Conjured

My companion has a painted porcelain face with glass eyes. She’s dressed in a white pinafore, and has one hand tied to the metal bar. The other rests limply in her lap. She has a crack in her porcelain neck; smoke oozes from the crack. Her legs are unfinished, and cotton spills out of the seams.

I cringe, pulling away from her—from it—and wait for the ride to end.

But it doesn’t.

I sweep past the ground, past the crowd, past the man in a black-and-white harlequin suit who turns a crank at the base of the wheel—the Magician, I think, though it doesn’t look like him. The wheel rises into the air, and the birds continue to burn.

* * *

I woke in the bushes. Twigs poked into my flesh. My head lay against the house, and the coolness of the concrete foundation seeped through my hair to my scalp.

It was daytime, either again or still. The sky was gray, and the shadows were flat. It was impossible to tell if it was morning or afternoon.

I’d been lucky. So far, I hadn’t lost the memory of the false hat. Or of Aidan, Topher, and Victoria’s warning. I could have been trapped again and not even known it. I can’t use any more magic, I thought.

Slowly, I crept out of the bushes. Out of the shade, the sun pricked my skin. Humidity thickened the air. A few cicadas buzzed, and I heard a lawnmower in the distance. I need Zach, I thought. He could keep me free—at least until I figured out what to do. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. All I knew was that I was sick of having things done to me.

With that thought, I sprinted across the yard. Reaching the fence, I threw myself at it and climbed over. I landed in the neighbor’s backyard, also empty.

No one shouted at me. No one chased me. So I kept running. I leaped over the fence into the next yard. And then the next yard, and the next. I ran through flower gardens and around sheds and play sets. I squeezed through bushes. I scrambled over wood piles. In one yard, I surprised an elderly woman who was kneeling in her garden—I landed in the soft earth of the flowerbed beside her. In another, kids played in a sandbox. But I didn’t slow. The body that the doctors had shaped for me was strong, and I didn’t need to slow. I felt my feet slap the ground and my muscles work and my heart pump and my lungs inflate and deflate, and it felt wonderful to run free after all the visions of ropes and bindings and boxes.

But it didn’t—it couldn’t—last forever.

The string of houses ended in a parking lot for a church. For an instant, I froze, staring at the church, as a memory poured into me. Elsewhere, another time, I’d seen a church beside a graveyard with silver pillars, marble statues, and a woman so still that she might as well have been one of the statues. She’d been wrapped in pale-gray scarves … Was it a real memory? I tried to picture the woman’s face, but she was shrouded in mist.

Shaking myself out of my reverie, I ducked behind a garage. Cars drove by. A sprinkler click-clicked as it rotated. On one of the driveways nearby, three boys played basketball. Everything seemed so peaceful and ordinary that it almost lulled me into feeling safe. But I couldn’t trust that feeling. I kept thinking of the woman in mist.

Across the street was the library surrounded by woods. Creeping around the garage, I hid behind a trimmed hedge. I waited until the road was clear, and then barreled across and plunged between the trees.

Green surrounded me, and I waded through the underbrush and climbed over fallen stone walls as I circled the library. The birds chirped louder, and the leaves rustled—squirrels, I hoped.

Listening to the noises, I thought about the woods in my memory, the one with ancient trees and the homes nestled high in the branches. I still couldn’t remember if I’d been chased through the woods or I’d been one of the ones doing the chasing. Oddly, it felt like both.