The Dragon's Tooth Part 21

He tugged the door open, jingled through, paused, and leaned back into the room.

"Cyrus, you said you parked old Skelton's truck?"

Cyrus nodded.

"And he just gave you his keys?"

"Yeah, why?"

Sterling's eyes sparked above his smile. "No reason." The door shut behind him.

Antigone looked at her brother, irritated. "Cy, now he knows you have them."

Cyrus moved to the nearest shelf. "I don't have the keys, Tigs." He fished the little paper ball out of his pocket and tossed it to his sister. "That's what was in there this morning."

Antigone unrolled it. "Trust Nolan?" She looked up. "We should tell Greeves. You said you were going to tell him about the tooth today anyway. He needs to know that Nolan has it."

"I don't want to tell Greeves."

"Why? You want to hunt for Nolan yourself?"

"I just don't want to tell him. It's embarra.s.sing. And I don't want to hunt for Nolan. We have enough other things to do, but mostly I don't think we could find him."

"We should find Mrs. E." Antigone tugged on her brother's shirt. "She said she would help us this morning. C'mon, we should go."

"I want to look around first." Cyrus scanned the shelves.

"Cy, I'm not gonna hang out in here with you and Sir Roger."

Cyrus grinned. "I think you are. If you head for the door, my mouth might just sort of slip."

He walked toward the skull.

"Cyrus ..." Antigone sighed. "If you want to play games, find a new friend."

"I'm not playing," Cyrus said. He tapped a gold-plated eye socket.

"Cyrus Lawrence Smith," Antigone said, raising her eyebrows. "Stop acting your age. Do you think I'm scared? You wet your pants the first time we watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang."

"Seriously, Tigs?" Cyrus said. "Who has more nightmares? And this won't be a nightmare. This will be real."

"Little brother ..." Puffing frustration, Antigone smoothed her hair, gritted her teeth, and pointed at the skull. "Selam."

Cyrus jumped, staggering into his sister. The two of them crashed back into the shelves and down into a row.

Antigone felt her brother's fist in her stomach and the hard floor against her shoulder blades. A box landed above her head. Gla.s.s broke. Paper rained down.

Water slapped into her hair.

Above them, the lights dimmed.

fourteen.

QUICK WATER.

CYRUS COULDN'T ROLL to either side. And he didn't want to scoot backward toward the skull. So he crawled forward, over the top of his sister, carefully sliding his hands through paper, gla.s.s, and some kind of puddling liquid.

"Get off!" Antigone slapped at him.

"There's gla.s.s," Cyrus said. "Hold on."

Antigone pushed his hips up into the air, got her boots braced on his legs, and then heaved him into a somersault.

Cyrus slammed awkwardly to the floor.

"Ow." He groaned. "Tigs, you just ruptured my kidney."

Antigone sat up. "My apologies. Now shut up. I'm trying to listen."

She leaned forward, staring at the skull.

Cyrus sc.r.a.ped himself up. "I think my hand is bleeding."

"Shhh." Antigone grabbed a shelf, thought better of it, and then pushed herself up off the floor. Water dribbled down from her hair and slapped onto her boot. "Nothing," Antigone said. "Absolutely nothing."

"The lights dimmed," Cyrus said. "I know they did."

"How would you know?" Antigone asked. "You were busy tackling me while screaming and sucking your thumb."

"First," Cyrus said, standing up, "I didn't scream. Second, that was your thumb in my mouth."

"Selam," Antigone said, stepping forward. "Selam."

Dust trickled across the floor. The lanterns dimmed and swung on the ceiling. For a moment, the temperature wobbled, and a long sucking sound, like a breath pulled through teeth, filled the room.

And it was gone.

The dust stopped.

The light grew.

"Hmm," said Cyrus. "We've seen it. It happened. Now let's agree not to do that again."

Antigone laughed. "Really, Cyrus? Who was just pretending to be the brave one?"

"I wouldn't have done it. I'm not dumb, Tigs. You're just funny when you're scared."

"Yeah, right. Can we go now, or do you need to change your pants?"

"Why? Oh. Aren't you hilarious. No. I didn't wet myself, Brave Sister. But only because you inspire me. What's all over the floor? It's on your boot, too."

Tiny drops of clear liquid were rolling through yellowing pages and ancient envelopes. Cyrus thumped to his knees. The drops were seeking each other, growing larger as they tumbled over shards of gla.s.s, through bunnied dust, and around Antigone's boots.

A ball slopped off Antigone's toe, swallowing a whole flock of drops, and gathered around her sole.

"I wouldn't touch it," Antigone said.

Cyrus extended a finger. "It looks like water."

"It's not acting like water. It's acting like mercury."

"I've never seen how mercury acts." Cyrus poked it. The ball quivered and slid slowly away on its flat belly.

"That's how it acts," Antigone said. "But it's silver, and it doesn't go looking for itself."

More tiny droplets tumbled past to join the ball. The bigger it got, the faster the smaller drops moved toward it.

Cupping his hands, Cyrus picked it up.

"Mercury is poisonous," Antigone said. "In chemistry, Mr. Sampson said it can soak through your skin and kill you."

"But this isn't mercury," said Cyrus. "This is water. Should I taste it?"

"You've been a little hard to deal with lately, so yeah, go ahead."

Cyrus held the ball up to the light. Antigone pressed up beside him to get a look. Tiny particles of dirt and splinters of wood were floating inside it, but as they watched, all of the impurities rose to the top of the sphere, then slid down around the outside until they reached Cyrus's skin.

It was cleaning itself.

"Wow," said Cyrus. "Tigs, try something. Cup your hands beneath mine."

Antigone held out her hands beneath her brother's, and then Cyrus spread his fingers.

The liquid immediately slopped through and bounced into Antigone's cupped palms.

Cyrus examined his fingers. "It feels just like water, but my skin's dry. All the gunk is left, though." He brushed off his hands and began scanning the rubble on the floor. A rectangular box lay open on its side. Gla.s.s was scattered around it.

Cyrus picked up the box. Inside, it was lined with red velvet and looked like the inside of an egg carton. A dozen baseball-size indents were set in two rows. One of them held half a hollow gla.s.s sphere. The rest were empty. A small, lined piece of paper had been tacked inside the lid.

"This is really weird, Cyrus," said Antigone. "Look what happens when you break it in half."

Cyrus glanced at his sister. She was cupping an egg-size ball of the water in each hand.

"They're two feet apart," Antigone said. "But they pull like serious magnets."

Her hands slapped together, and a single large ball dropped to the floor and bounced like a doomed water balloon.

Antigone scrambled after it as Cyrus looked back at the list. Eleven names had been handwritten in a column labeled MEMBER. They had written their ranks in the next column, and the "date of withdrawal" in the next. The "date of return" column was completely empty. The last "date of withdrawal" was 1932.

"They need some librarians around here," Cyrus said. "Some curators. Something. Somebody should be collecting late fees. Tigs, we can take stuff out of here. You just write your name down." He closed the lid and looked at the top of the box. A typed label had been filled out with a sloppy fountain pen and then glued down.

"Tigs, it's a fungus," Cyrus said. He held out the box. "And it was collected by a Smith. That makes it practically ours."

Slopping the ball from hand to hand, Antigone read the label. "Let's go with Quick Water. The other ones sound evil."

"Quick Water it is," said Cyrus. "Give me half."

Antigone splashed half her blob into her brother's hands. He held it back up to the light.

It was clearer than any water he had ever seen. Clearer than air. And it did strange things with the light, like a fish-eye camera lens. Looking into it was like looking into a different room, a different world, spread out, bent, curving, but perfectly sharp. He raised it all the way up to his eye and tried to look through it. Shelves warped up toward the ceiling around ... his sister?

Antigone screamed, and Cyrus jumped backward, tripped, and nearly fell again.

"Cyrus!" she said, covering her water. "We have to put them back. I saw an eye. The whole thing was magnifying an eye-an eyeball just sitting in my hand."

"It spooked me, too," Cyrus said, "but mine was looking at you. You were in mine."

"What are you saying?" Antigone asked. "I was in yours? How?"

"I was looking at you. I looked into the water, and the room was all bent, and at first I didn't notice that it wasn't the right part of the room, but then I was looking up at you."

"I don't get it," Antigone said. "More importantly, I don't like it. We're putting them back."

"I was looking into mine and out of yours!" Cyrus said. "I mean, I'm guessing that's what happened. That was my eye. Hopefully. Look again."

Cyrus held his water up-farther from his face this time-and he grinned. His wobbling ball was dark. But then Antigone opened her hands. When her water's quivering had settled down, there was her brother, smiling up out of her sphere like a bizarre cartoon-enormous-nosed and pencil-necked.

"Tigs," said the cartoon Cyrus. "This is the coolest thing ever, and we're taking it with us."

The door banged open, and Cyrus and Antigone jumped.

Eleanor Eldridge glared at them. She was wearing a straw hat and had a heavy book bag slung over her shoulder.

"What do you two think you're doing?"

Antigone slipped her water into Cyrus's hand and jumped forward. "Sterling said we could look around."

"Sterling," Mrs. Eldridge muttered. "Don't you go listening to Benjamin Sterling-he's a man with a dirty soul, though he did tell me where to find you."

She turned around. "Come along, then. It's time we talked about your tutors."