Chapter 3
Emily had spent
the better part of the past three days trying to avoid Vivi, but it had been
useless. She called, she emailed, she came over, and if that wasn’t bad
enough—she had Emily’s mom working for her and trying to push her agenda even
when she wasn’t around. Eventually, it became easier to just go along with
whatever Vivi wanted at the moment than to continue trying to fight it. That’s
how she ended up getting some of her freedom back, though, so it wasn’t all
bad.
Ever since last
autumn when she and Sarah had accidentally fallen into a huge sinkhole in one
of the neighborhood streets and then gotten lost in the tunnels under the city
for three days, Emily’s parents had kept tight control on where she could go,
when she could go there, and who she could go with. She used to be able to ride
her bike to the Capitol
Building a couple of
miles away, but now she wasn’t even allowed to go more than four blocks on her
own. No going out after sunset, no walking near the steep stairs at the edge of
her hilltop neighborhood, and especially no leaving the house without a mobile
phone in her pocket.
The thing was, and
of course Emily couldn’t tell her parents this, she was probably safer moving
around the city on her own now than she had been before because she had a whole
society of gnomes and trolls watching out for her.
When she and Sarah
were in those tunnels under the streets, it was a huge beast with a snout and
bristling hair like a boar—a troll named Lolfus—who had helped them. Lolfus had
saved their lives, and in those short three days Emily had ended up returning
the favor. Because of that, the underground trolls and the gnomes who lived and
worked with them protected the girls even when they didn’t realize it. Emily
knew how closely she was guarded, though, because she could always feel when
the gnomes were in some nearby stone sidewalk or the boulders in a neighbor’s
garden watching her. Even though it was creepy how they could move through
stone and soil like it was air, the presence of the gnomes always felt
reassuring to her.
Sarah had never
mentioned anything about feeling watched or knowing that gnomes were looking
out for them, so Emily decided maybe her own senses were colored a bit by
whatever weirdness she had that Lolfus said made her something called a Seer.
She had intuition that rivaled only her own mother’s for accuracy and would
sometimes have dreams that gave her glimpses of the future, or at least the possible future. Emily believed that the
dreams were meant to show her what could happen in the worst situations so
she’d have an opportunity to do something about it before it was too late. It’s
probably what had ultimately saved her life and that of Lolfus during that time
underground.
She couldn’t tell
her parents about anything that had happened with the trolls and gnomes. To
keep their secret world protected and hidden, Emily and Sarah had to tell their
parents that they fell in the sinkhole and wandered through the old Civil War
tunnels until they found a door to a basement where a security guard had just
happened to hear them knocking. It had seemed like a good story at the time,
but she never had any idea that it would make her parents think she was some
kind of bumbling doof who just fell into the street, got lost for days, and then
couldn’t go anyplace without one of them watching her like she was a toddler.
Too bad being a Seer hadn’t helped her out with that one.
Emily at least had
the opportunity now to walk to and from Vivi’s house without accompaniment,
could go with her to the recreation center, and, much to her delight, got the
okay to ride her bike with Vivi to the open-air market a mile away on Saturday
to check out the bazaar and some kind of yearly parade of pets.
She was actually
looking forward to the weekend adventure, but to tolerate Vivi for a whole
Saturday required a break from her in the days leading up to it. Sadly, no
matter what excuse she tried to make, her mom just wouldn’t fall for it. She
finally had to resort to begging.
“Mom, please can I go with you to run errands
today? There’s only so much ‘fashion show’ I can take in one week. Vivi doesn’t
want to do anything else!”
“I suppose that
would be okay.” Her mother eyed her suspiciously. “Are you sure you’d rather
hang out with me than your friend?”
“Sarah is my
friend. Vivi is more like my boss,” she sighed. Her mom nodded in
understanding, but said nothing of trying to help get her out of Vivi’s target
range.
The day was just
starting to take a turn from foggy and warm to oppressively humid and hot when
Emily and her mother climbed into their gray station wagon. Mom started the car
and lowered the windows to let the oven-like air out while waiting for the
vents in the dash to blow out a relieving cool breeze. Only a few minutes
later, their sweaty foreheads were dry as they turned onto a side street to
find a spot in a parking garage near City Hall.
They’d barely made
it around the corner when they came to a complete stop because of a traffic
jam. “Who thought it would be a good idea to close the whole right lane the day
before property taxes are due?” her mom complained.
As her mother
navigated around the orange road cones and the men in reflective vests and
hardhats, Emily took the opportunity to stare off through the passenger side
car window. She was hoping to see an open manhole cover or a hole cut into the
road to allow the workers access to whatever pipes and drains were underneath,
something that would always remind her of the accidental adventure she’d had
last fall, but instead she saw a group of workers with a small front-end loader
scooping up huge pieces of busted white marble and concrete from the sidewalk.
Yellow caution tape fluttered in the lazy breeze around the machine and its
crew. All but the man driving the front-end loader were looking up at the
monolith that was City Hall. Emily couldn’t help but follow the tilt of their
heads and look up, too.
On the sides of
the old skyscraper that housed the city government, she saw several dark
rectangles that looked like the building was shedding scales like a serpent. It
took her a moment to realize that these were the voids left from the slabs of
marble that now lay on the sidewalk below. A sidewalk that was normally very
busy.
Emily bolted
upright in her seat fast enough for her seat belt to catch. “Mom, it’s not the
road. Pieces of the building fell off!”
“You’re kidding,
right?”
“Nope,” Emily
said, shaking her head but never taking her eyes from the scene as they rolled
slowly past. “Not kidding.”
“Well, I certainly
hope nobody was hurt. Those pieces of marble are enormous.”
The hair on the
back of Emily’s neck began to tingle then as she watched the front loader scoop
another slab of stone into its bucket and move to place it in the back of a
waiting truck. Something just didn’t feel right.
That evening while
her mom cooked dinner, Emily sank into the sofa and waited for the evening news
to mention anything at all about the scene they’d witnesses earlier that day
downtown. She’d already checked every local television station’s website and
none had any updates other than the fact that one lane on the street was still
closed while cleanup continued.
A news anchor
transitioned from a story about recent robberies to what was being called the
“freak accident” at the heart of the city. Emily sat forward and absorbed every
word. Several pieces of marble had indeed fallen from the upper levels of City
Hall, and it had done so during the morning rush when the sidewalk was full of
people walking hurriedly to work. Miraculously, no one was hurt, but plenty of people
had the fright of their lives because of the close call.
The uneasy feeling
she had earlier returned as the station cut to footage from the scene. It was a
live feed, but the mess looked only a little better than when Emily and her mom
had driven by it hours before. The stone had hit the sidewalk with such force
that it was cracked and gaping in places, and the damage looked like it was at
least half of the block. Workers were using heavy equipment to pull up the
damaged chunks and prepare the space for new cement.
The reporter on
the scene thrust a microphone in the face of a crew foreman who announced that
the heat must have been to blame for a failure in the adhesive that was used to
apply the marble to the building in the 1960’s.
Hairs on her neck
stood again and she had to remind herself that no one was hurt. It was just a
weird thing that happened because of the heat. Everything would be fine.
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