried out.

“I know. That means the SRB will happen soon. The computer only gets images when the event is imminent.”

I shuddered. Something really bad was about to happen to my mom — and all we could do was watch it take place on a screen?

“Wait,” Daisy said. “Let’s see if we can get some volume on this and hear what’s happening.”

She touched the screen, and instantly I heard my mom’s voice coming through the computer!

“I don’t care
who
she’s with,” she was saying. “Or
how
long they’ve lived here. She’s
my
daughter and I’m
not
happy!”

Her daughter
— they were talking about me! Why was she unhappy with me?

I leaned closer to the screen.

“I know, darling,” my dad replied. “I’m only saying we should give them a bit more time. Robyn knows the area like the —”

“I don’t care
how
well she knows the area. You heard Martin. Even her father doesn’t know where they are. They’ve been gone for hours, and it’s getting really dark. I’m just not —”

Mom broke off as her phone rang. She practically threw herself across the table to grab it. “It’s Martin,” she said, checking the screen on her phone. “They must be back.”

Mom answered her phone. “Martin,” she said, her voice thick with relief. But as she listened, her face turned gray. “I see,” she said. “Right,” she added a moment later. Finally, she said, “OK, yes, if you don’t mind, put Robyn on.”

While she waited for Robyn to come on the phone, she turned to Dad.

“They’re back, then?” Dad said, smiling at Mom. But not his usual smile, the one he wears nearly all the time because he’s as happy and carefree as a baby and nothing in his world could make him do anything
other
than smile. This was more like the smile a scary clown wears — the type that’s painted on to hide the unhappiness underneath it.

Mom shook her head. “Robyn’s back,” she said, her voice almost cracking. “Philippa’s missing.”

Dad slumped into a chair as though someone had punched the life out of him. Mom turned back to her phone. “Robyn,” she said tightly. “Tell me what happened.”

Daisy had opened a new page on her computer and was looking through a long list. She ran her finger down the list, then stopped and shook her head. “I don’t believe it,” she said, talking more to herself than to me. “I’m so stupid!”

“What?” I asked flatly.

“The SRB,” she said, looking up as though she’d just remembered I was there. “It could be any moment now. It must have to do with your disappearance.”

“Mom’s SRB is my disappearance?”

Daisy shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s not that simple. There could be something else — maybe a
result
of your disappearance.”

“But how is that possible? I only disappeared because I was coming to find you, and you already knew that something really bad was going to happen to my mom.”

“I know.”

“But surely that’s impossible — isn’t it?”

Daisy let out a long breath. “Not impossible. Just hard to understand if you’re not used to the way these things work.”

“Try me,” I said.

“It’s complicated,” she admitted. “It has to do with MTB’s role.”

“MTB — that’s the department that decides if something’s meant to be?”

“That’s right. The thing is, MTB is a pretty efficient team, and sometimes if they don’t have a huge load of cases, they can get information on an SRB before it actually happens.”

“OK,” I said, half of my brain understanding what she was saying and the other half screaming at me that it couldn’t possibly be true.

“Listen, Philippa,” Daisy said urgently. “None of this really matters. The important thing is what’s happening or going to happen to your mom.”

“I know,” I said, swallowing hard. “What are we going to do?”

“That’s just it,” Daisy said darkly. “There’s nothing we
can
do now. It seems like the SRB is already in motion.”