Conjured

Chapter Twenty-Six

On the day of the trial, Malcolm escorted me into the courtroom. He was flanked by two agents, plus another six behind us. Their guns were drawn—two tranquilizer guns, two tasers, and two loaded rifles. Malcolm had said the guns were merely a precaution.

All the guns were pointed at me, and I heard whispers and gasps and the words “doll” and “puppet” as people craned for their first look at me.

The courtroom was on the first floor of the agency. There was a solid-wood jury box, as well as mahogany benches for the audience, plus the judge’s podium with a witness stand beside it. Lit by iron chandeliers, the warm wood made the room look oddly cozy.

The room was filled with strangers. As I passed by the bailiffs, I recognized three faces in the audience: Aidan, Victoria, and Topher. Aidan wore an elaborate and exotic suit that made him look even more handsome. He had an entourage around him of men and women in uniform, which made his offer to me seem all the more real. These were the people from his government, the ones who wanted me to work for them, who wanted to use me as their weapon. Near them, Victoria was dressed in a floor-length gown, and her hair was arranged in dreadlocks that imitated snakes. They slithered over her shoulders as she watched me walk down the long aisle from the door to the front of the courtroom. Beside her, Topher was also in formal dress, a uniform-like suit with an orange sun on his chest. A man next to him carried a flag with the same symbol. None of them gave any hint that they knew me, but Topher looked at Aidan, who shook his head almost imperceptibly. I didn’t know what the exchange meant.

Zach was also in the audience. He had agents on either side of him. I couldn’t see well enough over the heads of the audience to tell whether or not he was bound. He was as far from me as possible, near an emergency exit door.

At the front, the jury box was full of men and women, not all human, in gray and black suits. The judge was a man with a neatly trimmed beard.

The witness stand was empty, waiting for me.

The Magician was in silver shackles at the front of the courtroom. He wore an orange jumpsuit. Without his tattered suit and hat, he looked wrong. I wanted to place a hat on his head, just so he’d look like he should. This way, he looked like an ordinary man, and that only made me feel more unnatural with my cloth skin, yarn hair, and marble eyes.

As I passed by him, I felt his eyes on me. Malcolm led me to the witness stand and then stepped back. I climbed the steps alone. It was only three steps, but my cotton feet felt heavy. I looked at the judge. His skin was tinged green, and the flaps of gills were visible beneath the wiry curls of his beard. The gills were closed. His expression was unreadable.

I looked at Malcolm. He held his expression still, and I knew that meant there were thoughts and emotions held in check underneath, though I didn’t know what they were. Outside the courtroom, in the moments before my entrance, Lou had lectured me about the importance of remembering everything. Remember what you heard. Remember what you saw. Remember where you were. Malcolm had only said one thing: “Remember who you have become.”

He didn’t speak now. He nodded to the judge, and then he left me at the witness stand and took a seat in the audience in a row of marshals. I noticed that Aunt Nicki wasn’t there. But the courtroom was packed with people. As I looked over them, I felt shivers crawl over my cloth skin. I didn’t know them, but I recognized bits of them. That man, he had the same eyes as the boy with tattoos. The woman with the tears streaking her cheeks had the same face as the girl with silvery hair. I saw a little boy with diamonds in his dreadlocks. Another woman, older, had antlers that budded from her gray curls. She sat between Victoria and a man with snakelike skin. These were their families, the families of the dead. I wondered what they saw when they looked at me, a living doll in a dress of jewels and feathers.

I couldn’t look at them anymore. Looking up at the iron chandeliers, I wished I were elsewhere. I wished Zach and I had run away from the marshals, found a mirror, and kept running. But it was too late for running now.

The judge was speaking. “… the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

I met the Magician’s eyes with my green marble eyes.

Then I laid my cloth hand on a book and said, “I swear.”

A lawyer rose. “Let’s start at the beginning …”

The beginning. What was the beginning? Was it when the Storyteller made me? Was it when I was first filled with magic? Was it when I began to hear, began to see, began to talk, began to think, began to feel? Or was it when I left the wagon and left the carnival behind? Was it when Malcolm found me? Was it when the doctors gave me a new body? Or when I walked into the house on Hall Avenue, believing I was an ordinary girl? Or when I kissed Zach and defied the marshals? Or was it when I was a bird in the wallpaper, suddenly realizing that I could choose what I did, said, felt, or thought? Or later, when I chose not to be what the Magician meant for me to be and decided to be real instead?

I testified for three days, with breaks for the judge and jury to eat, pee, and sleep. I didn’t need to do any of these things. On the breaks, I simply waited in a room beside the courtroom until it was time for the questions to begin again. Sometimes I repeated things; sometimes I backtracked. A woman with a shirt buttoned to her neck typed every word I said. She had four arms. She typed quickly and never looked at me. I didn’t stop talking.

I told them every moment that I could remember. Every word spoken. Every sound heard. Everything I felt. As I talked, I remembered more and more until the memories were waves inside me, pounding at my skin, wanting to burst out. I let them—and out tumbled more memories, memories that weren’t even mine. The freshest were the memories of the Storyteller.

It was the Storyteller who had figured out how to drain magic from someone’s last dying breath. It was she who had crafted a doll that could hold that magic—it faded inside a human, but it stayed within her special doll. It was the Magician who had discovered how to siphon the magic from the doll into himself to use as he pleased. And it was he who had adapted the boxes into traps.

Together, they had joined the carnival and handpicked their victims—they targeted the young, the strong, and the unique magic users in each world. Together, the Magician and the Storyteller lured or trapped or chased them through forests or towns or fields and brought them to the wagon. Together, they drew the chalk symbols on the floor. Together, they killed.

At first they’d been devastated by guilt, and they had tried to find another way. But nothing else worked. And so, they’d learned to kill without remorse, and they’d learned that teenagers had the strongest magic.

I was with them for every death. Standing on the witness stand with the eyes of the families of the dead on me, I remembered them all.

I told them about how the Storyteller had recognized that I was becoming aware, how at first she’d fostered it but then she’d feared it. A doll who knew their secrets, who couldn’t be controlled, who was filled with bits and pieces of the magic and the memories and the knowledge of the people who had died … They’d built into me the magical equivalent of a failsafe—a trigger that caused me to lose consciousness whenever I used magic—but that only made them safe from my magic. They weren’t safe from my knowledge. I knew what they’d done, and I was beginning to think and, worse, to feel. The Storyteller resolved to make new dolls, replacements that wouldn’t have so much magic inside them and would never come alive. But she’d also loved me. She’d created me. I was hers and his, their sort-of child. So she’d set me free, hoping I’d never return, hoping to replace me with new, weaker dolls.

I was lost for a long time after that, going from world to world in a blur, until Malcolm found me. He’d been investigating this case for some time already and was looking for someone, or something, like me who could lead him to the killer. He saw me use magic that matched those of the victims, and he realized what I was—a receptacle for stolen power. He brought me here, initiated the surgeries, taught me how to function in a world beyond the carnival …

One of the lawyers interrupted me and submitted into evidence a series of recordings: videos of when I’d first arrived at the agency, of the surgeries, of the training. With the judge’s permission, he projected them onto a screen at the front of the courtroom.

Standing on the witness stand, I watched myself, stiff and halting, a doll who drifted in and out of rationality. On the screen, I saw Malcolm guide me into his office, where I sat in a leather chair, motionless and unblinking. I heard Aunt Nicki’s voice, thin through the speakers—she must have been holding the video camera. She called me Pinocchio, pronounced me a freaky thing, and told Malcolm if he wanted a pet, cats were much more appealing. But he knelt before me, looked into my green marble eyes and talked to me. Even then, he treated me as if I were a person.

He was with me as I was wheeled into the first of the surgeries. I reached out my hand to hold his, and I turned my cloth face to look at him with green-glass marble eyes, trusting him. The camera focused on our hands, my misshapen cloth fingers in his strong human ones.

Projected on the screen, the surgeries were a ghastly amalgam of medicine and magic. Veins were threaded inside me, skin was grafted onto me, and human eyes were transplanted onto my half-cloth, half-tattered-skin face—brown eyes in place of green glass. I forced myself to watch—each image causing memories to rise inside me, like bile rising in my throat.

Later, there was another video of me in Malcolm’s office. This time, I looked human but was still very doll-like in my movements, lurching through the office like a strangely detailed windup toy. He had to teach me how to eat, to pee, to sleep. As a doll, I’d done none of that.

Watching the videos, I remembered all of it. My memories, this time.

After it ended, I talked again. I told them everything from meeting Zach and working in the library to having lunch in the pizza parlor with Aidan, Topher, and Victoria. I omitted only their offer and their accusations against the agency, and the lawyer did not ask.

At last, I told Lou and the judge and the jury and the families of the dead about my return to the carnival with Zach and what happened in the wagon with him and Aidan. I didn’t spare a single detail, including the Storyteller’s death and my role in the Magician’s plans.

When at last I ran out of words, I stopped talking. I pressed my thread lips together and thought I might never talk again. I felt drained of all words. I sagged against the witness stand, my cotton body limp.

The Magician spoke then, for the first time. “They will kill you, you know.” His voice was conversational and his words were only for me, as if he weren’t bound and shackled in front of a crowd full of families that wanted to see him flayed alive for all that I’d said he’d done. “I am the only one who never would. I would never destroy you. I am the father you never had, and together we are magic!”

“You are not authorized to speak,” the judge said. He signaled to the bailiffs, and they advanced on the Magician. But he had said all that he wanted to say. He spoke the truth. I knew he would never kill me, and I knew that my own words had condemned me as much as they’d condemned him. I knew what I saw and what I did and what I didn’t do: I didn’t save any of them.

I wondered how they’d kill me—if they’d use magic, if they’d poison my food, if they’d shoot me. I wondered if, when the time came, Aidan, Victoria, and Topher would try to save me, or if what they’d heard had changed their minds. I wondered if I wanted to be saved, if I deserved to be saved.

I wished I could return to the carnival without the Magician. It was home, after all. I’d have liked to travel with the carnival from world to world, see the places from my memories but without the overlay of death and pain, touch an audience without taking from them. I remembered there were beautiful places out there beyond the silver mirror. I’d like to see them again, explore the multiverse.

As I was escorted from the witness stand, I wished I’d had a chance to say good-bye to Zach. Flanked by Malcolm and Aunt Nicki, he watched me as I was led out of the courtroom by armed bailiffs. I met his human eyes with my marble eyes. His were wet, tears staining his cheeks. He’d cried for me.

I was taken to a box.

It didn’t look like a box on the outside any more than the wagon did. It was a nice room on the second floor of the agency, the kind of room that I’d imagine would be in a hotel, except there were no windows. The bed had my quilt from the house on Hall Avenue, as well as the stuffed monkey.

The monkey was a gift from Malcolm—I had remembered that during my testimony, just as I’d remembered the times he’d patiently explained and reexplained where I was and what my name was, the time he’d introduced me to pizza, the time he’d shown me a supermarket, the time he and Aunt Nicki had demonstrated how to dance to the radio. I picked up the monkey and sat on the bed, as the guards who’d escorted me shut the door and locked it. Malcolm and Aunt Nicki had taught me how to be human.

My new room had a dresser with my clothes in the drawers. There was no mirror or anything that could be made sharp. A stack of books, all from the library, were beside the bed.

I wondered if there was any trace of me left in the house on Hall Avenue.

I wondered if there would be any trace of me anywhere in this world. Maybe in the records of the trial. The woman with many arms had typed my every word, plus there had been a video camera recording. And I knew Malcolm, Aunt Nicki, and Zach would remember me. I’d exist in their memories. Maybe that was enough. It didn’t feel like enough.

Hours passed.

One day, two, three.

I spent time sitting on the bed, the stuffed monkey in my arms. I read the library books and imagined that Zach had chosen them for me. I knew without anyone telling me that this was the closest I’d get to him. After what I’d told the jury about how powerful we were together, I doubted Lou would allow us anywhere near each other. I wondered if I’d see Zach again before I died. When I tired of reading, I stared up at the ceiling. There were no cracks in the plaster for me to count, only fluorescent lights in a row, but I counted anyway.

The bailiffs brought me food that I didn’t eat and water that I didn’t drink, and doctors came in to check on me. I didn’t talk to them unless they talked to me. I felt as if I’d talked enough to last several lifetimes.

Eventually, I stopped counting and started to think. In my head, I ran through everything I had said on the witness stand. I tried to separate the memories: times I was aware, times I wasn’t, to see if it was possible to draw a line between when I was a doll and when I was a person.

I couldn’t. The line was blurred, and it wiggled through the past.

Laying there with the monkey and with my own thoughts and memories, I thought about Zach too. Zach had told the truth, as always: who I was wasn’t who I’d become. And now that the trial was over, I didn’t have to stay this way anymore.

If I was going to die, I wanted at least to die as myself, not as who I was made to be.

Closing my eyes, I pictured myself as the girl that I’d become, the one that Zach knew. I let the magic run through me, shaping me, transforming me. I chose my face, my hair, and my green eyes. And then I lay on the bed and let the vision sweep over me.

The Storyteller and the Magician sit on either side of me. Each holds one of my cloth hands. There are stars spread over the sky, and a pale-gray cloud covers half the moon. The Ferris wheel is silhouetted against the sky. It’s motionless.

“I feel old,” the Magician says.

The Storyteller kneads my cotton knuckles with her gnarled fingers. I think it calms her. “Do you want to stop?” she asks him.

He sighs. “Some days, yes.”

“The audience threw roses,” the Storyteller says. “You changed them into birds. Rose birds whose perfume smell wafted through the tent every time they flapped their wings.”

The Magician smiles. “That was lovely.”

“It was,” she says.

They fall silent.

I think it would be nice to talk. Straining, I stretch my mouth. The threads that tie my mouth strain. I press my fabric lips together, and the threads lie limp. I try to open my mouth again.

“You add beauty to the world,” the Storyteller says. “People need that. They come into your tent expecting a trick, half wanting to see a fraud and half wanting to believe. You show them magic, and they leave full of wonder.”

“Sometimes I feel that it’s not enough.”

The Storyteller drops my hand and rises. She holds out her hand to him. “Make me something beautiful.” He leans toward me, breathes in, and then takes her hand. As he rises, green sprouts burst out of the ground. They shoot upward and wrap around the tent poles. Buds blossom and then open into burgundy roses. A trickle of water falls over the side of the wagon, forming a pool with water lilies.

Holding each other close, the Magician and the Storyteller dance.

I want to dance too. I want to tell them so. I push my lips together and wiggle them side to side, loosening the threads.

As they sway and spin to the sound of crickets and the night breeze, the Storyteller says, “Once upon a time, there was an empty boy, and the emptiness ate him inside until one day, he met a girl who knew how to fill him …”

I stretch my mouth again, and the threads snap one after another.

Hearing the snaps, the Storyteller and the Magician stop and look at me. They study my cloth face and button eyes. “Some would see her as an abomination,” the Magician says.

“Is that what you see?” the Storyteller asks.

He shakes his head and smiles. “I see beauty, wonder, and magic. I see the best of us. She is the ‘something beautiful’ we made together.”

The Storyteller smiles too, showing her crooked, stained teeth. “She could be. I’ll sew her a new dress, silk maybe. And I will give her glass eyes. Marbles or sea glass. I think perhaps they’ll be green. She’d look pretty with green eyes.”

The threads have snapped. I open my mouth. It widens freely. Carefully, I curve my lips, threads dangling, into a smile. “Thank you,” I say.

I went calmly with Malcolm when he came to claim me. I brought the monkey with me.

Malcolm led me back to the courtroom, which was again filled with the same people. Zach, though, wasn’t there, I noticed immediately, nor was Aunt Nicki. But Aidan, Victoria, and Topher were. And of course the Magician.

Malcolm led me to a table across the aisle from the Magician. He squeezed my shoulder. And then he left the courtroom. Gone, just like that. He left me alone. I never thought he would do that, and I suddenly felt fear squeeze my insides, my human stomach and lungs. I wanted to call out after him, but I didn’t. Half the eyes in the courtroom were on the Magician; the other half were on me.

And suddenly I realized I’d lied to myself. I wasn’t ready to die.

The judge banged his gavel. He listed the crimes—illegal use of magic across worlds, false identification, performing with an illegal license, and myriad other infractions. Then he paused and said, “Murder in the first degree.” And he began to list the names.

The list went on and on.

With each name, I remembered a face or a moment—all the talking that I had done had jogged loose the pictures in my head. I closed my eyes and let the images come, all the photos that I had identified in the tablet and Lou had then pinned to the bulletin board, all the boxes that had hung in the wagon, all the magic that swirled inside me.

The judge continued, and, caught in the memory of faces, I didn’t hear his words.

But I heard the intake of breath, the sudden stillness that spread over the courtroom, as the jury leader spoke the verdict. “We find the defendant guilty as charged.”

As one, the audience exhaled.

Guilty as charged.

The words echoed around the chamber.

I was led by a bailiff to a side room and instructed to wait. The court was in recess. I sat on a bench in a dull gray room and didn’t move, didn’t speak, and didn’t think. When it was time for sentencing, the bailiff led me back to the courtroom. Everyone had reassembled. I felt the Magician’s eyes on me. I didn’t look at him. Instead, I looked again for Zach. I didn’t see him or Malcolm or Aunt Nicki or Topher …

In the crowded courtroom, I felt alone.

The judge banged his gavel. “Sentencing is as follows: life imprisonment with no possibility of parole, this location with no possibility of extradition.”

The courtroom erupted in shouting. I heard shouts for the Magician’s death, loud anger. Several jumped to their feet. The bailiffs rushed forward.

The judge banged his gavel harder. All around the courtroom, the bailiffs pushed people back into their seats. Slowly, the courtroom stilled.

“His belongings will be destroyed, including the doll known as Eve, who was created through his deeds. All records from this case will be sealed to prevent these crimes from ever being repeated. This court is adjourned.”

The gavel banged again.

And the words sank in.

The Magician would be imprisoned.

I would be destroyed.