“This is the only one. But they’re edible, too, and I can throw in a couple of alcohol minnows, depending on what you’ve got. Maybe more than a couple.”
The girl’s second spoke up, a scattered-looking, wild-eyed boy. “Your friend doesn’t talk much. Why doesn’t he talk?”
“Accident,” I said, looking at my friend with a smile. “He doesn’t talk much ever since.”
“He makes me nervous,” the boy said, not realizing he was making the girl nervous.
“He should.”
And for a fair amount of time I stared at the boy and he stared at me while my friend tried to make himself look small and examined the ground.
“So,” I said, switching my attention back to the girl. “What do you have on offer?”
The girl nodded to the boy, managing to toss in a scowl, and he nodded to someone else, and down the line.
What was on offer was more or less what I had expected. They brought forward the smallest and youngest person there. He was maybe eight or nine, bald against ticks and lice, dark brown skin, some haunting still of remembered baby fat, but his eyes were old and from the rigid set of his jaw, his folded arms over his ragged shirt, I knew he was afraid.
“For the battle beetle and the minnows, you can have Teems,” the girl said.
“Why would I want Teems?”
Something in my tone must have seemed dangerous, or maybe it was how fast I replied. But either way, the girl was very careful in her reply.
“Because you know the Magician. Because if you take Teems to the Magician you’ll get four or five beetles.”
I was quiet, thinking about what she’d said, head bowed, with bad things crawling through my brain.
“Why do you think I know the Magician?”
“Because you’re Rachel the scavenger. You work for Wick, and Wick knows the Magician.”
The bad things in my head writhed harder, multiplied, and I tried to douse them in the flames created by the biotech, but it didn’t work.
I’d been made by a little girl, someone who had only seen me for a few minutes, half cloaked in darkness. She knew enough about me to presume I would want to trade a human being to the Magician for biotech …
“What’s the catch?” I asked. “You’d give Teems here away for one beetle and two minnows?”
“They’re not giving me away,” Teems said, arms still folded. A stern look made his face gaunt. “I want to go. I said I’d go.”
I understood, of course. This group couldn’t find enough food and water to live on, and Teems must be not just the youngest but the least-gifted scavenger, the weakest among them. Lose him, one less mouth to feed.
Teems’s stake in this arrangement was not to just be cut loose and be on his own in a dangerous place but to be given over to someone else’s patronage. And Teems wanted to own it, to construct a story about his life where he had control, where he had always wanted this to happen.
I knew I could get Teems for free. It wouldn’t even take a beetle and two minnows. The girl wanted him gone, needed him gone. But Teems would have to take his chances some other way.
I held out the beetle to the girl and she took it with care from my palm.
“I don’t want Teems,” I said, “but you can have the beetle if you hold on to Teems another month.”
Both Teems and the girl’s second were looking at me with a kind of mixed hope, bewilderment, and disappointment. The girl was already trying to figure out what game I was playing, and what that meant to her.
“I don’t know the Magician and I’m not this Rachel,” said the ghost. “And you don’t want to know Rachel or the Magician, either. Also, you shouldn’t invite strangers to your campfire, pretty though it is, no matter how you want to show it off.”
The girl had risen, as had I, and Teems retreated, and her boyfriend seemed conflicted, while the eight in the shadows had moved forward.
“Borne, you should show them as you really are.” I stared at the bulky man, while I could sense the girl trying to decide whether to tell the others to attack us. The look on the girl’s face was not what I would call charitable or forgiving.
Until she saw Borne in all his glory, for he had dissolved from bulky man to a glowing dragon-size version of their flaming biotech, an enormous fiery slug that loomed over their tents and gasped out flame, and because some part of Borne would always be a show-off, his version had a head and glowing eyes. It had been as easy as peeling a banana for Borne to shed his disguise.
All of them—the girl, her second, Teems, the others—drew back against the courtyard walls and after their initial gasp stayed very still and silent, as if maybe we couldn’t find them that way. But their faces, touched by the light from Borne’s flames, had a new tension and horror, a realization that the city still held secrets and surprises that could transfix them, strip them of the lie that they had survival instincts.
The girl held out the beetle and said, “You can take it. You can have it and anything else if you leave now.”
“Keep it,” I said. “And keep Teems. Don’t follow us. Don’t bring strangers to your sanctuary again. Don’t stay here another night. Don’t come looking for me. Don’t seek out the Magician.”
Then Borne made himself smaller and less fiery, and I led him out of that place.
*
I took Borne back past the playground to the roof of the department store, a few blocks from the burned bear. It had begun to snow, but the flakes were gray: ash from places to the west where the Mord proxies had put Magician strongholds to the torch. The ash wasn’t hot to the touch. It wasn’t anything. It was nothing, raining down from the black night sky.
There on the roof, out of view, Borne slopped over in relief, like someone who had been holding in his gut, streamed out over the ground, made a thick carpet of gentle neon eyes.
Now that Borne was there, in front of me, the ghost had receded, the urge to find him entangled in the reality. I asked him a question, but I can’t remember what it was, whether it was important. It must not have been.
“Can I come home now?” Borne asked, ignoring my question. “Has Wick forgiven me?”
“No.” Wick hadn’t forgiven him. Nor had I.
“Then why did you come here?”
To see how he lived. To make sure he was okay. Some bond, an ancient affection. Inflicting self-damage. The reflexive twitching of a dead lizard tail.
“Did you see something new tonight, Borne?”
The shape in front of me seethed, frothed, rippled at the edges, retreated into solidarity with the idea of the human, became again the hulking man the girl and her group had known.
“Is this the start of some lesson, Rachel? You made me leave. You and Wick both. You don’t have the right to tell me what to do now. Or to make me into a … a fireworks display.”
“Do you see how people live? Don’t add to their misery.”
“I’d never been to their campfire before. I would have protected them. I would have tried.”
“They’re all Rachels,” I said. “That girl. The other scavengers.”