The Apprentices by Mailie Meloy
“You’re actually not.”
She had stopped bothering to wear her heavy glasses, and he loved to look at her. Sometimes they even kissed, and that was nice. But there was no word from her grandfather, and Pip was thinking about trying to get a chess set when there was a pounding at the door.
Opal stared at Pip, her eyes deep wells of terror.
“Ask who it is,” he whispered.
“Who is it?” she called.
“Police,” said the voice.
“Play dumb,” Pip whispered. Then he rolled off the bed and slipped into the closet, pulling the door closed after him.
“Just a minute!” Opal called.
Pip could see through the slats in the closet door that she had hooked the chain before she unlocked the door, so it could only open three inches. He saw a policeman’s uniform through the gap.
“Is something wrong?” Opal asked innocently.
“You’ve been out of school for two days,” the officer said.
“The first day was a Sunday,” Opal said. “And I wasn’t feeling well on Monday. I had a headache. I called and told the school that.”
“You told them you were with your mother.”
“Have you met my mother? She’s no cure for a headache,” Opal said, with a smile in her voice. She was flirting with the cop just the right amount.
“Well, you can’t just run off and stay in a hotel,” the officer said, softening.
“Why not?”
“How about you come with us, and we’ll go see your mother.”
“I need to make myself presentable first,” she said.
“For your mother?”
“Especially for my mother,” she said. “I’ll meet you in the lobby in fifteen minutes.”
A pause. “Okay. We’ll be downstairs. No funny business.”
Opal closed the door and made a little panicked squeaking noise.
Pip crawled out of the closet. “You were perfect!” he whispered.
“Now what?” She hopped a little, as if to shake off the fear.
“We go out the back way.”
“I told you my grandfather wouldn’t send for us.”
“It’ll be fine. Just stay calm.”
Pip studied the fire escape plan and found the staircase that led to the back of the hotel. He looked out through the peephole and saw no one. They crept out silently, down the lushly carpeted hall, and past the elevators to the emergency stairs. Then they ran down three flights to the exit.
“Just walk out casually, like nothing’s wrong,” Pip said.
“Okay,” Opal said.
He pushed the heavy door open, feeling the cold air on his face, and stepped outside, with Opal following. Behind the door, as it closed, were two policemen. One of them grabbed the back of Pip’s collar. The other caught Opal by the arm. “No funny business, sweetheart, remember?” he said.
“Go!” Opal shouted. “Run!”
Pip shrugged out of his jacket, leaving it in the policeman’s fist, and ran toward the street. At the corner he turned and headed for the river. He could hear the heavy footsteps coming after him. What was ahead of him? A subway station. He might duck down there, but what if no train was coming? He cleared the hotel and kept running, the gray brick wall of a library looming to his left. Should he run in there? Get lost in the books? He might stay the night in the stacks, if he kept out of the coppers’ way. Most of the books Pip had read in his life were because libraries were good places to hide. But the policeman would see him going in. So no library. The sidewalk was full of people. He dodged shoppers and idlers and ran past a florist, a jeweler, a diner, a typewriter repair shop.
Then the crowd seemed to part, revealing an enormous policeman who snatched Pip out of the air, tucking him under his arm as if catching a rugby ball. Pip struggled, but the man had him tight, and you didn’t want to hit a copper. He relaxed under the policeman’s arm, and as he did, he saw Opal standing on the sidewalk up ahead. She was talking to a tiny woman in a fur coat and high heels, with tightly coiled black hair. Her mother, the princess.
The enormous copper set Pip down and pushed him into a waiting police car.
Opal and her mother turned, and Opal looked like she’d been crying.
“Don’t cry,” Pip called, and he waved. His tour of America wouldn’t be complete, after all, until he sussed out the inside of their jails.
CHAPTER 38
The Gap
Jin Lo was impatient to get to Benjamin, but the apothecary refused to move fast. He had already made the avian elixir, but he said he wanted to be prepared for every possible outcome. He was fussing and measuring in Vinoray’s laboratory, turning pages in the Pharmacopoeia, squinting at labels written in Spanish, Chinese, and Tagalog.
“We lose time,” Jin Lo said.
“When you are in a hurry, dress slowly,” the apothecary said.
“This means what?”
“It’s a Zen Buddhist saying. It means that when you rush, you make mistakes.”
“When I am in hurry, I dress quickly,” Jin Lo said. “I make no mistakes.”
“Yes, but you are a supremely competent human being,” the apothecary said. “I am a mere mortal, and I’m taking no chances.”
“What chances? We fly, we go.”
“You saw my son fall from the sky.”
“So?” she asked.
“So it could happen to us. We must guard against every circumstance we can predict.”
“Then I know what will happen,” Jin Lo said.
“What?”
“The circumstance we do not predict.”
The apothecary sighed. “Well, at least we’ll have eliminated the others,” he said. “Our work is an ongoing struggle with unintended consequences. We must try to narrow the gap—which is sometimes a gulf—between what we intend and the results we achieve.” He held a beaker of cloudy liquid up to the light and watched it swirl. “This solution will allow us to breathe underwater if we fall into the sea.”
“Unless we are dead.”
“Well, yes,” the apothecary said. “We might be stunned by the fall, certainly. But if we can breathe underwater, we have a better chance of survival, and a better chance of reaching Benjamin.”
Jin Lo had always wanted to be able to swim beneath the waves, like a fish. She reached for the beaker, but the apothecary pulled it away.
“Let me try it first,” he said. “It might not be safe.”
He drank some of the liquid, held the beaker and stood very still, looking thoughtfully into space, as if analyzing a fine wine. Then he said, “It’s not as malty as it sight’ve been.”
Jin Lo frowned. “Malty?”
“No, oh,” he said. “I santed to way salty.”
“Salty,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Sike the lea.”
Jin Lo understood that something was wrong in the way he was speaking, and that she should be able to decode it, but English always took some effort for her. She had learned it from American missionaries, and the apothecary’s vowels were different from theirs. Now his consonants were different, too, and she couldn’t follow the scrambling.
The apothecary shook his head in frustration. “I’m baying things sackward.”
“Backward?”
“Swell, witched,” he said. “It’s a soblematic pride effect.” Then he brightened. “Mait a winute!” he said. He rummaged in his black leather medical bag, came up with a jar of dried mushrooms, unscrewed the lid, and handed a piece of mushroom to her. “Thew chis,” he said, and he put one in his own mouth and chewed.
Jin Lo put the dried mushroom in her mouth and tasted the familiar earthy fungus. They had used it in Vietnam to acquire the language faster, before she left them.
Meanwhile, the apothecary filled a deep sink with water. He plunged his face in and held it underwater a very long time, until Jin Lo wondered if she should pull him out. Then he came up dripping, triumphant.
“Wit irks!” he cried, a
But with a problematic side effect. He could survive underwater, but he couldn’t talk straight.
“As wirds we bon’t be table to alk anyway,” he rationalized.
Jin Lo nodded. It was true. Once they were birds, they would be relying on looks and gestures and avian understanding. She wondered if their birdcalls would be affected. She drank the salty liquid and concentrated on saying “Not so bad,” but it came out “Bot no sad.”
Then the apothecary drank the avian elixir, and she watched him greedily. She loved being a falcon, fierce and beholden to no one. She watched his head shrink and his shoulders tip forward and his legs sprout sharp talons. Snowy white feathers sprouted all over his head, and then they seemed to flow down the front of his body, downy soft to absorb sound so he could fly unheard. His eyes grew large and yellow, and his nose and mouth drew out into a sharp and dangerous beak. His arms spread out into broad wings for floating, and he lifted his powerful shoulders, articulating the complicated joints. When the transformation was complete, he rotated his head to test the vertebrae, and shook his whole body, ruffling each immaculate feather into place.
Where the apothecary had been was a large white owl, staring at Jin Lo with depthless golden eyes. She would never get over the wonder of it.
CHAPTER 39
Floating
Magnusson posted a guard outside Janie’s bedroom at night, but she caught the guard sleeping and crept out into the silent house, searching for some clue about why, exactly, Magnusson was trying to lure her friends, and what he knew about them. There was a telephone in the kitchen and she picked up the receiver, wondering if she could call her parents in Ann Arbor. But a finger came down to end the connection. Sylvia was standing there in a blue silk nightgown. “Go to bed, Janie,” she said. “Please don’t make this harder than it is.”
In the morning, at breakfast, the telephone was gone. Janie fired questions at Magnusson, but he ignored them and went off in the jeep. She guessed he was going to the mine.
The guards were Americans, and none of them was particularly smart or especially kind. Another guard was posted outside her room that night, but she had more reason than he did to stay awake. When he finally fell asleep, she crept outside. There was a guard on patrol around the perimeter and she waited for him to pass, then ran silently, barefoot, for the fence, intending to climb it. As soon as she touched the wire, it threw her back on the grass, where she lay stunned, her hands stinging and one ankle aching. The guard hauled her off the ground and dumped her back in her room. Sylvia brought an ice pack and explained that the wire was electrified, and that Janie’s weight had been on her right ankle when the electricity passed through her body, seeking the ground.
“Yeah, I figured that out,” Janie said.
“I wish you wouldn’t fight so hard,” Sylvia said.
“You mean I should give in and be like you?”
“I mean you’re just hurting yourself.”
“What does Magnusson know about my friends?”
“Just what he told you. He’s interested in what they can do. And he knows you have some way of communicating.”
Janie spent the rest of the night searching for Benjamin, hoping to catch even a tiny glimpse that told her he was alive. But she found nothing.
In the morning, she put on her swimsuit and dived into the saltwater swimming pool. The water tasted like blood on her lips as she swam, or like tears. She started to cry for the first time, underwater where no one could see her, and imagined she was filling the pool.
After that, she spent most of her time in the pool. She wasn’t sure sometimes, as she floated on her back, where her own body stopped and the water started. Maybe everything was connected. Maybe her lifelong conviction that she was Janie Scott, independent person with independent thoughts and control over her own destiny, was all an illusion. She was just a salty, water-based extension of the pool, in a black tank suit.
The sun shone pink through her eyelids. When she opened her eyes a millimeter, she saw bright stars refracting through the droplets of water on her eyelashes. Her winter skin was getting tan. Her fingertips pruned in the water. But she didn’t get out. The pool was the only place she could forget the sharp talons sinking into Benjamin’s neck.
Sylvia appeared on the pool deck, wearing a white cover-up and a worried expression. “Janie,” she called. “Come have a lemonade.”
Janie dropped her hips so she sank beneath the surface, her hair floating around her head. She blew out all her air. If she stayed on the bottom, Sylvia couldn’t talk to her. But eventually she would have to breathe again. The apothecary should work on a way to breathe underwater. That would be useful. She rose to the surface and put her head up into the world where everything had happened.
Sylvia wore cat-eye sunglasses and yellow mules. Janie pushed herself out of the water, imagining that she was a sea lion, or a mermaid, and sat on the tiled edge.
“Osman put mint in it,” Sylvia said, handing her the lemonade.
Janie stirred the bright green leaves with a straw. Osman, the cook, wasn’t that much older than Janie. He had been a cook in the sultan’s household before Magnusson brought him to the island, and he grew mint and herbs and vegetables in a little patch of carefully tended soil outside the villa’s kitchen.
Sylvia kicked off her mules and dangled her legs in the pool. “You can’t stay in the water all day.”
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s hell on your hair, first of all.”
Janie twirled a strand of wet hair around her finger and brought it in front of her eyes. It looked the same as always. Brown. Wavy. American, Benjamin had said. She wanted to get back in the pool and drown the pain in her chest. “Looks all right to me,” she said.
“The salt water dries it out,” Sylvia said.
“What a tragedy.” Janie let the strand go and sipped her lemonade, which was cold and sweet. She kicked her leg to see the little ripples in the water catch the light.
“So much sun will be bad for your skin, in the long run,” Sylvia said.
Janie looked up. “The long run? Are you serious?”
“When you’re my age, you’ll care,” Sylvia said.
Janie tucked her leg up to turn toward the secretary. “You’ve kidnapped me,” she said, “and taken me to an island in Malaya. No one knows where I am. My best friend in the world is almost certainly dead, and if he weren’t, you would have some terrible plan for him. And your boss, or your boyfriend, or whatever he is, has told me that no one will ever find me again. You really think I’m worried about the long run? About wrinkles?”
Sylvia frowned.
Janie turned back to face the pool and concentrated on her lemonade—the cold feel of it on her tongue, on the back of her throat, going down her esophagus.
“Magnusson was good to me after my brother died,” Sylvia said.
“Yeah, you said that,” Janie said.
“I still miss him every day.”
Janie looked sideways at Sylvia, who had a faraway look. “How was he killed?”
“He went to Korea in 1950. They sent him with almost no training. It was terribly cold, and they were short of weapons. The Chinese came in overwhelming numbers, in warm, snow-camouflage uniforms. They’d been trained to fight in the mountains, and they killed our boys as they ran for their lives. My brother came home dead.”
“I’m so sorry,” Janie said.
“I think about him all the time. How funny he was, and handsome, how he walked into a room and people wanted to be near him. And how cold he must have been, and how afraid. Three years the war went on, boys like him dying every day. President Truman should have used the atomic bomb to stop it.”
Janie was startled. “You think so?”
“All those boys would be alive now, and home,” Sylvia said. “The North Korean army killed everyone with any education, in the occupied areas. They just shot all the professors and teachers and leaders
“But we would have killed people who had nothing to do with it,” Janie said.
“We did that anyway,” Sylvia said. “My brother had nothing to do with it—with a made-up border across a country we didn’t understand. None of those boys did.”
Janie looked at Sylvia’s pretty face, contorted with anger, and with the desire for atomic revenge. There was some connection here. “Why does Magnusson want my friends?” she asked.
Sylvia sighed. “I honestly don’t know, Janie. He keeps parts of his business secret from me. I’d tell you if I knew.”
“But you know how far back this goes. How did Opal happen to be my roommate?”
Sylvia hesitated. “I’m not sure.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Janie said. “You owe me the truth. Did Magnusson get me into Grayson?”
“I’m sure you would have got in anyway.”
“So the answer is yes.”
“He did get you the scholarship.”
For a moment, that almost seemed worse than everything else. Janie hadn’t gotten the scholarship on her own. “What if my parents had made me go to Michigan with them?” she asked.
Sylvia glanced around the empty pool deck.
“No one’s listening,” Janie said. “Just tell me.”
“He’s very intuitive about people,” Sylvia said. “He knew your parents would let you go to Grayson, if there was money for it. They think of you as very exceptional. Which, I mean—they’re right to think that, of course.”
Janie stared at her. “So he was counting on my parents’ vanity about me.”
“I’d call it their pride in you.”
“What else does he think about them?”
“I don’t think we should be having this conversation.”
“What harm can it do?” Janie asked. “Here we are.”
There was a pause. “Well, he knows about their political troubles,” Sylvia said. “Not that anyone thinks they’re really Communists. But points of vulnerability are always of interest. You’re their primary point of vulnerability, and the political trouble is secondary.”