Magic Mansion by Jordan Price (best fiction books to read .txt) 📕

alone making something that could open and shut, and slide around.

“How deep?” Bev asked.

“Deep,” Ricardo said…although representing three-dimension depth on a 2-D sheet of paper was beyond him. “So there’s room for the blades.”

“And how tall?”

The Gold Team members all looked at each other.

“It matters,” Bev said, “because if we build the box for Ricardo, who’s maybe what, five-ten and a half? Then it won’t work for Faye, who’s five-two. Her head won’t reach the top cutout.”

Ricardo was actually five-ten and a quarter…though with the product currently shaping his coiffed hair courtesy of Eliza Watt, he probably was closer to Bev’s guess. Which she’d made without even looking at him. While he was sitting down.

“We’ve been so busy worrying about building the box,” Ricardo said, “that we never asked who’d be inside it.”

Faye clucked her tongue. “That’s probably exactly what they were hoping for.”

“I’ll go ask,” Sue said. As soon as she climbed over everyone’s knees to get to the door, Bev’s pencil was flying across her paper.

Ricardo couldn’t have said how long Sue was gone. He was too busy watching the cabinet take shape on Bev’s sketchpad. She worked quickly and decisively, and the drawing took form so fast that it seemed like it had been filmed with a time-lapse camera, and in such perfect perspective it looked as if it could leap right off the page. Sue returned at some point during the rendering, but everyone was so mesmerized by the strokes of Bev’s pencil that no one even bothered to look up, let alone ask her what she’d learned, until finally Bev drew a set of casters on the bottom of the cabinet and finished the the final wheel with a dot in the center.

Everyone sat back in a daze. Even the cameraman.

“Wow,” Sue said reverently.

“I’ll still need to add the dimensions,” Bev said. “Assuming they told you who needed to fit inside the box.”

Sue shook her head no.

Bev scanned her teammates and said, “Fine. Then we build it for the shortest player,” she glanced at Faye, “and the fattest one.” She indicated her own thick middle. “Assuming Ricardo can scrunch himself down into it if he needs to.”

“Sure.”

Bev’s pencil hit the paper again, and a series of numbers, lines and arrows cascaded from it as quickly as if she was just doodling nonsense loops.

“You need to figure in the thickness of the plywood,” Faye said.

It seemed to Ricardo a bit like informing a duck that water was wet, but Bev just said, “Three-eighths inch,” as she continued to jot down her dizzying spill of figures. Ricardo considered offering to go and check—Bev had only seen the stack from across the room—then again, he tended to get the eighths and sixteenths on a ruler all turned around, so it was just as likely he’d screw it all up by reporting back with the wrong measurement.

When Bev was finished, she scowled at the drawing for a moment, then said, “The optical illusion won’t be nearly as good as it would be in a taller, thinner box. But we don’t even know if the visual effect is what we’re competing for, do we? It could be another timed competition. Or it could be that we don’t even perform with the darn thing at all. They might trample them with a team of elephants to see which one’s the first to break. We just don’t know.”

“You’re right,” Faye said, “we don’t.” Why was she being such a Debbie Downer? Most likely, she saw Bev as nothing more than a dowdy, middle-aged woman, and not a “real” magician. She took the sketch from Bev and looked it over critically, top to bottom and side to side. And then, as Ricardo steeled himself to leap to Bev’s defense, she added, “But we can’t prepare for everything. They might have us perform. And if they do, we’ll be damn well ready.”

___

When John rounded the top of the stairwell that led to the dormitory, voices carried into the hallway through the closed bedroom doors. Not just any voices. Red Team voices. Fabian and Kevin.

“Great,” Jia told John, “I’ve got a headache already. Do you care if I just hide in my room?”

Personally, he didn’t. And, in fact, he wanted to go with her…though that might be construed as an overture toward a fictitious on-screen romance he had no desire to pursue. “You’d better join us. There’ll be a camera there, after all. You don’t want to look like you’re not contributing.”

“Please. Like they’d take woodworking advice from the only woman on the team, anyway.”

“Even so, it would be in your best interest to stay. In case things don’t go well.”

Jia turned and looked up at John, cocking one eyebrow quizzically.

He elaborated, but only vaguely. “In case we happen to need a three to one vote. For any reason.”

“Vote?” she said as she turned the doorknob, “Ha. Where’d you get the idea that the Red Team was a democracy?” John shrugged. “Too bad you don’t want to be my fake boyfriend,” she tossed over her shoulder. “I could do with having some of your optimism rub off on me.”

With that, she opened the door, and Fabian’s raised voice bellowed out. “You don’t know that.”

“Know what?” John said.

Fabian and Kevin had converted the Red Team men’s dorm into a war room. Beds and luggage were piled against the walls. Four nightstands pushed together formed a large table in the center, the surface of which was covered with hastily-scrawled diagrams. Fabian and Kevin stood on opposite sides of the table, both of them palms-down, leaning in menacingly, hovering over their plans. The cameraman stood between them at the far wall, focusing momentarily on the doorway with John and Jia framed in it, and then widening its angle again to monitor Kevin and Fabian.

John stepped around Jia and considered repeating himself—drawn up to his full height, and twice as loud—but he opted to reserve the machismo in case he needed to pull it out later on in the