Bang!
The shed lurched. Bricks exploded within clouds of thick, gritty dust, causing Snodgrass to scream.
“Cannonball,” Daniel reported calmly, looking out the back window. “It’s Rotunder in her glass conservatory again.”
“How narratively appropriate,” Alice said as she stumbled across to the munitions box.
Opening it, she discovered inside several rifles, flamethrowers, and a rather nifty portable rocket launcher. Taking out a machine gun, she tossed it to Daniel. “Load this.”
Then, with a decidedly piratic smile, she reached for the rocket launcher.
“We won’t outrun them,” Mia reported almost cheerfully, as if she had nothing better to do that day than be shot at by pirates.
“We won’t have to,” Alice said. Pulling on a string that hung from the ceiling, she drew down a ladder, which automatically opened the trapdoor above. As she climbed one-handed, the rocket launcher propped on her hip, boots catching on her skirts with every step, she thought fondly of the Turkish trousers Mrs. Rotunder had loaned her. Lovely lady, really; shame about the unrepentant criminality. And the cannonballs, she added as the shed rattled from another blow.
Rising through the trapdoor into the high, cold sky, she narrowed her eyes as wind rushed against her face. Nowthiswas more like it. This quiet, this wild peace high above the grim and exhausting toil of spying, shopping, and making pleasant conversation. Here, a woman could be comfortable—pirates certainly had the right of it as far as that was concerned. Turning on the ladder’s upper rung, she wedged her skirt bustle against the rim of the trapdoor, propped one booted heel against the other edge, and lifted the rocket launcher to her shoulder.
“Ahoy there!” Mrs. Rotunder called jovially from the open flight window of her battle-conservatory, some thirty feet away. “You left without saying goodbye!”
“Goodbye,” Alice called back, and launched the rocket.
Boom!Flames and black smoke burst from one corner of the conservatory.
Crash!Glass shattered.
“Well done!” Mrs. Rotunder cheered, grinning. Beside her, Mr. Rotunder waved a greeting before lifting a rifle.
Alice ducked. Bullets ricocheted off the trapdoor roof. The A.U.N.T. shed rose abruptly, flew over the conservatory, then spun ninety degrees horizontally to face its rear. Pulling a rocket from her waistband, Alice reloaded the launcher, braced herself, and shot.
She only winged the conservatory this time, but it teetered wildly,the magic destabilized. Cool-faced, Alice dropped the launcher back into the shed and bent to take the machine gun Daniel handed up to her. The shed circled around once more to the conservatory’s front door, moving at a speed that sent wind rushing through Alice’s bones until she felt as though she was a bird cutting the airy way. Raising the machine gun, she took aim.
Mrs. Rotunder looked up from a dainty teacup to consider this new development. Her mouth shrugged. “Nice weapon,” she called out.
“Special issue,” Alice told her.
“Ooh!” Mr. Rotunder said eagerly.
“You must come to dinner one night and tell us all about it,” Mrs. Rotunder said. “I’ll send you an invitation.”
“You won’t know how to find me.”
The Rotunders glanced at each other and laughed. “Oh, I think I have a fair idea where you’ll be,” Mrs. Rotunder said. And as Alice fired the gun across her glass roof, shattering panels, the pirate saluted her with the teacup, criedtally ho!,and swooped away in a trail of flaming smoke and flaring magic.
Alice lowered the gun with a sigh.
That was that, then. The pirates were gone. The mission and its subsidiary perils were over. And the Alice she had been, leaping on furniture, dancing, eating mysterious stews, loving Daniel... that Alice needed now to shrink back down to size.
“All right up there?” Daniel called.
“Fine,” she told him, although her voice was too low for him to hear. “Time to go home.”
Everything was the same as it had always been. Alice felt oddly surprised by this, like one who wakes from lucid dreaming to discover the real world seems less vivid, feels less profound, than the one she’dvisited in her sleep. The corridors in A.U.N.T. headquarters were still shadowy and quiet—not rich with sunlight from an unbounded sky. The plain black uniform of the staff was still orderly—but in a way that now struck her as rather dour. And not dour in the usual good way. Depressing. As she followed a senior valet toward Mrs. Kew’s office, she could not resist reaching up to one of the portraits displayed in a precise line along the corridor, tipping it ever so slightly.
“Hooligan,”came a whispered voice that she might have mistaken as her own inner monologue were it not for the presence behind her. She did not have to turn around to know that Daniel was giving her a sternly disapproving look—but that his gun-gray eyes were smiling. She stood a little taller, swayed a little more fluidly, just for him.
And perhaps for herself too. I am aprofessionalwoman, she thought. That at least was something she could carry forward with her, a secret in her inner dark.
Upon arriving at Mrs. Kew’s door, the senior valet turned to them with an expression like a clipboard. “Agent A, enter here,” he said pointing at the office door. “Agent B, continue following me.”
