From the courtyard below, distortions rippled out from outstretched wands, while on the wall, kids cowered and dodged. Some were still running from the school, but those closest to Peter were trying to run back. In the melee, Jamal got hit by a spell from below; he stiffened and toppled like a tree.
Jeff spun, looking frantically for another escape. Behind him, the hatch exploded in a shower of splinters and gravel. Suzy yelled something about a window, but Jeff’s eye caught on a glint of something wet.
He ran to the very corner of the roof. Below, he could see a wide moat flowing along the edge of the wall. “Suzy!” He shouted. “There’s a moat!”
Suzy turned, and for a second, their eyes met. Then something hit him in the chest, hot and cold and electric, and his body went rigid.
He tried to call to his sister again, but his mouth wouldn’t work. He felt himself tipping, saw the sky rise up above him. The world kept rotating, and there was an upside-down city. Then the back of his head hit something, and he tried to scream through his clenched teeth as water rushed up to meet him.
SEVENTEEN
Suzy saw the spell hit her brother, and she was already running. She paused for a bare second on the edge, looking down. Jeff was mostly submerged – up to the middle of his face – and not moving. Something rippled through the air just over her head.
She jumped.
Hitting the water was an explosion of cold, but she hardly noticed as she thrashed over to Jeff. She saw him blink, which was reassuring, but there was panic in his eyes, and a second later, he sank under the surface.
Suzy dove. She caught her brother’s arm and yanked. It felt like she was pulling herself DOWN more than pulling him UP.
She readjusted, grabbing Jeff from behind, under his armpit. He was utterly rigid. She kicked hard, and both of their heads broke the surface.
Suzy gulped in air and looked around for someone to help her. They bobbed, the water sloshing up to Jeff’s eyes, Suzy floundering under his weight. She kicked furiously, and as they came up again, she heard Jeff gagging and coughing. It was a weirdly encouraging.
Suzy kept on kicking and treading water with one arm as best as she could, but she was making slow progress toward the edge of the moat. She was feeling the burn deep in her muscles when she noticed Jeff’s arms were beginning to bend slowly, feebly stroking at the water. Then his legs began to churn. Finally, he said, “I’m okay. Let me go.”
Suzy let go and almost laughed at the physical relief. She turned in a slow circle and finally got to take stock of her surroundings.
First, she became aware of what her subconscious had noticed when she hit the water – that this was less a moat and more an artificial river or canal, and they were moving along at a pretty good clip.
From the school roof, before she jumped, she had caught a glimpse of a city spread out along the river, but now the high, mossy stone banks of the canal hid all but the highest and closest rooftops from view.
Looking back, she could see the corner of the school poking through a wall that looked like it should have enclosed a medieval castle. Then the current pulled them around a bend in the river, and the wall disappeared.
Suzy turned to look ahead again and saw a stone bridge spanning the river ahead, silhouetted against the pale orange sky. Hanging from the bridge was a grate extending down into the water.
“Now what?” Jeff asked.
“Shh.” The rush of the water would probably hide their voices, but Suzy didn’t want to take any chances. She shook her head and braced her feet against the grate as she floated up to it. “I guess,” she whispered, “We should go back to the school…”
“Back to the school?! Why?” Jeff dropped to an angry whisper at Suzy’s frantic shushings. “They were trying to kill us!”
“I don’t think they were trying to kill us; they were trying to catch us. But we can at least be with everyone else, and whenever they – I mean our parents or whoever – come to get us, we’ll all be in the same place.”
“Paralyzing someone and knocking them into a river isn’t how you catch someone,” Jeff said. Suzy didn’t bother arguing; he was being dumb on purpose. She looked back up the river. No one following yet.
“So what do YOU think we should do?” she asked.
“I think we should get out of this river and look around. We can be like, the school’s spies. Do some reconnaissance. Figure out how to save everyone and teleport back to earth.”
“Reconnaissance,” Suzy snorted. “You’re not a spy, and you’re not going to save the school. The people back home are going to get us back. We just need to make sure we’re at the school with everyone else when that happens. But,” she conceded, “Maybe we could look around a little on our way back and try to stay hidden if we can. We can at least tell the people in charge what we saw.”
Suzy pulled herself over to the side of the canal and crawled up the steep stone embankment, Jeff at her side. As she neared the top, she peered over the edge and got her first clear view of the alien city.
Her first impression was that it looked old and European, with cobbled streets and wooden buildings packed close together. Hanging wooden signs on the buildings made these look like shops of various kinds.
In and out of the buildings, and on the street,
