stories by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly

Danceland

2010-01-24T17:08:00.000-08:00

Published in Bordertown, edited by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold. Signet, 1986.

Note: This version began as someone’s pirate file (arr, matey!). Since I don’t have my own scan of the published version, I’m using it here. I gave it a quick lookover and corrected a few things, but if you spot any errors, please mention them in the comments, and I’ll fix them. —Will

Note 2: The older Borderland anthologies are currently out of print, but the novels (Elsewhere and Nevernever by me, Finder by Emma) are still in print, and a new anthology is in the works. When I know the publication date, I’ll share it.)

Danceland

by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly

Friday night started, for me and for all of us I suppose, in the street outside Danceland. I was sitting in the sidecar, waiting for Tick-Tick. She’d parked the bike outside Danceland and made her usual arrow-like way across the street to Snappin’ Wizard’s Surplus and Salvage (“More Bang for the Buck, More Spell for the Silver”).

Snappin’ Wizard’s is the only other thing on that end of Ho Street that’s still lit up late at night. And oh, is it lit. Pre-Change cartop revolving lights flash rude and red in the windows. Between them, will-o’-the-wisps bop back and forth in rhythm. Signs on the window glass, in paint and fairy dust, shout about solar cells and self-bored stones and logic boards and clock spells, and how they’re cheap cheap cheap!

The Queen of bloody Faerie couldn’t keep Tick-Tick out of there. She’d left with a mumble about being just a minute, and she’d be right back. Or maybe she didn’t say it this time, and I only supplied it from the memory of all the other times she had. Whatever. I didn’t expect the Ticker back inside half an hour.

I slid way down in the sidecar so I could prop my head against the back padding, and shook an herbal cig out of its box. They’re big stuff with the elves, who don’t much like tobacco. I think they like them because it makes them all feel like old vid stars, dragging moodily on a cigarette. I’m not poking fun. Why do you think I smoke them?

I rolled the coltsfoot-and-comfrey smoke over my tongue like wine and watched the crowd in front of Danceland. People were milling on the sidewalk, waiting for the band to start. Four elvin Bloods in poet’s red clustered near the doors, looking sharp (and aware of it, I’ll bet) against the building’s black-patent paint job. A halfie woman with a lion’s mane haircut dyed black and white was practicing some synched dance step. She was coached by a black human woman with silver bells in her elflocks. An elf kid had his seedybox balanced on one shoulder, and people were dancing to its music. Four members of the Pack pulled up on two cycles, their jackets trailing bright motley streamers. One of them asked the crowd at large if the music had started. One of the Bloods by the door shook her head, not really friendly but not like anyone expected war, and the Pack kids drove off again.

Danceland’s double doors were arched over with row after row of white lights that flashed in sequence and seemed to chase each other forever, DANCELAND was written in script over the doors in pink-red neon—the genuine pre-Change article, but the gas was rattled around now with a spell. (I know this only from the Ticker’s explanation. The business of How Things Work is her specialty, not mine.) When I squinted, the whole front of the building became a blaze of bright fog.

It’s at the very end of Ho, but it’s worth the trip. The Factory is older, the Dancing Ferret is trendier, and the Wheat Sheaf is more exclusive. But Danceland has the old magic, the kind you don’t have to be an elf to make. The old magic is made with loud music and sweat and colored light. But the best thing about it is that stinging feeling at the back of your head that says anything could happen tonight.

Which is, come to think of it, the most pervasive magic in Bordertown. But keep in mind that magic doesn’t always work the way you expect in the Borderlands.

“Uh... hi,” somebody said behind me, breathy and excited-scared.

I leaned my head back a little more and looked up into big round brown eyes under a heavy thatch of brown bangs. Her skin was tan, too, or maybe just evenly grubby. She wore a gray denim jacket and jeans that weren’t ruined yet, and a black cap with a pheasant feather tucked in its band. The cap looked new. The whole ensemble was the quintessential Worldly kid’s idea of What They Wear In The Borderlands. You could start a mail-order company selling outfits like that and clean up: Halfie Frankie’s, Faerie Fashions. I hate runaways. They make me hurt all over, just under the skin.

There’s always been places that called to people. Even before the Change, there were cities that shone in the back of the mind like Faerie gold. You knew, knew, that if you could just run away to one of those places, you’d become someone else, someone wonderful, and wonderful things would happen to you. I heard a list of those magical cities once. I remember London, Liverpool (interesting name, but a disgusting concept), New York, and something with two words that started with an S. I’ve forgotten the rest.

“Are... you elvish?” she asked, smiling and biting her lip.

There’s nothing ambiguous about the roundness of my ears, and yes, I’m pale, but it’s because I hate going to sleep as much as I hate waking up. I remember being her age, though, and being about as long in town. I tilted up one lens of my riding goggles, showing her a dark-blue eye, and said kindly, “No, I’m Jewish.”

“Oh,” she said, crestfallen. I hoped she’d be gone by the time Tick-Tick came back; one sight of the Ticker and the kid would be offering to lick the Genuine Faerie Mud off her motorcycle boots.

“My name’s Orient,” I told her, as something of a peace offering, and stuck my hand out. She shook it. “I’m Camilla.” She signed, and wrinkled her nose. “It’s a stupid name.”

That gave my stomach a little twist. Camilla means “attendant at a sacrifice.” There were too many things of value to sacrifice in Bordertown if you were young, scared, and not scared enough.

“That’s okay. Everybody in Bordertown has a nickname.” She looked hopeful. Oh, I hate runaways. “Yours is...” I thought for a second. “... Caramel.”

She was disappointed, though she tried to hide it. I knew what she’d been hoping for: something like Firebird, or Starwind. The sort of name no one could live with, or up to. So I gave her one of my lopsided grins that Sai says looks rakish even without my eyes to help. I said, “Burnt sugar. Sweet, but smoky, and it’s been through the fire.”

Okay, it was hokey, but it cheered her up. “I guess that’s pretty good,” she admitted. “Where you from?” “Bellinbroke.” “Pretty faraway?”

“Took me nine days to get here, and I got good rides the whole way.”

It was too far; she’d never go back home, even if she wanted to. When she wanted to. I dragged hard on the cigarette to loosen the lump in my throat.

“Want some water?” Caramel asked me, and there was a coyness in her voice that made me raise both sides of my goggles this time. She held out a beer bottle, half full of beautiful, translucent crimson. Mad River water.

I took it from her. I wanted to peg the thing into the alley and hear it shatter. But that would be no help in the long run.

“Have you had any of this yet?” A nice, calm voice—I was impressed with myself.

“A little.” She was defiant at first. Then a sheepish look crept across her face, and she shrugged. “It tastes kind of gross.”

“This is elf stuff, Caramel. To them, it’s just water. The sort of humans who drink river water are... not in style.” Which was true enough, if you only counted the Wharf Rats. But there were humans and halfies who thought money was a license to be stupid in public, who wore crystal or silver cups on chains or silk cords around their necks. Maybe this kid hadn’t seen any of those yet. “I’ll make you a trade,” I said, swinging the bottle a little.

She looked at it, and at me. “What kind of trade?”

I balanced the bottle between us on the sidecar’s rim. Then I slid one of the silver bracelets, not the thinnest, off my left wrist and held it out. “I’ll give you this for it. On the condition,” I added, as she reached, “that you use it to pay your way into there,” and I nodded at Danceland. “You can keep the change. Whoever gives it to you, tell ‘em Orient sent you, and you want to talk to Goldy. Deal?”

Her eyes were practically rolling, from me to the bottle to Danceland’s front doors.

“Straight,” I said. “It’s just a dance club, and Goldy’s just a bouncer.” Goldy would disagree, of course. “He’s a good guy to talk to when you need to.”

She bit her lip—no smile this time—and finally took the bracelet. “Why this Goldy? Why not you, if you’re so concerned about me?”

I grinned, which was harder than it sounds. “Because I come and go. But I’ll find you if I need you.” Which was a joke of sorts, but of course she didn’t get it.

She turned to go, and we both saw him at once. You might think he was wearing a full-head mask, a good one of the sort that outfits like the Horn Dance wear. And once you wrote off the head as a mask, you could come up with something to explain away the pelt on the rest of him, too, like a fur suit in spite of the weather. But Caramel was new in town, had never seen the Horn Dance or anything else, and hadn’t developed that cynical turn for explanations. She not only stopped when she saw him, she stepped back a pace or two.

“Wolfboy!” I called, and his long nose swung our way. He grinned, which can put you off if you’ve just met him. He headed toward the sidecar, that long swinging walk earning a jealous scowl from one of the Bloods.

When you get used to it, he looks pretty good, actually. He’s lean and rangy and muscle-y, and covered all over with short coarse red-brown fur. He shaved his face once, and we all hated it. I think he decided never to do it again when the Ticker said, “It makes you look so... young.” That night he wore a black T-shirt with the sleeves ripped out, tight black jeans, and black hi-top sneakers. His ears end in pointed tufts, the lower half of his face is lengthened, and his canine teeth are... well, about what you would expect. He has claws, thick and slate-colored, on his fingers. When he types, he sounds like a dog on the kitchen floor.

“Wolfboy,” I said, “I’d like you to meet Caramel.”

Give the kid credit; she held out her hand. Wolfboy took it and inclined his head. Pretty courtly for a guy with a dog nose.

“Pleased to meet you,” Caramel breathed. She turned and looked at me sideways. “Guess I should go...” I gave her a nod. “You don’t want to miss the first song.”

Wolfboy and I watched her go. I said, “Lord, lord. Perfectly nice Friday night, and I have to get pinned down in the street by some little thing with the dust of the World still behind her ears.”

Wolfboy chuckled deep in his throat and patted my head.

“Oh, go chase cats.” I shook out another cigarette and held it out. I lit it, too, since paper matches are a nuisance for him.

“You been out of town?” I asked after his first mouthful of smoke.

He grinned like a fiend from hell, and pulled a many-folded leather wallet out of his back jeans pocket. With a flourish, he let the folds fall open in a sort of waterfall. Neatly flattened inside and preserved with a bought spell were something like twenty four-leaf clovers.

“Oh my stars and garters,” I breathed. “Well, if I need to borrow money I’ll sure ’nuff come to you. You gonna sell ’em inside?” I asked him, pointing to Danceland.

He refolded the wallet with a practiced flip and nodded.

“Offer one to Goldy. He’s going to need it.” When Wolfboy raised his eyebrows, I said, “I just sent that runaway to him.”

He giggled in a voice low enough to make a couple of Packies nervous and shook his head.

“I don’t suppose you’d trade one of those little green beauties for the latest copy of Stick Wizard, would you?” I squinted speculatively at him.

He looked down at me with an expression that even on his face was easy to read: You’ve got to be kidding.

I pulled my copy out of the map pocket in the sidecar (after all, what else am I going to use the map pocket for? Not maps, anyway). The stick-figure characters on the cover were block-printed with ink and fairy dust, and moved when you looked at them. On this issue, the Wizard was flying off his beat-up cycle as it hit a trip-wire. At each end of the wire were, of course, his arch-nuisances. Tater and Bert, the cigar-smoking elf delinquents. I could almost see Wolfboy salivating. Tater and Bert are favorites of his. He thinks they should have their own book. I don’t know about Wolf boy sometimes.

But he shook his head finally. I didn’t really expect him to deal—by the end of the night someone might give him a copy, after all. So I smiled and put it away.

“Here’s a fine convocation of riffraff,” Tick-Tick said behind me.

“Boil me in lead,” I cried, and turned. “She’s back before morning!”

“Oh, shut up. Hi, Lobo.” She smiled at Wolfboy. He smiled back and dropped his gaze. He loves being called Lobo.

The Ticker was loading a paper-wrapped parcel into the bike’s top cargo box. “Goodies?” I asked.

“Well, not that you’d think so. A little replacement stock, wire connectors and that sort of thing. And a toy or two.”

“Or eight or ten,” I said, but she didn’t answer me.

Tick-Tick is pure elf, and looks it. Pointed ears, luminous pale skin, shining silver eyes. Slender and almost oppressively tall. She’d never fit in the sidecar, so it’s a good thing she owns the bike. She usually dyes her hair dandelion-yellow and wears it short, with a single long lock at the very front and center of her hairline that hangs fine as milkweed fluff to her eyebrows. In spite of her height, she looks delicate as spun sugar. It surprises people to find that her favorite perfume is Eau de Bearing Grease and Hot Solder.

She was wearing her idea of power dressing tonight: a long gray leather coat and tight pants of the same, low red leather boots, a dark gray suit coat, white shirt, a red leather tie, and three garnet earrings in her right ear. I’ve tried to tell her that this is not what they wear in the boardrooms of the World’s corporations, but she points out (and rightly) that I can’t be sure, can I, and they might if they had the good taste to think of it, mightn’t they?

“So,” she said, “anyone here want to rock the moon down?”

“Me! Me!,” said I, and leaped out of the sidecar. Wolf-boy, sober lad that he is, let out a yell that made the whole street shudder. I left my goggles in the sidecar, and checked my hair in the rear-view mirror. The Ticker had done my dye job the week before, and I was still nervous about it: the spikes of red around my face showed like lit matches against the natural black of the rest. It’s been years since I left the World, but it has its fangs in me yet. There’s a limit to how conspicuous I can be and still feel safe.

“Yes, yes, you’re just breathtaking.” Tick-Tick sighed. “Come along.”

The crowd outside had turned into crowd inside, we found. Danceland’s insides are all black cinder block walls, from which they wash the fairy dust graffiti every night. “After all,” the club’s owner, Dancer, says, “this place is supposed to be different, for Zeus’ sake.”

The stage lights were still out, but the band’s equipment was set up, and the spell boxes that ran the amps were glowing gently. The Ticker headed for the pool tables to fleece a few unsuspecting Bloods, and Wolfboy and I pushed through to the bar.

Valda was already clunking bottles of beer down on the counter three at a time. “Val, precious Val,” I bellowed across three feet of noisy space, “did the coffee come in yet?”

She looked at me as if about to say no, then smiled and said, “You’re a lucky boy.” I blew her a kiss, and she headed for the other end of the bar to pour me a cup. Not, mind you, that I don’t like beer. I adore beer. But I can get that anywhere.

She set the cup in front of me and a bottle of beer in front of Wolfboy. I pried a silver stud out of my wristband and told Valda, “That’s for both,” before Wolfboy could pay.

He raised his bushy eyebrows at me, and I shrugged. “So pay me back when you’ve made your killing in good luck,” I said, meaning the clovers, of course. He winked and hoisted his bottle.

I let the steam and the coffee smell wash over my face for a second before I actually sipped any. Coffee is shortage-prone in the Borderlands, and expensive since most of what passes through is doing just that: passing through to Faerie. But, oh, it’s worth the price.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder and said in my ear, “Watch that stuff, young man.”

I turned and found Goldy shaking his head at me. Goldy is black and not tall, even for a human. But he’s built like a pyramid standing on its head. His hair is plush-short and metallic gold—thus the nickname, of course. He was in uniform, which is a green long-sleeved Danceland T-shirt. It’s not that conspicuous, since Dancer sells the things, and there are always a few in the club on any night.

“Goldy. What it is. Watch what stuff?”

He narrowed his eyes at my coffee cup. “That’s a dangerous intoxicant. You may get high as the Tooth and tear the place up before the night is out.”

I rolled my eyes. “Call me Mr. Coffee Nerves.”

“Or perhaps I might toss you out now and save myself a bit of trouble. It’d be no more than you deserve.”

“Me? Oh, you got my present, then.”

“If you mean your runaway, yes, you snot-nosed little mutant, I did. What am I supposed to do with her?”

“Talk her out of doing all the stupid things we did at her age.”

“Except for continuing my acquaintance with you, I’ve never done anything stupid. I assume you found her?”

I could hear the capital F he meant to put on “found.” “ ’Course not. Though I suppose you could say I found her nickname,” I mused. I wondered what she would have been called if she hadn’t met me.

The colored lights in the ceiling spat and swirled. “Back to the fray.” Goldy sighed and disappeared into the crowd. Then the stage lights came up, and Dancer, the owner, walked across the stage. I saw the way she did it, sort of lazy, as if there was no audience at all, and I shot a look at Wolfboy. When Dancer introduces the band, it’s something special. But when Dancer walks to the mike like that... Wolfboy gave me the thumbs-up, and we started moving toward the stage.

So did everyone else, of course, but we made it to the middle of the dance floor, at least. Somewhere ahead of us I thought I caught a glimpse of a black cap with a pheasant feather that vibrated with its wearer’s excitement.

Dancer stood at the mike for a second, during which you could hear every breath that was drawn in Danceland. Twice she began to move her hands, as if to preface words that didn’t come. Then she threw back her head and laughed, and said, “I give up. Ladies and gentlemen, Wild Hunt!”

The roar of the audience shook those black walls, and I helped. I doubt there was anyone in Danceland who didn’t know the name. Bordertown had been full of the sound of Wild Hunt all summer. The recordings came out once a week, a song at a time, on mag tape, or in an impression ball, or digitally coded. But there were no pictures of the band. No one had ever seen them in concert, and nobody seemed to know someone who worked in the studio where they’d recorded—you know the sort of thing. So we’d play the recordings, the tearing, heart-shaking music pouring over us, and we’d pretend that we could tell from the sound how they looked.

We were wrong. All of us. They took us by surprise, and she most of all, because all the poets and painters and visionaries in Bordertown could never have imagined her.

It’s not that she was the archetypal elf. Strider, the third of the Danceland bouncers, is the archetypal elf, a real flipping Prince of Faerie sort. No, this was the Snow Queen from out of that old tale, the beautiful White Lady of any romantic ghost story.

She was tall, of course, and pale, paler than Strider or the Ticker or any other elf I’d ever seen. Her eyes were the color of silver in the sun. Her hair was white as new snow, or expensive paper, or the fiery-white highlights on silver. Again the word silver—white as she was, she was a rich-looking white, and demanded rich words to describe.

Her hair was clipped close to her head on the left side, lengthening as it went over her head until it looked like a white wave cresting over her right ear. Her left eye was caught up in a bar of light blue paint that ran from her nose to her hairline, where it became a streak of pale blue dye across the short white hair. The dye ended in a curling tail above her left ear. It’s difficult for a human to judge elvin features—by human standards, there’s no such thing as a homely elf, I think—but I would swear that hers was the most beautiful face that Bordertown had ever seen.

She wore white leather leggings and a white sleeveless thing that shimmered like the silk that comes from the Elflands. She played a Fender Witchfire bass the blue of midnight. Fairy dust swirled in the paint job in galaxies and nebulae, suns that formed and flashed and died as you watched. Light strobed off the rings on her fingers as she chorded and slammed down on all four strings, then scraped her pick down the E. It was the opening riff of “Shake the Wall Down,” and suddenly everybody was dancing.

Wolfboy got snagged by an elf-girl with pale green hair, a wicked grin, and a red jewel on her cheek like a birthmark or a tear. He picked her up by her waist, whirled her around, and they were both gone into the crowd.

The hyperharpist played a Fairlight, one of the Sorcerer series judging from the stuff he got out of it. Waveforms so clean you could have eaten off them. The lead guitarist had a topknot of burgundy hair, an eight-stringed ax, and six fingers on each hand to play it with. The drummer was insane, but drummers often are. They just aren’t all as precise and tasteful in their madness as this elvin woman was. I won’t even try to describe what the halfie on elfpipes did with that instrument, but it wasn’t anything that an Elflands elf would have thought of, or approved of. The total effect was wonderful and impossible and, all right, magical.

And they sang, of course. All of them, in close, twisting harmony; or just her, the White Lady, with a pure clear voice that made every word a projectile into the head and heart. They segued straight into “Heart’s Desire,” a modified version that was somehow as creepy as it was driving.

Suddenly Sai appeared before me. She was grinning and shaking her head, and I realized that I’d been dancing by myself, gaping at the band ever since the music started.

“What are you doing, letting your tongue dry?” she yelled. I gave her my best I’m-an-idiot shrug.

Sai is another Danceland bouncer, the middle member of the Terrible Trio. She’s a halfie, tall, plump, with a round pink face and rainy gray eyes. She has Asian hair, uncompromisingly straight, heavy, and black. She wears it shoulder-length to show it off. Not that she liked her father, mind, or even knew him. She just hopes that someday some elvin bigot will smart off about it, and she can loosen his teeth. When an elf makes trouble in Danceland, Goldy and Strider let Sai throw him out, whenever possible. It makes her so happy.

“When did Dancer score this coup?” I shouted at her, and pointed at the band.

“Two days ago. She was half crazy with it, I tell ya. Didn’t know whether to bless her luck, or cuss it for not leaving time to advertise.”

“Poor baby.”

She shrugged and grinned at the same time. “Word gets around.” And it was true that the place was full. Advertising would have only meant the Terrible Trio would have to turn away tourists.

Strider slid gracefully through the crowd and put an arm lock around Sai’s neck. She rolled her eyes and pinched his thigh.

“Owoo! Halfie scum,” he said affectionately, loosening his grip and giving her a quick kiss behind the ear. “Pointy-eared creep,” she replied in kind, and put her hand in one of his back pockets.

Strider, as I said, is a veritable Lord of Elflands. He has the fine mane of silver hair to the middle of his back, the regal carriage, the elegant long-fingered gestures that melt the hearts of human girls.

Someday I’m going to ask how such an unlikely pair as Sai and Strider became sweethearts. Not anytime soon, mind you—but someday.

“Dance with this jerk,” Strider told her, nodding at me. “He looks brain dead standing there by himself.” “I’m on duty,” Sai protested. Strider shrugged. “Nothing’s goin’ down. Goldy and I can handle it for half a song, girl.” “You can’t handle your—”

He stopped her by smacking a kiss on her lips. “You’ve got the dirtiest mouth on Ho Street.”

I didn’t hear her response, but I think he blushed. Then he smiled lazily and drifted off through the dancers.

Sai dances well. You wouldn’t think, looking at her, that she’d have that elvin grace, but she does. She says it comes from her boxing days. I put some effort into trying to match her, and ended the song pleasantly winded.

Wild Hunt swept on into “Running on the Border.” It’s not really a dance number, but it has too much intensity, too much a sense of headlong motion, to be a ballad. It’s a showpiece for the guitarist and lead vocalist. They’re out in front for the whole song, weaving in and out of each other’s work with only breathing space between verses.

People stayed on their feet and on the dance floor, swaying in place and singing along, doing double handclaps just like on the tape.

Then someone pushed past me, so hard that I would have fallen if Sai hadn’t caught me. I got a ragged view of him as he went by, and a better one from the back once he was past: an elf, and from the clothes not a Bordertownie. He wore a full-skirted coat that fit close to his waist and stopped at mid-thigh, in a brocade of some magical weave that changed pattern restlessly. His hair was uncolored, and worn in a moon-white braid that reached his waist.

“My, my,” Sai said happily. “Weeds of Elfland he doth wear.” I hung on to her upper arm. “Calm down, he hasn’t done anything.” “Couldn’t I just warn him a little?” “No.”

I realized a moment later that Sai might get her chance yet. The elf in brocade pushed his way to the edge of the stage and shouted something at the band. It might have been a name; the Elflands accent throws me off until I get used to it.

Wild Hunt tried to keep going, but you could tell they were all rattled. When he shouted again and pounded a fist on the stage, the White Lady faltered and stopped, and the rest of the band came to a ragged halt behind her.

She turned off her mike, but I could still hear her in the silence that followed the music’s death. “Leave me alone,” she said. She had the Elflands accent, too, but not as thick.

The elf down front balled his fists and said something furiously in Elvish.

“No! I told you no. I am not—I will not go.” She was hanging on to the neck of the bass as if she was afraid someone would try to take it away.

Sai had begun moving forward, which was tough. The crowd had pressed itself away from the stage and back toward us, and they were packed as tight as a new brick wall. I followed along behind her as best I could.

More Elvish from the guy in brocade; I recognized the words for “clan” and, I think, “Border.”

The White Lady was turning away from him, as if to walk offstage, but she stopped when she heard his little speech. “Are you, now?” she said with scorn that would crack metal. “Well, not me. Maybe all those pretty sheep—” and she pointed in the general direction of the Elflands “—but not me.” And this time she did walk away, taking off her bass as she went.

The elf grabbed the edge of the stage, to vault onto it. Then Strider was there, a defending knight in a ragged Danceland T-shirt, as if he’d appeared out of the air. He set those long white hands of his on the guy’s shoulders, spun him around, and gripped his lapels.

Suddenly Strider let go and took a step backward. For a moment I felt a dropping feeling in my guts, wondering if he was hurt, if the Elflander had done something to him. But they each took a step sideways, and I could see wariness and surprise in Strider’s face, but no pain.

The Elflander had a long, angular face, with thin lips, a high-bridged nose, and slender eyebrows that winged up at the ends. He was looking at Strider as if the latter were something found growing on the floor of a public rest-room.

Strider spoke an elvish name, rather cautiously. I won’t try to transcribe it.

The Elflander raised his chin a notch and let his upper lip curl just a little. “You are not permitted to be free with my name,” he said.

“You’re over the Border now. That name doesn’t mean piss-all here.” Strider was usually politer than that, especially in a situation like this, where he’s supposed to be just doing his job. I don’t know whether the Elflander had meant to insult Strider or if the man was naturally arrogant—or naturally foolish. But Strider always knows exactly what he’s said.

After a quick up-and-down look at Strider’s habitual attire—the green Danceland shirt that looked as if someone had driven over it several times (which, in fact, Strider had), the blue jeans that seemed to be held together with patches and optimism—the Elflander said, “Little more than a savage. It is pitiful to know you are an elf.”

“Yeah, well, you set a fine example for the race, rich boy. Go make trouble in somebody else’s place.” Strider took a step toward him, to make his point a little plainer.

The elf drew something from under the skirt of his coat. At first I thought it was one of the retractable metal antennas that gang members duel with sometimes. But he snapped it to its full length and slashed the tip across Strider’s face with one quick motion, and it didn’t leave a welt. It left a gash.

In front of me I heard Sai cry out, and I wondered where Goldy was. Trapped in the crowd, most likely. People were scrambling away in that mad, mindless fashion that tells you something has happened and no one knows what. Strider stumbled back against the stage, blood on the lower half of his face like a bandit’s kerchief, and the Elflander pressed the attack grimly. A lunge caught Strider in the upper arm. Another pass sliced his T-shirt through the middle of the Danceland logo. It was too precise to be coincidence. I caught a glimpse of the bloody stripe across the skin beneath.

I was sticking my elbows into people, trying to get through to help. What I intended to do when I got there, I don’t know. My motions seemed horribly slow, and the Elflander horribly fast. I had an awful vision of reaching Strider only to find him in bits on the floor.

He was, in fact, on his knees, one arm clutched over his middle, his other hand in a fist. Sai had broken through and was nearly in reach of that damn Faerie blade when Strider gasped, “No.”

Sai stopped instantly, to my surprise, and looked to Strider for an explanation. The Elflander drew back a pace and lowered the tip of his blade just a little. Behind him Goldy stepped out of the crowd like a black phantom, ready to nail the stranger if he didn’t like Strider’s reason for not doing so. He had snatched a baseball bat from under some counter, and it hung loose at his side.

Strider shook the hair out of his face and turned cold, narrowed eyes on the Elflander. “This is an honor fight. Nobody gets this son of a bitch but me.”

Sai stiffened and looked as if she would have objected, but Strider ignored her. “And I will,” he spat out.

The Elflander turned his back (a fine gesture of contempt, but I wouldn’t have turned my back on Sai just then, whatever Strider’s stated preference was). He saw Goldy for the first time, and was obviously startled. But Goldy smiled evilly and bowed him through the crowd, which parted grudgingly. Every face I saw among them was turned to the Elflander, hard with hate. Strider is not always easy to like, but he’s one of ours.

Just before the door, the Elflander turned. He had returned his cutter into his gaudy jacket, and he drew himself up with, I’ll admit, a certain elegance. Addressing Strider, the stage, or us all, he said, “We shall continue this matter sometime soon.”

“Damn straight,” Strider grunted.

The two locked eyes. Then the Elflander glanced away and smiled thinly. He bowed as though we had all come to pay court to him, swirled, and was gone.

Sai and I helped Strider to his feet. I remembered the band only then, but they had left the stage. I was glad of it.

Wolfboy was holding the door to the back hall open for us. He looked impassive, even for him. We got Strider into the office and made him sit on the couch, but he refused to lie down. Sai got the first aid kit.

Strider pulled the shirt off over his head, with a fair quantity of teeth-gritting. The Elflander had gotten in a few licks that I hadn’t seen. It always looks bad when an elf is wounded; it’s the combination of gore on that pale skin and elvin blood’s tendency to clot slower than human. And of course, it looks worse when the elf is a friend.

I filled a bowl with water at the office sink and brought it, with a couple of towels, to Sai. She started with Strider’s face. The water in the bowl changed color quickly. There was a lot of silence, broken only by Strider’s occasional swearing. I wanted to say something cheerful. Plenty of things came to mind, all of them abysmally stupid. I kept quiet.

Goldy stuck his head in. “Is it as bad as it looks?” he asked.

Sai frowned, but Strider shook his head. “I’ll live. Mostly slashes, and none of them deep. The bastard knew what he was doing.” He grinned suddenly, which was almost frightening. “When he drew on me, he’d lost it for a second. But when he started cutting...”

“What was that objectionable little tool of his? Any idea?” “It’s a goddamn dueling toy in the Elflands,” Strider replied.

I think we were all equally startled. After Strider’s near-silence on the subject of his life in Faerie, a sentence like that one sounded like the whole Alexandrian library.

Sai rummaged in the first aid kit, found a tube of Gold-N-Rod Creme, and began to streak it across the slashes on Strider’s skin. Though she was careful, he said some remarkably inventive things, and when she did his face she had to hold him by the hair to keep his head still. I watched the stuff draw the edges of the skin together, appreciating that miracle more than I ever had. In the Elflands, of course, it works instantly and prevents scars from forming at all. That probably explained the Elflander’s perfect face, given his habits. But maybe he was just very good with his fencing gadget. Lucky him.

Goldy looked helplessly at Wolf boy and me. We shrugged, about in unison. “Strider, my lad,” he said finally, “are you quite sure you don’t want me to find him, cut off his pretty braid, and see that he eats it?”

“The hell you will!” Sai said, and her voice made us all jump, even Strider. “If he doesn’t want to do it himself, I’m gonna, you hear me? Oh, shit.” She turned away and banged her fist against her thigh.

Strider squeezed her shoulder. “Hey, all of you, why don’t you take a walk? I don’t exactly feel like talking right now. Okay?”

Sai looked up at him.

“Yeah,” he said gently, “you too.”

She nodded and stood. Wolfboy and I were already on our way out. Sai followed, closed the door behind her, and we all stood in the hall feeling useless.

At last Goldy said, “Ah, well. Friday night, a band that will draw half of Bordertown when the word gets out, and only two of us on the floor. Nothing we can’t manage, yes?” He looked at Sai.

Sai pursed her lips, then shook her head slowly. She held up one finger. “Oh dear,” said Goldy. “Please, Goldy? I gotta get out of here. I’d just take this out on some poor jerk out front.” Goldy sighed. “Very well. Don’t do anything foolish, will you?” Sai grinned wearily at him, and went down the hall toward the back door.

As we went the other way, back to the main room, Wolfboy tapped his chest, and Goldy said, “You’ll fill in?” Wolfboy nodded. Goldy shook his head. “If there’s any more trouble, wait for me, hmm? You may look like Captain Fangs’n’Fur, but you’re a pussycat in real life.” Wolfboy growled at him, and we all felt a little bit better.

Dancer had obviously held things together in the aftermath. The crowd had stayed, the band was onstage powering up and tuning, though the White Lady wasn’t back on yet. I wondered how I would feel, knowing that someone who’d sliced up Strider with no great provocation was very, very angry with me. I began to wonder if she’d like someone to walk her home...

Tick-Tick met us by the door. “I’ll buy,” she offered.

“Thank you, but no.” Goldy said. “I’m going to need every wit I have left. And as of this moment, all my breaks are canceled.” He gave us a little salute and went back to work. Wolfboy glanced at Goldy’s back as if thinking how rarely the Ticker offered to buy, then shook his head sadly and left us to get a shirt from Val so everyone would know he was on duty. I think Wolfboy likes uniforms more than the rest of us.

“Well, I’ll let you buy me something,” I said. Maybe I should’ve offered to watch the place, too, but I look bad in green.

“Good. I refuse to get drunk alone, just now.”

We didn’t actually get drunk. Valda set dark bottles down for both of us and let us drink some before she asked, “Is he okay?”

I thought about it. “That depends on your definition of ‘okay.’ Emotionally, no comment. Physically, he’ll be fine in a while, though he’ll have a peachy dueling scar.”

“Dueling,” Val spat. “That wasn’t goddamn dueling.” she wiped a glass with a furious motion. “He cut up Strider the way you’d cut the head off a weed. And Strider without even a pocket knife on him...”

That was when my body and mind caught up with each other. I found myself tight all over and inclined to shake.

“Drink up,” the Ticker said solemnly. “We’re all alive, and in a year this’ll be nothing but an anecdote.”

“Only if something worse happens in the meantime,” Valda muttered.

The White Lady came back onstage then, and the band started up. Even Wild Hunt couldn’t get me to dance any more that night. But I let the music erode the tension in me, and clear my head a little. Watching that white elvin woman helped me too; the very sight of her was like a cold compress to the forehead.

I was halfway through my second bottle before I said, “Ticker?” “Mm-hm?” “Why are the Trio the way they are?” She raised her eyebrows. “Which way?”

I struggled with the answer—I hadn’t had quite enough beer to loosen my tongue. “Goldy and Sai have suddenly gone a little bloodthirsty. And Strider, for that matter. If someone cut you up like that, how would you react?”

“I’d lie down and moan for a week.”

“Well, of course. But would you...”

“Swear vengeance, and insist that I be allowed first crack at the beggar? I don’t think so.”

“Would you expect me to do it for you?”

“Heavens, no!”

“Good. Though I don’t know what I would do. And yet, we’re as close as Goldy and Strider are.”

“Closer.” She finished her beer. “Where is all this going?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure. But I don’t like the Terrible Trio’s reaction any more than I like what they’re reacting to.”

Tick-Tick thought about that for a while. “I think it’s just steam. They’ve been playing their parts for so long—you know, Borderland’s baddest—and this reminds them that they’re mortal.” She looked at the empty bottle. “My, two beers do make me profound.”

“Chatty, anyway.” I beamed at her. She slugged me. After a minute, I asked her, “You think he knew him?” She blinked. “Strider and the pretty boy?” I nodded.

“You think he didn’t?”

I hated not knowing what had really gone on out there on the dance floor. I hated worse knowing that I probably never would. If Strider didn’t want to talk about it, he wouldn’t. We all have secrets in Bordertown; I suppose everyone has secrets in the World and in Faerie, but their secrets are smaller—and maybe more desperate. At least we can think of ourselves as—well, what’s that line from the song by Locas Tambien? “We’re tragic, romantic figures / We’re so much cooler than you!”

From then until closing, we did nothing more demanding than listen to the music and spend the Ticker’s money.

Wild Hunt came back for an encore, and then had to come back for another one even after Dancer turned the lights on. They finally got people settled down and ready to go home by resorting to a ballad, “Jenny on the Hill.” The White Lady put down her bass and sang it, in a style that was brutally simple and wonderfully effective. It took the melodrama out of the ending and made it seem that lost love and premature death were simply the way of the tragic world. I had to pretend to sneeze when the song was over, so I’d have an excuse to blow my nose.

Tick-Tick went to help herd people out the door.

“Orient!” Valda called.

I turned and found her holding up a push broom. “So you want to stay after closing like the employees?”

“Oh, lord,” I sighed, and took the broom. Wolfboy joined me in stacking chairs—all except the one Goldy dropped into and refused to leave.

He looked more drained than I’d ever seen him, and a little tense around the mouth.

“That bad?” I asked him.

“I doubted I’d live to see this moment. I don’t suppose you’d be so kind as to fetch me a beer?”

“The dying bouncer’s last request,” I said, and handed Wolfboy the broom. He snarled at me.

When I came back with the sweating bottle, Goldy said, “Seen your little runaway lately?”

I’d forgotten Caramel, frankly. “No.”

Goldy shook his head. “We may have lost her, then. I’m afraid that the events of the evening scared her away.”

“Can’t blame her for that.” I remembered my last sight of her jaunty, foolish pheasant feather. I’d felt a sneaking smug pleasure, one I hadn’t admitted to myself then, that thanks to me she’d gotten into what might prove to be the concert of the year. I felt dreary suddenly, and very, very old.

Wolfboy looked up then, and Goldy and I followed his gaze. The White Lady was crossing the dance floor toward us. She was even more of an apparition in the dusty setting of Danceland with the houselights on. Once there were angels, and they must have looked like that.

She smiled, a lovely curving of her carved alabaster lips. “May I sit?” Her right hand moved in a fluid arc toward the stacked chairs, and her rings all flickered.

Wolfboy grabbed a chair and set it out for her with a little bow. “Thank you,” she said with a grave smile. I wondered if she’d like one to rest her feet on. Hell, why use a chair? I’d get down on all fours and she could rest ’em on my back.

“You—all of you—were wonderful,” I said, and felt like an idiot.

She laughed. She had the kind of laugh that made you want to say a lot of amusing things. “That’s very sweet of you.”

“And very true,” Goldy said solemnly.

She smiled and tucked her chin. It was a charming gesture. “We don’t often play in concert, and it’s difficult for me—I feel very shy in front of an audience. But everyone here was so excited, so kind to us...” She fluttered her white hands. She had three rings on her right hand, all of elf-silver and sapphires, with only her middle finger and thumb bare of them. She wore none on her left hand; they’re hard on the guitar neck. A sapphire swung from each of her earlobes.

“There was a little too much excitement tonight, I’m afraid,” Goldy said, “for which I am heartily sorry.”

The smile fell off her face, chased away by something that might have been fright. She looked down. “I’m sorry, too,” she said softly. “The one who made the trouble... he was my fault, I think.”

“Your fault?” I asked. It was startled out of me, I suppose. “He... we were lovers, for a short time. He is not willing to leave it at that.”

So that was half of the night’s mystery solved. I felt a little sorry for the Elflander, even as I felt alarmed for her. It wouldn’t be easy to accept the loss of the White Lady with anything like grace.

We all fell silent, not wanting to pry, but not sure how to change the subject. In Bordertown, even more than in the World, you tread very lightly around personal matters—your own or someone else’s.

The pressure was relieved when Dancer came up to us, Tick-Tick dawdling along behind. “Good show,” Dancer said to the White Lady. “Damn good show.” Then I realized that she was carrying the bag that held the night’s receipts. Business with the band leader, of course. We all scattered to various jobs.

I managed to be the one by the door, though, when the White Lady was ready to leave.

“Will you be all right?” I asked her.

“What? Oh, yes, of course. You mustn’t worry about me.” She offered me a lovely smile, a little tinged with sadness. I don’t care if she was half a head taller than me. I felt protective.

“If he’s out there waiting for Strider, you could be in trouble.”

She shook her head. “He won’t hurt me. But I’ll watch for him, and be careful.” She touched my hand lightly, and added, “You are very kind.”

I was struck quite dumb, of course, in both the original and the more corrupt sense of the word. “Perhaps I will see you again?”

“I’d like that,” I said finally, getting my tongue loose from the roof of my mouth. “People around here usually know where I am.”

She looked amused. “But who would I ask them for?” Oh. Right. “My name’s Orient.”

“Orient. And mine is Linden.” She touched me again, a fingertip to my hand, and slipped out into the street and the dark.

I leaned against the door for a moment to catch my breath. Wolfboy was watching me from the bar; he grinned when I met his eyes.

I walked over to him. “I was only asking if she’d be all right,” I muttered. He treated me to one of his hair-raising giggles.

Valda called down the counter to us. “Guys? One more favor? Can you take the bottles back to the alley?”

Wolfboy spread his hands out, as if to imply that we would do anything for her. I wasn’t feeling quite that generous, but I wasn’t above hauling a box or two.

Val had already loaded the empties into the crates. The brewer would pick them up in the morning from the alley. Wolfboy and I shouldered a few each and headed for the back.

The way led past the office door, and I wondered if I should knock, see if Strider was all right. From the way Wolfboy slowed down, I suspected he was wondering the same thing.

“Oh, hell,” I said, “why not? If he objects, he’ll just break my face, right?” I knocked. There was no answer. I tried again, a little louder, and when nothing happened, I opened the door a little. Then I stuck my head in.

The room was just as we’d left it, but Strider wasn’t in it. I pulled my head back out and shut the door. “He must be all right,” I said. “He’s gone.”

Wolfboy thought about that for a second, then shrugged. We went on, through the door at the end of the hall that opened into Danceland’s private garage, and through that to the alley door.

All right, it’s not really an alley, it’s a very small cul-de-sac, with the building’s back door located near the closed end. So it’s black as the inside of an intestine out there on any night except when the moon is bright. Tonight, unfortunately, the moon was bright.

He was lying in a grotesque parody of ease, hands folded over his stomach, legs straight. He looked like a tomb statue in white marble. It was a long and horrible moment before I realized it was not Strider. Then I saw the braid and recognized it, and knew whose corpse it was in Danceland’s alley.

I’ve been staring at that last sentence for fifteen minutes. I’ve tried to go on and describe the body, and failing that, to simply recount, in order, who did what. After all, this is why I’m writing, this is the event I’m trying to make some tentative sense out of. But even though I can see, in my mind, the Elflander’s body—all too well, in fact, which may have as much to do with why I haven’t slept yet as this narrative does—I can’t write it down. It makes me shake.

Dancer sent Val to alert the coppers, and Tick-Tick to Strider’s and Sai’s place to warn them. The Ticker came back and reported that they weren’t there. Just as we were trying to decide if we were relieved by that, Strider came in the front doors. I wish now that one of us had thought to ask what he’d come back for, but I don’t suppose the answer would have been of any use. It’s just a loose end, like where he’d gone in the first place, like where Sai had gone when she’d left the club, like whether anyone could swear that Goldy and Wolfboy had been inside Danceland all night, like whether Linden was bothered enough by her old boyfriend that she’d want him dead. Even the Ticker’s alibi is low-grade. Hell, maybe they all did it. The only person whose innocence I’m certain of is me. And if this goes on, I’ll be asking people to corroborate my memories.

So the cops arrived and did all the investigative things we’d done and a great many more besides, and finally took Strider away with them to the lock-up. It was the obvious thing to do, but it didn’t make it any easier to watch.

The sun’s been up for three hours. I’d forgotten this particular time of day existed. I went back to Danceland after writing the last paragraph. I wanted a cig, and I wanted my damn copy of Stick Wizard, because I knew I wasn’t going to sleep. Both things were still in the sidecar. The Ticker had parked the bike in Danceland’s garage for safekeeping and gone home with Sai, to keep her from being alone and from doing something stupid.

I went to see if someone was around to let me in, or if I could get in by myself. I had to go through the cul-de-sac, of course. I didn’t get in the garage, didn’t even try, because I found something on the ground near the street end of the cul-de-sac, and it distracted me.

So I don’t have my cigs. I have a pheasant feather with a distinctive nick out of one edge, dirty now from lying in the mud. I’ve been picking it up and twirling it or sliding it through my fingers, as if it’s an impression ball, ready to pour out its stored song at a touch. I’ll sleep now. I have to, whatever I might dream. But I want to know what it means. Caramel, where are you now?

•

Doesn’t seem right to scribble in Orient’s diary. I look at my writing on his pages, and it’s like I came to Orient’s grave to make a speech (pretty silly idea, huh?) and found myself puking on the funeral flowers. Too late now. Should’ve tried this in pencil maybe, and erased it if I didn’t like it. Sorry, Orient.

I want to say that this is Lone Wolf’s writing that you’re reading now, but Orient calls me Wolfboy, like most people. Could be worse. Guess I’m grateful I don’t have to say it’s Dogbreath writing this.

It’s not easy. I look at all those pages Orient wrote, and I’m jealous, and I’m sad. He began with last night, but I’ll begin earlier. Orient’s my friend, or maybe, was my friend. That’s why I’m doing this, continuing what he started. Even if my written words aren’t much better than my spoken ones. Orient and I are a bit alike, you see, so it’s more than just finishing something a friend began.

That looks stupid: Orient and I are a bit alike. But it’s true. Maybe he’s not as quiet as I am, but he watches more than he talks. He likes to read, ’cause he thinks there’s more to living than most people do. He—

I hate writing this. God, I hope he’s all right.

He and I, we’ve both been changed by the Change. I don’t know who had it worse. Orient’s fey. That means “touched by Faerie.” He grew up in the World, and people always thought he was strange ’cause he could find things. Things he’d never seen. All he needed to know was that something existed, and—

Shit. I’m writing about him in the past tense. I won’t do that anymore, until we know something. And if he’s dead, I’m sorry. This stupid journal will be my tribute to him. Maybe I’ll burn it, or throw it in the Big Bloody, or see if I can get it published. Something. If he’s alive, he’ll get to read this. If he gets to read this, I want him to know that he’s a pissbrain and the only reason I wrote this was to mess up his stupid diary. The Human Compass writes about me as Wolfboy. What a pissbrain.

I hope he’s okay.

All Orient needs to know is that something exists, and he can find it. He told me about driving through some strange city with his Mom when he was eight. She wanted Greek olives for some reason. Maybe she was taking salad to a family get-together, or something. Orient pointed off in the distance, saying, “There.” She laughed at first, but he got mad. I can imagine it: “There, Mom! There!” And she got mad at his insistence. And she followed his directions to prove that he was wrong, ’cause he had never been in this city, he could not know where to find Greek olives, he did not even know what Greek olives were since she had never made this salad before. She would prove her point to him, then she would spank him, and he would never mention this nonsense again.

Orient led her to a Greek grocery that had the most beautiful olives you could imagine. Big, purple. All right, I’m making that part up. Maybe they were tiny, dried, bitter olives. The point is, they were there.

And the point is, she stared at Orient like he was what he wasn’t.

And the point is, that’s when he quit thinking of himself as a person and started thinking of himself as a freak.

And he never mentioned that nonsense again.

’Course, that didn’t do any good. He couldn’t stop finding stuff. People couldn’t stop noticing. People don’t like what they don’t understand. People don’t know that the trick is to try to understand what they don’t like. Orient was a freak, and in spite of being a handsome, bright kid, he was fey. Everyone whispered it. Some people shouted it. Some people laughed at him. Some people beat him. After a while, he got tired of pretending he didn’t hear and he didn’t hurt. He did what almost all fey kids do. He ran away to beautiful Bordertown. Just like the kid last night, I imagine, and if it’s different, it doesn’t matter.

Started off completely differently for me. I wasn’t bright and I wasn’t unusual and I wasn’t fey. I was a little geek with zits who wanted all the pretty girls, and none of the pretty girls wanted me. Not because I was fey. Because I was nothing special. What I would have given then to be fey...

So I did what all kids do who want to be special. I ran away. Just like the kid last night, maybe. And I ran with a couple of gangs in B-town, and I found that one way to be special was to develop a rep for a smart mouth. I was extremely high one night in the Dancing Ferret and some elf woman was talking too loudly about short-lived humans and their habits. So I said, “Yap, yap, yap. What a—” Well, you can guess what I called her by what she turned me into.

She stared at me at first. She obviously expected something more. Even elves forget sometimes about the way magic ebbs and flows in the Borderlands. Then she laughed, and everyone else laughed, even the Packies I had come with. I turned and ran. Loped, maybe. I could see my hands and arms, and I felt my body hurting and changing. I got my lifelong wish then. Even in Bordertown, I was no longer like anyone else.

There’s a million stories in the big city, and... Nah.

The thing is, Orient and I went through the same things, even if we did them in reverse order, for different reasons. The same past. We both knew too much about being outsiders. Maybe that’s part of the reason he became friends with me. Doesn’t explain the rest of our friends, or maybe it does. Orient said I liked playing dress-up better than most of our crowd, and that’s true so far as it goes. I like feeling a little less like something waiting for a silver bullet and feeling more like part of a community. But I could join any of the thousands of little gangs that form the greater gangs of the Pack, the Rats, the Bloods. Or even one of the independent gangs: Dragonfire, the Horn Dance, Commander X’s Kids... I don’t want it. Orient forgets that he was the one who once suggested we pick a name for ourselves, and I was the one who vetoed it with a chopping motion.

I’m not writing about it. I ought to. Somebody reading this is going to wonder what the hell happened, so I’ll be nice.

The early part of Friday night went pretty much like Orient told it. He was a little more taken with the White Lady, Linden, than I was. I thought she was too fond of playing tricks with her voice, and I’ve seen elf and human and halfie women who did more for me. I thought the real talent in the Wild Hunt was the drummer and the hyper-harpist and the halfie on elfpipe. Big deal. The band’s good and deserves its fame.

I heard a little more of the argument between the Elflander and the White Lady than Orient did. I hear a lot better than I did before I was changed. And I know a little more Elvish than Orient, so the argument was clearer to me. The Elflander wanted Linden to come back with him, he wanted her to come back now, it was important, and her life in Bordertown wasn’t. I’ll bet that really endeared him to her.

I can’t add anything else up until the end. Orient went into the alley first, moving awkwardly with three crates of empties. I knew something was wrong first. I smelled blood. I’m not as good as my rep; I didn’t know what kind of blood it was. I smelled a lot of things, most of them alley things, and some of them things that the Elflander did as he died. I attributed those to the alley, too, at first.

It was the stupid Faeriecloth coat that tipped me off. It caught the light from the back door. I wondered why the stranger ditched it, then I grinned, thinking someone had swiped it from him to teach him a lesson about Soho. I was still grinning when I saw that he was still in his coat. I was still grinning when I saw what had been done with him while he was in his coat. I made a grunting sound and set down my load of crates.

Orient turned. Then he saw what I was looking at, and we both stared for a little longer, then he went to the side and threw up. I don’t think he left that part out because he was ashamed. I think it wasn’t important to him.

The Elflander’s coat was in ribbons, like his skin, and the light made him all shiny with elfblood. I don’t know why I didn’t vomit. Maybe dogs can't vomit for emotional reasons. The Elflander’s long white braid had been stuffed into his mouth, and a part of my mind was saying that wasn’t very original while another part stared in horror. His dueling toy was still in his hand.

Orient and I went into the back room without having to suggest it to each other. Neither of us wanted to have to look at the corpse. Orient leaned against a stack of whiskey kegs and brought up both hands to push back his black, red-tipped hair. Or maybe just to massage his temples. He said, “Strider’s in trouble.”

I grunted.

“Can we cover it up?” That was phrased as a question more out of habit, I think, of being considerate of me. He answered it himself. “No way. Might get Dancer in trouble with the coppers, if we wait. Might get Strider in more trouble. Shit.” He looked at me then, face pale and controlled. “I’ll tell Dancer. It’s her alley, after all.”

I nodded. I was as happy to pass on the decision. Now I wish to god I’d sat down with Orient and talked about what we saw, him babbling, me scribbling on something. Maybe he wouldn’t be missing now if we had.

Having read what Orient wrote, I can guess what thoughts were going through his head as we went to tell Dancer. Strider did it. No, Strider’d meet the Elflander near the river or in a bombed-out house or in a deserted theater, and they’d fight until honor was satisfied or Strider was dead. That’s how Strider thinks, the simple git.

Sai did it then, to protect Strider from the stranger who had cut her lover for fun. No, Sai wouldn’t jump someone in the alley, and Sai wouldn’t go after him until she knew Strider was fine. Then she’d arrange for the stranger to be without his little dueling toy—have some friends surround him, or something. And she’d show him why she was SoHo’s middleweight champion for a season and a half, until she decided she was too pretty to stay a boxer. Sai wouldn’t kill. Not like this, anyway.

That meant Goldy did it, because he was frustrated that he couldn’t do anything else to show he cared for Strider, because he felt that he should have stopped the stranger sooner somehow, because he stepped outside to grab a breath of fresh air and saw the Elflander waiting for Strider—And that didn’t work either, because Goldy’s not like that, no more than the rest of us are. In fact, Goldy might take a certain delight in tossing the Elflander to the cops for a night in the B-town jail. Wouldn’t do that with a local, but with a Faerie lord in a silly coat...

And that left Orient with one last suspect, his White Lady. He wouldn’t like that, ’cause he had a crazy crush on Linden. But Orient’s smart. He’d weigh the possibility, and it wouldn’t work any better than any of the rest. You don’t carve up a crazy boyfriend. You just wait patiently until he finds someone else to pester. No wonder Orient seemed so frustrated in his last notes.

We stepped into the main room and Orient said, “The elf that made trouble tonight...” I was the only one who knew why he stopped, but everyone could tell something was wrong.

Val came over and put her arm around his back. “What?” she said.

“He’s dead. In the back alley. He’s all...” Orient winced. “... cut up.”

“Fuck,” Goldy said. Goldy never swears.

Dancer and the Ticker went back to look while Orient tried to describe it to Goldy and Val. His words didn’t do much to tell it, but his tone did. I was actually glad I couldn’t talk, myself.

“We call the cops,” Dancer said when she came back. “No,” Goldy whispered, and I thought there was going to be worse trouble.

Dancer didn’t hear, or maybe she’s wise enough to know when to pretend she didn’t. “Val, go tell Strider and Sai what happened. Tick-Tick will go tell the cops.” She glanced at the Ticker. “Better take the avenues to the cop shop, ’cause the short cuts might not be safe this time of night. And I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t even leave for another five minutes or so. Bikes can be so hard to start, sometimes.”

The Ticker smiled a tiny bit, more in recognition than in humor. Goldy nodded, said, “Yes. That’s right.”

Dancer brewed a pot of coffee while we sat around, not really talking about anything important, people saying things like “Good band,” and “Bastard deserved it,” and “Fuckin’ hell!” and no one bothering to answer any of the things. Dancer poured coffee for us all, and I realized that was another first. Not the freebies, ’cause Dancer can be so generous I sometimes wonder how she stays in business. But she never worked behind the counter. Val usually made decent coffee, and Goldy brewed great coffee. Dancer’s tasted like she was the one who taught Goldy, but even Orient’s “good coffee” seemed perfunctory.

Val came back and said Sai and Strider weren’t home. I didn’t like that. Then Strider came in. I liked that less. He was pocketing his key to the place and saying, “Anybody seen Sai?” He stopped, stared at us staring at him. “What’d I say?” And when no one answered immediately, he added, “Hey, if my part’s crooked, I’m sorry, I lost my comb.” His hair, as usual, was a perfect white mane.

Goldy shook his head.

“That’s a joke,” Strider said, moving toward the bar where we had gathered. Then he stopped and said quietly, “Something happened to Sai.”

“No, Strider,” Goldy said. “Not that we know of.”

“It’s that elf,” Dancer said. “He’s dead back by the empties. Cut up bad, like someone hated him.” That was obviously a warning, not an accusation. “Tick-Tick’s gone for the cops. I told her to. If I didn’t, they’d shut me down.”

Strider’s pale face went paler, which is some trick. The new scar was like a lightning flash on his cheek. He sat on a stool and whispered, “Oh, to sail a sunless sea.” It took me a minute to realize that was a Faerie oath, and before I did, Strider sounded more like himself. “It’s all right, Dancer.”

“I told her to stall. You could get out—” He shook his head. “And go where? This is Bordertown. I’m Strider. I don’t want anything else.”

“Don’t be a bigger fool!” Goldy hit the table with the flat of his chocolate-brown hand, and our cups danced.

Strider smiled slightly. “Hey, Goldy, don’t give me that. You know.”

“Yeah, you bastard.” Goldy turned his back on us all. His broad shoulders shook, and no one spoke for a minute or two.

“He’s dead,” Strider said, not quite asking. “Yes,” Orient said. “Fine. Then I don’t have to see him.” He glanced at Dancer. “Coffee, please?” “Yeah, sure.” She slid him a cup. “Goldy?” he asked, lifting the cup to his lips. Goldy grunted, sounding like me, I suppose. He didn’t turn around. “Tell Sai I love her. Tell her not to do anything stupid. And don’t you do anything stupid, either.” Goldy’s bright head bobbed in a nod. “Got any poems for me, Wolfboy?” I shook my head. I hadn’t written anything in three weeks, but I knew I’d write something soon. “You’re innocent,” Orient said, and his voice was accusing and angry. “Maybe.” Orient looked upward in exasperation. “You could say so, then.” Goldy said, “He doesn’t have to.” “No,” said Orient. “I guess not.”

Tick-Tick came back with the cops soon after that. I didn’t recognize them as cops, not immediately. There’s not a lot of law in B-town, and you almost never see the Silver Suits in uniform in SoHo. Law only comes in for important things, like an ugly killing that too many people will hear of. The woman was about Dancer’s age. Her hair was a sun-bleached brown with flecks of white, combed straight back from her forehead. Her skin was lighter than Goldy’s and darker than Tick-Tick’s. She wore a loose cotton jacket cut from a pattern of tropic flowers, black slacks, and black loafers. Her eyes were hidden behind silver glasses, probably Night Peepers. She kept one hand in her slacks pocket, maybe ’cause there was a weapon there, maybe ’cause it made her jacket hang better. The elf was less conspicuous, with his white hair cut very close to his skull and dressed in a sea-green suit.

“Name’s Rico,” the human said, not smiling. “My partner’s Detective Linn. Anyone want to see a copper card?” I’ve always wondered about that name, ’cause the only c-card I ever saw was brass.

“It’s all right, Sunny,” Dancer said, and Goldy snickered.

“Good,” Rico replied, looking at Dancer. “Sorry you’re in this.” Her head didn’t move at all as she asked Goldy, “Something amusing?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sunny.” Once we had a talk about why cops were called coppers. Goldy said that was because you could buy them cheap.

“For my cheerful disposition,” Rico said. So far her face hadn’t been any more expressive than her silver glasses. “Think it’s funny, Walter?” Goldy didn’t answer. At another time, the whole exchange would have been amusing, but it wasn’t now. I think Rico agreed. She said, “Everyone stick around, okay? You—” she pointed at me. “—show me the body while Linn takes statements.”

I can’t say that she did anything more significant than we did. She lit the place with a torch spell, which impressed me until I saw that it only made everything more obvious, and more ugly. Rico whistled a low note as she looked at the Elflander. She walked around and studied things, not touching anything. Then she stood quietly, and I figured she was doing what I was doing: trying to imagine it.

When she was ready to go, I stepped in front of her. I pointed at the body, pointed at the alley, and shrugged. Rico’s about my height, so she looked straight at me in that way they must teach at cop school and said, “Aren’t I going to do something more? What do you want? I should take fingerprints? I should try a spell to sense what happened here?”

I nodded.

“Right. Look, Lobo—” I realized it must have been the Ticker who told her my name.”—even if we had the murder weapon, we probably wouldn’t sense anything more than rage, quick heartbeats, and a real sick pleasure. And that last is a guess, so don’t quote me. As for fingerprints, make me laugh. No murder weapon. In an alley, anything else is circumstantial. The whole case would probably end right here if it wasn’t for two things.” She held the back of her hand toward me and lifted her index finger. “Your friend made some crazy threats in front of three hundred people.” She raised the next finger. “Someone killed Tejorinin Yorl.”

I tucked my chin slightly, showing her I didn’t understand.

“I don’t know either,” Rico admitted. “Not exactly. Some elf kid who just inherited something important in Faerie. Don’t know why he came out here; maybe on vacation or something. But he was rich and important, and we’ve gotta get someone for his murder.”

I almost hit her.

“I don’t like it,” Rico said. “Not at all. Dancer’s told me about most of you, and I asked questions of your friend at my office. Sounds like you’re all okay, for B-town kids. But facts are facts, Lobo. If we can find who’s responsible, everything’ll be fine. If we can’t...” She shrugged and headed back into Danceland.

I stood there and thought about it, until she called back. “C’mon, Lobo. I know you write. Linn’ll want your statement too.”

I just realized one of the reasons Orient might have started writing this account. It’s a testimony. I thought it was a diary, or what he said: he couldn’t sleep. Then I thought maybe he wanted to publish his version of the story in one of the street papers, maybe try to sell a book to one of the World presses: I Ran with a Bordertown Gang by “Orient.” Yeah, sure. Orient’s smarter than that.

Consciously or subconsciously, Orient was thinking about the same things Rico made me think about. Questions are being asked, and the answers have to go a long way. This Yorl was an Elflander, so there’ll be reports going to Faerie at least, and maybe to the World as well. Which means, just maybe, this thing we’re writing is going to be read by people who don’t know dick about B-town.

I went in and listened to the last couple of stories. The elf cop had a notebook, and he wrote everything in. Strider claimed to have been walking around, just thinking. Goldy was moving around the floor all the time, he said, but the cops knew he could have ducked out for a few minutes while claiming to be in a back room or on the balconies. They wrote down the names of the members of Wild Hunt, but didn’t seem too excited about getting anything from them. About the only time no one was watching them was while Yorl was slicing Strider, and Yorl was still alive when the band reassembled.

“What about Sai?” asked Rico. “She went walking, too,” said Goldy, not too happy. Rico nodded. “It’s a houseful of great alibis.”

I sat there, scribbling on some paper that Dancer lent me. I could have interrupted the statements, I suppose, but I wanted to write out my theory in full. So I did, and it was short, only a paragraph like the following:

The killing was the work of a gang, three at least and probably more. I saw Yorl when he was cutting Strider on the dance floor. Yorl was good, like he’d studied that dueling gadget for years. He was too good to let himself be carved all over, even by Strider. And this work was done mostly for the fun of the carvers. You saw that. The business with the braid. Even if Strider killed Yorl, Strider wouldn’t do that. Yorl had to have been surrounded, and as one kid distracted him, another cut him. Some sickies probably heard talk about Strider and the Elflander and decided to kill an outsider for fun, figuring Strider would get the blame. Everyone on Ho Street had to be talking about what happened in Danceland.

“A gang,” Rico said, when she joined me at a table.

I nodded.

“You’re the only one with this gang theory.”

I nodded again and gestured for her to give me back the paper. When she did, I wrote something like:

Orient doesn’t know much about knife fights. He didn’t think about the cuts. Or about what it means, doing that thing with the braid to a corpse. You blame him?

I think she smiled a tiny bit, and that was worse than the absence of expression. “No, I don’t. You want to pin this on the Bloods, the Pack, or the Rats?”

I snorted in disgust and wrote:

You think there’s only a few gangs here? There are hundreds. There are some really twisted bunches that hide within the bigger gangs. They wear the colors of the Bloods or the Pack or the Rats. They claim allegiance to the bigger gang and act like the rest of that gang is behind them. Could be any of them.

That little smile came back. “Dancer and I ran with the Go-boys when I was your age. We were part of the Pack. So, who do you favor?”

That made me stop, not because of what I wanted to say, but because of the fact I was writing this for a cop. Then I wrote: You hear of an idiot named Fineagh Steel who styled himself the leader of the Bloods? Fineagh built a little army of elf morons—they may live longer than us, but they can come just as stupid—then jackbooted around Soho for all of a week or two. Some kid took him out in a duel. I imagine a few of the bigger Blood gangs would’ve done something about him if the kid hadn’t.

Rico nodded. “I hear he’s dead. I hear his gang’s scattered. You think this was the work of one of his lieutenants maybe?”

I shrugged.

“Doesn’t work, Lobo.” She took off her glasses and grinned at me. Her eyes weren’t any friendlier than the glasses. “Why carve a strange elf? If they were jealous of him, they’d rough him up and steal his money, that’s all. No need to get the cops down on everyone.”

I nodded, wishing I had someone better to point at.

Rico folded up the page I’d written on and replaced her glasses. “Nice theory,” she said. “No evidence to back it up.” When she said that, it was like she’d kicked me, even though her voice sounded kind, for her. “Sorry.” Then she tore up my statement and handed me the shreds. I stared at it. She said, “If I convinced anyone that Strider couldn’t have done it by himself, we’d just have to lock up a couple of his friends, too.” She patted the back of my hand and left me sitting at the table.

I decided not to tell anyone about it until I knew more. Maybe Orient would still be around if I’d showed the pieces of my statement to him.

Rico and Linn left with Strider when a van and a few Silver Suits showed up. The Silver Suits poked around and fingerprinted us all and did some mystical juju that obviously had as much effect as Rico expected, but now their report would be nice and fat. When they were done, one of them said none of us should disappear. Goldy laughed at that, but it’s a little ominous, now that Orient’s gone. The Silver Suits took away Yorl’s body in a shiny black bag, and finally, Dancer said, “To hell with it. Good night, everybody.” And we all wandered out into the good night.

It’s Sunday. Still no Orient. I woke, went away, heard some interesting news, drank a whole lot of coffee. Now I have to do something while I wait, so I’ll keep abusing Orient’s journal.

I woke up around noon Saturday and didn’t want to get out of bed. I lay there, thinking it was time to change the sheets and wishing I lived with somebody and wondered if maybe Strider did it. Time does that, lets you see things differently, sometimes in ways you wish it didn’t. Whether he did or didn’t, I like Strider. But what do I know about him? What do I know about myself? Maybe the killing was an accident, and then Strider had to figure out how to cover it up. If you accept that, it’s not too hard to imagine him doing the rest, forcing himself to do something so atypical that no one would believe he had killed Yorl. Under normal circumstances, all he would need was a reasonable amount of doubt in the situation and charges would probably be dropped. He may never have known that he’d killed someone as important as Tejorinin Yorl.

Or maybe he knew exactly who he’d killed. What was Strider in the Elflands, before he was Strider?

The day was cooler than the day before, but that doesn’t bother me. I found my other jeans and a corduroy jacket and decided not to bother with shoes. There’s enough broken glass in B-town that that isn’t the smartest thing to do, I suppose, but it makes people think I’m tough. The fact is I tended to run from trouble before I was changed. Now that I’m stronger and more perceptive, I run even faster.

I went to Sai’s. She makes great huevos rancheros without the least provocation. And if she didn’t feel like cooking for a stray, she might need some company.

She had company. Tick-Tick was there, sitting a little stiffly on a purple beanbag, maybe aware that it clashed with the red leather outfit that she wore. Sai wore a faded man’s undershirt and cut-offs. Under her black bangs, her eyes were almost as red as Tick-Tick’s leather. I made a little circular motion with my hand, and Sai smiled a tiny bit, saying, “Hi, Wolf boy. C’mon in. The Ticker toasted bagels, but I’m not too hungry.”

I suppose I should mention that Sai was almost always hungry, but you probably get the idea that Friday night’s events had everyone acting out of character.

Tick-Tick said, “Rico and her faithful elvin companion came by earlier.” I nodded and stuffed a bagel in my face.

“They didn’t have anything useful to say,” she said, and shrugged. “We didn’t have anything useful to tell them.”

“She said I could visit Strider,” Sai said. “You want to come, too?”

I grabbed two bagels and followed. Sai took her bike, a beautiful blue thing that she called the Bat-cycle for some reason. I hopped into Orient’s usual place in Tick-Tick’s sidecar, which made me wonder where he was. I pointed at the seat and frowned, and the Ticker said, “I haven’t seen him around. We were supposed to meet. We can swing by his place after seeing Strider.”

The B-town Jail isn’t particularly better or worse than most jails, I imagine, but I wouldn’t want to stay there. Rico had left a note at the front desk, so we didn’t have any trouble getting in. I wasn’t too crazy about the man at the front desk, who shook his head as he looked at me and said, “You kids are getting weirder every year.”

A couple of Silver Suits walked Strider into the waiting room and leaned up against the wall as if they were bored enough to sleep. One was bored by each door, and they both had three-foot sting-rods dangling from straps around their right wrists.

“Nice place,” Tick-Tick said. “You should try their breakfast,” Strider answered. “You’re such an asshole,” Sai said. “I’m glad to see you, too, love.”

They kissed, and the Ticker and I tried to pretend we were as bored as the guards. “We’re getting you out of here,” Sai said quietly. “No whispering,” one guard called. “Besides, you aren’t.” “He’s innocent!” Sai said.

“You’re confessing?” the guard asked. Before Sai could say anything more, he said, “Look, kids. Behave yourselves, and we won’t bug you.”

“Yeah,” Strider said, seconding the guard’s advice.

“Okay,” Sai said. “Okay. But I don’t like this, Strider. I want you out of here.”

“No chance for bail,” Strider said. “I just hope I don’t lose my tan.”

“Don’t be a pain,” Tick-Tick said. “You just make it worse for Sai when you act like that.”

Sai quickly shook her head. “No. I understand.”

“Hey,” Strider said softly, and he stroked her chin with his forefinger. “I’m okay. Maybe I’ll get a lot of reading done.”

“Rico said the charge is Murder One,” Sai said. “I don’t want you to get that much reading done.”

Tick-Tick’s elvin features were very grim as she said, “You won’t get any reading done if they opt for a memory-wipe, Strider. Not until you learn how again. And if they pick death—”

Strider turned away suddenly. “Trial’s weeks away. ’Sides, they’ll do what they’ll do, okay? You guys better leave now.”

“No,” the Ticker said. “I can go back to my cell anytime,” Strider said.

“You certainly could,” the Ticker admitted. “That won’t help you, and it won’t help Sai. Is that what you want?”

“I want out,” Strider said.

The Ticker nodded. “I know. We have to find who did it. The cops need someone to hang for this one. Maybe literally.”

Strider glanced at Sai. She looked at her lap, and I suddenly knew why Strider was being so stupid. I suspected it earlier, but I knew it then. He thought Sai did it. He was too stupid to realize that if she had and he’d been arrested, she would’ve confessed immediately. I wondered if she’d already considered confessing anyway, just to save Strider. I decided to ask Tick-Tick or Orient later. No point in giving Sai the idea.

I pulled out a sheet of scrap paper and wrote out something like what I’d written for Rico about my theory, then added: Problem is, we don’t have anyone likely. Any ideas?

One of the guards read it before letting Strider have it. Strider read it and his eyes flicked wide from their usual squint. “You sure about this, Wolfboy?”

I held my hands wide, like: Who’s ever sure? Then I nodded. Sai and Tick-Tick read the note together. Tick-Tick said, “You should’ve said something—Oops.”

I waved downward to show I’d let that pass, then grabbed the note back and scribbled: Rico didn’t like it. Where’s a suspect? Who’d want to carve a stranger, even one as bad as Yorl?

“Wharf Rats, perhaps,” Tick-Tick mused. “A chance for fun, and a chance to blame someone else.” “Not all the Rats are like that,” Sai said. Her brother’s a Rat. “It only takes three or four like that,” Tick-Tick said. “There were five Rats in Danceland last night,” Strider said, and we all got very quiet.

“Is it my turn to call you an idiot?” Tick-Tick asked.

“No,” Strider said. “Hers.” He pointed at Sai.

“I’ll save it for later,” Sai said. “What about these Rats?”

“They had a table up on the left balcony. Near the women’s room. I was watching them before Yorl decided I was a fencing dummy.”

I lifted my hand. Tick-Tick glanced at me, then told Strider and Sai, “After you two left, Lobo filled in on the floor.”

“Did you see the Rats?” Strider asked, surprisingly hopeful for Strider. “One was a little brown-haired guy with tiny round glasses. Wire rims. The rest were, well, Rats.”

Rats aren’t usually distinctive as anything more than Rats. Sai’s brother is a nice guy, but he’s a River addict like most of them, and he dresses poorly and smells a little funny... I didn’t think about any of that. I just shook my head.

“You went by that corner,” Tick-Tick said to me, ’cause she likes things very clear. “After Strider and Yorl fought. And the Rats weren’t there.” I nodded. I’d remember Rats. The Ticker added, “Was this when you and Goldy first made the rounds?” I nodded again. Tick-Tick smiled. “Rico might like your theory a little better, now.”

“Yeah,” said Strider without any emotion at all. “Some Rats did it. She’ll love that.” “Still...” Tick-Tick said. “We’ll find them,” Sai announced. Strider nodded, not particularly hopeful, and said to Sai, “I thought...”

“I know,” she said, and the Ticker and I looked away again. We talked for another couple of minutes about nothing particularly promising. When it was time to go, I gave Strider a poem I wrote late the night before. It was a stupid thing about owls flying over dark forests, but he read it and said, “Nice. I’ll put it on my wall.”

His own damn wall. That was when I could’ve cried. Tick-Tick watched me give him the poem, then suddenly began patting her pockets. She came up with the new Stick Wizard and passed it on, saying, “From Orient and me.” Sai looked sad. “I didn’t bring you anything.”

“Yes, you did,” he said, and kissed her lightly on the lips. Then his mouth quavered a fraction, and he turned and said to the guards, “Let’s go.”

Sai watched him leave, then said, “Where to?”

“Orient,” Tick-Tick announced.

“He can find a Rat with round glasses?”

“I don’t know,” the Ticker admitted. “But it’s worth a try.”

And it would have been, if we could have found Orient. We went to his flat, then to Danceland, where we told Goldy and Dancer and Val what we’d learned. None of them had seen Orient. Val was annoyed because he’d promised to buy her lunch at Taco Hell. So we went back to Orient’s apartment. The Ticker had a spare key, so we went in and bitched about him being out of anything worth drinking. Then Sai saw his diary open on the kitchen table.

“You shouldn’t read that,” Tick-Tick said. “It’s about last night,” Sai replied.

“Ah,” Tick-Tick said, and she read over Sai’s left shoulder while I read over Sai’s right. Tick-Tick finished first. She moved away and said, “Why didn’t he come get me?”

“He didn’t want to wake you,” Sai said hesitantly: “Maybe he didn’t want to wake me.”

Tick-Tick didn’t answer. She looked out the window, then said, “I’m spreading the word. I’ll tell Horn Dance, I’ll tell Scully, I’ll tell Commander X’s Kids. Somebody must have seen him somewhere.”

“I’ll go too,” Sai said.

“Someone should wait here, in case he returns.”

They both stared at me until I volunteered with a nod. I reread Orient’s entry, then began my own. No Orient. I woke up this morning on his rug—which needs to be swept or beaten. Goldy came by with a turkey sandwich and a quart of orange juice. He brought coffee beans. (I write that hoping Orient will read this and suffer a little for troubling his friends.) Goldy made a big pot of coffee and told me that the gangs are turning B-town inside out. Everyone was calling in favors. Sai has her brother’s friends cruising the wharfs. Goldy talked to a few Pack leaders who hope he’ll join their gangs someday. Tick-Tick spread the word among the Bloods; what with the ones who like her and the ones who admire Strider, there’ll be a lot of elves in red leather cruising B-town. She even made a run up the Tooth to speak with Scully and some of the Hill kids, Dancer and Val went to talk with Farrel Din and other old-timers. Goldy says the streets are alive. We’ll find Orient and we’ll find the Rats who were in Danceland Friday night, and maybe we’ll even find who killed the Elflander. Sometimes I’m rather proud of this stupid town.

•

Reading Wolfboy’s entry, I almost felt as if I was dead. Are there ghosts? If they walk, do they suffer from the guilty looking-over-someone’s-shoulder feeling that I got from Wolfboy’s introduction?

There’s a lot of comfort, for me, in reading his account of what happened. The knowledge that Wolfboy and the Ticker were at work on the other end of the puzzle and that we eventually met in the middle—it puts everything in context. I wasn’t alone, I wasn’t isolated; I was helping to solve the larger problem in my own inimitable nitwitted fashion. But that’s not what it felt like in that room.

As soon as I’d written, “Caramel, where are you now?” I felt the pull. It’s not as if it grids itself out nicely in my head: here’s all the compass points marked with little red letters, and here’s the dotted line drawn over the street map with the big star at the end marked “You win!” I’m a finder, not a cartographer.

“Pull” is the best description I have for it. When I’m trying to find something, whether it’s running water or someone’s glasses, I can feel it drawing me toward it as if I was on the end of a string. The string, unfortunately, can go straight through furniture, buildings, or a dozen feet of solid earth, which is more than can be said for me. I also don’t know where the thing is until I’ve found it, which is why you can’t walk across town, knock on my door, say, “Orient, I’ve lost my pink socks,” and expect me to tell you they’re on the floor of your closet. But if you ask me to find them for you, I’ll feel the pull, and if I follow it, I’ll be led eventually to your place, your closet, and your socks. Payment in advance, please.

So Caramel felt like Thataway, and I left the journal and the feather behind and followed my feelings.

I dodged around a lot. The way led through Soho, where fallen buildings or contumacious gangs will sometimes block off streets or even whole neighborhoods. There are also a few gangs who wouldn’t dream of keeping strangers out—the local economy would collapse if they did. I triangulated around anything I couldn’t walk through, and ended up near the river.

Caramel was in what remained of a warehouse-loft a few blocks from the wharf. It had been brownstone once, with a frosting of terra-cotta details: garlands and vases and things, and elaborate moldings around the windows. Some of the terra-cotta remained, though much was either scavenged or broken. The whole building had been painted by the simple expedient of getting on the roof and pouring cans of paint down the walls. No one had thought to mask the windows, apparently.

I could hear harsh-voiced bells from a distant boat. I smelled fish, machine oil, and the sweet-and-musty odor of the Mad River. An orange cat slid from a windowsill and into hiding as I watched. Nothing else moved. It was too late in the morning for the fish markets, and too early for anyone else in this neighborhood. Hell, it was too early for me. I was hungry, and raw all over from lack of sleep. I felt as if I’d left my eyeballs in talcum powder overnight. My finding talent, which doesn’t turn off and fades only slowly, had begun to feel like a rhythmic yanking, mostly at my back teeth. And, of course, I was solidly in the middle of Wharf Rat territory. My day was made.

I circled the building once, just to make sure Caramel was in it and not in something past it. The possibility that she’d done the murder had crossed my mind. It must have been on its way to someplace else, because it didn’t stay long. But it made me nervous to find her in Rat City. It reminded me of that bottle of river water I’d taken from her. The water of the Big Bloody can, among other things, produce multiple personalities in a human being, all with a remarkable talent for disguise. Many of the Rats are raving psychotics in lamb suits.

If she didn’t kill the Elflander—which, nervous or not, I was betting—then the evidence pointed to her as a witness. If I could get her out of hiding and convince her to talk... well. I was counting on her clearing Strider. But if she convicted him instead, then that was right, it was justice, and I’d see it done and get the hell out of town because I wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of the place anymore.

There was no security on the front door, of course. I followed my talent up the stairs, through a hall whose walls might have been held up by the binding action of the spray paint on them. Then in midhallway I stopped, and stepped back into an alcove where a radiator had once stood.

The Ticker would have had my skin, I realized, long before that. She’s tried for years to instill a sense of self-preservation in me, and after all her work, it’s only rudimentary. In this case, for instance, it kicked in much too late.

Sin Number One: I’d arrived unarmed, unprovisioned, and unaccompanied. I could just hear her. Orient, my dear boy, we have a body count already. This is Condition Red. I don’t care if you’re only going down the hall to take a leak...

Sin Number Two: Having already committed number one, I’d compounded it by walking into a strange building in hostile territory without noticing what was, literally, right under my nose.

There are a lot of ways for an inhabited building to smell. Infants. Boiled cabbage. Sex. Disinfectants. Lamb chops. Perfume. Wood stoves. I haven’t got the Wolf’s nose, but I didn’t need it. This building was lived in by a group of people with nasty personal habits. Drinking river water gives human sweat and urine a characteristic odor, and that odor haunted the halls and clanked its chains at me. Oh, I knew those chains.

I stood in the alcove cussing myself out for maybe three-quarters of a minute. Then I continued down the hall. What else could I do? If they had a sentry hidden, I’d already been seen, and there’d be someone waiting for me on the stairs. If there wasn’t a sentry, I had nothing to worry about anyway.

There were only two doors in the hall, and one of those was a rusty sliding one for an old dumbwaiter system. My trail led through the wall between them. I put my ear to the clammy plaster and heard voices, but none of them was Caramel.

I heard a sound behind me and turned. I was just in time to see that the rusty dumbwaiter door hid a nice renovated quiet lift mechanism, and that the woman stepping out of it had a tire iron. Her first swing caught the wrist of the arm I’d blocked with. Her second landed where the first had been meant to: the side of my head. Lightning flash. And nothing.

Coming back was slow, and I suspect intermittent. That last is hard to be sure of, since I wasn’t a reliable observer through much of it. But I know when I woke up more or less in earnest.

I didn’t know where I was. I don’t mean I didn’t recognize it—I’m talking about with my eyes still closed. I couldn’t find north. I couldn’t find anything.

It was like waking up to discover you’re lying on the ceiling. A scream worked its way into my throat and stuck there.

I don’t know if it was the vertigo or the blow to the head—I haven’t had a lot of experience with being knocked out—but stage two involved being violently sick. I got myself propped up on my elbows afterward, in the process discovering the grinding pain in my wrist. I was cold and sweating and trembling, and I wanted to wash my mouth out with something. I lifted my head, very carefully, and saw what the Welcome Wagon had left.

A big glass jar of water. In red.

A little despairing noise got out of my mouth before I could stop it, and I rolled over and covered my eyes with my good arm. Welcome back, Orient.

I heard a door open; then someone kicked my foot solidly. The little seismograph recently installed in my skull went to the top end of its scale. When I dared open my eyes, I found a brown-haired man in wire-rimmed glasses bending over me. He smiled kindly when he saw I was conscious. All his teeth were bad.

“Hello. Are you feeling better now?”

I felt much worse. He had the gentle voice and sweet manner that I associate with genuine maniacs.

“Good. You know,” he said with a birdlike turn of his head, “if you meant to ride in like The Borderland Kid and rescue your little friend, you didn’t do a very good job.”

His eyes went quickly to the other side of the room, and I got my head up enough to look there. Caramel was sitting hunched in the corner staring mournfully from under her tousled brown hair. Big miserable brown eyes. I lowered my head. “Thank you. I know,” I said. I felt very much like hell.

He smiled meditatively down at me, massaging his fingers. “Well, you’ll have to stay here now. She’ll pull her weight just fine, once she gets used to things—” and he grinned at the jar of river water next to me. “You—we’ll find a place for you too, I’m sure. Make yourself comfortable.” He nodded and left the room. The bolt slid home.

I heard Caramel scramble across the floor to me. “Are you—” she began in a whisper. “Oh, shit, of course you’re not okay. Can I do anything to help?”

“No. Thanks.” I wasn’t whispering to keep them from hearing us. I was whispering to keep me from hearing us.

A moment later she lifted my head, very carefully, and put something soft under it. “My jacket,” she explained.

The cloth smelled like soap and clean cotton. And I’d thought she lived in a building like this?

“When they brought you in... I thought you were dead. There’s blood on your face.” She paused, men said, “I know you shouldn’t drink this stuff, but is it safe to wash in?”

“Yeah. Better wash it now, though, before we get desperate.” “Desperate?” “Before long we’re going to be very thirsty. That’s why it’s there.” “Should we throw it out, then?”

“They’ll bring us more.”

She didn’t answer that. After a moment I felt damp cloth against my cheek and smelled the water. I opened my eyes finally.

She looked older than she had last night. That’s not quite true; she still looked sixteen. It was just an older sixteen. Ah, Bordertown, with its little rites of passage.

“You have a concussion, I think,” she said. “How do you—” “Your right pupil looks a little bigger than the left. What are you doing here?” That last sentence sounded yanked out of her. I smiled, sort of. “I told you I’d find you if I needed you.”

“How?”

I told her about my talent. It was a little perfunctory, since I felt out of breath the whole time. But when I finished, her eyes were round and wondering.

“That’s marvelous!” “Not always,” I said.

She was startled. Then she looked down and seemed very intent on wringing out her scarf. “I guess this is one of those times.”

“No!” I reached toward her with my right hand. She was on my left side so it didn’t quite make it. “That’s not what I meant.”

I now know what a searching look is; she fastened one on me. “You’re a nice guy,” she said, as if it was not a compliment but a simple observation of fact.

My conscious mind was beginning to go out with the tide. “Not always,” I repeated, and went off into the dark again.

Waking up was much simpler the second time. I shifted position in my sleep, and my left wrist hit the floor. I made some noises, some of them profane. I had the good sense to raise my head to look at it, rather than raising the arm. My wrist was plum-colored where the tire iron had connected, and impressively swollen. “Should splint it,” I muttered to myself.

“Working on it,” Caramel said. She sat down next to me and held up two pieces of wood. “Dividers from the desk drawers,” she said cheerfully.

Neither of us really knew how to apply a splint, but I helped by lying still and gritting my teeth. When she was done, I felt like a seal with a wooden flipper, but the joint was immobile.

I hadn’t known there was a desk in the room until then. I got my right elbow under me and checked out the cell.

It had been someone’s library once, high-ceilinged, with tall windows and decorative plaster friezes at the tops of the walls. Most of the walls were fitted with built-in shelves, all of them empty now. There were water stains on the plaster from leaks in the roof. One window had been inexpertly bricked up, probably right after the Change. The other window was barred, and the light came dimly through a layer of pea-green paint. There was a fireplace between two tiers of shelves, closed up with a sheet of plywood wedged into the opening. The floor must have been handsome once, but damp and neglect had weathered the planks gray. A heap of what looked like bedding occupied one corner, and the aforementioned desk, one drawer missing, stood in another.

“All the comforts of home,” I muttered. Caramel didn’t answer. “Are you okay?” I asked. She snorted. “Yeah.” “They... didn’t hurt you, did they?”

She shook her head, then realized what I was really trying to say. “No. A couple of them thought about it, but I talked them out of it.”

“You talked them out of it?”

She grinned. “This is kind of embarrassing.”

“I won’t laugh. I’m not sure I can.”

“Well, I told them something from an old story I heard once. I told them I was fey, and that everybody in my family turned into tigers when they lost their virginity, and ate their lovers. And that I was still a virgin.”

I had to laugh after all. “That’s really dumb.”

“I know.” She was laughing, too. “But they were all pretty high. I don’t think they’d have swallowed it otherwise.” She folded her knees up under her chin. “I hadn’t been in here long before they brought you in.”

“Did they bring you here?”

She shook her head. “I followed them from Danceland. I managed to get myself locked in the garage downstairs. That’s where they found me.”

“You shouldn’t have followed them.” Caramel fell silent for a little, then said, “They killed that guy.” That was hard to reply to. So I didn’t.

“I think they were waiting for him. I saw him turn the corner into the alley, walking with one of them, and when I got to the corner, the rest were there. The guy with the glasses held out something in his hand and said, ‘Looking for this?’ and the elf went for his sword thing. Then they closed in on him and started sticking him, and... and cut off his braid. And...” She covered her face with both hands. I thought she wouldn’t go on, but she said, “The one with the glasses said something about the river, that it was the blood of Elfland. And that if it was good, what would the blood of an elf be like?”

Then she stopped. I was glad of it.

I wanted desperately to know where Wolfboy and Tick-Tick were. Wanting should have been enough to give me a bearing on them. Nothing happened.

The jar of river water was beginning to stick in my thoughts. I wondered how Caramel was feeling. My mouth was dry and still sour-tasting, and my throat scratched a little. When had I last drunk something? At Danceland? I’d had coffee and beer there, both good for drying you out eventually.

“Why did you follow them here?” I asked Caramel. “What was I supposed to do, go home and stick my head under the pillow?” she snapped. “I would have.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “Would you have? When they started splitting up to leave, and you knew you were the only person who could find out where they were going?” She looked like an empty-handed person who wanted something to throw. Then her eyes got wide and a little bleak and she turned back to me. “You could have done it, couldn’t you?”

“What?”

“You could have tracked them down. You could have found them.” “No. Not unless I’d seen them. Otherwise I wouldn’t know who I was looking for, and I couldn’t do it.” “Really?” “Really.”

She rubbed her face and swept her hair back. She had a very high forehead. “Well,” she said, “Well. Like I say, they split up when they left, to cover their tracks, I guess. The guy with glasses had a bike, and he drove off on that. But before he left I saw him put whatever it was he held out to the elf in his saddlebag. So I followed one of the ones who were on foot, and got here. I snuck into the garage, to find that thing. It seemed important, and I was afraid that if I didn’t take it, the glasses guy would get rid of it before anyone could get back here. And I found it, and hid it—and then they caught me.”

“But you said you hadn’t been here long before they brought me in.” Caramel looked rueful. “It took me a long time to get up the nerve to break into the garage.”

That made me laugh a little, which made her do the same. “So what was it?” I said. “The thing in the saddlebag.”

She nodded and began to unlace one of her sneakers. That puzzled me, until she pulled it off and shook something out into her hand. “I don’t think he knows it’s gone yet,” she said, and held it out to me.

I didn’t take it from her. It was temporarily beyond me to raise my hand and reach for it. Such an unassuming little object, however valuable it might be...

It was a ring of elf-silver set with a sapphire. My teeth chattered. “Hide it again,” I said, when I could. “It’s important.”

Linden was never offstage long enough to have done it. No, we knew who’d done it—Glasses and Friends. But if the deed had been bought... ? Oh, I wanted something cold to drink, and I wanted a nice herbal cig with it, and I wanted to bang my head against the wall until all my problems went away. I had a witness, and a missing puzzle piece, and no way in the World or elsewhere that I could deliver either of them.

The pea-green light grew steadily weaker. I crawled across the room and propped myself against a wall. Caramel took a nap, curled up on the heap of bedding. I looked at the jar of river water. I tried to remember every band I’d ever seen play. I counted the number of times I’d seen Tick-Tick blow something up. I looked at the jar of river water. Caramel shifted position. I looked at the jar of...

The door lock made noise, and I tapped Caramel’s ankle to wake her up. Glasses came in with a flashlight and blazed it at us. None of the kindly light of a Faerie lamp here. I doubted there had ever been magic in this room, beyond the twisted magic that the river worked on humans.

I couldn’t see him in the glare, until he turned the beam on the jar of water.

He made a clucking noise. “Maybe I should leave you some crackers,” he said. He turned the flashlight back on us. “It’s not so bad, you know. They’ll tell you out there that it’s dangerous, but they always say that. That’s wisdom in that jar, strength, inspiration. They don’t want you to be smart or strong or great. They want to step on you. That’s why they’re afraid.”

I blinked and shook my head, and the light came closer.

“Really?” his sweet voice came out of the flashlight beam. “I’m stronger than you, right now. And you’re afraid of me, aren’t you?”

I could see him, finally; he squatted companionably next to me. He took my chin in his fingers. Then he drew his hand back and slapped me casually. A lot of little bells rang in my head, and I slid further down the wall.

“Leave him alone,” said Caramel, in a surprisingly steady voice.

He looked at me, then toward her, as if considering the merits of her suggestion. Then he got to his feet. “All right, dear, I can do that for a little while. But you can help, you know. Just get him to drink up, and all the unhappy times are over, okay?” He smiled at her, and went out the door.

“D’you think you could knock him out the next time he comes in?” I said thinly.

“Hmm.” A moment of silence. “I could hit him with a desk drawer... No, I don’t think I could hit him hard enough. I’m not very big.”

True, she wasn’t. I sat in the dark and remembered what she looked like. Once, in the World, they would have called her elfin. That was before they discovered that the elves were a lot bigger than they’d made them out to be.

I wanted something to goddamn drink.

“You want to sleep?” she asked.

“No. I want to talk. What’s Bellinbroke like?”

She chuckled a little. Have you ever noticed how much laughter can sound like crying? Bubbles of air coming out, and a little inhalation at the end like a sniff? “I’ll get homesick, and it’ll serve you right.”

But she told me about her father, who taught at the university; and about her mother, private and self-possessed as a feral cat, who left her husband for one of his younger colleagues. Caramel told me how her father seemed to forget that his daughter existed, except when she forced him to remember. There are a lot of ways to get your father’s attention forcibly, most of them unpleasant. Caramel had worked her way through, she figured, about half of them before she realized that the effect was never permanent. So she ran away to the Borderlands.

“What about you?” she said at last. “Me?” “Yeah, you. Come on, I told you mine.”

So I told her, which is a measure of how out of touch I’d become. There was a terrible pain in my head that made all of my thoughts rattle around loose, I didn’t know where anything was, and I was so dry I was afraid I’d crack if I moved. No, let’s be honest. I was too far gone for witty descriptions. Drink the damn water, I told myself. Drink it now, get out of here, and you can kick it later. I wasn’t so fuzzy-minded that I couldn’t spot the two basic errors in that sentence.

I told Caramel almost all of it. I told her about the stupid olives, I told her about my mother watching me out of the corner of her eye when she thought I didn’t see. Believe me, you can live with getting beat up in the parking lot at school dances. You can put up with opening your locker and finding a dead cat in it. You can even bear it when the next-door neighbor, usually distant but kind, gets drunk one night and tries to run you down with his car. But when you realize that your mother never touches you except when she has to...

I think I was semiconscious some of the time. I discovered that Caramel was holding my hand at one point, and couldn’t remember when she’d first taken it.

I didn’t tell her about my early life in Bordentown. I told her I did some pretty despicable things, and left it at that. Safe enough, since I know I’ve forgotten many of them. The river will do that. It does make you feel strong and smart, but only because it takes away all the things you’ve ever measured strength and smarts by. Everything, even your own well-being, is set at a distance and devalued. You can do the most appalling things and forget them a moment later, because they simply aren’t significant. And then even the river begins to slip away and forsake you, and you need more and more of it to make you strong and smart, to make you forget your freakish talent that’s the real cause of your fall, not the river, not your own asshole self-pity. That much I remember.

And I remember not being allowed to sleep, being stuck under cold running water until I was awake enough to scream and claw, being made to walk, walk, walk with a fierce voice alternately cursing me and bursting into tears.

If we didn’t get out of there soon, I would drink that water, I would take my faithless mistress back. In the dark of that room where magic never came, I was certain that this time no one would be there to make sure I kept walking.

I should have told her about some of the good things. I didn’t. I fell asleep.

When I woke up, it was still dark. Caramel had her head on my knee, probably napping again. My mind was full of the exquisite clarity that is often the leading edge of hallucination. My mouth felt glued shut.

I thought, reveling in the ability to do so. Escape. Not for me; I wouldn’t get a block away in this condition, even if every Rat in the building went to Faerie on holiday. For Caramel. Camilla. Attendant at a sacrifice. In hiding behind Danceland, watching five Rats let the blood out of a fairy tale, for the greater glory of whatever they worshiped. I’d taken away her name, but the destiny seemed to have stuck. Well, she wouldn’t have to attend mine.

The door was no good—solid, locked, raving lunatics on the other side of it anyway. Neither of us was strong enough to get the bars out of the window. The floor was old, but in good shape—Glasses had crossed the room with nary a creak. The ceiling was also solid, and fifteen feet away. How to get one small girl out of a top-floor room...

The fireplace. Oh, god, the fireplace.

I shook Caramel awake and pried my lips apart. To her eternal credit, she woke up fast and without a fuss.

“Go see if you can get the plywood out of the fireplace opening,” I whispered. Even that made me feel as if I’d been breathing thumbtacks. “If you can’t do it without making a racket, come back here and tell me.”

I waited alone in the dark while she made scrabbling noises at the other end of the room. “Can’t,” she said finally in my ear. “Not without a noise.”

“Help me over there.”

I worked on one end, with my one good hand, and she worked on the other. I felt all my fingernails break and bleed, and kept clawing away. Finally I got desperate enough to give the bottom of the plywood a kick. With a scraping sound that nearly made me swallow my tongue, it tilted. We grabbed the now-grabbable top edge and pulled the board free.

Maybe they were asleep. Nobody came in. I stuck my head into the fireplace opening, trying not to think of all the things that might accumulate in a disused fireplace. Far above me I saw a square of dark blue shot with stars. The flue had rusted and fallen out, along with an ominous lot of crumbling firebrick. Still, if I hadn’t been so dehydrated, I would have cried.

“Take a look,” I whispered. “Can you get up that?” She brushed by me; I felt her hair against my face. “I think so.”

“Careful. There’ll be loose brick. Watch out for a guard on the roof.” It was staccato and disconnected, but I knew I couldn’t keep talking for long.

“Where do I go for help?” I shook my head, which, of course, she couldn’t see in the dark. She grabbed the front of my shirt and hissed, “Where? Come on!”

I didn’t know where. I didn’t know where anything was. Or anybody. People might be at Danceland; more likely it was closed. She could try a dozen different places and not find anybody. I couldn’t find anybody. Delirium was setting in.

“Please!” I could hear her crying. “I don’t know people in Bordertown, and by the time I get help, it could be too late for you. Where can I find help?”

And it came, like a couple of notes from a familiar song, just enough to recognize it by. Thataway.

Not enough. What the hell was it? Where was north? I felt for it and called for it, until the dark in front of me was shot with colored sparks. That was north. There.

Still not enough. This time I couldn’t just follow until I got there. I had to figure it out from here.

I found them all, in the midst of pain and madness—Danceland, Tick-Tick’s place, Wolfboy’s. They were all too far south to be the trace I’d gotten when Caramel asked me to find help. Then I tried my place. It matched.

I told her. She sobbed, and kissed me on the mouth, and lowered me gently to the floor. Then she scrambled around me and went to work.

I reconstructed it later, with no small quantity of admiration. She piled the bedding up to look as if she was in it, all except a couple of pillows. Those she put in the bottom of the fireplace, so any loose brick that she dislodged would make no sound when they hit. Then she leaned over me again.

“Can you get the plywood back up once I’m in?” She had a hand on my face, so I could nod in answer. “Okay. Hold the fort, Orient.”

I heard her at first in the chimney, until I fought the plywood back into place. I think anyone who was looking for something amiss would find it—but that was my job, to keep anyone from looking. Just long enough for Caramel to get away. I dragged myself away from the fireplace and let go of consciousness for a while.

I have large, merciful gaps in my memory where the rest of it should go. I remember waking up to find the window an oblong of gray-green in the shadowed room, and discovering that I’d dragged myself most of the way to the water jar. Instinct is a wonderful thing.

I remember Glasses coming in, casting a cursory glance toward the pile of inhabited-looking blankets, and giving me the benefit of his conversation for a few minutes. He drank some out of the jar. I could hear him swallowing, seeing his throat working. A little of it trickled down his chin and shone there, until he saw me staring at it. He wiped it away very slowly. I tried not to cry until the door closed behind him.

Many gray intervals later, something boomed, not far away. The second time it happened, I identified it as an explosion. It happened a third time.

These, I knew, were significant. I decided to stay awake, on the off chance that I’d remember why.

The gunshot brought me fully conscious, though. It came from the next room. Then the door burst inward, and Glasses stood in the opening, eyes wild. He had a sawed-off shotgun, and he was leveling it at me. The whole scene seemed remarkably clear, and I had time to wonder why, after years of haphazard observation, I should suddenly be able to count the hairs on the backs of my murderer’s hands.

I thought the roaring noise was the sound of the shotgun, and me dying. But some of Glasses’ chest blew into the room, and so did he. A second later the Ticker came through the door, all scarlet leather and bared teeth, an immense handgun in a two-fisted grip.

She looked to me, saw the water jar, and stooped on it like a hawk. It broke against the wall with a splash, and I whimpered.

“Shh, shh,” she said, and held me against her. It was Tick-Tick, you see, who wouldn’t let me quit walking and die all those years ago.

I felt her start to shake, and remembered that, for all her skill with things that go boom, I’d never seen her do what she’d just done. “Lobo!” she shouted. “All clear. Get your ass in here!”

He had the water, a cloth soaked with it. They’d known I wouldn’t be able to swallow at first. Wolf’s brown-furred face was contorted, as if he’d be crying if his tear ducts worked that way. They carried me out between them, through the smell of fired weapons.

Someone had thought to bring a stretcher, and it was waiting in the hall, along with Goldy and Sai and—dear grinning god, was that Scully, from up the Tooth? The wet cloth had given me back the use of my tongue and lips, if not my throat, exactly. I whispered to the Ticker, “How big a party is this, kid?”

She shrugged as best she could, carrying me. “We had to get you back. We’ve all lost our house keys.” And then, for only the second time in as long as I’ve known her, I saw her cry.

•

No point in going over the rescue. There are enough pieces of it in Orient’s part of the story. It was your basic arrival of the cavalry, I suppose, but none of it was fun. Too much worry about what could go wrong, for us and for Orient, and whether we could free him before the Rats realized that we were there. The worst part was when their sentry spotted us from the roof, right after Tick-Tick’s first smoke bomb went off. The Rat had a gun, and we were all pinned down until the Ticker said, “We need to lower the technology level around here.” She closed her eyes and mumbled something, and there was an explosion from the roof that was almost as loud as one of hers. She nodded grimly, and we went in. Afterwards, there wasn’t much happiness in our success. Orient was a mess, and we all knew we wouldn’t have found him at all if Caramel hadn’t escaped. Still, we thanked everyone who had shown up and watched the Gathering of the Gangs disperse.

We took Orient home while a couple members of the Horn Dance fetched Doc. Doc cleaned and splinted and bandaged as Orient gasped and winced and looked extremely unhappy. He wrote out a short version of his stay at Glasses’ place. I wanted to make a joke about having two mutes in our little group, but I couldn’t think of anything funny. People had died. Nobody important enough that the cops would come around, but people nonetheless. Orient drank a lot of water while he wrote it. The Doc said, “That’s enough. You got your story from him, now go away and let him sleep.”

“What do we owe?” Tick-Tick asked. “Ah, forget it. Wasn’t interesting enough to charge you for.” I fetched Doc’s coat. Next time she puts her hand in her pocket, she’ll find seven four-leaf clovers.

We all went out and sat on the steps so we wouldn’t disturb Orient. No one spoke. Tick-Tick’s face was drawn and tired, almost gray under her dandelion hairdye, and one pointed ear was bruised and slightly bloody. Sai squinted in the distance, her eyes very Asian and very elvin at the same time. She wasn’t watching anything that I could see. Goldy rubbed his strong, brown hands over his metallic hair and stared at the sidewalk. It was just after noon of a beautiful day, we’d saved Orient, and I expected us all to pass out from exhaustion.

Caramel stood nearby, looking like she didn’t know whether to stay or leave. Sai noticed her and said, “Hey, c’mon. Sit and rest. You could use it. We all could.”

“Thanks,” Caramel said as she sat cross-legged beside me. She glanced at Sai, then at the rest of us. “What’re you going to do now?”

“We’re going to talk too much,” Goldy said. “As usual.” Tick-Tick nodded. “And maybe we’ll figure it all out. What have we got?”

I held up the ring that Caramel had found. A sapphire set in Faerie silver. Orient had winced when he said who wore sapphire and silver rings.

“We have the ring,” Tick-Tick said. “And a witness.” She nodded at Caramel. “That’ll clear Strider.” “It’s not enough,” Sai said. “It’ll free him,” Tick-Tick said. “It’s not enough,” Sai repeated with a shake of her thick, black hair.

Goldy nodded. “The singer would’ve let Strider die for her. The Rats were just Rats, but she’s the one who used them.”

“We could go to Rico with what we’ve got,” Tick-Tick said. “Maybe Rico could help.” Goldy said, “Rico can’t do a thing. Linden will say the ring was stolen by the Rats, and that’ll be that.” “Even if we do nothing,” Tick-Tick said, “Linden will have to live with it.” I wondered if she was thinking about the Rat she shot, or the one whose rifle had exploded in his grip.

I raised my hand, then started scribbling while they waited: Why the ring? Why was it important to Yorl? Why would Linden kill someone who meant little to her? Why were the Rats at Danceland that night?

“Very good questions,” Goldy said. “But do you have very good answers?”

Why did Yorl come here from Elflands? Who is Yorl? Who is Linden?

Goldy said, “No, no, no, my friend. Good answers.” No one laughed.

“I doubt Linden’s in Rico’s files,” Tick-Tick said. I agreed with a nod. Records in B-town are pretty thin. The coppers get reports on runaways sometimes, and they’re building a file on people they’ve arrested, but that’s about it. Rico would need a better reason than “we think she hired some Rats” to go through the trouble of tracing a SoHo musician.

Where’s Linden? I wrote last, and Tick-Tick shook her head sadly. “We’re going to have to wake poor Orient.”

Orient woke violently, scattering his bedcovers. Tick-Tick put her hand on his brow and he settled down.

“Sorry, kid,” he whispered. “It’s all right. Lobo’s got some questions for you.”

Orient nodded sleepily. “You guys can’t do anything without me.” He looked bad, pale enough to be an elf, but he sounded pleased. I was still sorry we woke him.

I wrote: Where’s Linden?

He closed his eyes, which turned into a wince. After a second he pointed toward the hotel area in SoHo.

“That-away,” he croaked.

Then I wrote the tricky one. Where’s an elf named Yorl, a relative of Tejorinin Yorl?

Orient frowned at me. I wasn’t sure he understood, and even if he did, the question might be too vague for him. A worse possibility occurred to me: what if there were as many Yorls among the elves as Joneses among us? But Orient grinned weakly.

“If there’s more than one of them, I’m gonna have a migraine, Wolf.” He bit his lip and closed his eyes. Then he opened them again, wide. “Same way,” he whispered, nodding toward the hotel area. “Same damn way.”

We talked a lot more after that, sitting in the street. Everyone liked my theory and no one liked my plan. No one came up with a better one, so finally we scattered to the various bikes. The Ticker stayed with Orient because someone had to—and because she thought this last part was unnecessary, I think. Or maybe she didn’t want to get in a position where she might have to hurt someone else. Caramel was willing to play the part I wanted the Ticker to take, so the B-town Players were ready for their first bit of improv.

Finding Linden wasn’t hard. We asked at a couple places for the lead singer of Wild Hunt, and somebody said she was staying at the Roses of Elfland. Sai and Goldy weren’t happy about waiting in the street, but they agreed. They thought they were there in case the plan fell apart. They were there because I didn’t trust them to keep to the script with Linden.

Caramel and I knocked at Linden’s door. She answered, opening it enough that we could see sunlight and expensive furniture behind her. The room smelled of herbal cigarettes, perfume, and something tart that was her own scent. She wore a sea-green dress with billowing sleeves.

It was cut on one side to reveal golden stockings set with tiny diamonds. Her hair fell over her right shoulder like a moon-lit avalanche of virgin snow. I understood why Orient was so taken with her. I thought she was reasonably attractive, even. “Yes?” she said, and then, catching my gaze with her silver eyes, she said, “You helped pack up after the gig at Danceland. We appreciated that.” She smiled kindly.

I wanted to bow and say something gracious. Caramel and I looked odd in the clean hall of the Roses of Elfland. My jacket and jeans hadn’t looked good before this morning’s adventure, and Caramel’s gray traveling clothes were smudged with grease, mud, soot, and half-a-dozen things less easy to identify. Then I almost laughed, realizing that the clothes were the least of our oddness. Caramel seemed very shy and very young as she stood before Linden, and I was hardly the boy-next-door. I nudged Caramel, who said, “Uh, we have something you’ll want.”

“I beg your pardon?” asked Linden.

“A ring,” said Caramel, growing more sure of herself. “Belongs to Ms. Yorl. Is it yours?” She showed the silver and sapphire ring. It was almost identical to the three on Linden’s right hand.

“No,” Linden said, blinking at us. “But it looks just like mine. Your Ms. Yorl and I have remarkably similar taste.” When neither of us said anything immediately, she smiled thinly and said, “Good day.” She began to close the door.

Okay, it was a stupid plan. I had an impression ball in my pocket, recording since we came up the stairs. Nothing we recorded would be proof, not in court, but I’d hoped we’d get something that would convince Rico to probe into Linden’s past. That was shot now.

Then Caramel said, just before the door closed, “So you won’t care if we take it to the cops.” Something about the way she said it reminded me that she’d watched Tejorinin Yorl get cut up.

The door stopped swinging. Linden’s face was framed in it, a porcelain face haloed in sunlight. “Why should I?” she said, sounding suddenly short of breath. I almost felt sorry for her.

“No reason.” Caramel stroked the ring between her thumb and forefinger. “What do you think a wizard could learn from this? Betcha one could find its owner at least. Betcha we’d get a good reward.”

Linden’s lips pressed together, and she shook her head slightly. Silver strands of hair drifted freely, and I suddenly knew we’d won. She said, “What do you think you’re doing? What do you want from me?”

I grinned at her. I doubt I could’ve put my whole face into it. Baring the teeth was probably enough.

“Do you want money?” she said quickly, her voice going up the scale. “Is that it? It is a nice ring.” She reached for it, and Caramel stepped back. “I had nothing to do with it!” Linden cried. “Nothing!”

I nodded and looked at Caramel until she asked the obvious question: “Nothing to do with what?”

Linden stood in the doorway and stared as if she was seeing something besides us. Then she slammed the door.

Rico liked the impression ball. Linn preferred the ring—he coaxed all the magic out of it and found not just Linden-as-owner, but a little trick that made it seem that where the ring was, Linden was, too. Just in case somebody being led into an alley should need a little magical reassurance that this was a safe place to go. Combined with Caramel’s statement, it made Linden look bad.

Rico looked for female members of the Yorl family. I had wondered why someone with a new inheritance would suddenly come to Bordertown, especially someone who seemed to despise B-town the way Yorl had seemed to. I expected that Yorl had a sister. Rico found that Yorl had a wife who had left him a couple of years before his mother died. Mom’s death left him the head of the family and a rich guy. Now that he was dead too, the missing wife stood to inherit a nice piece of whatever it is that elves consider valuable, if only she would reappear in Faerie. There were no photos or fingerprints of this wife; elves don’t photograph, and they don’t seem fond of the latter. But, amusingly enough, her elvish name translated into English as Linden.

The rest was easy to put together. Yorl must have arrived inconveniently in B-town and insisted that Linden abandon the band and be a proper wife and lady because he had a position to uphold now. When Linden heard that the mom was dead, the temptation must have been too much. So the Rats came to Danceland to meet with her, and during the confusion between Yorl and Strider, she gave them their commission and the Yorl-decoy off her finger. Whose idea it was to do it in back of Danceland to frame Strider, we’ll probably never know. Me, I bet Glasses thought the chance was too good to waste.

Today we all went to the Border to watch a couple of elvin Silver Suits escort Linden Yorl through the gate to Faerie. No matter what happened to her there, she wouldn’t come through the Gate again. Rico told us that she was officially Not Welcome in Bordertown.

We dressed in our best, of course. Orient was up and around, maybe a little too pleased with the effect of his arm in a black sling. And Caramel stayed close to him; Tick-Tick thinks Orient doesn’t need any more nursing, but Caramel is very protective of him still.

Linden saw us. We’d meant her to. I saw her give a quick look to Orient, but he didn’t move an eyebrow.

As Linden went across the Border, Strider called out something in Elvish. “What was that?” Sai asked him. “Jealous, love? Never you mind.”

But I know enough Elvish to recognize the proverb. At least, I’d always thought it was a proverb. Now I’m not sure. Loosely, it’s “Love wealth above life itself, and starve in splendor.” It might be a curse. My other suspicion I don’t want to think about: that it might be part of Faerie’s penal code.

We went back to Danceland, Goldy made coffee, and Orient found Dancer’s lost receipt book. And I wrote this.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Little Red and the Big Bad

2009-11-23T21:15:00.000-08:00

Published in Swan Sister, edited by edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Simon & Schuster, 2003.

Little Red and the Big Bad

by Will Shetterly

    You know I’m giving the straight and deep ’cause it’s about a friend of a friend. A few weeks back, just ’cross town, a true sweet chiquita, called Red for her fave red hoodie, gets a 911 from her momma’s momma. The Grams is bed-bound with a winter bug, but she’s jonesing for Sesame Noodles, Hot and Sour Soup, and Kung Pao Tofu from the local Chineserie—’cept their delivery wheels broke down. So Grams is notioning if Red fetches food, they’ll feast together.
    Red greenlights that. Veggie Asian chow and the Grams are solid in her top ten. So Red puts on her hoodie, leaves a note for the Moms, and BMXes away.
    Now, down by the corner is a fine looking beastie boy who thinks he’s the Big Bad, and maybe he is. He sees Red exit the eatery with a humongous bag of munch matter and calls, “Hey, Little Red Hoodie Hottie. Got me a tasty treat?”
    Red doesn’t slow. She just says, “Not if you’re not my Grams, and you’re not.”
    This Big Bad wouldn’t be so big or so bad if he quit easy. He smiles and follows Red to her chained-up wheels. While Red juggles dinner and digs for her bike lock key, the Bad says, “Take five? Or all ten?” and holds out both hands.
    Red warms to his style and his smile—this beastie boy isn’t half as smooth as he thinks he is, but half is twice as smooth as this town’s seen. Red hands off the bag, the Bad peeps in, and his stomach makes a five-two Richter. He’s thinking he’s holding the appetizer, and Red’s the main course.
    Red mounts her wheels, takes back the bag, gives the Bad a gracias, and pedals off down the main drag, riding slow . She doesn’t want to be a sweatpig when she gets to Gram’s. The day’s as sweet as a sugar donut, but Red’s not happy. As she rides, she calls herself a ho for flirting up a corner boy with Grams so sick. Pumping the right pedal is like pins. Pumping the left is like needles.
    The sec Red rounds the corner, the Bad’s off on a mountain bike, zipping ’cross town, cruising down alleys, cutting through yards, taking every shortcut he knows and making up seven new ones. ’Cause when he peeped in the chow sack, he saw the foodery’s little green delivery slip spelling out Grams’ name and address.
    The Bad gets to Grams’ front door while Red’s still blocks away. He leans on the buzzer till a weak, weak voice asks, “Who’s there?”
    The Bad pitches his voice like Red’s . “It’s me, Grams! It’s major munching time!”
    Grams laughs and buzzes him in. She’s laughing right until she sees the Bad, and then she’s not laughing at all.
    Red’s the gladdest when she gets to Grams’ place. Walking up to the door, she pokes her nose in the bag of Chinese tastiness, snorting peppers and garlic as if she were dipping her face in a spicy sauna. She has to smile. What can be wrong when a great dinner’s coming?
    In Grams’ bedroom, the Bad thinks the same as a tap-tap comes at the door. He hops in the Grams’ bed, calls, “Hurry in, my sweet surprise!” and pulls the covers up over his nose.
    Red walks in the front room, saying, “You shouldn’t leave your door open.”
    The Bad calls from the back, “It’s just to let you in, my munchiliciousness.”
    Red heads down the hall, saying, “Your voice sounds funny.”
    The Bad calls, “It’s just my sore throat getting sorer. It’ll be better once I eat, my little main dish!”
    Red brakes at the bedroom door. The place looks nice, if nice is a dark, dark cave. On the shadow that she knows is Grams’ bed is a shadow that could be Grams. The shadow says,“Now come snuggle your poor, cold Grams,” and pulls the bedcovers back to invite Red in.
    Red sets down the food, gives the shadow some serious squinteye, and wants to turn on every light in the room.. Then she hears Grams, near to tears, add, “Or don’t you love your Grams?”
    Red says, “Sure do, Grams,” and hops in bed without a doubt in her head. But when the Bad pulls her close, Red’s a little spooked. She says, “Your eyes are way bright, Grams.”
    “’Cause I’m way glad to see you,” says the Bad, pulling her closer.
    More spooked, Red says, “Your arms are way strong, Grams.”
    “‘Cause I’m way glad to hold you,” says the Bad, pulling her closest.
    And as spooked as spooked gets, Red says, “And your teeth are way sharp, Grams.”
    “‘Cause I’m way glad to eat you,” says the Bad.
    Now, I could say that’s when a bold cop hears Red scream, runs in faster than the Bad can bite, shoots down the Bad like the cold, cruel creature he is, finds Grams tied up safe in a closet, and Red and Grams and the cop all get the happy ever after.
    Or I could say there’s no scream, no handy cop, and the Bad has a happy belly glow for days, thanks to Red and her Grams.
    Either way, there’s uno problemo with my story: If the Bad dies, how do I know how he gets ’cross town? If Red dies, how do I know how she feels biking to Grams’?
    Here’s what’s sure: One dies. One lives to tell the tale. And the one telling the tale is guessing ’bout the other.
    Now pick the end you like. But before you do, think on this:
    The storyteller’s still around. Maybe nearer than you think.
    And everyone’s got to eat.

Midnight Girl

2009-11-23T17:50:00.000-08:00

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Dream Catcher

2009-11-05T11:23:00.000-08:00

Published in The Armless Maiden, edited by Terri Windling. Tor Books, April 1995.

Dream Catcher

by Will Shetterly

Dear John Marshall,

My name is Crosses Water Safely. At school, I was called my white name, Janine Skunk. I didn’t know my real name then. You always held your nose and waved your hand in front of your face when you saw me, and everyone laughed. Grandmother says skunks are beautiful and smart. She says anyone who can trick Rabbit is smart, and Rabbit knows to leave Skunk alone.

Grandmother dreamed my real name. She saw me in a storm in the front of a canoe. Many people were in the canoe, and they were all scared. But I was not scared. The people stopped being scared when they saw I was not scared. And then the storm went away.

Grandmother lives on a reservation up north. Father said she is a bush Indian. And he laughed like you always did at school, John Marshall. My mother looked down and did not say anything. I want to be a bush Indian when I grow up.

Grandmother came to stay with us last fall. She came because Father told her I was having bad dreams. He laughed when she showed up at our door. He said she was a bad dream herself, and where would she sleep? She said she would sleep on the floor of my room if she had to. She came because she had made something for me. A dream catcher.

Grandmother said all dream catchers look like spider webs. It doesn’t matter what they’re made of. She made the frame of mine with basswood twine and birch branches. The colored string came from a Hudson Bay store. You hang the dream catcher in your window. Bad dreams get caught in it, but good dreams pass right through.

When we hung the dream catcher in my room, Grandmother asked if I remembered the bad dreams. She looked at me very hard and said it was important. I said not really. She asked if I remembered anything about them. I said maybe. She asked what I remembered. I said red eyes. She asked what else. I just shook my head and laughed like the dreams were silly.

I didn’t have any bad dreams that night. In the morning, Grandmother looked at the dream catcher and looked at me and smiled. I smiled at her, too. I wanted her to stay with us forever.

That was the day I took the dream catcher to Show and Tell and told how Grandmother made it for me. Our teacher said it was a good report. But in the hall, you grabbed the dream catcher and said a skunk should be able to scare away bad dreams with its stink. When you threw it down the hall, I was glad it didn’t break.

That night, Father asked Grandmother if she wasn’t tired of sleeping on my floor. She said she didn’t mind. I didn’t have any bad dreams that night, either. In the morning, I looked hard at the dream catcher, but I couldn’t see any dreams. Grandmother said I didn’t know how to look. But someday I would see everything better.

That day, you asked if my grandmother had made me a brain catcher, ’cause I could sure use one. Also, Father asked me to go to the park and play softball with him. I said I was tired. Mother said I was always tired and always in my room and I should go.

When we came back, Father said he needed a shower. Mother said he sure did. Father said I should shower too. I said I was okay. He laughed like I was very funny and said to come on, don’t waste water. Then he saw Grandmother looking, and he said oh, forget it.

After dinner, he brought home a brand new living room couch that folded out into a bed. He said Grandmother should sleep comfortably, since she wanted to stay with us forever. Grandmother said he did not have to do that. He said it was done, and he wanted her to be comfortable. He took a big drink of beer and he didn’t say anything else. Grandmother looked at me and didn’t say anything, either.

At bedtime, she said if I needed her, I should just call. I could not answer. I laughed like it was okay and went into my room and put on the nightlight and got into bed.

I lay there for a long time, trying to go to sleep. I told myself it was okay with Grandmother in the next room. But it wasn’t okay with Mother in the next room.

Then I heard him standing outside the door. I smelled him there. I prayed for him to go away, and I told God I was sorry for whatever I had done. Then he opened the door and whispered my white name. I tried not to hear. When he got into the bed, I tried not to look. He turned my face so I had to look. He said he loved me. His eyes were all bloodshot.

When the door opened, he jumped up and pointed at me and said, “She wanted—” and “You don’t think I was going to—” and “I was drunk, I didn’t know—”

Grandmother came straight to me and hugged me. She wrapped my blanket around me real tight. She said, “We’re going.”

Father said, “It’s not what you’re thinking! You can’t believe—”

Grandmother led me to the dream catcher and took it down from the window.

“She’s my daughter!” Father yelled. “You’re not taking her—”

Grandmother held up the dream catcher and said, “Look.”

He looked at it, and then at her, and then at me. I looked at the dream catcher. Grandmother handed it to me. I hugged it. Father screamed and ran out.

Mother was in the hallway. She did not say anything as we went out. Father was in the living room, curled up in a ball and gasping. Grandmother did not slow down.

I am living on the reservation now. I have two best friends, Adam Mishenene and Martha Kwandibens. I have a dog, Socks. He walks funny because he was hit by a car, but he will fetch anything. I have to talk to a counselor every week who thinks if I say everything that happened, it will be better. Mother and Father have to see a counselor too. Maybe we will be a family again this summer. I said I would give it a try, anyway, and everyone cried.

I wrote to my old teacher, asking how everyone was. She said you had been taken away, John Marshall. When I saw that, I was happy. Then she said your parents had been doing something bad to you for a long time. That is why I am sending you what’s with this letter. You hang it in the window, and only the good dreams come through.

Your friend,

Crosses Water Safely (Janine Skunk)

Black Rock Blues

2009-11-05T11:18:00.000-08:00

First published in The Coyote Road, ed. by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, published by Viking.

Black Rock Blues

by Will Shetterly

1

He’s running above the sun-splashed ocean, leaping from cloud to rainbow and back again, grinning because no one can catch him, when someone walks up beside him, smiles in the smuggest way, and says, “Wakey-wakey.”

He says, “G’way,” and pulls the sleeping bag over his head.

The smug walker is a beautiful young woman with skin the color of the deepest sea and hair the color of the darkest night. She’s naked. Street would like that if her smile wasn’t so annoying. She says, “Time to wake up, trickster.”

He sits up fast, thinking something’s terribly wrong if he has a visitor in his hideaway, but at least the smug walker from his dream will be gone.

Only she’s not. She’s in his room. Or, to be precise, she’s in a storage room at the back of the Dupree Building that’s full of cartons of Hi-John’s Good Luck Lawn and Garden Spray. She’s wearing a blood-red jacket and purple jeans and low gray boots, and her head has been shaved and her skin is only as dark as a plum, but her smile is at least as annoying in reality as it was in the dream. She looks remarkably familiar for someone he’s never seen. Maybe it’s just that her smile reminds him of someone, but he can’t remember who. He wants to say something clever. What falls from his lips is, “Hunh?”

Her smile gets even more annoying. “Yes. You were always loveliest in the morning.”

He blinks three times. She refuses to disappear like the dream, so he says, “Wha-- Who’re you?

She shakes her head. “Now, that’d be telling, wouldn’t it?”

He wants to get out of his sleeping bag because he doesn’t like looking up at her. But when he found this room, he arranged the cardboard boxes so six formed a bed and two made a table and four made a chair with a back and a footstool. His clothes are on top of the remaining stacks across the room. “What do you want?”

“And that’d be telling, too.”

He frowns, then sees that this poor girl is trying to play the player. He grins and stretches. “What’d you call me?”

Her smile falters. She says, “All right. You get one. Trickster.”

His grin is so wide he has to crank it down for fear of hurting his face. “Well, now and then, I s’pose.” He points at his clothes. “I’m putting those on.” He points at the door. “A lady would wait outside.”

She points at the window. “While a two-bit grifter takes the back door? My thought is not.”

He stands and tries not to shiver as he walks across the cold concrete floor. “O ye of little trust.”

She taps the side of her head. “O me of much smart.”

He tugs on gray silk boxers, but leaves his socks off because there’s no way to put them on without the annoying girl seeing the holes in the heels. “They call me Street.”

“Unless they’re looking for a light-fingered fool or a punk to run a cheap-ass scam. Then they ask for Trickster.”

“And when they ask for you?”

She hesitates, then shrugs and says, “Oh.”

“Mystery woman.”

She smiles. “That, too.”

“Oh!” He has to laugh. “They call you O!”

“Now I’ve given you two.”

He nods. “O’Riley. Odegaard. Oprah. Eau Claire. Open Sesame. Oh, what a pain.”

O shakes her head. “Wasting time, T.”

Street frowns as he buttons up a black guayabara. “So, O, how’d you find—” Her smile makes him hear himself, and he gets the grin back to say in time with her, “That’d be telling, wouldn’t it?” He puts one leg into his tan chinos. “You didn’t tell the cops—”

“Of course not.”

He pauses with the chinos half on. “You’re all right, O. Y’know, if you snuck in hoping for some quality time with a fine young fellow like myself—”

“I told Bossman Sevenday.”

With one leg halfway into the chinos, Street looks at her instead of what he’s doing and falls, landing hard on his hands. “What the—” As she laughs, he pushes himself up, jerks up his pants, and glares at her. “Why would you—”

“Things’ve been too easy, T. You need some spice in your life.”

He yanks his belt tight, grabs a turquoise silk jacket, and steps into dark red loafers. “What’d I ever do to you?”

She smiles cooly.

He gives her a mocking smile in return and says, “That’d be telling, wouldn’t it?”

O nods. “They’ll be here in two minutes. We better take the fire esc—”

Street frowns. “We?”

Which is when the storage room door swings in as if it was kicked by a mule. The mule is a huge man so tall that he has to duck when he steps inside. His T-shirt says, “Looking for someone to hurt.”

O says, “They would be early.”

Street wrenches open the storage room window. “Come on! If—”

A little man in a dark red suit drops onto the fire escape with a friendly smile and a large pistol. “Tut, tut, my tricksy. A gent pays his bills afore making his departure. And it’s true you’ll be making the big departure soon, but Bossman Sevenday’ll have what’s his first, now, won’t he?”

2

Mr. Big and Mr. Small don’t offer answers, so Street doesn’t ask questions. They drive from the Dupree Building in Flashtown to the country homes of Hillside while Big and Small sing Tin Pan Alley songs in perfect harmony. O follows the black limousine in a small silver roadster with the top down. Street thinks she must be working with his captors, but he can’t figure out why she was acting more like audience than actor, and he doesn’t like thinking about her. So he joins Big and Small on the choruses, and he smiles as they wince whenever he goes off key.

They pass many walled homes before Mr. Big turns toward a high gate like gleaming ivory. It swings back at their approach. The limousine rolls over a long white cobblestone driveway and stops beside a bone-white mansion. Small leaps out to open Street’s door, saying, “If you’d be so kind, my tricksy.” Street feels safer staying where he is, until Small nods at Big and adds, “The kindness is for my compatriot. He must clean the car if a guest is reluctant to leave it.”

Big grins sheepishly, and Street leaps out.

O parks her roadster beside the limousine and walks over to them. For the drive, she added racing goggles and a white scarf. She pushes the goggles up on her forehead. Street thinks she’s the finest thing he’s ever seen, then wishes he hadn’t thought that.

“On with the show!” O calls, waving the others toward the back of the mansion.

Street asks, “Do I get paid?”

Big says in a very gentle voice, “Oh, you should hope you don’t, Mr. Trickster.”

O leads, and Big and Small follow, and Street sees no choice but to be escorted around the mansion. In the back, a man lounges by an enormous pool, drinking a pina colada. He wears a black top hat, smoky round glasses, a black Hawaiian shirt printed with silver skulls, gray pinstriped surfer shorts, and black flip-flops. He looks up and laughs. “Trickster! O! So very good to see you!”

Street, knowing who this must be, says, “And I couldn’t imagine anyone better to see me, Mr. Bossman Sevenday, sir. I’m just afraid there’s a teensy misunderstanding—”

“A misunderstanding?” says Bossman Sevenday. “When Trickster is involved? Oh, no. How could that be?”

As Bossman Sevenday and Big laugh heartily, Small whispers, “He’s not happy, my tricksy. You should make him happy.”

Street desperately wants to do precisely that, and has no idea how. He looks at the swimming pool, an elongated hexagon, then looks closer. It’s the shape of a coffin.

Bossman Sevenday laughs harder and says, “You like my pool, Trickster? You may swim in it anytime. Some people like it so much, they go in and never want to leave.”

Street swallows and says, “I love your pool, Mr. Bossman Sevenday, sir. But I was thinking how happy I would be if I could do something for you. Whatever you liked. All you’d have to do is tell me what you wanted, and I’d be on my way to do that this very second, Mr. Bossman Sevenday, sir.”

Bossman Sevenday stops laughing and says, “The rock.”

“The rock?” Street says.

Bossman Sevenday nods.

“That’s it?” says Street.

Bossman Sevenday nods again.

Street looks at O. She says, “He wants the rock.”

Street says, “Of course he wants the rock! I’ll go get it now.” He begins to back out of the yard. “Mr. Bossman Sevenday, sir, I’m very, very grateful for the chance to get you a rock. I mean, the rock.”

Bossman Sevenday begins laughing again. “Of course you are, Trickster. You have twenty-four hours.”

Street says, “I might need a little—”

Bossman Sevenday frowns.

Street says quickly, “—less time than that. You never know. Twenty-four hours, that’s plenty. You’ll have it in a day, at the very latest.”

“Good Trickster,” says Bossman Sevenday. And, as he laughs and Street backs away, the flesh from Bossman Sevenday’s face drips like candle wax from his skull.

Street trips and leaps up and runs. Bossman Sevenday’s laughter follows him around the bone-white mansion and down the cobblestone drive. The cobblestones sound hollow like drums beneath Street’s feet. As he reaches the front gate, he thinks the cobblestones are skulls and imagines people buried together, packed as tightly as cigarettes. He leaps onto the gleaming ivory gate to climb it, but it swings inward. He drops from it, runs into the road, then hears a car racing down the driveway.

3

The silver roadster pulls up beside him. O says, “Faster if you ride with me.”

Street doesn’t slow down. “No,” he puffs. “Way.”

O says, “I’m not about to take you back. Not without the rock. If you want to get away from here—”

Street jumps over the side of the roadster and buckles himself into the passenger seat. “Go!” O puts the speedometer exactly at the posted speed limit. Street says, “Faster!”

O says, “If a cop stops us, we’ll go a lot slower.”

Street nods. “Right. Good thinking. I’m cool with that.” But Street breathes fast and sweats profusely. He knows he doesn’t smell like he’s cool with anything. He says, “Back there. Did you see anything odd?”

“Odd?”: O grins. “Nope.”

The melting face must’ve been a freak of the sunlight. The cobblestones must’ve only sounded hollow. Street says, “Me, neither. Just wanted to show the Bossman I’m dedicated to finding his rock.”

O says, “I think he knows that.”

“Except I don’t know what it is,” Street admits. “Or who took it. Or why he expects me to find it.”

O says, “Why doesn’t matter as much as the fact he expects it.”

“True. You know where it is?”

O shakes her head. “If you were looking for something that people wanted, where would you go?”

Street frowns, then grins.

4

Street leads O through Meandering Market. Today, it’s in a freight lot near the docks. His grin is back, because people are nodding and smiling, saying, “Howzit, T-man!” and “Yo, the Streetdog!” and “Tricks baby, lookin’ so fine!” The impromptu aisles are thick with people who like bargains and don’t care about sales slips. Street usually moves through the Market like a prince, perusing each dealer’s wares, looking over clothes, tunes, shows, tech, gems, and all the sweet distracting things of the world. Now he’s moving just fast enough not to make anyone wonder why he’s moving fast.

The crowd is full of people who want to be seen in their bright colors and careful hair. Picking any of them out would be a challenge, but Street’s challenge is greater. He looks where he thinks no one is, in shadows and quiet places. He spots the little brown man at the tent and aluminum trailer called Pele’s Cafe. Mouse sits on a stool near the back, nursing a cup of the house java.

Mouse spots Street just as quickly. He sets the coffee cup down, looks around, and Street knows Mouse is doing the math, distance to aisles and number of obstacles and the length of Street’s stride and the speed of Mouse’s. Then Mouse smiles at Street, telling Street two things: Mouse figures he can’t get away, and Mouse would really, really like to get away.

Mouse says, “How ya, Tricks? You and the lady seeking a seat? You can have mine in half a mo, if you fancy.”

Street says, “Ah, Mouse! How long has it been?”

Mouse shrugs. “There’s just dead time between deals. You looking for a ride? I know someone with a lead on a silver Zephyr, good as new—”

O says, “If it’s parked by Dingo’s newsstand, you don’t.”

Mouse says, “Or a bulletproof vest? Only one hole in it.”

Street says as if he knows exactly what he’s talking about. “I’m after the rock.”

Mouse’s eyes don’t change at all, meaning he’s much more guilty than if he looked scared. Mouse says, “The actor? Plymouth? The Hope Diamond? Not my speed, Tricks. You know me. Sweet and small, nothing memorable. I so hate trouble.”

Street says, “Mouse, you got to know yourself. Take me, for example. I am a very smooth liar.”

O snorts, but if it might have turned into a laugh, she stifles it when Street glances at her.

He tells Mouse, “You’re a smooth facilitator. Someone wants to sell and someone wants to buy, no one’s better than you at making it happen. But you’re not a smooth liar. No shame there. Perfection in all things is a gift given to few of us.”

“Very few,” O agrees. “Very, very few.” Street glances at her again. She says, “So very few—”

Street tells her, “Should I need your help, you’ll know because I’ll have ripped out my tongue and used it to hang myself to spare me from asking you.”

O says, “Ooh! Looking forward to that!”

Street puts a hand on Mouse’s shoulder to keep him from sidling away. “So. The rock.”

Mouse says, “Haven’t seen it.”

Street says, “And if you had, what would you have seen?”

Mouse shrugs. “A black rock. I don’t know. I just hear what you do.”

“And if you were looking for the black rock, where would you go?”

“You got me confused with the library reference desk, Tricks.”

“Fair enough. Should I receive anything of value, you take ten percent.”

Mouse shrugs. “But I don’t know anything.”

Street nods.

Mouse says, “And I take fifteen.”

Street nods again.

Mouse says, “Mama Sky.”

O’s mouth opens as if she’s going to say her nickname, but she closes it.

Mouse says, “See you in better times,” and slips away, a faint shadow that dissolves in the surging sea of Market shoppers.

5

As the Zephyr speeds up Sunset, Street says, “You got to admit that went well.”

O keeps her eyes on the road. “True. If there’s one thing you know, it’s how to deal with scumbags.”

Street glares at her, but she’s not looking, so he laughs. “Got us a name, didn’t I?”

“A name’s not the rock.”

“Anyone else get this far?”

O says grudgingly, “No.”

Street laughs.

O says, “How’re you going to find Mama Sky?”

Street smiles. “I’m not.”

O glances at him as a truck comes around the corner. O takes the shoulder of the road, spraying dirt, then swings back onto the road, and says, perfectly calmly, “You’re not.”

Street shakes his head. “Saw your face when Mouse said the name. You know her.”

“True.”

“I’m thinking we’re heading there now.”

“You’re thinking right.”

“So. Who is she?”

“My mother.” O’s voice says it would be a good idea not to ask more questions, which makes Street want to ask a lot more. Then he looks at her face and decides that while she’s probably twice as annoying as any annoying person could be, he can wait until she’s ready to talk again.

6

O slows at the top of Sunset, then speeds along High Road and parks. For a moment, Street thinks they’ve stopped at a garden with a view of the city and the ocean. Then he sees they’re in front of a small house that’s the same blue as the sky. A large woman in a loose house dress of the same blue comes out of the front door to stand perfectly still with a perfectly calm expression. Her skin is as dark as O’s. Her white hair billows from her round face like clouds.

Street looks at O and the large woman. The light dims, and he glances up. Heavy clouds are gathering in front of the sun. As the sky darkens, so does the color of the house and the woman’s robes.

Street says, “If it’s about to rain, it’d sure be nice to go inside or put up the top.”

A drop of rain hits him, then another, and water begins to fall more heavily.

O says, “Mother.”

Mama Sky says, “Daughter.”

O says, “Is this necessary?”

Mama Sky says, “Am I happy?”

O says, “You have the rock.”

Mama Sky says, “Why would I have the rock?”

O says, “You never tell me what I want to know.”

Mama Sky says, “I always tell you what you need to know.”

O says, “How do you know what I need to know?”

Mama Sky says, “Because I’m your mother.”

O says, “I don’t know why I came here!” and reaches to start the car.

Street catches her hand. “Because of the rock.”

“I don’t care about the rock!”

Street says, “I wish I could say that.” The rain is a cold torrent. He’s soaked, like O and the roadster. He gets out, splashing through deep puddles to stand at the bottom of the porch. “Mama Sky, ma’am? I’m—”

She says coldly, “I know who you are.”

Street says, “Oh. Well, I’m powerful sorry you don’t like what you’ve heard. I hate the notion that a fine looking woman like yourself isn’t glad to see me.”

Mama Sky squints at him, then laughs. “You are a most foolish young man who thinks that flattery excuses most of his faults.”

As the rain slackens, Street says, “When a fine looking woman with a laugh as big as the world thinks a man has faults, he hopes telling her the truth will excuse all of them.”

Mama Sky shakes her head. “What my daughter sees in you, I’ll never know.”

O says, “Mama!”

Mama Sky smiles again, and the rain stops. Street thinks that Mama Sky knows what a young woman might see in him. Then he wonders if that means O sees something in him that isn’t as annoying as what he sees in her. He glances at her and only sees annoyance.

Mama Sky says, “You children come in.”

The return of bright sunlight feels good on Street’s skin, but he says, “Thank you, ma’am,” quickly to keep O from saying anything. He grins at O, then heads inside.

The living room is small and comfortable and filled with furniture in every shade of dawn and dusk and clouds and rainbows.

Mama Sky says, “Let me get you some tea,” and O says almost as quickly, “We can’t stay,” and Street says just as quickly, “Tea would be lovely.”

O glares at him. Mama Sky beams and goes into the kitchen. Street circles the living room, ignoring O and looking for anything that might be called a black rock. The only things in the room as dark as an overcast midnight are a pillow and a plate stand and the bindings of some books.

Mama Sky returns with a blue tray, a blue teapot, and a blue plate heaped high with macaroons and meringues. Street says, “Allow me,” and hurries to help her.

She smiles and shakes her head and sets the tray on a coffee table painted with children flying kites and sailing in boats. “I’m not so helpless.” She pours a cup of tea for each of them.

Street’s afraid that O will refuse hers, but she accepts it and says quietly, “Thank you, Mother.”

Street takes a deep drink. It’s green tea with ginger, and he doesn’t have to lie when he says, “Delicious!” He crams a meringue into his mouth, swallows, sips tea, crams a macaroon, swallows, sips tea, and then notices the women staring at him.

Mama Sky says, “When did you last eat?”

Street opens his mouth to answer. When he thinks about the past, he remembers playing tricks, sometimes for money, sometimes for fun. He remembers running and hiding because few people have as finely developed a sense of humor as he. He remembers eating and drinking things that had to be consumed quickly because they tasted terrible or he had to get someplace quickly. But he can’t remember when he last sat still and ate. “I’ve been kind of busy today.” He eats six more cookies, but more slowly, savoring each bite.

Mama Sky says, “Let me fix you a sandwich.”

Street says, “I’d surely love that some other time, but I’m under a deadline. With the emphasis on dead.”

Mama Sky frowns. “Whose deadline?”

Street says, “Bossman Sevenday’s.”

The room darkens. Street thinks it will rain again. Then everything lightens, and Mama Sky says, “You’re trying to find this rock for Bossman Sevenday?”

Street says, “Yes, ma’am.”

Mama Sky says, “I wouldn’t have anything belonging to that, that—” She spits into a flowerpot. “But Ms. Brigitte’s a fine lady, and I’d help you for her sake, if I could. But I can’t.”

O stands. “Dead end, T. Let’s go.”

Street asks Mama Sky, “Do you ever shop at the Meandering Market?”

Mama Sky says, “Why would I? I have my garden. Visitors bring me things. I have much more than I need.”

O says, “See, T? All done here. Let’s go.”

Street says, “Did anyone bring anything like a rock? Maybe something for your garden?”

Mama Sky says, “No, I assure you, that is not the case.”

O says, “Wasting time, T. You got free food. Time to move.”

Mama Sky says, “But you know, someone did bring me something last week. That Stormboy.” She looks at O. “He’s quite proper, and dependable, too.” She looks at Street, then laughs. “All kinds of dependable, though. Sometimes dependable fun is best.”

O says, “Stormboy isn’t dependable fun. He’s dependable un-fun.”

Mama Sky says, “Maybe I shouldn’t have pushed you to take up with him.”

“Maybe not,” O agrees.

“Trickster’s not so bad,” Mama Sky says. Then she looks at Street and says, “But I’ll count my silver when you leave.” Then she laughs.

Street says, “I wouldn’t take anything from you, Mama Sky.”

Mama Sky says, “You know, I believe you, which proves I have some foolishness in me. But you took something from Bossman Sevenday.”

Street shrugs. “I don’t like him.” Then he frowns. “But I didn’t take anything from him.”

Mama Sky says, “Why does he want you to find his rock?”

Street says proudly, “Because I can.” Then he frowns. “Bossman Sevenday seems to think I’m responsible. But I’d remember—”

O says, “What?”

Street says, “That’s mad.”

O says, “What is?”

Street says, “I remember everything I did for the last six days. I don’t remember a thing before. It’s like the world started then.”

Mama Sky smiles. “World’s much, much older than that, Trickster.”

Street shakes his head, then says, “What did Stormboy bring you?”

Mama Sky goes to a shelf covered with little things like white twigs and seashells and porcelain statues of white and black pugs. She picks up a blue cloth bag tied with blue string and says, “Stormboy said this brings luck in love. So long as I don’t look in it, there’s hope for him to court my O. But if I think he’s not the one to encourage, I might as well open it and keep what’s in it.” Mama Sky looks at O. “And since you’re so set on not having him—” She starts to pull the end of the string that’s tied around the bag.

Street and O yell together, “No!”

Mama Sky looks at them. “Don’t you want to know if it’s this black rock?”

Street says, “If I was playing a trick, I’d set up something like that.” As the women frown at him, he adds, “Only it’d be a subtler, smarter, and much kinder trick than I’d expect someone like Stormboy to play.”

O says, “Yours are hardly ever subtle, smart, or kind.” Then she adds, “But Stormboy’s idea of subtle is a mudslide or a lightning strike.” She holds her hand out to Mama Sky. Mama Sky sets the blue bag in O’s palm. O traces the shape of the thing in the bag, then nods. “It’s the rock.”

Street says, “And it’s a trick?”

O nods. “Stormboy is an even more despicable weasel than you.”

Street grins. “You like someone less than me?”

O says, “Now you only have to move higher in my opinion than everyone else in the world.”

Street laughs. “A start is a start.”

7

As O drives down Cigarillo Canyon, Street lifts the blue bag off the console. The rock inside is the size of a small chicken egg. It feels familiar in his hand.

O says, “Put it back.”

“I was thinking I’d take a little peek.”

“You were not.”

“Okay, I was thinking I’d pretend to take a little peek to trick some information from you.”

“Like?”

“Like what would happen if I took a little peek.”

“Why would I know?”

“Because you stopped your mother as fast as I did. Maybe faster.”

“Maybe I had the same thought you did.”

Street tugs the string to untie the bag.

O says, “No!” and reaches for it.

Street dangles it just beyond her reach. “Here’s what I think. I think there’s all kinds of things you’re not telling.”

“As if that’s hard to figure out.”

“And something stole my memories six days ago. This rock.”

O laughs. “A rock takes people’s memories. Yeah, right.”

“Last, I think if I take the rock out, I’ll lose six more days, but you’ll lose everything up to this moment. And we’ll be equal.”

O glances from the road to him. “That’d be a dirty trick.”

Street nods. “Yeah.” He ties the bag up and sets it back on the console.

At the end of Cigarillo, O turns onto Tree Lizard. Street can’t read what’s going on behind her smooth expression. He thinks that she’s her mother’s daughter, then wonders why he likes knowing that. He says, “I don’t know if it means anything to say you’re sorry for something you don’t remember, but I am sorry.”

O flicks her cool eyes to him, then back to the road. They’re driving through Flamingoville, a neighborhood that’s nice for nothing special except being nice: bright little houses, friendly shops, good cheap restaurants, sidewalks filled with lazy, happy people.

Street says, “I think I did something stupid, and you tracked me down, and now you’re trying to help and punish me at the same time.”

“What do you think you did?”

“Since you’re too fine for me to have gone chasing someone else, um, I stole the black rock from Bossman Sevenday?”

O nods. “You’re such an idiot.”

Street hits the glove compartment with the flat of his hand. “Oh, man! I am such an idiot!”

“I told you that.”

“I was hoping you’d say someone framed me. I really stole it?”

“They say you were drunk at the Talon with a little box, telling our crowd you were the best thief ever because you could steal the black rock from Bossman Sevenday and put it back before he noticed. And you had the rock to prove it.”

“He caught me putting it back?”

O shakes her head. “Everyone laughed and said anything could be in that box. How could you know what you had in it? So you got angry and looked inside—”

“Am I that stupid?”

O nods. “Then you wandered off looking twice as drunk. No one knew what happened after that. So I started asking for the word on Trickster, and I heard about a kid called Street who went by that handle. The rest is history.”

Street grins. “So, um, does that mean you and I are—?”

O says, “Were.”

Street grins wider. “I may be stupid, but I do have great taste.”

“Did you hear the past tense?”

Street keeps grinning. “I still have great taste.”

O shakes her head sadly. “I still have terrible taste.” Then she finally smiles at him. The wait was worth it

When O turns the smile back to the road, Street says, “What bothers me is why a man would have a rock that makes people forget everything?”

O says, “Who said a man had a rock like that?”

Street swallows. “So, Bossman Sevenday is—?”

O says, “Who would you steal from to prove you’re the best thief ever?”

“Not the All One. No way it’s the All One. Tell me I’m not that stupid.”

O says,”You’re not that stupid.”

Street stares ahead, and feels his eyes stretching wide, and he wants to scream. He closes his mouth and says quietly, “Death. I’m stupid enough to steal from Death.”

O nods. “All the newly dead still have their memories, thanks to you. Bossman says they’re making quite the ruckus. He’ll be glad to get the rock back.”

Street looks at the blue bag. “He’s getting it back. He’ll be glad.” Street laughs. “Nothing to be worried about, then.”

O says, “He’s Death.”

Street says, “Is there someplace else we can go?”

“Where Death can’t find you?”

Street tries to swallow again, but his throat is dry. He says in a rough whisper, “Then let’s take him the rock.”

“Good,” says O, and she turns off Memorial into the big ivory gates to Bossman Sevenday’s home.

8

As they walk up the white marble steps, the door is opened by an elegant dark woman in a dress as black as the heart of a cave. She says, “You’re early.”

O says, “Yes, ma’am.”

Street says, “You’re Ms. Brigitte? I’m—”

“Trickster,” says the dark woman. “Indeed, you are. I shall tell my husband—”

Bossman Sevenday’s voice booms from deep within the mansion. “Trickster! Oya! So good of you to return so soon!”

Ms. Brigitte steps back, opening the door wide. A pale hall with many closed doors along its sides stretches into murky shadows. Street’s focus is on Bossman Sevenday, striding toward them in impeccable evening wear. Even the near end of the long hall is dim. There’s a reddish glow to the west, though Street was sure he came into the house from midafternoon.

Ms. Brigitte says, “Business tires me,” and leaves the hall, closing a pair of white doors behind her. The air smells of cigarettes and perfume and oranges and peanut butter and all the other smells that Street has ever known, but muted. He hears music and laughter and crying and gasps that are the sound of loving or dying, equally muted. He looks at O. “Oya?”

She nods.

He says, “A good name. I’m sorry I forgot it.”

She smiles, and he thinks that if nothing is good after this moment, he could be content. And then he thinks that’s the stupidest thought he has ever had, because he wants everything to be even better. He calls, “Mr. Bossman Sevenday, sir? I’ve got your rock.” He holds out the cloth bag.

As Bossman Sevenday reaches for it, Street thinks about jerking the stone out. But it belongs to Bossman Sevenday, who must know how to show it to the dead without forgetting who he is. Maybe his dark glasses let him look on the stone. Street could knock off the glasses. The idea is tempting, but it doesn’t seem like a good idea to risk making Death like him even less. Letting Bossman take the bag, Street says, “I’m glad to have this straightened out. Taking something from Bossman Sevenday! You know only a fool would do that.”

“Yes, I do,” says Bossman Sevenday, laughing as he takes Street’s arm. “Walk with me.”

O says, “The gem’s back. Everything is back the way it should be now.”

Bossman Sevenday says, “Not quite. Someone stole from me.”

Street almost smiles in pride, then stops himself. “Not really, Mr. Bossman Sevenday, sir. You’ve got the rock back. And if you’ve got it, it’s like it was never gone, so no one could say anything was taken. Not really. If you see what I mean.”

Bossman Sevenday laughs. “They’ll talk, Trickster. Which is why you must come with me now.”

Street says, “Oya, want to wait outside for me? I shouldn’t be long.”

Bossman Sevenday shakes his head and laughs louder. “Ah, Trickster, don’t ask her to be that patient.”

Street says, “You’re taking me now?”

Bossman Sevenday nods.

“And I’m not coming back?”

Bossman Sevenday nods again.

“I didn’t expect this.”

Bossman Sevenday says, “Expecting things is not one of your gifts, Trickster.”

O says, “Bossman, I’m asking—”

Bossman Sevenday shakes his head. “Some things I must do with no thought of others.”

Street says, “I can’t believe it. No one’ll believe it at first.”

Bossman Sevenday says, “Believe what?”

Street drops to his knees. “Oya! See me here before the Bossman!”

As O squints at him, Bossman Sevenday says, “Begging won’t save you.”

“I’m not begging.” Street clasps his hands together.

Bossman Sevenday says, “Sure looks like—”

Street cries, “Thank you, Mr. Bossman Sevenday, sir! Thank you!”

Bossman Sevenday frowns.

Street glances at O, “You see how happy I am? You tell everyone of Bossman Sevenday’s kindness! You tell ‘em to stop fearing him, because he’s the most forgiving gentleman there could be!”

O nods hesitantly.

Street looks back up at Bossman Sevenday. “I was terrified you’d kick me out in the world without my memories, and folks would laugh at me for the rest of my life as the poor fool who tried to steal from you. I thought I’d suffer and suffer as the proof that no one should mess with you.”

Bossman Sevenday says, “You will—”

Street cries louder, “Now Oya’s seen how you’ll even forgive a trickster who was fool enough to steal from you. People will come up to you and say you’re the gentlest gentleman of all!” Street leans forward and kisses Bossman’s cold shoes. “See, Oya! Tell ‘em how grateful I was when you left me!” He kisses Bossman’s shoes again. The leather is even colder against his lips. “Bless you, Bossman Sevenday! Bless you!”

Bossman Sevenday looks at O, then at Street. Smoke comes from behind his round sunglasses, and they begin to glow red, and he says, “Get. Up.”

Street says, “Are we going now, Bossman?” He scrambles to his feet and grins. “I can’t wait!”

Bossman Sevenday’s face is a flaming skull as he screams, “Get out! You get out of here this instant!”

Street says, “But Bossman, haven’t you forgiven—”

O grabs his wrist and jerks him toward the door.

Street says, “No, O! I beg you! Don’t make me go back!”

They stumble down the long hall. The tiles rock beneath them as the earth quakes. Doors blow open. Harsh winds like arctic storms and scorching desert gales buffet them from each door that they pass, and they hear screams and wails of despair. And as they run, Street shouts, “Let me go back, O! Please!”

Ms. Brigitte stands at the front door. She glares at them, then throws the doors wide and shouts, “You deserve no less!”

“No! Please, no!” cries Street. He and O plunge down the steps and leap into the Zephyr and race away from Bossman Sevenday’s home.

And, as they go, Street is not sure whether the sound that he hears is Bossman’s rage or his laughter.

9

Street stretches in the car as they cruise into the city. O looks at him and says, “I don’t think you know the meaning of subtlety.”

Street nods. “I’m not the only one.”

O says, “You don’t have your memories.”

Street says, “I know life’s good, and you’re the best there is. What else do I need to know?”

O laughs. “Not one thing at all.”

Street says, “So everyone in our crowd has a purpose?”

O nods. “More or less. And duties with the purpose.”

Street says, “What about me?”

O shakes her head.

Street laughs. “So my only purpose—” He smiles smugly at O. “—is to be.”

O smiles back. “A pain.”

He shrugs. “Well, yes. Everyone’s good at something.”

The Thief of Dreams

2009-11-05T10:58:00.000-08:00

First published at Endicott Studio.

The Thief of Dreams

by Will Shetterly

A tiger dreamed of gazelles running free across the plains. Then the tiger woke, its dream gone. It saw a gazelle and leaped upon it to make the gazelle its breakfast.

A serpent dreamed of a city overgrown by the jungle. Its walls were strong, and its wells were full of cool, clear water. A child came. The serpent told it, "I guard this city for you and your people. Take it, grow strong, and help others."

Then the serpent woke, its dream gone. A child passed nearby, walking toward the city. The serpent sank its fangs into the child's ankle.

A king dreamed of a leader who lived like her people in a simple home with simple food and helped them build schools and hospitals.

Then the king woke, his dream gone. A servant brought his breakfast on a tray of gold. As his ministers advised him to raise the taxes to keep the army strong, he told them, “I had a dream. It’s gone now.”

“It was stolen,” said the servant.

Everyone looked at her, but the king only said, “By whom?”

“The Thief of Dreams,” said the servant.

“I must catch this thief to get back my dream,” said the king. “I will post a reward. I will send out my troops. I will have my wisest counselors learn who steals dreams.”

The servant said, “Only you will know your dream. You must seek it yourself.”

So the king, alone and on foot, set out on his quest.

On the plain, a tiger leaped upon him. As its jaws closed around his throat, the king cried, “Tell me, before you kill me, did you steal my dream?”

The tiger said, “No. But I have had a dream stolen."

“Our dreams were taken by the Thief of Dreams,” said the king. “Let’s seek the thief together.”

“Agreed,” said the tiger, so they set out side by side.

In the jungle, a serpent struck at the king. As its fangs touched his skin, the king cried, “Tell me, before you kill me, did you steal my dream?”

The serpent said, “No. But I have had a dream stolen.”

“I have also had a dream stolen,” said the tiger at the king’s side.

“Our dreams were taken by the Thief of Dreams,” said the king. “Let’s seek the thief together.”

So the king, the tiger, and the serpent searched the world.

Years passed, and the tiger died.

More years passed, and the serpent died.

Even more years passed. The king, old and ill, met a stranger. After telling his story, the king said, “The tiger, the serpent, and I wasted our lives pursuing the Thief of Dreams. What did we leave behind?”

The stranger said, “In the plains, the gazelles run free. In the jungle, a child found a city with strong walls and good wells that has been brought alive again. And in your land, the people made your servant their leader. She helped them build hospitals and schools.”

The king knew the stranger then. “You stole our dreams!”

The stranger touched the king’s hand and, as the king died, said, “No. I gave them.”

Kasim's Haj

2009-11-05T10:53:00.000-08:00

A FOLK TALE

Years ago, I read someone's version of this story in a newsgroup, probably about Islam. That person guessed the story might be from the 1001 Nights, but it doesn't feel like a story Scheherazade would tell. If you recognize it, let me know. I think the only thing you need to know is that it's traditional for a muslim to make a journey at least once in life to Mecca out of devotion to God. The journey is called the Haj.

Because this is not my story, I’m placing this version in the public domain.

Kasim's Haj

by Will Shetterly

Haroun al-Rashid, caliph of Baghdad, dreamt that he was at the gates of paradise and heard a voice: "What would you like to know, Haroun al-Rashid?"

He wanted to know if he would enter paradise when he died, but it seemed rude to ask for himself. Since he had just made his pilgrimage to Mecca, he asked, "Which of the pilgrims who made the Haj this year will enter paradise?"

"Only one."

"And who is that most favored and deserving one?"

"Kasim of Ismail Street."

The caliph woke. He disguised himself as a man of modest means and went into his city. The hour was early. No one stirred. When he came to Ismail Street, only one window in a tiny shop had its shutters open. By the light of a small lamp, an old man in old clothes was sewing a new sole onto an old shoe. Haroun al-Rashid asked, "Do you know where I would go to find Kasim of Ismail Street?"

The shoemaker said, "Oh, my friend, I am very sorry that I cannot tell you where to go to find a man by that name."

Haroun al-Rashid sighed in disappointment.

The shoemaker added, "The only man I know by that name you have already found."

Haroun al-Rashid stared at him. How could this be? The shoemaker was too old to make the Haj alone and too poor to make the Haj with helpers. Haroun al-Rashid asked, "Did you make the Haj this year?"

"No," said the shoemaker. "I have not had that honor."

"I am sorry to have troubled you," said Haroun al-Rashid, wondering how his dream had sent him so wrong.

"I planned to make the Haj this year," the shoemaker said. "I saved a penny every week for forty years to make the Haj. And I thought I had saved enough coins at last."

"But you hadn't?" Haroun al-Rashid asked.

"Oh, I had," said the shoemaker. "But on the coldest day of winter, my wife said she would like to eat camel meat. We had not eaten anything but water and rice for several weeks, and she was pregnant."

"So you bought so much camel meat you couldn't make the Haj?" Haroun al-Rashid asked.

"Oh, no," said the shoemaker. "I told my wife we could not afford meat. But then our house began filling with the smell of camel stew. The smell came from our neighbor's house. We could not escape it."

"And then you went to buy meat?" asked Haroun al-Rashid.

"Oh, no," said the shoemaker. "My wife said she would die if she did not have a taste of camel stew. She asked me to go to the neighbors and beg them for one bite."

"But instead you went to buy meat of your own?" asked Haroun al-Rashid.

"Oh, no," said the shoemaker. "I went to my neighbor and said that my pregnant wife had not eaten meat in weeks and could he spare a bite for her? He began to cry. He said, 'My friend, you do not smell camel stew. We have not had any food in our house for weeks. To keep my children from starving, I went into the market and bought an old donkey skin for a penny that we are boiling for soup. I am sorry that I have no camel stew for your wife. May God grant her wish soon.' So I went back to my home and dug up the coins I had saved for the Haj and gave them to my neighbor." The shoemaker shrugged. "God willing, someday I might make the Haj."

Haroun al-Rashid nodded. "God willing, someday I might make the Haj, too."

Brian and the Aliens

2009-10-30T18:26:00.000-07:00

First published in Bruce Coville's Book of Aliens (Scholastic, 1994)

Brian and the Aliens

by Will Shetterly

A boy and his dog were walking in the woods when they saw a space ship land. Two space aliens came out of it. One alien was blue, and one was green, and they were both covered with scales, large red eyes, and long tentacles. Otherwise, there was nothing unusual about them.

The aliens walked into the middle of the clearing and jammed a flag pole into the ground. The flag had strange colors on it that hurt the boy's eyes, and odd lettering that looked like "We got here first. Nyah-nyah."

The boy whispered to his dog, "I'm not scared. You go first."

The dog said, "Rowf! Rowf!"

The boy thought the dog meant, "Yes, you are, you can't fool me." So the boy said, "Am not," and he walked toward the aliens. (What the dog really meant was, "If you'd throw a stick, I'd chew on it until it was soft and slimy, and then I'd bring it back so you could throw it again.")

The blue alien said, "Hello, native person. I am Miglick and this is my partner, Splortch. We have discovered your planet."

"Yep," said the green alien. "We did. It's ours."

"And we name it Miglick Planet," said Miglick.

"Yep," said Splortch. "We do. No, wait! We name it Splortch Planet."

The boy said, "It has a name. It's Earth."

Miglick told Splortch, "Perhaps we should name it for our home. We could call it New Veebilzania."

"Boring!" said Splortch.

"Everybody calls it Earth," said the boy.

"Rowf! Rowf!" said the dog.

Splortch said, "Are these Splortchians trying to tell us something?"

Miglick said, "The little Miglickian said 'Rowf!' I believe that means they'd like to give us all their gold." (What the dog really meant was, "Are these aliens friendly? Do they want to roll in some mud?")

"Um, we don't have any gold to give you," said the boy.

"That's too bad." All of Miglick's eyes squinted. "Then what were you saying, Miglickian?"

"My name's Brian. And I'm a human on Earth. This is Lucky. He's a dog."

"His name's Pry-on," Splortch told Miglick. "He's of the tribe of Splortchians called hummings. This clearing where we landed is called Urp. The littler Splortchian is extremely fortunate. Its tribe are called ducks."

"I know that," said Miglick. "I heard everything the Miglickian said."

"No, you didn't," said Brian. "The entire planet is called Earth. The people who live on it are called humans. My name's Brian, his name's Lucky, and he's a dog. Okay?"

Most of Splortch's eyes squinted in a frown. "Excuse me. If you want to name things, discover your own planet."

"But humans were here first," said Brian.

"Okay," said Miglick. "Whenever we can't think of a better name for something, we'll use the old humming name. Isn't that fair?"

"That's fair," said Splortch, squatting on its tentacles to look at Lucky. "You don't have much to say, do you, fortunate duck?"

Brian said, "Ducks fly. They have wings. Lucky's a dog."

All of Splortch's eyes squinted in a frown. "I understand, Pry-on. I'm not stupid." The alien leaned close to Lucky. "So, where are your wings, fortunate duck?"

Lucky licked Splortch's face.

Miglick said, "I think that means the duck would rather not fly just now, but it is grateful that we discovered Miglick Planet."

Splortch looked at Brian. "You may lick my face, too, Pry-on."

Brian said, "No way!"

Miglick said, "The humming does not think it is worthy to lick your face."

Splortch said, "Ah, modest humming, you are indeed worthy to lick my face."

Brian shook his head. "Excuse me, but I don't want to lick anybody's face."

All of Splortch's eyes opened wide to stare at Brian. "Does that mean you aren't grateful that we discovered your planet?"

"Well," said Brian, "I always knew where it was."

Miglick sighed. "These Miglickians are so unreasonable. And to think I was sorry that they would all have to die."

"Have to what?" said Brian.

"Die," said Splortch. "You breathe oxygen, right?"

"Right," said Brian.

"Okay, then," said Miglick.

"Okay, then, what?" said Brian.

"Okay, then, you'll all die when we replace Earth's oxygen with methane," said Miglick. "Isn't that obvious?"

"Oh, dang," Brian said.

Splortch said, "Veebilzanians breathe methane. We took oxygen-breathing pills when we landed, but they don't last very long. And they taste terrible."

Brian said, "I don't want to seem rude or anything, but why do you have to replace our oxygen with methane?"

Splortch looked at Brian, then shrugged several tentacles and said, "What kind of rest stop would Splortch Planet be if Veebilzanians had to breathe oxygen? Can you imagine being cooped up in a space ship for hours and hours and hours, and finally you come to a planet where you can get out and walk around, and there's no methane to breathe?"

Miglick looked at Splortch. "Inconceivable."

"But Earth isn't a rest stop," said Brian.

"Of course not," said Miglick. "Until we replace the oxygen."

"These Splortchians aren't very smart," said Splortch.

"No," said Miglick. "Well, let's start the methane-making machine."

"Wait!" shouted Brian. "You can't just kill everything on Earth."

"Sure we can." Splortch pointed at a control panel on the side of the space ship. "We just press the red button. That starts the methane-making machine. Presto, Earth's a rest stop, and everyone's happy."

"But what about humans and dogs and everything that's already here?" asked Brian.

Miglick nodded. "The humming's right."

Splortch nodded, too. "Well, they won't be happy. They'll be dead." Splortch extended a tentacle toward the red button.

"Don't do that!" shouted Brian. "It's wrong!"

"It is?" Splortch drew its tentacle back to scratch its head. "It's not the green button, because that starts—"

"No," said Brian. "It's wrong to kill people."

"Hey, we know that." Miglick reached to press the red button.

"Don't!" shouted Brian. "Humans are people, too!"

"You are?" All of Splortch's eyes opened wide.

Brian nodded.

Splortch said, "Do you speak Veebilzanian?"

"Well, um, no," said Brian.

"Do you worship the great Hoozilgobbler?" said Miglick.

"Um, I don't think so," said Brian.

"You don't have tentacles," said Splortch.

"Well, no," Brian agreed. "But we're still people."

"Hmm," said Miglick. "Do you have space ships that can travel between the stars?"

"We have space shuttles that can go around the Earth. And humans went to the moon once."

"Only to your moon?" Miglick laughed. "That's not a space ship. That's a space raft."

"We're really people," said Brian. "If you got to know us, you'd see."

Splortch and Miglick glanced at each other. Miglick said, "This planet would make such a nice rest stop."

"True," said Splortch. "But hummings and ducks might be people."

"Quite right," said Miglick. "We'll have to find out."

"Whew!" said Brian, thinking the aliens would become someone else's problem now.

"Rowf!" Lucky said. (What Lucky meant was, "Does anyone want to go home and see if there's any brown glop in my food bowl? If there is, we can all get down on the floor and eat together.")

Splortch said, "You two Splortchians stand over there. We'd like to take your image."

"Our picture?" said Brian.

"I guess so," said Splortch.

Brian shrugged and led Lucky under a tree, where he stood looking at Splortch and Miglick, who were standing in front of the space ship. Miglick said, "Perfect," and Brian smiled as the alien pressed a green button on the control panel.

In the next instant, Brian was looking at a boy who looked exactly like himself and a dog who looked exactly like Lucky. The blue alien was standing beside Brian, and the green alien was missing. The tree was behind the boy and the dog, and the space ship was behind Brian and the blue alien.

Brian said, "Hey! What happened?"

The blue alien said, "Rowf! Rowf!"

Brian raised a green tentacle to scratch his head, and then he stared at the tentacle.

The dog said, "Ret's go, Sprortch. And you two hummings, be carefur in our bodies."

"Don't press any buttons while we're gone," said the boy. "You don't want to start the methane machine until we're back."

Brian stared, then shook his tentacles in frustration.

"Rowf!" The blue alien rubbed its head against Brian's tentacles until Brian patted it. "Rowf!"

"Rots o' things smell grr-reat!" said the dog.

"Come on, Miglick," said the boy. "The sooner we prove hummings aren't really people, the sooner we can start the methane-making machine."

"Rokay! See you rater!" The dog ran ahead of the boy to get a good whiff of a dead skunk. "Yo! That's grr-reat!"

"Dang!" Brian stomped his tentacles twice, and then he squatted and told the blue alien beside him, "It's okay, Lucky. We'll fix this. Um, somehow."

Just then, a woman behind him said, "All right, who's making a monster movie?"

Brian turned around. A tall police officer stood at the edge of the clearing with her hand on her holstered pistol.

Brian said, "I'm not a monster, I'm a space traveler. I mean, I'm a kid, and this is my dog. No one's making a movie. Can you help?"

The police officer cocked her head to one side, then called, "Jack, what do you think?"

A fat police officer came out of the woods and walked toward the space ship. He stared at it and said, "I think I don't know what I think, Sarge."

"It's simple," said Brian. "Only I can't explain it. And there's not time to try, 'cause we have to save Earth right away!"

"You're a kid?" The policewoman moved her hand away from her pistol and scratched her head.

"Sure," said Brian. "The aliens switched bodies with us by pushing that green button." He pointed at it with a tentacle.

"This one?" the policeman asked. And he pressed the green button.

#

Meanwhile, the alien who looked like Lucky and the alien who looked like Brian walked out of the woods. A girl called, "Brian!"

"Herro," said the dog.

"No, I think I'm Pry-on," said the boy. He called to the girl, "Who are you, humming from Urp?"

"What's the game?" said the girl.

"There's no game," said the boy. "I'm Splortch. This is Miglick. We're from Veebilzania. We must decide whether we should kill everyone on your planet by turning it into a rest stop for space travelers."

The dog nodded in agreement.

"Okay," said the girl. "I'm Captain Brandi of the Starship Enterprise."

"Glad to meet you, Captain Pran-dee."

The girl said, "I've got your space ship locked in a tractor beam. You have to leave Earth alone, or I'll blow up your ship with my photon torpedoes."

"Oh, oh!" said the dog.

The girl said, "Is Lucky okay?"

The boy said, "Um, we have to go now."

"No way," said the girl. "Or I'll blow up your ship. Besides, Mom said you have to come in for lunch."

The boy said, "These Urp creatures are more clever than we suspected. Maybe they really are people."

"I don' know," said the dog.

The girl patted the dog's head. "Poor Lucky. Did you eat something you shouldn't have?"

A woman stepped out of a house and called, "Brian! Brandi! Lunch is ready!"

"Coming, Mom!" The girl grabbed the boy's hand and tugged him toward the woman's house. The dog stared at them, then back at the woods, and then followed the girl and the boy inside.

At the kitchen table, the girl sat in one chair, so the boy sat in another. The dog jumped into a third. The Mom looked at the dog and said, "Down, Lucky!"

"But he's hungry," said the boy.

"He has food." The Mom pointed at Lucky's dish, which was full of brown mush.

"Good!" said the dog as it jumped down.

"Lucky sure sounds strange," said the Mom.

"He can't speak as well as I can," said the boy. "And he can't pick up things in his hands." The boy pointed at his thumb. "I think it's because hummings have this special finger, and ducks don't. Tentacles are far more practical. And far more attractive."

The girl and the Mom laughed. The girl said, "Brian's a space alien. I always knew it."

The boy nodded proudly. "I am Splortch from Veebilzania. That is Miglick, my partner."

"Herro," said the dog, looking up from his dish.

"How do you like the duck food?" asked the boy.

"Good!" said the dog.

The Mom asked, "How'd you train Lucky to bark like that?"

"He di'n't," said the dog.

"I didn't," said the boy. "We learned your language from your television broadcasts."

The Mom put her hand on the boy's forehead. "I think you've been watching too much television, mister. Do you feel all right?"

Before the boy could answer, someone pressed the door buzzer. "I'll get it!" the girl said.

"Oh," said the boy in relief. "That's not the sound of you hummings blowing up our space ship?"

The girl opened the front door, then said, "Mom? It's the police."

"No, it's not." A fat policeman walked into the room. "It's me, Brian."

"Rowf," said a tall policewoman, trotting in after the policeman.

"Oh, oh," said the boy.

"Ro, ro," said the dog.

"Mom!" said the policeman, pointing at the boy and the dog. "They're aliens and they want to kill everyone on Earth. We have to stop them!"

As the policewoman ran toward the dog dish, the policeman called, "Lucky! Come back here!" The policewoman barked sadly and returned to the policeman's side.

The Mom looked from the two police officers to the boy and the dog.

"It's me, really!" the policeman said. "The aliens switched bodies with Lucky and me. And when the police showed up, I got put into the policeman's body by mistake."

"That is not true," said the boy. "I'm Pry-on the humming, not Splortch from Veebilzania." He pointed at the dog. "This is a fortunate duck, not my partner Miglick. Send away those hummings in blue clothing and let us stay with you until we decide whether you're really people."

The Mom stared at the boy.

The boy added, "Please?"

"Brian?" the Mom asked the boy. "The joke's over now, understand?"

"It's not a joke!" said the policeman. "If you don't believe me, they'll turn all the oxygen into methane, and everyone will die!"

"Yes, they're playing a joke!" said the boy. "But not me! I'm really Pry-on! Make the joking people go away!"

The Mom said, "This isn't funny, Brian." She turned toward the police officers. "And you two should be ashamed of yourselves, playing some game like this—"

The policewoman whimpered. The policeman said, "Oh, dang."

The girl pointed at the policeman. "Mom, that's Brian."

The woman stared at the boy. "Then who're you?"

"Oh, all right," said the boy, sighing. "I'm Splortch. I traded bodies with Pry-on."

The dog said, "But where are our real bodies?"

"Right here," said someone at the door.

"Hey, great!" said Brandi. "Space aliens!"

The green alien pointed a tentacle at the policewoman, who was hiding behind the policeman. "Just don't let me eat dog food, okay?"

"Don't worry, Sergeant," said the policeman. "Lucky does everything I tell him to. Except when he doesn't."

At that moment, a man in cowboy boots walked in the front door and stared at the two aliens, the two police officers, the two children, the dog, and the Mom.

"Dad!" the policeman yelled, wrapping his arms around the surprised man and giving him a big hug. "You're home early!"

"Uh—" began the Dad.

"Roo's he?" said the dog.

The policewoman started drinking water out of Lucky's water dish.

The boy said, "Please tell Captain Pran-dee not to destroy our space ship. We could put our rest stop on another planet."

"I—" began the Dad.

"Do you live here?" said the blue alien. "Or are you another space alien?"

"Um—" began the Dad.

"Everything's under control," the green alien said. "But your son promised he wouldn't let me drink out of the dog dish, and look at me now." The alien pointed a tentacle at the policewoman, who was happily lapping up water from the dog dish.

"Oh, sorry." The policeman released the very confused Dad and called, "Lucky! Stop that." The policewoman looked up from the dog dish, then ran over and crouched beside the policeman.

The Dad said, "If I go outside and come back in again, will this make sense?"

"I doubt it," said the Mom. "But if it works, I'll try it too."

"We only saw your television broadcasts," said the boy. "We didn't know you were intelligent beings."

"Rat's right," said the dog. "We won't take away your grr-oxygen now."

The girl gave the Dad a hug. "Isn't this great? Everyone's in the wrong bodies, except for us!"

The blue alien said, "Sarge, I sure hope you'll write the report on this case," and then coughed.

The green alien nodded, said, "Maybe we should say we fell asl—" and then coughed, too.

The Dad scratched his head. "This is one of those TV shows where they trick people, right?"

"No time to explain, Dad!" said the policeman, running outside with the policewoman following behind him. "C'mon, everybody!"

"Hey, our bodies!" cried the space aliens, running after the police officers.

"Hey, our bodies!" cried the boy and the dog, running after the aliens.

"Hey, Brian and Lucky!" cried the Dad, running after the boy and the dog.

"Hey, Dad!" cried the girl, running after the Dad.

"Hey, everybody!" cried the Mom, not running after anyone. "Who's going to explain what's going on?"

"Not now, Mom!" said the policeman, stopping for a moment at the edge of the woods. "The aliens said their oxygen pills don't last very long!"

"Rat's right!" said the dog. "Grr-I forgot!"

"What oxygen breathing pills?" said the blue alien.

"I don't like the sound of this," said the green alien, and then it coughed again.

"Hurry!" said the girl, grabbing her Mom's hand to lead her into the woods.

The Dad looked up into the trees as they ran. "They sure hide the video cameras well."

Just as everyone entered the clearing where the space ship stood, the two aliens fell on the ground and began gasping desperately. The dog pressed a purple button on the space ship's control panel, and two small yellow pills popped out. The dog gave them to the aliens. As soon as the aliens popped them into their mouths, they quit coughing.

After Splortch and Miglick used their machine to put everyone back into their proper bodies, Splortch said, "Thank you for not destroying our ship, Captain Pran-dee."

The girl shrugged. "Oh, that's all right."

Splortch said, "And thank you for remembering about the oxygen pills, Pry-on. You saved us from having to live the rest of our lives as hideous freaks. Um, nothing personal."

"I kind of liked being a duck," said Miglick.

"I kind of like being alive," said the policewoman. "You did good, kid."

Brian blushed and shrugged. "That's all right."

Splortch said, "After we build a rest stop on Pluto, you all have to come and visit us."

"That'd be nice," said the Mom.

"And bring some of that good duck food," called Miglick as the space ship's door closed behind him.

"Goodbye!" everyone shouted as the space ship took off. After it disappeared in the sky, the Dad said, "They use very long wires and a really big mirror, right?"

"Let's go finish our lunch," said the Mom.

Brian patted Lucky's head. "Glad to be a dog again?"

Lucky licked Brian's face and said "Rowf! Rowf!" And everyone knew that meant "yes!" (Though it really meant, "You smell that dead skunk? Let's all go roll on it!")

—The end

Midnight Girl - Version 0.92 (was 9.0)

2009-10-28T14:58:00.000-07:00

Public proofing of this version is over. The official version should be available in a few days.

Silver or Gold

2009-10-10T19:30:00.000-07:00

First published in After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien (Martin H. Greenberg, editor), Tor.

Silver or Gold

by Emma Bull

Moon Very Thin sat on the raised hearth -- the only place in the center room out of the way -- with her chin on her knuckles. She would have liked to be doing something more, but the things she thought of were futile, and most were undignified. She watched Alder Owl crisscross the slate floor and pop in and out of the stillroom and the pantry and the laundry. Alder Owl’s hands were full of things on every crossing: clean clothes, a cheese, dried yellow dock and feverfew, a tinderbox, a wool mantle. She was frowning faintly all over her round pink face, and Moon knew that she was reviewing lists in her head.

“You can’t pack all that,” said Moon.

“You couldn’t,” said Alder Owl. “But I’ve had fifty years more practice. Now remember to cure the squash before you bring them in, or there’ll be nothing to eat all winter but onions. And if the squirrels nest in the thatch again, there’s a charm --”

“You told me,” Moon sighed. She shifted a little to let the fire roast a slightly different part of her back. “If I forget it, I can look it up. It’s awfully silly for you to set out now. We could have snow next week.”

“If we did, then I’d walk through it. But we won’t. Not for another month.” Alder Owl wrapped three little stoneware jars in flannel and tucked them in her wicker pack.

Moon opened her mouth, and the thing she’d been busy not saying for three days hopped out. “He’s been missing since before Midsummer. Why do you have to go now? Why do you have to go at all?”

At that, Alder Owl straightened up and regarded her sternly. “I have responsibilities. You ought to know that.”

“But why should they have anything to do with him?”

“He is the prince of the Kingdom of Hark End.”

Moon stood up. She was taller than Alder Owl, but under that fierce gaze she felt rather stubby. She scowled to hide it. “And we live in Hark End. Hundreds -- thousands of people do. A lot of them are even witches. They haven’t all gone tramping off like a pack of questing youngest sons.”

Alder Owl had a great many wrinkles, which deepened all over her face when she was about to smile. They deepened now. “First, youngest sons have never been known to quest in packs. Second, all the witches worth their salt and stone have tried to find him, in whatever way suits them best. All of them but me. I held back because I wanted to be sure you could manage without me.”

Moon Very Thin stood still for a moment, taking that in. Then she sat back down with a thump and laced her fingers around her knees. “Oh,” she said, halfway between a gasp and a laugh. “Unfair, unfair. To get at me through my pride!”

“Yes, my weed, and there’s such a lot of it. I have to go, you know. Don’t make it harder for me.”

“I wish I could do something to help,” said Moon after a moment.

“I expect you to do all your work around here, and all of mine besides. Isn’t that enough?” Alder Owl smoothed the flap down over the pack and snugged the drawstring tight.

“You know it’s not. Couldn’t I go with you?”

Alder Owl pulled a stool from under the table with her foot and sat on it, her hands over her knees. “When I travel in my spirit,” she said, “to ask a favor of Grandmother, you can’t go with me.”

“Of course not. Then who’d play the drum, to guide you back?”

Alder Owl beamed. “Clever weed. Open that cupboard over the mantel-shelf and bring me what you find there.”

What Moon found was a drum. It was nothing like the broad, flat, cowhide journey-drum, whose speech echoed in her bones and was like a breathing heartbeat under her fingers, whose voice could be heard in the land where there was no voice. This drum was an upright cylinder no bigger than a quart jar. Its body was made of some white wood, and the skins of its two heads were fine-grained and tufted with soft white hair around the lashings. There was a loop of hide to hold it with, and a drumstick with a leather beater tucked through that.

Moon shook her head. “This wouldn’t be loud enough to bring you home from the pump, let alone from -- where are you going?”

“Wherever I have to. Bring it to me.”

Moon brought her the drum, and Alder Owl held it up by the loop of hide and struck it, once. The sound it made was a sharp, ringing tok, like a woodpecker’s blow.

Alder Owl said, “The wood is from an ash tree planted at the hour of my birth. The skins are from a ewe born on the same day. I raised the ewe and watered the tree, and on my sixteenth birthday, I asked them for their lives, and they gave them gladly. No matter how far I go, the drum will reach me. When I cannot hear it, it will cease to sound.

“Tomorrow at dawn, I’ll leave,” Alder Owl continued. “Tomorrow at sunset, as the last rind of the sun burns out behind the line of the Wantnot Hills, and at every sunset after, beat the drum once, as I just did. ”

Moon was a little shaken by the solemnity of it all. But she gathered her wits at last and repeated, “At sunset each day. Once. I’ll remember.”

“Hmph. Well.” Alder Owl lifted her shoulders, as if solemnity was a shawl she could shrug away. “Tomorrow always comes early. Time to put the fire to bed.”

“I’ll get the garden things,” Moon said. She tossed her cloak on and went out the stillroom door into the night.

Her namesake was up, and waxing. Alder Owl would have good light, if she needed to travel by night. But it would be cold traveling; frost dusted the leaves and vines and flagstone paths like talcum. Moon shivered and sighed. “What’s the point of having an able-bodied young apprentice, if you’re not going to put all that ableness to use?” she muttered to the shifting air. The cold carried all her S’s off into the dark.

She pinched a bloom from the yellow chrysanthemum, and a stalk of merry-man’s wort from its sheltered bed. When she came back into the house she found that Alder Owl had already fed the fire and settled the logs with the poker, and fetched a bowl of water. Moon dropped the flowers into it.

“Comforter, guard against the winter dark,” Alder Owl said to the fire, as always, as if she were addressing an old friend. She stirred the water with her fingers as she spoke. “Helpmeet, nourisher of flesh and heart, bide and watch, and let no errant spark leap up until the sun should take thy part.”

Firelight brushed across the seamed landscape of Alder Owl’s face, flashed yellow in her sharp, dark eyes, turned the white in her hair to ivory. Tomorrow night, Moon thought, she won’t be here. Just me. She could believe it only with the front of her mind, where all untested things were kept. The rest of her, mind and lungs and soles of feet, denied it.

Alder Owl flicked the water from her hand onto the hearth, and the line of drops steamed. Then she handed the bowl to Moon, and Moon fed the flowers to the fire.

After a respectful silence, Moon said, “It’s water.” It was the continuation of an old argument. “And the logs were trees that grew out of the earth and fed on water, and the fire itself feeds on those and air. That’s all four elements. You can’t separate them.”

“It’s the hour for fire, and it’s fire that we honor. At the appropriate hours we honor the other three, and if you say things like that in public, no educated person in the village will speak to you.” Alder Owl took the bowl out of Moon’s hands and gathered her fingers in a strong, wet clasp. “My weed, my stalk of yarrow. You’re not a child anymore. When I leave, you’ll be a grown woman, in others’ eyes if not your own. What people hear from a child’s mouth as foolishness becomes something else on the lips of a woman grown: sacrilege, or spite, or madness. Work the work as you see fit, but keep your mouth closed around your notions, and keep fire out of water and earth out of air.”

“But --”

“Empty the bowl now, and get on to bed.”

Moon went into the garden again and flung the water out of the bowl -- southward, because it was consecrated to fire. Then she stood a little while in the cold, with a terrible hard feeling in her chest that was beyond sadness, beyond tears. She drew in great breaths to freeze it, and exhaled hard to force the fragments out. But it was immune to cold or wind.

“I’d like to be a woman,” she whispered. “But I’d rather be a child with you here, than a woman with you gone.” The sound of the words, the knowledge that they were true, did what the cold couldn’t. The terrible feeling cracked, melted, and poured out of her in painful tears. Slowly the comforting order around her, the beds and borders Alder Owl had made, stopped the flow of them, and the kind cold air wiped them off her face.

At dawn, when the light of sunrise lay tangled in the treetops, Alder Owl settled her pack on her back and went out by the front door. Moon went with her as far as the gate at the bottom of the yard. In the uncertain misty land of dawn, Alder Owl was a solid, certain figure, cloaked in shabby purple wool, her silver and black hair tucked under a drunken-brimmed green hat.

“I don’t think you should wear the hat,” Moon said, past the tightness in her throat. “You look like an eggplant.”

“I like it. I’m an old woman. I can wear what I please.”

She was going. What did one say, except “Goodbye,” which wasn’t at all what Moon wanted? “When will you come back?”

“When I’ve found him. Or when I know he can’t be found.”

“You always tell me not to try to prove negatives.”

“There are ways,” Alder Owl replied, with a sideways look, “to prove this one.”

Moon Very Thin shivered in the weak sun. Alder Owl squinted up at her, pinched her chin lightly. Then she closed the gate behind her and walked down the hill. Moon watched her -- green and purple, silly and strong -- until the trees hid her from sight.

She cured the squash before she put them in the cellar. She honored the elements, each at its own hour. She made cheese and wine, and put up the last of the herbs, and beat the rugs, and waxed all the floors against the coming winter muck. She mended the thatch and the fence, pruned the apple trees and turned the garden beds, taking comfort from maintaining the order that Alder Owl had established.

Moon took over other established things, too. By the time the first snow fell, her neighbors had begun to bring their aches and pains to her, to fetch her when a child was feverish, to call her in to set a dog’s broken leg or stitch up a horse’s gashed flank. They asked about the best day to sign a contract, and whether there was a charm to keep nightshade out of the hay field. In return, they brought her mistletoe and willow bark, a sack of rye flour, a tub of butter.

She didn’t mind the work. She’d been brought up for it; it seemed as natural as getting out of bed in the morning. But she found she minded the payment. When the nearest neighbor’s boy, Fell, trotted up to the gate on his donkey with the flour sack riding pillion, and thanked her, and gave it to her, she almost thrust it back at him. Alder Owl had given her the skill, and had left her there to serve them. The payment should be Alder Owl’s. But there was no saying which would appear first, Alder Owl or the bottom of the sack.

“You look funny,” Fell said.

“You look worse,” Moon replied, because she’d taught him to climb trees and to fish, and had thus earned the privilege. “Do you know those things made out of wood or bone, with a row of little spines set close together? They call them ‘combs’.”

“Hah, hah.” He pointed to the flour. “I hope you make it all into cakes and get fat.” He grinned and loped back down the path to the donkey. They kicked up snow as they climbed the hill, and he waved at the crest.

She felt better. Alder Owl would never have had that conversation.

Every evening at sunset, Moon took the little drum out of the cupboard over the mantel. She looked at it, and touched it, and thought of her teacher. She tried to imagine her well and warm and safe, with a hot meal before her and pleasant company near. At last, when the rim of the sun blinked out behind the far line of hills, she swung the beater against the fine skin head, and the drum sounded its woodpecker knock.

Each time Moon wondered: Could Alder Owl really hear it? And if she could, what if Moon were to beat it again? If she beat it three times, would Alder Owl think something was wrong, and return home?

Nothing was wrong. Moon put the drum away until the next sunset.

The Long Night came, and she visited all her neighbors, as they visited her. She brought them fir boughs tied with bittersweet, and honey candy, and said the blessing-charm on their doorsteps. She watched the landscape thaw and freeze, thaw and freeze. Candle-day came, and she went to the village, which was sopping and giddy with a spell of warmer weather, to watch the lighting of the new year’s lamps from the flame of the old. It could be, said the villagers, that no one would ever find the prince. It could be that the King of Stones had taken him beneath the earth, and that he would lie there without breath, in silence, forever. And had she had any word of Alder Owl, and hadn’t it been a long time that she’d been gone?

Yes, said Moon, it had been a long time.

The garden began to stir, almost invisibly, like a cat thinking of breakfast in its sleep. The sound of water running was everywhere, though the snow seemed undisturbed and the ice as thick as ever. Suddenly, as if nature had thrown wide a gate, it was spring, and Moon was run off her legs with work. Lambing set her to wearing muddy paths in the hills between the cottage and the farmsteads all around. The mares began to foal, too. She thanked wisdom that women and men, at least, had no season.

She had been with Tansy Broadwater’s bay thoroughbred since late morning. The foal had been turned in the womb and tied in his cord, and Moon was nearly paralyzed thinking of the worth of the two of them, and their lives in her hands. She was bloody to the elbows and hoarse with chanting, but at last she and Tansy regarded each other triumphantly across the withers of a nursing colt.

“Come up to the house for a pot of hot tea,” Tansy said as Moon rinsed soap off her hands and arms. “You won’t want to start out through the woods now until moonrise, anyway.”

Moon lifted her eyes, shocked, to the open barn door. The sun wore the Wantnot Hills like a girdle.

“I have to go,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ll be all right.” She headed for the trail at a run.

Stones rolled under her boots, and half-thawed ice lay slick as butter in the shadows. It was nearly night already, under the trees. She plunged down the hill and up the next one, and down again, slithering, on all fours sometimes. She could feel her bones inside her brittle as fire-blasted wood, her ankles fragile and waiting for a wrench. She was afraid to look at the sun again.

The gate -- the gate at the bottom of the path was under her hands. She sobbed in relief. So close... She raced up through the garden, the cold air like fire in her lungs. She struggled frantically with the front door, until she remembered it was barred inside, that she’d left through the stillroom. She banged through the stillroom door and made the contents of the shelves ring and rattle. To the hearth, and wrench the cupboard door open . . .

The drum was in her hands, and through the window the sun’s rind showed, thin as thread, on the hills. She was in time. As the horizon closed like a snake’s eyelid over the disk of the sun, Moon struck the drum.

There was no sound at all.

Moon stared at the drum, the beater, her two hands. She had missed, she must have. She brought the beater to the head again. She might as well have hit wool against wool. There was no woodpecker knock, no sharp clear call. She had felt skin and beater meet, she had seen them. What had she done wrong?

Slowly Alder Owl’s words came back to her. When I cannot hear it, it will cease to sound. Moon had always thought the drum would be hard to hear. But never silent. Tell me if you can’t hear this, she thought wildly. Something else they’d said as she left, about proving negatives -- that there were ways to prove the prince couldn’t be found.

If he were dead, for example. If he were only bones under the earth.

And Alder Owl, beyond the drum’s reach, might have followed him even to that, under the dominion of the King of Stones.

She thought about pounding the drum; she could see herself doing it in her mind, hammering at it until it sounded or broke. She imagined weeping, too; she could cry and scream and break things, and collapse at last exhausted and miserable.

What she did was to sit where she was at the table, the drum on her knees, watching the dark seep in and fill the room around her. Sorrow and despair rose and fell inside her in a slow rhythm, like the shortening and lengthening of days. When her misery peaked, she would almost weep, almost shriek, almost throw the drum from her. Then it would begin to wane, and she would think, No, I can bear it, until it turned to waxing once again.

She would do nothing, she resolved, until she could think of something useful to do. She would wait until the spiders spun her white with cobwebs, if she had to. But she would do something better than crying, better than breaking things.

The hide lashing of Alder Owl’s drum bit into her clenched fingers. In the weak light of the sinking fire, the wood and leather were only a pale mass in her lap. How could Alder Owl’s magic have dwindled away to this -- a drum with no voice? What voice could reach her now?

And Moon answered herself, wonderingly: Grandmother.

She couldn’t. She had never gone to speak with Grandmother herself. And how could she travel there, with no one to beat the drum for her when she was gone? She might be lost forever, wandering through the tangled roots of Grandmother’s trees.

Yet she stood and walked, stiff-jointed, to the stillroom. She gathered up charcoal and dried myrtle and cedar. She poured apple wine into a wooden cup, and dropped in a seed from a sky’s-trumpet vine. It was a familiar set of motions. She had done them for Alder Owl. She took down the black-fleeced sheepskin from the wall by the front door, laid it out on the floor, and set the wine and incense by it, wine to the east, charcoal to the south. Another trip, to fetch salt and the little bone-handled knife -- earth to the north, the little conical pile of salt, and the knife west, for air. (Salt came from the sea, too, said her rebellious mind, and the knife’s metal was mined from earth and tempered with fire and water. But she was afraid of heresy now, afraid to doubt the knowledge she must trust with the weight of lives. She did as she’d been taught.)

At last she took the big drum, the journey-drum, out of its wicker case and set it on the sheepskin. The drum would help her partway on her travels. But when she crossed the border, she would have to leave body, fingers, drum all at the crossing, and the drum would fall silent. She needed so little: just a tap, tap, tap. Well, her heart would have to do.

Moon dropped cross-legged on the sheepskin. Right-handed she took up the knife and drew lightly on the floor around herself as if she were a compass. She passed the knife to her left hand behind her back, smoothly, and the knife point never left the slate. That had been hard once, learning to take the knife as Alder Owl passed it to her. She drew the circle again with a pinch of salt dropped from each hand, and with cedar and myrtle smoking and snapping on their charcoal bed. Finally she drew the circle with wine shaken from her fingers, and drank off the rest. Then she took up the drum.

She tried to hear the rhythm of her breathing, of her heart, the rhythm that was always inside her. Only when she felt sure of it did she begin to let her fingers move with it, to tap the drum. It shuddered under her fingers, lowing out notes. When her hands were certain on the drum head, she closed her eyes.

A tree. That was the beginning of the journey, Moon knew; she was to begin at the end of a branch of the great tree. But what kind of tree? Was it night, or day? Should she imagine herself as a bird or a bug, or as herself? And how could she think of all that and play the drum, too?

Her neck was stiff, and one of her feet was going to sleep. You think too much, she scolded herself. Alder Owl had never had such trouble. Alder Owl had also never suggested that there was such a thing as too much thinking. More of it, she’d said, would fix most of the world’s problems.

Well, she’d feel free to think, then. She settled into the drumbeat, imagined it wrapped around her like a featherbed.

-- A tree too big to ever see all at once, one of a forest of trees like it. A tree with a crown of leaves as wide as a clear night sky on a hilltop. Night time, then. It was an oak, she decided, but green out of season. She envisioned the silver-green leathery leaves around her, and the rough black bark starry with dew in the moonlight. The light came from the end of the branch. Cradled in leaves there was a pared white-silver crescent, a new moon cut free from the shadow of the old. It gave her light to travel by.

The rough highroad of bark grew broader as she neared the trunk. She imagined birds stirring in their sleep and the quick, querulous chirk of a squirrel woken in its nest. The wind breathed in and out across the vault of leaves and made them twinkle. Moon heard her steps on the wood, even and measured: the voice of the drum.

Down the trunk, down toward the tangle of roots, the knotted mirror-image of the branches above. The trunks of other trees were all around her, and the twining branches shuttered the moonlight. It was harder going, shouldering against the life of the tree that always moved upward. Her heartbeat was a thin, regular bumping in her ears.

It was too dark to tell which way was down, too dark to tell anything. Moon didn’t know if she’d reached the roots or not. She wanted to cry out, to call for Grandmother, but she’d left her body behind, and her tongue in it.

A little light appeared before her, and grew slowly. There were patterns in it, colors, shapes -- she could make out the gate at the bottom of the garden, and the path that led into the woods. On the path -- was it the familiar one? It was bordered now with sage -- she saw a figure made of the flutter of old black cloth and untidy streamers of white hair, walking away from her. A stranger, Moon thought; she tried to catch up, but didn’t seem to move at all. At the first fringes of the trees the figure turned, lifted one hand, and beckoned. Then it disappeared under the roof of the woods.

Moon’s spirit, like a startled bird, burst into motion, upward. Her eyes opened on the center room of the cottage. She was standing unsteadily on the sheepskin, the journey drum at her feet. Her heart clattered under her ribs like a stick dragged across the pickets of a fence, and she felt sore and prickly and feverish. She took a step backward, overbalanced, and sat down.

“Well,” she said, and the sound of her voice made her jump. She licked her dry lips and added, “That’s not at all how it’s supposed to be done.”

Trembling, she picked up the tools and put them away, washed out the wooden bowl. She’d gathered up the sheepskin and had turned to hang it on the wall when her voice surprised her again. “But it worked,” she said. She stood very still, hugging the fleece against her. “It worked, didn’t it?” She’d traveled and asked, and been answered, and if neither had been in form as she understood them, still they were question and answer, and all that she needed. Moon hurried to put the sheepskin away. There were suddenly a lot of things to do.

The next morning she filled her pack with food and clothing, tinderbox and medicines, and put the little ash drum, Alder Owl’s drum, on top of it all. She put on her stoutest boots and her felted wool cloak. She smothered the fire on the hearth, fastened all the shutters, and left a note for Tansy Broadwater, asking her to look after the house.

At last she shouldered her pack and tramped down the path, through the gate, down the hill, and into the woods.

Moon had traveled before, with Alder Owl. She knew how to find her way, and how to build a good fire and cook over it; she’d slept in the open and stayed at inns and farmhouses. Those things were the same alone. She had no reason to feel strange, but she did. She felt like an imposter, and expected every chance-met traveler to ask if she was old enough to be on the road by herself.

She thought she’d been lonely at the cottage; she thought she’d learned the size and shape of loneliness. Now she knew she’d only explored a corner of it. Walking gave her room to think, and sights to see: fern shoots rolling up out of the mushy soil, yellow cups of wild crocuses caught by the sun, the courting of ravens. But it was no use pointing and crying, “Look!”, because the only eyes there had already seen. Her isolation made everything seem not quite real. It was harder each night to light a fire, and she had steadily less interest in food. But each night at sunset, she beat Alder Owl’s drum. Each night it was silent, and she sat in the aftermath of that silence, bereft all over again.

She walked for six days through villages and forest and farmland. The weather had stayed dry and clear and unspringlike for five of them, but on the sixth she tramped through a rising chill wind under a lowering sky. The road was wider now, and smooth, and she had more company on it: Carts and wagons, riders, other walkers went to and fro past her. At noon she stopped at an inn, larger and busier than any she’d yet seen.

The boy who set tea down in front of her had a mop of blond hair over a cheerful, harried face. “The cold pie’s good,” he said before she could ask. “It’s rabbit and mushroom. Otherwise, there’s squash soup. But don’t ask for ham -- I think it’s off a boar that wasn’t cut right. It’s awful.”

Moon didn’t know whether to laugh or gape. “The pie, then, please. I don’t mean to sound like a fool, but where am I?”

“Little Hark,” he replied. “But don’t let that raise your hopes. Great Hark is a week away to the west, on foot. You bound for it?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I am. I’m looking for someone.”

“In Great Hark? Huh. Well, you can find an ant in an anthill, too, if you’re not particular which one.”

“It’s that big?” Moon asked.

He nodded sympathetically. “Unless you’re looking for the king or the queen.”

“No. A woman -- oldish, with hair a little more white than black, and a round pink face. Shorter than I am. Plump.” It was hard to describe Alder Owl; she was too familiar. “She would have had an eggplant-colored cloak. She’s a witch.”

The boy’s face changed slowly. “Is she the bossy-for-your-own-good sort? With a wicker pack? Treats spots on your face with witch hazel and horseradish?”

“That sounds like her... What else do you use for spots?”

“I don’t know, but the horseradish works pretty well. She stopped here, if that’s her. It was months ago, though.”

“Yes,” said Moon. “It was.”

“She was headed for Great Hark, so you’re on the right road. Good luck on it.”

When he came back with the rabbit pie, he said, “You’ll come to Burnton High Plain next -- that’s a two-day walk. After that you’ll be done with the grasslands pretty quick. Then you’ll be lucky if you see the sun ‘til you’re within holler of Great Hark.”

Moon swallowed a little too much pie at once. “I will? Why?”

“Well, you’ll be in the Seawood, won’t you?”

“Will I?”

“You don’t know much geography,” he said sadly.

“I know I’ve never heard that the Seawood was so thick the sun wouldn’t shine in it. Have you ever been there?”

“No. But everyone who has says it’s true. And being here, I get to hear what travelers tell.”

Moon opened her mouth to say that she’d heard more nonsense told in the common rooms of inns than the wide world had space for, when a woman’s voice trumpeted from the kitchen. “Starling! Do you work here, or are you taking a room tonight?”

The blond boy grinned. “Good luck, anyway,” he said to Moon, and loped back to the kitchen.

Moon ate her lunch and paid for it with a coin stamped with the prince’s face. She scowled at it when she set it on the table. It’s all your fault, she told it. Then she hoisted her pack and headed for the door.

“It’s started to drip,” the blond boy called after her. “It’ll be pouring rain on you in an hour.”

“I’ll get wet, then,” she said. “But thanks anyway.”

The trail was cold, but at least she was on it. The news drove her forward.

The boy was right about the weather. The rain was carried on gusts from every direction, that found their way under her cloak and inside her hood and in every seam of her boots. By the time she’d doggedly climbed the ridge above Little Hark, she was wet and cold all through, and dreaming of tight roofs, large fires, and clean, dry nightgowns. The view from the top of the trail scattered her visions.

She’d expected another valley. This was not a bowl, but a plate, full of long, sand-colored undulating grass, and she stood at the rim of it. Moon squinted through the rain ahead and to either side, looking for a far edge, but the grass went on out of sight, unbroken by anything but the small rises and falls of the land. She suspected that clear weather wouldn’t have shown her the end of it, either.

That evening she made camp in the midst of the ocean of grass, since there wasn’t anyplace else. There was no firewood. She’d thought of that before she walked down into the plain, but all the wood she could have gathered to take with her was soaked. So she propped up a lean-to of oiled canvas against the worst of the rain, gathered a pile of the shining-wet grass, and set to work. She kept an eye on the sun, as well; at the right moment she took up Alder Owl’s drum and played it, huddling under the canvas to keep it from the wet. It had nothing to say.

In half an hour she had a fat braided wreath of straw. She laid it in a circle of bare ground she’d cleared, and got from her pack her tinderbox and three apples, wrinkled and sweet with winter storage. They were the last food she had from home.

“All is taken from thee,” Moon said, setting the apples inside the straw wreath and laying more wet grass over them in a little cone. “I have taken, food and footing, breath and warming, balm for thirsting. This I will exchange thee, with my love and every honor, if thou’lt give again thy succor.” With that, she struck a spark in the cone of grass.

For a moment, she thought the exchange was not accepted. She’d asked all the elements, instead of only fire, and fire had taken offense. Then a little blue flame licked along a stalk, and a second. In a few minutes she was nursing a tiny, comforting blaze, contained by the wreath of straw and fueled all night with Alder Owl’s apples.

She sat for a long time, hunched under the oiled canvas lean-to, wrapped in her cloak with the little fire between her feet. She was going to Great Hark, because she thought that Alder Owl would have done so. But she might not have. Alder Owl might have gone south from here, into Cystegond. Or north, into the cold upthrust fangs of the Bones of Earth. She could have gone anywhere, and Moon wouldn’t know. She’d asked -- but she hadn’t insisted she be told or taken along, hadn’t tried to follow. She’d only said goodbye. Now she would never find the way.

“What am I doing here?” Moon whispered. There was no answer except the constant rushing sound of the grass in the wind, saying hush, hush, hush. Eventually she was warm enough to sleep.

The next morning the sun came back, watery and tentative. By its light she got her first real look at the great ocean of golden-brown she was shouldering through. Behind her she saw the ridge beyond which Little Hark lay. Ahead of her there was nothing but grass.

It was a long day, with only that to look at. So she made herself look for more. She saw the new green shoots of grass at the feet of the old stalks, their leaves still rolled tight around one another like the embrace of lovers. A thistle spread its rosette of fierce leaves to claim the soil, but hadn’t yet grown tall. And she saw the prints of horses’ hooves, and dung, and once a wide, beaten-down swath across her path like the bed of a creek cut in grass, the earth muddy and chopped with hoofprints. As she walked, the sun climbed the sky and steamed the rain out of her cloak.

By evening she reached the town of Burnton High Plain. Yes, the landlord at the hostelry told her, another day’s walk would bring her under the branches of the Seawood. Then she should go carefully, because it was full of robbers and ghosts and wild animals.

“Well,” Moon said, “Robbers wouldn’t take the trouble to stop me, and I don’t think I’ve any quarrel with the dead. So I’ll concentrate on the wild animals. But thank you very much for the warning.”

“Not a good place, the Seawood,” the landlord added.

Moon thought that people who lived in the middle of an eternity of grass probably would be afraid of a forest. But she only said, “I’m searching for someone who might have passed this way months ago. Her name is Alder Owl, and she was going to look for the prince.”

After Moon described her, the landlord pursed his lips. “That’s familiar. I think she might have come through, heading west. But as you say, it was months, and I don’t think I’ve seen her since.”

I’ve never heard so much discouraging encouragement, Moon thought drearily, and turned to her dinner.

The next afternoon she reached the Seawood. Everything changed: the smells, the color of the light, the temperature of the air. In spite of the landlord’s warning, Moon couldn’t quite deny the lift of her heart, the feeling of glad relief. The secretive scent of pine loam rose around her as she walked, and the dark boughs were full of the commotion of birds. She heard water nearby; she followed the sound to a running beck and the spring that fed it. The water was cold and crisply acidic from the pines; she filled her bottle at it and washed her face.

She stood a moment longer by the water. Then she hunched the pack off her back and dug inside it until she found the little linen bag that held her valuables. She shook out a silver shawl pin in the shape of a leaping frog. She’d worn it on festival days, with her green scarf. It was a present from Alder Owl -- but then, everything was. She dropped it into the spring.

Was that right? Yes, the frog was water’s beast, never mind that it breathed air half the time. And silver was water’s metal, even though it was mined from the earth and shaped with fire, and turned black as quickly in water as in air. How could magic be based on understanding the true nature of things if it ignored so much?

A bubble rose to the surface and broke loudly, and Moon laughed. “You’re welcome, and same to you,” she said, and set off again.

The Seawood gave her a century’s worth of fallen needles, flat and dry, to bed down on, and plenty of dry wood for her fire. It was cold under its roof of boughs, but there were remedies for cold. She kept her fire well built up, for that, and against any meat-eaters too weak from winter to seek out the horses of Burnton High Plain.

Another day’s travel, and another. If she were to climb one of the tallest pines to its top, would the Seawood look like the plain of grass: undulating, almost endless? On the third day, when the few blades of sun that reached the forest floor were slanting and long, a wind rose. Moon listened to the old trunks above her creaking, the boughs swishing like brooms in angry hands, and decided to make camp.

In the Seawood the last edge of sunset was never visible. By then, beneath the trees, it was dark. So Moon built her fire and set water to boil before she took Alder Owl’s drum from her pack.

The trees roared above, but at their feet Moon felt only a furious breeze. She hunched her cloak around her and struck the drum.

It made no noise; but from above she heard a clap and thunder of sound, and felt a rush of air across her face. She leaped backward. The drum slid from her hands.

A pale shape sat on a low branch beyond her fire. The light fell irregularly on its huge yellow eyes, the high tufts that crowned its head, its pale breast. An owl.

“Oo,” it said, louder than the hammering wind. “Oo-whoot.”

Watching it all the while, Moon leaned forward, reaching for the drum.

The owl bated thunderously and stretched its beak wide. “Oo-wheed,” it cried at her. “Yarrooh. Yarrooh.”

Moon’s blood fell cold from under her face. The owl stooped off its branch quick and straight as a dropped stone. Its talons closed on the lashings of the drum. The great wings beat once, twice, and the bird was gone into the rushing dark.

Moon fell to her knees, gasping for breath. The voice of the owl was still caught in her ears, echoing, echoing another voice. Weed. Yarrow. Yarrow.

Tears poured burning down her face. “Oh, my weed, my stalk of yarrow,” she repeated, whispering. “Come back!” she screamed into the night. She got no answer but the wind. She pressed her empty hands to her face and cried herself to sleep.

With morning, the Seawood crowded around her as it had before, full of singing birds and softness, traitorous and unashamed. In one thing, at least, its spirit marched with hers. The light under the trees was gray, and she heard the patter of rain in the branches above. Moon stirred the cold ashes of her fire and waited for her heart to thaw. She would go on to Great Hark, and beyond if she had to. There might yet be some hope. And if there wasn’t, there might at least be a reckoning.

All day the path led downward, and she walked until her thighs burned and her stomach gnawed itself from hunger. The rain came down harder, showering her ignominiously when the wind shook the branches. She meant to leave the Seawood before she slept again, if it meant walking all night. But the trees began to thin around her late in the day, and shortly after she saw a bare rise ahead of her. She mounted it and looked down.

The valley was full of low mist, eddying slowly in the rain. Rising out of it was the largest town Moon had ever seen. It was walled in stone and gated with oak and iron, and roofed in prosperous slate and tile. Pennons flew from every wall tower, their colors darkened with rain and stolen away by the gray light. At the heart of the town was a tall, white, red-roofed building, cornered with round towers like the wall.

The boy was right about this, too. She could never find news of one person in such a place, unless that person was the king or the queen. Moon drooped under a fresh lashing of rain.

But why not? Alder Owl had set off to find the prince. Why wouldn’t she have gone to the palace and stated her business, and searched on from there? And why shouldn’t Moon do the same?

She flapped a sheet of water off her cloak and plunged down the trail. She had another hour’s walk before she would reach the gates, and she wanted to be inside by sundown.

The wall loomed over her at last, oppressively high, dark and shining with rain. She found the huge double gates open, and the press of wagons and horses and pedestrians in and out of them daunting. No one seemed to take any notice when she joined the stream and passed through, and though she looked and looked, she couldn’t see anyone who appeared to be any more official than anyone else. Everyone, in fact, looked busy and important. So this is city life, Moon thought, and stepped out of the flow of traffic for a better look around.

Without her bird’s eye view, she knew she wouldn’t find the palace except by chance. So she asked directions of a woman and a man unloading a cart full of baled hay.

They looked at her and blinked, as if they were too weary to think; they were at least as wet as Moon was, and seemed to have less hope of finding what they were looking for. Their expressions of surprise were so similar that Moon wondered if they were blood relations, and indeed, their eyes were much alike, green-gray as sage. The man wore a dusty brown jacket worn through at one elbow; the woman had a long, tattered black shawl pulled up over her white hair.

“Round the wall that way,” said the man at last, “until you come to a broad street all laid with brick. Follow that uphill until you see it.”

“Thank you.” Moon eyed the hay cart, which was nearly full. Work was ointment for the heart. Alder Owl had said so. “Would you like some help? I could get in the cart and throw bales down.”

“Oh, no,” said the woman. “It’s all right.”

Moon shook her head. “You sound like my neighbors. With them, it would be fifteen minutes before we argued each other to a standstill. I’m going to start throwing hay instead.” At that, she scrambled into the cart and hoisted a bale. When she turned to pass it to the man and woman, she found them looking at each other, before the man came to take the hay from her.

It was hot, wet, prickly work, but it didn’t take long. When the cart was empty, they exchanged thanks and Moon set off again for the palace. On the way, she watched the sun’s eye close behind the line of the hills.

The brick-paved street ran in long curves like an old riverbed. She couldn’t see the palace until she’d tramped up the last turning and found the high white walls before her, and another gate. This one was carved and painted with a flock of rising birds, and closed.

Two men stood at the gate, one on each side. They were young and tall and broad-shouldered, and Moon recognized them as being of a type that made village girls stammer. They stood very straight, and wore green capes and coats with what Moon thought was an excessive quantity of gold trim. She stepped up to the nearest.

“Pardon me,” she said, “I’d like to speak to the king and queen.”

The guard blinked even more thoroughly than the couple with the hay cart had. With good reason, Moon realized; now she was not only travel-stained and sodden, but dusted with hay as well. She sighed, which seemed to increase the young man’s confusion.

“I’ll start nearer the beginning,” she told him. “I came looking for my teacher, who set off at the end of last autumn to look for the prince. Do you remember a witch, named Alder Owl, from a village two weeks east of here? I think she might have come to the palace to see the king and queen about it.”

The guard smiled. Moon thought she wouldn’t feel too scornful of a girl who stammered in his presence. “I suppose I could have a message taken to Their Majesties,” he said at last. “Someone in the palace may have met your teacher. Hi, Rush!” he called to the guard on the other side of the gate. “This woman is looking for her teacher, a witch who set out to find the prince. Who would she ask, then?”

Rush sauntered over, his cape swinging. He raised his eyebrows at Moon. “Every witch in Hark End has gone hunting the prince at one time or another. How would anyone remember one out of the lot?”

Moon drew herself up very straight, and found she was nearly as tall as he was. She raised only one eyebrow, which she’d always found effective with Fell. “I’m sorry your memory isn’t all you might like it to be. Would it help if I pointed out that this witch remains unaccounted for?”

“There aren’t any of those. They all came back, cap in hand and dung on their shoes, saying, ‘Beg pardon, Lord,’ and ‘Perishing sorry, Lady.’ You could buy and sell the gaggle of them with the brass on my scabbard.”

“You,” Moon told him sternly, “are of very little use.”

“More use than anyone who’s sought him so far. If they’d only set my unit to it...”

She looked into his hard young face. “You loved him, didn’t you?”

His mouth pinched closed, and the hurt in his eyes made him seem for a moment as young as Fell. It held a glass up to her own pain. “Everyone did. He was -- is the land’s own heart.”

“My teacher is like that to me. Please, may I speak with someone?”

The polite guard was looking from one to the other of them, alarmed. Rush turned to him and frowned. “Take her to -- merry heavens, I don’t know. Try the steward. He fancies he knows everything.”

And so the Gate of Birds opened to Moon Very Thin. She followed the polite guard across a paved courtyard held in the wide, high arms of the palace, colonnaded all around and carved with the likenesses of animals and flowers. On every column a torch burned in its iron bracket, hissing in the rain, and lit the courtyard like a stage. It was very beautiful, if a little grim.

The guard waved her through a small iron-clad door into a neat parlor. A fire was lit in the brick hearth and showed her the rugs and hangings, the panelled walls blackened with age. The guard tugged an embroidered pull near the door and turned to her.

“I should get back to the gate. Just tell the steward, Lord Leyan, what you know about your teacher. If there’s help for you here, he’ll see that you get it.”

When he’d gone, she gathered her damp cloak about her and wondered if she ought to sit. Then she heard footsteps, and a door she hadn’t noticed opened in the panelling.

A very tall, straight-backed man came through it. His hair was white and thick and brushed his shoulders, where it met a velvet coat faced in crewelled satin. He didn’t seem to find the sight of her startling, which Moon took as a good sign.

“How may I help you?” he asked.

“Lord Leyan?”

He nodded.

“My name is Moon Very Thin. I’ve come from the east in search of my teacher, the witch Alder Owl, who set out last autumn to find the prince. I think now...I won’t find her. But I have to try.” To her horror, she felt tears rising in her eyes.

Lord Leyan crossed the room in a long stride and grasped her hands. “My dear, don’t cry. I remember your teacher. She was an alarming woman, but that gave us all hope. She has not returned to you, either, then?”

Moon swallowed and shook her head.

“You’ve traveled a long way. You shall have a bath and a meal and a change of clothes, and I will see if anyone can tell you more about your teacher.”

Before Moon was quite certain how it had been managed, she was standing in a handsome dark room with a velvet-hung bed and a fire bigger than the one in the parlor, and a woman with a red face and fly-away hair was pouring cans of water into a bathtub shaped and painted like a swan.

“That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Moon in wonder.

The red-faced woman grinned suddenly. “You know, it is. And it may be the lords and ladies think so, too, and are afraid to say.”

“One of them must have paid for it once.”

“That’s so. Well, no one’s born with taste. Have your bath, and I’ll bring you a change of clothes in a little.”

“You needn’t do that. I have clean ones in my pack.”

“Yes, but have they got lace on them, and a ’broidery flower for every seam? If not, you’d best let me bring these, for word is you eat with the King and Queen.”

“I do?” Moon blurted, horrified. “Why?”

“Lord Leyan went to them, and they said send you in. Don’t pop your eyes at me, there’s no help for it.”

Moon scrubbed until she was pink all over, and smelling of violet soap. She washed her hair three times, and trimmed her short nails, and looked in despair at her reflection in the mirror. She didn’t think she’d put anyone off dinner, but there was no question that the only thing that stood there was Moon Very Thin, tall and brown and forthright.

“Here, now,” said the red-faced woman at the door. “I thought this would look nice, and you wouldn’t even quite feel a fool in it. What do you say?”

Draped over her arms she had a plain, high-necked dress of amber linen, and an overgown of russet velvet. The hem and deep collar were embroidered in gold with the platter-heads of yarrow flowers. Moon stared at that, and looked quickly up at the red-faced woman. There was nothing out of the way in her expression.

“It’s -- it’s fine. It’s rather much, but...”

“But it’s the least much that’s still enough for dining in the hall. Let’s get you dressed.”

The woman helped her into it, pulling swaths of lavender-scented fabric over her head. Then she combed out Moon’s hair, braided it, and fastened it with a gold pin.

“Good,” the red-faced woman said. “You look like you, but dressed up, which is as it should be. I’ll show you to the hall.”

Moon took a last look at her reflection. She didn’t think she looked at all like herself. Dazed, she followed her guide out of the room.

She knew when they’d almost reached their destination. A fragrance rolled out of the hall that reminded Moon she’d missed three meals. At the door, the red-faced woman stopped her.

“You’ll do, I think. Still -- tell no lies, though you may be told them. Look anyone in the eye, though they might want it otherwise. And take everything offered you with your right hand. It can’t hurt.” With that the red-faced woman turned and disappeared down the maze of the corridor.

Moon straightened her shoulders and, her stomach pinched with hunger and nerves, stepped into the hall.

She gaped. She couldn’t help it, though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. The hall was as high as two rooms, and long and broad as a field of wheat. It had two yawning fireplaces big enough to tether an ox in. Banners hung from every beam, sewn over with beasts and birds and things she couldn’t name. There weren’t enough candles in all Hark End to light it top to bottom, nor enough wood in the Seawood to heat it, so like the great courtyard it was beautiful and grim.

The tables were set in a U, the high table between the two arms. To her dazzled eye, it seemed every place was taken. It was bad enough to dine with the king and queen. Why hadn’t she realized that it would be the court, as well?

At the high table, the king rose smiling. “Our guest!” he called. “Come, there’s a place for you beside my lady and me.”

Moon felt her face burning as she walked to the high table. The court watched her go; but there were no whispers, no hands raised to shield moving lips. She was grateful, but it was odd.

Her chair was indeed set beside those of the king and queen. The king was white haired and broad-shouldered, with an open, smiling face and big hands. The queen’s hair was white and gold, and her eyes were wide and gray as storms. She smiled, too, but as if the gesture were a sorrow she was loath to share.

“Lord Leyan told us your story,” said the queen. “I remember your teacher. Had you been with her long?”

“All my life,” Moon replied. Dishes came to roost before her, so she could serve herself: roast meat, salads, breads, compotes, vegetables, sauces, wedges of cheese. She could limit herself to a bite of everything, and still leave the hall achingly full. She kept her left hand clamped between her knees for fear of forgetting and taking something with it. Every dish was good, but not quite as good as she’d thought it looked.

“Then you are a witch as well?” the king asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve been taught by a witch, and learned witches’ knowledge. But she taught me gardening and carpentry, too.”

“You hope to find her?”

Moon looked at him, and weighed the question seriously for the first time since the Seawood. “I hope I may learn she’s been transformed, and that I can change her back. But I think I met her, last night in the wood, and I find it’s hard to hope.”

“But you want to go on?” the queen pressed her. “What will you do?”

“The only thing I can think of to do is what she set out for: I mean to find your son.”

Moon couldn’t think why the queen would pale at that.

“Oh, my dear, don’t,” the king said. “Our son is lost, your teacher is lost -- what profit can there be in throwing yourself after them? Rest here, then go home and live. Our son is gone.”

It was a fine, rich hall, and he was a fair, kingly man. But it was all dimmed, as if a layer of soot lay over the palace and its occupants.

“What did he look like, the prince?”

The king frowned. It was the queen who drew a locket out of the bodice of her gown, lifted its chain over her head and passed it to Moon. It held, not the costly miniature she’d expected, but a sketch in soft pencil, swiftly done. It was the first informal thing she could recall seeing in the palace.

“He wouldn’t sit still to be painted,” the queen said wistfully. “One of his friends likes to draw. He gave me that after...after my son was gone.”

He had been reading, perhaps, when his friend snatched that quiet moment to catch his likeness. The high forehead was propped on a long-fingered hand; the eyes were directed downward, and the eyelids hid them. The nose was straight, and the mouth was long and grave. The hair was barely suggested; light or dark, it fell unruly around the supporting hand. Even setting aside the kindly eye of friendship that had informed the pencil, Moon gave the village girls leave to be silly over this one. She closed the locket and gave it back.

“You can’t know what’s happened to him. How can you let him go, without knowing?”

“There are many things in the world I will never know,” the king said sharply.

“I met a man at the gate who still mourns the prince. He called him the heart of the land. Nothing can live without its heart.”

The queen drew a breath and turned her face to her plate, but said nothing.

“Enough,” said the king. “If you must search, then you must. But I’ll have peace at my table. Here, child, will you pledge it with me?”

Over Moon’s right hand, lying on the white cloth, he laid his own, and held his wine cup out to her.

She sat frozen, staring at the chased silver and her own reflection in it. Then she raised her eyes to his and said, “No.”

There was a shattering quiet in the hall.

“You will not drink?”

“I will not...pledge you peace. There isn’t any here, however much anyone may try to hide it. I’m sorry.” That, she knew when she’d said it, was true. “Excuse me,” she added, and drew her hand out from under the king’s, which was large, but soft. “I’m going to bed. I mean to leave early tomorrow.”

She rose and walked back down the length of the room, lapped in a different kind of silence.

A servant found her in the corridor and led her to her chamber. There she found her old clothes clean and dry and folded, the fire tended, the bed turned down. The red-faced woman wasn’t there. She took off her finery, laid it out smooth on a chair, and put her old nightgown on. Then she went to the glass to unpin and brush her hair.

The pin was in her hand, and she was reaching to set it down, when she saw what it was. A little leaping frog. But now it was gold.

It was hers. The kicking legs and goggle eyes, every irregularity -- it was her pin. She dashed to the door and flung it open. “Hello?” she called. “Oh, bother!” She stepped back into the room and searched, and finally found the bell pull disguised as a bit of tapestry.

After a few minutes, a girl with black hair and bright eyes came to the door. “Yes, ma’am?”

“The woman who helped me, who drew my bath and brought me clothes. Is she still here?”

The girl looked distressed. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t know who waited on you. What did she look like?”

“About my height. With a red face and wild, wispy hair.”

The girl stared, and said, “Ma’am -- are you sure? That doesn’t sound like anyone here.”

Moon dropped heavily into the nearest chair. “Why am I not surprised? Thank you very much. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

The girl nodded and closed the door behind her. Moon put out the candles, climbed into bed, and lay awake for an uncommonly long time.

In a gray, wet dawn, she dressed and shouldered her pack and by the simple expedient of going down every time she came to a staircase, found a door that led outside. It was a little postern, opening on a kitchen garden and a wash yard fenced in stone. At the side of the path, a man squatted by a wooden hand cart, mending a wheel.

“Here, missy!” he called out, his voice like a spade thrust into gravel. “Hold this axle up, won’t you?”

Moon sighed. She wanted to go. She wanted to be moving, because moving would be almost like getting something done. And she wanted to be out of this beautiful place that had lost its heart. She stepped over a spreading clump of rhubarb, knelt, and hoisted the axle.

Whatever had damaged the wheel had made the axle split; the long splinter of wood bit into Moon’s right hand. She cried out and snatched that hand away. Blood ran out of the cut on her palm and fell among the rhubarb stems, a few drops. Then it ceased to flow.

Moon looked up, frightened, to the man with the wheel.

It was the man from the hay wagon, white-haired, his eyes as green and gray as sage. He had a ruddy, somber face. Red-faced, like the woman who’d --

The woman who’d helped her last night had been the one from the hay cart. Why hadn’t she seen it? But she remembered it now, and the woman’s green eyes, and even a fragment of hay caught in the wild hair. Moon sprang up.

The old man caught her hand. “Rhubarb purges, and rhubarb means advice. Turn you back around. Your business is in there.” He pointed a red, rough finger at the palace, at the top of the near corner tower. Then he stood, dusted off his trousers, strolled down the path and was gone.

Moon opened her mouth, which she hadn’t been able to do until then. She could still feel his hand, warm and calloused. She looked down. In the palm he’d held was a sprig of hyssop and a wisp of broom, and a spiralling stem of convolvulus.

Moon bolted back through the postern door and up the first twisting flight of stairs she found, until she ran out of steps. Then she cast furiously about. Which way was that wretched tower? She got her bearings by looking out the corridor windows. It would be that door, she thought. She tried it; it resisted.

He could have kept his posy and given me a key, she thought furiously. Then: But he did.

She plucked up the convolvulus, poked it into the keyhole, and said, “Turn away, turn astray, backwards from the turn of day. What iron turned to lock away, herb will turn the other way.” Metal grated against metal, and the latch yielded under her hand.

A young man’s room, frozen in time. A jerkin of quilted, painted leather dropped on a chair; a case of books, their bindings standing in bright ranks; a wooden flute and a pair of leather gloves lying on an inlaid cedar chest; an unmade bed, the coverlet slid sideways and half pooled on the floor.

More, a room frozen in a tableau of atrocity and accusation. For Moon could feel it, the thing that had been done here, that was still being done because the room had sat undisturbed. Nightshade and thornapple, skullcap, henbane, and fern grown bleached and stunted under stone. Moon recognized their scents and their twisted strength around her, the power of the work they’d made and the shame that kept them secret.

There was a dust of crushed leaf and flower over the door lintel, on the sill of every window, lined like seams in the folds of the bed hangings. Her fingers clenched on the herbs in her hand as rage sprouted up in her and spread.

With broom and hyssop she dashed the dust from the lintel, the windows, the hangings. “Merry or doleful, the last or the first,” she chanted as she swung her weapons, spitting each word in fury, “fly and be hunted, or stay and be cursed!”

“What are you doing?” said a voice from the door, and Moon spun and raised her posy like a dagger.

The king stood there, his coat awry, his hair uncombed. His face was white as a corpse’s, and his eyes were wide as a man’s who sees the gallows, and knows the noose is his.

“You did this,” Moon breathed; and louder, “You gave him to the King of Stones with your own hand.”

“I had to,” he whispered. “He made a beggar of me. My son was the forfeit.”

“You locked him under the earth. And let my teacher go to her...to her death to pay your forfeit.”

“It was his life or mine!”

“Does your lady wife know what you did?”

“His lady wife helped him to do it,” said the queen, stepping forward from the shadows of the hall. She stood tall and her face was quiet, as if she welcomed the noose. “Because he was her love and the other, only her son. Because she feared to lose a queen’s power. Because she was a fool, and weak. Then she kept the secret, because her heart was black and broken, and she thought no worse could be done than had been done already.”

Moon turned to the king. “Tell me,” she commanded.

“I was hunting alone,” said the king in a trembling voice. “I roused a boar. I...had a young man’s pride and an old man’s arm, and the boar was too much for me. I lay bleeding and in pain, and the sight nearly gone from my eyes, when I heard footsteps. I called out for help.

“‘You are dying,’ he told me, and I denied it, weeping. ‘I don’t want to die,’ I said, over and over. I promised him anything, if he would save my life.” The king’s voice failed, and stopped.

“Where?” said Moon. “Where did this happen?”

“In the wood under Elder Scarp. Near the waterfall that feeds the stream called the Laughing Girl.”

“Point me the way,” she ordered.

The sky was hazed white, and the air was hot and still. Moon dashed sweat from her forehead as she walked. She could have demanded a horse, but she had walked the rest of the journey, and this seemed such a little way compared to that. She hoped it would be cooler under the trees.

It wasn’t; and the gnats were worse around her face, and the biting flies. Moon swung at them steadily as she clambered over the stones. It seemed a long time before she heard the waterfall, then saw it. She cast about for the clearing, and wondered, were there many? Or only one, and it so small that she could walk past it and never know? The falling water thrummed steadily, like a drum, like a heartbeat.

In a shaft of sun, she saw a bit of creamy white -- a flower head, round and flat as a platter, dwarfed with early blooming. She looked up and found that she stood on the edge of a clearing, and was not alone.

He wore armor, dull gray plates worked with fantastic embossing, trimmed in glossy black. He had a gray cloak fastened over that, thrown back off his shoulders, but with the hood up and pulled well forward. Moon could see nothing of his face.

“In the common way of things,” he said, in a quiet, carrying voice, “I seek out those I wish to see. I am not used to uninvited guests.”

The armor was made of slate and obsidian, because he was the King of Stones.

She couldn’t speak. She could command the king of Hark End, but this was a king whose rule did not light on him by an accident of blood or by the acclaim of any mortal thing. This was an embodied power, a still force of awe and terror.

“I’ve come for a man and his soul,” she whispered. “They were wrongly taken.”

“I take nothing wrongly. Are you sure?”

She felt heat in her face, then cold at the thought of what she’d said: that she’d accused him. “No,” she admitted, the word cracking with her fear. “But that they were wrongly given, I know. He was not theirs to give.”

“You speak of the prince of Hark End. They were his parents. Would you let anyone say you could not give away what you had made?”

Moon’s lips parted on a word; then she stared in horror. Her mind churned over the logic, followed his question back to its root.

He spoke her thoughts aloud. “You have attended at the death of a child, stilled in the womb to save the mother’s life. How is this different?”

“It is different!” she cried. “He was a grown man, and what he was was shaped by what he did, what he chose.”

“He had his mother’s laugh, his grandfather’s nose. His father taught him to ride. What part of him was not made by someone else? Tell me, and we will see if I should give that part back.”

Moon clutched her fingers over her lips, as if by that she could force herself to think it all through before she spoke. “His father taught him to ride,” she repeated. “If the horse refuses to cross a ford, what makes the father use his spurs, and the son dismount and lead it? He has his mother’s laugh -- but what makes her laugh at one thing, and him at another?”

“What, indeed?” asked the King of Stones. “Well, for argument’s sake I’ll say his mind is in doubt, and his heart. What of his body?”

“Bodies grow with eating and exercise,” Moon replied. This was ground she felt sure of. “Do you think the king and the queen did those for him?”

The King of Stones threw back his cowled head and laughed, a cold ringing sound. It restored Moon to sensible terror. She stepped back, and found herself against a tree trunk.

“And his soul?” said the King of Stones at last.

“That didn’t belong to his mother and father,” Moon said, barely audible even to her own ears. “If it belonged to anyone but himself, I think you did not win it from Her.”

Silence lay for long moments in the clearing. Then he said, “I am well tutored. Yet there was a bargain made, and a work done, and both sides knew what they pledged and what it meant. Under law, the contract was kept.”

“That’s not true. Out of fear the king promised you anything, but he never meant the life of his son!”

“Then he could have refused me that, and died. He said ‘Anything,’ and meant it, unto the life of his son, his wife, and all his kingdom.”

He had fought her to a standstill with words. But, words used up and useless, she still felt a core of anger in her for what had been done, outrage against a thing she knew, beyond words, was wrong.

So she said aloud, “It’s wrong. It was a contract that was wrong to make, let alone to keep. I know it.”

“What is it,” said the King of Stones, “that says so?”

“My judgment says so. My head.” Moon swallowed. “My heart.”

“Ah. What do I know of your judgment? Is it good?”

She scrubbed her fingers over her face. He had spoken lightly, but Moon knew the question wasn’t light at all. She had to speak the truth; she had to decide what the truth was. “It’s not perfect,” she answered reluctantly. “But yes, I think it’s as good as most people’s.”

“Do you trust it enough to allow it to be tested?”

Moon lifted her head and stared at him in alarm. “What?”

“I will test your judgment. If I find it good, I will let you free the prince of Hark End. If not, I will keep him, and you will take your anger, your outrage, and the knowledge of your failure home to nurture like children all the rest of your life.”

“Is that prophecy?” Moon asked hoarsely.

“You may prove it so, if you like. Will you take my test?”

She drew a great, trembling breath. “Yes.”

“Come closer, then.” With that, he pushed back his hood.

There was no stone helm beneath, or monster head. There was a white-skinned man’s face, all bone and sinew and no softness, and long black hair rucked from the hood. The sockets of his eyes were shadowed black, though the light that fell in the clearing should have lit all of his face. Moon looked at him and was more frightened than she would have been by any deformity, for she knew then that none of this -- armor, face, eyes -- had anything to do with his true shape.

“Before we begin,” he said in that soft, cool voice. “There is yet a life you have not asked me for, one I thought you’d beg of me first of all.”

Moon’s heart plunged, and she closed her eyes. “Alder Owl.”

“You cannot win her back. There was no treachery there. She, at least, I took fairly, for she greeted me by name and said I was well met.”

“No!” Moon cried.

“She was sick beyond curing, even when she left you. But she asked me to give her wings for one night, so that you would know. I granted it gladly.”

She thought she had cried all she could for Alder Owl. But this was the last death, the death of her little foolish hope, and she mourned that and Alder Owl at once with falling, silent tears.

“My test for you, then.” He stretched out his hands, his mailed fingers curled over whatever lay in each palm. “You have only to choose,” he said. He opened his fingers to reveal two rings, one silver, one gold.

She looked from the rings to his face again, and her expression must have told him something.

“You are a witch,” said the King of Stones, gently mocking. “You read symbols and make them, and craft them into nets to catch truth in. This is the meat of your training, to read the true nature of a thing. Here are symbols -- choose between them. Pick the truer. Pick the better.”

He pressed forward first one hand, then the other. “Silver, or gold? Left or right? Night or day, moon --” she heard him mock her again, “-- or sun, water or fire, waning or waxing, female or male. Have I forgotten any?”

Moon wiped the tears from her cheeks and frowned down at the rings. They were plain, polished circles of metal, not really meant for finger rings at all. Circles, complete in themselves, unmarred by scratch or tarnish.

Silver, or gold. Mined from the earth, forged in fire, cooled in water, pierced with air. Gold was rarer, silver was harder, but both were pure metals. Should she choose rareness? Hardness? The lighter color? But the flash of either was bright. The color of the moon? But she’d seen the moon, low in the sky, yellow as a peach. And the light from the moon was reflected light from the sun, whose color was yellow although in the sky it was burning white, and whose metal was gold. There was nothing to choose between them.

The blood rushed into her face, and the gauntleted hands and their two rings swam in her vision. It was true. She’d always thought so.

Her eyes sprang up to the face of the King of Stones. “It’s a false choice. They’re equal.”

As she said the words, her heart gave a single terrified leap. She was wrong. She was defeated, and a fool. The King of Stones’ fingers closed again over the rings.

“Down that trail to a granite stone, and then between two hazel trees,” he said. “You’ll find him there.”

She was alone in the clearing.

Moon stumbled down the trail, dazed with relief and the release of tension. She found the stone, and the two young hazel trees, slender and leafed out in fragile green, and passed between them.

She plunged immediately into full sunlight and strangeness. Another clearing, carpeted with deep grass and the stars of spring flowers, surrounded by blossoming trees -- but trees in blossom didn’t also stand heavy with fruit, like a vain child wearing all its trinkets at once. She saw apples, cherries, and pears under their drifts of pale blossom, ripe and without blemish. At the other side of the clearing there was a shelf of stone thrust up out of the grass. On it, as if sleeping, lay a young man, exquisitely dressed.

Golden hair, she thought. That’s why it was drawn in so lightly. Like amber, or honey. The fair face was very like the sketch she remembered, as was the scholar’s hand palm up on the stone beside it. She stepped forward.

Beside the stone, the black branches of a tree lifted, moved away from their neighbors, and the trunk -- Not a tree. A stag stepped into the clearing, scattering the apple blossoms with the great span of his antlers. He was black as charcoal, and his antler points were shining black, twelve of them or more. His eyes were large and red.

He snorted and lowered his head, so that she saw him through a forest of polished black dagger points. He tore at the turf with one cloven foot.

I passed his test! she cried to herself. Hadn’t she won? Why this? You’ll find him there, the King of Stones had said. Then her anger sprang up as she remembered what else he’d said: I will let you free the prince of Hark End.

What under the wide sky was she supposed to do? Strike the stag dead with her bare hand? Frighten it away with a frown? Turn it into --

She gave a little cry at the thought, and the stag was startled into charging. She leaped behind the slender trunk of a cherry tree. Cloth tore as the stag yanked free of her cloak.

The figure on the shelf of stone hadn’t moved. She watched it, knowing her eyes ought to be on the stag, watching for the rise and fall of breath. “Oh, what a stupid trick!” she said to the air, and shouted at the stag, “Flower and leaf and stalk to thee, I conjure back what ought to be. Human frame and human mind banish those of hart or hind.” Which, when she thought about it, was a silly thing to say, since it certainly wasn’t a hind.

He lay prone in the grass, naked, honey hair every which way. His eyes were closed, but his brows pinched together, as if he was fighting his way back from sleep. One sunbrowned long hand curled and straightened. His eyes snapped open, focused on nothing; the fingers curled again; and finally he looked at them, as if he had to force himself to do it, afraid of what he might see. Moon heard the sharp drawing of his breath. On the shelf of stone there was nothing at all.

A movement across the clearing caught Moon’s eye and she looked up. Among the trees stood the King of Stones in his gray armor. Sunshine glinted off it and into his unsmiling face, and pierced the shadows of his eye sockets. His eyes, she saw, were green as sage.

The prince had levered himself up onto his elbows. Moon saw the tremors in his arms and across his back. She swept her torn cloak from her shoulders and draped it over him. “Can you speak?” she asked him. She glanced up again. There was no one in the clearing but the two of them.

“I don’t -- yes,” he said, like a whispering crow, and laughed thinly. He held out one spread and shaking hand. “Tell me. You don’t see a hoof, do you?”

“No, but you used to have four of them. You’re not nearly so impressive in this shape.”

He laughed again, from closer to his chest this time. “You haven’t seen me hung all over with satin and beads like a dancing elephant.”

“Well, thank goodness for that. Can you stand up? Lean on me if you want to, but we should be gone from here.”

He clutched her shoulder -- the long scholar’s fingers were very strong -- and struggled to his feet, then drew her cloak more tightly around himself. “Which way?”

Passage through the woods was hard for her, because she knew how hard it was for him, barefoot, disoriented, yanked out of place and time. After one especially hard stumble, he sagged against a tree. “I hope this passes. I can see flashes of this wood in my memory, but as if my eyes were off on either side of my head.”

“Memory fades,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

He looked up at her quickly, pain in his face. “Does it?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry -- did you tell me your name?”

“No. It’s Moon Very Thin.”

He asked gravely, “Are you waxing or waning?”

“It depends from moment to moment.”

“That makes sense. Will you call me Robin?”

“If you want me to.”

“I do, please. I find I’m awfully taken with having a name again.”

At last the trees opened out, and in a fold of the green hillside they found a farmstead. A man stood in the farmhouse door watching them come. When they were close enough to make out his balding head and wool coat, he stirred from the door; took three faltering steps into his garden; and shouted and ran toward them. A tall, round woman appeared at the door, twisting her apron. Then she, too, began to run.

The man stopped just short of them, open-mouthed, his face a study in hope, and fear that hope will be yanked away. “Your Highness?”

Robin nodded.

The round woman had come up beside the man. Tears coursed down her face. She said calmly, “Teazle, don’t keep ‘em standing in the yard. Look like they’ve been dragged backwards through the blackthorn, both of them, and probably hungry as cats.” But she stepped forward and touched one tentative hand to the prince’s cheek. “You’re back,” she whispered.

“I’m back.”

They were fed hugely, and Robin was decently clothed in linen and leather belonging to Teazle’s eldest son. “We should be going,” the prince said at last, regretfully.

“Of course,” Teazle agreed. “Oh, they’ll be that glad to see you at the palace.”

Moon saw the shadow of pain pass quickly over Robin’s face again.

They tramped through the new ferns, the setting sun at their backs. “I’d as soon . . .” Robin faltered and began again. “I’d as soon not reach the palace tonight. Do you mind?”

Moon searched his face. “Would you rather be alone?”

“No! I’ve been alone for -- how long? A year? That’s enough. Unless you don’t want to stay out overnight.”

“It would be silly to stop now, just when I’m getting good at it,” Moon said cheerfully.

They made camp under the lee of a hill near a creek, as the sky darkened and the stars came out like frost. They didn’t need to cook, but Moon built a fire anyway. She was aware of his gaze; she knew when he was watching, and wondered that she felt it so. When it was full dark and Robin lay staring into the flames, Moon said, “You know, then?”

“How I was...? Yes. Just before...there was a moment when I knew what had been done, and who’d done it.” He laced his brown fingers over his mouth and was silent for a while; then he said, “Would it be better if I didn’t go back?”

“You’d do that?”

“If it would be better.”

“What would you do instead?”

He sighed. “Go off somewhere and grow apples.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be better,” Moon said desperately. “You have to go back. I don’t know what you’ll find when you get there, though. I called down curse and banishment on your mother and father, and I don’t really know what they’ll do about it.”

He looked up, the fire bright in his eyes. “You did that? To the king and queen of Hark End?”

“Do you think they didn’t deserve it?”

“I wish they didn’t deserve it.” He closed his eyes and dropped his chin onto his folded hands.

“I think you are the heart of the land,” Moon said in surprise.

His eyes flew open again. “Who said that?”

“A guard at the front palace gate. He’ll probably fall on his knees when he sees you.”

“Great grief and ashes,” said the prince. “Maybe I can sneak in the back way.”

They parted the next day in sight of the walls of Great Hark. “You can’t leave me to do this alone,” Robin protested.

“How would I help? I know less about it than you do, even if you are a year out of date.”

“A lot happens in a year,” he said softly.

“And a lot doesn’t. You’ll be all right. Remember that everyone loves you and needs you. Think about them and you won’t worry about you.”

“Are you speaking from experience?”

“A little.” Moon swallowed the lump in her throat. “But I’m a country witch and my place is in the country. Two weeks to the east by foot, just across the Blacksmith River. If you ever make a King’s Progress, stop by for tea.”

She turned and strode away before he could say or do anything silly, or she could.

Moon wondered, in the next weeks, how the journey could have seemed so strange. If the Seawood was full of ghosts, none of them belonged to her. The plain of grass was impressive, but just grass, and hot work to cross. In Little Hark she stopped for the night, and the blond boy remembered her.

“Did you find your teacher?” he asked.

“No. She died. But I needed to know that. It wasn’t for nothing.”

He already knew the prince had come back; everyone knew it, as if the knowledge had blown across the kingdom like milkweed fluff. She didn’t mention it.

She came home and began to set things to rights. It didn’t take long. The garden wouldn’t be much this year, but it would be sufficient; it was full of volunteers from last year’s fallen seed. She threw herself into work; it was balm for the heart. She kept her mind on her neighbors’ needs, to keep it off her own. And now she knew that her theory was right, that earth and air and fire and water were all a part of each other, all connected, like silver and gold. Like joy and pain.

“You’re grown,” Tansy Broadwater said to her, but speculatively, as if she meant something other than height, that might not be an unalloyed joy.

The year climbed to Midsummer and sumptuous life. Moon went to the village for the Midsummer’s Eve dance and watched the horseplay for an hour before she found herself tramping back up the hill. She felt remarkably old. On Midsummer’s Day she put on her apron and went out to dig the weeds from between the flagstones.

She felt the rhythm in the earth before she heard it. Hoofbeats, coming up the hill. She got to her feet.

The horse was chestnut and the rider was honey-haired. He drew rein at the gate and slipped down from the saddle, and looked at her with a question in his eyes. She wasn’t quite sure what it was, but she knew it was a question.

She found her voice. “King’s Progress?”

“Not a bit.” He sounded just as she’d remembered, whenever she hadn’t had the sense to make enough noise to drown the memory out. “May I have some tea anyway?”

Her hands were cold, and knotted in her apron. “Mint?”

“That would be nice.” He tethered his horse to the fence and came in through the gate.

“How have things turned out?” She breathed deeply and cursed her mouth for being so dry.

“Badly, in the part that couldn’t help but be. My parents chose exile. I miss them -- or I miss them as they were once. Everything else is doing pretty well. It’s always been a nice, sensible kingdom.” Now that he was closer, Moon could see his throat move when he swallowed, see his thumb turn and turn at a ring on his middle finger.

“Moon,” he said suddenly, softly, as if it were the first word he’d spoken. He plucked something out of the inside of his doublet and held it out to her. “This is for you.” He added quickly, in a lighter tone, “You’d be amazed how hard it is to find when you want it. I thought I’d better pick it while I could and give it to you pressed and dried, or I’d be here empty-handed after all.”

She stared at the the straight green stem, the cluster of inky-blue flowers still full of color, the sweet ghost of vanilla scent. Her fingers closed hard on her apron. “It’s heliotrope,” she managed to say.

“Yes, I know.”

“Do...do you know what it means?”

“Yes.”

“It means ‘devotion.‘”

“I know,” Robin said. He looked into her eyes, as he had since he’d said her name, but something faltered slightly in his face. “A little pressed and dried, but yours, if you’ll have it.”

“I’m a country witch,” Moon said with more force than she’d planned. “I don’t mean to stop being one.”

Robin smiled a little, an odd sad smile. “I didn’t say you ought to. But the flower is yours whether you want it or not. And I wish you’d take it, because my arm’s getting tired.”

“Oh!” Moon flung her hands out of her apron. “Oh! Isn’t there a plant in this whole wretched garden that means ‘I love you, too?’ Bother!”

She hurtled into his arms, and he closed them tight around her.

Once upon a time there ruled in the Kingdom of Hark End a king who was young and fair, good and wise, and responsible for the breeding of no fewer than six new varieties of apple. Once upon the same time there was a queen in Hark End who understood the riddle of the rings of silver and gold: that all things are joined together without beginning or end, and that there can be no understanding until all things divided are joined. They didn’t live happily ever after, for nothing lives forever; but they lived as long as was right, then passed together into the land where trees bear blossom and fruit both at once, and where the flowers of spring never fade.

Joshua Tree

2009-10-10T19:26:00.000-07:00

First published in The Green Man (Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, editors), Viking.

Joshua Tree

by Emma Bull

My name is Tabetha Sikorsky. Yes, that’s usually spelled “Tabitha,” but spelling has never been my mom’s hot subject. I’m not sure what my dad’s hot subject is, but I hope it’s wood shop, since he’s now living in Phoenix nailing roofing on tract houses.

That beats the hell out of being a manicurist in the middle of the desert in the most horrible town in the world. Which is what my mom is. Which makes me the daughter of a manicurist in the middle of, etc., etc. No comment on where that falls on the beats-the-hell scale.

I’m sixteen. The school district thinks I’m seventeen (when they think of me), because my mother faked my birth certificate to get me into kindergarten when I was four. Kindergarten is free daycare. It wasn’t till third grade that I realized my real age wasn’t a secret of Defense Department proportions, and Mom and I wouldn’t go to jail if it came out that she’d forged my birth certificate. But it was still a while before I stopped getting dizzy and sick to my stomach every time someone asked, “And how old are you, sweetie?”

I don’t want anyone to think my mom doesn’t love me. I’ve seen her with people she’s said “I love you” to, and I figure she does a better job of loving me than she does with most of them. She just has a short attention span. I bet I was 24/7 interesting when I was the new Cabbage Patch baby, but now I’m only intermittently riveting. I try not to use it up.

We live in a town that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the Marine base. They put military bases in the middle of nowhere because real towns wouldn’t take that crap. In our case, they put the base in the center of hundreds of miles of desert and let a town happen around it, like a parasite. That’s us: Tapewormville.

If you’re just driving through, it probably looks like a thriving little burg. Look! They’ve got a Seven-Eleven and a Circle K! If you stay, you have time to notice that the successful businesses deal in the following: barbering (there are more “MARINE HAIRCUTS” signs in town than stop signs) liquor (drink here, or take-out); fast food (pizza delivery is big); strippers; and auto body shops. The body shops are because, after coming into town to drink and watch girls take off their tops, the Maggots try to drive back to the base. It’s not just an economy, it’s a whole ecosystem.

Not that the only people on base are the Maggots. The officers are mostly older, married with kids, even. Even Marines grow up eventually. Still, it’s like living in an occupied country. I read someplace that people in Guam want the U.S. military base out of there, but they’re afraid the economy would tank. Well, here we are: Guam with no ocean.

Normal towns have plenty of laundromats and supermarkets and clothing stores and stuff. Not base towns. The base has its own washing machines. It has a mess hall and a commissary. Uniforms come with the gig. And for everything else, like videos and cigarettes and magazines that aren’t Soap Opera Digest, there’s the PX. So that leaves the townies’ needs, which can be met by one scabby Wal-Mart twenty miles away.

It’s probably pretty clear that I’m not a base kid. I was born a townie, and I’m scared shitless that I’ll die one. I’m more scared of that than car wrecks, earthquakes, or AIDS. This is the kind of town you can’t possibly stay in all your life. So why are there so many people here who’ve done exactly that?

That’s the real reason the town hates the base. On base, people get reassigned, moved around, resign their commissions.

They can leave.

Which raises an interesting question: To get out of this town, do I have to join the Marines?

I’m writing this because Ms. Grammercy gave us an over-the-weekend assignment for Junior English: write our autobiographies. She had to explain to the back of the room what “autobiography” means. Okay, that’s not fair. I already knew, and Maryanne Krassner probably knew, because she reads them if they’re by actors. But I could see the rest of the townies in the back two rows hearing “autobiography” and thinking, “Cars?”

I thought it was a bullshit assignment. We’re in high school. How much autobiography are we supposed to have? But I’ve sort of gotten into it.

To encourage our creativity (she actually said that) Ms. G. gave us a list of questions we could start with. Here they are:

1. What is your name?

2. How old are you?

3. Who are your parents? What do they do?

4. Do you have brothers or sisters?

5. Where were you born? What is your hometown like?

6. What career do you want to pursue?

7. What is your favorite kind of music?

8. What person has had the most influence on your life?

9. What problem in the world is most important to you?

Here’s what I wrote to turn in:

My name is Tabetha Sikorsky. I’m seventeen years old. My mother’s name is Cheryl and she’s a manicurist. My father’s name is Arthur and he does construction in Phoenix. My mother and father are divorced. I don’t have any brothers or sisters. I was born here. It’s small but okay. I would like a career at a store maybe a record store. My favorite music is Eminem. The person who had the most influence on my life was Ms. Keating my 3rd grade teacher because she was smart and still pretty. I think the problem in the world that’s most important to me is pollution.

I think it’s a masterpiece. Especially considering what I had to work with.

I picked Eminem from an unbiased study of the T-shirts in Mr. Kuyper’s Geography class. Two Jennifer Lopez, one U-2, two Bone Thugs ‘n’ Harmony, three Led Zeppelin (and isn’t that sad?), four Eminem. The Ms. Keating thing I just thought was funny. As for the world problem--oh, excuse me, “the problem in the world”--how am I supposed to pick one? Global warming, poverty, war, torture, nuclear waste disposal, the whole damn government, everybody else’s government. I was sitting next to the trash can, and I had an inch left before the margin, so I settled on “pollution.” If you cross the margin lines on your notebook paper, Ms. G. takes points off. It’s as if we’re figure skaters and she’s the Russian judge.

I take it back about not being able to write your autobiography at sixteen/seventeen. I just realized I know everything that will happen in Ms. G.’s class on Monday. I’ll pass my homework over Luis Perez’s shoulder, and he’ll make a big deal of reading it and laughing before he passes it up. (I was going to write that I wanted a career as an exotic dancer, but then I remembered Luis. He stifled my creativity.) Piper Amendola will toss back her Pantene Pro-V hair and hand in twenty typed pages with the comment that she found the assignment “really useful and interesting.” Ms. G. will tell the front of the room that they’re all clever and going to heaven or college, whichever comes first, and the back of the room that we don’t seem to be trying.

And if I know what will happen Monday, why shouldn’t I know what will happen next month, in ten years, everything right up to when I die? I can write my whole life story now. But some things are too big a waste of time even for me.

# # #

Monday went as predicted, except I forgot to mention the hangover from Janelle’s birthday party. I knew I’d have one; I just forgot to mention it.

The party Janelle told her stepmom about was on Saturday. But Sunday we went over to Little Mike’s rec room for the real thing.

When I was a kid, and I thought about what I’d have when I got my own place, it looked a lot like Little Mike’s. It’s embarrassing to write that. Black-light posters, for godsake. A couple crisscross strings of Christmas lights “for atmosphere” (of what? Trailer-park holiday cheer?). A black vinyl couch that makes fart sounds when you move around on it, no matter what you’re wearing. A red shag carpet that smells like dog pee when you’re close enough--like when you sit on the floor (I only did it once). And the incense, of course. “African Love.” I think he bought it at a truck stop.

But Mike’s okay. He’s always up for hosting a party, as long as you give him money for the beer. If you want pot, though, you have to bring your own. He doesn’t want to violate his parole. I don’t have the heart to tell him that supplying alcohol to minors has got that covered already.

I really thought I’d get through Sunday night without a crappy moment. TLC was playing loud on Mike’s stereo, my third beer was in my hand, Janelle was sitting beside me singing along, Barb and Nina were dancing and pretending they didn’t notice the guys watching them.

Then suddenly, boom. Everything sucked. I have no idea what set it off. Nina was shaking her big butt and her big boobs, and I could tell that in her head she looked like Lisa “Left Eye”. But she really just looked sloppy and sad. Barb’s water bra bounced up and down, and the guys watched like the young males in the herd watch the female who’s going into heat, planning to be first with the most when she’s ready (in this case, after one more beer).

Suddenly everyone in the room seemed to be on the fast track to pregnancy, jail, or a seasonal job on the line at a fruit packing plant. Including me.

I looked at Janelle, and she wasn’t singing along anymore. For a second I thought maybe she felt it, too. The crappy mood almost lifted. Then I realized what was actually up with her face, and helped her outside to puke.

Little Mike’s place is at the edge of town. His backyard is basically miles of sand, rocks, and mesquite. There’s even a joshua tree right behind the garage, a pretty sickly-looking one (though how can you tell with joshua trees?) with its two branches twisted like rejects from a grade school pipe cleaner project.

I held Janelle’s hair out of her face while she did the deed. Janelle never just throws up and gets on with her life. It’s a big production number that goes on forever. The motion sensor light over the back door had turned off by the time she got serious about it.

Janelle sounds like she’s dying when she pukes, so I tried to distract myself, but the desert in the dark doesn’t provide much material. I pretended the tree was a psycho killer with two heads sneaking up on a houseful of naughty, naughty teenagers. A psycho killer with shaggy, spiky hair. Stupid hair. Stupid psycho killer, making your big move on a bad hair day. Don’t you want your picture in the paper?

Janelle and I became best friends in fifth grade. Actually, we became twins. I stole Mom’s paring knife, and we cut our thumbs and pressed them together in a sacred ritual in Janelle’s garage. We wore the same clothes, loved the same bands, crushed on the same TV stars, had the same opinions--I bet it drove everyone nuts.

We recruited Barb and Nina to the posse the next year. It was girl heaven. Sleepovers at my house, when my mom would give us manicures at the kitchen table. Parties at Nina’s, whose dad works in the bakery at Costco. Afternoons riding Barb’s uncle’s horses. Saturdays when we’d dress up in clothes Janelle’s stepmom was giving away and pretend we were making a music video.

It was at Nina’s quinceañera that I first made a joke that Janelle, Barb, and Nina didn’t get. It didn’t happen again for a while, but that was the first one.

I handed Janelle a couple of tissues and let her swish her mouth out with my beer (then let her keep the bottle). “Thanks, Beth,” she said, “you are the best friend ever. I just really love you.”

I don’t know why, but the puker/hair-holder relationship generates these feelings of intimacy. It wears off in about an hour, or sooner if you screw it up.

“Do you ever think that growing up isn’t as good as it was supposed to be?” I said.

Our moving around had turned the light back on, so we could even see each other. Her face was still blotchy and pale, and the dark liner around her lips was smeared. “What?” she said.

“When we were little kids, it just felt like we were on this big adventure. Now it’s like we’re on a guided tour of a landfill. Do you know what I mean?”

She frowned. “If you don’t want to be at my party, you don’t have to stay.”

“It’s not the party! But don’t you ever feel like there’s something really important out there, that we aren’t getting?” You’d think I’d have learned to cut my losses by now.

“Oh, God, Beth, I get enough Jesus crap from my stepmom.” She took a big swallow of beer and said, “I’m going back in.”

Of course, I did, too. Everything was swell. I had another beer, and we were all laughing and happy. Wahoo.

Here’s what I think I’m having trouble with: this is what happiness is. When I was a kid, I thought I’d just get happier and happier as I got older, and have more things to be happy about. I based this theory on observation of select adults. The problem with my results is that I couldn’t tell the difference then between happy and fake-happy. Now I know you pretend to be just frigging ecstatic over everything, maybe because you’re so glad it’s not worse. Pleased to meet you! means, Thank God you’re not a cop! or, I love this car! means, At least it’s not a ‘78 Datsun with bald tires and bad hoses!

But sometimes I can still have these moments of total happiness. And I feel as if every time I pretend to be happy, I’m scaring that real happiness off.

I rode my bike home from the party. Randy Nesterhoff offered me a ride, but the car smelled like Southern Comfort from six feet away. I’m stupid, but at least I’m selective about it.

# # #

I don’t know why I’m still writing this shit down. If I wanted to keep a diary, this wouldn’t be the way I’d do it. And for sure no one is ever going to see this. Unlike the masterpiece version, which I turned in Monday morning. (Got it back today. C-, with my carefully omitted commas written in, in red. Got to give Ms. G. something to do.)

Maybe what I’m doing, writing this, is what Piper’s crew do when they’re crammed in front of the girls’ room mirror before first period (and just incidentally, hogging the sinks). “Eeuw, is that a zit?” “Is my hair too straight?” “I just got this lip gloss, is it, like, okay?” I’m holding up these words to my face so I can check myself out. Looking for normal in there somewhere, or even a good sort of abnormal.

Piper and Co. take that whole “the few, the proud” thing pretty seriously--their folks are officers, so they’re sweetly condescending to the base kids whose fathers are mere grunts, and treat the townies the way the Spanish missionaries treated the Indians. Make yourselves useful and don’t talk back, or we’ll shoot you. I’m pleased to say that Piper hasn’t once figured out a way I can be useful to her.

Bigots are people who say, “I don’t hate all [fill in the blank] people. Why, some of my best friends are [ditto].” I’m proud to say I’m not a bigot. None of my friends are kids from the base.

As far as I know, the only good thing that ever came off that base was Steve. Mom dated him (“dated” meaning “slept with”) for nine months, when I was twelve/thirteen. He didn’t treat me like an adult, exactly. It was more that I was a real person to him, not someone he had to impress on the way to impressing Mom. He figured out that I really wanted a mountain bike, and gave it to me for my birthday.

Then he got transferred. I didn’t find out for almost a year that he asked Mom to marry him when it happened. He wanted to take us with him.

Obviously, we didn’t go. Mom had a huge fight with him instead. Don’t ask me to explain that.

He’s in Saudi Arabia now. Another desert.

I think sometimes I should do with Piper what the Indians did with the missionaries. Be polite but stupid to her face, and sabotage the hell out of her when she’s not looking. But I can’t keep my mouth shut. Today she and Kristin Gold and Amber Janeke were hanging around Piper’s locker, which is annoyingly close to mine. I passed them on my way to get my geography book, and Piper said, “Do you smell something?” Smothered laughter from Kristen and Amber.

So I stopped. “Probably,” I said. “Your locker door’s open.”

It took her a second to get it. By that time I had my locker open and my book out. (Being fast on your locker combination is a survival skill.) I smiled at her, slammed the door, and hauled it for class. I was so proud of that one that I raised my hand when Mr. Kuyper asked where Mongolia is. Adrenaline is a dangerous drug.

And of course, I came back after class and found the entire contents of my locker on the hall floor. Note to self: check door after slamming to ensure latching has occurred.

There are at least two sets of Rules for Life, as far as I can tell. There are the ones that get you picked up by the cops or taken to the assistant principal’s office if you break them: Don’t leave school grounds, don’t spray paint stop signs, don’t drink, don’t drop firecrackers in the toilets.

But there’s a different set that you really can’t break if you don’t want your life to suck relentlessly. At the head of the list, Rule Number One: Don’t get noticed. As long as you stay exactly the person everyone thinks you’re supposed to be, you’re fine. Piper can answer questions and get A’s on homework because that’s who she’s supposed to be. I’m supposed to be someone else. Usually I have that person nailed. But sometimes I lose perspective and do something inconsistent.

Then I have to put my crap back in my locker, get my gym shoes out of the toilet, prove to Janelle that I’m not dissing her party, and give the wrong answer to a question I shouldn’t have stuck my hand in the air over anyway. But that’s fair. High school exists to teach you the rules, and I figure I’m getting a solid B average.

# # #

Ring ring! Life changes. How can you not love telephones? For better or worse, ring ring! and presto, there’s something different in your ear from what you were doing or thinking a second ago. Even if it’s about replacement windows or something.

But it might not be. What if it’s NASA, and they want you to know the shuttle is making an emergency landing, and it looks as if touchdown is going to be somewhere around your bathtub, and you might want to evacuate your neighborhood?

Raves are not on the list of approved uses for National Monuments, I bet. But it’s tough to police a national monument that’s hundreds of thousands of acres wide, full of blind canyons and dry washes. What makes Joshua Tree a monument, anyway, like the Lincoln Memorial? And why is it a national monument and a national park? Who decides this stuff?

Anyway, now Saturday night is spoken for.

Mom answered the phone, so after I hung up, she had to know who it was. It’s hard to explain a phone call from a stranger who asks for you by name, then only has fifteen seconds of things to say. I told her it was the library, and a book I’d reserved was in. Thank god she has no idea when the library closes.

Mom shares the school district’s expectations for her daughter. I think that’s because the school district is her most dependable source of information on me. We aren’t home together much. It makes the library excuse risky, though, since she has no idea how much I read, and based on my grades, I shouldn’t know when the library’s open, either.

“What book?” she asked.

I was in the middle of dialing Bob Esquivel. I turned the phone off and tried to look dazed while I figured out an answer.

I guess Mom and I really haven’t seen much of each other lately, because I was surprised at how tired she looks. There are two deep lines between her eyebrows and this heaviness around the corners of her mouth, as if she’s been having a bad day for the last 365. When I was really little and Dad still lived with us, she had cheerleader hair, blonde and thick and long. When people talk about hair like ripe wheat, I figure that’s what they mean. Now her hair looks more like dry grass before the fall wildfires, the life sucked out.

“Just a book for school,” I said, then, thinking of Mr. Kuyper, “about China.”

“Don’t they have the right books in the school library? You’d think they’d have what the teachers are teaching, for godsake.”

“It’s not like you’re paying extra, Mom. The library’s free.”

“Nothing’s free. Those books cost tax money.”

What do you say to that? Better books than a bomber? Maybe I looked a little too stupid, because she stomped out to the kitchen.

She cheered up after she found out there was lasagna in the fridge. It’s weird--cooking is the only thing I’m supposed to do well that I’m actually good at.

And I cheered up because Bob was home and up for Saturday night.

I don’t know how they do these things in cities, but out here, if you want to find the party, it helps to have a global positioning system. Seriously. Bob Esquivel’s the only other person in town I know who likes to rave. He has a GPS and a dirt bike, and a profile like Keanu Reeves. He graduated last year, and the high school halls are dark and drab since then. Okay, they were dark and drab before that, but for some of us, birds sang and the ceiling rained flowers if he met our eyes as we passed on the way to class. The “us” did not include Janelle, Nina, and Barb, who thought his hair was too long.

Raving is one of the things I don’t have in common with those guys. The first rave I ever went to, Janelle went, too. After fifteen minutes, I was bouncy and breathless and felt like a little kid who’d just discovered a fully-equipped secret fort. Janelle hated the music, thought all the people were freaks, and was afraid to touch anything for fear of getting AIDS or TB. Janelle believes everything she reads on the Internet.

Given that I’m not exactly the life of the party at parties, I suppose it’s weird that I’d drag my ass into the desert in the dark to hear some DJ spin for a bunch of X-heads wearing glow-necklaces.

Well, surprise.

The way to get through normal life is to pretend it isn’t getting to you. If you let on that you’re hurt, the other animals will turn on you and tear you to pieces. Don’t attract the attention of predators.

But in the dark in the desert, with a pile of speakers the size of our house kicking out the groove, and everyone around me faceless and trancing, it’s different. Then I can scream loud as I want, and sometimes everyone around me does, too, as if for once I’m not the only one who wants to scream. I can stamp as if everything I hate is down there in the dirt and I can smash it to bits. I can jump up and down and flap my arms like a nut, just because maybe the DJ will see the top of my head and then I can imagine the groove is just for me.

Most of all, when I’m out there banging up against dozens of strangers and sharing their sweat, I’m alone. Yes, alone. So I’m safe. I’m free.

I should have mentioned the park earlier. I usually think of this place as being divided into two cultures, the base and the townies. But it’s really three parts, and the third one is the park. That’s a whole different culture.

There’s the rangers, who live here but not quite here--I don’t know how to explain it. Then there are day visitors, campers, backpackers, rock climbers, driving through town on Highway 62 in shiny SUVs and rental cars. Lots of Eddie Bauer and Northface logos on clothes, lots of bright-colored nylon gear. They stop for breakfast at the Lucky Lizard or La Boule (the only places in town with real coffee, and I’m counting our house) and fill ’er up with premium, but that’s it for their contact with the other two cultures.

If this were the Middle Ages, we’d be the peasants, and the Marine base would be the landowners. The park would be the Church, with its own walls and special rules, and the monks being contemplative in their monastery. With pilgrims in really nice wagons.

The Marines ship people out, the tourists come and leave. But the peasants are forever. The only escape the park offers is the occasional rave, and that’s like getting drunk--it’s temporary.

It’s a really good temporary, though.

# # #

How can you do something so crappy to your kid as to move her to a new school in spring of junior year? I guess the Marines don’t exactly ask first, but wasn’t there an aunt she could have stayed with?

Naturally, Ms. G. stood her up in front of the class and introduced her, as if this were third grade. I don’t remember her name--I was too busy feeling sorry for her, and being mad at myself for wasting time feeling sorry for her.

She looked like David Bowie dressed up like Audrey Hepburn. Little black sheath dress, bangle bracelets, big sunglasses pushed up into her hair, which is white-blonde and short and sticks up. Fishnet stockings (tramp!) and Converse hi-tops (weirdo!). She looked out over the rest of us with these huge round brown eyes, like a deer who has no idea that that thing in your hands is a shotgun.

Sure enough, when the bell rang, Randy Nesterhoff sauntered up to where New Girl was stuffing her books into the biggest purse in the world. “Man, you don’t have any tits at all, do you?” he said. His buddies snickered behind him.

She looked up and kind of blinked her eyes wider--it’s not easy to describe. “Neither do you,” she said.

“Yeah, well, I’m a guy.”

Her eyebrows went up. “You are?” She shouldered the monster purse and walked out. Randy’s crew laughed and Randy turned purple.

Me, I was revising my opinions about deer.

The second incident, at lunch, was even more interesting. Amber and Piper had set up the ballot box for Junior Formal king and queen at the end of the cafeteria line, so there was no dodging it.

“Did you vote yet, Beth?” Amber cooed as I went by with my tray. The way she asked made it a joke. Only not funny.

“You should vote for yourself,” Piper added. “Then at least you’d get a vote.”

Somebody behind me said, “What was your name again? Piper?”

I had to turn and look. It was New Girl.

Piper opened her mouth, but New Girl finished, “No, I must have misheard. I mean, you’re a girl, not a light plane.”

For a second, I adored New Girl. Then she turned to me and said, “And you don’t look like a Beth.”

It’s one thing to step into the searchlight yourself. Dragging someone else in with you is rude. “My parents couldn’t spell ‘Goddess,’” I said, and bolted for the table where Janelle and Barb were sitting.

They asked me about New Girl. God knows, they couldn’t help but notice her. I just said she was in my English class.

But I thought about it for a long time. New Girl is an equal-opportunity insulter: Randy the townie and Piper the officer’s brat both got a faceful. She doesn’t care if she sticks out like the proverbial thumb, and she has no clue about the class structure.

Obviously, Dead Chick Walking.

# # #

I don’t know how to tell this. I don’t even know if it happened. But if it didn’t happen, what did?

I’m really careful about what I drink at a rave. Beer out of a bottle, watch it being opened, then don’t let the bottle out of my sight. Keg beer, watch the cup all the way from the tap to my hand, and then don’t let the cup out of my sight. Never hard liquor, because the bottle stays open too long. What did I say earlier about only being selectively stupid? You never know when somebody’ll decide to spring enlightenment on you unannounced.

I have to cover that because that’s the first thing you think--it’s still what I think, except I know it can’t be true. Unless I drank so much that I don’t remember being stupid--eating a brownie or drinking out of someone’s canteen. But I wouldn’t do that. I’m always careful.

Okay, this is making me cry. And the tears really sting, which makes me feel sorry for myself, so I want to cry even more. Stupid, stupid, stupid. But I feel like I was abducted by aliens or something, as if there was a piece of my life when I lay bare-assed under a big light and everyone stared at me only I can’t remember it. Instead there’s this thing I do remember that can’t have happened.

Must not be crying next time Mom comes in.

Mom stayed home from work to take care of me. She hasn’t done that since I was in third grade. She’s taking the emergency room nurse’s instructions pretty seriously. She pops in to check the Gatorade level in my glass, and no matter how much I’ve drunk, she makes me drink more, and then she refills it. You’d think I’d be peeing like a horse. Shows how dried-out I am.

She came in when I was writing. I told her this was homework. That was the first time she sounded pissed off since it happened. She said, “The school won’t expect you to do your damn homework with your brains cooked out.” I remember it exactly because I liked the image. My skull like a busted pressure cooker, and all my nutritious brains coming out like steam.

I wouldn’t hurt as much if I’d lie still, but if I don’t write this, I think it instead, and it goes round and round until it’s a little brain tornado. At least if I write it down, it seems like it goes in a straight line. And on one of these Gatorade runs, Mom will tell me to quit or else, so I want to do as much as I can before then.

She was so scared in the emergency room.

It was a great party Until. Riding there with my arms around Bob’s waist--I feel stupid about it now, but I thought, Tonight he’ll see me dancing, and he’ll be really into me. We’ll dance together like Belle and the Beast, alone in the desert and as the sun comes up he’ll kiss me. It makes me feel crappy just to write it, but I have to.

We got to the last set of coordinates, which turned out to be an alley between two long rockpiles, and followed the line of tiki torches stuck in the rock cracks over our heads. At the end of the alley I could feel the space open up, as if there wasn’t anything for my body’s sonar to ping off of. The sky was like a black sequined dress--no moon, but all the stars in the universe, gathered to watch.

The party was marked off by a huge circle of torches ten feet high. Outside the circle, I couldn’t see a thing. I knew there was a lot of there out in the dark, but I couldn’t tell if the desert went up or down on either side, or just lay flat forever. The DJ stand was at one end of the circle, with its red work lights and secret movements--not whole people, just parts moving in and out of the light. There must have been a hundred people in the circle, being restless and noisy.

We stepped out of the alley--and an organ chord swelled up from everywhere. The whole circle went dead quiet. It was like the party had been waiting for us.

Bob went to find the beer. I wanted to follow him, but that chord began to throb, right in time to my heart. I ran toward the torches. The chord turned into the intro to an old Prince song, with the DJ scratching it so it had a new rhythm. Then he let the song go.

I let me go. I was sweating like a hog in about a minute, when he started cross-fading between Prince and the Ramones. Someone near me started to laugh, as if they’d got a joke.

He spun up some Moby after that, and I danced till my legs felt wobbly. Then I found the kegs and got a big red plastic cup of beer. It was thin and acidy, but it was like cold lemonade after dancing. I chugged it.

I like remembering the beginning of the night. I just want to write about dancing and getting my buzz on, and the cool things I saw in the circle. I did see cool things, like the woman who’d glued rhinestones to her arms and chest and face in patterns until she was one shining diagram, and the guy who’d smeared the stuff inside the Cyalume lightsticks on his hands and was drawing patterns in the dark as he danced. There were a bunch of people in masks made of leaves and feathers, dancing together, and when the torchlight shone in their eyes, it was like seeing a coyote watching you through the bushes. They were cool enough that I figured they’d come in from L.A.

I danced and drank until I didn’t feel either cool or uncool. The point wasn’t see-and-be-seen. The point was to be there, part of this mob in the dark. I felt as if I had to be there, or there’d be a break in the circuit, that the juice wouldn’t flow. If I stopped dancing, there’d be a rolling blackout. If I stopped dancing, even the DJ wouldn’t be able to mix. I was invisible, unnoticed--but connected and necessary.

But I did stop dancing, didn’t I?

I went for beer--and there was Bob. He was shiny in the torch light, and his shirt was unbuttoned. He looked like a big, sweaty romance novel cover. “Beth,” he said. “You look way hot.”

I pretty much stopped breathing. “So do you.”

“Yeah.” He grinned and flapped his shirt. He meant temperature-hot. I replayed the conversation--okay, then so did I.

“You know, I really like you,” he added.

I was drinking beer. It slopped over my upper lip, down my chin, and onto my tank top. “I like you, too,” I got out past the back of my hand as I wiped my face.

“I like that shirt. You should wear more clothes like that.”

It was just a tank top. I wanted him to like me, not my clothes.

“You should wear it without a bra, though. If you wore tight clothes, guys would notice you more.”

Okay, he’d found the Ecstasy. Sure he liked me--right then, he liked everyone. But maybe he liked me a little bit more...?

“Hello, Goddess,” said a voice off to my right. It was New Girl.

“Huh-uh,” Bob said. “This is Beth.”

New Girl shook her head. She looked even more deer-like in the dark, with her eyes black and shining. She’d stuck a line of sparkly bindi down her cheek below one eye, like tears. Her hair in the torches made her head look like a little moon. She had on a black sleeveless T-shirt with a glitter snake on it.

“You can’t be a Beth. What’s your real name?” she asked. She didn’t look at Bob.

“Tabetha,” I said.

“Excellent! The Goddess Tab, who dances in the desert to bring secrets to the surface!”

“Ooo-kay. Way too much X.” I turned to get away and drink my beer. Inside my head I was yelling “Follow me!” at Bob. Instead, New Girl followed, and Bob trailed after.

“No X. I don’t do that stuff. It’s too embarrassing afterward,” said New Girl. “It makes me tell people I can’t stand that they’re wonderful human beings.”

My sentiments exactly, but I wasn’t going to tell her so. “What the hell is your name?” I asked.

“Alice. The female incarnation of the Hanged Man from the tarot. A woman on a perilous quest of self-discovery down the rabbit hole of life.”

I actually opened my mouth to blow her off when I realized that I was hearing the kind of thing that I think but never say. “Is it really Alice?”

“Uh-huh. Is it really Tabetha?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, then we know each other’s true names. And you know what that means.”

And I actually did. Jesus, nobody else in town would, but I did. All those years of reading weird shit, and it finally seemed as if it had a point.

That’s when Bob said, “You talk really strange. Either of you give blow jobs?”

I don’t know what I was about to say or do before Bob’s little conversation starter, but suddenly I was scared of whatever it was. Real terror, like I’d almost walked in front of a speeding car and barely jumped back in time. I don’t remember what I said, but I chugged my beer and headed straight for the center of the circle where it was darkest.

Even that was no good. If something got slipped into my beer, it must have been before that, because suddenly I didn’t feel safe. The whole mob was watching me, waiting for me to do something I wasn’t supposed to. But what was I supposed to? No matter how loud the music was, every noise I made was louder. When I moved, I was in someone’s face. I wasn’t connected anymore. And “darkest” wasn’t dark enough to hide in. I had to get away.

I shoved out of the dancers, past the torches, and stumbled over rocks and tufts of grass. Then I just kept going. After a minute my eyes adjusted to the starlight, as much as they ever would.

Everything was horrible. Bob wasn’t going to kiss me under the sunrise. I was the slut with beer on her shirt who’d maybe do him because it wasn’t as if guys liked me. And Alice New Girl had seen the whole thing.

That’s when I put my foot in a hole, twisted my ankle, and fell down. Another wake-up call. I just sat there and cried like a jerk.

I had to go back to the circle. To being who I’m supposed to be--too stupid to bruise, too dumb to imagine, hard and happy and in hiding. I’m the tortoise, pulling my body parts back under cover, saying, Who, me? Oh, I’m just a rock.

Of course, I couldn’t find the circle.

They’d made it hard to find, because if you could see it from anywhere, then so could the rangers. But I couldn’t hear it, either. I’d gone a lot further than I thought.

I got scared. That’s what screws you when you’re lost in the desert. I should have stayed where I was till morning. I could have been right next to a park road. Instead I went stumbling through the dark.

I remember the sun coming up. I was in the middle of a plain, and the plain had joshua trees all over it, spaced out like an orchard without rows. Real trees, maybe thirty or forty feet high, not like the crummy little tree behind Mike’s garage. Every one had a big crown of twisty branches, but there was no shade. When the wind blew, it hissed through the leathery knife-blade leaves, but nothing moved.

Rockpiles stuck up around the plain. I couldn’t tell how far away they were. No road, no trails. Not even footprints.

I just kept walking. I didn’t know what else to do. Little lizards slid off rocks when my shadow fell on them. Ravens flew over, making ugly laughing sounds. A rabbit with black ear tips crossed in front of me and didn’t even look at me. A coyote sat and scratched his ear with a hind leg, then trotted off between the rocks. It got hotter and hotter. I remember noticing I wasn’t sweating anymore.

Now comes the part I remember that didn’t happen. I don’t know when, except that there was still enough light to see by.

I thought it was a tree. I saw its feet first, and they were twisted and dry and dark like juniper roots. Its legs were like the trunks of the big joshua trees, corky-looking bark where the old leaves have fallen away. Above that, dry leaves hung on it like brown daggers overlapping. Only its head and hands were green. Knobs of green sword leaves like the ends of the joshua tree branches. Mistletoe was scattered around its head, the dark red strands like tiny bones. It had a face, but it was made of leaves, so I almost had to imagine it, like seeing pictures in clouds. That bent leaf in the middle is the nose, that line of leaf-ends there, that’s the mouth. And those deep pits between the leaves are where its eyes would be.

Inside my head I was flailing and screaming, but my body wasn’t doing anything. I think I was either passed out or close to it. It was like having a bad dream--you want it to go away, but it doesn’t occur to you that you can do anything about it.

It bent over as if it was trying to look into my face. I guess I must have been sitting or lying down. Maybe. It had to bend practically in half. Then it picked up a rock and cut its hand open.

That sounds nasty, but it was just interesting at the time. It cut a long gash in the bark of its palm. Water, or maybe sap, oozed up out of the cut and filled its cupped hand. It stuck its hand out under my nose.

Now I understand about animals being able to sniff out water. The water smelled like being alive. Everything else in the world was dying, in different ways and at different speeds, but that water was alive forever.

So I drank it. I was so thirsty I’d stopped feeling it, but all of a sudden I couldn’t get enough to drink. (So much for Miss I’m-careful-what-I-swallow. But since it couldn’t have happened, does that time count?)

And that’s it. I don’t remember anything else, even in little confetti bits like I remember the rest. There’s just nothing between that and when I woke up in the morning at the edge of the park where the all-terrain vehicle freaks go to play. Some vroom-vroomer saw me sit up on my sand dune and nine-one-oned.

I have a hideous sunburn (blisters in places) and I’m massively dehydrated. But I overheard the doctor tell the nurse he thought I was lying about being out there for two nights and a day. I wasn’t messed up enough. And for sure I was lying either about where I started or about being on foot, because it was twenty miles from there to the place I was found.

Sure, whatever. I’m lying. That works for me.

# # #

Our dog died when I was eleven/twelve. Oh, boo hoo, right? Well, yeah--he was a great dog, and I’d grown up with him. But what was important, because I hadn’t expected it, was the way it changed things between Mom and me. We did a lot of talking in between the crying, about important stuff. I don’t know why grief made us feel as if it was safe to take the lids off. But it turned a crappy experience into a pretty good one, and for a while, we were closer than we’d been since I was tiny.

My point is, sometimes truly crappy experiences have a crowbar effect on the rest of your life. Everything shakes loose. Then you can let it go back to the way it was, or you can step in and make something happen, something that might be permanent.

Janelle, Nina, and Barb came over yesterday after school. You’d think I had cancer. Lots of hushed voices and sentences trailing off. Of course, me being lost in the desert is about the most interesting thing that’s happened to any of us for years, so I understand that they’d want to get some mileage out of it. It made me feel like a museum exhibit.

Then Barb and Nina had to go babysit Nina’s brothers. So I told Janelle about Bob at the rave.

“So did you do it?” Janelle asked.

“Do what?”

“Blow him. You didn’t?” She squeaked that last bit. “Beth, I thought you were into him!”

I couldn’t think of a thing to say. No joke, no verbal shrug, no cover story, nothing.

“Oh, god.” Janelle looked disgusted. “He was supposed to say, ‘I love you. I’ve always loved you.’ Right?”

“Of course not!” Well, yes. Was that wrong? If it wasn’t wrong, why had I denied it?

“Hel-lo! Guys have to know there’s something in it for them. It’s just, you know, biology. You love them before the blow job, and they love you after.”

“Don’t you ever both love each other at the same time?”

Blank stare from Janelle.

It was worse than not speaking the same language. At least with languages there’s a chance you’ll have a word for the concept.

I told her I was tired. Actually I was kind of sick to my stomach. She suddenly remembered to talk as if I was dying. And brain damaged. “You take care of yourself, hon. Okay?” Then she left.

That was when I had my big revelation. I didn’t want to be just like Janelle anymore. I couldn’t be. I wasn’t built with the right parts or something. I guess I’d hoped that, if I stuck with her, she’d want to be more like me. But what was there about me that screamed “role model”?

Being like Janelle wouldn’t save me from my life. And being like me wouldn’t save Janelle. The people from the Titanic might have found some floating debris to hang onto, but they were still in the middle of the North Atlantic.

I said it was a revelation. I didn’t say it made me insanely happy.

After dinner (frozen pizza--I’m the cook, after all), Mom came to my bedroom door and said, “There’s a girl who says she’s in your English class and has your homework assignment.” She was half-frowning--not angry, just trying to figure out how she felt about this. “Alice somebody?”

Oh, god. Alice New Girl, witness to my shame, calling to find out if I had committed seppuku like a smart person. Well, I had to face the world eventually. Make like a rock, I told myself. “Sure. Where’s the phone?”

“She’s not on the phone,” said Mom. “She’s here.”

I had only seconds to get my ducks in a row. All I could do was tug the sheet up straight and make my face blank. In that last moment I saw my bedroom as others see it: the matching furniture bought during my ten-minute girlie phase in fifth grade, now with the white laminate chipped off the corners. The dark blue mini-blinds with the puffy valance (Wal-Mart!) that grotesquely needed dusting. Clothes tossed everywhere. Invalid crap on the nightstand.

Alice came in. She wore black capri pants and a red bowling shirt with “Stan” embroidered over the pocket, and had the giant purse over her shoulder. Her face was world-class blank. “Hi,” she said.

My mom took that as some kind of signal, because she left. Alice instantly closed the door and plopped down on the floor beside the bed. “Oh, jeez, Tab, you look awful! I’m so sorry. I tried to follow you at the rave, but I lost you in the dancers. Then I went back and tried to get that idiot guy to help me find you, but he was so full of Happy-Shiny he couldn’t find his own head. How do you feel?”

Like I’m in the path of Hurricane Alice, I wanted to say. “Okay, considering.”

“Considering that you could still be out there, bleaching like a cow skull?”

“With the ravens picking out my eyes,” I said, just to see if she’d be grossed out.

“And the kangaroo rats stealing away your hair to make their nests,” she said gleefully.

I tried not to grin. “The search party would never find me, but I’d be all around them.”

“Part of the desert forever!” Alice finished. “It sounds like a song.”

“Or an Outer Limits episode. You brought my English homework?”

She made a spitting noise. “That was just an excuse. I’m grounded. Nothing else would have got me past the parental units, short of climbing out a window.” She looked at the wall over my head. “Where’s that?”

When I did my frantic life-flashes-before-my-eyes view of the bedroom, I’d forgotten the tree picture over the bed. It’s a blown-up color photo I got at a church rummage sale, nothing fine art about it. In the picture, a path climbs a hill in the foreground, around these big oak trees and a couple of good-sized rocks, then curves out of sight.

When I first saw it, I had this hunger to get into the picture, to follow that path. I can still stare into it and imagine walking around those rocks, into the shade of the trees, and seeing what’s on the other side of the hill.

“I don’t know where it is.” Then I amazed myself, because my mouth opened again, and out came, “It’s a picture about possibilities. About wanting. The path always goes out of sight.” I didn’t just figure that out, but I hadn’t planned to tell anyone. Now to see what Alice would do to my exposed throat...

Alice looked very serious and intense. “What do you want when you look at it?” she asked.

I didn’t feel like I could lie. I’d started this, after all. And the tree picture is one of the few things I’d grab if the house caught fire. I shrugged (which reminded me about the sunburn). “I don’t know. I just want.”

A big grin spread across her face. “Yes! Just like ‘Malibu’!”

“What?”

“Hole! Courtney Love! On Celebrity Skin... You haven’t heard it?”

She grabbed up the giant purse and pulled out a portable CD player. At first I thought there were morning glories glued all over it. Then I saw some of them were scuffed, and I realized they were painted on. Amazing.

Alice handed me the headphones. “‘Malibu’ makes me feel the same way. Like there’s a road in front of me, and I have to find a way to get on it and see where it goes, or I’ll go nuts.” She looked up to make sure I had the phones on and pushed “play.”

Wistful, jangly, beautiful guitars in my ears, and a girl singing, talking right to me. I mean, spooky to me--the voice wanted to know how I’d gotten so screwed up, and how I’d held it together in spite of it. And then it said, Hey, meet me halfway, chica, and the two of us can maybe save your stupid life, okay?

Even with the sunburn, I got goosebumps.

When the chorus started, Alice sang along, as if she knew without listening exactly how long the first verse was. Then she grabbed the phones off my ears.

“Hey!” I said.

“I can’t not listen to it. We need a boombox.”

I pointed to my desk. She jumped up, found mine (under a pair of jeans), and put the disk in. The song started over, and Alice bumped the volume up.

“Play it again,” I said when it stopped.

After a couple more plays, we were singing along with Courtney as loud as we could. About a place where the ocean would wash away all the bullshit. A place to live, not just survive.

“Have you ever been?” Alice asked.

“What, to Malibu?” I laughed. “No chance.”

“But it’s only three hours away! Well, L. A. is. When my dad told me we were coming to California, I went nuts. But it seems like nobody here has ever been to L. A....” Alice grabbed her spiky hair and pulled it. “Three hours away there are great bands and dance clubs and juice bars and history and art and the ocean, and we’re missing it! There are surfers and pelicans and movie stars!”

“All in the same place?” I asked, trying not to laugh.

“Yes! And you and I have got to go.”

It wasn’t like with Janelle, when I knew I was trying to fit my sticking-out pieces into the empty spot in the puzzle. It was as if I’d had a dream every night that I couldn’t remember, and Alice had remembered it for me.

I know where that path in the picture comes out. On the other side of that hill is Malibu.

Mom must have heard us singing and shrieking, because she came in and said I had to rest.

“I’ll bring your homework tomorrow.” Alice winked.

“Don’t forget your CD.” I really didn’t want to remind her.

“You can borrow it,” she said.

Mom came back after she shooed Alice out. I asked, “Have you ever been to the ocean?”

She stared at me for a second. “No.”

“Alice and I are going.”

“Oh? When’s that happening?”

“I don’t know yet. But we will.”

She gave me such a funny look--as if I’d surprised her, as if she felt sorry for me. Or for her. But she just said, “Drink your Gatorade.”

I’ve listened to the whole album about a dozen times already.

# # #

Today I told Alice what happened when I was in the desert. She’s the only person I’ve told. It was like having to be honest about how I felt about the tree picture: either I wasn’t going to say anything about what happened after I ran off, or I had to tell her the whole thing.

I was afraid she would be different when I came back to school. I had visions of her being tight with Piper, pretending I’d become See-Through Girl. I know all about survival tactics, after all.

And, okay, I was afraid of the way I’d be--that I’d go back to sticking with Janelle and our posse. Because I do know about survival. I didn’t know if I could resist that yummy, cozy, Supposed to Be hiding place.

But it was as if Alice and I were wired up like Secret Service guys. We could watch the crowd for snipers while we had each other’s backs. I’ve started raising my hand in class. I just laughed and walked away when Amber called me “Gross Peeling Thing”. I’m not alone, like the tree behind Little Mike’s garage. I’m a forest, like the trees in the park.

The park is why I had to tell Alice. “Let’s go out there this Saturday,” she said today after sixth period.

“Why?” The bottom fell out of my stomach.

“Joshua Tree is a big deal. I read about it. It’s this amazing ecosystem that doesn’t exist anywhere else. And so far I’ve only seen it in the dark.”

“It’s the desert. There, I saved you so much time.”

“Tab!” Then she looked at me with her eyes squinched up. “Is this anything I should know about?”

Even when I was behaving like a psych case, she didn’t insist I tell her my deepest, darkest secrets. So of course I had to.

I told her about the creature in the desert, about waking up on the other side of the park, and the doctor saying I was lying.

Alice didn’t say anything right away. I got scared. “It was probably heatstroke,” I added, and heard the flatness in my voice.

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

That scared me even more. “Why not? It was heatstroke, LSD, or I’m insane! What do you mean, ‘I don’t think so’?”

“Remember your lips?”

I was about to yell at her, but she looked so serious.

“Lips dry out worse than any other part of your face, because they don’t have any oil glands,” she went on. “When I came to see you right after it happened, you looked like you’d just come off a barbecue grill. But your lips didn’t. They weren’t even dry.”

I think every hair on my body stood straight up. “When I drank out of its palm--”

“You put your mouth in the water.”

This Saturday we’re spending the day in the park. We’re going to bike in, and pack a lunch and huge amounts of water. Alice has a guide to the birds and animals and plants, and the plan is to see how many we can check off.

It’s funny, but I’m not worried about seeing the joshua tree thing again. I think if something like that happens to you, you get one shot. You can do what you want with it, but that taste of live magic is one per customer.

Now that I’m not trying to be who I’m supposed to, I’ve started to wonder about the rest of the world. Is everybody wearing a disguise with the zipper stuck? Are all the supposed-to-bes big fat lies? If so, how about the desert? I know what it’s supposed to be: no water, no life, everything poisonous, pointy, or otherwise out to get you.

I was supposed to be a loser. Maybe the desert and I have something in common.

Can’t wait to talk this over with Alice.

What Used to Be Good Still Is

2009-10-04T16:54:00.000-07:00

First published in Firebirds Rising, ed. Sharyn November, Firebird 2006.

What Used to Be Good Still Is

Emma Bull

Porphyry is a volcanic rock. Maybe that's why it happened. Maybe it was because the hill that became a pit was named Guadalupe, for the Virgin of Guadalupe, who appeared in a vision to a Mexican peasant a long time ago. Maybe it's because walls change whatever they enclose, and whatever they leave out.

And maybe it could have happened anywhere, any time. But I don't believe that for a second.

I expect I wouldn't have taken too much notice of Sara Gutierrez if my pop hadn't. I was a senior at Hollier High School, varsity football first string, debating team, science club. Sara was the eighth-grade sister of Alfred Gutierrez, who I knew from football. But the Gutierrezes lived in South Hollier, down the slope from the Dimas shaft, on the other side of Guadalupe Hill, and we lived on Collar Hill above downtown with the lawyers and store owners and bankers. Alfred and I didn't see much of each other outside of football practice. The only time my father saw Alfred's father was when Enrique Gutierrez had his annual physical at the company hospital, or if he got hurt on the job and Pop had to stitch him up.

But one night I was up studying and heard Pop in the kitchen say, "I don't know if that youngest Gutierrez girl is simple or plain brilliant."

Pop didn't talk about patients at home as a rule, so that was interesting enough to make me prick up my ears.

"Probably somewhere in between, like most," Mom said. Mom didn't impress easily.

"She came into the infirmary today with her chest sounding like a teakettle on the boil. If I can keep that child from dying of pneumonia or TB, I'll change my name to Albert Schweitzer." He paused, and I knew Mom was waiting for him to come back from wherever that thought had led him. She and I were used to Pop's parentheses. "Anyway, while I'm writing up her prescription, she says, 'Doctor Ryan, what makes a finch?'"

"I don't suppose you told her, 'God,'" Mom said with a sigh.

"I didn't know what to say. But when she saw I didn't get her drift, she asked why are house finches and those little African finches that Binnie Schwartz keeps in her parlor both finches? So I started to tell her about zoological taxonomy--"

"I just bet you did," Mom said. I could hear her smiling.

"Now, Jule--"

"Go on, go on. I won't get any peace 'til you do."

"Well, then she said, 'But the finches don't think so. We're human beings because we say we are. But the finches don't think they're all finches. Shouldn't that make a difference?'"

A pause, and the sound of dishes clattering in the wash water. "Sara Gutierrez spends too much time on her own," Mom said. "Invalids always think too much."

I don't remember what Pop replied to that. Probably he argued; Pop argued with any sentence that contained the word "always."

By the time I came home for the summer after my first year of college, the matter was settled: Sara Gutierrez was bright. She'd missed nearly half her freshman year in high school what with being out sick, but was still top of her class. Pop bragged about her as if he'd made her himself.

She was thin and small and kind of yellowish, and you'd hardly notice if she was in the same room with you. The other girls in town got permanent waves to look like Bette Davis. Sara still looked like Louise Brooks, her hair short, no curl at all. But that summer I saw her at the ballpark during one of the baseball games. She looked straight at me in the stands. There was something in her eyes so big, so heavy, so hard to hang onto that it seemed like her body would break from trying to carry it.

Nobody ever suggested that Sara was bright at anything likely to be of use to her. A long while later I looked her up in the Hollier Hoist, the high school yearbook, to see what her classmates must have made of her. She'd been a library monitor. That was all. No drama society, no debating team, no booster club, no decorating committee for the Homecoming dance.

I guess she saved her debating for me. And she danced, all right, but you won't find that in the yearbooks.

Hollier was a mining town--founded in the 1880s by miners and speculators. The whole point of life here was to dig copper out of the ground as cheap as possible, and hope that when you got it to the surface you could sell it for a price that made the work worthwhile. The town balanced on a knife edge, with the price of copper on one side, and the cost of mining it on the other.

And that didn't apply only to the miners and foremen and company management. If copper did poorly, so did the grocers, mechanics, lawyers, and schoolteachers. What came up out of those shafts fed and clothed us all. Pop was a company doctor. Without copper, there was no company, no one to doctor, no dinner on the table, no money for movies on Saturday, no college tuition. He used to say that Hollier was a lifeboat, with all of us rowing for a shore we couldn't see. The company was the captain, and we trusted that the captain had a working compass and knew how to read it.

Underground mining's expensive. The shafts went deeper and deeper under the mountains following the veins of high-grade ore, the pumps ran night and day to pump out the water that tried to fill those shafts, and the men who dug and drilled and blasted had to be paid. But near the surface, under what farmers call dirt and miners call overburden, around where the rich veins used to run, there was plenty of low-grade ore. Though it didn't have as much copper in it, it could be scraped right off the surface. No tunnels, no pumps, and a hell of a lot fewer men to pay.

Guadalupe Hill was a fine cone-shaped repository of low-grade ore.

The summer after my sophomore year at college, I came home to find the steam shovels scooping the top off Guadalupe Hill. You could see the work from the parlor windows on Collar Hill, hear the roar and crash of it funneled up the canyon from the other side of downtown. Almost the first thing I heard when I got off the train at the depot was the warning siren for a blast, and the dynamite going off like a giant bass drum. From the platform I could see the dust go up in a thundercloud; then the machinery moved in like retrievers after a shot bird.

As Pop helped me stow my suitcase in the trunk of the Hudson, I said, "I'd sure like to watch that," and jerked my head at Guadalupe Hill.

"I'd take you over now, but your mother would fry me for supper."

"Oh, I didn't mean before I went home." I would have meant it, but I knew he'd be disappointed in me if I couldn't put Mom before mining.

Once I'd dropped my suitcase in my room and given Mom a kiss and let her say I looked too thin and didn't they feed me in that frat house dining room, Pop took me down to watch the dig.

It was the biggest work I'd ever seen human beings do. Oh, there'd been millions of dollars of copper ore taken out of the shafts in Hollier. Everyone in town knew there were a thousand miles of shafts, and could recite how many men the company employed; but you couldn't see it. Now here was Guadalupe Hill crawling with steam shovels and dump trucks, men shouting, steam screeching, whistles, bells. It went as smooth and precise as a ballet troupe, even when it looked and sounded like the mouth of Hell.

And the crazy ambition of the thing! Some set of madmen had wanted to turn what most folks would have called a mountain inside out, turn it into a hole as deep and as wide as the mountain was tall. And another set of madmen had said, "Sure, we can do that."

Later I wasn't surprised when people said, "Let's go to the moon," because I'd seen the digging of Guadalupe Pit. It was like watching the building of the pyramids.

Pop stopped to talk to the shift boss. Next to that big man, brown with sun and streaked with dust, confident and booming and pointing with his square, hard hands, Pop looked small and white and helpless. He was a good doctor, maybe even a great one. His example had me pointed toward pre-med, and medical school at Harvard or Stanford if I could get in. But looking from him to the shift boss to the roaring steam shovels, I felt something in me slip. I wanted to do something big, something that people would see and marvel at. I wanted people to look on my work and see progress and prosperity and stand in awe of the power of Man.

Over dinner, I said, "It makes you feel as if you can do anything, watching that."

"You can, if you have enough dynamite and a steam shovel," Pop agreed as he reached for a pork chop.

"No, really! We're not just living on the planet like fleas on a dog anymore. We're changing it to suit us. Like sculptors. Like--"

"God?" Mom said, even though I'd stopped myself.

"Of course not, Mom." But I'd thought it, and she knew it. She also knew I was a college boy and consequently thought myself wiser than Solomon.

Conversation touched on the basketball team and the repainting of the Women's Club before I said carefully, "I've been wondering if I'm cut out for med school."

Guess I wasn't careful enough; Pop gave me a look over his plate that suggested he was onto me. "Not everyone is."

"I don't want to let you down."

"You know we'll be proud of you no matter what," Mom replied, sounding offended that she had to tell me such a thing.

"I'm thinking of transfering to the Colorado School of Mines."

"Might need some scholarship money--being out of state," said Pop. "But your grades are good. The company might help out, too." He passed me the mashed potatoes. "You don't have to be a doctor just because I am."

"Of course not." I needed to hear him say so, though.

We sat in the parlor after dinner. Pop got his pipe going before he said, "The Gutierrez family isn't doing so well. Tool nippers got laid off at the Dimas shaft, and Enrique with 'em. I think it hit Sara hard."

At first I thought he was talking about Mrs. Gutierrez; I don't know that I'd ever heard her first name. Then I remembered Sara.

"You might take the time for a chat if you see her." He took his pipe out of his mouth and peered at it as if it were a mystery. "She asks about you."

If there's a young fellow who can remain unmoved by the knowledge that a girl asks about him, I haven't met him.

Sara was working in the Hollier Library for the summer. I found an excuse to drop in first thing next day. I came up to the desk and called to the girl on the other side who was shelving reserved books, "Is Sara Gutierrez working today?"

Of course it was her. When I look back on it, it seems like the most natural thing in the world that the girl would straighten up and turn 'round, and there she'd be. Her hair still wasn't waved, and she wasn't pink and white like a girl in a soap ad. But she wasn't thin anymore, either. Her eyes were big and dark under straight black brows, and she looked at me as if she were taking me apart to see what I was made of. Then she said, without a hint of a smile, "She'd better be, or this whole place'll go to the dickens."

I'd planned to say hello, pass the time of day for a few minutes. But a little fizz went up my backbone, and I heard myself say, "Must be awful hard for her to get time off for lunch."

"She'd probably sneak out if someone made her a decent offer."

"Will the lunch counter at the drug store do?"

Sara looked at me through her eyelashes. "Golly, Mr. Ryan, you sweet-talked me into it."

"I'll come by for you at the noon whistle."

She had grilled cheese and a chocolate phosphate. Funny the things you remember. And she said the damnedest things without once cracking a smile, until I told her about my fraternity initiation and made her laugh so hard she skidded off her stool. By the time I asked for the check I'd gotten a good notion of how to tell when she was joking. And I'd asked her to go to the movies the next night, and she'd said yes.

I picked her up for the movie outside the library, and when it was over, I proceeded to drive her home. But at the turnoff for the road to South Hollier, she said, "I can walk from here."

I turned onto the road. "Not in the dark. What if you tripped in a hole, or met up with a javelina--"

"I'd rather walk," she said, her voice tight and small.

I didn't think I'd said or done anything to make her mad. "Now, don't be silly." I remembered Pop saying that Sara seemed to take her father's layoff hard. Was that what this was about?

"Really--" she began.

In the headlights and the moonlight I could see two tall ridges of dirt and rock crossways to the road on either side, as if threatening to pinch it between them. Two corrugated iron culvert pipes, each as big around as a truck, loomed in the scrub at the roadside.

"Where'd that come from?"

She didn't answer. The Hudson passed between the ridges of dirt, and I could see the lights of the houses of South Hollier in front of me. I pulled over.

"Are they building something here?" I asked.

Sara sat in the passenger seat with her hands clenched in her lap and her face set, looking out the windshield. "It's Guadalupe Hill," she said at last.

"What?"

"They have to put it someplace. The tailings will make a new line of hills around South Hollier on the east and south."

I tried to imagine it. North and west, the neighborhood ran right up to the mountain slopes. This would turn South Hollier into the bottom of a bowl with an old mountain range on two sides and a new one on the others.

"What about the road?"

"That's what the pipes are for."

"You mean you'll drive through the pipe, like a tunnel?"

"One for each direction," she answered.

"Well, I'll be darned." The more I thought about it, the cleverer it was. Wasn't it just like mining engineers to figure out a way to put a tailings dump where it had to go without interfering with the neighborhood traffic?

Sara shook her head and pleated her skirt between her fingers. I put the Hudson into gear and drove down the road into South Hollier.

At her door, I asked, "Can I see you again?"

She looked up into my face, with that taking-me-apart expression. At last she said, "'May I.' College man."

"May I?"

"Oh, all right." Her eyes narrowed when she was teasing. Before I knew what had happened, she was on the other side of her screen door. Based on her technique, I was not the first young man to bring her home. "Good night, Jimmy."

I drove back to Collar Hill with vague but pleasant plans for the summer.

She met me for lunch a couple times a week, and sometimes she'd let me go with her and carry her packages when she had errands to the Mercantile or the Fair Store. Once she wanted sheet music from the Music Box, and she let me talk her into a piano arrangement of a boogie woogie song I'd heard at a college party.

"Should I hide it from my mama?" she asked, with her eyes narrowed.

"I'll bet she snuck out to the ragtime dances."

"Oh, not a good Catholic girl like my mama."

"Mine's a good Catholic girl, too, and she did it."

Sara smiled, just the tiniest little smile, looking down at the music. For some reason, that smile made my face hot as a griddle.

Sara wouldn't go to a movie again, though, or the town chorus concert or the Knights of Columbus dance. I asked her to the Fourth of July fireworks, but she said she was going with her family.

"I'll look for you," I said, and she shrugged and hurried away.

The fireworks were set off at the far end of Panorama Park, down in the newer neighborhood of Wilson where the company managers lived. Folks tended to spread their picnic blankets in the same spot every year. The park divided into nations, too, like much of Hollier. A lot of the Czech and Serbian families picnicked together, and the Italians, and the Cornishmen; the Mexicans set up down by the rose garden, at the edge of the sycamores. The Gutierrez family would be there.

I got to the park at twilight, and after saying hello to a few old friends from high school, and friends of Mom and Pop's, I pressed through the crowd and the smells from all those picnic dinners. When I got to the rose garden it was almost dark, but I found Alfred Gutierrez without too much trouble.

"You looking for Sara?" he said, with a little grin.

"I told her I'd come 'round and say hi." I was above responding to that grin.

"She's around here someplace. Hola, Mamá," he called over his shoulder, "where'd Sara go?"

Mrs. Gutierrez was putting the remains of their picnic away. She looked up and smiled when she saw me. "Hello, Jimmy. How's your mama and papa?"

"They're fine. I just wanted to say hello..."

Mrs. Gutierrez nodded over her picnic basket. "Sara said she had to talk to someone."

Was it me? Was she looking for me, out there in the night, while I looked for her? There was a bang--the first of the fireworks. "Will you tell her I was here?"

Alfred grinned again, and Mrs. Gutierrez looked patient in the blue light of the starburst.

I watched the fireworks, but I didn't get much out of them. Was Sara avoiding me? Why wouldn't she see me except when she was downtown; in the daytime, but never the evenings? Could it be she was ashamed of her family, so she wouldn't let me pick her up at home? The Gutierrez family wasn't rich, but neither were we. No, it had to be something about me.

It wasn't as if we were sweethearts; we were just friends. I'd go back to college in September, she'd stay here, and we'd probably forget all about each other. We were just having fun, passing the time. She was too young for me to be serious about, anyway. So why was she giving me the runaround?

By the time the finale erupted in fountains and pinwheels, I'd decided two could play that game. I'd find myself some other way to pass the time for the next couple months, and it wouldn't be hard to do, either.

That was when I saw her, carried along with the slow movement of people out of the park, her white summer dress reflecting the moon and the street lights. She was holding someone's little girl by the hand and trying to get her to walk, but the kid had reached that stage of tired in which nothing sounded good to her.

"Hi, Sara."

"Jimmy! I didn't see you there."

I wanted to say something sophisticated and bitter like, "I'm sure you didn't," but I remembered that I'd resolved to be cool and distant. That's when the little girl burst into noisy, angry tears.

"Margie, Margarita, I can't carry you. You're a big girl. Won't you please--"

I scooped the kid up so quickly that it shocked the tears out of her. "A big girl needs a bigger horse than Sara," I told her, and settled her on my shoulders, piggyback-fashion.

We squeezed through the crowd without speaking until we got to Margie's family's pickup truck. The Gutierrez family was riding with them, and I had to see Alfred smirk at me again. Folks started to settle into the back of the truck on their picnic blankets. Something about Sara's straight back and closed-up face, and the fact that she still wasn't talking, made me say, "Looks kind of crowded. I've got my pop's car here..."

Mrs. Gutierrez looked distracted and waved her hands over picnic basket, blankets, sleeping kids, and folded-up adults. "Would you--? Sara, you go with Jimmy. I don't know how..." With that, she went back to, I think, trying to figure out how they'd all come in the truck in the first place.

Sara turned to me, her eyes big and sort of wounded. "If you don't mind," she mumbled.

We were in the front seat of the Hudson before I remembered my grudge. "Now, look, Sara, you've been dodging me--"

She was startled. "Oh, no--"

"I just want to say you don't have to. We've had some fun, but if you think I'm going to go too far or make a pest of myself or hang on you like a stray dog--"

The force of her head-shaking stopped me. "No, really, I don't."

"What's up with you, then? We're just friends, aren't we?"

Sara looked at her knees for a long time, and I wondered if I'd said something wrong. "That's so," she said finally. "We are."

She sounded as if she were deciding on something, planting her feet and refusing to be swayed. I'd only started on my list of grievances, but her tone made me lose my place in the list. "I guess I'll take you home, then."

We talked about fireworks as I drove: which we liked best, how we'd loved the lights and colors but hated the bang when we were kids, things we remembered from past July Fourths in the park. But as I turned down her road and headed toward South Hollier, Sara's voice trailed off. At the tailings ridge, I stopped the car.

"Darn it, Sara, why should I care where you live? Is that what this is about, why you go all stiff and funny?"

She stared at me, baffled-looking. "No. No, it's that..." She reached for the door handle. "Come with me, will you, Jimmy?"

In the glare of the headlights, she picked her way up to the foot of the tailings. I was ready to grab her elbow if she stepped wrong; the ground was covered with debris rolled down from the ridge top, rocks of all sizes that seemed to want to shift away under my feet or turn just enough to twist my ankle. But she went slow but steady over the mess as if she'd found a path to follow.

She stopped and tipped her head back. The stars showed over the black edge of the tailings, and I thought that was what she was looking at. "Can you tell?" she asked.

"Tell what?"

Sara looked down at her feet for the first time since she got out of the car, then at the ridge, and finally at me. "It doesn't want to be here."

"What doesn't?"

"The mountain. Look, it's lying all broken and upside down--overburden on the bottom instead of the top, then the stone that's never been in sunlight before. It's unhappy, and now it'll be a whole unhappy ring around South Hollier." She turned, and I saw two tears spill out her eyes. "We've always been happy here before."

For an instant I thought she was crazy; I was a little afraid of her. Then I realized she was being poetic. Pop had said her dad's layoff had hit her hard. She was just using the tailings as a symbol for what had changed.

"You'll be happy again," I told her. "This won't last, you'll see."

She looked blank. Then she reached out toward the slope as if she wanted to pat it. "This will last. I want to fix it, and there's nothing..." She swallowed loudly and turned her face away.

I couldn't think of a way to fix things for her, and I didn't want to say anything about her crying. So I turned back to the tailings ridge, textured like some wild fabric in the headlights. "That gray rock is porphyry, did you know?"

"Of course I do." The ghost of her old pepper was in that. I suppose it was a silly question to ask a miner's daughter.

"Well, do you know it's the insides of a volcano?"

She looked over her shoulder and frowned.

"The insides of a want-to-be volcano, anyway," I went on. "The granite liquifies in the heat and pushes up, but it never makes it out the top. So nobody knows it's a volcano, because it never erupted."

Sara had stopped frowning as I spoke. Now she turned back to the tailings with an expression I couldn't figure out. "It wanted to be a volcano," she murmured.

I didn't know what else to say, and she didn't seem to need to say anything more. "I ought to get you home," I said finally. "Your mom will be wondering."

When we stopped in front of her house, Sara turned to me. "I only told you that, about the...about the mountain, because we're friends. You said so yourself. I wouldn't talk about it to just anybody."

"Guess I won't talk about it at all."

She smiled. "Thank you, Jimmy. For the ride, and everything." She slid out of the passenger side door and ran up to her porch. She ran like a little kid, as if she ran because she could and not because she had to. When she got to the porch she waved.

I waved back even though I knew she couldn't see me.

Mom asked me the next day if I'd drive her up to see her aunt in Tucson. We were halfway there before she said, "Are you still seeing Sara Gutierrez?"

I was about to tell her that I'd seen her the night before, when I realized that wasn't how she meant "seeing." "We're just friends, Mom. She's too young for me to think of that way."

"Does she think so, too?"

I thought about last night's conversation. "Sure, she does."

"I know you wouldn't lead her on on purpose, but it would be a terrible thing to do to her, to make her think you were serious when you aren't."

"Well, she doesn't think so." Mom was just being Mom; no reason to get angry. But I was.

"And it would break your father's heart if you got her in trouble."

"I'm not up to any hanky-panky with Sara Gutierrez, and I'm not going to be. Are you satisfied?"

"Watch your tone, young man. You may be grown up, but I'm still your mother."

I apologized, and did my best to be the perfect son for the rest of the trip. But the suggestion that anyone might think Sara and I would be doing things we'd be ashamed to let other people know about--it hung around like a bad smell, and made me queasy whenever I remembered it.

Did people see me with Sara and think I was sneaking off with her to-- My God, even the words, ones I'd used about friends and classmates and strangers, were revolting. Somewhere in Hollier, someone could be saying, "Jimmy Ryan with the youngest Gutierrez girl! Why, he probably dazzled her into letting him do whatever he wanted. And you know he won't think about her for five minutes after he goes back to college."

When Mom and I got back from Tucson, I rang up Sam Koslowsky, who I knew from high school, and proposed a little camping and fishing in the Chiricahuas. He had a week's vacation coming at the garage, so he liked the notion.

For a week, I didn't see Sara, or mention her name, or even think about her, particularly. I hoped she'd gotten used to not seeing me, so when I came back, she wouldn't mind that I stopped asking her out or meeting her for lunch.

It would have been a fine plan, if Mom hadn't wanted me to go down to the library and pick up the Edna Ferber novel she had on reserve. When I saw that the girl at the desk wasn't Sara, I let my breath out in a whoosh, I was so relieved. Maybe relief made me cocky. Whatever it was, I thought it was safe to go upstairs and find a book for myself.

Sara was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the geography section, her skirt pulled tight down over her knees to make a hammock for the big book in her lap. She looked up just as I spotted her. "Jimmy, come look at this."

It was as if she hadn't noticed I'd been gone--as if she hadn't noticed I wasn't there five minutes earlier. She had a wired-up look to her, as if she had things on her mind that didn't leave room for much else, including me. Wasn't that what I'd wanted? Then why was I feeling peeved?

I looked over her shoulder at the book. At the top of the page was a smudgy photograph of Mount Fuji, in Japan. Sara jabbed at the paragraphs below the photo as if she wanted to poke them into some other shape. "Mount Fuji," I said, as if I saw it every day.

"But that's not just the name of the mountain. The mountain's a goddess, or has a goddess, I'm not sure which. And her name is Fuji. And look--" Sara flipped pages wildly until she got to one with a turned-down corner (I was shocked--a library assistant folding corners) and another photo. The mountain in this one was sending up blurry dark smoke. "Here, Itza-- Itzaccihuatl in Mexico. Itza is sort of a goddess, too. Or anyway, she's a woman who killed herself when she heard her lover died in battle, and became a volcano. And there's a volcano goddess in Hawaii, Pele."

"Sure. All right," I said, since she seemed to want me to say something.

"And there's more than that. Volcanoes seem extra-likely to have goddesses, all over the world."

I laughed. "I guess men all over the world have seen women blow their tops."

Instead of laughing, or pretending to be offended, she frowned and shook her head. "There's so much I need to know. Did you want to go to lunch? Because I'm awfully sorry, I just don't have time."

That reminded me that I was annoyed. "I just came to get a book. People do that in libraries." I pulled one down from the shelf above her head and walked off with it. The girl at the desk giggled when she checked it out, and it wasn't until I was outside that I found I was about to read A Lady's Travels in Burma. Between that and Mom's Edna Ferber, I figured I was punished enough for being short with Sara.

I waited a week before I stopped by the library again. Again she was too busy for lunch, but as I moved to turn from the desk, she said, "I really am sorry, Jimmy." She didn't look like a girl giving a fellow the brush-off. In fact, something about her eyebrows, the tightness of her lips, made her look a little desperate.

I could be busy, too, I decided, and with better reason. I wrote to the Colorado School of Mines to ask what a transfer required in the way of credits, courses, and tuition. I wrote to some of the company's managers, in town and at the central office, inquiring about scholarship programs for children of employees who wanted to study mining and engineering. I gathered letters of recommendation from teachers, professors, any Pillar of the Community who knew me. Pop helped, and bragged, and monitored my progress as if he'd never had visions of a son following him into medicine.

In mid-August, I got a letter from the School of Mines, conditionally accepting me for the engineering program. All I had to do was complete a couple of courses in the fall term, and I could transfer in January. I took it down to Pop's office as soon as it came, because he was almost as eager as I was.

He was with a patient. I sat in the waiting room for a few minutes, but I felt silly; waiting rooms are for patients. I ducked into the little room that held Pop's desk and books and smelled like pipe tobacco. The transom over the door between it and the examining room was open, and the first words I heard were from Sara. I should have left, but I didn't think of it.

"See, Margarita? Just a sprain. But don't you go near the tailings again."

"You do," said a little voice with a hint of a whine.

"I'm grown up."

"When I'm grown up, can I?"

"Maybe," said Sara, something distant in her voice. "Maybe by then."

"Tailings dumps shift and settle for a while," Pop agreed on the other side of the door. "They're not safe at first for anybody. Including grown-ups."

"Have...have many people been hurt, in South Hollier?" Sara sounded as if she wanted Pop to think it was a casual question. But I knew her better.

"Some sprains and bruises. Probably some scrapes that I never see, but only minor things. Folks just can't seem to stay off a hill or a high building, whatever you tell 'em. Especially the little ones," Pop added in a new, dopey voice. Margie squealed, as if maybe Pop had tweaked her ear.

I was mostly packed and ready to head back to college when Lucas Petterboro, three years old, wandered away from his yard in South Hollier and out to the new tailings dump. From what could be told after the fact, it seemed he'd caused a little slide clambering up the slope, which had dislodged a much larger rock, which had produced a still larger slide. Searchers found his shoe at the bottom of the raw place in the dump, which gave them an idea where to start digging.

Pop and Mom and I went to the funeral. Pop had delivered Luke. Everyone in South Hollier was there, and so were a lot of other people, mining families, since the Petterboros had been hard-rock miners down the Princess Shaft for thirty years. Mom sat beside Mrs. Petterboro at the cemetery and held her hand; Pop talked to Joe Petterboro, and now and then touched him lightly on the shoulder. The pallbearers were South Hollier men: Mr. Dubnik, who'd won the hard-rock drilling contest three years running; Mr. Slater, who ran a little grocery out of the front of his house; Fred Koch, who'd been in my class and who was clerking in a lawyer's office downtown: and Luis Sandoval, the cage operator for the Dimas Shaft. It was a small coffin; there was only room for the four of them. The children of South Hollier stood close to their parents, in their Sunday clothes, confused and frightened. Their mothers and fathers held their hands and wore the expression folks get when something that only happens to other people happens to one of their own.

And me? There wasn't a damned thing for me to do.

So when Sara came up to me, her eyes red in a white face, and slipped her hand into mine, I wanted to turn and bawl like a baby on her shoulder. If she'd spoken right away, I would have.

"So," I said at last, harsher than I'd meant to. "Guess that mountain's still unhappy, huh?"

She let go of my hand. "Yes. It is." She pulled her sweater close around her, though the sun was warm. "It keeps me awake at night. The engineers say the ridge ought to be stable, but there was a slide last week that came within three feet of the Schuellers' back door."

"Too much rain this summer." That made her shrug, which made me look closer at her. "What do you mean, it keeps you awake? Worrying won't help."

Her eyes were big and haunted and shadowed underneath. "I can hear the mountain, Jimmy."

Her mom called Sara's name. Sara shot me a last frightened look and went to her.

I went back to college the day after the funeral. I sat on the train still seeing that look, still hearing Sara say, "I can hear the mountain." I told myself it was poetry again, and banished her voice. But it always came back.

I shut it out with work. By the time the term ended and I packed all my worldly goods on the train for home, I'd gotten top grades in my classes, a scholarship from the company, and an invitation to visit my fraternity's house on the School of Mines campus at my earliest convenience.

I walked in the back door of the house on Collar Hill and smelled pipe tobacco, ginger snaps, and baking potatoes. I saw the kitchen linoleum with the pattern wearing away in the trafficked spots, saw Mom's faded flowered apron and felt her kiss on my cheek. Suddenly I felt safe. That was the first I knew that I hadn't felt safe for a long time, and that the feeling building in me as the train approached Hollier wasn't anticipation, but dread.

"You'll have to go find us a Christmas tree," Mom said to me over dinner. "Your father's been so busy lately that it's full dark before he gets home."

"And your mom won't let me buy a Christmas tree in the dark anymore," Pop added.

"Oh, the poor spavined thing you brought home that year! You remember, Jimmy?"

It was as if I'd been away for years. I shivered. "Why so busy, Pop?" If it was the tailings, if it was South Hollier...

"Mostly a bumper crop of babies--"

"Stephen!" Mom scolded.

"--along with winter colds and pneumonia and the usual accidents. Price of copper is up, the company's taken more men on for all the shifts, and that just naturally increases the number of damned fools who let ore cars run over their feet."

"Right before I left, the Petterboro baby--"

"Lord, yes. Nothing that bad since, thank God."

"Then the tailings are safe?"

Pop cocked his head and frowned. "Unless you run up to the top and jump off. It's true, though, that the South Hollier dump made more trouble in the beginning and less now than any others. I guess they know what they're doing, after all."

The tightness went out of my back. It was all right. Of course Sara hadn't meant it literally, what she'd suggested at the funeral. And now everything was fine.

When I saw Sara on Main Street the next afternoon, on her way to catch the trolley home, I knew that something wasn't fine at all. Her cheeks were hollow, her clothes hung loose on her, and the shadows around her eyes were darker than when I left.

"You've been sick again," I said, before I realized how rude it would sound.

"No. Ask your dad." She thumped her knuckles against her chest. "Lungs all clear."

"But--" I couldn't tell her she looked awful; what kind of thing was that to say? "Pop's car's down the block. Can I drive you someplace?"

"I'm just headed home."

"Why, I know right where that is!" I sounded too hearty, but she smiled.

"There's still room, with all that chemistry and geometry in there?"

"The brain swells as it fills up. My hat size gets bigger every year."

"Oh, so it's learning that does that."

When we got to the tailings, I saw that the culvert pipes were in place on the roadway, and the fill crested over them about six feet high. I steered the car into the right-hand pipe. I felt like a bug washed down a drain as the corrugated metal swallowed the car and the light. The engine noise rang back at us from the walls, higher and shrill. I wanted to crouch down, to put the Hudson in reverse, to floor it.

"Looks like they've moved a lot of stone since summer." I watched her out of the corner of my eye as I said it.

She nodded. It wasn't the old nervous silence she used to fall into near the tailings. She wasn't stiff or tense; but there was a settled quality to her silence, a firmness.

"Pop says the dump's quit shifting."

Sara looked at me as we came out of the pipe and into South Hollier. "That's right." She made it sound like a question.

I didn't know what to answer, so instead I asked, "Is your dad back at work?"

"They brought him on as a mechanic at the pit. He likes it. And it means he'll get his full pension after all."

South Hollier was now enclosed in its bowl, a Medieval walled town in the Arizona mountains. It looked constrained, like a fat woman in a girdle. But kids played in front yards, women took wash off their clotheslines, smoke rose from chimneys. Everything was all right.

Except it wasn't. Something was out of whack.

When I pulled up to Sara's front door, I said, "We're still friends?"

She thought about it. I realized I liked that better than if she'd been quick to answer. "We are."

"Then I'll say this, one friend to another. Something's eating you, and it's not good. Tell me. I'll help."

Sara smiled, a slow one that opened up like flower petals. We heard her screen door bang, and looked to see her mom on the front porch.

"Jimmy!" Mrs. Gutierrez called. "Jimmy Ryan, when did you get home? Come in for coffee!"

Sara gave a little laugh. "Don't argue with my mama."

I went in, and got coffee Mexican style, with a little cinnamon, and powdered-sugar-dusted cookies. Mrs. Gutierrez skimmed around her scoured red-and-yellow kitchen like a hummingbird. But here, too, something wasn't right.

Mrs. Gutierrez gave Sara a pile of magazines to take to a neighbor's house. When we heard the screen bang behind her, Mrs. Gutierrez turned to me. "You see how she is?"

"Has she been sick?"

Mrs. Gutierrez twisted the dishrag between her hands, and I was reminded of Sara twisting at her skirt, the first night I'd driven her home. "When... At night, late, she goes to bed. She says she's going to bed. But I lie awake in the dark and hear her go out again. It's hours before she comes back."

I felt so light-headed I almost couldn't see. "Is it some boy?" I was scared at how angry I sounded. "Is she--" Everything else stuck in my throat. I had no business being angry. I was furious.

But Mrs. Gutierrez shook her head. "Do you think I would let that go on? Almost I wish it were. Then we'd have shame or a wedding, but not this--this fading away."

It was true. Sara was fading away.

"What can I do?"

"Find out what's happening. Make her stop."

So I began to meet her for lunch. She wasn't too busy anymore, but she was always tired. Still, she smiled at me, the kind of weary, gentle smile that women who work too hard wear, and let me take her to the drug store lunch counter. I made her eat, which she didn't mind doing, but didn't seem to care much about, either.

"Are you going to tell me what's wrong?" I asked every time. And every time, she'd say "Nothing," and make a joke or turn the subject.

One day--I know the date exactly, December 12--I badgered her again.

"There's nothing wrong, Jimmy. Everything's fine now."

"That sounds like things used to be wrong. What's changed?"

Sara gave a little frustrated shrug that made her collarbone show through her blouse. "You remember I told you we used to be happy? Well, we're happy again. That's all."

"Your mom's not happy."

"Yes, she is--she's just looking for something to be unhappy about. Is that why you're always nagging me? Because she told you to?"

"Well, why shouldn't she? You're skin and bones, she says you don't sleep, you sneak out of the house--"

Sara's face stopped me. It was like stone, except for her eyes, which seemed to scorch my face as she looked at me. "You know what you are, Jimmy Ryan? You're a busybody old woman. Keep your nose out of my business from now on!"

She spun around on her counter stool and plunged out of the drugstore.

By the time I got out to the sidewalk she was gone. She wasn't at the library, or the high school.

That night I picked at my dinner, until Mom said, "Jimmy, are you sick?"

"I had a big lunch, I guess. Pop, can I borrow the car tonight?"

"Sure. What you got planned?"

I felt terrible as I said, "Supposed to be a meteor shower tonight. I thought I'd drive out past Don Emilio and watch."

This time he didn't give me a look across the table. I almost wished he had.

I drove out the road toward South Hollier at about 9 p.m. I didn't know when the Gutierrez family went to bed, but I didn't want to arrive much past that time, whatever it was. I parked the car off the road just before the culvert-pipe tunnels and walked the rest of the way.

The night was so clear that the starlight was enough to see by. I circled South Hollier, only waking up one dog in the process, until I found a perch where I could see the front and back doors of the Gutierrez house. That put me partway up the lower slopes of the tailings dump. I'd thought there was another house or two between theirs and the dump; had they been torn down to make room?

It got cold, and colder, as I waited. I wished I had a watch with a radium dial. Finally I saw movement; I had to blink and look away to make sure it wasn't just from staring for so long at one spot.

Sara was a pale smudge, standing in her back yard in a light-colored dress, her head tipped back to see the stars, or the ridge top. She set out to climb the slope.

She wasn't looking for me, and I was wearing a dark wool coat. So I could follow her as she climbed, up and up until she reached the top of the ridge. I had the sense to stay down where I wouldn't show up against the sky.

Sara stood still for a moment, her head down. Then she lifted her face and her arms. She began a shuffling step, rhythmic, sure, as if the loose stones she danced over were a polished wood floor. About every five steps she gave a spring. Sometimes she'd turn in place, or sweep her arms over her head in a wide arc. I followed her as she moved along the ridge, until in one of her turns the starlight fell on her face. It was blank, entranced. Her eyes were open, but not seeing.

I couldn't stand it. "Sara!"

She came back to her own face; I don't know any other way to say it. She came back, stumbled, and stopped. I scrambled up the slope to her, and grabbed her shoulders as she swayed. They were thin as bird bones under my hands.

"Sara, what is this? What the hell are you doing out here?" My voice sounded hollow and thin, carried away by the air over the ridge.

"Jimmy? What are you doing here?"

I felt my face burn. The only true answer was "Spying." I felt guilty enough to be angry again. "Trying to find out what you wouldn't tell me. Friends don't lie to each other."

"I haven't...I haven't lied to you."

"You said everything was fine!"

She nodded slowly. "It is, now."

"You're sleepwalking on the tailings!"

Her face took on a new sharpness. "You think I'm sleepwalking?"

"What else?"

"Oh, God." She scrubbed at her face with both hands. "Don't you remember, when I told you about Fuji and the others?"

I let go of her shoulders. For the first time I felt, in my palms, the heat of her skin, that radiated through the material of her dress. "This isn't some bunk about the mountain?"

"I had to fix it. There wasn't anybody else who could."

"You're not fixing anything! This is just a pile of rocks that used to be a hill!"

"Jimmy. I am the mountain."

She stood so still before me, so straight and solid. And I was cold all the way through, watching the light of the stars waver through the halo of heat around her.

"Sara. Please, this is-- Come down from here. Pop will help you--"

Her eyes narrowed, and her head cocked. "Can he dance?"

She was still there, still present in her crazy head. The rush of relief almost knocked me over. What would I have done if she'd been lost--if I'd lost her?

If I'd lost her. Before my eyes I saw two futures stretching out before me. One of them had Sara in it, every day, for every minute. The other... The other looked like bare, broken rock that nothing would grow on.

The shock pushed the words out of my mouth. "I love you, Sara."

She shook her head, wide-eyed. "Oh..."

"Marry me. I'm going to Colorado next month, you can go with me. You can finish school there--"

Sara was still shaking her head, and now her eyes were full of tears and reflected stars. She reached out a hand, stretching it out as if we were far, far apart. "Oh, Jimmy. I want-- Oh, don't you see?"

"Don't you care for me, Sara?"

She gave a terrible wordless cry, as if she were being twisted in invisible hands. "I can't leave!"

"But for you and me--"

"There are more people than just us. They need me."

"Your folks? They've got your brothers. They don't need you the way I do."

"Jimmy, you're not listening. I can't leave. I'm the mountain."

Her face wasn't crazy. It was streaked with tears and a deep, adult sorrow, like the saints' statues in St. Patrick's Church. Sara reached out to me the way Mary's statue reached down from her niche over the altar, pity and yearning in the very finger-joints. I saw the waving heat around her, and the stars in her eyes and her hair.

I stepped back a pace. I couldn't help it.

I saw her heart break. That's the only way I can describe what I watched in her face. But when it was done, what was left in her eyes and her mouth and the way she held her head was strong and certain and brave.

"Goodbye, Jimmy," she said. She turned, sure-footed, and ran like a deer along the tailings ridge into the night.

I think I shouted her name. I know that something set the dogs barking all over South Hollier, and eventually Enrique Gutierrez was shaking me by the shoulders.

When Sara hadn't come home by morning, we called the police. Mr. and Mrs. Gutierrez were afraid she'd broken her leg, or fallen and been knocked out. I couldn't talk about what I was afraid of, so I agreed with them, that that could have happened.

Every able-bodied person in South Hollier joined the search. Everyone thought it would be over in an hour or so. By afternoon the police had brought dogs in, and were looking for fresh slides. They didn't say they were looking for places where the rocks might have engulfed a body.

If she was out there, the dogs would have found her. Still, I had to go down to the station, because I was the last one to see her, because the girl at the lunch counter had heard our fight. And God knows, I must have seemed a little crazy. I told them what I'd seen and what we'd said. I just didn't tell them what I thought had happened.

I didn't transfer to the Colorado School of Mines. Leveling mountains didn't appeal to me anymore. I went back to pre-med, and started on medical school at the University of Arizona. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, I enlisted, and went to the Pacific as a medic.

After the war, I finished medical school and hired on as a company doctor at the hospital in Hollier. Pop had passed, and Mom was glad to have me nearby. I couldn't live in the house on Collar Hill, though, that looked down the canyon to where Guadalupe Hill had been. I found a little house in South Hollier, small enough for a bachelor to handle.

The Gutierrez house was gone. As the dump grew, it needed a bigger base, and the company bought the house and knocked it down to make room for more rock. Mr. and Mrs. Gutierrez bought a place down at the south end of Wilson, and while they were alive, I used to visit and tell them how their old neighbors were getting on.

I'd lived in South Hollier for a couple of months before I climbed the slope of the tailings one December night and sat in the starlight. I sat for maybe an hour before I felt her beside me. I didn't turn to look.

"The mountain's happy now," I said. My voice cracked a little.

"I'm happy," she said. "Be happy for me, Jimmy."

"Who's going to be happy for me?"

"I'll do that. Maybe someday you will, too."

I shook my head, but it seemed silly to argue with her.

"What used to be good still is," she said. "Remember that." And after a minute, "I take care of everybody, but you most of all."

"I'll die after a while and save you the trouble."

"Not for a long time." There was motion at the corner of my eye, and I felt warm lips against my cheek. "I love you, Jimmy."

Then there was nothing beside me but a gust of cold wind.

I'd watched the mining of Guadalupe Hill, and thought men could do anything, be anything, conquer anything. I'd thought we'd cure cancer any day.

Now Guadalupe Pit is as deep as Guadalupe Hill once was high, and next to it there's a second pit that would hold three Guadalupes. Both pits are shut down, played out. There's no cure for cancer, the AIDS quilt is so big that there's no place large enough to roll the whole thing out at once, and diabetes has gone from a rarity to an epidemic.

But in South Hollier there's a ridge that could have been nothing more than a heap of barren, cast-off rock; and a cluster of buildings that could have slowly emptied and died inside their wall. Instead there's a mountain with a goddess, and a neighborhood that rests safe and happy, as if in her warm cupped hands.

For Elise Matthesen, and the necklace of the same title.

The Last of John Ringo

2009-10-04T16:34:00.001-07:00

The Last of John Ringo

by Emma Bull

You were dead, all but the bullet.
Was there a shining, sober moment,
A choice, a rightness,
Like the one between the trigger pulled
And the target struck,
When the end seemed the only, perfect one?
Last waltz, last chord, and home in the moonlight?

Or was it disarray on discord--
One thing forgotten, another misplaced,
A third mishandled, a fourth dropped unheeded--
Until your life, continued,
Would have been bootless, horseless,
A cartridge belt upside down:
Fool’s motley for a dying boomtown?

There was water in the mines.
There was no next town,
No next good game.
The sunset only day’s end,
Not a curtain before the next grand act,
Not a promise to ride on toward.
So you chose, or the gods chose for you.

Untidy life, snagged to knots with other lives,
Gives way at last to one smooth course of myth.
From your black-oak wayside seat
It was a snarl beyond your picking-out.
But those who lived dug channels for your past,
Made art of you,
And art makes sense.

So crude despair or drunk mischance gave place
To murder: thundering vengeance come at last.
That’s an end that makes a tale;
That’s a villain makes a hero.
The point of all your restless, angry life
Was that it ended. Choice, chance, or retribution:
How would you have lived, knowing your dead man’s fame?

A final joke: the boomtown survived.
It breathes now as a place you’d not have lived in,
But dead, you are a model citizen,
Necessary, as all coins have two sides.
To those who want forever for their names
You say, “Choose big enemies, and hope for bigger lies.
Then sit down by the road.”
You were dead. But not for long.

Man of Action

2009-10-04T16:29:00.000-07:00

Man of Action

lyrics by Emma Bull

My therapist had quite a lot to say
When I explained I was unmoved by chocolates and bouquets.
“What are you looking for in love,” she asked, “that you can’t find?”
I said, “The smell of cordite would brighten up my day.”

Does he wear his jacket loose to hide the holster?
Does he keep his schedule free to cut and run?
I’m the girl dressed in black in the Lotus Elan
And I’m looking for a man of action.

She says I long to nurture secretly,
But sensitive and sweet gives me a case of ennui.
See, I want a hero from a Hong Kong action flick
With a brand new Smith & Wesson and a taste for irony

Does his hair smell like the smoke from burning buildings?
Does he have a dragon tattoo on his arm?
I’m the girl on the train with the timer for the bomb
And I’m looking for a man of action.

I could be happy with a man who’s built for speed
A heat trace like an F-16, a ruthless sense of style
Strange clicking on his phone line, scars he can’t explain
Who never takes the first cab and who doesn’t often smile.

Afraid I’m gonna have to miss our session
Hope you’ve got another patient due to make confession
I’ll be at the airport in my trenchcoat and my shades
Looking for a long-legged dark-haired indiscretion.

Does he drive like hell-hounds know his license number?
Does he always sit where he can see the door?
I’m the girl on the bridge with the bag full of money
I’m the girl at the stick of the black helicopter
And I’m looking for a man of action.