She led him to the brewing room, her shoes not making their usualclick-click. He looked down. Something about the way her feet moved looked unreal. Almost as if they weren’t making contact with the floor.
“Beatrix,” he said as they crossed the threshold, “your feet?—”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said.
He nodded and retrieved his extra demarcation stones and a stick of charcoal. She asked him for curare and he found it for her, a tincture in a bottle marked with a red DANGER sticker. She slipped the bottle into one of her coat pockets. Then they set out for the transmitter, and every time the thought crossed his mind that something was wrong—a small thought, but insistent—it was soothed away by her words.
“This is good,” she said.
Yes.
“This is the right thing to do,” she said.
Of course.
She held his hand and murmured to him in a voice that sounded less and less like hers, but what she said washed his anxieties away like the lapping of ocean waves, over and over, before his disquiet could amount to anything.
He found the transmitter for her and wrestled it from the multiflora rose brambles.
She smiled at him and held out her hand again. “Come with me for a moment. We’ll be right back.”
He thought they would walk somewhere. Then he saw the red leaf in her hand.
They were out the other end of the teleportation stream—standing in some sort of park, Peter blinking in the sunlight—before he could get a word out.
“How—where did you—” he stuttered.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” she whispered into his ear. “It’s perfectly understandable.”
Yes. That was right. They needed reds, she’d managed to get one and that was good. There was nothing to worry about.
Was there?
The uneasy voice in his head was getting louder and more insistent.Something is wrong.
“Everything is all right,” Beatrix said, looking around.
Yes.
No.
He turned and realized where they were: a block away from the Capitol complex, in a decrepit park atop a garage he’d once parked in. He turned back to find her slipping the stone under a metal trashcan.
The full implications struck like lightning, clearing some of the fog from his brain. He leapt for the stone, hand outstretched. Then this Beatrix-who-was-not-Beatrix threw an arm around him and the next instant they were back in the Ellicott Mills forest, his hands empty, the payload stone sitting in a spot where it could take out the Capitol, the White House, the Pentagram—and worst of all, the many people living and working in that wide radius.
He had his hand in his pocket, fingers brushing leaves, when the imposter snapped, “Stop that! And don’t say a thing.”
It was Miss Knight—Miss Draden. She still looked like Beatrix (how,how?)but she no longer was trying to imitate Beatrix’s voice. That shock gave way to a worse one: Hismuscles obeyed her. He could not grip the leaves or form a spellword.
“Lie down,” she said. “Hands out of your pockets.”
He fought the order but only delayed its execution. She pulled out the bottle of curare, paralysis agent in anesthesia brews, and removed the dropper. In his struggle against the compulsion he was under, he managed to stutter, “No, don’t! All—all those people?—”
“All thosewizards,” she said, eyes dark, face grim.
“You’ll kill hundreds of thousands of people.People,” he shouted, the words getting out more easily now, but the rest of his body barely responding to his desperate mental commands. “More typics than wizards!”
“They chose this life.”
