nodded. She thought of the lives she had brightened this morning. The people she and her family had helped. But how long would they be able to keep it up? The Blisses had provided enough magic that morning to last the town a couple of days, but they couldn’t really go on baking and delivering everything to people’s homes without being paid. They weren’t broke, not yet, but they couldn’t support the whole town.
“A life without the occasional slice of cake is … it’s an empty life,” he continued, inching closer. “Look out there,” he said, gesturing again at Calamity Falls. “Emptiness. That’s what’s going to become of all those lives.”
Gus reached a paw out of the backpack and swatted Rose’s ear. “I don’t like this!” he whispered.
The strange behemoth of a man bent over so they were eye to eye. “Would you … I mean, do you want to help those people?”
“Of course!” Rose said. She thought of the wish she’d made. She didn’t really believe what the cat had told her (did she?). A wish couldn’t change the world (could it?). But even so, she would take it back if she could. “It’s what I want most in the world.”
“Oh good!” said the man. “In that case …”
He snapped his fingers.
Before Rose could take a deep breath to scream, darkness closed over her and Gus as they were enveloped in a giant empty flour sack.
THE TWO HOURS that Rose spent trapped in the burlap sack with Gus were by far the worst of her life.
First of all, no one likes to be kidnapped by strangers and tossed into a bag. Questions such as Where are they taking me? and Will I ever return? naturally arise. Second, being trapped in a burlap sack inside a moving vehicle in summer feels essentially like being kept in an itchy oven. A bouncing, jouncing, moving oven. Third, the residual flour that dusted the walls of the bag mingled with her sweat to form a disgusting paste. She scrabbled at the neck of the sack with her nails, but it was firmly tied shut.
Then there was the matter of Gus. “I have claws,” he kept whispering to her. “Just remember that, Rose. They are weapons of mass destruction, these claws.”
Luckily, the man who had stuffed her in the sack seemed not to be able to hear the whispers of the Scottish Fold cat over the hum of the van and the honking of traffic. All Rose could do was keep her wits about her and, every so often, yell, “Where are we going? Let me out of here!”
But there was never any answer.
When the van finally came to a stop, a pair of sturdy arms lifted the sack containing Rose and Gus out of the van. She heard the opening of doors and felt a sudden rush of air-conditioning.
Then the arms set her down in a chair, and the burlap sack was pulled away.
Rose was instantly blinded by fluorescent lights.
She found herself sitting on a rusted metal chair in the centre of a room made of grey concrete. Feeble light peeked through tiny windows near the ceiling. At one end of the room was a grey metal desk covered in manila file folders. The wall behind the desk was lined with filing cabinets of rusted grey metal. The rows of rectangular fluorescent lights that hung from the ceiling sputtered and hummed in the awful way that fluorescent lights do, as if they were actually prisons for thousands of radioactive fireflies.
The room smelled like metal and disinfectant, and Rose suddenly felt a wave of longing for the scents of home: butter and chocolate and cakes just pulled from the oven.
“I don’t like this place,” Gus whispered, digging flour out of the spaces beneath his crumpled ears with his paws. “It looks like an office from a movie about … how terrible offices are.”
She petted the cat on the head. “It’s OK. You’ve got those claws, remember?”
“Indeed,” the cat purred.
Rose shook out her hair. She dusted flour off her red T-shirt and her eyelids and from behind her ears and even flicked some out of her armpits.
“Where am I?” she yelled.
When no one answered, Rose spun around and saw two men standing by a grimy, empty water cooler in the opposite corner of the room. One of them was the hulking, squinty gentleman in the maroon velour track suit who had approached her on top of Sparrow Hill, and the other was a tall bespectacled man. He had a tiny face and a bulbous white head that was entirely hairless. He looked like an illustration of an alien wearing a suit.
“Hello?” she hollered again. “Where am I?”
Neither of the men so much as turned to acknowledge her – they kept chatting at the water cooler, sipping from little paper cones.
“What is this?” said the bald man, gesturing at Rose, so that water splashed from his little paper cone onto the floor. “You were supposed to get the BOOK.”
“It was a no-go on the book, boss,” the man wearing the track suit answered. “The bakery is closed. I couldn’t get in there. So I brought the cook instead.”
Rose gasped. These two had been after the Bliss Family Cookery Booke – but what could they possibly want with it? It was bad enough when Aunt Lily had gotten her hands on the Booke, but when she’d given it back, Rose had thought that she – and her family – were safe.
The wiry bald man refilled his cone of water. “No, not the cook, the book. What we need is the book.”
The bulky man let out a long huff. “But, sir, the cook is the next best thing to the book. She won that French baking contest. She can do it.”
The bald man goggled his eyes at Rose. “But she’s so young!” he said in a sharp, quiet voice. “So scrawny! And she has a cat in her backpack, with broken ears!”
“I can hear you, you know,” Rose fumed. “I’m right here. And if you don’t tell me where I am, I will set my cat on you.”
Gus jumped out of the backpack and sat back on his hind legs, hissing and swiping, with his front legs extended and his claws bared. He looked like a praying mantis.
“And his ears are not malformed,” Rose added. “They are a distinctive feature of the breed.”
“Don’t worry, little lady,” said the thin man. “We’ll explain everything, just calm that old cat down.”
Rose gave Gus a stern look. He shrugged and retracted his claws. “Good kitty,” she said, pulling Gus into her lap and petting him until he was purring. “There,” Rose said. “Now, I repeat: where am I?”
The two men inched along the perimeter of the room toward the desk, keeping as far away from Gus as they could.
The bald man sat in the chair behind the desk, while the man in the velour track suit settled in behind him, leaning against the row
