“Why are you called Pepper?” said What-the-Dickens, as they walked back up staircases into the tree trunk.

“You do ask a lot of questions,” she commented.

“Pepper,” he said. “Why Pepper?”

“I’m trying to tell you. Don’t be a thistlehead. To understand where the names come from, you gotta understand our culture. That little pantomime — who knows if any of it is true? But here we skibbereen are, side by side with a bigger, treacherous world. We keep to ourselves as much as we can. We don’t steal and we don’t borrow: we pay for what we take.”

“I’ll pay you if you tell me why you’re called Pepper.” He was teasing her. This was teasing. It made him feel gingery inside. Or maybe peppery.

How amazing to feel calm enough to feel peppery or gingery. Is this what it means to feel at home? he wondered.

Pepper snapped, “Stop grinning like a hoptoad with a big old fly rolled up in his tongue. I’m telling you. Now listen: Every colony of skibbereen gets its own system of naming. We borrow our names from the first set of words we see — but we change them. Undertree Common was founded, let’s see, two plus one plus one plus two more years ago. More or less. Give or take. That’s when the highway was going in, see, and this bit of woods was cut off from human foot traffic.”

“Why here?”

“Rural skibbereen often use highway cloverleafs for their settlements. Out of the way, conveniently cut off, yet centrally located — all at once. While barreling by at forty miles an hour, what human nudnik could spot the odd skibberee? In cities, I’m told, it’s a different story — colonies in water towers at the top of skyscrapers, in abandoned subway tunnels, etc. But I’ll never know much about that. However good I do, that’ll be way beyond me.”

“What are you, a historian? I’m asking about your name. Your name. Pepper, Pepper, Pepper.”

“Shut up. I’m telling you, okay? At the time that the settlers discovered this available tree trunk, they also saw in the underbrush a few discarded pages of newspaper advertising. Hawking the wares of some local pharmacy. So our colony harvests its names from the words we find in that bit of text. So our names are things like Intyfresh, Clea, Spirin, Olga, Flossie, Doctor Ill, Outhwash. But they derive from human words like mintyfresh, clean, aspirin, Colgate, floss, pill, and mouthwash. Me, I’m Pepper, derived from peppermint.”

He liked it. He liked her. “What about Silviana?”

“She broke the rule and named herself.”

Sort of like me, thought What-the-Dickens, but didn’t say so. “Are there many skibbereen in the world?”

“Whether humans know it or not, the truth is there are lots more than one Tooth Fairy. Dozens of tooth fairies work in any given sector during any given season of tooth decay. Most of them are nameless, harmless skibbereen stationed at their division headquarters. They do their jobs; they go home to sleep and dream of teeth; they get up; they brush and gargle; they go back to work.”

“It sounds wonderful to have a real mission in life. A home, a family, a vocation.”

“Wonderful might be the word some would use. But not everyone. Not me.”

He raised his eyebrow.

“Oh, what would you know? You’re a natural born idiot. Most of the skibbereen never get more than a few feet from their native colonies. In their whole lives, What-the-Dickens. The lowers are born together in a heap. In a heap they work like slaves together, and together in a heap they die. Only if you get to be an Agent of Change do you get out at all. The world is a honey of a place, full of intrigue and novelty. But skibbereen have to stay hidden if they want to stay alive. Being abroad without a license is a big no-no.”

He didn’t quite get the concept of being born in a heap, but he could hear the feeling in her voice. “So that’s why you want your license so much.”

“Now you’re catching on.” She lowered her voice. “Life here is just fine if you got no curiosity — and most of them don’t. But some of us do, and getting licensed to do active duty is a must. I’d die of boredom otherwise.”

“You’ve got a personal name — Pepper. Isn’t that a sign of something?”

“It’s provisional. I could easily lose my name and go back to being known by my job title.”

“I want to be an Agent of Change too,” said What-the-Dickens. “Will you teach me?”

“It’s not up to me,” said Pepper. “And anyway, ain’t you listening? We don’t work in pairs. Got it? If even one of us is ever accidentally seen by a human, we do our best to imitate a mutant wasp or a butterfly. Often we end up being sprayed with Raid or Flit or the like. We have to be free to live alone and die alone, to preserve the safety of the colony. We have to pretend we got no names, no lives, no futures. We have to be nobodies.”

What-the-Dickens said, “Well, I come with a lot of practice feeling like a nobody. I’ll fit right in.” He grinned at her, but in truth he was feeling very like somebody just at present.

“Don’t get too comfy here,” she warned him. “We’re not good with strangers. The truth is, we’re a funny little race of critter. We’re neither bird nor mammal. I doubt we have butterfly ancestors, but we’re not an idiotic little fairy tale come to life, either. We don’t know what we are. We only know what we do. That’s about all we can count on.”

“What did you mean when you said we were born in a heap?” Maybe he could learn something about his origins now.

They had reached a broad door that had DOCTOR ILL painted on it in shiny silver letters. Pepper looked this way and that; the corridor was empty in both directions. “We mustn’t be late,” she said. “Everyone’s super-punctual around here. Even a clock has teeth, we’re told, and time has a bite all of its own. But if you shut up and stop asking so many questions, I’ll rattle off everything I know about the subject. Which ain’t a lot.”

She sketched in the natural history of the skibbereen as best she could. In short order What-the-Dickens learned that his sort was usually hatched in dollops of seventy to ninety at a time.

As Pepper described it, the science seemed distinctly vague. But What-the-Dickens deduced that in her last few days of pregnancy, a mother skibberee, weighed down by her egg sac, doesn’t usually get around much. Most often she settles in the notch of a tree limb. Then she gets to work. She gnaws through the filaments and netting of her sac to expose her eggs to light, so they can heat up enough to hatch.

By this point she is pretty exhausted. She’s happy to let sunlight finish the good job she started. When she feels peckish she nibbles on the discarded filaments, which are crunchy, like strands of celery string: stuffed with nutrition, and tasty besides.

Usually she looks over her eggs — thirty-nine here and seventeen there and twenty-four over there, and a funny leftover one clumped on the stem — her lovely eggs! Like a froth of soap bubbles. She can never quite add them up — seventy-nine, eighty-one, or was it seventy-seven? — but does it matter? She loves them all.

Sooner or later her hatchlings start to emerge. A whole new population of skibbereen appears almost at once. When the air hits them, they grow at once. Within a minute the skibbereen newborns are as tall as they’ll ever be: three inches, four max.

“But where did the rest of my hatchlings go?” asked What-the-Dickens. “Where did I come from?”

“Basically, no one ever knows the answer to that question,” said Pepper. “I mean, think of the Duty Pageant: skibbereen as a species ain’t got a clue where they came from. Your question is just a bit more personal than everyone else’s. You’ll get used to it. Don’t worry.”

She straightened her shoulders and wetted her fingers and pressed down the seams of her wing tips, working out the wrinkles. “Now mind your manners and look smart — at least as smart as you can, given your looks,” she whispered. “The doctor is a good old codger, but he’s formal, and he can’t stand an uppity skibberee. Gets on his nerves to be talked back to. And I can’t afford to frost him.”

What-the-Dickens squared his shoulders. I’ve survived the solitary interview, he thought. This should be a piece of cake. “Ready when you are.”

Pepper knocked. A cutting, superior voice responded. “Enter, at once!” The word enter came out more like Eye-YEN-ter!

They came through as directed. The room was a single shaft of blond wood tapering upward to a point, like a conical tent. Suspended on strings from the ceiling hung a wooden object, lovingly lit by fireflies penned into recesses. “What is that?” said What-the-Dickens.

Doctor Ill looked up from his desk. “Who are … ? — Oh, yes.” He consulted his notes. “A rogue tooth fairy, I’m told. How novel. How charming. You look perfectly ordinary, in a raffish, obliterated sort of way. But darling boy, you don’t ask the questions here. I do.”

“Oops. Sorry,” said What-the-Dickens.

Doctor Ill leaned his elbows forward on the padded leather patches that covered the worn spots on the sleeves of his shirt. Nearby in its cage, his muzzled mouse quivered and looked either timid or mortified, or both.

“Settle down, dear,” he said to it, withdrawing a fragment of shredded carrot from a stack of old small matchboxes piled one on top of another like a chest of drawers. “Here, Muzzlemutt, have a carrot. It’s just a skibberee you haven’t met yet.”

Doctor Ill fed the carrot to the mouse, who could hardly eat it due to the muzzle, but gummed it ferociously into carrot juice.

“Poor pet,” said What-the-Dickens. “Is he scared of me?”

“He’s scared of skibbereen who ask questions,” said Doctor Ill.

Pepper kicked What-the-Dickens in the calf, but not before he had pointed questioningly at the wooden object hanging over the Doctor’s desk.

“You’re amused by the premier piece in my art collection. You have taste, dear boy. What is your name?”

After a silence, Pepper muttered, “You can answer the Doctor now.”

“What-the-Dickens,” he said.

Doctor Ill picked up his cane from behind his desk and pointed at the sculpture. “That masterwork is said to be one of the original wooden teeth carved for the jaw of George Washington. Of course it could be a forgery, but it’s still impressive, no? ‘I cannot tell a lie: I have a false tooth!’” Doctor Ill laughed at his own joke, but no one else got it.

“It’s called the crown jewel,” whispered Pepper to What-the-Dickens, with a little bob in the direction of Doctor Ill. “And he who rules underneath it is the crown. That’s Doctor Ill.”

“Wow.” What-the-Dickens was amazed. “Where’d it come from?”

“Enough about that.” Doctor Ill turned to Pepper. “I don’t know where you picked up this vague fellow, but I suggest you bring him back where you got him. I’ve been advised he’s not a spy, and that is good. Still, he’s clearly not our sort at all.”

“I’m not?” said What-the-Dickens.

Doctor Ill looked displeased at the sound of a question.

“Please forgive him, sir,” said Pepper, attempting a curtsy, though it looked more as if she was delivering herself of a pressure of gas. “He don’t know any better. He’s an orphan, he tells me, who has never met another of his kind before yesterday. I’ve been trying to read him the riot act and all but he’s a bit, well, slow. He can’t put two and two together to come up with, well, whatever it is.”

“Interesting,” said Doctor Ill, “but not my concern. We take care of our own, Pepper, and we don’t fraternize with rabble.”

“What was I to do, sir? He just showed up —”

“No questions!” Doctor Ill was harsh with Pepper, perhaps because she ought to know better. “Now listen, Pepper. You had a job to fulfill. You arrived back at base a few minutes after sunrise. We don’t muck about here with excuses. You have violated your probationary period and failed to satisfy the committee. I will give you liberty to deliver this alien back to the wild, but when you return you must surrender your name and your hopes of a license. No Agent of Change appointment for you. You will learn to be happy in a menial task. That is your lot: you have shown us so yourself by your failure to follow the rules.”

Pepper hung her head.

“It was all my fault!” cried What-the-Dickens. “Don’t blame her, sir! She couldn’t help it that I discovered her and interrupted her in her mission. Don’t penalize her. Penalize me instead, why don’t you?”

Doctor Ill sighed and put his hand to his chest. “No one knows the private costs of being a public servant.” He fortified himself with a sip of something that smelled nutty-sweet. “You can’t be expected to understand, dear lad, the ways of our colony. Be grateful you weren’t slaughtered by skittish skibbereen manning the stump runway.”

“I am grateful, and I wasn’t slaughtered because Pepper was with me,” said What-the-Dickens. He was urgent and earnest both. “Please, sir. Good doctor. It isn’t right to punish her just because she was nice to a lost skibberee.”

The Doctor took another sip and studied the airborne tooth as if looking for guidance in its crevasses.

Finally he sighed, and shook his head as he spoke. “I am a kind soul. Kindness has always been my curse. So I will grant you one more chance, Pepper. I’ll give you an assignment tonight. But it will be harder than usual, because you must make up for your tardiness on the recent mission. You must prove yourself worthy.”

“You are totally kind,” said Pepper.

“Your assignment will come in over the network in the usual manner,” said Doctor Ill. He picked up the porcupine cane again and pointed it at Pepper. It looked like a long, treacherous stinger. “But you must take this interloper with you and lose him somewhere. That’s the price you pay for your extra chance. You must return to base with your next assigned tooth — alone.”

“Oh, now listen —” began Pepper, but she fell silent at the stern look of the Doctor.

“We cannot integrate with the likes of him,” said the Doctor. “He is a foreign element. As such, he is more risky to us than you know. Sweet fool that he is, he can have little idea about how skibbereen colonies work. If he is an orphan, I regret it. But he is not one of us and he may not become one of us. I say this with passion and sorrow, for I am a tolerant creature, myself. (Everyone says so, and they’re right.) Still, that is my decision. Do you understand?”

“Do I have a choice?” replied Pepper in a small voice.

The Doctor didn’t answer. What-the-Dickens said, with as little bite in his tone as he could manage, “Well? Does she?”

“You know what happens if we make allowances,” said Doctor Ill. “No, of course you don’t, for you are innocent and stupid. Have you ever heard of decay?”

What-the-Dickens had not ever heard of decay.

“It threatens us,” said Doctor Ill in a short voice. “And if we should let up our guard, dear boy, all would be lost. We can’t and we don’t make allowances for … peculiarity. All stoutness of effect is lost if one starts accounting for peculiarity. Decay is softness, you see; permissiveness, cloudiness of thought, and sentimentality.”

All would be lost for you, maybe, thought What-the-Dickens. But I started out lost. I have just been found. I’ve just witnessed my first-ever Duty Pageant. I’m reporting for duty. That’s not softness. That’s strict obedience.

“I think,” said What-the-Dickens, “I deserve a chance to prove myself not especially peculiar. Isn’t that fair?”

“Oh, fair,” said Doctor Ill. “Well, if you’re going to talk about fair …” He looked at What-the-Dickens a little more closely. “Perhaps setting you your own task would be the appropriate thing to do. But I can’t afford to be fair to everyone. I’m done with this chatter. Accept the task, Pepper, and accept the price of my judgment, you What-the-Nutcase person. Accept it, or decline it and go about your business, in which case you would be stripped of your name at once and denied your license to fly abroad. As for What-the-Dickens — well, if you stick around here when I’ve told you to go, I can’t answer for what happens to you. You are dismissed.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Pepper in a hushed and startled voice. “I suppose we accept. We have no other choice, really.”

“Before we leave,” said What-the-Dickens, “may I ask one other thing? Even though I’m not supposed to ask anything?”

Doctor Ill didn’t deny the petition. He just closed his eyes and waited.

“What does skibbereen mean, even?”

The Doctor recited from memory. “Skibberee, singular; skibbereen, plural. From the verb intransitive, skibberow [Middle English skippen from Old Norse skeappa]: to skip about (archaic).”

“Thank you for that, anyway,” said What-the-Dickens.

They backed out. As they closed the door behind them so softly it hardly made a click, the mouse mewed in relief or regret; they couldn’t tell.

Pepper gripped his hand. “Thank you,” she said to him.

“Skibbereen don’t touch each other,” he reminded her, but grinningly. “Did I do okay?”

“You did swell. You did terrific. We’ll work out something. Your life is reprieved, and I have an extension of my license application: one more mission, one more chance. Let’s hurry up and launch. We’ll invent the rest as we go along.”

“Where are we hurrying to?” asked What-the-Dickens.

“First stop, the bank vault,” said Pepper. “We have to stock up with some change.”

“Change? Because you’re an Agent of Change?”

But Pepper was too excited to answer his questions. She hurried ahead, on tiptoes made swifter by the lift of an illegal wing swipe from time to time. He followed her deeper into the bowels of Undertree Common, toward the central bank. They hadn’t gone far when he —