Apocalypse to Go (27 page)

“Sure. Lots. Why?”

“Then there’s nothing I can do about your choice of occupation. You’re still a human being. You might even change your mind about all this one day.”

I let my mouth drop open and stared at her. Ari stood up and held out a hand in my direction.

“Come along,” he said. “We’d best leave now.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Eric! Sit down! What do you think I’m going to do, convert her away from you? I promise you, I’m not going to do anything of the sort. All right?”

Ari hesitated, then sat, but he crossed his arms tightly over his chest and glared at her.

“In your own way you do love her, don’t you?” Major Grace said. “It seems obvious to an old lifer like me. Rose, I’m glad you’ve got your Eric. No one’s going to steal you
the way they may have stolen your brother. I won’t lie to you. This is not likely to turn out well.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that. You hear so much crap about the big gangs. I guess they’re all bad, huh?”

“Yes, and the small ones aren’t much better.”

“Someone saw Sean talking with this guy who was bragging he belonged to Storm Blue. Is that a real gang, or was he just blowing hot air?”

“Let’s hope it’s not true. The Storm Blues are the worst.” She fixed me with a narrow-eyed stare. “If anyone from that gang approaches you, do not go with them.” She turned the stare on Ari. “Most of the missing persons in my book were last seen with Storm Blue men. I don’t care how much money they offer you. Don’t take it.”

“I won’t,” Ari said. “I’d rather not lose her.”

“Good.” She smiled briefly. “Now, Rose, come back tomorrow, and maybe I’ll have something to tell you. You’re also welcome to come here for a meal. We serve lunch at noon and dinner at sunset every night.”

“Thanks. I mean, really, thanks.” I glanced at Ari as if I were asking his permission. “Maybe, huh?”

Ari shrugged, glanced at the Major, shrugged again. “I’ll think about it.” He stood up. “But, yes, thank you.”

This time, when he held out his hand, I got up and took it. He pulled me close, a little roughly, and marched me out of the Major’s office just like a real Eric the Pimp would have done. We went downstairs and walked out past the long line waiting to see the doctor. There was no sign of the tall guy with the potbelly. He’d been too far back in line to have already seen Dr. Dave and legitimately left.

We said nothing until we’d gotten outside and walked some distance from the guard at the door. We paused on the corner and looked across the street to the coffeehouse. I could just see Hendriks and Spare14 in the window. Hendriks saw us, waved once, and got up. Spare14 followed, and they headed for the door.

“Storm Blue again,” Ari said. “I wonder what they do with those stolen children.”

“Sell them, probably. That file you showed me talked about a slave trade, remember.”

His flare of rage burst into my mind and made me tremble. I felt it as danger, not aimed at me, but danger nonetheless, as raw and impersonal as an earthquake or tornado. If a Storm Blue gang member had walked by at that moment, Ari might have drawn and shot him.

“Calm down, Eric,” I muttered. “This place is crawling with people with talents.”

“Right.” He took a deep breath, then another, looked this way and that, laid a hand on my shoulder. The rage slowly blew away like dead leaves in the wind. “Tomorrow we’ll see what Major Grace can tell us.”

“Yeah. Jeez, she’s quite a lady, huh? It hurt to lie to her.”

“You have a conscience?” He smiled. “I learn something new about you every day.”

I was tempted to kick him but refrained because Hendriks and Spare14 were crossing the street to join us. As we walked back up Grant, Ari told them what little we’d learned. I gave them my impressions of Major Grace.

“I must see if TWIXT can offer her assistance in some way,” Spare14 said. “The gang lords must hate her.”

I shivered in a sudden SAWM. “Yeah, I just bet they do.”

“She needs someone in the mission to keep an eye on things,” Ari said.

“A good job for one of our undercover men.” Hendriks glanced at Spare14. “When we return to the office, perhaps you can make a suggestion to the liaison captain?”

When we reached the office, Hendriks and Ari went into the kitchen to finish off the remains of the lunch, while Spare14 sat at his desk and talked in numbers to his landline phone. I flopped down on the couch. I wasn’t precisely tired, more overwhelmed by the tangled lines of psychic force on Interchange and the strangeness of it all. The tinnitus rang a little louder than before.

I found myself thinking of Major Grace, a grand example of the Harmony I sought for myself. She must have had strict principles to join the Salvation Army in the first place, which would have made her an exponent of Order, but her compassion had kept her from fossilizing into a one-person judge and jury like so many Order-bound people did. Had
we put her in danger by visiting her? Only if someone in Storm Blue had not only seen but recognized us.

I ran an SM:D, then an SM:L, for Mission House. The threat persisted as a constant background, like the hum of traffic near a freeway or the sound of waves on a beach. When I remembered Sophie’s story of the Peacock Angel missionaries who’d been driven out of town, I realized that all the missionaries, not just Major Grace, lived in danger from the gang lords. The hatred had threatened them long before we’d ever dropped by, just as Donaldina Cameron and her helpers had lived in constant peril from the men who’d made money off the girls she rescued. Like her, these missionaries must have known the danger and decided that it would never stop them. They’d set up an island of Harmony in the midst of Chaos.

Spare14 finished rattling off numbers and hung up the phone. “There.” He gave me a firm nod. “Things are moving in the right direction. Allow me to apologize once again, O’Grady, but I’d best not give you any details about procedures at this time. Once we have our official linkage, I can be more forthcoming without breaking regulations.”

“I can understand that,” I said. “Not a problem.”

Ari and Hendriks returned to the living room, snacks in hand. Ari handed me a bottle of orange juice and glared. I drank a couple of mouthfuls and handed it back.

“O’Grady,” Spare14 said. “You need to rest. There’s a bedroom of sorts here, just a mattress and pillow on the floor, I’m afraid, but better than nothing. I have a reputation as a binge drinker to maintain, you see. Whenever the Axeman is due to come round, I place a few empty gin bottles on the furniture in here and then stagger out of that room to greet him. Quite convincing, apparently. When in Rome and all that.”

The bedroom turned out to be narrow, bare, and almost unfurnished. A mattress, two blankets, and a pillow lay on the wood floor near an uncurtained window. Nearby stood a wooden orange crate full of empty gin bottles, Spare14’s props. Before Ari let me lie down, he examined the room minutely with two different gadgets. As he left, he shut the
door behind him. I got comfortable on the mattress and went into trance.

I was hoping for images of Sean and Michael. Instead, I saw a grotesque white woman—fat, dressed in a garish striped blouse and blue jacket, with red lips and dyed hair. She was laughing hysterically and bobbing up and down from the waist, over and over. I tried to move away, but in my trance-bound state every step I took brought me back to the woman. I spoke to her and got only the laugh for answer. Behind her, I saw mirrors that reflected nothing, not even her back.

I heard Ari’s voice, saying, “They can move quite quickly when they want to.”

I broke the trance. I lay still, sweating, panting for breath, and decided that I’d cross trance exploration off my list of procedures for the moment. I allowed myself to fall asleep in hopes of some sort of meaningful dream, but the only clue I received was one I knew already: the sound of the sea, murmuring as I went under.

L
IGHT FLOODED MY EYES
and woke me. Ari had turned on the bare bulb of the overhead fixture. I sat up, flung an arm up to shield my eyes, and muttered a few choice words. When he turned the bulb off again, I realized that night had arrived. A pale light glimmered through the uncurtained window from a streetlamp outside. Ari knelt down on the mattress next to me, and I sat up.

“Tell me something,” I said. “I need your first fast response to a sentence. Don’t try to think about it. Just tell me what it means off the top of your head.”

“Very well.”

“They can move quite quickly when they want to.”

“TWIXT. My new ID, my position as an agent recruit—cutting through a great deal of red tape.”

“Huh.” This meaning seemed to have no bearing on anything. “I heard a message, but it must have come from someone else’s subconscious mind, not yours.”

We got up and returned to the living room, lit by a cheerful yellow glow from a brass floor lamp with a satin shade and a pronounced lean. Spare14 was sitting at his desk, eating cold ravioli, while Hendriks sat on the chair by the window, drinking a bottle of dark beer.

“Agent Hendriks,” I began.

“What? Call me Jan, please.”

“Okay, sure. I need your quick response to something I heard in trance.”

Jan, fortunately, had experienced the process with another psychic, as had Spare14 when I ran the AH procedure with him—that’s Audio Hallucination, as the Agency slang goes. Both responded much as Ari had, which left me believing that the sentence I’d heard might indeed pertain to TWIXT. Why and what it meant continued to baffle me.

Ari went into the kitchen and came out with a white carton in one hand and a spoon in the other.

“Can I get you to eat something before we go?” Ari said.

“Depends on what it is.”

“Gelato. Dark chocolate.”

“No problem. Hand it over.”

He grinned at me. “I assumed that it was something you couldn’t turn down and that you could keep down.”

“You’re right.” I took the spoon and carton. “On both counts.”

Jan rolled his eyes. “Tsk, Nathan,” he said. “You act like her father.”

Ari gave him an icy look that made him wince, but I smiled. That’s it! I thought. I sat down on the couch and started in on the gelato while I thought things through. I felt so conflicted that I lost track of how many calories I was consuming. The last person I wanted to confront at the moment was my father, but on the other hand, we had to find Michael and Sean fast.

“Okay,” I said. “What the trance statement meant is a reference to my father. We need a world-walker. He’s one. How fast can TWIXT move on getting Dad out of that lousy collar and here? If they remand him to your custody—”

“Just so.” Spare14’s voice rang with excitement. “We’d have the team member we badly need. Let me see what I can do. It’s quite true that TWIXT can move quickly in a crisis. As I said before, a world-walker in criminal hands certainly qualifies as a crisis.”

So I sat on the couch eating ice cream while Ari and Jan checked their respective Berettas and Spare14 made phone calls across various world levels. He spoke mostly in numbers, although now and then I heard a reference to O’Brien,
Flannery M. The scene struck me as so surreal that I began to wonder if I was caught in a trance vision. The cold gelato reassured me that I was awake. I’d finished about half of it when Spare finally got off the phone.

“I’ve gotten in touch with several higher-ups,” he said. “We should have news in the morning, one way or another.”

“Very good,” Jan said. “Javert will be glad to hear it, too. It will mean that his person can stay with him at all times. Javert suffers from anxiety when he loses his world-walker. It’s being in the tank, you see, that disturbs him. He’s fearless in the open sea.”

“Speaking of whom,” Spare14 said, “we need to get down to the water.”

“Right,” I said, “but before we go, I’ve got to repair my makeup. Too much got rubbed off when I was sleeping.”

After I did the necessary maintenance, we left. When we walked outside into a chilly wind, I was glad I’d brought a jacket to go over the thin hoodie. Fog covered the sky but stayed high in a silver dome. The streetlights at the corners shone yellow with a glow much paler than the illumination I was used to. The houses we passed were mostly dark and shuttered.

Occasionally, we walked by a restaurant or bar that had already closed. I was thinking that I must have slept late, maybe even to midnight, but we passed a grocery store with a clock, dial glowing green, visible through the iron bars over the front window. Only nine in the evening—apparently no one trusted the night in this neighborhood.

We hurried over to Mason Street. Down the middle of the brick pavement ran the gleaming metal slot for the cable. The clanks and buzz of the vibrating line sounded impossibly loud thanks to the lack of normal traffic, or I should say, the lack of a level of traffic that I considered normal.

“Should be a cable car along soon,” Spare14 remarked.

In a few minutes his prophecy proved correct. Ringing its bell, the little wooden car slid up the hill and stopped in the intersection when Spare14 hailed it. We swung aboard the outside seats, and Spare14 paid everyone’s fare. The
gripman clanged the warning bell. We started off with the familiar lurch and hum.