The Apprentices (8 page)

“Maybe,” Janie said.

“So, did you really get kicked out?”

“I did.”

“I heard that, but I couldn’t believe it.”

“They said I cheated on the trig test.”

Tadpole burst out laughing. “You?” he said. “You’d have to cheat to get an answer
wrong.
”

Janie’s heart warmed toward him, for believing in her. “Thanks, Tadpole,” she said. “I mean it. Thank you.”

Tadpole blushed and seemed tongue-tied, and then recovered. “Hey, are you going to the dance? The, you know, Winter Wonderland thing?”

The question almost made her laugh. “No.”

“Oh,” he said. “I was just wondering.”

“Okay.” She started to make her way around him. She needed to read Benjamin’s letter.

“No, wait!” he said, holding up both arms to block her. “Maybe you want to go. I mean, I’m on the dance committee. So I’m sort of supposed to make sure people want…you know, to go.”

When Janie was still a Grayson student, she might have become self-conscious and unsure about whether anyone—even awkward, brainy Tadpole—was inviting her to the dance. But in the last week her evasiveness had gotten such a workout that she didn’t have any of it left for the Winter Wonderland. “Are you inviting me to the dance?” she asked.

He blushed again. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, yes. I am.”

“I’ve been kicked out,” she said. “I’m not even supposed to be on campus. I can’t go.”

“Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

“But thanks for inviting me. I’d go if I could.”

“Really?”

“Don’t tell anyone you saw me, okay?”

“Oh!” he said. “No. Of course. I won’t.” Blushing so furiously had made his glasses fog again, and he took them off. Janie took advantage of his nearsightedness to dart around him and escape.

J
anie tore open Benjamin’s envelope as soon as she got off campus. Something small and square slipped out of the letter, and she caught it before it fell.

The object was a flat glassine envelope that fit in her palm, and it was sealed with a double fold. She could see through the shiny, almost transparent paper to a coarse gray powder inside. She put the powder carefully in her pocket and read the letter, paying special attention to the first letter of each word.

The letter wasn’t stilted, but she tried the code anyway.
Isyswjd. Rthrmfogy. Tafglt.
Unless it was someplace in Iceland without many vowels, there was no code revealing where Benjamin was. She tried the last sentences, but there she found
Msya. Tsqacyeatawm. Iycsi. Giat.

Nothing.

So maybe the instructions were all that the message was meant to convey. The apothecary, Benjamin’s father, had given her a homesickness remedy when she first arrived in London. It was a combination of two powders, aspen and honeysuckle, dissolved in water. She’d met Benjamin on her first day using it, so it had been hard to determine what, exactly, had conquered her homesickness: aspen and honeysuckle, or a new friend.

She needed privacy to try the powder, but there was no privacy. Raffaello was at Bruno’s when she got there, and she carefully tucked both envelopes away in her pocket.

“I auditioned!” Raffaello said.

He looked so proud that she had to laugh. “Congratulations,” she said. “Was it scary?”

“Not as scary as facing Aunt Giovanna. Is that what made you sick? Do you feel better?”

She’d forgotten she’d said that she didn’t feel well. The morning seemed so long ago. “Much better, thanks.”

“Good, because my dad needs us to do some prep in the kitchen. Have you ever chopped garlic?”

She shook her head.

“I’ll show you how,” he said. “They’ll put up the cast list over the weekend.”

He told her all about the audition as they peeled and chopped. So it wasn’t until late, when her fingers were pruned and the dishwater had soaked out all the garlic smell, and she had closed out the till and taken her tips, and the others had gone to bed in the apartment over the restaurant, that she was finally alone. Her hands felt clumsy from exhaustion or nervousness as she drew a glass of water. She tapped in a few grains of the coarse powder, letting it dissolve. Then she drank it down. Benjamin had said to think about
him.
Sitting cross-legged on the couch, she closed her eyes.

She thought about the first time she had seen him, a stubborn, sandy-haired boy arguing with the lunchroom matron at St. Beden’s during a bomb drill. Janie had crouched obediently under the lunchroom table, like all the other students, and from there she had seen Benjamin telling the matron that hiding under tables wasn’t going to protect them from an atomic bomb.

Then she thought about standing with him on the deck of an icebreaker at sea, heading north under a brilliant scattering of stars. He had reached out and touched her hair. She had known there was danger ahead, and still there was nowhere else in the world she had wanted to be.

Then something else happened. In that imagined space behind her eyelids, the inky sea faded away, and she saw lush green trees. She was no longer on the sea at night. It was day, but the sunlight filtered through dense foliage. She was crouched against a muddy slope in some kind of tropical jungle. The roots of a huge fallen tree, still hung with clods of dirt, provided shelter. She could smell the damp earth.

A blast of gunfire went off surprisingly close, and Janie flinched. Then she realized that the gunfire was steady and continuous, just over the rise.

She wanted to turn her head to look, but the imagining wasn’t the kind she could control. It was like a vivid, uncontrollable dream, and it made her a little dizzy. Now there were two hands in front of her, not her own hands, rubbing some kind of liquid between them. The sharp smell of alcohol reached her nose.

A man’s voice spoke nearby, and Janie’s field of vision swung to take in the speaker. She gasped and nearly opened her eyes. Crouched next to her was the apothecary—Benjamin’s father, Mr. Burrows. He wore a dark cotton shirt and a sweat-soaked blue bandana around his neck. “The firing’s dying down,” he said. “It won’t be long.”

Janie listened to the gunfire. Soon she only heard a distant, random shot every few seconds.

“Let’s go,” the apothecary said.

Janie seemed to be clambering up behind him, around the roots of the tree. Then her vision began to swim and break up. It was as if the illusion couldn’t stand movement. The effect could only work when Benjamin kept still.

For it
was
Benjamin, she was sure of it. It was his hands she had seen, in place of her own. She had been seeing
through his eyes.
She sat very still on the couch, trying to bring the vision back. It was like trying to recover the fragments of a lost dream. But there was only darkness. She opened her eyes and saw Bruno and Giovanna’s dim living room. When she
turned her head, her vision spun, and she thought she might throw up, so she kept still. The curtains and books that had once seemed cozy and welcoming now seemed only dull and disappointing, after Benjamin’s lush, dangerous world.

Benjamin’s world! She closed her eyes to try to go back, but saw nothing. Where was he? Why was he in the jungle? Were they going into battle? How had he made the gray powder? Had he taken some? He must have.

And another question: Could Benjamin see through her eyes also, or did the effect only go one way? Did he know when she was doing it? She thought he must not, or he would have spoken to her. But maybe she could have spoken to him!

“Benjamin!” she called softly, in the empty living room.

Nothing. She had to try again.

She stood and moved carefully to the kitchen. The room didn’t spin so much now. She filled her glass with water, tapped in a few more grains of powder, and drank it down. Her stomach seized, cramping, and she had to sit down on the kitchen floor to keep from falling over. She tried to be quiet, not to wake the others. She closed her eyes to find Benjamin again, but saw nothing, and felt only the disorienting dizziness and the pain in her stomach.

So maybe she wasn’t supposed to take the stuff again so soon. The avian elixir, which had turned them into birds, worked like that: Benjamin had fallen from the sky after taking it too quickly a second time.

She waited for the nausea to pass, and tried to breathe, and thought about what jungle Benjamin might be in. She
wished he had thought to write his location or some message on his shirtsleeves, just in case she looked in unexpectedly. “HI, JANIE, I’M IN ________.” Or he could have used his old code in the letter, in some meaningless first sentence, to tell her where he was.

She remembered the arguments they’d had in London over how to use the Pharmacopoeia, and how to anticipate the hazards of whatever they were planning. She could imagine Benjamin retorting that he hadn’t included a coded nonsense sentence because he wanted to be very
clear
about what she was supposed to
do.
And it was dangerous to keep using the same code, as someone might
break
it. And he didn’t know exactly how the powder would
work
over such a great distance.

She smiled, imagining his indignant voice and his explanations. Benjamin was clearer to her now that she had seen his world through his eyes. She could try to reach him later, when it seemed safe to try again. She would look harder for signs of where he might be.

Then she remembered the gunfire, and Benjamin running out of their shelter. She hoped he and his father were safe, wherever they were.

B
enjamin Burrows and his father were huddled in a makeshift foxhole, beneath the exposed roots of a fallen tree, waiting for the shooting to stop. Benjamin kept his arms protectively over his head and tried not to think about the grenade that could come flying into their shelter at any moment. He reminded himself that he had wanted a life of adventure. He had not wanted to run an apothecary shop in London. To keep his mind off the bullets flying through the air, he made a mental list of all the things that he had not wanted to make his living selling:

Aspirin

Hot-water bottles

Epsom salts

Milk of magnesia

Cod-liver oil

Cotton gauze

That last item brought him back to reality, and he reached for his satchel to be sure he still had plenty of gauze bandages.
They were going to need them when the fighting stopped. A grenade exploded not far away, and Benjamin rolled into the wall of earth beneath the upended tree roots. A spray of dirt and small rocks hit his back. He looked up at his father. “You all right?” he asked.

“Yes, yes, fine.”

His father seemed to have shrunk in their weeks in the jungle. Benjamin was skinnier, too. They were living on rice, mostly, and green shoots his father found, and occasional bowls of stewed pork from the grateful families of men they had saved. But the villagers could barely feed themselves, let alone share with two hungry foreigners.

One night, Benjamin had woken with an itching head, his scalp crawling with something. He had leaped up shouting, clawing at his hair, and brought away dried blood and writhing ants beneath his fingernails. He woke his father, whose calm diagnosis had been that a leech had found its way onto Benjamin’s head as he slept, injecting an anticoagulant to prevent blood clotting. When it had drunk its fill and dropped off, it left Benjamin’s scalp bleeding freely. The ants had been attracted by the blood. “This whole jungle’s out to get me!” Benjamin had cried. But his father had said that was a fallacy. The ants and the leech weren’t out to get him. They didn’t even recognize him as a particular individual. They were only doing what ants and leeches do: seeking nourishment.

“We need to get out of here,” Benjamin said now, beneath the fallen tree.

“Not yet,” his father said. “They’re still firing.”

“I mean out of this whole country. This place. We’re not cut out for this kind of war.”

“The people here need us,” his father said. “We have an obligation to help them.”

Benjamin sighed and settled back into the damp earth. They had come to Vietnam because his father had been looking for a particular plant with unusual medicinal qualities. But the Vietminh, who had fought the Japanese with the support of the United States, and defeated the French in a bid for independence, were now supported by Communist China. One day while Benjamin and his father were out collecting, Vietminh soldiers overran the rural village where they had been staying. The local people put up a fight and were slaughtered or captured. When Benjamin and his father returned, they treated the survivors. As soon as they were finished, a messenger begged them to come to the next village, where the same thing had taken place.