Conjured (35 page)

“I won’t cooperate if he’s not safe,” I said quietly, low so that Zach wouldn’t hear. “You want my testimony, then that’s my price. Don’t harm him. Don’t detain him. Don’t … do anything to him he doesn’t want. In fact, help him. Set him up with whatever life he wants, with or without his family, in whatever world he wants. And I’ll say whatever you need me to say.”

“She means it,” Aunt Nicki said behind me.

I turned to look at her. Her gaze slid away from me, as if she didn’t want to look at my doll face. She watched Malcolm lock the briefcase. Aidan was beside him, double-checking and triple-checking the locks.

“She has succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. You have to admit that,” Aunt Nicki said, her eyes still on Malcolm. “Malcolm was right.”

Lou grunted. “Suppose I’ll have to give him a promotion.”

“He deserves a damn medal,” Aunt Nicki said. To me, she said, “Malcolm was the one who first discovered you, you know, after you escaped the carnival. You were careening
between worlds. He insisted you had the potential to grow, to coalesce into a coherent being, even though you were”—she gestured at my cloth body—“like this. The rest of us thought he was crazy.”

Malcolm lifted the steel briefcase. He was flanked by multiple agents.

“He badgered Lou into pulling in magic-wielding doctors from multiple worlds—specialists to build your body.” Frowning again at me, Aunt Nicki clarified, “Your human body. At the time, you couldn’t control your magic well enough to do it yourself, even if you’d understood what we wanted you to do.”

“Those doctors are ridiculously proud of you,” Lou said. “They babble on about papers that they’ll write based on you. You made a number of careers.”

“At Malcolm’s insistence, we set you up,” Aunt Nicki continued. “Gave you a home. A job.”

“At
my
insistence, we recruited Aidan, Victoria, and Topher to befriend you—they were our three strongest, the ones best suited to challenge you and the ones best able to defend themselves against you, if need be,” Lou said. “Working with them, we threw as much stimulation at you as we could.”

“Malcolm believed the memories and instincts were buried in there, inside you,” Aunt Nicki said. “We simply needed to help you become someone who could access them. And we succeeded!”

“Yes.” Lou contemplated me as if I were a sculpture he’d carved. “Yes, we did. We’re all proud of you.” From Lou, this was an extraordinary statement. I stared at him with my marble eyes. Maybe … maybe I had misjudged him.

The agents parted, creating a path through the crowd, and Malcolm marched toward one of the silver mirrors, carrying the briefcase. He looked back once, directly at me, and raised his hand in a wave. Aidan vanished from his side as Malcolm melted into the mirror—I wasn’t certain if Aidan had gone through the mirror or not. I felt a breath of wind on the back of my neck.

“You have done well.” Lou smiled, an unnatural expression on his face. I hadn’t thought his mouth could form any shape but a scowl. I remembered I’d seen him smile exactly once, when he’d handed me the magic box. He put his hand on my shoulder, as if to be friendly. “Our apologies,” Lou said. “But we can’t risk losing you now.”

I looked behind me to see Aidan holding an open box, the one that had once held the Storyteller. “See you at the trial, Green Eyes,” Aidan said. Lou shoved me toward him, and Aidan touched me with the box.

I was trapped inside.

On the day of the trial, Malcolm escorted me into the courtroom. He was flanked by two agents, plus another six behind us. Their guns were drawn—two tranquilizer guns, two tasers, and two loaded rifles. Malcolm had said the guns were merely a precaution.

All the guns were pointed at me, and I heard whispers and gasps and the words “doll” and “puppet” as people craned for their first look at me.

The courtroom was on the first floor of the agency. There was a solid-wood jury box, as well as mahogany benches for the audience, plus the judge’s podium with a witness stand beside it. Lit by iron chandeliers, the warm wood made the room look oddly cozy.

The room was filled with strangers. As I passed by the bailiffs, I recognized three faces in the audience: Aidan, Victoria, and Topher. Aidan wore an elaborate and exotic suit that made him look even more handsome. He had an entourage
around him of men and women in uniform, which made his offer to me seem all the more real. These were the people from his government, the ones who wanted me to work for them, who wanted to use me as their weapon. Near them, Victoria was dressed in a floor-length gown, and her hair was arranged in dreadlocks that imitated snakes. They slithered over her shoulders as she watched me walk down the long aisle from the door to the front of the courtroom. Beside her, Topher was also in formal dress, a uniform-like suit with an orange sun on his chest. A man next to him carried a flag with the same symbol. None of them gave any hint that they knew me, but Topher looked at Aidan, who shook his head almost imperceptibly. I didn’t know what the exchange meant.

Zach was also in the audience. He had agents on either side of him. I couldn’t see well enough over the heads of the audience to tell whether or not he was bound. He was as far from me as possible, near an emergency exit door.

At the front, the jury box was full of men and women, not all human, in gray and black suits. The judge was a man with a neatly trimmed beard.

The witness stand was empty, waiting for me.

The Magician was in silver shackles at the front of the courtroom. He wore an orange jumpsuit. Without his tattered suit and hat, he looked wrong. I wanted to place a hat on his head, just so he’d look like he should. This way, he looked like an ordinary man, and that only made me feel more unnatural with my cloth skin, yarn hair, and marble eyes.

As I passed by him, I felt his eyes on me. Malcolm led me
to the witness stand and then stepped back. I climbed the steps alone. It was only three steps, but my cotton feet felt heavy. I looked at the judge. His skin was tinged green, and the flaps of gills were visible beneath the wiry curls of his beard. The gills were closed. His expression was unreadable.

I looked at Malcolm. He held his expression still, and I knew that meant there were thoughts and emotions held in check underneath, though I didn’t know what they were. Outside the courtroom, in the moments before my entrance, Lou had lectured me about the importance of remembering everything. Remember what you heard. Remember what you saw. Remember where you were. Malcolm had only said one thing: “Remember who you have become.”

He didn’t speak now. He nodded to the judge, and then he left me at the witness stand and took a seat in the audience in a row of marshals. I noticed that Aunt Nicki wasn’t there. But the courtroom was packed with people. As I looked over them, I felt shivers crawl over my cloth skin. I didn’t know them, but I recognized bits of them. That man, he had the same eyes as the boy with tattoos. The woman with the tears streaking her cheeks had the same face as the girl with silvery hair. I saw a little boy with diamonds in his dreadlocks. Another woman, older, had antlers that budded from her gray curls. She sat between Victoria and a man with snakelike skin. These were their families, the families of the dead. I wondered what they saw when they looked at me, a living doll in a dress of jewels and feathers.

I couldn’t look at them anymore. Looking up at the iron
chandeliers, I wished I were elsewhere. I wished Zach and I had run away from the marshals, found a mirror, and kept running. But it was too late for running now.

The judge was speaking. “… the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

I met the Magician’s eyes with my green marble eyes.

Then I laid my cloth hand on a book and said, “I swear.”

A lawyer rose. “Let’s start at the beginning …”

The beginning. What was the beginning? Was it when the Storyteller made me? Was it when I was first filled with magic? Was it when I began to hear, began to see, began to talk, began to think, began to feel? Or was it when I left the wagon and left the carnival behind? Was it when Malcolm found me? Was it when the doctors gave me a new body? Or when I walked into the house on Hall Avenue, believing I was an ordinary girl? Or when I kissed Zach and defied the marshals? Or was it when I was a bird in the wallpaper, suddenly realizing that I could choose what I did, said, felt, or thought? Or later, when I chose not to be what the Magician meant for me to be and decided to be real instead?

I testified for three days, with breaks for the judge and jury to eat, pee, and sleep. I didn’t need to do any of these things. On the breaks, I simply waited in a room beside the courtroom until it was time for the questions to begin again. Sometimes I repeated things; sometimes I backtracked. A woman with a shirt buttoned to her neck typed every word I said. She had four arms. She typed quickly and never looked at me. I didn’t stop talking.

I told them every moment that I could remember. Every word spoken. Every sound heard. Everything I felt. As I talked, I remembered more and more until the memories were waves inside me, pounding at my skin, wanting to burst out. I let them—and out tumbled more memories, memories that weren’t even mine. The freshest were the memories of the Storyteller.

It was the Storyteller who had figured out how to drain magic from someone’s last dying breath. It was she who had crafted a doll that could hold that magic—it faded inside a human, but it stayed within her special doll. It was the Magician who had discovered how to siphon the magic from the doll into himself to use as he pleased. And it was he who had adapted the boxes into traps.

Together, they had joined the carnival and handpicked their victims—they targeted the young, the strong, and the unique magic users in each world. Together, the Magician and the Storyteller lured or trapped or chased them through forests or towns or fields and brought them to the wagon. Together, they drew the chalk symbols on the floor. Together, they killed.

At first they’d been devastated by guilt, and they had tried to find another way. But nothing else worked. And so, they’d learned to kill without remorse, and they’d learned that teenagers had the strongest magic.

I was with them for every death. Standing on the witness stand with the eyes of the families of the dead on me, I remembered them all.

I told them about how the Storyteller had recognized that
I was becoming aware, how at first she’d fostered it but then she’d feared it. A doll who knew their secrets, who couldn’t be controlled, who was filled with bits and pieces of the magic and the memories and the knowledge of the people who had died … They’d built into me the magical equivalent of a failsafe—a trigger that caused me to lose consciousness whenever I used magic—but that only made them safe from my magic. They weren’t safe from my knowledge. I knew what they’d done, and I was beginning to think and, worse, to feel. The Storyteller resolved to make new dolls, replacements that wouldn’t have so much magic inside them and would never come alive. But she’d also loved me. She’d created me. I was hers and his, their sort-of child. So she’d set me free, hoping I’d never return, hoping to replace me with new, weaker dolls.

I was lost for a long time after that, going from world to world in a blur, until Malcolm found me. He’d been investigating this case for some time already and was looking for someone, or something, like me who could lead him to the killer. He saw me use magic that matched those of the victims, and he realized what I was—a receptacle for stolen power. He brought me here, initiated the surgeries, taught me how to function in a world beyond the carnival …

One of the lawyers interrupted me and submitted into evidence a series of recordings: videos of when I’d first arrived at the agency, of the surgeries, of the training. With the judge’s permission, he projected them onto a screen at the front of the courtroom.

Standing on the witness stand, I watched myself, stiff and
halting, a doll who drifted in and out of rationality. On the screen, I saw Malcolm guide me into his office, where I sat in a leather chair, motionless and unblinking. I heard Aunt Nicki’s voice, thin through the speakers—she must have been holding the video camera. She called me Pinocchio, pronounced me a freaky thing, and told Malcolm if he wanted a pet, cats were much more appealing. But he knelt before me, looked into my green marble eyes and talked to me. Even then, he treated me as if I were a person.

He was with me as I was wheeled into the first of the surgeries. I reached out my hand to hold his, and I turned my cloth face to look at him with green-glass marble eyes, trusting him. The camera focused on our hands, my misshapen cloth fingers in his strong human ones.

Projected on the screen, the surgeries were a ghastly amalgam of medicine and magic. Veins were threaded inside me, skin was grafted onto me, and human eyes were transplanted onto my half-cloth, half-tattered-skin face—brown eyes in place of green glass. I forced myself to watch—each image causing memories to rise inside me, like bile rising in my throat.

Later, there was another video of me in Malcolm’s office. This time, I looked human but was still very doll-like in my movements, lurching through the office like a strangely detailed windup toy. He had to teach me how to eat, to pee, to sleep. As a doll, I’d done none of that.

Watching the videos, I remembered all of it. My memories, this time.

After it ended, I talked again. I told them everything from meeting Zach and working in the library to having lunch in the pizza parlor with Aidan, Topher, and Victoria. I omitted only their offer and their accusations against the agency, and the lawyer did not ask.

At last, I told Lou and the judge and the jury and the families of the dead about my return to the carnival with Zach and what happened in the wagon with him and Aidan. I didn’t spare a single detail, including the Storyteller’s death and my role in the Magician’s plans.

When at last I ran out of words, I stopped talking. I pressed my thread lips together and thought I might never talk again. I felt drained of all words. I sagged against the witness stand, my cotton body limp.