Is he nervous? Rose thought. I’m usually the nervous one. Aloud, she said, “I came because even though the bakery is closed, I wanted to bring you your favourite – Sticky Buns! So you’re not forlorn without them.”
Rose nearly kicked herself as the words left her mouth. Forlorn? Why did she say that? She sounded like a ninety-year-old granny. Devin probably thought she was a word-obsessed moron.
Devin opened the box and sank his teeth into one of the thick, pillowy buns. “Mmmmmmmmm!” he exclaimed. “My oh my, that is one gnarly bun.” The m’s and n’s came out crystal clear. “Weird! I can breathe again!” He smiled, and his eyes lost their sleepy look.
“Good weird or bad weird?” Rose teased.
“Good weird,” he replied, smiling.
Back outside, Gus whispered, “He’s not even that cute,” as Rose skipped toward her bike, her feet so light that she felt like she might be receiving assistance from unseen fairies.
“Says you.” Rose squealed, already replaying the moment in her mind like a beloved DVD.
“The basket of your bike is decidedly uncomfortable for travel,” Gus observed, squinting up at the empty wire basket. “And cold. The wind, you know.”
“Would you like to ride in my backpack?” Rose said.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
She knelt down and opened the flap, and Gus leaped inside. From the dark, she could hear him moving around and saying, “Much warmer! This is more like it!”
She reshouldered the pack and had very nearly reached her bike when a voice called out to her from the lookout fence at the top of the hill.
“Are you Rose Bliss?”
Rose turned and saw a hulking figure silhouetted against the afternoon sky. The only person she’d ever seen with such enormous shoulders was Chip – but this man sure didn’t sound like Chip. She moved closer.
“You’re Rose Bliss, aren’t you?” he repeated in a deep, gravelly voice.
The man had a nice-looking face – at least for someone almost as old as her dad – rugged, with a huge head, a square jaw, and narrow, beady eyes. He had thick black hair and wore a track suit made of fuzzy maroon velour. His fingers and the front of his track suit seemed to be covered with a light dusting of flour.
“I don’t like this,” Gus whispered. “What’s that on his fingers? What sort of grown man wears a maroon velour track suit?”
Rose’s parents had always told her not to talk to strangers, but ever since she’d won the Gala des Gâteaux Grands, everyone knew who she was. There was no real point in denying it. “Yes, I’m Rose Bliss.”
“I thought so.” The man gestured over the tranquil pastures of Calamity Falls. “You know what’s a travesty, Rose? The new bakery law.”
Rose softened a bit. “Yeah, it makes no sense.”
“Those people out there,” the man went on, sounding passionate, “they need cake and pie and cookies and doughnuts. Just a little sweet thing once in a while reminds a person of how sweet life is.” He rested his hand on his chest, like someone about to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Rose 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