“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.”
“Oh, we have the list,” Antigone said.
The old woman laughed. “Throw it away. You two may be the most unpopular Acolytes Ashtown has ever seen. Nobody wants to share a room with you, let alone share a lesson. And the club masters with their little white uniforms wouldn’t go near you for a triple fee.”
She glanced back at Cyrus and snorted around a half smile. “You surely won’t be getting any language help from the monks. But I’ve done my best and you should be grateful. Hop to, hop to! I’m not waiting.”
She hurried back through the door. Tucking balls of Quick Water into their pockets, Cyrus and Antigone jogged after her.
“Now,” she said when they’d reached the main hallway, “you’re on the list as having paid all dues — though I’m not sure how — so we’ll start with proper clothes. Keep up, keep up. I’ll explain things on the way.”
Mrs. Eldridge led them out the main doors and into the muggy summer morning. Dennis Gilly, sweating under his bowler hat, grinned at them as they passed. The far side of the lawn was busy with white-uniformed grapplers taking turns throwing and bouncing each other in the grass. On the gravel path directly at the bottom of the stairs, two boys were each working on a single bicycle with its own large umbrella propeller.
But Cyrus’s eyes were in the air.
He stopped and Antigone stopped with him. No more than fifty feet off the ground, six small, football-shaped hot-air balloons were engaged in a battle. Three of the balloons were white and three were red, but each was painted with a different symbol — Cyrus saw the ship, the snake, and something that looked like a bear.
The baskets were tiny, barely big enough for one person but each holding two. On the back of each basket there was a large fan, like something off a swamp boat. Mounted on the front, there was a small cannon.
From one of the baskets, two people had fallen and were dangling at the end of long ropes tied around their waists. A third person, a girl, had taken over their balloon. She was running the fan and the cannon by herself.
Mrs. Eldridge stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked back up at Cyrus and Antigone. She clicked her tongue and snapped her fingers. Cyrus didn’t hear. The balloons were circling each other, ramming each other, and firing brown lumps at each other that tumbled down to the ground.
One of the lumps bounced off a balloon and spun through the air toward Cyrus, thumping onto the stairs not six feet from where they were standing. It looked like a compressed loaf of bread.
“What are they doing?” Antigone asked.
“Nothing productive,” Mrs. Eldridge said. “It’s quite childish, though Journeymen have been doing it as long as I can remember. It’s a game of conquest. Board an opponent’s balloon and hurl him from the basket. They’re only supposed to fire stale bread at each other, though Sterling’s kitchen tends to provide it fresh. Now come on, and watch your heads.”
Cyrus and Antigone stumbled down the stairs. While they watched, two balloons collided. Bread and shouted threats were exchanged from point-blank range, and then the boarding struggle began, with fan-driven baskets spinning.
Antigone yelped as two bodies fell, bounced, and dangled — one from each balloon. The war above them raged on.
Cyrus and Antigone reached Mrs. Eldridge.
“No Keeper would agree to give you flight lessons,” she said. “But there aren’t many I would trust in a 1914 canvas and wood plane anyhow. Diana Boone has agreed to teach you both, but Rupe had her flying all night and she’s sleeping at the moment. Your first lesson will have to wait.”
Cyrus could feel Antigone looking at him. He bit his lip and fought back a smile. He was going to fly. The path began to circle the broad lawn.
“As for weaponry,” Mrs. Eldridge said, “well, that was worse. The best I could do was Gunner for your shooting, and he’s an Order washout — hardly ideal. But he can shoot, and no one will argue with that. Rupert Greeves will handle your fencing himself. He’s a master’s master, but good luck with scheduling, especially with all the trouble you’ve brought to his life. James Axelrotter, ‘Jax’ whenever he’s actually seen, might help you with zoology, though those requirements are ludicrous and infeasible — I intend to speak with Mr. Rhodes about it.”