Troubletwisters by Garth Nix, Sean Williams

of.’
    ‘Uh, if you say so . . .’ Jaide looked at Jack, who shrugged, and then said the first things that fell into her mind. ‘A house and the number two.’
    ‘Jackaran?’
    Jack scratched his nose.
    ‘Um, I guess . . . a nose . . . and a . . . doughnut.’
    Grandma X reached over and Kleo delicately withdrew her paw. Her blue gaze was curious as Grandma X turned over the first card. It showed a mouse hanging upside down in a snarl of threads.
    ‘The hanged mouse!’ said Jack. ‘How did you know?’
    Grandma X just smiled mysteriously and turned over the remaining four: an acorn; a barbed arrow; a gutted fish; and an oak tree, her first guess.
    ‘No correct guesses from the troubletwisters,’ said Grandma X, with a rueful look for both of them. ‘Perhaps we shall see something from the other perspective. Show me your cards, Jackaran.’
    ‘Okay,’ said Jack. He folded his cards into a stack and put them in front of him, as she had done. The first he turned over was plain burnished gold, and the second was, too. But so were the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. The illustrations were gone.
    ‘But . . . but there was a wave, and a cave, and . . . uh . . .’
    ‘Not unexpected,’ said Grandma X, ‘and not terribly helpful, either. What about your cards, Jaidith?’
    Jaide laid her cards down and turned them over one by one. Four of hers had become blank, too, but the fifth card still showed the wavy lines of a breeze supporting a bird caught in mid-flight.
    ‘How can they change?’ Jaide asked. ‘What’s going on?’
    Grandma X swept up the cards in one smooth motion and clicked her fingers. The click echoed through the room, and with its echoes, Jaide and Jack felt the warmth of the hot chocolate rush through them again, and they forgot the card game completely.
    ‘Here we are, I’ve got the cards,’ said Grandma X. ‘Not the usual type. These are more fun. Before we play, who thinks they can flip a card into that bronze bowl in the corner?’
    Jack took a card and was surprised by the weight and the fact they were metal, and by the strangest sensation that he had handled cards like this before.
    ‘I’ll try,’ he said, but when he flicked the card it missed by several inches.
    They all had several goes. Grandma X missed most times. Jaide missed her first two attempts, but then got the knack of it. Four out of her last five went in with resounding clangs of metal on metal, and Kleo came to sit at her side, as if the cat was a prize that Jaide had won.
    ‘How are you doing that?’ asked Jack, growing frustrated. He had missed every time, and even managed to lose one of the cards in the process.
    ‘Oh, it’s easy,’ she boasted, and perhaps became a little overconfident, because her very next attempt ricocheted off the lip of the spittoon and whizzed about their heads like an excited hummingbird before finally embedding itself in the side of a loaf of bread. Kleo yowled and ran out of the room with her ears flat to her head.
    ‘All right, that will do.’ Grandma X picked up the cards and shifted the spittoon out from the wall. ‘Well done, Jaidith. Don’t look so glum, Jackaran. We’ll try something else you might be good at next. First, though, I’d like to find that missing card. Will you help me look? It must be in here somewhere.’
    They turned the kitchen inside out, looking in all the obvious spots first, then opening drawers and even shifting the fridge to see behind it. There was no sign of the card anywhere.
    ‘Hmm,’ said Grandma X, putting her hands on her hips and staring at Jack as though he had lost the card deliberately. ‘Let’s see if you can find something else instead. Before I went to bed last night, I hid six coins in the lounge. Think of it as a treasure hunt. But remember, everything else has to go back in its place afterward. No permanent mess, please.’
    ‘Why?’ asked Jack, feeling uncharacteristically rebellious.
    ‘Why no mess? I had enough of that