“Oh, gross,” said Call. “I’m going to puke.”
Tamara had to slap a hand over her mouth to smother her laughter. “It’s a date,” she said when she’d stopped wheezing. “On dates, people are supposed to have fun.”
“Or pretend to,” Aaron said, narrowing his eyes at Celia. He really seemed to think she might be guilty.
“How is staring at each other fun?” Call demanded.
“Okay,” Tamara said, giving both boys an unfathomable look. “If you two jokers were taking somebody out, what would you do?”
Call watched Celia’s cheeks go pink as Jasper leaned in and said something to her. It was weird to watch. For one thing, it was bizarre to see Jasper be nice to someone. Usually, even when he was in his not-a-total-jerk guise, he had an edge to the stuff he said. But with Celia, he seemed like he was acting like a normal person.
And she seemed into him.
Which was totally unfair, since the only reason that Jasper even asked her out was to cover up what they’d really been doing in the library.
Come to think of it, Celia had always said that Call was overreacting when he talked about what a jerk Jasper was. Maybe she’d liked Jasper! Maybe she’d only been pretending to like Call to get closer to Jasper.
“I don’t know,” Aaron said. “Whatever she wanted to do.”
Call had forgotten the question that Aaron was answering. For a moment, Call kind of hoped Celia was the spy after all. It would serve Jasper right if she were.
Tamara poked Call in the shoulder. “Wow. You must really like her.”
“What? N-no!” he sputtered. “I was just lost in thought! About how Jasper is a total sucker.”
Aaron nodded sagely. Jasper and Celia were dipping their fingers at the same time and blowing, causing illusions of butterflies and birds to fly up in the air. Both of them started to laugh, just before one of Jasper’s birds swooped down to eat one of Celia’s butterflies.
That was more like it! Call grinned. He wondered what would happen if he conjured the illusion of a cat to chase all the birds.
“You should just ask her out if you like her that much,” Tamara said slowly, thinking through her words carefully. “I mean, I think she’d forgive you if you explained.”
“Explained what?” Aaron asked.
Call overheard Jasper start to complain to Celia about Fuzzball, Gwenda’s ferret. And even though Celia had told Call all about Jasper’s allergic reaction to Fuzzball last year, so Jasper had to know she knew, Celia still totally pretended this was new information. Jasper ate it up. He went on and on about the dumb ferret and how much he didn’t like it and she acted like she was fascinated.
Call wanted to scream.
“Ooh, look,” Celia said when Jasper had finally exhausted the ferret topic. “Alex Strike is starting up a movie. Do you want to go watch?”
Alex was an air mage, and one of the ways he deployed his talent was to shift and shape colored air against the wall of the Gallery cave, creating the illusion of popular movies. Sometimes he changed the endings to amuse himself. Call had a clear memory of an Ewok and droid and ghost Darth Vader conga line in Alex’s version of Return of the Jedi.
Jasper took Celia’s hand and helped her off the couch. Together they went over to the west side of the room, where rows of low stools had been set up. They found two seats together just as the light in that part of the cave dimmed and the first scenes of a movie started to play against the wall.
“Here we go,” Aaron whispered. “She’s going to take advantage of the dark to knock him unconscious.”
Call suddenly felt tired of the whole thing. “No, she’s not,” he said. “I’ve been alone with her dozens of times. If she’d wanted to hurt me, she could have. We should just give up on this. The only danger on this date is Jasper boring Celia to death.”
“Or us being bored to death,” muttered Tamara. “Call’s right, Aaron. Jasper promised to grill her about Call, but I think we can safely say that he’s forgotten all about that.”
Shapes moved against the wall, casting strange patterns of light. Call could see Alex sitting in the back, moving his hands slightly to make the images dance. From what Call could tell, the movie was a combination of Toy Story and Jurassic Park, with toys being chased across the screen by velociraptors.
“This is a dead end,” Call said. “But I have an idea of what we could do tonight.”
That made Aaron look over in surprise. “What?”
“If someone went down into the elemental prison and freed Skelmis, then there are at least some witnesses. There have to be.”
“The other elementals,” Tamara said, realizing what he meant instantly. “They’re imprisoned down there. They would have seen what happened.”
“But wouldn’t the Assembly already have asked them?” said Aaron.
“Not necessarily,” said Call. “Most people are pretty afraid of elementals. They don’t think of them as creatures you can talk to. And they’re hard to fight off. But with two Makaris … and an elemental in a cage …”
“It’s a crazy plan,” said Tamara, but her brown eyes were alight.
“Are you saying you don’t want to do it?” said Call.
“No,” said Tamara. “I’m just saying it’s a crazy plan. How would we get down there?”
“Anastasia practically gave us the whole rundown on how to do it during the meeting,” said Call. “She said she keeps a key in her room, and one around her neck. All we have to do is get into her room when we know she isn’t there and grab the key.”
“And the guards?” said Aaron. “What about the guards at the door?”
“We’ll worry about that when we get there,” Call said. “The spy got in. There must be a way. And if we don’t do it tonight, she’s going to change all her locks. We won’t have this chance again.”
Aaron gave Celia one last suspicious look and nodded his head. Together, they crept out into the hallway. As they started toward the area where the Masters’ rooms were, Call realized there were three complications to his plan. One, he wasn’t sure which room belonged to Anastasia Tarquin. Two, he didn’t have a way in. And three, once they were inside, they were going to have to guess her password.