Orphan of Mythcorp (10 page)

And then he whipped that sword around. The
clanging of metal biting metal filled the records building. Grunts
and more clanging. Nimrod drew Malthus outside, clearing the
exit.

“
Run!”

I didn’t need to be told twice. I ran out of
there and didn’t look back.

Since there wasn’t an
Escaping from School for Dummies
book
in the library (I checked), I hobbled my way over to the Camelot
staircase. I was thinking of asking Ava for advice, since she’s the
smartest of the Morai. Well, the smartest next to Ash, but he
doesn’t count because he’s a zipperdick.

But then as I was standing there, massaging
my buggered knee, my peepers fell on the plywood covering the
busted back doors.

“
Hmm.”

Naked Charlie walked past the plywood. He
didn’t seem to notice me, too intent on something I couldn’t see.
They do that sometimes, my spooks, stroll aimlessly, looking at
invisible stuff. Whatever they see, it’s from Limbo, and I can’t
help but be a smidge curious. He bent over near the plywood. I
raised my hand to cover a certain unseemly sight. Without warning
he took off through the plywood.

Was this some kind of spooky spook guide
stuff?

I limped over and pried on the wood. The
biggest sheet didn’t budge. So I tried the smaller piece, the one
on the right, covering the window that had shattered during Nimrods
uninvited entrance. “Come on you stubborn bugger, get off.”

The nails pulled out, sending me sprawling
backwards. As I landed on my butt, a ten-foot tall black woman’s
face materialized in the hallway. “Ahh!” I screeched and scrambled
backwards. The ghostly face vanished like a puff of smoke as my
buggered knee exploded in pain. What was that thing? A huge
decapitated spook? Man, I needed doojee.

With sweat dripping from my forehead, I stood
and used the cripple-stick to shove the plywood out of the way,
looking around to make sure that face didn’t return. The opening
was narrow, only wide enough for someone real thin. I knew being
skinny would come in handy some day. I wedged my leg through first,
and then, as I was stuffing my head through, I happened to look
back inside.

Lamorak was watching. Blast! Caught in the
act. What could I do? I waved, pressed a finger to my lips.
“Shh.”

Lamorak did not move; just stood there on the
bottom step, looking at me with his creepy whiteys. After ducking
through the hole, I glanced back. Lamorak swiveled around and
climbed the stairs, triple-braids bouncing with every step. He was
tight with Ash, so no doubt my little Great Escape would be fodder
for the Morai rumor-mill by sunup tomorrow.

One problem at a time.

I stood on the grass, sucked in great gusts
of fresh air. “Should’ve worn a jacket.”

Bending down, I dragged my cripple-stick
through the hole and looked out over the baseball diamond. Quiet
out here. Peaceful. It was just temporary, I knew, but still. After
buttoning up the top of my blue flannel shirt, I started hobbling,
tracing the perimeter of the school. Seven minutes later I rounded
the second corner and reached the Weeping Willow in the front of
Philicity High.

The school was situated about a half mile (a
wild guess, as I have no experience in judging distances) down from
the end of the street to my left. The other end I couldn’t even
see, it was shrouded in night shadows. So I took off, left down the
lane. It was strange. For the first time in my life walls did not
rise up beside me and there were no locked doors barring my path. I
could go anywhere, do anything. I was my own man walking my Empire
of Dirt.

My right hand remained firmly pressed on the
top of the cripple-stick, but my left, well, it was jittering. It
kept shooting up to my face every few ticks, scratching at
imaginary creepy-crawlers.

‘
Are you scared?’ Marie asked. ‘You’re
hand is—’

“
I’m fine,” I snapped. Shook my head
and sighed. Marie had lost some enthusiasm for her dancing.
“Listen, I’m sorry I bit your head off. It’s just,” snapping my
hand and banging the stick to dispel the jitters, “I’ve never been
on my own before. And it’s a big city.”

Half-truths are the same as partial-lies, but
they sound friendlier.

As I hobbled along on the sidewalk in dark
periodically interrupted by street lamps, I stole peeps at Maries
face. It was still bruised. She’d always been there for me, a loony
but constant presence I could always look on without feeling like a
perv or a stalker. She’d even taught me how to talk and how to
dance. Seeing her like this, bruised, depressed, scared—it shook
me. I decided that if I ended up needing another spook spy, I’d
send Castor or Naked Charlie, or maybe even Sigurd.

Well, maybe not Sigurd. He was not someone
you wanted around unless some apocalyptic bull-crap was going
down.

By the time I reached the end of the street,
I was totally buggered. I plopped my rump down on some kind of huge
memorial rock on the corner. As I rested, Marie kept watch,
sneaking peeks down the streets while performing half-hearted
pirouettes.

The slip-slide murmur of traffic was
clear from my new rump rest and I could even see red and blue blurs
through the fog down the street. I looked up at the reflective
green street signs. “Corner of Beta and
151
^st
Street? Holy-moly!” We
were fifty-three blocks away from the records building. We weren’t
even on the right Circle. Alpha Circle is the outer circular avenue
tracing the circumference of Philicity, while Beta traces the inner
circumference of the metropolis.

In other words, we were screwed.

I tore the map Izzy had given me out of my
back pocket. My knee gave a twinge of pain as I twisted it trying
to score the map. “Ouch.”

‘
Where do you need to go?’ Marie asked.
She was in the middle of the intersection, oblivious to the
oncoming pickup, and despite her distance from me, I heard her just
fine. “I know this city like the back of my hand. I’ve lived here
for years.’

“
You haven’t lived anywhere for years,”
I mumbled under my breath.

Still panting a smidge, I stood, leaned on my
stick. “How do we get to Ninety-Eighth Street from here? I can’t
walk that far, not with my leg so buggered and no B-drops to dull
the pain.”

‘
A cab, I suppose,’ she whispered as
the pickup barreled through her essence. ‘I used to love taking the
bus, but . . . I cannot recall the last time I rode one.’ She
twirled and started heading back towards me. ‘It’s so hard to
remember things lately.’

She flickered . . . dimmed . . . bamfed out
of sight.

“
Great.” Where was I going to find a
cab at midnight?

Alpha Circle spans eight lanes. If I was
going to make it to the records building before tomorrow night, I’d
either have to hump it on over right now or Frogger my way across
in the day traffic. I still had a little juice left in me. Not like
I was going to sleep anyway, not with the DT’s mucking my rhythm
up.

I leaned on the stick and stood. A dull ache
had spread from my knee down my leg and since the devil is always
in the details, my calf also felt like it had just been massaged by
a hammer. “Screw it.” Looking both ways first, I stepped down off
the curb. “One lane,” I grunted. Darn it was chilly out. “Two
lanes.” A car approached from the left. I couldn’t see it, but the
whine of the electric engine was stretching out of the fog. “Three
lanes.” I was going to have to huff it faster than this if I didn’t
want to end up a pancake.

‘
A splat on the pavement!’ Castor
bleeped from the other side of the road five lanes ahead. ‘Come on
down, you’re the next victim under The Wheels of Misfortune.
Ha!’

Just to make sure I didn’t satisfy Castors
sadistic hopes and dreams, I scurried forward. As I was crossing
the seventh into the eighth and final lane, the car zoomed past
behind me. I scrambled up onto the curb on the other side of Alpha
Circle and blew Castor a kiss.

The spook snorted and shuffled away to
inspect the stone-encased trash can.

A bench caught my rump. With my jittering
right hand I wiped sweat from my forehead, though it seemed
pointless; my whole body was doing the mambo now.

Castor thrust his head straight into the
trash—which gave me an idea. “Hey Cas?”

‘
Hey yourself, bony,’ he said, head
still inside the receptacle. ‘Kind of busy here. Look at that, some
dingbat tossed a perfectly good burrito. What a bunch of wastrels
skulking around these days. No one wasted food in my
day.’

“
Cas.” You have to say a spooks’ name
often, or you’ll lose his attention. “How would you like to snoop
on someone, maybe get him in trouble?”

He raised his head out of the bin.

Bingo.

I laid it out for him, careful to explain the
danger he’d be in and the danger he be putting Ash in. Back when
his pulse still pumped and he weighed more than a glass of air,
Castor had been an Iconocop, so if there was anyone he despised
more than me, it was the Morai. Shoot, he’d probably hunted down
their parents, the original Morai back during the Purge. Maybe that
was how he’d gotten himself eternally buggered. So this was like
his chance for revenge.

Without dragging it out—because that would’ve
been a dull old time—Castor flickered and winked out of sight. As I
rose from my bench I smiled. The spook was no doubt already
hovering around Ash; the spooks’ ability to use Limbo as a sort of
whiz-bang conduit from one place to another was absolute dynamite,
sure as sure.

I stretched and turned to follow the
sidewalk down 151
^st
Street. It
was still too dark to see to the end, but the arc-lamps standing
every one-hundred feet or so stretched into the darkness. This was
going to take all night and I needed someplace to sleep now. A
straight-backed wooden bench nestled on the edge of an eight lane
trafficker just wasn’t going to cut it.

A few hundred ticks passed as I doddered down
the street, whispers of relaxing music slipping out from someone’s
bedroom stereo. Trickling stream. Babbling brook. Mumbling river. I
couldn’t enjoy it due to the chill nibbling at my extremities.
Breath clouds lingered like comic book word bubbles.

It must’ve been near midnight by the
time I reached the opposite end of
151
^st
Street. I was halfway
into a fresh fantasy about Izzy when I reached the crosswalk. It
was busier here along Alpha Circle, a car or truck or big rig
passing every twenty to thirty ticks. So instead of pulling a
Frogger, I waited for the red LED hand to flash green. In
retrospect, I should’ve hitched my pants and sped across. As it
was, I waited just long enough to allow
her
to saunter up to me.

I smelled her first; strawberries barely
concealing womanly body odor. And then I saw her.

“
You’re lost, orphan.” Her lips didn’t
seem to move enough, and I was struck by her lazy wardrobe. This
woman clearly a fan of the ‘grunge’ look. Long AC/DC T-shirt,
ripped jeans, mussed hair.

“
How’d you know?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I just know things. Follow me.
I’ll take you where you need to go.” With that she turned and
started heading down the street. She had a funny way of walking.
Neither hip-swaying like a woman, nor the heavy swagger of a man.
It was more like she was a robot, or an angel, who hadn’t yet
learned how to pretend to be human. Some impulse took me as I
watched her, and I hurried to catch up.

“
How do you know where I need to go?” I
asked, breathless.

Another shrug. “Follow me, don’t follow me.
You’ll find answers soon enough either way.”

Thanks, Mrs. Vague. “At least tell me your
name.”

She let out an exasperated sigh. “Call me
Anne. Anne Thrope.”

“
Hi, Miss Thrope,” I said. “I’m
Morgan.”

Charging up the street in her peculiar
saunter, Miss Anne Thrope said, “Yeah, I know.”

Marie suddenly popped up on the walk beside
the woman. A sour look crinkled her features. ‘What are you doing
with this pillager? Drop her and go home, Morgan. She is not what
she seems.’

What the flip was a pillager? Marie was from
a time before I even existed, so I supposed it was only natural
she’d retain a few idioms I’d never heard—it just hadn’t happened
before.

“
What are you looking at, orphan?” the
pillager asked.

“
Nothing,” I said. I got to remember to
ignore the spooks when I’m around people.

This seemed to open her up as we passed
underneath the light from a street lamp. “Some lucky bastards see
things others are too blind to observe. These bastards would do
well to use their gift to help others.”

Was she talking about my spooks? What did
Marie mean by ‘She’s not what she seems’?

“
This place I’m taking you to,” Anne
Thrope said. “It like a fair. A place where they sell anything you
can imagine, everything you could want.” She paused, scratched he
booty through a nice hole in the blue jeans. “Three things before
going into Vera City. Don’t take your money out until you’ve struck
a deal. Don’t engage with the flying boy. And whatever happens,
don’t do anything to piss off the King. He is a man, yes, but he is
also something else.” She sighed and took another turn. Now I was
totally flimflammed. “One day soon the King will come for you and
your people.”

“
Um, I don’t think I have any
people.”