Philippa Fisher and the Fairy's Promise (8 page)

The ALD supervisor, FGRaincloud74921, bowed low in front of her superiors. “FG32561 is due in my office first thing in the morning. If I might be permitted to offer an opinion, given this fairy’s previous misdemeanors, I would suggest that she be given the harshest of punishments. And this is my newest recruit, who helped us find the errant fairy,” she said, holding out her MagiCell to show her superiors a picture of the heroic young fairy.

The two night stars looked at the picture on the screen, and then at each other. To an observer, the slight nod which passed between them would most certainly have passed for an agreement with FGRaincloud’s proposal for punishing FG32561.

To them, however, the nod meant something quite different.

“We are delighted with your work,” FGNightstar90034 said with a smile so bright, the room twinkled and sparkled. “But we would like to deal with this fairy ourselves. We will have her brought directly to us in the morning.”

“Would you like me to see her first, so I can give her an indication of the severity of her punishment?” FGRaincloud74921 asked with a lick of her lips, as though thirsty for blood.

FGNightstar27785 shook her head. “That won’t be necessary,” she said. “We’ll take it from here.”

The interview was clearly over, and with a brief nod, an awkward curtsy, and a swift exit, FGRaincloud74921 returned to her post in ALD.

The two senior High Command officials sat in silence for a moment as they waited for the door to close behind the supervisor.

The conversation they were about to have needed absolute privacy.

“It’s a miracle!”

“I’ll say. At the eleventh hour, as well!”

“This could be just what we’ve been looking for.”

“Let’s hope so. It’s our last option.”

“I know. It’s getting hard to put up a normal front. If word gets out about our situation, we’ll have no way of stopping the panic.”

“But can you imagine FGRaincloud74921 not spotting the truth about her new fairy godmother?”

“To be fair, without seeing the picture, we wouldn’t have known ourselves — and even then it’s only because we’ve recently come across her in our research.”

“True. And now the pair of them have been virtually delivered to our door. Let’s get on with it.”

“Wait. The stakes are so high, and we need to be sure they’re up to this. We can’t afford a failure.”

“How about putting them both to the test first, to make sure they are the ones?”

“Good idea. If they don’t pass the highest loyalty test, we don’t go through with it.”

“Let’s hope they pass, then. For all of our sakes. If they don’t . . .”

“No — don’t say it. We can’t even contemplate failure. If this fails, we’re all in more trouble than we could even imagine.”

“You’re right. Let’s do it. First thing in the morning, we get that fairy in here and get this thing going, before it’s too late — for all of us.”

It was eight in the morning and still dark when Robyn called for me. I left a note for Philippa’s parents, since they were both snoring and dead to the world.

Closing the front door softly behind me, I followed Robyn down the driveway and we headed to the woods.

“This is it,” I said when we got to the stone circle. “You’d better go now, before they get here.”

“Who’s
they
?” she asked.

I frowned. “I don’t know. They’ll send someone to collect me.”

“Because they took your transportation powers away, along with everything else?”

“Exactly.”

“I hope they send someone nice,” Robyn said.

“Yeah, me too.”
Not likely,
I added silently.

Robyn pulled her coat close around her. “Will I have any way of knowing what’s going on?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so. I’m really sorry.”

“OK,” Robyn said, doing about as good a job as I was at hiding her feelings. I hated leaving her like this, without knowing what would happen or when she might see me — or Philippa — again. Then she turned to leave. “Hey, maybe I could talk to Annie?” she asked.

“Annie? What for?” Annie had already helped us once when Robyn’s dad had trapped me in a jar.

“I don’t know. Just — well, remember when you left us last time, Annie told you she would always make sure you were all right? Maybe she’ll help us now. I could ask her.”

I let out a breath. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure we should be involving her. I wouldn’t want to get her in trouble with ATC, too.”

“OK, I understand. I won’t do anything now,” she said. “But if things get really bad, if for any reason we really need her . . .”

“Yeah,” I replied, not wanting her to finish her sentence any more than she did. “If worse comes to worst, I’m sure Annie will be there for us. If you get desperate, you could see if she knows anything.”

Robyn nodded. “Good luck,” she said, turning back around to wave.

I waved back, feeling wooden and cold. “You too,” I said, forcing my mouth into a smile. “Go on. I’ll be fine.”

Robyn nodded and then, pulling her coat around her once more, she turned and walked away.

“Wow, look at you!” Tabitha had poked her head over the divide and was grinning at me.

I guessed she was referring to the fact that I looked like someone who’d been up half the night. I should have slept like a baby. I was given a room of my own at ALD with every comfort I could imagine. That was the problem — like everything else up here, you just had to imagine it, and it was there. But I couldn’t imagine anything! All my mind could focus on was the questions and worries swirling around in my head. What were they going to do with Daisy? How long would it be till I was found out? And when I was, what would they do with
me
?

I tried to look calm, and tried to smile at Tabitha, but I’m sure I failed miserably on both counts. “Look at me? Why?” I asked.

“You haven’t even been here a whole day, and you’re up for promotion already!” Tabitha said.

“Promotion?”

“That’s what I just heard.” Tabitha came over to my desk and went on. “I overheard Supervisor Raincloud74921 talking to someone about it. She was trying to claim the credit for herself. Said she’d handpicked you to join the department — which is quite funny considering she hadn’t even realized you were joining us!”

“Oh, yes, ha, ha, that is funny, Tabitha,” I said, trying to sound vaguely jovial.

“Tabby. That’s what my friends call me,” she said with a slight blush. “If we’re friends, that is.”

I smiled genuinely for the first time since Daisy had left. “Of course we are,” I said. “So tell me, Tabby, what else have you heard?”

“Well, I heard something about you finding a fairy who’s broken a whole bunch of FGC rules.”

“Mm-hmm,” I said, biting my tongue to stop myself from shouting,
“That’s my friend you’re talking about, and she did it for a good reason, you know!”
Tabby obviously hadn’t even realized that the fairy who was on her way back to ATC to be punished was the same one who’d brought me up here only yesterday.

Tabby leaned in closer. “And I heard something else,” she whispered, her eyes shining with the excitement of her news. With a quick look around to check that no one was listening, she went on. “I heard that there’s a
human
up here!”

“A — a —” I couldn’t find any more words. What was I supposed to say to
that
?

“I know. Isn’t it the most outrageous thing you’ve ever heard? Imagine a human getting into ATC! No one knows how it happened, or even where the human is — but some of the systems have registered its presence.”

“Its?”
I asked before I could stop myself.

“The human’s! They’ll find it soon enough and dispose of it somehow — but what a scandal, right?”

“Yeah!” I said. “Ha! What a scandal!” I couldn’t really say anything else for a while. All I could think about was the phrase
“dispose of it somehow.”

What would she think if she knew it was me she was talking about?

Tabby shook her head and went on. “You know, it’s hard to even imagine it now, isn’t it? I mean, fairies and humans having the kind of friendships we used to have back in the old days.”

I didn’t get it. It was their job to try and make sure things went smoothly for us. Why did they do it when so many of them didn’t seem to like us? I wanted to ask her — but I knew I couldn’t.

“Um . . . yeah,” I said, wishing I had a clue what she was talking about.

She looked indignant. “But it’s not our fault it changed, is it? After all, it’s the humans who let
us
down, who forgot about
us,
stopped believing in
us,
forgot about the symbols of friendship that we’d built
together.
It’s not the fairies who moved on and left them behind. And yet we’re still the ones who keep doing everything we can for them. We’ve never gone back on our side of the bargain, and we never will. Honestly, it’s not surprising if every now and then we get a bit touchy about it!”

I paused to take in what she’d said. Her answer had half answered the question I’d wanted to ask — but in the process it had opened up about fifty more! What bargain? If only I could ask her more about it — but how could I, without making her suspicious?

“Yes, I suppose I see what you’re saying,” I said eventually. “And of course, I feel that way too, quite often.” I really couldn’t think of anything more convincing to say. But I was intrigued. Fairies and humans had once been friends? If it had been that way in the past, maybe sometime in the future it could be like that again. Perhaps one day, fairies wouldn’t get into enormous trouble just for trying to help a human out.

The last thought brought me back down to my current reality.

As if on cue, the supervisor appeared at the end of the corridor — and she was heading our way.

“Now then, my little gem,” she said, straightening her already impeccable suit and flicking a nonexistent bit of fluff from her shoulder. I looked around to see who she was calling a gem. A second later, she was at my desk. “You’re to come with me,” she said — to me! “You’re wanted at High Command.”

I got up from my desk and followed her, trying to ignore the looks I got from the other fairies all the way down the aisle, and trying to stop my legs from giving way beneath me. We reached the wall, and the supervisor nodded briefly at it. The wall shimmered and wobbled in front of me. “Good luck,” she said. And with that, she nudged me toward the wall.

Closing my eyes, I took a couple of steps, hoping I wasn’t about to walk into a wall in front of the whole office. But I didn’t. The wall dissolved around me, zipping shut the second I’d walked through it. I turned around. FGRaincloud74921 was gone. The office was gone. I was in a white, bare corridor. At the end of it, a door stood open. I walked toward it. Inside, two stars twinkled and shone so brightly, I had to shield my eyes.

Then one of them spoke!

“Don’t be shy,” it said. “Come in. Come a bit closer.”

I walked toward the star. The door closed behind me as a chair appeared out of nowhere.

“Sit,” the other one said.

I sat down in the chair.

“Now then,” said the first star, and while I was trying furiously to stop myself from contemplating how they were going to “dispose” of me, the star added, “We’ve got a job for you.”

“So, let me just make sure I’ve got this right,” I said. The stars had explained what my job was — and I didn’t have a clue how to respond. “Because of my good work for ALD in catching an errant fairy, I am going to be rewarded and promoted?”

“Correct,” said the first star with a slight twinkle.

“But before that, you want me to go down to Earth, collect the fairy, and bring her back to you so she can be punished accordingly.”

The second star twinkled even more strongly. “Also correct.”

I paused before saying anything else. They wanted me to personally go down to Earth and collect Daisy so she could face the worst punishment of her life. And if I didn’t want to? I had the feeling this wasn’t a polite request — and I knew from Daisy that you don’t turn down orders from ATC High Command.

“OK, then,” I said. The only other problem was the small matter of my not having any idea how to get down to Earth. If I knew that, we wouldn’t have been in this mess in the first place.

“We will transport you to the portal,” one of the stars went on as if it had read my thoughts. “From there, we want you to take this for FG32561 to get back here.”

At that moment, something appeared out of nowhere and floated over toward me. It landed on my knee.

“A box?” I asked.

“Open it.”

I lifted the lid, and a waft of multicolored smoke billowed out like a silk scarf on a breeze. As the colors floated around the box, a piece of parchment floated out and mingled in among the colors. I looked up at the stars.

“Read it.”

I snatched the piece of parchment and read aloud.

“Go to the highest ring of stones,
And read aloud this rhyme.
Call out the numbers that you see,
And travel just one time.”

I looked inside the box. There was nothing else. No numbers.

“Where are the —” I began.

“The numbers will appear when you are at the portal. Recite the poem, and they will flow out with the colors. When FG32561 says them out loud, she can cross over. She is to use this to come back to ATC. We will take it from there.”

“Right,” I said, placing the parchment back inside the box. The colors instantly floated back inside, and I closed the lid. “Right,” I said again, not really knowing what else to say.

The stars said nothing more. Their light was fading. The interview was over.

I backed toward the door. “OK, well, thank you,” I said, opening the door and letting myself out.

As soon as I was through the door, it disappeared and I was alone in the vast white emptiness of ATC High Command. My knees gave way as I thought about what I had to do. I could hardly think of a worse punishment. Find my best friend — and bring her in to be punished.

I didn’t have long to think about it. Within moments of my leaving the room, two figures approached me — out of nowhere, like everything else around here. As they came toward me, I saw that they were young men, boys, not much older than me. It hadn’t occurred to me that fairy godmothers could be male. I guess they’d be fairy godfathers or godbrothers or something.

Smiling, they approached me and both shook my hand. “Well done,” one of them said as we walked along the corridor together. “Very impressive work you did there. We do like to see them caught like that, especially when they think they’re being so clever.”

“Mm,” I said.

“Makes our day, that does,” the other one said. “It’s generally a bit dull at RPD. Not usually all that much happening.”

“RPD?” I said, hoping it wasn’t something
else
that I should have known.

“Retrieval and Punishment Department,” the first one said lightly.

“Typical,” the other one said with a wink. “No one’s ever heard of us!” Then he led us around a corner to a new corridor. “Shortcut,” he explained, and I followed in silence.

As we walked, I realized I’d been here already. It was the same corridor Daisy and I had come through when we’d arrived at ATC. Or a similar one, anyway. Bright white, spotless, and completely empty, except for us. It seemed to go on forever.

After we’d been walking for a while, the boys came to an abrupt halt. “Well, this is our stop,” one of them said. “Do you want us to wait here for you, in case she gives you any trouble?”

“No, I’ll be fine,” I said, trying to smile reassuringly at them. The last thing I wanted was to be escorted straight back to those stars with Daisy. I’m not sure what they had in mind if Daisy caused “trouble,” but I didn’t want to find out.

“You’ve got the code?” the other boy asked.

I patted the box under my arm.

“We’ll leave you to it, then,” he said. “Good luck.”

“Thank you,” I said with what I hoped was an efficient nod. I waved awkwardly at them. “See you later.”

They waved back. Then in unison, they turned around, walked a few paces — and disappeared.