The moment we walked into the I.M.P. office, the weight of the past encounter with Verosika still lingered in the air. Loona was trying her best to seem unaffected, though her restless energy betrayed her. Moxxie, as usual, kept his composure, but I could see the tightness in his shoulders. Millie, on the other hand, was as chipper as ever, though she noticed the tension too.
"Sir," Moxxie said as he set down his briefcase, his eyes narrowing slightly. "What's the plan for today?"
I tried to shake off the unease from the lobby. Verosika wasn't just a pop star to me. She was a reminder of a past I wasn't proud of, one I couldn't escape. But I was trying—trying to build something here, trying to be better.
"Alright, team," I said, forcing a cheerful tone. "Shake it off. We've got work to do."
Moxxie gave me a skeptical look. "Sir,, are we not going to address the... elephant in the room?"
"What elephant?" I snapped, though I knew exactly what he meant.
"Verosika," he replied bluntly. "It's not every day your pop star ex-girlfriend shows up out of nowhere and parks in your spot."
Millie nudged him gently. "Moxxie, maybe we should just focus on the job. Whatever's going on between Blitz and Verosika, it's not our business."
Loona batted her eyes. "Speak for yourself. I wanna know all the details."
"Nope!" I barked, cutting off the conversation. "We're not doing this. Not today. Let's get inside and figure out who we're offing next."
As if on cue,
That was when the door burst open and a demon stumbled in, lanky, wild-haired, lab coat scorched black at the hem, hauling a smoke-belching contraption that looked like it had been welded together in a junkyard by someone who'd only heard about welding.
"IMP!" he cried, his voice cracking. "I need your help!"
Millie's hand went to her weapon. "Whoa there, buddy. Maybe start with who you are and what you want."
"Name's Loopty Frennik! I'm an inventor, a genius! And I've just been wronged in the worst possible way!"
Moxxie crossed his arms. "Let me guess. Your business partner screwed you over, and now you want revenge."
"Exactly!" Loopty slammed his fist onto my desk. The contraption let out a pitiful wheeze of steam. "This is my greatest invention, a time-disruptor! My partner stole the prototype and plans to use it to erase me from existence!"
"A time-disruptor," Loona said. "What's it do, turn back time so you can make better life choices?"
Loopty glared at her. "It disrupts the flow of time around a target, aging them to dust or regressing them to infancy. In the wrong hands it's a weapon of unimaginable power!"
I smirked. "Sounds like a fun toy. Where do we—"
I stopped, with the rest of it halfway up my throat, and looked at Moxxie instead.
He blinked, then cleared his throat. "If it's that dangerous, why not destroy it?"
"The prototype is indestructible," Loopty said. "But if you retrieve it, I can recalibrate it to make it safe."
"You're sweating through that coat," Loona said. "For a guy who just got robbed."
"Lab fumes!"
I filed that away. Ordinarily I'd have gone straight past it toward the part with the explosions. "My partner, Lyle, is having his dream life on Earth now that he's succeeded," Loopty went on. "I need you to stop him!"
"Stop him how?" Moxxie asked.
"Whatever it takes."
"Then let's talk about the fee." Moxxie took Loopty by the elbow and steered him to the corner. I stayed at my desk with my mouth shut. It felt like holding my breath underwater, and I kept doing it until he came back with half the money up front and a look on his face like he'd won something.
"Okay," I said, and picked up the marker. "Somebody tell me how we get to Earth and into a rich guy's house."
Loona already had her phone out. "Lyle's got a fan blog. Rich people are so easy. He has a home nurse, and she clocks out at three."
"Tour buses run right past those mansions," Millie said. "We could go as tourists!"
"Recon first," Moxxie said. "In through the back at shift change, take the device, out. No theatrics." He looked at me. "That last part is directed at you, sir."
"I know," I said. "I'm agreeing with you."
I wrote it on the whiteboard, in his order, and nobody said anything, and I could feel them not saying it.
"Just tell me I don't have to wear a disguise," Loona said.
"You'll all need human ones," Loopty said.
I groaned. "Fine. But I'm not wearing anything that makes me look like a clown."
An hour later I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt.
Loona had a visor pulled low over her eyes and the expression of a girl planning several murders. Moxxie wore a cardigan. Millie had bought a fanny pack and was thrilled with it. My grimoire rode in mine.
The guide's voice crackled over the bus loudspeaker. "And on your left, folks, the home of Lyle, inventor and philanthropist, a fine example of what hard work can build." The house sat on its hill like a wedding cake somebody had made angry.
"Rich guy," I said. "Let's get to it." I was half out of my seat.
"Shift change is at three," Moxxie said, without looking up from his watch.
It was two-forty. My leg wanted to be somewhere. I sat back down.
"Wow," Loona said.
"Shut up."
At three the nurse's little car rolled down the drive and we were through the back door and up the stairs in under a minute, and I'll admit that felt good. Nobody had to yell.
Then we found Lyle.
He lay in a bed the size of a boat, hooked up to a machine that hummed and blinked, and he was ancient. The skin on his hands hung off him. He held a photo of a pile of money the way you'd hold a photo of a person.
"I can't live like this," he muttered. His voice cracked. "I'll never feel young again."
His free hand went to the line in his arm. I didn't like what his face was doing.
Light poured through the ceiling. The door flew open and the cherubs of C.H.E.R.U.B. came down from Heaven in formation, wings out, halos on full.
"We're here to save you!" Cletus announced, with a flourish that took up most of the room. "You've helped so many people with your inventions, Lyle! It's not your time yet!"
I groaned. "Great. Cherubs."
"What's their deal?" Millie whispered.
"The infomercial," Moxxie whispered back. "The one that was on earlier. Those are the guys from Heaven."
We ducked behind the curtains and watched Cletus and his crew tell Lyle about all the people his inventions had helped, the ones who had sent the cherubs down to protect him from despair. "Look at all the beauty life still has to offer!" Cletus chirped. "You're loved, Lyle. You just don't see it yet."
I snorted, too loud. Moxxie grabbed my sleeve.
"The machine goes wherever he goes," he breathed. It was bolted to the back of a wheelchair, tubes running to Lyle's arm. "If the cherubs take him out, it comes with him. We tail them. We wait for a moment where he's parked and unattended, and Millie and Loona lift it. You'll cover them with a distraction."
"How big?"
"Small, sir. Small."
"Small," I said. "Got it."
The cherubs loaded Lyle into the chair. He looked at the ceiling like he'd already left. We followed them out.
They took him to an overlook first. The sun was going down over the whole valley in a way that ought to have cost money.
Lyle squinted at it. "It's nice, I guess. But I've seen plenty of sunsets. They don't pay the bills."
"Yeah, real inspiring," I called from behind a bush. It slipped out. It had been sitting there all day. "You can't even buy a burger with a sunset."
Cletus's head whipped toward the bush. Moxxie pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose.
"Sorry," I whispered. "That was one. That's all of them."
At the mall, the cherubs parked him by a fountain surrounded by families and laughter, kids chasing pigeons, a couple splitting a pretzel. "This is what life's all about," Cletus said with a bright smile.
"Sure," I said, from behind a potted palm, "until you step on a Lego or get stuck in line behind a screaming toddler. Real magical."
"Sir," Moxxie hissed.
"I know. Last one."
It wasn't. Lyle's patience wore a little thinner at every stop, and I could see it working on him, and each time it worked I felt it in my chest, the old, easy warmth of being the loudest voice in the room. I knew the feeling. I'd run on it for years.
The last stop was an opera house.
Gilt boxes, red velvet, a chandelier the size of a compact car. The cherubs parked Lyle in a box on the left, with a clear view of the stage. Moxxie went down into the seats. Millie and Loona slipped into the corridor behind the box.
I took the catwalk.
It ran along the ceiling above the stage, a metal grate with a rail, and right at its end sat a spotlight on a swivel mount, beside a row of cleats where the stage crew had tied off the lines for the second act's set pieces. A grand piano hung in the dark above the front of the stage, waiting for its cue, on a single fat rope.
Moxxie had set his watch to mine. "Ten seconds of dark, sir. Not eleven."
"Ten," I whispered into my collar. "I've got it."
The singer walked out. The house went still.
The singer opened her mouth and a sound came out that filled the building. I watched the box through the light's sight and saw Lyle lean forward. For the first time since we'd found him, the old man looked like somebody was home. His mouth had come open a little.
Moxxie's voice crackled in my ear. "Thirty seconds."
The singer took a breath. The aria turned toward its second verse.
I had one hand on the swivel and Moxxie's ten seconds in my head. My other hand grabbed the mount and hauled it hard, and the beam swung off the singer, across the dark, and onto the box on the left, where Cletus's shocked face filled the circle of light.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I bellowed, "the cherubs from the infomercial! Free of charge!"
Somebody in the audience laughed. Then everyone did. The singer's voice cracked, wobbled, stopped. My heel swung wide with the swivel and clipped one of the cleat pins. I felt it go. I didn't think about it.
Down in the box, Lyle's face closed.
I saw it from forty feet up, in the glow of my own spotlight. The wall came back up, brick by brick, in under a second, and behind it a tired old man sat with his hands in his lap like he'd been caught wanting something.
The grin was still on my face. I could feel it in my cheeks, the way you feel a sneeze.
I knew that closing. I'd caused it before, in rooms with better lighting, to someone who'd told me something true, and I'd made a joke, and the joke had worked. It always worked.
Small, sir. Small.
My hand was still on the mount. I swung the beam back across the dark and put it on the singer and held it there, steady as I could make it.
"Keep singing," I said. Nobody could hear me. "Please."
She looked up into the light like she was deciding something, took another breath, and started the verse over.
The house went quiet again. It took a few bars, for the audience and for Lyle both, but his face came open. Moxxie was a small dark shape in the seats, and even from up there I could tell he was looking at me.
The aria ended. The whole hall stood up. The singer walked to the edge of the stage to take her bow, and the cherubs wheeled Lyle down the aisle to the rail, close enough to clap.
Above them, a line hummed.
I looked at the cleats. One pin was gone. The rope on the piano had been slipping on its wrap ever since, a finger's width at a time, and I hadn't heard it because I'd been busy looking at Lyle.
It creaked once, loud enough that the singer turned her head. The piano dropped a foot.
I saw how it would go. The job was to stop Lyle, and he was thirty feet under a falling piano, and nobody in the building knew my heel had done it. Loopty would pay the rest of the fee. We'd go home. It would look like an accident, because it would be one, and I'd be a demon who had stood on a catwalk and let something happen.
I'd done that before, too. I was good at it.
"MOVE!"
It came out of me so loud that half the audience ducked. The singer stumbled back from the lip of the stage. I vaulted the rail, caught the curtain rope with both hands, and went down it faster than my hands liked, and hit the floor of the house running.
Cletus saw me coming and shrieked. I didn't stop. I hit Lyle's wheelchair like a linebacker at full speed, and the chair went skidding sideways into an aisle seat with the machine's tubes ripping out of their sockets, and the two of us tumbled into the carpet as the piano came down on the lip of the stage.
It hit every key at once.
The noise went through my whole skeleton. Splinters rained. The front rows of the orchestra pit disappeared under a heap of wire and lacquer, and the chandelier swung on its chain and lost half its crystal, and for a second the only sound in the hall was one string, somewhere in the wreck, still humming.
The singer was alive, on her rear at the back of the stage, staring. Lyle lay beside me with his cane across his chest and one shoe missing. His eyes were huge.
"You," he said.
"Ask me later." I got my knees under me. "I'm busy."
"You DEMON!" Cletus was screaming, wings flapping. "You did this!"
"Yeah," I said. "Some of it."
The machine had come loose from the wheelchair and slid into the aisle, glowing, and Cletus dove for it. A shaft of heavenly light opened in the ceiling and hauled it up, and the cherubs went up after it in a shrieking bunch, evidence of demonic tampering echoing down the shaft, and the light closed.
Millie and Loona had finished coming down the stairs and stood at the end of the row, breathing hard.
"Well," Loona said, "that's the machine."
"That's the machine," I agreed.
Moxxie came running up the aisle with his cardigan snagged on something. "Sir!" he said. "That was not the plan!"
"No," I said. "It wasn't."
I pulled the grimoire out of my fanny pack and opened a portal in the middle of the aisle. My hands shook a little. I hoped nobody could tell.
Back at the office nobody said anything for a while. Millie took off her tour hat and folded it very carefully, which is what she does when she's upset. Moxxie stood in his ruined cardigan and looked at the whiteboard, at the plan I'd written in his order. Loona took the couch.
"Sir," Moxxie said eventually. "The rigging."
"I know," I said. "That was me. My heel hit the pin. I saw it after." I hadn't planned to say it. It was out of me and on the floor of the office before I could pick it up.
"I know, sir. I watched you do it." He turned around. "I also watched you come down."
I didn't have anything for that. I looked at the whiteboard.
"My question," Loona said, from the couch.
"Go."
"On the catwalk. Your face did something right before you swung that light back. What was it?"
"That was me about to keep going," I said. "Same as always. I just caught it this time."
She nodded, and looked at her phone, and after a while said, "Cool." That was all she said. I hadn't known how much I was waiting for her to say something else until she didn't.
My phone buzzed against the desk. I picked it up and read the message and felt my face fall.
L. FRENNIK: I KNOW. COMING TO COLLECT.
"Loopty knows," I said. "He's coming to collect."
Loopty came through the wall. The door was right there. He burst through the drywall in a spray of plaster with a piece of the frame around his neck, steaming, furious, his hair standing straight up.
"You... you messed up!"
I sighed at the hole in my wall. "Look, Loopty, we tried, okay? Your invention's gone. Heaven took it. I made a call at the end there, and the machine went with the angels because of it. That one's on me."
"You ruined EVERYTHING—"
"Sir," Moxxie said. "Behind him."
The figure in the doorway was leaning on a cane. He was breathing like a broken bellows, and his coat was torn, and he was, very much, alive.
"I don't know what you people were trying to do," Lyle said. His voice was steady. "But I think I've made my decision. I'm not giving up."
The portal I'd opened had stayed open a crack when we left. A man who could outlast a squad of cherubs, apparently, could outlast a portal. It had taken him most of the afternoon to climb the stairs.
Loopty stared at him. Something moved across his face. The steam went out of him a little at a time. "Lyle," he said. "You're old."
"I know."
"I guess..." Loopty said slowly. "I guess it's not all about the money, is it. We've been through too much."
"No," Lyle said. "I don't guess it is."
They stood there in the wreck of my wall for a long moment, two old partners with a stolen invention between them that neither of them had anymore, and for the first time all day nobody was yelling.
Then Wally Wackford burst through the hole in the wall, waving a foam finger, asking if anybody wanted to talk about inventing.
"Not now, Wally," Moxxie said.
"Later!" Wally said, and left through the hole he'd come in by.
I sat down on the edge of my desk. My hands had stopped shaking, more or less. There would be another day like this one, and the next one wouldn't end as cleanly. The old me hadn't gone anywhere. He'd been on the catwalk with me, and he'd be around tomorrow. I'd caught him once. That was going to have to count.
I tapped Moxxie on the arm and nodded toward Lyle and Loopty, who had started arguing about who owed whom for the wall.
"They're still paying for this, though," I said.
"I'll draft the invoice," Moxxie said.