The end result? I looked vaguely mixed-race, a kind of genetic scramble that said “Interchange” to me. Ari looked me over and grinned.
“Too bad I don’t own a pair of leather trousers,” he said. “A high-class whore like you should be keeping me in expensive clothes.”
I kicked him. He laughed.
Before we left, I put Chaos wards on every possible entry point. Ari set the alarm system on high and shunted the message capability to Tzaki’s cell phone. As a final measure, I called Annie and told her we were leaving. She and our other associate, Jerry Jamieson, would be on strict Chaos watch until I returned.
Spare14 had rented an office just off Bryant Street, appropriately near the Hall of Justice. Ari double-parked in front of a narrow stucco building that housed a bail bondsman’s shop on the ground floor and Spare14’s unlabeled office above. When Ari unloaded the luggage, I carried the sports bag, and he took the suitcase. We hurried up the narrow stairs to the second floor.
Spare14’s office door opened to a nondescript room, painted white, that he’d furnished with cheap pressboard furniture, also white, and a turquoise rug. When we walked in, Spare14 looked me over in surprise, then smiled with a small nod of approval. He was wearing baggy blue slacks with a garishly printed flowered shirt, his Sneak the Numbers Runner attire, I figured.
“I’ll leave Nola with you,” Ari said to Spare14. “I’ll just take the car around to the garage.”
“Very well.” Spare14 handed him a plastic card. “Here’s the parking pass. It goes in the machine by the entrance.”
Spare14 escorted me into an inner room, also painted white, but with blue furniture: a short sofa, a pair of padded chairs that lacked arms. An uncurtained window looked across the narrow street to yet another bail bondsman’s office. I walked over to the window and glanced out. Ari had already driven off.
I turned around and saw a person sitting opposite me on the sofa. I hadn’t heard anyone walk in while my back was turned. I could have sworn that she hadn’t been in the room when I entered, because she was a hard person to miss, a tall, heavyset African-American woman wearing an assortment of ragged clothing: black miniskirt over a pair of bike shorts, a dirty purple cardigan over a blue tank top over a green shirt with a deep tear at the dangling hem. Beside her on the floor sat a mesh shopping bag crammed with bits of cloth, topped with a black purse with a broken strap. She must have noticed me staring at her outfit, because she grinned at me.
“My work clothes,” she said. “You don’t want to look prosperous, not in the town we’re going to.”
“Yeah, so I’ve heard,” I said. “I’m Nola O’Grady, by the way.”
“Ah, yes. You’ve not met before,” Spare14 said. “Nola, Willa Danvers-Jones, our world-walker for this trip.”
We smiled at each other and nodded. I heard someone knock on the door in the other room. Spare14 had just turned in that direction when Ari strode in to join us.
“Good lord!” Spare14 said. “I must be getting old. I thought I’d locked the outer door.”
“You did.” Ari held up a thin piece of wire. “Sorry.” He passed his hand over a pocket of his jeans, and the wire disappeared.
“I see.” Spare14 smiled in a sickly sort of way. “Never mind, then. As I was about to say, I’ve got some good news. Javert has returned to SanFran. He’s waiting for us in the bay at Aquatic Park. The travel tank gets rather oppressive.”
“It must,” Willa said, “but what’s he doing back on Three?”
“He wants to link up with O’Grady.” Spare14 looked my way. “Javert is far and away the most psychically talented agent TWIXT has. He thinks that if you two work together on this case we can solve it quickly. We’ll need to. When missing persons cases drag on, they tend to become dead letters.”
“I see.” I could taste fear like acid in my mouth. What if
I never saw my brothers again? “I’m real grateful he’d lend a—well, a tentacle.”
“We’re taking this case quite seriously, I assure you. The Storm Blue gang have reached beyond their own world. We at TWIXT prefer to discourage criminals from doing so.” His voice, normally so quiet, snapped on the last few words. “It’s one of our primary missions.”
“So we have backup,” Ari said. “Good.”
“Yes. Another TWIXT agent will join us at my office there, Hendriks from the Netherlands. He’s a crack shot like you, Nathan. Just in case we run into some difficulty.”
Some difficulty. Gunplay. I felt my stomach clench at the thought. Ensorcellment wears off after a while. Death by gunfire, not so much.
“Is something wrong?” Willa leaned forward on the couch. “O’Grady, are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I forced out a smile. “I’m picking up odd vibes, I guess. Just in general.”
Everyone looked at me, all of them concerned, questioning. I realized that I was mostly frightened, which I didn’t care to admit, but also insecure about my talents for the first time in years. Would I be able to read a deviant world level properly? What if I couldn’t, and we never found Michael and Sean?
Dead letters
. The words rose to taunt me.
“We’d best get on our way,” Ari said.
“Quite.” Spare14 took radiation badges out of his shirt pocket and handed them out. “Do wear these, and I have potassium iodide pills in the office on Three. They protect the thyroid gland, or so I’m told by the medical staff.”
The badges looked kind of like the X-ray films dentists use, a two-inch square of film surrounded by white plastic, but these had a pin on the back, and the film looked more like a bright pink gel. Ari attached his to his shirt under the sweater, and I put mine on a bra strap.
“Do you need one?” Spare14 said to Willa. “You shan’t be there very long. I’m sure you’ve somewhere else to go.”
“I always have somewhere else to go.” Willa paused for a grin. “Way somewhere else.” She hauled herself up from the couch. “I’ll meet you down at South Park.”
“Is that where the gate is?” I said.
“It’s not exactly a fixed gate.” She glanced my way. “We call it an ‘area of overlap’ in the trade. Lots of underground vitrification around there, from the Oh-Six fire, y’know. I’ve got my focus orbs with me.”
“Orbs?” I took a step toward her. “The kind you throw?”
“Oh, better’n that! These are the reusable variety. You’ll see.” She picked up her shopping bag. “Worth their weight in gold. Maybe more.”
The orbs, I supposed, lurked under the junk in the bag. I wanted to ask more questions, but she shuffled off to the door, mimicking a homeless woman, old and broken, who would attract no attention whatsoever on the street. The so-called decent citizens would just turn their heads and refuse to look her way.
Spare14 put on a hideous sport coat—linen-colored polyester with gold threads scattered through it—and led us out of the office. He locked up, then gallantly carried the sports bag for me, leaving the suitcase for Ari. By the time we reached the street, Willa was nowhere in sight. When a cab glided by, Spare14 hailed it.
The drive was a short one. The cab let us out where Jack London Alley debouches onto South Park Avenue, a narrow street that runs around the well-kept oval of grass and trees that makes up the park. This particular neighborhood always reminds me of the French Quarter in New Orleans. Wooden flat-front buildings from the early 1900s sit cheek by jowl. Some have shops or restaurants on their ground floor, but even with the residences, their front doors open right onto the sidewalk. Most have fire escapes hanging on their upper floors instead of fancy balconies, but the general effect’s the same.
Spare14 paid the driver, and we walked into the park, past the children’s playground and through the trees to the east end. Willa was sitting waiting for us on a clean wooden bench, painted green, in the shade. She could travel as fast as Michael, I gathered, faster than we could drive, for sure. As we hurried over, she rummaged in her shopping bag and brought out a blue sphere, about the size of a billiard ball.
“Blue signifies the world you call Interchange,” Spare14 said to me.
“Its real name is Terra Three, right?”
“We call it that, yes, but you must always remember that the world levels include the entire universe, not just this planet or even this solar system. When the universe generates its copies, it copies the entire thing, all the galaxies, all the stars.”
“That’s a real hard concept to wrap my mind around.”
“I have a great deal of trouble with it myself. It’s only clear to a few astrophysicists, I should think.”
“So when you say Terra Three, you’re really saying Universe Three or our tiny little bit of Universe Three.”
“Precisely. The numbers mean very little, actually. With the usual human vanity, the scientists on my home world call us Terra One and number the rest from there according to some arcane formula. Your world, for instance, is Four, but it’s really much closer to Six than to Five.” Spare14 shrugged. “I can’t pretend to understand why.”
When we reached her, Willa smiled in greeting and waved her free hand at the bench. “Come sit down,” she said. “It’ll be a squeeze, but you’ll all fit, I think.”
A squeeze it was, until I sat on Ari’s lap to make room for the luggage. Willa held up the sphere and contemplated it. She said nothing, did nothing that I could see, but the world twisted around me. I nearly vomited as the park wrenched ninety degrees, then shuddered slowly back to its original position. Ari’s hands tightened on my waist, then relaxed.
“Here we are,” Willa said. “Now, you all be careful. I’m heading back to One. Going to pick up Hendriks there.”
Ari eased me off his lap. I stood on wobbly legs and looked around the park, thick with underbrush between spindly, unpruned trees. Instead of asphalt, red bricks paved the street. The houses across from the park needed painting and lacked fire escapes. The sky above swirled with yellow mist. When I turned to speak to Willa, the bench, made of warped gray wood and dotted with bird leavings, stood empty.
“Shall we go?” Spare14 picked up the sports bag. “We’ve got a bit of a walk ahead of us, I’m afraid.”
“Wait,” I said. “Last bit of my disguise.”
I rummaged in the sports bag and brought out an economy-sized tube of petroleum jelly, which I slipped into the back pocket of my jeans. I made sure that the label emerged, though, so passersby could see what it was. Spare14 quirked a questioning eyebrow.
“For unnatural acts,” I said. “Cost you extra, mister.”
Spare14 blushed. A couple of young men, dressed in baggy black slacks and blue Dodger T-shirts, were strolling down the walk toward us. Ari laughed and slapped me on the behind.
“Don’t, Eric!” I put a whine in my voice. “Be nice for a change.”
The Dodger guys grinned and walked on by. Ari watched them go, then shrugged out of his leather jacket. Under his gray sweater the shoulder holster made an obvious bulge.
“Could you carry this? I’ve got to keep one hand free.” He held the jacket out in my direction. “I want to let this world know I’m armed.”
“You won’t be the only person who is,” Spare14 said. “But O’Grady, I’ll take the jacket. We have a bit of a walk ahead of us, and you look decidedly unwell.”
“Yeah, I don’t feel right.” I paused, to let the impressions of this foreign world filter into my consciousness. “The lines of psychic force are kind of skewed or maybe moving around. I don’t really understand it.”
“It stands to reason that things will be difficult at first,” Spare14 said. “My talents are very limited, but when I first went to a deviant world, I felt a distinct unease.”
“Unease is a good word for it, yeah.” I paused again. “Let me try something before we go.”
I conjured up a mental image of Sean and Michael, then tried running an SM:P. Nothing. When I cut it back to focus on Michael, I picked up only the traces of a void, a complete lack of everything, a sense of so utterly nothing that I could assume Michael must have gone through a gate into a deviant world level.
With the next SM:P I tried searching for Sean. Epic fail! as Michael would have said. Just as I felt a trace of Sean’s Qi, I took a belly flop into a psychic swimming pool, a hard
smack into something hostile, hard at first, then rebounding, a pain that flooded my body and mind.
“Crud!” I gasped, took a step, and nearly fell.
Ari grabbed one arm and Spare14 the other. I could hear them speaking as they lowered me onto the bench, but the words refused to make sense. A red glare danced in my eyes, just as if I’d looked straight at the sun. I shut them, then put my hands over my eyes as well. In the welcome dark the glow faded. I spread my fingers to allow a small amount of light through and peered between them. I could still see, though small black flecks, ringed with gold, drifted in my field of vision.
“What happened?” Ari said. “Are you all right?”
“I will be in a minute.” I spread the fingers a little wider, realized that the flecks had disappeared, and let my hands drop to my lap. “I tried looking for Sean. Something hit me in the guts, something psychic, I mean.”
“I thought it must have been something like that.” He sat down next to me on the bench and stared into my eyes. “Your pupils aren’t dilated. Good. I was afraid you’d been concussed.”
“I’m not getting a headache, not in the usual way, anyway.”
“Er, can you walk, O’Grady?” Spare14 hovered nearby. “We really had better leave. This park is Blue territory.”
“And we’re as Orange as hell, yeah,” I said. “I’ll be okay. Let’s go.”
As soon as I stood up, I knew I was making a mistake by moving, but staying meant danger. Mostly I felt confused mentally and tired physically, a bad combination in enemy territory. I put part of the blame on the failed SM:P, but beyond that I could perceive a web of psychic talents, hundreds of them, all of them conscious, in use, accepted. Their presence, so openly recognized and displayed, overwhelmed me.
It was like listening to loud static through headphones glued to your ears. You twist your head this way and that, but you can’t escape the buzzing of a million bees.
We headed off north toward Market Street. For the first few blocks the neighborhood looked oddly familiar despite
being so shabby. Beat-up old houses shared the cracked sidewalks and rutted streets with small commerce—a sheet metal shop, a plumbing supply, a couple of run-down liquor stores. I realized that I was remembering how this area in my world had appeared when I was a small child, before they built the new ballpark down by the Bay and brought gentrification wholesale to the SoMa neighborhood.