Conjured

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.