We all went down to the beach. Davis drove with Spare14 in the passenger seat and Jan on the running board, clinging to the cab with one arm through the open window. Dad took Ari and me with him on a fast walk. On the beach pale surf gleamed in the moonlight. I could see the ocean moving and swelling, a dark mass that stretched out to a silver horizon.
“Do you sense any danger?” Dad asked me.
“No. Just a distant warning about the city as a whole, but we already know it’s dangerous.”
We walked down to the tide line and waited there for the truck. When it arrived, Jan jumped down and Spare14 got out to join us. I did an SM: Location while Davis backed the vehicle up to the water’s edge. He climbed down from the cab and hurried to the back of the tank.
“No one around,” I said.
Davis worked the mechanism and released Javert into the surf. He jetted out into deeper water in a burst of relief and sheer joy.
Together we summoned Qi and got to work. I found Michael easily. He was asleep in a wood-paneled room with the blonde girl clasped in his arms. From the ease with which they both slept, I could deduce that he was well treated, one of the gang, hardly a prisoner at all—except for the hold over him that Sean gave the gang.
Where was Sean? Javert and I decided to leave searching for him to the last, just in case the psychic sentinel shut us down before we’d finished scanning out the location. We started from Michael’s room and began to widen our view—not that we saw precisely or clearly. What we received were impressions, better than nothing but by no means as clear and detailed as a map. I could see Michael because he was my brother. If Sean had been collar-free, I could have seen him, too. Anyone or anything else—no.
First, a hallway led to stairs at either end. Opposite Michael’s door, another door, leading to hallways and enemies, where distantly I could perceive another psychic mind, prowling around, wide awake—a Maculate. No go there, then. Up one stairway to a narrow room, cluttered with junk: rusty machinery, slabs of wood, tangles of electrical wire. Up the other stairway to an enormous room. I got impressions of a long floor-to-ceiling rise of metal, of a curved wall nearby, of littered trash and odd little walls just standing around, unconnected to anything. Finally, we saw a detail. Leaning against a wall stood a huge wooden sign painted with a faded, cracking clown face. From the picture in my book, I knew this had once hung on the Fun House.
Javert pumped me more water Qi. We floated through the big room and saw a right-angle crack in the ceiling: a hatch, a metal hatch. We pulled back to our bodies, then returned to the site, but above ground this time. We found the hatch near the concrete foundations of a ruined building. The psychic mind prowled closer and went on alert. Closer still—a nocturnal being, Claw for sure.
LEAVE!
As much as I hated to cancel the search for Sean, staying risked giving our presence and the game away. We sped away from the ruins and returned—I to the group around the water tank and he to the ocean. My stomach growled. So, apparently, did Javert’s.
EAT FISH! PLEASE.
I relayed the message.
“Did you want one of these here sandwiches, Miss?” Davis said. “The captain sure sent me plenty of ’em.”
“No, thanks. I—”
“Yes, she does!” Ari snapped.
Rather than fight with him about it, I took a cheese-and-lettuce sandwich. It smelled so good, and I was so hungry by then, that I did eat most of it.
While I ate, Davis unwrapped the raw salmon. He cradled it in his arms and waded out into the surf. Javert came jetting back in. In the dim moonlight I could see little, but I got the impression that his extensible tentacles shot out, grabbed his dinner from Davis’ arms, and stowed it on top of his head. He jetted out again, and I withdrew the link between us. I had the feeling that watching him eat would have been both rude and kind of disgusting. Davis came dripping out of the surf.
“You’ll catch cold,” Spare14 remarked.
“Nah, I’m used to it. I think I’ll have me one of those sandwiches while I dry. We should be safe enough out here if you all want to go home.”
“I can walk Spare and Hendriks back to the streetcar stop,” Dad said. “Won’t take me but a minute or two, and then I’ll come back for my daughter and her intended.”
I felt like growling at the word but giggled instead, helplessly.
Thanks to Dad’s help, we all returned to the apartment without trouble. As soon as we got in, Dad sat down on the couch and fell asleep. I retrieved my pad of paper and crayons from the bedroom. While the Playland reconnaissance was fresh in my mind, I made as much of a map as I could of what I’d seen. By the time I finished, Ari’s watch read nearly midnight.
“We need to make some decisions about sleeping arrangements,” Spare14 remarked. “It appears that the senior O’Grady has claimed the couch.”
“I spotted a hotel just about half a block away,” Ari said. “That’s where Nola and I are staying tonight.”
“Very well,” Spare14 said. “Just be careful on your way there. Get back here by nine o’clock.”
Ari grabbed his sports bag, and we left the apartment. We walked down a silent, dimly lit Broadway—no cars, no strip joints, and the only bar we saw had the shabby look of a haunt for elderly alcoholics. It smelled like one, too, when we passed it, a fug of beer and sweat and tobacco smoke.
We turned into a narrow alley that dead-ended at the hotel in question, three floors of wooden firetrap, or so it looked on the outside. The front door opened to a tiny lobby, papered in peeling green paisleys, that smelled of smoke with an undertone of vomit.
The registration desk stood beside a stairway leading up. Behind it sat a fat woman with short gray hair and bright red lipstick, a lifer, judging by the deep wrinkles around her mouth. Her upper arms bulged out of a tight white sleeveless shirt. She lowered the newssheet she’d been reading and looked us over.
“An hour or all night?” she said.
“All night,” Ari said. “How much?”
“Five bucks, since you brought your own girl.” She laughed, wheezing, at her own joke and held out a mottled hand.
Ari handed her a five and received a room key in return. Apparently, this establishment scorned the idea of guest ledgers. We climbed up to the second floor, found the room, and went in. It contained a double brass bed, a wooden chair, and a nightstand. A bare light bulb hung from a chain in the middle of the ceiling. The air, however, smelled reasonably fresh, as did the sheets when I pulled back the blankets on the bed to check. Ari got out his travel lamp, set it on the nightstand, and turned off the overhead glare.
“Better than Spare14’s floor, huh?” I sat down on the edge of the bed and kicked off my shoes.
“Tolerable, yes.” He drew the Beretta, crossed to the window, and looked out. “No one followed us.”
“I would have known if they had.”
He holstered the gun and pulled down the window shade, which was mottled with the brown splotches of leaked rain. He turned back into the room and considered me without speaking. His SPP had changed to sullen.
“Okay, something’s wrong.” I took off the pink hoodie and tossed it onto the wooden chair. “What is it?”
He shrugged and crossed his arms over his chest. To give myself a moment to think, I picked up the pillows on the bed and checked under them for bedbugs. Nothing moved, and the wall above the bed lacked the telltale stains of bugs squashed by previous patrons.
“I guess this place is clean enough.” I put the pillows back in place. “Ari, what’s wrong?”
Again the shrug. I was in no mood to play guessing games. From his SPP I could untangle a few strands.
“It’s because of Dad, isn’t it? What’s wrong, an ex-con isn’t good enough for you?”
“What? That’s got nothing to do with it. To be honest, from what I know of the Brittanic Empire, I have to admire him. Any decent man would fight against it.”
“Then what the fuck is wrong?”
“That’s more like the woman I love.”
This reply totally confused me. Ari uncrossed his arms and walked over to sit down next to me on the bed.
“When your father’s with you,” he said, “you act like you’re sixteen years old. You even giggled a couple of times. It was rather nauseating, actually.”
I stared, caught between anger and insight. The insight won. “Crud,” I said. “I’ll have to watch that. I guess it’s because I was a teenager last time I saw him.”
“That, too, I’m sure.”
“What else?”
“He brings it out in you. I’ve never seen a man establish control over an adult child as quickly as he did. It took him what? A couple of hours?”
I remembered Sean saying that I was living with a man much like our father. “Control that you want for yourself.”
“That’s quite unfair,” he snarled, which reassured me that I was right.
“No, it’s not. You love being in control, in bed or out of it. Why else are you always harping on getting married?”
“Most women want to be married.”
“Maybe in Israel they do. I don’t.”
His Qi twisted around us, sharp as thorns. I went tense, ready to stand up and put distance between us. His scowl made me realize that we’d just driven onto a collapsing bridge. I could escalate the argument, say just the right thing that would make him slap me hard enough to bruise. Our affair would be over, and Dad would have me all to himself again. I turned the metaphoric car around and drove back onto safe ground.
“Ari, please, can’t we drop this for now?”
His metaphor: rage as a vicious dog on the loose. He grabbed it by the collar and chained it up again. “Yes, of course. We’re both tired.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and stressed to the max.”
“True.” He took a deep breath and got up, walked over to the window again and pulled up the shade to look out. Anger management. I could feel his Qi easing. He lowered the shade and turned around to look at me from the safe distance.
“Come to bed,” I said. “It’s been too long.”
He stared and stayed where he was. I pulled off my top and threw it onto the hoodie.
“Oh,” he said. “That.”
“Yeah.” I unhooked my bra, slipped it off, and tossed it onto the heap. “This.”
He came back, sat down, and pulled me close. When he kissed me, he laid one hand on my breast. The Qi began flowing again, but smoothly, and in the right direction. We both stank of sweat, but the smell fit the sleazy room and became oddly erotic.
Yeah, brass beds do creak. A lot. Afterward, I hoped no one was trying to sleep in the room below us. Ari yawned once and fell asleep. I did the same in his arms.
I woke early the next morning to a generalized sense of danger, too weak to be a full-blown SAWM or ASTA, but too insistent to be ignored. I got out of bed and dressed in my jeans and a blue-and-white striped shirt—clothing I’d picked as things Nuala would never have worn. I badly needed to use the bathroom, but the room lacked one, and prowling around the hotel alone in search struck me as a bad idea, especially with that free-floating danger signal hovering around me.
I decided that I’d better wake Ari up. I stood about three feet from the edge of the bed and said his name over and over. Shaking him awake would have been dangerous. Eventually, he turned over with a grunt and sat up.
“What?”
I explained the problem. He laughed.
“There’s probably a chamber pot under the bed.”
“You’re kidding!”
He got out of bed, knelt down, and pulled out the utensil in question. It came covered with a flimsy towel, once white, now much stained though recently washed.
“You’d better take off those jeans,” Ari said. “It’s tricky for women until you get used to it.”
It was, but I managed.
Returning to Spare14’s crummy apartment felt like returning to civilization after that. Jan had already been out to a local bakery, and Spare14 had made a large pot of strong tea. I ruined some coffee in that lousy percolator while the others started in on the food.
Although both Dad and Ari nagged me to eat breakfast, all I could get down was a cup of coffee and some shreds of a sweet roll. For the first time I could admit to myself that maybe I did have an eating disorder. I knew I needed to eat, I wanted to eat, but my throat seemed to close up as soon as I took a mouthful. I could barely choke anything down.
Jan snarled at both Ari and Dad. “You’re only making it worse for her,” he said, “and incidentally, I’m sick of listening to you.”
Dad winced and shut up. Ari glared, but Jan glared right
back. Spare14 cleared his throat and broke up the macho staring match.
“I’ve been speaking with the liaison captain,” Spare14 said. “She says to go ahead with any reasonable plan. She agreed with O’Grady. Fight Chaos with Chaos. I suppose things come down to that.”
“Good,” Jan said. “Kerenskya’s a woman of courage. Unlike some of the others we’ve been saddled with.”
“That’s enough,” Spare14 snapped.
“Quite right. I overstep.” Jan grinned at him. “I am silent.”
“I only wish.” Spare14 turned to Ari. “We have to figure out how to beard the Chief in his den.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “We’ve planted a lot of rumors, and I’ve seen a lot of people staring at me. I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned up here.”
I’m not sure if that was a premonition or a lucky guess, but the Chief, arrived soon after. I’d just gone into the bathroom to curl my hair and do my anti-Nuala makeup when I felt a SAWM like a stab of ice in my stomach. I heard the doorbell buzz and Spare14’s voice, but I couldn’t decipher his words. I put down the curling iron and began to summon Qi. Heavy footsteps came upstairs, four men from the sound of it. I began to spin the gathered Qi into a ball, ready to throw. Unfamiliar voices filled the living room. One baritone growl I heard distinctly.
“Where is she? In here?”
Someone flung open the bathroom door, and I found myself face-to-face with a man wearing a navy blue uniform and carrying a Colt.45 in his right hand. The nameplate on his shirt pocket read “Hafner.” He stared at me with dark eyes, deep-set in his hatchet-sharp face.
“Shit!” he said. “You’re not her.”