I go hunting for Dancer and find him hunting for me in, like, no time at all. It cracks me up because what are the odds we could go looking for each other in the hugeness that’s Dublin and actually find each other? But we always do. Like magnets.
When I see him, I grin. He’s walking down the street in the gray dawn, glowing like a star going supernova. I can’t look straight at him. I have to take quick looks at him from the corner of my eye. There’s a bubble of light around him so bright it’s blinding. He’s wearing sunglasses over his glasses and looks like some kind of glowing Mutant X guy with a superpower of his own, like say Super Brain.
“Dude!” I say.
“Like it? Hold on, let me turn it down.” He fiddles with something near his waist and the light dims to something closer to what my MacHalo throws off.
I check him out. His clothes are shiny. Shiny jeans, shiny shirt, even shiny ball cap. Clothes hang on his tall, lanky frame like something out of one of those glossy magazines, casual perfection. His hair’s getting long again. He’s going to ask me to cut it soon. I like those times. We take care of each other like two monkeys picking each other’s nits. Folks underestimate a good nit-pick. “New fashion statement?” I tease.
“Thinking about your wardrobe, Mega,” he says. “I was working on the spray for Papa Roach when all the sudden I got this idea for Shade protection. I need to spray your clothes with a reflective base, then I designed a harness of lights for you that runs off a battery system, and get this: it self-charges with motion!” He fiddles with a gizmo at his waist, wearing the rapt expression of a boy genius playing with electronics. All the sudden his head whips up and he grins and I just grin back because when Dancer grins like that all my worries disappear.
“Because of the way you move, it’ll never go out. I’ve been testing it and it stays charged off even my movements for days. I figure one good freeze-frame will juice it up for a week. That means when you go to Shade-town, you can sleep easy, wearing it.”
I’m speechless. Dancer was thinking about me, pondering the ins and outs of my life, so he could make it better. He spent his time working on something, not to save Dublin, like the Papa Roach spray, but just me. I fiddle with the bracelet on my wrist. He gave me that, too. It weirded me out when he did because I was afraid he was going to get mushy on me but that was way back in the beginning of us hanging together when I didn’t know that Dancer never gets mushy. We don’t let that kind of stupid stuff get between us. Using some of your own time to make someone else’s life better is, like, the nicest thing you can do for anybody. I almost can’t stand it, it makes me so happy.
“You’re the Shit,” I tell him.
And this time he doesn’t say it right back at me, he says, “You think so?” like he wants to hear it again, so I say it again and his grin gets even bigger.
After a sec he notices the wad of posters I forgot I was holding.
He makes a sound of disgust. “Mega, I been tearing those things down for hours. I stumbled on one of the crews putting them up and followed them around, ripping them down. They’ve got a bunch of Rhino-boys hanging them. Is it true? Did somebody take your sword?” He looks me up and down, searching for it. He blinks like he just noticed me for the first time and I get so embarrassed it’s all I can do to not freeze-frame right out of there. I feel so stupid!
I forgot what I was wearing!
My jaw juts and I say, stiff-like, “It’s all they had that fit me. Ryodan made me change. I didn’t have nothing to do with this getup. I wouldn’ta picked it in a million years!”
Dancer’s looking at me like I’m an alien from outer space. I could just sink into the street, yank the concrete and trash over my head and hide. I hug my arms over my chest, cross my feet at the ankles and turn sideways a little, trying to make myself narrower so there won’t be so much of me to see.
“I know I look stupid, okay? It’s been a real sucky day for me and I got bigger problems on my mind than what I’m wearing so quit looking at me like I’m some kind of geek dressed up for Halloween, because I didn’t have a choice since Christian gave me his stupid pajamas and Ryodan said they smelled—”
“Christian gave you his pajamas and they smelled? Wait a minute, Christian wears pajamas?”
“I only needed his pjs because I woke up in his bed with only my bra and underwear on and all my clothes destroyed, otherwise I never would have worn them,” I clarify when I realize how weird the first part sounded.
“Well. That explains things.”
I love that about Dancer. He always gets me without me having to go on and on telling how point A got to point B. “All I’m saying is this ain’t my fashion statement, so don’t hold it against me.”
“S’cool, Mega. You look cool.”
“I look stupid.” I’m so mortified I could expire of mortification.
“You look older. Sixteen or seventeen. If you had on makeup you’d probably look eighteen.”
I think I’m nonplussed. I’ve never been nonplussed before but I know the definition and I imagine this must be what it feels like. It’s not quite flummoxed, or bewildered. Words have subtle nuances. A year or two ago I might have been flabbergasted. This is a slightly different kind of stymied. Yes. I think it’s nonplussed. “Well,” I say, and smooth my skirt.
Gah! Feck! What are my hands doing to me? I actually just smoothed my skirt! Am I turning into some kind of sissy? I don’t even wear skirts! But when Ryodan made me change the only thing they could find that fit me was the waitress uniform from the kiddie subclub and I was so pissed off about the posters, then so glad to see Dancer, that I totally forgot I was wearing a short skirt, snug blouse, and baby doll heels that suck to freeze-frame in, but I had more important things to do than dash into a store and switch shoes, like tear my face off every fecking lamppost in the city. Feet are feet sometimes; if they’re working that’s good enough.
“Who took your sword, Mega? And how did anybody even get it from you?”
My mood darkens instantly. I get so mad I get lockjaw and I can’t talk for a sec. “Jayne,” I finally grind out through my teeth. I rub my jaw muscles a sec and loosen my mouth back up. Superstrength sucks sometimes when it’s in every single muscle in your body. When you get a muscle cramp, it’s a big deal. It can go on for a good long while. “That fecker Jayne took it and left me for dead. I got hurt by one of those …” All Dancer knows about the iced scenes is what he saw the other night and it still hadn’t exploded by the time they got me out of there. At least I don’t think it had. It occurs to me I’m not sure. I need to ask somebody later. “I got hurt and Jayne took it while I couldn’t do anything to stop him. I went to Ryodan and told him we needed to go get my sword back and he refused. Said he liked me better without it.”
“Dude!”
In a single word Dancer just gave me all the righteous indignation and pissed-offedness that the situation deserves. “I know, right?”
“What is he thinking? You’re the Mega. You don’t take Wolverine’s claws!”
“I know, right?”
“Dude,” he says again.
We look at each other commiserating, because grownups are so fecked up and we’re never going to turn out like them.
Then he grins. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go take it back.”
Since the walls fell, Dublin feels a lot like a movie set to me.
It’s the quiet. The city is a ghost town with squatters hiding in the wreckage, rifles cocked. Sometimes I see whites of eyes gleaming at me through boarded-up windows. If they’re human, I try to talk to them. Not all of them are receptive. There are some real nuts out there, as creepy as some of the Unseelie.
Before the walls crashed, back when I used to pedal around the districts on my courier bike, back when the sidhe-seers were masquerading as an international messenger service run by Ro, the city was filled with a constant white noise. It was hard, even with my superhearing, to distinguish between the congestion of cars and buses, folks’ heels on pavers and cement, planes landing and taking off, boats docking in the bay. Cell phones drove me crazy. There were days when all I heard was a blur of text message alerts, e-mail alerts, rings, songs, games.
Still, as annoying as it could be, it was music to my ears, the complex chords of the city I love. Now there are only the flat notes of soldiers marching, monsters hunting, and the occasional plaintive trill of something dying.
Dancer and I race through the streets, telling each other jokes, laughing our heads off. Hanging with him is the only time I can totally forget myself.
We round a corner and belly up to a contingent of Rhino-boys.
When they see us, one of them grunts into a radio, “Got her, boss, she’s at Dame and Trinity.”
I glance over my shoulder, lock everything down on my grid, grab Dancer, slide sideways and freeze-frame us out of there.