Tricks for Free Read online

Artie didn’t create “Melody West,” because he’d been too young when I first needed her. She’d been a gift to my parents from Uncle Al, a jink living in Las Vegas who got adopted into the family through the usual complex series of unreasonable events. We don’t have much blood family left in the world, but we make up for it by acquiring honorary family everywhere we go.

  As far as most people are concerned, “Melody West” disappeared after she graduated from high school, one more boring mystery for a world that’s always been absolutely full of them. I’ve never liked to let anything useful go to waste. I’d been expanding upon and tinkering with her identity ever since, keeping her on the grid just enough to qualify as a real person. She’d never held a steady job, never anything lucrative enough to attract the attention of the IRS, but she’d never applied for benefits either. She moved around a lot. She was unremarkable, unnoticeable, and she was mine. No one else knew her ID was still active.

  Antimony Price couldn’t get a job at Lowryland, because Antimony Price wasn’t here. Melody West, though, just might stand a chance.

  “Melody?” The woman who called my name didn’t look up from her clipboard.

  I rose. “Here.”

  She finally glanced up. Her nostrils flared in barely-smothered dismay at the sight of me. There’s only so much a truck stop bathroom can do for a body.

  I’ll give her this much: she covered her reaction quickly. “This way,” she said, stepping back into the hall. People had been vanishing through that door all morning long. None of them had come back. There was another door that led to the outside, to keep those of us still waiting from either getting dispirited when we saw happy applicants, or cocky when we saw disappointed ones. Psychologically speaking, it was probably a good design.

  In practice, it made me feel like everyone who left was being fed into a giant meat grinder somewhere behind the scenes. And now it was my turn. I forced myself to keep smiling and followed the nameless woman out of the room, toward what I hoped would be my future.

  * * *

  Children and parents all over the world speak the name of Michael Lowry with only slightly less reverence than the name Walt Disney. They were rivals once, after all, and while Disney proved to have the edge when it came to modern family entertainment, Lowry held his market share with an iron hand, producing innovative pictures and inexpensive alternatives for the family that couldn’t quite afford the golden spires of Disney’s enchanted kingdoms. Not managing to match Disney’s towering successes didn’t take him out of the game.

  Like Disney, Lowry dreamed of amusement parks, immersive environments for the whole family to enjoy. Like Disney, Lowry saw California and Florida as the best locations to realize his dreams, since they were the states with the mildest winters and hence the fewest annual closure dates. They weren’t the only ones to flee to America’s vacation destinations, but they were the first to break ground on their great entertainments, and Florida’s Lowryland opened only two years after Disney World.

  Not that anyone would have known Disney World even existed from walking down the hall of the Lowryland recruitment office. Framed black-and-white photos of Lowryland were placed every few feet, each tastefully accentuated with a plaque or framed award certificate or article extolling the superior virtues of Lowry Entertainment, Inc. over all other children’s entertainment companies. I’d been expecting team spirit from the Lowry folks—no point in being on a team if you can’t find something to cheer about—but this was approaching pep rally levels.

  My escort led us to a cubicle maze, where she gestured for me to take a seat on the petitioner’s side of an L-shaped desk. She wrinkled her nose, ever so slightly, when my butt hit the chair. I was clearly even dirtier looking than I’d thought. My heart sank.

  I could try Lowry again, of course. The nice thing about having a fake ID is that you can always get another one. But fake IDs cost money, and without contacting my family, I’d have to find a way to get that money on my own. Robbing convenience stores might play a big part in my future if I wanted to be able to buy clean clothes, a clean name, and a second shot at all the jobs I was about to not get.

  “All right, Miss . . . West, what brings you to the Lowry family? Why should we consider you for the position?”

  “I’m a hard worker, I’m motivated to meet and exceed any employment requirements, and I have experience working with traveling carnivals, which means I’ve worked with crowds, children, people experiencing ride-related vertigo, and entertainers.” All of that was true. That’s the key to a good lie: build it on a foundation of as much truth as possible, because the truth will shore it up even when the falsehoods begin falling away.

  I’m getting awfully tired of lying about who I am. There’s always been a veil of pretense between me and the rest of the world, thanks to my family and what we do, but there’s a big difference between basic subterfuge and this “Bruce Banner on the run from the government goons” bullshit that has consumed my life.

  The woman flashed me a frozen smile. My heart sank. That wasn’t the sort of smile that came before “you got the job.” It might be the kind of smile that came before “Security is going to escort you off the premises.” All in all, not a good sign. My fingertips grew hot as my anxiety about failing to get the job translated into adrenaline and the adrenaline translated, as it so often does, into my body trying to involuntarily set things on fire.

  Being an untrained magic-user in the process of manifesting her powers is fun, and by “fun” I mean “only slightly better than being covered in wasps, like, all the goddamn time.” Better yet, there’s no one around to train me. The last magic-user in our family was my grandfather, Thomas Price, and he’s been missing since long before I was born. My Aunt Mary could get me the lessons I need, but she’s a crossroads ghost, and well . . .

  Some prices are still too steep for me to pay, even if it means occasionally charring my clothes.

  I stuck my fingers under my knees, smothering them as best I could, and met the woman’s frozen smile with a weak, wavering smile of my own. Please don’t say what you’re about to say, I thought. Please don’t.

  She did. “Lowryland is not a traveling carnival, Miss West, and while we appreciate your enthusiasm, your lack of either references or a fixed address makes you—”

  “Melody?” Excitement tinged my assumed name, causing it to climb higher with every letter, until it peaked in something just shy of a squeak. “Melody West?”

  The woman with the clipboard blanched. I turned.

  There, standing in the mouth of the cubicle, was my high school cheer captain, Sophie Vargas. Oh, she was older now—who wasn’t?—and had traded her cheerleading uniform for a smart pantsuit in a shade of cream that set off her naturally tan skin gorgeously. It looked like it cost about as much as my cousin Elsie’s car, and that wasn’t even going into the accessories, which were all opal, and obviously all real. Her makeup was tasteful, her heels were both leather and low, and I could easily have walked past her on the street without a second glance, if not for one little detail:

  She had a spirit bow—in the Lowry Entertainment logo colors, red and silver—clipped above her left ear. It was a playful, almost juvenile affectation, and it made the rest of her make sense. Sophie was always an overachiever. Now she was just overachieving on a corporate level.

  I didn’t have to work to make my eyes widen or my jaw drop. The sight of her did that all on its own. “Sophie?”

  “Oh, my God, I heard your voice down the hall, and I thought ‘naw, that can’t be Mels,’ but here you are—” Sophie paused, frowning. “Here you are. Clarice, what are you doing here? If this is an intake interview, it should be happening in one of the conference rooms.”

  “Miss West’s credentials are somewhat . . . lacking,” said the clipboard woman. She was less frightening now that she had a name and was grimacing like she’d bitten into something sour. “S
he does not have a fixed address, and while she’s listed several relevant skills, she has no verifiable past employment.”

  “I see,” said Sophie. There was a sudden, venomous sweetness in her tone. I remembered that voice aimed at cheer newbies on the field behind our high school, usually right after they complained about something trivial. “Did you not receive this quarter’s memo on giving back to the community by working with people who lack work history but possess applicable skills?”

  “That was meant to help us hire more seasonal college workers, not homeless people,” said Clarice.

  Sophie’s face froze. “I see. Thank you for your candor; I’ll be speaking with your supervisor. Melody, with me, please.”

  It had never been a good idea to argue with Sophie when she used that tone. I couldn’t imagine that had changed. I jumped to my feet, grabbing my backpack from where I’d stuffed it under the chair, and started toward the cubicle exit. At the last moment I paused, offered Clarice a wan smile, and said, “Thank you for meeting with me.”

  Sophie took my arm and whisked me down the hall before Clarice could reply. That might have been for the best. I couldn’t imagine whatever Clarice might have to say would be terribly complimentary.

  The cubicle maze extended to the far wall, where Sophie took a sharp left, pulling me into a narrow hallway with walls only a few shades darker than her suit. I made a sound of impressed amazement as I realized her outfit was not only designed to coordinate with her accessories and her coloration, but with the building itself. She was dressed to look like the whole place had been painted solely to flatter her. It was either genius or proof that she’d spent too much time as a cheerleader. Or possibly both. Both was always an option.

  We reached an open door with her name on a brass nameplate next to it. SOPHIE VARGAS-JACKSON. I blinked.

  “You got married?”

  “I would have invited you, but no one knew where you were.” Sophie gave me a measuring sidelong look. It was the first time she’d visibly assessed me since stepping into Clarice’s cubicle. It definitely wasn’t the first time she’d done it. Sophie was good like that. People never knew she was sizing them up until it was done. “You know, most of the old squad has stayed in touch. You’re the only one who dropped off the face of the planet.”

  “Yeah, well.” I looked away before she could see more than regret in my eyes. “Things got complicated.”

  “Things always do.”

  Sophie’s office was sleek, sophisticated, with leather chairs and glass-topped furnishings, all accented with little pops of Lowry red. (Literally “Lowry red.” That’s the name of the color. Isn’t trademark law fun?) She stepped around the desk and sat in her high-backed executive chair, gesturing for me to have a seat. I sat.

  The visitor’s chair here was sure a lot nicer than the one in Clarice’s cubicle. It was probably going to need to be steam-cleaned after encountering me.

  “Did you marry him?” asked Sophie, without preamble.

  I blinked at her. “Uh . . .”

  “Because I’ve been the hiring manager here for two years—don’t laugh, I’m young, but I went to business school, and the company knows potential when it comes along. I’ve seen a lot of people come through those doors and run into the gatekeepers like Clarice. She’s supposed to screen out the ones who aren’t safe to be around children, the ones who aren’t competent. Clearly, it’s time to send her back to sensitivity training.” Sophie rolled her eyes. “Some people can’t get it through their damned thick skulls that if you’re willing to see the potential in everyone, you’re in a position to benefit from everyone. You’ll never find a harder, more dedicated, more loyal worker than someone who’s already been passed over by somebody else.”

  “You’re running a corporation like a cheer squad?” Sophie had become squad captain when we were sophomores in high school, winning by a clear majority vote on a platform of inclusiveness and not being a jerk without good reason. She didn’t quite have an “everybody into the pool” policy, but under her guidance, our squad had become a lot more diverse and a lot more successful than it had been under the previous regime’s “we like skinny blondes who don’t make good bases but sure can shake their asses” guidelines.

  Sophie smiled thinly. “I’m not running the corporation yet. Give me ten years, and maybe I will be. Did you marry him? Because I’ll be honest. I assumed you’d said ‘no’ when he asked, and that he’d murdered you and stuffed your body into a drainage ditch somewhere. It’s not like your absentee parents would ever have noticed.”

  Just like that, everything clicked.

  Melody West did not come from a warm and loving home, because if she had, I wouldn’t have spent all my time making excuses for the absence of her—of my—parents. My home was warm. My home was loving. It was just that my parents couldn’t come to my school functions any more than they’d come to Verity’s or Alex’s. We were as close to on our own as the system allowed. But that meant people looked at my naturally somewhat dour demeanor and frequent bruises and assumed I was neglected at best, abused at worst. I didn’t work very hard to convince them otherwise. If they thought they had all the answers, they didn’t look any deeper.

  Unfortunately, it also meant that when my squad decided I was dating a boy who beat me, they didn’t trust my parents to step in and stop it before I got seriously hurt. My high school career had been peppered with well-meaning interventions aimed at ending a relationship that didn’t exist. When Melody West vanished after graduation . . .

  It was easy to understand why they’d drawn the conclusions they had, and I felt terrible for doing that to them.

  Not so terrible that I wouldn’t take advantage now that I needed it. I cast my eyes down at my hands, clasping them together in my lap, and mumbled, “I didn’t get murdered.”

  “Where is he now?”

  I shrugged.

  Sophie sighed, relieved. “Mel, did you finally leave him?”

  I glanced up, reading her expression quickly before I said, “I was in a bad spot. I couldn’t stay. So I just . . . I ran with what I had on me. The money ran out a couple of days ago. I know I look like hell, but I can work, you know what kind of work ethic I have, and I thought . . . I thought I might feel better if I went to work someplace that’s about making people happy. I thought it might make me happy, too.”

  All of it was true, except for the last part. Working at Lowryland wasn’t going to make me happy. It was going to make me harder to find. It was going to buy me the time to figure out what to do next. I needed to disappear before the Covenant used me to find my family.

  Sophie nodded. “I can’t do you any special favors just because we have a history.”

  “I know. I didn’t expect to find you here.”

  “But I can do you the favor Michael Lowry wanted us to do for the entire world: I can give you a chance.” Sophie leaned across the desk. “Do you really want a job?”

  “I do.”

  “Then welcome to Lowryland,” she said, and held out her hand. “And welcome back to your life.”

  I took her hand, and shook it, and smiled. Things were finally going my way.

  Two

  “If you live a lie too long, it turns into the truth. Be careful which ones you decide deserve that kind of power.”

  –Enid Healy

  A shitty company apartment five miles outside of Lakeland, Florida

  Now

  MY ALARM WENT OFF before sunrise, shrieking shrill and piercing in the gloom of my bedroom. Only gloom, not darkness: both my roommates were already up, and while they were generously keeping their voices down until I crawled out of bed, neither of them could see in the dark. The hallway light crept around the edges of my door, painting everything in shades of charcoal.

  I rolled onto my side and hit the alarm clock with all the pent-up aggression I’d collected over
the past few days. It stopped shrieking. It did not, alas, break. Like all Lowryland Cast Member Housing (capital letters mandatory, unless you wanted an Official Lowryland Branding Lecture), our apartment came equipped with ancient, industrial-strength alarm clocks designed to wake the dead, if necessary. If you could break one, you’d be fined twenty dollars and issued a replacement that had been made less than ten years ago, which meant it could take an iPod hookup and wake you with something less violent than the screeching of a nuclear air raid siren.

  (As to why we didn’t just replace them: spot inspections were a thing that happened because, apparently, we couldn’t be trusted not to destroy company property. If one of the managers swung by and found us with an unauthorized alarm clock, we could be fined a lot more than twenty dollars. We’d also get a black mark on our records—all three of our records, even if only one of us had gone to Target for modern technology. Much as we hated the alarms, we hated black marks on our record even more.)

  My name is Antimony Price, even if no one calls me that anymore, and sometime in the last eight months, this became my life. I worry about alarm clocks now. I worry about black marks on my record.

  I worry about getting out of bed on time.

  Groaning, I sat up and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands, trying to make them want to open. They did not. Opening was, in fact, low on their list of things to do today, right above “staying open” and “looking at the world.” I respected their right to protest, but had to declare a fiat, since they didn’t really have a choice. I needed to work if I wanted to eat, and I needed to eat if I wanted to stay alive. For all that things had turned to shit since leaving the carnival, I wasn’t ready to lay down and die. Not yet. Not until I knew whether I’d managed to save my family by running when I did.

  Most people have seen the footage, either live or on YouTube: a blonde girl in high heels and a sequined dress fighting a giant monster snake on national television, right before declaring war on a shadow organization, shooting the camera, and disappearing. (Oh, heads almost certainly rolled over that. Someone should have killed the feed before it hit the air. The network did kill the feed for all time zones after the first one. But we live in the age of instant gratification, uploads and downloads and viral videos, and once the cat—once the giant dimension-hopping snake—was out of the bag, there was no putting it back. The world was watching.)