Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck (17 page)

27 · BRiDGE iN
TROUBLED WATER

MILTON SNAKED ACROSS
the basement floor, darting and dodging the various knights with frenetic ferret energy. He ducked into the church’s dimly lit antechamber and locked the door behind him. Scanning the cheerless room, he noticed an elderly female knight crumpled on a faded yellow chesterfield, snoring softly. He padded carefully across the floor, gently pressed open another door on the opposite end of the room, and peeked into the adjoining hallway. He could hear Sentinel Shane and Warder Chango talking.

“Dude,” Warder Chango said, “the Guiding Knight wants us to check out the antechamber. The little Bridge dude locked the door on the other side. I’
d
join
you but my foot, man, is axed. I just know my nail is, like, totally …”

Milton could hear someone slamming against the other door, trying to break it down. He stole down the hallway, away from the voices, his back sliding against the dingy velvet wallpaper.

Bronze light fixtures on the ceiling cast dim, golden circles down the hallway. Milton followed them around the corner to a pair of metal doors, surrounded by potted palms. He pushed the doors open as the voices behind him gained in volume and clarity.

The doors swung open with a sluggish squeak. Inside the dark, grim room were crates, a conveyor belt leading to a crackling furnace, flowers—orchids and lilies, mostly—bags of popcorn, cases of generic soda, and
… a casket
.

A-TISKET, A-TASKET, A GREEN AND YELLOW CASKET
^TM
read the sticker on the side.
A sticker?
Milton thought with distaste.
How tacky!
By the looks of it, though, the sticker was the only thing holding it together. As advertised, the casket was bright, bile green and hornet yellow. It looked like something Batman would use to hastily bury a supervillain’s lesser henchman. It was made of plywood, with simulated brass handles that weren’t even on completely straight.

Milton shivered and stepped cautiously toward the casket. He needed to look inside. He had no idea why. It
was as if the casket were at the bottom of some crater, with Milton standing on the edge, unable to resist its subtle, sloping incline. Part of it, truth be told, was his obsessive-compulsive disorder—the beckoning lure of the sticker’s slightly peeling corner was too powerful for him to resist picking at.

He stopped before the casket. Milton ignored the overwhelming urge to peel the sticker; instead, he grasped the lid tentatively and lifted it. A blast of pungent vapor that reminded him of biology class hit him in the face. The smell made his eyes tear up and gave him an instant headache. Through the blur of tears, he saw a husky boy in a cheap navy blue blazer and red striped clip-on tie. The boy’s cruel features were slathered with thick orange makeup. His lip was curled into a sneer. Of course Milton would be in this mortuary basement, looking down into the face of the boy he had helped put here.

Damián
.

28 · FRiENDS iN
LOW PLACES

THE RAPACIA ASSEMBLY
was teeming with whispering girls and snickering boys. Up on the auditorium stage were a half dozen male and female teachers shifting uncomfortably on beige metal chairs, save for Poker Alice, whose metal chair had wheels.

“What do you think this is all about?” Norm asked Marlo.

Marlo shrugged. “Got me,” she replied. “All I know is that it’s taking away from my valuable robbery planning time.”

Norm looked at Marlo, her eyes wide with concern. “What if they know?”

Marlo chewed the place on her lip that her mother wouldn’t let her pierce.

“Then we’re between a screwdriver and a piece of wood,” she murmured. “You know, royally—”

A pair of hooves clacked across the gleaming mahogany stage. Marlo’s mouth went dry. A hush washed across the crowd like thick, suffocating syrup. A musky odor like that of a wet goat that had rolled in its own dung wafted from the stage, forcing its way into Marlo’s nostrils before collecting at the back of her throat.

Bea “Elsa” Bubb gripped the sides of the lectern, her claws wrenching the sides until the wood screamed.

“Girls, boys, teachers, and assorted demons,” Principal Bubb said, her voice crackling over the public-address system. “You’re here today so that I can make one thing perfectly clear:
Nothing”
—her double-barrel-shotgun eyes fixed on Marlo—“and
no one
is going to interfere with Mallvana Day, where the Grabbit is to cut the ribbon—as much as it can, having no hands—to open a new wing of the afterlife’s most prodigious shopping experience: Debtopia.
This is a very big deal
. It’s part of the Eternal Quality Unification Adherence Law, where the Powers That Be and the Powers That Be Evil grudgingly work together to assure a strong, stable afterlife.”

The side of Marlo’s face began to tingle. Sure enough, the creepy new teacher’s aide, Amandi Firofnu—aka Damian, she was sure of it—was staring at her.

“She” was the spitting image of Damian, the bane
of both her brother’s existence and his
non
existence. But why would he be here, in drag, in Rapacia? It didn’t make any sense. It’s not like the Powers That Be Evil needed to send in moles to dig up dirt on people. It had never seemed particularly shy about the direct approach. Until she knew more, Marlo intended to just play along, hiding her knowledge of Amandi’s true identity like an ace up her sleeve.
(Great
, Marlo thought,
now Poker Alice has
me
thinking in gambling metaphors.)

Marlo’s other cheek began to prickle. It was that boy she’d seen in the hall, observing her in his surreptitious way a dozen or so rows away. Marlo blushed, which she couldn’t stand, because—with her scrupulously maintained pallor—it made her feel like a sunburned snowman. She also hated that her own body had betrayed her, sabotaging her attempt to appear aloof by broadcasting her interest in bright crimson.

Bea “Elsa” Bubb surveyed the crowd of restless youth with obvious disgust.

“Tomorrow, before classes, all children will be herded to Mallvana to attend the ceremony.”

The children twittered with excitement. The principal did her best to dampen this wave of enthusiasm as quickly as possible.

“All of you will be held on a very tight leash,” she added. “Some literally. There will be no disruptions, as the eyes of Heck—the entire afterlife, for that matter—will be trained upon us.”

The twitters were now replaced by resigned sighs and groans. The girls and boys were still happy they would be spending an hour in Mallvana—highly supervised or not; they just didn’t want their teachers to know that. That way it would
still
be something that the children could whine and moan about. They couldn’t take that away.

This development left Marlo precious little time to transform her cracked team of prepubescent dweebs into a crack team of machine-perfect thieves. At least she had worked out the major points of the job, preying upon the “vanity greed, and weakness” (thank you, Ms. O’Malley) of her soon-to-be dupes. And, since Marlo’s ultimate plan depended on Lyon’s, she had sketched out a “can’t-miss” ploy of nabbing one of the diamonds from Keats, the bird-demon stagecoach driver, and left it on Lyon’s chair before the ceremony so that Lyon would think that
she
had one up on Marlo. Playing fellow players was what being a girl was all about.

Principal Bubb drummed her talons atop the walnut podium. When amplified, they sounded like an army of giant ants marching off to battle in wooden clogs.

“Now, it is my extreme displeasure to introduce the next part of our assembly,” she announced with a sour scowl. Marlo noticed that just offstage was a tall, elegant yet frumpy old woman wringing her hands nervously. The woman smiled a radiant, bucktoothed grin.

“Please give a tepid welcome for our next mandatory speaker—another contractual obligation of the Galactic Order Department—all the way from …”

The principal tasted the words in her mouth, rolling them around with the look of a child forced to eat some terrible food and hoping for an opportunity to spit it out into her napkin and feed it to the family dog.

“…
up there
. Ms. Roosevelt.”

Bea “Elsa” Bubb waddled to her seat while Ms. Mandelbaum and Poker Alice rolled their eyes in derision. The auditorium filled with awkward applause.

Ms. Roosevelt, her white-feathered angel wings jutting out of her dowdy floral-print dress, fluttered onto the stage. One of the male teachers, a man with a golden crown and stiff, matching robe, stood up and extended his hand. Ms. Roosevelt briefly considered the hand, then waggled her finger at the man and grinned.

“Nice try, Mr. Midas,” she scolded. The man shrugged his shoulders and returned to his chair, which, Marlo noticed, shone like freshly minted gold.

Ms. Roosevelt cleared her throat as she took her place behind the podium. “I know that your young selves can only take so much lecturing,” she said, her smile casting a light and a warmth that she spread across the audience with gentle sweeps of her head. “Believe it or not, I was once a gangly young thing, impatient to engage with the world, thinking I knew everything there was to know. But we never know it all,
for there is never enough to know. We grow only by doing what we think we cannot.”

The room grew quiet despite itself. Even the teachers seemed to be captivated, albeit reluctantly by Ms. Roosevelt. No wonder the faculty of Heck seemed loath to allow angels equal stage time. Not only did it set back their agenda of making every child feel ugly stupid, and worthless, but it was also a painful reminder of a grace they would never know.

“In my lifetime—both on the Stage and
up there
, as Principal Bubb put it—I have learned a few things that could, hopefully, give you a little clarity in these dim times,” Ms. Roosevelt said soberly. “It is, after all, better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.”

Okay, that particular piece of fortune-cookie wisdom went way over Marlo’s head, but the angel’s presence—her soothing sparkle—was enough to drive the message home nonetheless.

“Charity is a subject that is very close to my heart,” Ms. Roosevelt relayed with tenderness. “It starts with being generous
with yourself
. Being your own friend. Because, unless you are, you can’t expect to be friends with anyone else.”

The angel took a quick breath. In that momentary pause, Marlo could hear Lyon’s voice—that sugary, breathy yet sharp inflection, like a pink Hello Kitty razor blade—pierce the silence.

“Sounds like what ugly girls tell themselves when they can’t make friends.”

Bordeaux—the living punctuation to whatever Lyon said—snickered predictably. Lyon looked back at Marlo and smiled slyly clutching Marlo’s note in her hand.

The bait has been taken
, Marlo thought with self-satisfaction.

“This place, Rapacia, holds with it opportunity” the angel continued. “Nothing is set in stone. So in this realm of greed and selfishness, I will leave you with a parting thought—”

“Don’t let the saloon door hit you in the hiney” Poker Alice quipped to Ms. Mandelbaum out of the corner of her wrinkled, tobacco-stained mouth.

“Shhh!” scolded Ms. O’Malley.

Marlo was liking her swashbuckling pirate of a teacher more and more.

“When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die,” Ms. Roosevelt said in a voice dripping with certainty.
“Really
die. So, in this way, when you give to others, you’re really giving to yourself: the gift of eternal life.”

Ms. Roosevelt paused, looked out into the audience, searching the faces with eyes leaking tears, and beamed.

“Thank you.”

And, just like that, the angel glided off the stage in
one long sweeping gesture, as if she were signing her name with her whole body in a great, cursive flourish. She was gone.

The crowd was speechless. Marlo realized in that moment that most of her life had been spent swinging from one criminal act to another. Just a skinny ape in secondhand clothing avoiding herself, stealing moments, always in motion, either plotting the future or running from the past.

I’ve got a job to do, and I can’t let some old hag with a halo screw that up
, Marlo told herself as she wiped away the tears stinging her eyes.
I’ve got to do it. For the Grabbit. For the girls. For myself
.

Norm patted her on the back comfortingly.

Marlo had indeed made a friend down here. But she still felt that she was a long way from—as Ms. Roosevelt had put it—being her
own
friend.

Just then, a blast of stale breath puffed into Marlo’s ear.

“Hello, girls.”

Startled, Marlo and Norm turned. There was Amandi, with her arms folded on the back of the two girls’ chairs. Creepy, Marlo thought, how she snuck up on them like that.

“What do you want?” Marlo asked suspiciously.

Up on the stage, Principal Bubb prodded Amandi with her eyes.

“Nothing,” Amandi said unconvincingly. “Just a little chat. Just us girls.” She scooted her chair closer. “Do you ever miss anyone? Like …
family?
Wish you could, you know, get in touch with them somehow?”

Marlo and Norm raised their eyebrows at one another as if to say, “This girl is both crazy ugly
and
ugly crazy.”

Onstage, the teachers who could rise from their chairs did, while Poker Alice urged her metal throne forward in fitful, labored bursts. Principal Bubb clacked offstage, her burning gaze flaring with every hoof-fall.

Amandi’s eyes darted nervously back and forth between the stage and the two stone-faced girls in front of her. The stocky girl sighed.

“This isn’t working,” Amandi muttered to herself. She cleared her throat with all the prim femininity of a jellyfish being fed down a garbage disposal and leaned in close to Marlo. “I know about the robbery,” she whispered.

Marlo’s stomach and heart traded places. She fought to tame her budding freak-out in hopes that it remained a freak-
in
.

“What
are
you talking about?” Marlo finally managed.

Amandi smirked. “I overheard a certain airhead
heiress talking about it,” she replied, nodding toward Bordeaux, who was staring out at the exit stairwell.

“The escalator is broken,” Bordeaux informed a passing demon.

Marlo took a deep breath to steady her nerves. “Look, I don’t know what Flintstones vitamins you’re both on,” she said, “so why don’t you just—”

“Here’s how it’s going down,” Amandi interrupted. She sat back in her metal chair smugly. It screamed under the sudden shift in weight. “I’m on your team,” she said flatly. “You have no choice. Not with what I know.”

Marlo sighed with resignation. Poker Alice wheeled back onstage, chuffing and wheezing like a decommissioned steam engine. She grabbed Midas’s golden chair with one arm, while wheeling herself away with the other.

Marlo rubbed her temples. She needed to contain Amandi before she spilled the jelly beans. She had no idea what Amandi/Damian’s deal was, but she knew one thing: if Amandi was an enemy, then she would be exactly where Marlo wanted her …
close
.