Authors: Katharine Kerr
Water to Burn (25 page)
Early on Thursday morning, Ari and I made one run over to the new flats with several boxes of fragile things like glassware and our laptops. It was a good thing we did, because the Chaos magic symbol had returned, along with some typical graffiti, the F-word, and a tag insulting everyone of Chinese descent.
“I’ll go get the hose and those rags,” Ari said.
I threw a Chaos ward at the symbol with no result at all. Apparently, the paint was only paint this time around. Before we left, Ari washed everything off of the wall. Neither of us wanted Aunt Eileen to see the obscenities.
Aside from that nasty little incident, the move went as easily as moves ever do, which meant tiring and confused but possible. Even without the Donovans, we had enough warm bodies. Uncle Jim took Thursday off and allowed Michael and Brian to miss a day of school. Aunt Eileen, my older brother Sean, and his boyfriend Al also showed up. We got all the stuff out of the apartment, into the upstairs flat, and arranged in a single long day, except of course for the inevitable boxes of small items that only I could put away.
We even had a surprise helper. Around one o’clock, Itzak Stein turned up. He’d taken the afternoon off, he told me, to help Ari install the security system.
“Security system?” I said.
Itzak gave me his charming smile. “Did you really think Ari could live without one? Mr. Suspicion Writ Large?”
“More fool me, yeah. Well, then, thank you.”
While the rest of us unpacked and fussed with furniture, Ari and Itzak scurried around, hammering insulated staples, stringing wires, placing routers, and generally putting together elaborate electronics inside and out. At one point I walked into the bedroom to find Ari frowning at my old camcorder. He was turning it around and around in his hands.
“Something wrong with that?” I said. “It’s not going to blow up or anything, is it?”
“No, it’s just very unusual.” He set it back down on the dresser. “I’ve never seen one quite like it.”
“That’s because I got it from the Agency. There’s a guy there who does stuff to stuff.”
“Interesting. Do you need me to move some furniture?”
“No. I think everything’s pretty much in place.”
Toward the end of the day, Uncle Jim ordered pizza and soft drinks for everybody, and salad, too, at my insistence. While we waited for the order to arrive, I went into the bedroom to start hanging clothes in the closet. Michael followed me. With him came a little Chaos critter, a scaly blue cross between a lizard and a meerkat, with yellow claws and snaggly brown teeth. He called it “Or-Something,” since we had no idea if it was male or female, alive or some sort of artificial construct. Whatever it was, it could walk the worlds and carry messages between them. Normally, the Chaos masters use them as spies, but this particular creature had come over to the side of the Balance, mostly because Mike fed it. It sniffed at the folded blankets and promptly pissed on the mattress.
“Fail!” Michael said. “Clean that up!”
Or-Something whimpered, and the puddle of green slime dried up and disappeared without leaving a stain.
“Nice trick, bro,” I said.
“Thanks.” Michael rummaged in his jeans pocket, brought out a couple of linty M&Ms, and gave them to the critter. “It can learn stuff, but you’ve got to be seriously patient with it.”
“Yeah, I bet. How does it make the mess disappear, or do you know?”
“I think it just dumps it in another world, probably the one it comes from, wherever that is.”
“So it can move things between worlds?”
“I guess.” Michael shrugged and held out his hands palm-up. “It can’t talk, so I dunno for sure.”
I opened a cardboard box of Ari’s clothes and set it on the bed where I could unpack more easily. Or-Something started to sniff the cardboard in a suspicious manner. When Michael snapped his fingers, it disappeared, much to my relief.
“There was something I wanted to ask you,” Michael said. “About Lisa.”
“Which one?”
“The one in the deviant level. I’ve sort of broken up with the one here.”
“Just sort of? You mean: she doesn’t know it yet.”
He winced. I spent a few seconds rejoicing that I was no longer a teenager.
“But anyway,” Michael said, “the one there, y’know? I was wondering if I could bring her here.”
“Say what?”
“Help her start a new life, y’know? She’s stuck in that crappy world, working as a—a—” He braced himself. “A whore, really, a cheap whore, and she’s too good for that.”
“They’re all too good for it, the women who get forced into prostitution. Look, Mike, when you say ‘cheap whore’ you’re being really judgmental. She’s got to do what she’s doing to survive.”
“Well, yeah, I know that. I just didn’t think, like, you would.”
“I’m not judging her. Women have worked in the sex industry practically forever.”
“Thanks. But I still want her to stop doing it. She sure wants to stop.”
“Good for you and her, but getting her the new life isn’t going to be easy. She’ll be an illegal immigrant. Her life’s going to be one long juggling act.”
“Yeah, but the family knows how to do that, because of—”
“Careful!” I paused to look around. “You never know who’s going to be listening.”
“Sorry, yeah.”
Michael went to the bedroom door, glanced out into the hall, then shut it. I waited to speak until he’d come back to the closet. He handed me one of Ari’s shirts from the box on the bed. I put it on a hanger.
“She’ll even need a new name,” I said. “She can’t use Lisa, because there’s a Lisa already here who’s just like her. Who is her, really.”
“She knows that. And I meant to ask you, what if she did come here, and then ran into the other Lisa? If they met and like maybe shook hands, would they explode or something?”
“I’ve got no idea. I’ll ask NumbersGrrl.”
“Thanks, yeah, she might know. Lisa’s always wished she was named Sophia, she told me. She read it in a book somewhere.”
“She can read, then.”
“Yeah, when the gang girls take in a baby, they try to raise it right.”
Except, of course, for expecting these children to end up hustling on the streets or running some other scam, but I kept that thought to myself. What choice did they have, really?
“Anyway,” Michael went on, “I thought maybe you could get her fake papers. Like, through the Agency.”
“You do realize, don’t you, that you’re asking me to commit a felony?”
“A felony?” He gaped at me. “But if the Agency—”
“The Agency is not God. It has to operate within certain guidelines, for instance, the laws of this country. Getting fake papers for an illegal alien is frowned upon by your typical district attorney. As we all know.”
“Well, yeah.” He handed me another shirt to hang up.
“There’s also a person whose permission you’d have to get.”
“I already asked. Aunt Eileen talked about Mary Magdalene and then said yes. She’d never let a girl live like that when she could take her in and help.”
“I should have known.” I paused for a long sigh. “I take it Lisa wants to leave and come here.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“You have a point, but look, if we do this, and I do mean if, buster, she’s going to be the only one. You cannot bring your entire gang.”
“I know that. Once she’s here, I’ll never go back. I promise. It’s too dangerous. You were right about that.”
“Occasionally, my aged brain comes up with the right answer, huh?”
“You bet. It’s not just the rads, though there’s that.”
“You told me about the cops and the gangs. Life there must be pretty violent.”
“Unless you’re rich. But—” He paused again, frowning at the floor, thinking something through. “I don’t know what this is, like, all about, but José’s been making some weird hints, about something I could do and like maybe make a lot of money.” He looked up. “I just keep changing the subject. I don’t know why, but whatever it is creeps me out.”
“That creepy feeling’s a warning. Your talents are coming online, all right. Doesn’t Lisa know what José means?”
“If she does, she won’t tell me, not yet anyway. No one else is going to tell me anything, that’s for sure.” Michael paused, then smiled like a man with three aces and a pair of kings. “She’s got all kinds of information you can use, about the levels and gates and stuff. She told me she wouldn’t tell me until we said she could come through, but I believe her.”
I couldn’t blame a girl in Lisa’s position for bargaining. I would have done the same in her place. I still felt like smacking the clever little darling across the face.
Michael was watching me with large hopeful blue eyes. So, what do you do when your baby brother—the one you bottle fed, changed, pushed in a stroller, walked to his first day of school, taught to ride a bike, helped with his homework, and so on down the whole cruddy maternal list—comes to you because his first real girlfriend lives in desperate circumstances and you can help get her out?
“Oh, all right.” I took the bargain. “Let me see what I can do. If the Agency ever sends a team to seal off that gate, I want you and Lisa on our side of it, so we’d better get moving.”
“Thanks, Nola!” Michael beamed at me, then threw his arms around me and hugged. “You’re the best sister ever in both of the worlds. I’m hella stoked! Seriously!”
I returned the squeeze, but I felt like a complete sucker, not thanks to any psychic talent, but Just Because. As soon as everyone else began eating, I filed a report with Y. I requested his help with getting Sophia a U.S. passport or at least, a green card that she could eventually use to apply for citizenship. I emphasized that the girl had crucial information to trade for the papers. Beyond that, as I told Michael, we could only wait and see what the Agency decided.
Late that night, after the last of the pizza was eaten and everyone had gone home, Ari and I sat on the old blue couch and contemplated the big stack of folded-down boxes. Outside, the rain began with its usual cozy patter.
“I did something really stupid this afternoon,” I said.
“Agreed to help Michael and his girlfriend, yes.” Ari said. “I suppose this information the girl has will be worth it.”
“It better be! He must have told—” A sudden suspicion appeared in my mind. “Or do you have the bedroom bugged?”
“No, of course I don’t! The office downstairs is on the security system, but I’ve blocked off the sounds from our bedroom. Simple decency and all that. Can’t have you scaring the neighbors.”
I was too tired to kick him. “But about Michael—”
“Yes, he did tell me. He asked me if I could get the papers if you couldn’t. Your brother’s entirely too clever.”
“You mean, he doesn’t believe you only work for Interpol?”
“Exactly. I told him that if he let one wrong word slip, they’d find his body on a lonely hillside.” Ari stretched his legs out in front of him, a somehow melancholy gesture. “I doubt if he believed that, though.”
“Do you think you could get her the papers?”
“If she were Jewish, we could cover her under the Right of Return, but according to Michael, she’s not. Why?”
“Just a vain moment of hope that I could pass the buck. Oh, well, if I end up in federal prison, will you visit me?”
“I’ll do better than that.” He put an arm around my shoulders and drew me close. “I’ll smuggle you out of the country before they catch you. I know how to get a new identity for you.”
“You’re wonderful.”
“I’m glad to see you recognize that.”
He smiled, and I kissed him. We didn’t do much talking the rest of the evening.
At ten o’clock the next morning, I was unpacking glassware in the kitchen when my uncle, Father Keith, the Franciscan priest, called me. His first words, not even a hello, were, “Is Michael using drugs?”
“He told you about Lisa?”
“He told me a strange tale about a girl of that name.”
“It’s all true, the deviant world levels, his sweetheart in one of them, the works.”
“Did her parents really dump her in an empty lot when she was two days old?”
“They did, yeah, because of her club foot. It happens a lot over there.”
Father Keith was silent for so long that I began to wonder if we’d lost the connection.
“Too bad it’s true,” he said eventually. “I’d know what to do if he were using drugs.”
“Why did he call you, anyway?”
“To see if I’d make her a fake baptismal certificate.”
It occurred to me that Michael was going to be a firstclass operative at the Agency once he officially joined up. “Will you?” I said. “After all, you’ve done it before.”
“My sins haunt me. How badly do you need it?”
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