Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) by Ysabeau S. Wilce Read Free Book Online Page A

and pushing.
The best place to be in a stampede,
said Nini Mo,
is not in a stampede.
But I was still stuck, pressed hard up against the stage. The crush was suffocating; I could barely breathe, and what air I was able to gasp was tainted with smoke and perfume. If I went down, I’d be trampled underfoot in no time, and there’d be nothing left of Flora but goo on the soles of a lot of supertrendy shoes.
    Then an iron grip grabbed my shoulders and hauled me up over the edge of the stage. I stumbled upright, wheezing. The Horses of Instruction’s banjo player had me by the arm and was now dragging me across the stage. Firemonkey and the cadaver had disappeared; the chubby drummer was still drumming, his head flinging back and forth like a pendulum, heedless of the pandemonium. The banjo player and I ran into the wings, past the amplification dæmon still caught in his protection circle. He snapped his crocodile-long jaws at us as we passed, but the charged circle held and his gnashing teeth snapped empty air.
    Backstage was a melee of frantic roadies and screaming groupies. The banjo player was taller than me and used that height and bulk to clear a path. Shoving people out of our way, we ran down a corridor, and then flung ourselves through a doorway. I fell against a row of costumes, coughing and wheezing, my lungs burning. A bright girdle of pain now encircled my waist where the tentacle had squeezed me. I coughed until it felt as though my lungs had been torn into fragments, but when I was done, despite the pain, I felt better. At least I could breathe again. The banjo player had slammed the door shut behind us and now leaned against it, regarding me.
    “You all right?”
    “Ayah. Thanks for grabbing me.”
    “My pleasure, Tinks.”
    The banjo player pulled off the wide-brimmed hat. And there was my sister Idden, grinning at me, looking exactly the same as the last time I had seen her. Except that now she was as bald as an egg.

Six
Surprise! Revolutionary Fervor. A Hasty Exit.
    I GAPED AT I DDEN like a greenhorn at her first sight of snow. Of all the questions that ran through my head—
What are you doing here? How did you get here? When did you learn to play the banjo?
—what came out of my mouth was, “What happened to your hair?” Idden has always looked a lot like Mamma: same blue eyes, same high cheekbones, same yellow hair. Even without hair, the resemblance was still strong.

    Idden laughed, her gold lip-plug (also new) winking in the sputtering light. “I got tired of washing it. Cool, eh? Give me a hug, tiny sis.”
    We squeezed each other so tightly that the buttons of Idden’s duster ground into me painfully. She smelled like cigarillo smoke and lemon verbena, and she felt thin and bony.
    I asked, “What are you doing here? I thought you were at Fort Jones.”
    “I was, baby, but obviously I’m not anymore.”
    “Are you on leave?”
    Idden laughed. “You could say that. Toothache-leave.”
    Toothache-leave—that’s Army slang for deserting. I yanked out of Idden’s embrace and stared at her. Idden had deserted? Never in the history of the Fyrdraaca family had anyone ever deserted! I could not imagine it. Deserted! And though enlisted soldiers desert sometimes, officers hardly ever. Enlisted soldiers have to serve out their term, but officers can resign at will and therefore have no reason to scarper. I had never heard of an officer deserting.
    Idden grinned. “Got nothing to say to that, Tinks?”
    “Mamma is going to kill you!” I said, ignoring the provocative use of my despised kiddie nickname.
    “She’ll have to catch me first,” Idden said, “and I’m guessing from your reaction that she doesn’t even know.”
    “We all thought you were at Fort Jones. Poppy just got a letter from you. But, Idden, how could you desert? What were you thinking? They’ll shoot you if they catch you.”
    “Let them try,” Idden answered. “You don’t look any taller, Tinks. I think you’ve