Romani Armada (44 page)

The train was pulling away from the station as Marley passed the bar entrance to Lucky’s, and a few people were climbing down from the elevated platform. Gawain had told her when she moved into the apartment that twenty years ago the city, in its infinite wisdom, had built the sports arena three blocks over. That was when Detroit was still struggling to remain stable and normal. But when they had built the car park to accommodate the arena, they had simply chopped off the end of Gershom Street to use for the car park.

So now Lucky’s, Marley’s apartment building, half a dozen other apartment blocks and the adult cinema that had been closed since Marley moved in were all located on one side of the road. The train station and the abandoned police sub-station were on the other side of the road. They all sat cut off on a dead-end that no one ever came into unless they were lost or lived here. Overhead, the elevated train deck crossed the street, casting a permanent shadow.

Marley caught the smell of coffee from the coffeehouse side of Lucky’s and sniffed appreciatively. She couldn’t afford a cup, or she would have stopped. Besides, she had bad news to break. Might as well get it over and done with.

The glass entrance to her building was two doors up from Lucky’s. The door had a large crack in it. The crack had been there since she had moved in with Gawain. The keypad didn’t work. Ditto, since she moved in. Gawain hadn’t bothered giving her the code. She stepped into the foyer. The old art deco mosaics on the floor once would have been beautiful, but now they gaped like a toothless old woman long past her prime. Marley didn’t bother with the elevator. That had never worked, either. Like the street outside, there was garbage in the corners and along the sides of the foyer here. She barely registered it anymore, although for the first few weeks it had driven her crazy. Now she just made sure she didn’t step on it.

Mrs. Metaxas was brushing off her mat as Marley passed by on the second floor. “You look white, honey. You need meat!” Mrs. Metaxas called, as Marley swung around the stairs and started climbing up to the third floor.

Shock
, Marley mentally catalogued. “Thanks, Mrs. Metaxas!” she called over her shoulder.

On the third floor corridor, Alicia was sitting reading, her books spread about on the dusty floorboards, three feet from her apartment door, which was closed tight. Marley felt her heart squeeze a little as it always did when she saw Alicia parked outside the apartment this way. She rested her back against the yellowing wall and slid down to sit next to the small girl. “Hi Alicia,” she said softly. “Mom busy?”

“She has a customer.” Alicia was matter-of-fact.

Marley found weary street wisdom in very young people one of the hardest things to adapt to in Hammerside. Alicia was only five years old. Marley rubbed her temple. “Do you know if she’s going to be long, Alicia? Do you want to come inside with me? You’d be more comfortable.”

“He only paid for an hour,” Alicia replied simply. “So his time’s nearly up. But thanks.” She showed Marley her reading board, which displayed nine forty-eight.

Marley rested her hand on Alicia’s shoulder. “Okay, then. We should have another reading lesson soon. How are you going with
Pride & Prejudice
?” Alicia was not only five years old, she was a prodigy. Hammerside – well, all of Detroit – did not offer the sort of schooling that could develop Alicia’s potential. Marley had been trying to do what she could but that was limited, under the circumstances.

Marley kept reminding herself that there were hard-luck stories like this happening all over Hammerside, across Detroit and all over the world, every day. She could only do what she could do, each day, in small ways. Besides, she was in danger of becoming a hard luck story herself.

Alicia wrinkled her nose. “I read about four chapters of
Price & Prejudice
,” she told Marley. “It’s okay. But they keep talking about men all the time and getting married. Momma says they had it right back then. They made sure he earned plenty first, then worried about how good he was in bed. But I want to read a book about fairies instead.”

Marley hid her smile. “Just you wait about fifteen years,” she said, standing up. “You’ll love
Pride & Prejudice
.” She dug her keys out of her bag and walked to her apartment door. “If your momma doesn’t let you in soon, come and see me, okay?”

“Okay,” Alicia called, and went back to reading.

Marley unlocked the door and went in.

* * * * *

Her apartment was threadbare, cramped and for a moment she saw it with the eyes of a stranger: The warped floor, yellowed walls, hinky old kitchen table, chairs and cold cabinet. The broken down couch in mustard yellow and brown stripes so faded and stained the colors were lost. No television or net monitor. No coffee table. There was no attempt at curtaining over the windows, which were dirty. The lights had no fixtures. The door to the apartment had a heavy iron bar across it as its security lock. The linoleum floor had rips in it and curled at the corners and edges.

For the second time that morning, Marley thought of the sharp similarities between waitressing and medical residency. Only she was supposed to have left residency behind. Pity tears stung her eyes and she clenched her jaw. She wasn’t going to give into them.

Gawain was at his “desk” – an old wardrobe door he’d found cast aside somewhere that he’d propped on top of stacks of books. He had the guts of his precious computer open and was tinkering with the insides of it, trying to keep it running. When she shut the door, he lifted his head and looked at her.

Gawain Pellegrini was a geek who defied many clichés but lived up to others. People skills were his major weakness and there, he and Marley were a pair, which was why they had gravitated together in college. But he wasn’t stupid, mean or disloyal and for all those characteristics he was the only reason she had a roof over her head these days.

“How bad is it that you’re back here now?” he said simply.

Marley clenched her jaw for a second. When she was sure she could speak evenly she said, “I got fired.”

He glanced at his watch. “Okay....” He put the jeweler’s screw down and got to his feet. “Alright.” She could see his mind whizzing faster and faster behind the clear grey eyes. Gawain didn’t wear glasses, which seemed odd only in retrospect.

He was about five-eleven and lean, as only a guy who spends his time repairing and obsessing over computer technology can be. But she had seen him stripped and he had a useful amount of muscle hidden under the layers of tee-shirts and jeans. He was a committed Converse fan. She had never seen any other shoes on his feet. She had no idea where he found them for Converse had stopped making their famous shoes years ago. Gawain’s Chucks were all second-hand and refurbished models that he had traded for. But even in snow conditions they were all he would wear and today he wore the grunge-green pair.

Gawain pushed an uneasy hand through his shaggy hair. He called himself a redhead, but Marley privately thought of him as a strawberry blond. His family name was Italian, but genetics said someone had slipped a bastard or two under the family blanket somewhere along the line, because Gawain’s coloring defied the typical Italian markers. She was never going to find out though, because Gawain’s past was an untouchable subject, never to be raised in conversation.
Verboten.

Well, she had her own touchy subjects and Gawain and she were too alike for Marley to get upset about the off-limits topic. Besides, they had a more immediate crisis, apparently.

“Why are you looking at the clock?” she asked him.

“Sonya’s going to be here in less than twenty minutes, looking for the rent.” Gawain tugged at his full lower lip thoughtfully. “I figured I could hold off your half at least until you came back from work. But with you here, she’s going to want the lot and you don’t have it. Do you?” he added, cocking his head a bit.

Marley shook her head.

“I have a client that’s supposed to be paying me next Monday...but that’s next Monday.” Gawain sighed.

Marley dumped her bag on the table and dug for her wallet. “Let’s see.” She emptied it of everything in it, including rumpled LRT passes in the deep corners. She smiled grimly at the sight of them. The LRT had been in Los Angeles, two years and what felt like a whole millennium ago. Then she went through her bag for change and added that to the pile. The heap looked pathetically small.

Gawain dug in his pockets, added the few notes from his bill clip, coins from the bottom of his pockets, then opened his wallet, emptied it and added the handful of bills from that, too. He turned to his desk and lifted a double handful of pencils and pens out of a ceramic oversized coffee mug with the inscription “WTF?” in large letters and dumped them on the desktop. He tipped the coffee mug upside down on top of the heap of notes on the table, tipping a big pile of credits onto the growing collection.

“You start counting,” he suggested. “I’ll keep looking.” He headed for his bedroom.

“We’re going to pay her with clinking credits?” she said, a gusty laugh of disbelief wheezing out of her.

“You got a better idea, doc?” He didn’t stop to wait for her answer, because he’d been over this ground already. In the few seconds when she’d told him she’d been fired, the logic processing center that Gawain had for a brain had figured out all the possible alternatives, discarded them and come down to this. They were going to scrounge for the rent and face down Sonya no matter the cost to their combined pride, because anything else would be worse.

Grimly, Marley started lifting the curling edges of the linoleum to see if there were forgotten coins lying beneath.

After seven years of slogging her guts out through pre-med, medical school, internship and residency, she’d finally hung her doctor’s shingle and joined the ranks of the demi-gods she had worshipped all those years: real doctors. Marley had thought she’d left behind forever the trash-can lifestyle of medical students and medical residents – on the run, short on time, sleep and money, constantly in debt and wondering how to pay this month’s bills and still eat.

As she delicately nudged aside grimy, years-old muck in search of forgotten coins, she reflected that she had come full circle and then some. Who’d’ve called that?

Not her. Not in a million. For that, she’d need someone who could read the future.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chronometric Conservation Agency Headquarters, Villa Fontani, Rome, 2264 A.D.:
Mariana dropped the reading boards she had been asked to deliver on one of the big tables near the door. She chose the table with the most surface area free of fabrics, tools, shears and more equipment that she had no idea was called or what its use might be, except that it had something to do with making clothes.

Although describing what Cybelia and her team did as ‘making clothes’ was such an understatement.

“Ciao
Cybelia!
Buongiorno a voi.
” Mariana waved to the short woman with the pure silver hair. The hair was not a product of age, because Cybelia’s face was unlined and lean, the face of a much younger woman than the hair seemed to hint at.

Cybelia raised her head from the table where she was standing watching the computer cut pattern pieces out of a bolt of royal blue silky something that shimmered in the sunlight pouring through the high windows that lined the big room.

“
Ciao
Mariana,” she returned. “More mail?”

“Bills,” Mariana told her. “Sorry. Nayara says they’re to come out of your budget.”

Cybelia turned off the cutting equipment and moved to the table where Mariana stood. She picked up one of the reading boards and thumbed it on. After a few seconds she sighed. “Our expenses are so high right now,” she said and swallowed. “We lost everything when the station blew. All the garments we had collected from the past...hundreds of them. Those are prototypes we’ll never get back.”

“Don’t you have their patterns stored?” Mariana asked, for she had begun to learn a little bit about Cybelia’s trade and knew that all the department’s patterns had been stored electronically.

“Oh yes, but the construction of patterns can lose so much in translation if you don’t have a model to measure against and Nayara is not letting anyone travel for anything but commercial purposes right now...and there’s very few of those happening.” Cybelia put the board down and gave a small laugh. “It’s the small things that we miss the most. Scraps of lace, antique buttons, remnants of material, thread. Ribbons! Such a small thing, ribbons, but they are used on almost everything pre-dating the middle of the twentieth century. Those are things we had spent nearly two hundred years building into a useful resource. They’re almost impossible to replace. They can’t be duplicated and there’s no modern supplier or manufacturer.”

“There has to be a way around it,” Mariana said.

“More money is always useful.” Cybelia smiled. “But the coffers are empty at the moment. The refit and equipping of this villa took most of the Agency’s resources and there’s so few paying clients right now that it will be a while before we’re up to strength again.”

“I know,” Mariana replied, for keeping track of the Agency’s budget and forecast was partially her responsibility.

Cybelia reached over and plucked at Marian’s sleeve. “Speaking of buttons, you’re missing one.”

Mariana looked down at the cuff. “Oh, I know. I keep meaning to find a replacement.”

“You lost the button?”

Mariana nodded as Cybelia tilted her head, looking at her. “How...um...where did you get that top, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“China. Late twenty-first century.” Mariana pressed her lips together. “Well, I suppose I should say that I got it from you, because this was one of the tops they gave me to wear when I was back there.”

“Just before the station blew, I remember,” Cybelia murmured, still studying her. “Why are you still wearing it?” she asked curiously.

“I...” Mariana cast about for an answer. “These are the clothes I have,” she ended lamely. She looked down at the trousers. “They were clean and they fit, and people wander around the agency in togas and kilts anyway...”