Sumi's Book Page 10

  The delicate fabrics in the fairy’s gowns were unraveling, but I found gold pants and a red jacket with faded flower appliqués. Ignoring the tears in the knees, I slipped the pants on under my dress. The jacket cloth had worn thin, but the long sleeves covered my arms.

  In the next house, I found a floppy gardening hat and a pair of boots that would actually provide some protection from the elements.

  Kano used an upside-down basket tied on to his head with frayed twine to keep the rain off. If we hadn’t been in the middle of a dying city, I would have laughed. We looked like thrift-store rejects in our rags and makeshift accessories, but with all our bright colors, we were still the height of fashion in Queen Mitsu’s Bristolmeir.

  I wondered what the queen looked like, then decided it would make no difference. Queen Mitsu could be as elegantly beautiful as a geisha on the outside, but she would still be as ugly as her evil heart.

  When Kano asked which way we should go, I pointed toward the center of the city. “It’s the logical place to look for a way under the dome.”

  “What makes you think so?” Kano asked as he pushed pieces of a crushed fountain off the path.

  “Intuition,” I said with a shrug. Every mall I had ever been to—in Japan and America—had escalators in or near the center.

  The farther we went, the harder the conditions became. Like the tree in the fairy house, the blight had stricken Bristolmeir in the center and was working its way out. Every obstacle made me more grateful for the clothing we had scavenged. As we scrambled over a huge pile of downed trees and broken crystal, I slipped in the loose debris. I slid halfway back down on my stomach, but I wasn’t cut or scratched.

  At one point, the path and surrounding area had caved in, so we ducked into a tunnel that was just big enough to crawl through.

  “Let’s hope that whatever dug this tunnel isn’t still in it,” Kano said as he crawled into the dark.

  I had an idea. “Maybe we should turn into something worse than whatever made the tunnel. Just in case we run into it.”

  Kano craned his neck to look back at me. “Like what?”

  “Like this!” I closed my eyes to get a good picture planted in my mind. Then I transformed into an alligator.

  “What are we?” Kano asked as he copied my form.

  “Alligators,” I said. “They are very mean, very fast swamp creatures with big teeth and strong jaws.” I couldn’t help but feel proud as we barreled through the tunnel on short, sturdy legs. I didn’t even mind the mud. I was confident that nothing could bite through my tough hide.

  “I have to remember that one,” Kano said, after we emerged into daylight and changed back into human form. “There might be alligators in Aventurine, but I’ve never seen one.”

  “I never thought I’d like being one.” I grinned.

  We were near the center of the city. All the flowers and leaves had crumbled or were soggy with rot. Giant toadstools had collapsed under the weight of their caps, and piles of moldy spores had collected under tall brown ferns. Six channels fed into a large central pool, but the water was green and smelled like sewage. Insects, two-headed snakes, and bald rodents flitted, slithered, and scurried over everything.

  “Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”

  Kano and I both snapped our heads in the direction of the gravelly voice. At first glance, I thought a vulture sat on the back of a sagging park bench. But as we cautiously walked closer, I realized that the speaker was a hunchbacked fairy with beady black eyes and a beaked nose. Her toes were curled like talons, and she was wrapped in a tattered black cloak. She looked like a Halloween witch. Was this Queen Mitsu?

  “You don’t belong here,” the witch fairy snapped.

  Kano wasn’t afraid. “Queen Patchouli sent us.”

  “Did she now,” the fairy scoffed. “And what terrible crime did you commit to warrant such punishment?”

  “None,” Kano answered.

  “I’m on a mission,” I said, stepping up.

  “In training, are you?” The fairy’s harsh tone softened. “What lineage?”

  “Yugen,” I said. “I have to get below Bristolmeir to finish my quest. Do you know the way?”

  “I do,” the witch fairy said, “but there’s nothing under Bristolmeir except Queen Mitsu’s City of Mirrors.”

  “What?” I gasped. A whole city of mirrors? Finding the fifth mirror shard there would be impossible.

  “You should be afraid!” The dark fairy wagged a bony finger in my face. “Go back while you can.”

  “I have to go on,” I said, hoping she didn’t notice the tremor in my voice. “Please, show me how to get below.”

  The witch fairy hesitated, then pointed at the tower in the center of the dome. “The door is in that spire. The lift no longer goes up, but it might still go down.” Without another word, she pulled her cloak over her head.

  “How am I supposed to find one little piece of mirror in a city of mirrors?” I asked Kano as we headed toward the central tower.

  “You’ll know it when you see it,” Kano said.

  I exhaled, still troubled. “It’s not just that. I was hoping to avoid Queen Mitsu. I thought I’d see the last shard and we’d escape.”

  “I was hoping that, too.” Kano stopped, took my hand, and smiled. “Don’t worry. We’ll be okay as long as we stick together.”

  “You’re a great guide, Kano,” I said, “but you’re an even better friend. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome, Sumi.”

  The tower was much bigger than it appeared from a distance. The base was at least sixty feet wide on all six sides. Shadows and black webs haunted crystal facets that had once sparkled with diamond light. Large garden boxes at each corner were overgrown with black thorns and iron vines, and most of the walkway mosaic tiles had been shattered.

  “That must be the door,” Kano said.

  I followed his gaze toward a round sand dollar door in the wall. It looked just like the other doors except it was bigger and totally black. All the creatures digging, flying, and hunting around the tower plaza gave it a wide berth.

  Kano and I walked up to the door, but the sections didn’t slide open when I pressed the center knob.

  “It’s stuck,” I said.

  “Maybe I can pry it open.” Kano dashed over to the nearest garden box and broke a black thorn off the stem. He held it like a knife. “These thorns are as hard as steel.”

  When the door suddenly opened, I was so excited I hopped in. “C’mon, Kano! We don’t need—”

  The door slammed closed. I pressed the inside knob over and over, but the door didn’t open again.

  According to Darcy the dog, the entry door had deliberately closed to keep the minilobster from following us. Now I suspected that Kano and I had been separated on purpose as well. Making the mirror whole was my mission. If I wanted to continue my training as a fairy godmother, I had to complete this last leg on my own.

  I was honor-bound to uphold my family’s traditions, but I also wanted to succeed for myself—not out of duty or because it was expected. No calling could be more satisfying than designing gorgeous clothes every girl could feel good about wearing.

  And I was one step closer to being able to do that—I just had to find the fifth shard.

  As I glanced around the lift for a down button, a clear bubble emerged from the walls and encased me. That was when the floor disappeared, and I started to fall.

  11

  Reflections of Evil

  I screamed.

  Who wouldn’t? I was falling into a bottomless abyss. Luckily, it wasn’t actually an abyss or bottomless, and my scream ended as abruptly as the bubble stopped. I sat inside it, hovering a foot off a glass floor, until the bubble burst and dumped me. I landed with a thud and inhaled sharply, but the glass underneath me didn’t break.

  Shaking and winded from the fall, I paused to catch my breath and get my bearings. A few deep inhales and slow exhales restored my breathing, but
I couldn’t get oriented. The walls of the chamber were covered with tiny mirrors. In the dim light, thousands of distorted images created a surreal Sumi collage.

  I had definitely fallen into Queen Mitsu’s City of Mirrors.

  I didn’t see a way out of the bubble chamber, but there had to be one. I crept forward on my knees and carefully felt along the walls with my hands. There was a break in a corner, obscured by the endlessly reflecting mirrors. One wall stopped short, and the other extended far beyond it. The exit led into a corridor filled with broken mirrors covering the floor, ceiling, and walls.

  My heart pounded, sounding like thunder in my ears. I didn’t want Queen Mitsu to know I was here, if it wasn’t already too late. I might have triggered an alarm when I landed.

  I took another deep breath to calm my nerves and crawled along the corridor. The ceiling looked high enough for me to stand, but I was wary of optical illusions. I didn’t want to shatter a mirror, either. The glass might cut me, and the sound would surely give away my location. I got to my feet very slowly, feeling the air above me with my hands in case a mirror was closer than I imagined. Once standing, I moved forward as though walking on eggshells.

  The corridor ended at a T, with two corridors branching off to each side. I turned left because it felt like the right way to go. At the next three intersections, I made another left, then two rights. A sense of direction wasn’t possible in the mirrored maze, and I had to rely on my intuition alone.

  Confusion wasn’t the only bad effect the mirrors had on me. I had a pounding headache, and then I walked straight into a mirror at the end of a dead-end passage. The tilt of the mirror had made it look like the passage continued on. In the next corridor, I stumbled over a camouflaged step. Then the ceiling suddenly dropped lower, and I bumped my head.

  I was getting frustrated. I tried not to think about wandering, lost and aimless, until I collapsed. I just kept walking, trusting that the shard and I would find each other.

  Queen Mitsu found me first.

  I heard an amused cackle that couldn’t have come from anyone else. The evil fairy queen was watching me. The hairs on my skin rose, and my throat went dry.

  Her mean laugh echoed through the twisted maze. Apparently, she thought my fumbling progress was highly entertaining, and that annoyed me. I came to a wide hub area where five corridors branched off, and I finally saw myself in a large full mirror. My image wasn’t broken up into a hundred parts, and I realized Queen Mitsu had another reason to be amused.

  The queen’s poison had caught up with me.

  My beautiful black hair was a mess of dry bristles, and my face was covered with red warts and pimple scars. As I watched, my white teeth turned black, and my fingernails grew into hooked talons.

  “What did you do to me?” My eyes flashed. I didn’t need the wicked queen to tell me that I was turning into a monster like the fairies. I just wanted her to know I wasn’t afraid. I was angry.

  “No need for tantrums, dear,” Queen Mitsu cooed, mocking my distress. “Soon you’ll be perfect.”

  “I was perfect before.” I began to shift back into my normal form. “Ha!” I exclaimed with triumph when the warts and pimple scars began to fade.

  “What a foolish girl,” the queen said as the blemishes returned. This time there were black lumps that oozed yellow stuff, too.

  I fought her with every ounce of strength I had, but the fairy queen was stronger. She countered each of my successes with something worse. My rotting hair fell out in clumps, and the skin under my fairy rags hardened and cracked.

  “You can’t win.” Queen Mitsu spat out the words with ridicule and contempt. “No one has more power within Bristolmeir and the City of Mirrors than I, especially not a girl who has barely begun her fairy godmother training.”

  I stopped trying to undo the queen’s awful changes, but I wasn’t giving up. It was just smarter to conserve my strength. I needed it to retrieve the fifth shard, which was still hidden in the midst of a million other mirrors.

  Since nothing was keeping me there, I chose the middle corridor and scanned all the mirror images as I walked. For a while, only pieces of Sumi-the-ugly-and-gross were visible. Then, bits of an unfamiliar figure began to appear, and I started to piece together an image of the fairy queen.

  She might have been beautiful once, but not anymore.

  In Queen Mitsu’s journey toward perfection, she had lost all her hair, muscle mass, and coloring. She looked exactly how I had always pictured a goblin. Wrinkled gray skin clung to a stooped, bony frame. Her black eyes were sunken into a skeleton face, and the nostrils of her flattened nose flared above thin, parched lips. Torn gray fairy wings hung limply from her hunched back.

  She was shriveling out of existence, but I suspected she wouldn’t disappear until everything else was gone, too.

  However, seeing the queen’s shrunken condition bolstered my confidence. I didn’t have her magical power, but I was physically stronger. That was my only advantage. Queen Mitsu had everything else on her side.

  “Who are you?” the queen asked, her voice echoing down the corridors. She was too impatient to wait for my reply. “Where are you from?” she added.

  “I am Sumi Hara from Japan.” I answered with a partial truth. Queen Mitsu knew I was a young fairy godmother, but judging by her questions, she didn’t know my lineage or my mission. I didn’t want to give her more information than necessary.

  “I do not know this place called Japan,” the queen muttered. “Is it in the waking world or a remote part of Aventurine?”

  “It’s very far away,” I said, turning left at the next corridor.

  “How did you find my maze?” A lilt of delight brightened the queen’s scratchy voice. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “I fell in,” I said. “And yes, it’s quite amazing.”

  “There’s nothing else like it in all Aventurine,” the queen stated proudly.

  “That’s true,” I agreed. Trying to process so many fragmented images was a strain, and I paused to rest my eyes.

  “You’re much too ugly and imperfect to have been here long,” the queen observed. “Did you come seeking my perfection?”

  “I got lost.” Standing still and with my eyes closed, I could smell something rotting. I was certain the odor came from Queen Mitsu. I wanted to move away from it, but when I opened my eyes, I saw a telltale glint of light.

  “Lost and found,” the queen said, giggling, “by me.”

  I didn’t respond. The glint could vanish if I looked away even for a second.

  “Why have you stopped?” The queen’s tone turned sullen. “It’s been much too long since I’ve had company. Hurry up, Sumi Hara from Japan.”

  “Uh, well …” I flinched at hearing my name from her lips, but quickly recovered. “I’m not sure which way to go.”

  That wasn’t a lie. If I moved, I’d lose sight of the shard.

  “That’s easy!” The queen laughed. “The more mirror images of me you see, the closer you are!”

  I had to move or Queen Mitsu would become suspicious. She’d already made me hideous, but at least I was still Sumi. Who knew what she would do if I fought her?

  My main goal was getting the final shard. And now I had to risk losing the shard’s reflection as I took a step forward to supposedly go find the queen.

  The light jumped a dozen mirrors and glinted from a mirror just ahead of my position. When I took another step, the glint jumped forward again. After three more steps, I realized that the glint must have been guiding me to the shard’s location in the maze. I tested my theory at the next T. When I turned right, the glint appeared ahead of me. But I didn’t see it when I turned and started down the left-side corridor. Now that I was sure the light would keep me on track, I quickened my pace. The sooner I found the shard, the sooner the hand mirror would be whole and my mission would be over.

  “What are you doing?” Queen Mitsu asked in an irritated huff.

  Flustered, I answered wit
h a question. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re moving quickly,” the queen said. “Are you that anxious to meet me? You’re the first to rush to me.”

  “Of course!” I choked back the lump in my throat and slowed my pace. The queen was so arrogant, I thought she’d believe me. She didn’t.

  “Or is it that you’re looking for something else?” the queen said slyly.

  My deception was falling apart. I tried to keep her talking to buy a few more minutes. “I want a piece of the maze as a souvenir.” It was a lame excuse, but I couldn’t think of any other.

  “Then take one,” the queen said.

  “Thank you, but I want just the right piece. It has to be perfect,” I added.

  The queen paused. In the silence, I felt like a mouse trapped by a cat that could catch me whenever it wanted.

  “I was an ordinary fairy queen once,” the queen finally said. “So I’m familiar with all of the fairy godmother lineages, and I know about the Yugen mirror.”

  I quickened my pace. I was running out of time, but Queen Mitsu seemed to enjoy toying with me. I could only hope that she would leave me with enough time to reach the shard.

  “But,” the queen continued, “I didn’t know that one of the Yugen shards was in my City of Mirrors—until now.”

  I began to run as quickly as I could without losing sight of the light or ramming into mirrors.

  “Queen Patchouli holds on to Takara after the Yugen girls complete their mission,” Queen Mitsu said. “Then she scatters the shards for the next Yugen fairy-godmother-in-training to find. This time, I found one first.” She hesitated, then exclaimed, “That must be why my power grew so suddenly!”

  Why didn’t Queen Patchouli take precautions so that the powerful shard wouldn’t fall into evil hands? I couldn’t think of a reason, unless she didn’t know the queen would become evil. Kano hadn’t known how bad Bristolmeir had become. Or maybe Queen Patchouli had wanted me to come here and face the queen? That was a scary thought.