Quite Contrary (27 page)

Elizabeth’s dress hadn’t gotten any more elaborate, but white silk sparkled around her legs and she looked completely like a princess now. As I walked up behind her, I called out, “Can you fix Scarecrow’s feet? She burned them pretty badly before we found you.”

“Of course! I’d love to,” Elizabeth answered. She started to turn back to us, and then her face dragged back down the street. “The city is calling. I can’t do it now. The city is calling!” She took off like a shot, bare feet flying down the street as her magical purity rushed ahead of her like a wave, cleaning everything before she touched it.

Rat slid down my back onto the pavement, and in a desperate voice told me, “She will be fine, honest. She just has to finish her story first. We have to catch her!” Little feet scrabbled as he ran ahead of us after Elizabeth.

“No, we don’t. Come on,” I told Scarecrow. Taking her arm, I led her back into the castle.

The castle was still partly a factory. Maybe it always would be. Somewhere near the entrance there would be lockers, or storage trunks, or—yes. A tidy row of shiny new lockers. Scarecrow tilted this way and that, peering past me curiously as I yanked them open one by one. This place had never been big on safety gear. The brass goggles I found in the first one were cool, but not my style. Empty locker, empty locker, pair of jeans, leather gloves—bingo.

“She’s not as strong as you are, Miss Mary. Please don’t blame her. She can’t fight her story,” Rat squeaked behind me. I nearly jumped out of my skin, and my body did give a jerk. My heart thumped in my chest, too. I hadn’t expected him to come back.

Bending down, I lifted my prize off the bottom of the locker.

“Boots!” breathed Rat. I could hear the longing in his voice. He was going to have to suck it up.

“Scarecrow needs them more. This is as close as I can get to replacement feet.”

Scarecrow squealed as I passed her the boots, and scooped her arms around them. “Clothing! Real people wear clothing!” she crowed, and then in case I’d thought she seemed too much like a real person she fell straight down on her butt. The crack of wood on pavement echoed loudly, but she didn’t seem to notice. She wrestled with the shoes until she had them on her feet, then tied the laces into a snarled mess. Hey, it’d do.

Now it was time to yell at Rat. Who’d come back to me.

I threw up my hands in frustration. “Rat, where is Elizabeth? Take me to her, okay?”

He bolted upright, body stretched like a paper towel tube as his head twisted this way and that. If I ever had to yell at him again, I’d have to cover my eyes, because there was no way I’d be able to do it with him pulling adorable crap like this.

“This way!” he squeaked, racing off again down the street.

“Are—” I started to ask Scarecrow, then felt like an idiot as she promptly leaped forward, galloping after Rat and waving her arms in the air. Yes, she was stable. Physically, anyway.

Which meant I had to run, so I did. It felt good. I wasn’t much of a runner, but the racing energy of it chased away the last gunky feeling from the temple, and my shoes pounded on the streets like hammers and that was awesome. The city hadn’t gotten any less cool, either. It had lost the elegant rust, but now cogwheels turned on the sides of buildings and steam whistled randomly out of valves. Before I caught up with Scarecrow, I passed a mechanical cat pulling the metal shell off its arm and licking the gears underneath.

Elizabeth was lucky. I kind of wished I could live here myself.

When I did catch up with Scarecrow, I thought Rat might be running so fast because if he slowed down any she’d step on him. We’d have to slow down soon. I was a walker, not a runner, and my lungs ached. Huffing desperately, I asked, “How do you know where she is?”

“I follow the trail of fresh air!” Rat squeaked back.

We passed an open front shop with a machine like an octopus poised over a rack of glass mugs. This place! Which meant—right, there were the gates of the railroad yard hanging open in front of us. As I watched, the gate I’d knocked off lifted up off the pavement and its hinges locked back into place. When those smelters enchanted a crown, they did not fool around.

Elizabeth stood right on the railroad track, hands clasped behind her back. With her in sight, I could collapse against the gateposts and wheeze until I got my breath back. So I did. Scarecrow plowed up gravel as she skidded to a halt, and stopped to watch a yellow and black striped sign wave up and down on a pole. Rat was a bit more focused, but he stopped several paces behind Elizabeth as well, because a train was pulling up.

It wasn’t much of a train. More of a cute, baby trainlet. A shiny copper engine and two open cars, none of them taller than me. The engine puffed white steam as it ground to a halt in front of Elizabeth.

Elizabeth curtseyed. The clouds parted just long enough for a beam of sunlight to make her white dress and crown sparkle, I guess in case she didn’t look princessly enough. “Welcome, travelers. I am Princess Madrigal, and you are the first visitors to my new city.”

Of the half a dozen people sitting in the cars, the first one who climbed down was a teenage boy. Brass and leather goggles perched in sandy white hair, and he wore what looked to me like a white full-length lab coat and leather pants. He was, without a doubt, the coolest geek I’d ever seen in person. He stared at Elizabeth like she’d clubbed him, but that seemed like a fair reaction.

“And I’m Prince Jacob of the Tinkers, Your Highness,” he returned. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. More than a pleasure. This line was supposed to take us to the city of iron and yellow smoke. I’m not sure if that’s where we are, or if this is a happy accident.”

He reached out a gloved hand, obviously nervous, and Elizabeth laid her hand on top of it. “This was the city of iron and yellow smoke. My city may need a new name, now. And new people, so I hope you’ve come to stay.”

“So do I.”

Oh, geez. That could not have been more corny.

Rat crept back to my feet, and I asked him, “What am I seeing?”

“Happily Ever After, Miss Mary,” he answered.

“No way,” I snapped. “No. No way. Rat, you have to do something. Are you in love with her, or not?”

“He’s her prince. The story’s over, and she will be happy forever after,” Rat replied. He sounded so calm. No, he sounded fake calm.

I gritted my teeth, not calm at all. “Don’t give me that. You’re the expert. Start a new story. You can get yourself turned into a human. I bet you could get her turned into a rat, but I know you’d enjoy being human more.”

Prince and Princess didn’t pay us the slightest bit of attention. Especially the Prince, whose eyes were all on Elizabeth. “We’re an expedition. So much was lost when the city of iron and yellow smoke was abandoned. We were hoping to uncover its secrets.” If he puffed his chest out any further, he’d explode.

“They’re in love already. I’m not going to risk her happiness for mine. She has her Happily Ever After and she doesn’t need me anymore,” Rat said. He still sounded so calm. His heart must be breaking. He wouldn’t even look back at the happy couple, he just kept staring up at me.

Staring up at me. Right. Get the hint, Mary. “Yes, okay, I need you. But I’d rather you be happy.” My tongue felt like lead, but I forced the words out.

“I’ve chosen, Miss Mary,” he replied.

The blankness in his words tore at me, because I knew what they had to hide. His beautiful princess was making cow eyes at a pretty boy she’d just met as he showed her the size of his monkey wrench.

I guess we were both Eponines together. We didn’t have to be completely alone. I reached down, and Rat jumped into my hand and clawed his way up my sleeve.

Now it was me trying to keep my voice blank. I didn’t want him to hear the relief and delight washing across me as I said, “We might as well get going, then.”

“Can I come?” Scarecrow asked.

That brought me up short, but it shouldn’t. “Why would you want to come with me?”

“I was hoping I could get a Happily Ever After, too. You make those, right? You made one for her.” Scarecrow pointed at Elizabeth, who was busy helping the prince fill in a map. Oh, no, wait, they were tearing it up instead. No maps around here, I supposed.

Elizabeth was too busy with her own story to help anyone else with theirs. And you know what? That was fine by me. Someone ought to be happy. “It gives me a direction other than ‘running away.’ You’re the expert, Rat. How do we make Scarecrow a real girl?”

“By going that way. There’s a river on the other end of the city. We start there,” Rat answered. He sounded confident. He really did know his job. Da—no, I wasn’t falling into that again. A promise was a promise.

I left the happy couple, heading for the waterfront with a rat on my shoulder and a wooden girl following behind me. A wooden girl who spun like a top with every step for no particular reason. I had to get her made into a real girl before I strangled her.

he smell told me I was getting close to the waterfront. Everything smelled wet, like it had just rained. Maybe I’d been following that smell and didn’t realize it, but it had just seemed obvious which way the water was. Down the road in front of me, the buildings stopped, and then I reached the last pair and the river lay in front of me.

The river was big. I could see the far shore, and that’s all I could say about it. The smell of the water struck me overwhelmingly as I stepped out onto the boardwalk. Faint overtones teased me, of smoke and rotting garbage and something else I didn’t know. A smell like mist rather than the wetness after it rains.

River or no river, the view reminded me vividly that I was still in the city of iron and yellow smoke. I couldn’t see a shoreline. A metal boardwalk wider than a freeway stretched out of the water, with metal railings. Stairways and ramps led down to docks, and to the right of me a giant construction of girders and metal poles loomed over the wharf. It didn’t serve any purpose I could see, and looked like a skyscraper’s worth of scaffolding all bunched up like a spider’s web. It must have done something, because there was another way down to the shore off to my left.

I reached up and rubbed the top of Rat’s head with my thumb again. I’d been doing it off and on the whole walk, and it was getting a little too touchy feely for me, but the poor guy had been so quiet. Maybe he couldn’t get the girl, but leaving Elizabeth had to be tearing him apart.

“Which way?” I asked him.

He lifted his head and sniffed around, then answered, “It doesn’t matter yet.”

I shrugged, turned left, and walked down the boardwalk. I drifted out to the railing, and stared over the water. So much water, muddy blue and rippling as it flowed down the channel. It didn’t have the manufactured schizophrenic look the city had, but I liked the view. It was peaceful, right up until Scarecrow ran past me to a black metal bell on a post along the railing. She rang it over and over, yanking the chain as gonging smashed the silence.

I rolled my eyes. “You don’t know what that does! You can’t just go around pulling and pushing everything that catches your eye.” Setting my shoulders, I stepped faster until I reached the bell myself. Pushing her aside, I grabbed the chain and gave it a few yanks myself. I grinned. Scarecrow couldn’t grin, but she clasped her hands behind her and swung from side to side in a way that looked pleased to me. Rat crawled into my hood and put his hands over his ears. I couldn’t blame him. The bell was loud.