Wondrous Things

The city is bustling before dawn even breaks. The air is thick with the smell of fresh rain, yet cool enough to chill. As the sun rises, its glow bathes glass, puddles, and brick in gold. The streets are crammed with people, every one of them in a hurry. The grumble of traffic rises over the sound of peddlers, but never enough to drown them out.

To most, this is an average setting. To others, it’s cover. 

Do you see them? There. By the grocer’s. Two children, no older than ten, crouched beside crates of produce and fresh bread displayed to passersby. Two younglings—used to being ignored—at least until they do something wrong. Like, for example, attempting to nick something for breakfast. 

The little girl keeps a sharp watch while the little boy reaches as far as he dares. Luck is with him on the first grab. He snatches his arm back to himself and hands a brown-spotted apple to the little girl. She smiles and touches his cheek in thanks. 

He reaches out a second time, thin fingers scraping wood, his heart rabbiting behind his tiny lungs. He reaches. And reaches—and something cracks against his hand with enough force to split skin. The little boy howls and jerks back into the little girl, who clutches at his ratty shirt with wide eyes. 

A mean-faced man with a scraggly mustache appears in front of them. “A coupla’ rats, eh?” he growls with a sneer. “I’ll teach ya not to steal from me!” He wraps his massive hand around the little boy’s arm and yanks him to his feet. The little girl scrambles after him, reaching for her friend, big blue eyes brimming with tears. She tries to yell at the man to let the little boy go, but all that comes out is a desperate gasp. 

He snarls something ugly at her and shoves her away. The little boy is crying now, still stuck in the man’s grasp. The little girl knows she has to do something or the little boy will be taken away. She can’t bear to lose the only friend she has out here, or worse, be made to return home to her father. 

The thought shakes her. She scans around for something to distract the grocer. 

“You think you can just steal from me, eh?” the man snarls at the little boy’s face, shaking him. “Dirty little—ow!” 

The little girl has found a nice, palm-sized chunk of asphalt, and throws it as hard as she can at the man. He drops the little boy out of sheer surprise, who promptly stomped on his foot. 

“C’mon!” the little boy cries as the man staggers back, spewing curses. The little girl springs after him, and the two make a mad dash down the street. The grocer shoves through the throngs of people littering the street yelling for aid as the children wove through the grownup’s legs, taking the twists and turns they’d memorized before they could even talk. 

The little boy takes the little girl’s hand so they won’t lose each other in the crowds.They need somewhere to hide. They can’t run forever—it’d been days since either of them had anything to eat, and the grocery man was much larger than both of them. It won’t take long for him to catch up, once he has a little advantage, and they are already losing ground. 

The little girl tugs sharply on the little boy’s hand. There, a little ways up, an alley. They can make a break through there and lose the grocer. The children exchange only a glance before they sprint with the last of their energy to the mouth of the alley, and don't stop until they collapse far enough away from the street that they can’t be seen. 

The little boy pulls the little girl behind an old dumpster and peeks around the edge of it. There is no sign of the grocer. The little girl shivers against the brick wall, her eyes blown wide, her chest rising and falling so rapidly the little boy was afraid she would pass out. He knelt in front of her. 

“You gotta be calm,” the little boy whispers, clutching her hand again. “Mistah Jay’s gone. Gotta be calm now.” 

The little girl nods and takes deep breath after deep breath until she stops shaking. The little boy doesn’t let go of her hand until she is able to stand again. 

The little girl makes a what now? gesture. The little boy shrugs his knobby shoulders. 

“Dunno,” he says, and turns in a circle, drinking in their new surroundings. “Don’t think we been down here before. I think we’re lost.” He looks at the little girl again. “What d’you think we should do?” 

The little girl grins, showing off crooked teeth. She makes a new gesture, one the little boy knew meant explore! which makes him break into a smile. 

#

When the two of them first found each other, all that time ago, they decided that they were going to memorize as much of the city as they could. Because if they knew the city better than the adults did, then no one could catch them or hurt them or take them away. They staked out a little area to call theirs, a couple of blocks of condemned buildings and run-down shops, that became more home to them than their pasts were. 

But because they were young, and bored, and grownups can’t understand that when you have nothing sometimes thievery is the only option—the younglings were forced to expand their bounds. Every day they would reach a little further, grow a little braver.

So now as the children race through new territory, a feeling like sunlight arcs under their skins, the fear from that morning fading away like fog at dawn. 

They pass a bookshop, a bar, and a bakery—they immediately detour to raid the bakery’s garbage, coming up triumphantly with a burnt loaf of bread. They slow just enough to eat as they explore, tearing the bread into chunks and stuffing them into their mouths. 

They’re rounding the corner when the little boy stops in his tracks. The little girl turns to him, finds him staring fixedly across the street, where an odd alley between two towering complexes gapes. It’s the little girl’s turn to fall still. Something in them both whispers to investigate, and something else warns them to turn around. 

The little boy turns back. The little girl steps forward. 

They stare at each other. 

She points silently at the gap. He shakes his head. “It feels bad,” the little boy says. But the little girl just points, as resolute as the little boy’s ever seen her. When he hesitates again, she softens, reaching out to touch his face like she had when she thanked him for the apple. She stares deep into his eyes and presses their foreheads together, a gesture the little boy knows to mean here. Safe. 

She’s telling him there’s nothing to fear if they’re side by side. This time when the little girl steps forward, the little boy goes with her. 

The gap turns out to be a forgotten side street that the city must’ve abandoned years ago. All of the storefronts they pass are boarded up, or shattered, or streaked with burn marks or patches of mold. Not a sound emerges from the area—even the traffic from the street over is weirdly muffled. The feeling in their guts tugs them farther, until they reach their destination. 

In the center of the collection of broken buildings rises a colossus of faded red and blue and yellow, patterned with peeling stars and swirls. It’s not until they look up that they realize what it is: the entire entrance of the building is modeled after a nutcracker soldier. Its glass doors are blown inwards. A hanging sign sticks out of the shaft of his halberd, but the name had long since been worn away. It’s…a toy shop? 

The children exchange twin looks of excitement, the little girl makes the explore! gesture again, and together they dash inside. 

It’s dark inside, once they lose sight of the doors. Their eyes adjust quickly enough, though, and it isn’t long before they’re tearing through the gutted shop with as much enthusiasm as they had running through the city. 

The little girl finds enormous barrels of sticky green goop. She doesn’t hesitate to scoop a handful, aim, and launch it at the little boy where it lands with a splat! and a shriek of delight. The little boy laughs and retaliates by chasing her with a foam dart gun. They wade through mountains of stuffed animals, heaps of books and figurines, and…. The little girl discovers a winding staircase to an entire second floor dedicated solely to gleaming robotic creatures and sets to winding them all up at once. They descend in a swarm to the bottom floor, forcing the little boy to take cover beneath overturned shelves. 

Something glimmers in the corner of the little boy’s eye, tucked further away in the dark. He glances this way and that, but the little girl hasn’t returned from the second floor, and there is no one else in the shop. He reaches to investigate. Hidden beneath a collection of things lies what caught his eye: a thin wand, about the length of the little boy’s arm, made of stiff plastic and filled with swirling, glowy glitter. The little boy holds it up with a small laugh of wonder and gives it a shake. 

He’s so distracted by his discovery that he doesn’t notice the little girl behind him until she pokes him in the back, making him jump almost out of his skin. The little girl just giggles, gives a twirl when she has his full attention. She had found a tin knight’s helm and a wooden sword. She brandishes the sword at the little boy with a sharp smile. 

The little boy blinks. Oh. He holds out the wand, mimicking her stance. 

“Think you can beat me, soldier? Huh?” the little boy challenges, his voice high with glee. “Well I’m the best wizard in the whole world! Nothin’ beats my…uh…water blast!” He points the wand at the little girl—and a wave of glowing blue water crashes into being, throwing the little girl across the room. The little boy gapes as the water dissipates into nothing.

Wait. Where’s…? 

The little girl sits up, spitting water with a hacking cough. The little boy rushes to her side. She’s soaking wet. 

“‘M sorry, ‘m sorry!” the little boy gasps, helping her to her feet. “Are you okay?” 

The little girl pats his hand gently. I’m fine. The little boy sighs. She taps him, more insistently, pointing at the wand. Her eyes widen, but not in fear, rather in curiosity.

“I dunno,” the little boy admits, “I jus’ said what I wanted to do, an’ it jus’ did it.”  His head snaps up, locking eyes with the little girl. “It did what I said to! It’s magic!” The little girl flutters her hands and beams, and he beams back. A familiar feeling curls in his stomach, the same one that led him and the little girl here. It tells him to do it again, to make something else. What harm could it do? 

Another feeling, the one that told him to turn around, warns him to leave, to forget the wand. But…he trusted the little girl before, when she kept going. And that led him to this magic wand! Surely experimenting a little wouldn’t hurt. So the little boy ignores the bad feeling and focuses back on the wonder that is this little magic wand. 

“What should we make next?” the little boy asks. The little girl thinks for a second, looking around the floor for inspiration. Then she brightens and crouches, scooping a fuzzy stuffed green dragon from the ground. She holds it up like a trophy. 

“You sure?” the little boy asks, because he at least understands that if the water was real, so too would be the dragon. The little girl nods. She points at the stuffed animal, then at herself, and the little boy understands. “Oh! You wanna play soldier n’ dragon.” The little girl nods again. The boy shrugs and points the wand at the stuffed animal. “Dragon!” 

The stuffed animal shudders and the little girl drops it. She backs into the little boy as the dragon grows, its furry hide splitting open to reveal gleaming scales and toxic yellow eyes. Smoke and sparks drip like ooze from razor-sharp fangs. It zeroes in on the younglings as its body finishes the transformation, and a bone-shattering howl is ripped from its terrible maw. 

The little boy screams, “RUN!” He grabs the little girl and makes a break for the front door, but a whiplike tail swipes the ground from under them and they collapse. The little girl scrabbles away, shoving the little boy to get him to move when the dragon thunders forward. It spreads its wings, knocking more out of place as it tramples everything in its path. The children are small enough to dodge it, and the little girl drags the little boy up the staircase to the second floor. The dragon whirls, and a blast of white-hot fire destroys the staircase just as they make it to the top.

There’s nowhere to hide up there. The entire second floor is a perfect circle, with a single arched window facing outside. The children can hear the dragon rampaging below. Black smoke is starting to drift upwards. If they don’t leave this place soon, they will die. 

The wand, the little boy thinks suddenly. 

“We hafta get rid o’ the dragon,” the little boy says. “Can you distract it? Lead it outside?” The little girl nods, lips pressed in a thin line. The little boy leans forward like she had, outside on the street, before they’d gotten into this mess. He presses their foreheads together, brown eyes locked on blue. Here. Safe. The little girl gently knocks her forehead against his to return the gesture. Then she stands, adjusts her helmet, and approaches the edge of what used to be the stairs. With a final glance over her shoulder, the little girl drops silently to the first floor. 

The little boy’s heart lurches into his throat and he leans over the edge, frantically scanning for the little girl, but there’s no sign of her. The dragon is still throwing a fit below. He doesn’t have time for worry. 

Then he hears a tremendous crash and an answering roar, and he knows that the dragon is outside. 

The little boy turns and runs, shattering the window and falling to the street below. He manages to land directly on the dragon’s broad scaly back. Its scales cut into his hands and legs as he tries to hold on, but the dragon bucks and he goes flying, hitting the street with a resounding crack.

Suddenly the little girl reappears at his side, pulling him upright as he tries to remember how to breathe. The dragon stands before them in all its fiery glory, steam rising from its gleaming body, hate in its yellow eyes. Black tongue swiping over green lips. 

Behind it, the toy shop is in flames—but only the toy shop. The fire doesn’t leap for the buildings next to it. 

It’s all magic, the little boy thinks feverishly. “It’s all magic—” he whispers. The dragon rears back, light glowing deep within its throat as it prepares another blast. He rolls onto his knees and raises the wand…but the wand isn’t there. The little boy searches desperately for it, heart kicking in his chest, no, no, no— 

LEAVE! The little girl stands between him and the dragon, the wand tight in her grip, her mouth gritted in a snarl—though not a single sound escapes it. The command was pure thought. 

The word—action?—seems to rend the air between the children and the creature, sending a concussive shockwave into the dragon and behind it to the toy shop. It crumbles inward from the force of the blast, eerie fire still eating away at the remains. The dragon shudders like it did the first time, giving an unholy cry as its body folds in on itself. In a matter of seconds a charred stuffed animal is lying in the street. The little girl walks calmly over to it and tosses it into the fire. The wand, winking in the sunlight, hangs from her fingers. She tosses it in, too. 

The little boy stands on shaking legs and joins her. Everything flickers blue, only for a moment, and the fire dies like it never existed. She tugs at the hem of his shirt, regarding him with exhaustion in her eyes. 

The children link hands, put their backs to the ruins, and hobble out of the mysterious side street as one. Because of this, they don’t see the mouth of it ripple and fade away, like it had never been there in the first place.