Sixteen
“Damn.”
—Alice Healy
A converted slaughterhouse in the Meatpacking District, resuming narration with the assistance of Sarah Zellaby
THE CEILING in my temporary room was water stained enough that it sort of looked like a Magic Eye puzzle, one of those pictures that’s supposed to resolve into three dimensions if you stare at it long enough. It was a far cry from the kind of hotel where I usually stayed. It was even a far cry from the Port Hope, where I could probably have found a few water stains if I’d been willing to look hard enough.
It was better than being dead. I stretched out on the air mattress with my hands folded behind my head, squinting up at the ceiling. Maybe it would be a sailboat. Or a functional solution for the Riemann Hypothesis. Either one would be fine with me.
I was starting to relax when pain flared into sudden life at the back of my skull, as intense as if I’d somehow slammed my head into the concrete floor. Only I hadn’t moved. I cried out, too startled to do anything else, and sat up, clapping a hand over the spot. The pain got worse . . .
. . . and then it was gone, disappearing as suddenly as it had come. One second, pain, the next second, no pain. I lowered my hand slowly, waiting for the pain to come back. It didn’t. Everything was silent.
That was when I realized that the sense of Verity’s presence—a low constant, as long as we were within a few miles of each other, even if I normally couldn’t “hear” her when we weren’t in the same building—was gone. Verity? I thought, as hard as I could. At this distance, she shouldn’t have been able to answer me, but there should have been something.
There was nothing.
I staggered to my feet, trying to make sense of the silence. It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard. I’ve had family around me for as long as I can remember, people I was so telepathically attuned to that I could hear them without trying. It was disorienting, like blowing out the last candle in the middle of a blackout. It was also terrifying, because I didn’t know what it meant . . . but I suspected.
“Uncle Mike!” The words came out in a wail as I turned and bolted for the door.
The main room of the slaughterhouse was empty. I practically flew down the stairs, following the vague sense of “people this way” to the kitchen where Istas and the Madhura were sitting around a table. I grabbed the edge of the doorframe to keep myself upright, aware that I had to look half insane with worry, and not really giving a damn. “Where’s Mike?” I demanded.
Istas blinked. “You are distressed,” she said. “Why? Are we under attack?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Where’s Mike? I need him. Tell me where he is.” I couldn’t resist giving a telepathic “push” at the end, trying to make her tell me. I encountered nothing—no resistance, no response. Istas might as well have been a rock for all the effect that I had on her mind. That was what I got for trying to push someone who wasn’t human. I’m more attuned to humans than I am to any other species, even my own. Istas was the only waheela I’d ever met, and I had no idea how to make her do what I wanted. I couldn’t even pick up on her thoughts, just her emotions, and even those were blurry, like I was reading them through thick fog.
Luckily for me, she felt like playing along. “He is in what was originally the foreman’s office,” she said. “I believe he is attempting to make the Internet function, so you can communicate with the outside world, and I can go shopping.” A brief scowl crossed her face. “I hope this is resolved soon. Verity will not allow me to have things shipped here, and Kitty becomes annoyed if I receive more than one package per day.”
I stared at her. The Covenant was in town and Verity had gone silent in my head, but Istas was worried about the mail. Verity would probably have called that proof that trivial desire endures no matter what, allowing our minds to find stability under the most chaotic conditions. Then she would have made a bad dance pun. All it made me do was want to scream.
I swallowed my first three responses before asking, “Where is the foreman’s office?”
“He said that he would be in the office in the leftmost corner,” said the younger Madhura. I could feel him at the edge of my mind, a little static melody against the louder, less delicate noise generated by Istas. I couldn’t feel his brother at all. If I hadn’t been looking at the table, I would have assumed that only two people were there. “Are you well, lady Johrlac?”
The older Madhura hissed, “Sunil! Do not insult her.”
“I’m sorry.” Waves of stricken embarrassment that I didn’t understand washed off the younger Madhura. “I meant no offense.”
Exhaustion swept over me, washing the Madhura’s incomprehensible embarrassment away. I shook my head. “It’s fine. I need to go talk to Uncle Mike.” He would know what to do. He would know what to tell me. Standing in this kitchen with three relative strangers, the only thing I could think to do was crawl back into my bed and wait until all this blew over, and I knew that wouldn’t help anyone. “Thanks for your help,” I said. Then I turned and left the kitchen.
Somehow I managed not to start running again until I was out of their sight. This time, I looked for the sound/feeling of a human mind nearby, and followed it to the office where Uncle Mike was setting up a cable router on another of the folding card tables that seemed to be everywhere around the Nest. He didn’t look up when he heard my footsteps, but his thoughts tensed, going from calm to on alert without visibly changing his posture. I glanced toward his hand. He had a knife that I was pretty sure hadn’t been there a moment before.
“What’s going on, Sarah?” he asked.
His question was calm, reasonable, and the last straw for my overstretched nerves. “I can’t find Verity!” I wailed.
“What?” Uncle Mike lifted his head. Concern baked off him like heat off pavement in the summer sun. “Verity went out for a run, to clear her head. She should be back in a little while. Is there something I can help you with?”
I took a deep breath. Sometimes humans can be so slow. Choosing my words carefully, I said, “I don’t mean ‘she’s not in the building’—I knew that. I mean I can’t find her anywhere in the city. I should be able to find her no matter where she is in this city, and if she left, I should have had time to realize that she was moving farther away. I was in my room when my head started hurting like my skull was busted. Then the pain went away, and Verity was just gone.”
Uncle Mike stood slowly, putting both modem and knife down on the table. “Sarah, are you telling me Verity’s dead?”
Those were the words I’d been most afraid of hearing. Tears suddenly burned in the corners of my eyes. I managed to swallow and forced myself to shrug, whispering, “I don’t know. I’ve never been connected to anyone who died before. I don’t know what it would feel like. Maybe she’s dead. I don’t know.”
“Shh, Sarah, shh.” He closed the distance between us in three long steps, putting his arms around me and gathering me close to him. It was a human gesture, and not one I was entirely comfortable with, but I let myself be gathered, pressing my face against his chest and sobbing. At least there was a layer of fabric between his skin and mine. He stroked my hair with one hand. “You need to calm down, okay? Can you do that for me? Because if Verity’s out of the picture, we have to figure out what we’re going to do, and I need you to be with me for that. So let it out, and let yourself calm down.”
How can you say that? I demanded, my throat too full of tears—and snot, since mucus production is one of the biological traits that cuckoos are “lucky” enough to share with the human race—for me to speak.
Mike didn’t respond. He just kept stroking my hair. Slowly, I realized that he hadn’t heard me. I can only communicate telepathically with people I’m attuned to, and that requires spending a certain amount of time in my physical company. Uncle Mike and I only saw each other at holidays, if then, and I usuall
y spent Christmas and Thanksgiving hiding in my room, if we were in Columbus, or hiding in Artie’s room, if we were in Portland. Without Verity, there was no one left who could hear me when I didn’t remember to talk out loud.
Swallowing to try and clear some of the stickiness from my throat, I pushed away from Mike and said, “Verity’s not out of the picture, okay? She’s just missing. I don’t know how, or why, but she’s not out of the picture. She’s not gone. Don’t you let yourself think that she is, not for an instant, or I swear, I will make you regret it.”
“I’m not saying she’s dead, Sarah, but if you can’t find her, and you hurt before she disappeared, there’s a pretty good chance that she’s not in fighting shape right now. We’re going to need to find her, and you’ve been here a lot longer than I have. So what do we do?”
The word “panic” rose to the tip of my tongue. I swallowed it, and said, “We need to call the Freakshow. Kitty will know if anyone saw anything.”
“Bogeymen aren’t always happy to share information. Kitty had a relationship with Verity. What makes you sure that she’ll talk to us?”
He was already referring to Verity in the past tense. I didn’t think he even realized he was doing it. I swallowed again, this time to stop myself from screaming, and said, “Kitty’s relationship with Verity is why she’ll talk to us. Kitty and Verity have an understanding, and Kitty and I know each other.” Calling us friends would have been too much of a stretch, but “allies by necessity” was a pretty accurate description.
Kitty would want Verity to be okay. If there was any way for her to help us out, she would.
“Okay,” said Uncle Mike. “So you go call the Freakshow.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Check the defenses, make sure there’s a lot of traps set, and change anything Verity would have known how to get around.” His tone was apologetic, and his words were accompanied by a wave of sorrow and determination so emotionally loud that I could have picked it up from a complete stranger. “We gotta assume she’s compromised, kiddo, and that means we batten down the hatches and we get ready for the siege to begin. Now get Kitty on the phone, and find out if there’s anything she can do to help us get Verity back. You’re the one who comes closest to knowing what happened to her, and I’ve got work to do.”
With that, he turned and walked out of the room, leaving me standing alone, staring after him, with absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do. No; that wasn’t true. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and started scrolling through my contacts. I would call the Freakshow. Kitty would know what to do. Someone would know what to do, because I didn’t have a clue.
“You’ve reached the Freakshow,” said the bored, half-attentive voice of Angel, the bar’s only human bartender. “We’re closed right now, but if you’d like to come see us tomorrow night, we’d be happy to make all your dreams come true.” It might have been easier to believe her if she hadn’t punctuated her words with the sound of gum being noisily snapped.
“Angel, this is Sarah Zellaby, Verity’s cousin. Is Kitty available?”
“Who?” Angel’s tone changed over the course of that single syllable, going from distracted to fully focused on the phone. “You’re the blue-eyed girl, right? The one that comes in with Very some nights.” I could practically hear her thoughts rearranging themselves, making me important to her. My telepathy doesn’t work at a distance, but Angel had been in my sphere of influence before. Cuckoo tricks can linger. “Is everything okay?”
“Not really, no,” I said. “Is Kitty available?”
“Yeah, yeah. Hang on.” There was a soft scraping sound as she cupped her hand over the receiver. She may as well not have bothered; I heard her clearly when she shouted, “Hey, Carol! Tell Kitty she’s got a priority call on line two!” The scrape repeated as Angel took her hand away. Then she said, in a more reasonable tone, “She should be with you in a second. Sorry about the wait.”
“It’s okay.” I started walking in a circle around the card table, trying to calm myself down. It wasn’t working very well. I tried another tactic: “You’re still working? Even with the . . . even with everything that’s going on?”
“I like it here,” said Angel. “The Covenant of St. Stupid isn’t going to chase me off a job I actually enjoy just because they’ve decided to get judgmental about my coworkers. Kitty said I could have the time off without penalty, no problem, and I told her I’d rather stick with my friends. Some assholes want to come in here and start hacking, I’ll be right there with my pepper spray.”
A nervous giggle welled up in my throat. “That’s a really good attitude. Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s the right thing to do.”
There was a clunking noise, followed by Kitty saying, “Thanks, Angel. You can hang up now.”
“Anytime, Kitty. Sarah, hope everything gets better for you. You sound stressed.” A click, and a change in the quality of the sound over the line, told me that Angel had hung up on her end.
“Hello?” I said.
“Sarah Zellaby,” said Kitty. Her voice seemed to come from next to me, rather than through the phone. That’s a classic bogeyman trick. They can throw their voices anywhere they can hear—which includes the other end of telephone lines. Just one more way nature and technology combine to make the world a creepier place. “Verity’s little adopted cousin with the big blue eyes and the clear antifreeze for blood. What brings a cuckoo like yourself to my virtual door?”
Humans have only known about cuckoos for a few generations. The bogeymen have known for centuries and, surprise surprise, they don’t like us much. That’s something they have in common with every other sapient species in the known world. “It’s Verity,” I said. “I can’t find her.”
There was a pause. Knowing what cuckoos were meant that Kitty also understood what we could do. “I’m listening,” she said.
I gave her the same explanation I’d given Uncle Mike, dwelling a little longer on the static, and the way it had gone away completely when the pain did. I finished by saying, “I’m scared. I think something terrible may have happened to her.”
“Before we start jumping at sunbeams, let me ask you this: is there any chance you’re having the cuckoo equivalent of a muscle cramp or something? Maybe you can’t feel her because you’ve got a problem, not because she’s not there.”
“I can feel everyone else in the building.” Everyone except the older Madhura—Verity said his name was Rochak—but his thoughts had been hidden before Verity disappeared. Bringing him into this would just confuse things. “Besides, this isn’t the sort of silence I get when someone blocks me out. I mean, it is. But that never starts with pain. I’ve never felt anything like that before.”
Kitty made a small, frustrated sound. “Which means, if I believe you, that the damn Covenant probably got her. Fuck. Do you think they killed her quick, or did they take her prisoner so they could torture her first?”
My breath caught in my chest, wedging there like a stone. I struggled to force it out, trying to get my voice back. Finally I said, “How can you even ask me that?”
“Look, Sarah. For you she’s family; I get that, I really do, and it sucks that you’re the one making this call, almost as much as it sucks that I’m the one taking it. But if she’s dead, she’s dead, and I have living people to worry about. If the Covenant knows what Verity knows, they can clean this city out. You follow me? Nobody’s safe if they’re torturing her—and don’t try telling me that she won’t break. Given enough time, and enough knives, everybody breaks. It’s just a matter of finding out how hard you have to push.” Kitty spoke with a soft assurance that whispered of experiences I’d never had, and never wanted to have. I found myself wondering which end of the knife she’d been on. I realized just as quickly that I really didn’t want to know. That sort of thing was Verity’s territory, and she was welcome to it.
Kitty listened to the silence for a few seconds. Then she sighed. “Look, Sarah . . . if they took her prisoner, that sucks for us, because we don’t know what she’s going to tell them. We have to be prepared for the worst. But it could be awesome for her.”
“How is being taken prisoner by the Covenant awesome for anybody?” I asked.
“People usually keep their prisoners alive for at least a little while before they kill them. If she’s been taken prisoner, there’s a chance that you can get her back.”
“But how am I supposed to—”
“I’m sorry, Sarah. I really am. I know she’s your cousin, and I know you love her. I owe her a lot. I wish it hadn’t gone down like this. But you’re the one who has to worry about getting her back. I’m the one who gets to worry about getting my people through this alive. Good luck.”
Kitty hung up after that. She didn’t say good-bye. There wouldn’t have been any point.
Mike and Istas were in the main room when I emerged. The Madhura I could detect was still in the kitchen; I assumed the older Madhura was there with him. Having someone in the building that I couldn’t “hear” made me profoundly uncomfortable. I was used to people being hard or even impossible to read. Them being invisible was something entirely different. It was like when—
I stopped where I was, eyes going wide. Uncle Mike looked away from the deadfall he’d been arranging over one of the windows—Istas was holding the rope that supported the deadfall’s weight with one hand, like it was negligible to her—and frowned at me. “Sarah?” he asked. “What did Kitty say?”
“That charm.” I started briskly toward the table where Verity had dumped Margaret Healy’s possessions. Midway there, I broke into a run. When I reached it, I started rummaging frantically through the knives, ammo packs, and things I didn’t know the uses of. “Where is it? Why can’t I find it?!”