Rogue (7 page)

He shoved five into his face at once. “Ghost perk: I can eat as much as I want and not gain a pound.”

“You always eat as much as you want. And you never gain a pound.”

“This is also true.”

“I wonder how it’ll work with . . . you know . . . the other end,” Lex said.

Driggs swallowed, then looked thoughtful. “I’ll keep you posted.”

“Wait one flippin’ minute,” Ferbus slurred. “There isn’t any trout in these sandwiches!”

Everyone stopped chewing to stare at him.

“Um. Should there be?” Uncle Mort asked.

“ Kh="he shoRead the sign!”

Uncle Mort followed his gaze. “‘Welcome to Roscoe, New York,’” he read off the town sign. “‘Trout Town, USA.’”

“And no trout! What a waste!”

Uncle Mort raised an eyebrow. “I’m sorry this foodie tour isn’t up to your lofty standards, Ferbus. I’ll be sure to refund the price of your ticket.”

Ferbus shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder why we even came to Trout Town, USA at
ALL
,” he moaned, swinging his arms out and accidentally smashing his bottle of Yorick on the ceiling.

“Aggh!”
Pandora yelled as the drink rained down everywhere. “For the love of Mamie Eisenhower, it’s getting into the furs!”

Elysia turned the shade of a stop sign. “We’ll never be able to go out in public,” she whispered to Lex, her voice furious as she watched Ferbus attempt to mop up the mess. “No restaurants, no movie theaters. Just thirty-one varieties of Hamburger Helper, one per night, month after month”—her voice went up with each word—“for the rest of my
life!
”

“Get a towel!” Pandora was still shouting. “In the back there!”

Pip yanked a towel off a pile of something and tossed it to Driggs, who used it to soak up the liquid. “Exactly what kind of animal did these furs come from, Dora?”

She narrowed her eyes. “The slow kind.”

“Hey, Mort?” Pip was looking at something he’d found underneath the towel. He held up an old copy of
The Obituary
, the Grimsphere’s newspaper. “Is this you?”

Uncle Mort turned around and looked. A glimmer of recognition passed through his eyes; at the same time, his shoulders deflated. “Twenty years to clean those things out, Dora. Couldn’t find a spare minute?”

“I’m a busy woman.”

Pip was studying it more closely. “It
is
Mort! And look who else!” Bang, looking over his shoulder, signed an excited pair of jazz hands.

Lex knew what that meant. “LeRoy too? Let me see that.”

They passed her the paper. Splashed across the front page were the words
TANK-BOMBING JUNIORS ARRESTED
. The article beneath it had mostly crumbled away except for a large black-and-white photo of four people: a younger but still fabulous version of LeRoy; Uncle Mort at the same age, with blood on his face; a Native American girl with dual pigtail braids; and one other Junior whose face was covered by his or her hands.

Lex looked at her uncle in disbelief. “You bombed a
tank?
”

“No.”

“Then—what, you bombed something
with
a tank? Where did you get a tank?”

He rolled his eyes. “There was no bomb. They got that all wrong.”

“But—” She took a closer look at the photo, at the slash across his cheek. “Your scar.”

Something was going on in Uncle Mort’s eyes—sadness, maybe regret, or a hint of anger. Pandora whacked him with a bony arm. “Tell ’em, kid. They’ll probably find out sooner or later.”

Uncle Mort cracked his knuckles, then, staring out the window, cracked them again. “I was a Junior once, too,” he said so quietly that everyone leaned forward to hear him better. “And much like you, Lex, I somehow got it into my head that I was pretty much right about everything, all the time.”

“And the times have changed how?” Lex said.

“Well, back then I only
thought
I was right.” He turned and grinned at her. “Now I
am
right.”

“Ah.”

“There were four of us Juniors, and we were just as close as all of you are now. We were the dream team, if ever there was one. LeRoy . . .” He smiled K”ur of u, remembering. “LeRoy was brilliant. Smooth talker, knew how to get strange things from strange places, and downright scary when he needed to be.” He pointed to the girl with braids. “That’s Skyla. A genius mind for planning. She’s the one who fully engineered our attack, detailed our positions and timing right down to the second.”

“So there
was
an attack,” Lex pressed.

“Yes, but we had our reasons. It was this feeling we’d all been getting ever since we first arrived in the Grimsphere—an inkling that something about the Afterlife was off. So we did a little digging, did some calculations. And in the end, the evidence was staring us in the face: the Afterlife was eroding, and it would disappear forever if we didn’t stop, or at least cut down on, human involvement in the area of death.”

“Which is what we’re trying to do right now,” Driggs said. “Stop the violations.”

“Right. But back then, we were ahead of our time. We tried to tell the mayor, but he wouldn’t listen to us, thought we were just a bunch of stupid kids. Next we tried to go over his head and tell the president, but again, we were blown off. Everyone thought we were just conspiracy theorists, out to cause trouble because we were bored or couldn’t hold our Yoricks.”

A spark lit up in his eyes. “But we knew we were right. We
knew
it. So, desperate to get the attention of those in power, we decided to do something a little . . . drastic.”

After a moment of silence, Pip couldn’t help himself. “What?” he asked. “What did you do?”

Uncle Mort managed an expression that was sheepish and proud at the same time. “We smashed the jellyfish tank. Knocked Croak offline for a week.”

Every one of the Juniors gasped. “You
what?
” Elysia cried.

“How did you not get exiled for that?” Lex asked, incredulous. “They’d probably throw
me
in the Hole just for jaywalking, yet you and LeRoy become
mayors?
How does that happen?”

At this, Uncle Mort looked pained. Turning his gaze to the floor, he started rubbing his scar, from his eye to his ear.

“We got creative,” he said.

Before he could expand on that, though, his Cuff crackled. He held it up to his ear, frowning. “Hello?”

A muffled voice came back.

“Who is this?” he demanded, his face getting hard.

“G’day, Croakers!” Broomie’s voice sang, clear and bouncy. “On the road again?”

“Broomie!” the Juniors shouted, thrilled to hear from their friend from DeMyse.

“Ask about Riqo!” Pip told Uncle Mort. Along with Broomie, Riqo had teamed up with them in DeMyse, then distracted Zara so that they could escape. Last time they had seen him, his blood was seeping into the hotel carpet as they Crashed out of DeMyse.

But Uncle Mort didn’t seem to hear Pip. Agitated, he cupped his hand over the Cuff. “Cuffs can hardly be considered secure lines, Broomie. What are you doing?”

“I know, sorry about that, mate. But I figured this was too important not to pass on, no matter the risk: You’ve got some allies.”

Smiles broke out around the car. “How’s that?” Uncle Mort said.

“Kilda showed your video around, and—”

“Kilda’s alive?” Lex exclaimed.

“Alive and chatty as ever. She told me that a small group of Croakers decided to up and follow you, just in case you ran into trouble. Sort of like extra backup for Wicket. So if you see anyone on your tail,
don’t
just fire off a few rounds for the hell of it. Check to see if they’re friendly first.”

“Okay,” said Uncle Mort. “Got it.”

“Mort!” K">to s Pip insisted. “Ask about Riqo!”

“How’s LeRoy?” Uncle Mort said into the Cuff.

“Don’t worry, he hasn’t changed his mind,” Broomie answered. “He’s solid, trust me. Plus, he knows I’ll personally neuter him if he bails.”

“Sounds terrifying. Thanks for the heads-up, Broomie.”

“No worries! Good luck!”

Uncle Mort hung up, prompting a loud sigh from Pip. Lex, however, was frowning. “What is it that LeRoy might change his mind about?”

“Oh, his wallpaper patterns, I’m sure.”

Lex rolled her eyes but didn’t press further. Her record of successfully getting information out of Uncle Mort when he didn’t want to volunteer it was abysmal.

“Mort,” Driggs said, thinking, “if you’ve known for years that interacting with the portals was bad for the Grimsphere, why didn’t you ban Grims from going in there and socializing with the souls? And why did you give us the ability to Crash?”

“Crashing was a necessary evil. Norwood was closing in on us, and I didn’t see any other way to provide an escape for all of you. As for the portals, I couldn’t let on that I still had a problem with them once I became mayor. Didn’t want to tip anyone off, so it had to be business as usual.”

“So you’ve known all along that mingling with souls and Crashing were both harming the Afterlife?” Lex said. “And you never told anyone?”

Uncle Mort glared at her. “You try juggling the governance of a town
and
the preservation of the Afterlife
and
the safety of a bunch of kids entrusted to your care,” he said. “Pretty hard to pull all those off at the same time without a bit of deception.”

“Hear, hear,” Grotton piped up, having swooped in just in time to catch the end of their conversation. He looked pointedly at Lex. “We all need our secrets, don’t we, love?”

Lex flinched, feeling cold all over.

He knows
, she realized.

Grotton knew about all those Damnings she’d done in secret. Of course he knew. He’d been following her ever since she got to Croak.

Her eyes stayed glued to his, those colorless, lifeless orbs hanging lazily in the stuffy car air. It took every bit of self-control to keep from visibly reacting, tipping off the Juniors that something was wrong. “Yeah,” she said through a dry mouth. “We do.”

Luckily, no one seemed to read anything into their frosty exchange. “Get out of here,” said Driggs, shooing Grotton away as if he were a bothersome housefly. “Go read your precious Wrong Book.”

“Oh, no need to read it,” Grotton said with a malicious grin. “I wrote the thing, after all. I know it down to the last letter.”

Lex didn’t dare look away. She was holding the gaze of the man who had been responsible for training Zara, who in turn had killed Cordy. She knew she was going to kill him, for good this time. And yet something was passing between them—almost an understanding. They’d both Damned a whole mess of people. The only difference was that Grotton’s Damning was legendary, whereas Lex’s was still a secret.

Carefully, as if the slightest motion might cause Grotton to launch into a proclamation right there in front of everyone, she turned away, looked out the window, and swallowed as the snow-covered trees flew by.

***

Some time later, Lex woke up and swept her gaze around the car. All the Juniors were conked out, even Driggs, his head flopped down on her shoulder. Carefully, she shifted him to Ferbus’s shoulder instead, not wanting to rouse him awake—or worse, to his ghostly form.

As she moved, her foot hit something on the floor.

She reache Km">word for the bulky object. The Wrong Book’s gold letters glistened in the light of the setting sun. She snuck a glance at Pandora, who was squinting intently at the road and not paying a lick of attention to her passengers. Uncle Mort was going over some papers he’d taken from the basement—Lex caught a glimpse of something that looked like a schematic of a tall, tapering building, like a lighthouse. She didn’t know what that could possibly be for, but Uncle Mort often didn’t make a lot of sense.

Yet he’d been pretty clear about not using the Wrong Book for their own needs, saying that it was far too evil and unpredictable. But how bad could it be?

She opened the cover of the book. There was no title page, no introduction.

She flipped to the next page. Nothing there either.

The rest of the pages fanned through her fingers, each one blank. Her hands began to get clammy and stick to the paper as panic set in.

They’d risked everything for this? An empty book?

“There’s a trick to it,” a voice whispered in her ear.

Lex jumped in her seat, then held still to make sure she hadn’t woken anyone else. Bang’s eyes fluttered open but closed just as quickly.

Lex turned her head to find Grotton’s beside hers; he’d stuck it down from atop the roof to read over her shoulder.

“Don’t
do
that,” she hissed.

“Sincerest apologizes, love, but that’s what ghosts do, I’m afraid.” He grinned. “We spook.”

Lex tried to make her voice as even as possible. “What is this?” she asked, jabbing her finger onto one of the empty pages. “A joke?”

“Elixir ink,” he said. “Can only be read or revealed—”

“By the person who wrote it,” Lex said with a groan, remembering what Uncle Mort had said back in the basement. “So it’s useless to everyone but your dickish self?”

“Yes,” he said. “Unless I’m feeling particularly charitable.”

“Are you feeling particularly charitable right now?”

“Not so much after that rude comment, but—” He beamed maliciously. “Perhaps a sneak peek.”

He passed his translucent hand over the page. As he did, the words became visible wherever he touched, as if he were a human magnifying glass. Lex was able to read a heading that said
T
HE
P
ROJECTION
before he yanked his hand away, turning the page blank once again.

“What was that?” she asked.

“The projection process. How to briefly and temporarily project my visage away from the Wrong Book when an occasion calls for it—to drop off a note, for instance, or pop in to say hello to a new friend.”

Lex knew what he was getting at. The clues he’d left for her to find at the library, the times he’d shown up in a white tuxedo to stare at her from afar—

And, of course, when he’d appeared to Zara, to train her.

“You bastard,” she spat. Bang was definitely awake now and staring at her with big eyes, but Lex couldn’t stop herself. “Zara never would have stolen my Damning power, never killed my sister, never fully turned into a monster without you goading her on and telling her precisely what to do. This is all your fault.”