I nodded.
“Okay, get in your pneums. I’ll have to take you up to the MER. There’s no direct pipe to the Grimm Collection from here.” He brought his face close to us. “Buckle up,” he said.
We traveled to the MER in Aaron’s pocket, swaying and bumping with each step. “I think I’m going to be sick,” said Marc.
“Please don’t,” I said.
Sarah was on pipe duty in the Main Exam Room.
“Mind if I just get in there for a sec, Sarah? I need to send something downstairs,” said Aaron.
“Sure,” she said. “Actually, while you’re here, could you watch the pipes for me while I run to the ladies’?”
“Of course,” said Aaron. We heard Sarah walk away.
“Send me first, and give me five minutes to get out of the way before you send Elizabeth,” said Marc.
I heard the hiss as Aaron opened the pipe and sent the two pneums of supplies down. Another hiss and a thump as he sent Marc down. Then a long pause—five minutes is forever when you’re in a plastic tube in somebody’s pocket, waiting to go crashing through space.
At last, Aaron’s hand appeared again and pulled me out of his pocket.
The blood rushed to my head. “I’m upside down!” I yelled.
Aaron lifted me to eye level again, holding me so I was lying on my back, and whispered, “I know. You have to start out upside down or you’ll land on your head. The pipes go up before they go down.”
“Oh, great,” I moaned.
“Sorry,” said Aaron. “It’s not my fault, it’s geometry.” He turned me upside down again and pulled the pipe door open. “Well, bye, Elizabeth. Travel safely,” he said, and let go.
Fans of roller coasters and water slides would love traveling by pneumatic tubes. You shoot through the pitch dark, bumping and spinning until you have no idea which way is up—especially if you’ve left your sense of direction in a
I’m not a fan of roller coasters.
I lay there stunned, facedown, my cheek pressed against the plastic, trying to get used to the light and the silence before I faced the job of rocking the door free. I had just about caught my breath when my pneum lurched.
It was Marc. He slid my door open. “Wasn’t that awesome? Better than snowboarding!” He held out his hand and pulled me out.
“Thanks,” I said, leaning against the edge of the wire basket.
There was something funny about Marc—he looked different. He frowned at me appraisingly. “You’re so tall,” he said.
I laughed. “Yeah, six whole inches,” I said, but I knew what he meant. Aaron had made us both the right size to fit snugly in the pneums, which meant we were exactly the same height. It was weird being the same height as a basketball star. It made me feel impossibly tall.
The pipes rattled ominously overhead. “We better move before we get hit on the head with a pneum,” said Marc.
We climbed out of the basket. Marc gave me a leg up. We might be the same size, but he was still way stronger. We emptied the pneums and stuffed our backpacks with the string, paper clips, and other supplies. Marc tied one end of a length of twine to the basket, tossed the other end off the shelf, and climbed down.
“Come on, Elizabeth,” he called up from the floor.
“Ack. It’s a long way down!” Rope climbing was never my favorite part of gym.
“Loop the rope around one leg and take your weight with your feet,” said Marc. “Good—no, your feet! Not your hands, your feet!”
I scraped my palms pretty badly—it’s amazing how rough a piece of ordinary string can feel when you’re only six inches tall—but I reached the floor without falling. “Where now?” I said.
“Call number I *GC 683.32 G65—this way.”
Dust flew up and resettled at our feet; it was like walking through feathers and packing peanuts. Was the floor always this dusty?
Marc grabbed my elbow as I made yet another wrong turn. “Over here,” he said. He stopped in front of a gray metal locker the height of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.
“Great,” I said. “How are we going to get the door open?”
“Lasso the handle,” said Marc, tying a loop in the string.
He was pretty good at throwing the lasso, but it kept slipping off the handle. “Enough,” I said eventually. “It’s not working.”
“Got any better ideas?” he said. “It’s not like I can fly.”
“Hey,” I said, “what about using some of the objects in here? Like the flying carpet?”
“Huh.” He stuffed the lasso into his backpack. “Not the carpet—we could never get it unrolled, and anyway, it’s on a high shelf—but the Hermes shoes are on a low shelf.”
“The Hermes shoes?”
“You know, the winged sandals. Come on.”
Another long, dizzying walk between the vast cabinets. “Here,” said Marc, tugging me by the elbow. He stopped beside an open tower of shoes. The lowest shelf came to our armpits. I found myself nose to nose with a scuffed ballet slipper the size of a small rowboat, with dozens of others moored beside it. I *GC 391.413 T94 c. 1— c. 12 read the labels. The twelve dancing princesses’ twenty-four dancing shoes.
Marc swung himself easily onto the shelf, shouldering slippers aside. “Come on,” he said.
Maybe I could have pulled myself up when I was still doing ballet, but my arms weren’t strong enough anymore. “What if I wait here?”
“Fine.” Marc piled up some slippers and climbed up two shelves. I heard him moving back and forth up there.
“Found ’em!” He stuck his head over the edge a little farther along. “I’m coming down. Get under cover so I don’t hit you with a shoe,” he called to me.
I crouched beneath the shelving unit, flinching away from the dust bunnies. Bunnies, ha—dust ogres was more like it. A tangle of hairs like monstrous, scaly wires. Clumps of green and yellow fibers, lots of pale, flaky stuff, and ugh, was that a fly wing?
I turned my back on the mess and looked out from under the shelf. Overhead I saw the sole of one sandal, wings beating at its heel. Its mate was suspended by its straps, flapping in a panic.
“Easy there,” said Marc softly, leaning out of the steady sandal to put his hand on the panicked one. “Hey, boy—nice and easy. Steady now.”
The sandal continued to thrash in the air.
“Elizabeth! Can you grab the straps?”
The frightened sandal dove and bucked. Marc threw me one of its leather straps, and I caught the end. That seemed to panic the sandal even more; it flapped away, dragging me along the floor. I hung on, pulling it down with all my weight as Marc landed his own sandal beside me.
“We’d better switch,” he said. “Yours is freaking out. It’s the left one—the pair must be right-handed.”
“Right-handed?”
“Okay, right-footed.” He stepped out of the right sandal, where he’d been sitting like a kayaker with his legs
