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I pulled Julie up. She winced as the magic smashed against her body. The currents wound about her…and calmed. It was as if she suddenly wasn’t there. Interesting kid.
“You been here before?”
She shook her head. “Not this deep.”
“Walk where I walk. Stay away from the walls. Especially if you see them get fuzzy.”
We started through the labyrinth of trailers. A long time ago the Honeycomb was a mobile park retirement community called Happy Trails or some such. It sat just under the Brown Mills Golf Course, across the Jonesboro Road. At first it had survived the magic waves pretty well, and when the cheap project apartments east of it crumbled and split, a slow but steady trickle of homeless refugees filled the mobile park. They pitched tents on the manicured lawns, bathed in the communal pool, and cooked on the outdoor grills. The cops chased out the squatters, but they just kept coming.
Then one night the magic hit especially hard, and the manufactured homes warped. Some expanded like glass bubbles, some twisted, others stuck together merging into hives. More yet divided and grew additions, and when the dust finally settled, a fifth of the inhabitants had vanished into the walls. To the Outside . Nobody could ever figure out what theOutside was, but it was definitely not anywhere in the normal world. The retirees fled, but the refugees had nowhere to go. They moved into the trailers and stayed put. Once in a while somebody would disappear, as each new magic tide twisted the Honeycomb a little more. A fun place to live if you were into that sort of thing.
“How can we find out where Esmeralda lives?” Julie puffed behind me. “I only know she lives in the Honeycomb. I don’t know where exactly.”
“You hear that whooming? The Honeycomb changes all the time so they have to have some sort of beacon. It’s probably at the entrance, which should be guarded by somebody. We’re going to go there and ask nicely where Esmeralda lived.”
“What makes you think they’ll tell us?”
“Because I’ll pay them.”
“Oh.”
And because if they don’t tell me, I will pull out my Order ID and my saber and make myself very hard to ignore.
I wasn’t wild about heading into the Honeycomb with a little girl in tow, but considering the neighborhood, she was safer with me than without me. I wondered how she got down there in the first place…
“How did you get down into the Gap?”
“We hiked from the Warren. There’s a trail.” A little light went off in her eyes. “But I probably can’t find it now. So if you send me back, I’ll just wander around without any water or food.”
Why me?