Arlo Finch in the Kingdom of Shadows Read online

  “Maybe it’s a chimera,” said Wu. “A creature that’s half owl and half snake.” That gave him an idea: “They both eat rats, so maybe we could feed it one and that’s how you get past it. I bet we can find a rat somewhere.”

  Jaycee had no patience for Wu’s theories. “What are you talking about? We’ll just ask. Someone will know where it is.”

  “What if they don’t want to tell us?” asked Arlo.

  Jaycee shrugged. “Then we’ll deal with it. We can’t just stand around worrying about things that haven’t happened yet.” With that, she started walking down the hill into Fallpath.

  In planning this expedition, Arlo had wondered how Jaycee would handle the challenges of the Long Woods. Would she be overwhelmed? Could she keep up? He hadn’t considered how much preparation his sister had already had. Like him, she’d always been the new kid at a new school, figuring out the rules on the fly. She might never have been in this magical forest, but she’d found her way around Philadelphia and Chicago. She’d flown by herself to China. She’d seen more of the real world than Arlo had.

  “She’s right,” Arlo said to Wu. “We’ll figure it out.”

  Arlo and Wu thanked Fox, then followed Jaycee down the path into the city. When Arlo looked back, Fox was already gone.

  * * *

  The main road running through Fallpath was a narrow stripe of mud. Ramshackle buildings of two and three stories leaned into the street, in some places joined together by plank bridges. Electrical cables connected creaking rooftop windmills and duct-taped solar panels. On either side of the road, carts and tables were stacked with food, weapons and scavenged items. Arlo spotted manual typewriters, iron daggers, roasted pigs, potion jars, medieval lutes, an abacus, dolls, fidget spinners and an Atari video game cartridge for E.T.: The Game.

  The vendors and buyers all looked to be human, of every conceivable ethnicity and background. Many had animals with them: dogs, chickens, two-headed lizards on leashes. Most of the haggling seemed to be happening in English, but based on the accents, it wasn’t everyone’s first language.

  “Do these people live here?” asked Wu.

  “Some of them, I think,” said Arlo. In what little he could find written about the Long Woods, Arlo had learned about the distinction between Longborn—people who were native to the Long Woods—and those who came later in life, called Drifters. Fallpath was apparently the only permanent settlement in the Long Woods, so it had become the nexus of trading—legal and otherwise.

  As they headed deeper into the town, it got so crowded Arlo could barely see his boots.

  “Watch out for pickpockets,” warned Jaycee.

  Arlo felt a tug on his backpack. He spun around to see a small, white-haired woman with brown teeth that pointed in nine directions. She lunged at him, sniffing his jacket.

  “You’ve been near a spirit!” she hissed. “A furry one. I can smell it on you.” Her eyes were mismatched colors, green and brown, just like his. She’s a tooble, too, Arlo realized.

  Jaycee pushed her way between them. “Go away! Shoo!”

  The crone didn’t back off. “It’s on you, too. Still warm! Must be close. Where is it?”

  Arlo quickly glanced back down the road to the hill above the city where they’d left Fox. The old woman followed his gaze. She smiled, then whistled through her teeth. Two younger women in filthy hooded sweatshirts—Her daughters? Arlo wondered—were suddenly at her side.

  “Get your cages, girls! We’ve got quarry.” With that, the three women pushed their way through the crowd, headed out of town.

  “Should we warn Fox?” asked Wu.

  “He said he wasn’t going to stick around,” said Arlo. “He’ll be fine.” Arlo said it with confidence he didn’t really feel. “C’mon. We need to find the owl and the snake.”

  “I can take you,” said a thin voice behind him. “The owl and the snake. I can take you.”

  The voice belonged to a young girl, one so short Arlo hadn’t seen her at first. She couldn’t have been more than five. She was wearing cartoon-cat pajamas, purple rain boots and a knit Cleveland Browns hat that covered most of her straight black hair.

  “You know where they are?” Arlo asked. “The owl and the snake?”

  Before the girl could answer, Wu asked, “Is it a chimera? Half owl and half snake?”

  Now the girl seemed confused.

  “Listen,” said Jaycee. “If you can take us to them, we’ll give you a candy bar.” Jaycee pulled an energy bar from her jacket pocket. The girl’s eyes lit up.

  “It’s really more like a protein bar than a candy bar,” said Wu.

  Jaycee glared at Wu, who quickly added, “They’re good, though. They really taste like candy bars.”

  Arlo focused on the girl: “Can you take us to the owl and the snake?”

  The girl grabbed Arlo’s hand, leading the way. She moved fast, weaving effortlessly through the crowd. Several times Arlo glanced back to make sure Jaycee and Wu were keeping up.

  They left the main road, ducking into a narrow alley. Greasy cooking smoke stung Arlo’s eyes. Suddenly, the girl stopped in front of a door hanging loose on its hinges. They’d gone less than a hundred feet.

  “Here,” she said, pointing.

  “This is where the owl and the snake are?” Arlo asked. “We can find them in here?”

  This couldn’t be right. The building looked seedy, even by the standards of Fallpath. A heavily tattooed man with vomit in his beard was propped against the wall, unconscious. Several human teeth lay in the mud beside him. Arlo could hear music spilling from behind the door, and rowdy men arguing.

  Arlo had expected to find the owl and the snake at some sort of shrine or temple or mystical library, not a backwoods bar. As Wu and Jaycee caught up, Arlo broke the bad news: “I don’t think she knows where she’s going.”

  “She does,” said Jaycee. She pointed to a hand-painted sign above the door:

  THE OWL AND THE SNAKE

  They’re not animals or spirits, Arlo realized. It’s the name of a place.

  Jaycee handed over the promised protein bar. Arlo expected the girl to tear off the wrapper and devour it, but instead she tucked it under her hat. Then she pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  Arlo, Jaycee and Wu leaned to get a quick glance before the door swung shut again. It was definitely a bar, complete with beer taps, neon signs and sawdust on the floor. A jukebox played the kind of country rock that Mitch the mechanic liked.

  “Why would the atlas be in a bar?” asked Wu.

  “Let’s find out,” said Jaycee, pushing past them. Arlo and Wu followed her in.

  Despite not even being noon, the patrons of the Owl and the Snake had clearly been here for hours drinking and gambling. Instead of money or poker chips, they seemed to be wagering with something more valuable: spirits. Arlo recognized the lantern-sized devices he’d seen the Eldritch use when they descended upon the Summerland.

  “They’re trappers,” he whispered to Wu. “Those things are cages.”

  One man showed his cards, evidently winning his hand. As he went to collect his winnings, his opponent suddenly flipped the table over. Arlo, Wu and Jaycee pressed back against the wall as a full-on brawl broke out, among not just the two men but half the bar.

  “You!” shouted a female voice from across the tavern. Arlo looked over and saw an Asian woman in her forties wearing leather pants and an army-green canvas jacket. She was standing with the young girl and holding the protein bar. “Why are you giving my kid candy?!”

  She was headed their way, mostly ignoring the fighting around her. When a burly man stumbled into her path, she deftly spun him around, then kicked him back into the brawl. Then her focus returned to the trio.

  “It’s actually a protein bar,” said Wu.

  The woman was now directly in front of them. Even in heeled boots, she was barely taller than Arlo, but she was incredibly intimidating. “My daughter has a soy allergy.”

  “So d
o I,” said Arlo. “There’s no soy in it. You can check the ingredients.”

  The woman locked eyes with Arlo, dubious. Like him, her irises were two different colors: one blue, one brown. Then she turned her attention to the protein bar, finding the ingredients list. One of the drunken fighters slammed into the jukebox. It shattered and sparked. The music died. That finally crossed a line for her.

  “Enough!” she shouted. She then twirled one finger above her head.

  Suddenly, a massive wind rose up in the bar, lifting each of the troublemakers off the ground. The door opened, then one by one, the brawlers were flung screaming out into the street. Once the last one was out the door, the woman dropped her hand. The wind stopped. The bar was now eerily quiet.

  The woman tossed the protein bar to the young girl, who had been waiting on the other side of the room. The woman said something to her in Chinese that Arlo guessed might be half now, half after dinner. The girl whined in response, but the mother wasn’t giving in. Ultimately, the girl skulked out of the room.

  The woman surveyed the damage to the bar. In addition to the broken jukebox, tables and chairs were overturned, shattered beer steins everywhere.

  “Do you want us to help you clean up?” asked Arlo, hoping to get on her good side.

  “No,” she said dismissively. “This happens all the time.” The woman knocked three times on the bar. Arlo watched as tables and chairs began rolling and righting themselves, like animals getting back up after a fall. Invisible hands scooped up the shards of broken steins, which mended themselves in midair. They then floated back to a shelf behind the bar, neatly arranging themselves in rows. In less than thirty seconds, the bar had been largely reset.

  Even Jaycee was impressed by this display of practical magic. “Can you do that?” she asked Arlo.

  Arlo couldn’t, but he was pretty sure he knew how it worked. “Does everything have a spirit bound to it?”

  “Not everything,” the woman answered, pointing to the jukebox. “That’ll be a hassle to fix. Might just have to replace it.” She then looked at Arlo more closely, intrigued. “I’m Zhang. What’s your name?”

  Whether Arlo should use his real name had been debated within the patrol from the early planning stages. It seemed likely that Arlo’s name had been mentioned by Hadryn and others. You don’t know who you can trust, warned Indra.

  “Daniel,” he said. (Daniel was in fact his middle name.)

  “What’s your deal, Daniel?” asked Zhang. “You’re a tooble, but you’re clearly not Longborn.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you seem amazed by things you would have seen your whole life. You’re obviously tourists.”

  Jaycee had grown impatient. “We’re looking for an atlas.”

  Zhang feigned surprise. “And why do you think there’d be an atlas here?”

  “A friend said you had one,” said Wu.

  “Did your friend tell you how expensive it was to use the atlas? Because for first-timers, the fee is fifty thousand dollars cash.”

  “We don’t have any money,” said Arlo.

  “Then we don’t have anything to talk about.” Zhang took a rag from her belt and began wiping down the tables.

  “We have something better than money,” said Wu.

  “Don’t say Bitcoin.”

  Arlo took off his daypack. “It’s an upscale. A big one.”

  That got her attention. “Really? Let’s see it.”

  Arlo unzipped the pack, awkwardly extricating a duct tape–covered bowling ball. While solid, it was also remarkably light, as if just a plastic shell. Arlo could easily hold it in one hand as he started peeling back the tape to reveal an edge of glinting red-gold coatl scale. It strained against the tape, inexorably tugged upwards.

  He peeled back a little more. With a rip, the ball suddenly fell, just missing Arlo’s feet. Still holding one end of the tape, Arlo nearly had his arm yanked off as the scale shot upwards. Upscales were like helium balloons, but much stronger. They were what made it possible for coatls to fly.

  “Where’d you find it?” Zhang asked.

  While Fox had pointed Arlo and Blue Patrol in the right direction, actually obtaining the coatl scale had required an exhausting trek through the Long Woods to a cavern halfway up a jagged mountain peak. Once inside, it had taken hours to get the scale down from the roof of the cave, with Arlo climbing up a human pyramid. They’d gotten out of the coatl’s nest just moments before the huge flying serpent returned.

  Arlo didn’t want Zhang to know any of that. “In a cave,” he said.

  “So, can we see the atlas?” asked Jaycee.

  Zhang took the scale from Arlo, admiring its pearly iridescence. Judging by her reaction, it was clear the upscale was worth more than the fifty thousand dollars she’d asked for.

  “You’ve got a deal.”

  4

  THE ATLAS

  AT PINE MOUNTAIN ELEMENTARY, Arlo and his friends had frequently consulted Culman’s Bestiary of Notable Creatures, a book of supernatural lore the librarian kept locked away in her cabinet.

  Arlo was picturing something similar for the atlas: a hardcover tome listing locations around the world. It would probably be oversized, perhaps with an embossed leather cover. The pages might be edged in gold.

  He could not have been more wrong.

  At the end of a short hallway, Zhang unlocked a heavy iron door. She then reached inside to flip a light switch. Row after row of dusty bulbs slowly flickered to life, revealing just how immense this space was. It was bigger than the school gymnasium. Maybe even bigger than the entire school.

  Rough wooden shelves ran in maze-like rows, with each spot on the shelves marked with a letter and number. The labels seemed to correlate to the object stored there: a rusted bike, a broken bottle, a graveyard angel.

  “It’s like the warehouse at Ikea,” said Wu. “If it was super, super creepy.”

  Arlo suspected this giant room was still within the small footprint of the Owl and the Snake. Distances in the Long Woods were unpredictable. It seemed reasonable that powerful enchantments could squeeze extra square footage into a building.

  Zhang switched on a desk lamp at a cabinet with dozens of small drawers. “Where exactly are you trying to go?” she asked.

  Arlo turned to his sister, who knew all the details.

  “It’s a park on the north side of Guangzhou,” said Jaycee. She handed over a few sheets of paper she’d printed from the internet with a map of the city and the park circled in red.

  “And you’ve been there?” Zhang asked. “Is there an actual forest? Not just a tree or two. It needs to be pretty wild.”

  “I was there two months ago. And yeah, if you get off the main path you wouldn’t know you’re in the city at all.”

  Zhang seemed satisfied. She pulled out a drawer in the cabinet and began flicking through index cards, searching for something.

  Meanwhile, Arlo and Wu started examining the nearest shelf. Each object on it had its own tag, a stub of yellowed paper attached with waxed string. For a plastic kazoo, Arlo read the handwritten description:

  1/20/87 northwest of a broken stone wall

  Wu showed Arlo the tag on a moldy stuffed dinosaur:

  8/4/70 an island in the middle of the river

  “What are these things?” whispered Wu.

  Arlo had no idea. There wasn’t any obvious connection between the objects, and none of them seemed at all valuable. So why were they labeled? Why was the door locked?

  “Maybe it’s a museum,” Arlo whispered back.

  “Or maybe she’s some kind of weird hoarder.”

  Zhang looked over at them. “Don’t touch anything!” she yelled.

  “Sorry!” they both yelled back.

  But what’s the big deal? Arlo wondered. Why doesn’t she want us touching it? He decided there was no harm in asking: “What is all this stuff?”

  “Wow, you really are tourists.” Zhang pulled a card from the dr
awer, evidently the one she’d been looking for. Then she gestured with her hand to indicate the entire room. “This is the atlas.”

  Arlo was as confused as Jaycee and Wu. “I thought the atlas was a book.”

  “How could it be a book? You can’t map the Long Woods. You can only navigate between known places.”

  That made sense to Arlo, but— “Then how can you navigate to a place you’ve never been?”

  He couldn’t tell if Zhang was more annoyed or amused. “Daniel, my man. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” She held up the card from the catalog. “Follow me.”

  Zhang led the way through the shelves, snaking left and right to arrive at a dark section, the overhead lights having burned out. She sent up three snaplights in quick succession, giving her enough light to make out the labels: “R17. R18. R19.”

  She reached in to pick up a Rubik’s Cube. It was scrambled, and at least one of the colored stickers had peeled off. Zhang checked the tag, comparing it to the index card. “Yup. This is your park.”

  She handed Arlo the cube. He was confused. “Do I have to solve it?”

  “I can solve it,” offered Wu. “I can do it in three minutes.”

  “No. It’s not like that at all.” She took the cube back. “This Rubik’s Cube, it’s a marker. For whatever reason, it ended up near one of the entrances to the Long Woods. Maybe someone dropped it—whatever. And it sat there long enough that some of the energy from the Long Woods seeped into it.”

  Zhang sent up three more snaplights in different directions, illuminating the shelves. “Everything here came from some place in the world. And they all carry a little piece of the world with it. If you focus on it, you can feel where it came from and use that to find your way there.”

  She handed Arlo the cube again. He stared at it, trying to concentrate on it the way Superman did with his heat vision.

  “Not like that. Wow. That’s ridiculous.” She cupped her hand under Arlo’s. “Don’t think about the thing itself. Think about what’s around it. Where does it want to be?”