Emma Bull (21 page)
Authors: Finder
I'd missed the whole boxing match for the sake of Rico's stupid case. Good riddance to it and her.
I slumped in the sidecar in relative comfort, while Tick-Tick drove with decorum and a sixth sense for avoiding potholes. When we got to her place, she worked the elevator rope. There wasn't enough light in the atrium to see how far her neighbor had gotten on the tapestry. Besides, it had only been a day—two daysùsince I'd seen it. In a normal life, that wasn't long. I wondered if he'd found his skull. Heck, maybe he could get Walt's.
Tick-Tick had a fainting couch about two levels up from the kitchen platform. I hobbled up the risers and sprawled on it. "Did you tell 'em, at the clinic, that you lived in a tree house?"
"Ho. Ho. Wait until morning, when you're stiff as bricks and have to come down for breakfast. Which puts me in mind of dinner. What do you want for it?"
"No vegetables. It'd be cannibalism. Actually, I don't think I could eat right now. Do you mind?"
"Gracious, no. Waste away to nothing. We'll hang you on a pole with your mouth open and use you for a wind sock."
A little later she called softly, "Are you asleep?"
I turned my face away from the window, where the outlines of buildings against the navy blue sky made such pleasant, cool geometry. The Ticker was sitting at her workbench in a spill of light from a kerosene lamp, a book open in front of her. I don't know what it was; it had tiny, closely-spaced type, thin yellowed pages, and occasional illustrations that looked like Victorian engravings, dense and scratchy.
"No, I'm awake."
"I shouldn't bother you."
Pretty tentative, for the Ticker. "You're not bothering me. I'm not doing anything." Well, I was breathing, and my heart was beating. But the rest of me wasn't busy.
"Ah. Then… have you thought about it yet?"
"What do you mean?"
"I said you should give up Rico's puzzle, and you said you would think on it. I wondered if you had, or if you cared to think aloud."
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"I don't have to." Her hea
d came up rather sharply when I said that. "I've been laid off."
For a moment she sat still as a painting. Then she said, in a changed voice, "Oh. Oh, bother."
"Huh?"
"Sleet and snow, I'd never thought Sunny Rico was a fool."
"I'm not following this," I said. I hadn't expected the news to make her angry and amused and resigned, and all of them at once.
Tick-Tick folded her arms over the back of her chair, rested her chin on them, and looked at me. "I, at least, know that the surest way to make you want to do something is to tell you that you absolutely may not."
I thought about it. Then I said, "Not this time. It's a relief. I can get back to real life now. Hell, maybe I'll find a steady girlfriend and learn to play the guitar."
She glared at me. "You are my dear friend," she declared, "and you lie like a rug."
"No, honest."
She snorted delicately and turned back to her book.
But I really wished that I hadn't taken the time to think about it. Because as soon as I did I realized that, of course, she was right.
Street Smarts
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Linn did come around, the next day. He looked tired, which doesn't always look the same in elves as it does in humans. His eyes weren't bloodshot, and there were no shadows under them, and heaven knows he couldn't have been paler than normal and not be dead. He just seemed dimmed, like a candle flame flickering in its own wax.
I was sitting in the kitchen window (that is, the window closest to the level the kitchen is on) nursing a cup of tea when Tick-Tick showed him in, so I had a nice vantage point to watch him from. His gaze bounced from level to level around the room like a runaway Superball, starting and ending at the
Ticker's workbench. I couldn't tell if he was trying to look unalarmed, or unimpressed. I was pretty sure it was one or the other.
"Good morning. Tea?" I asked, sliding down off the windowsill.
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"Tha
nk you, no. I'm pleased to see you well, or seeming well."
"Not bad, actually." What I wanted to say was, "Have you found out anything? What's Rico up to?" and, oddly enough, "How is Rico?" though nothing suggested that she should be any different from the way she'd been when I'd seen her last. But the words were hanging in off-the-case limbo, and it seemed important to pretend that that didn't bother me.
"Have a seat," Tick-Tick said, pulling up a Louis XIV side chair with dairy-cow-print cushions.
He turned his head aside and coughed. The hand he covered his mouth with was nicely manicured; the Ticker's hands usually had something black under the fingernails. "I will, if each of you will take a seat, as well."
Tick-Tick shrugged. "You want to talk to Orient. I can get out of the way."
Tick-Tick's verbal style usually slid easily from fey to human idiomatic and back, but I'd noticed this about her: in the presence of another elf, one she didn't know well, her language was adamantly human and embarassingly graceless. It was her version of a Brooklyn accent, I guess. I also had a few guesses about why she felt the need to do it when she did it, but that was her business, very little of mine, and not a bit of anyone else's.
Linn made no sign that he'd heard anything unusual. He shook his head. "You know of these devices, I believe. If you will, sit and listen, and what I neglect to ask, speak out upon. I would be glad of it."
"I guess I can do that."
Honestly, she sounded as crass as me. Which was probably where she learned a good bit of it. I
scrunched my mouth up at her, which she pretended not to see.
Linn asked questions like paleontologists dig up bones. It's hard to accurately describe catastrophe after you've taken part in it; each successive loud noise tends to obscure the last one, until the only thing you're sure of is that everything came unglued, somehow. But Linn demanded, patiently and politely, every tiresome detail in order, from the time I arrived at the corner down the block from Walt's. He did it by the steady application of "What happened then? No, before that." Except, of course, that when Linn said it, it sounded better.
The Ticker seemed to relax as the questions progressed; things that explode were, after all, one of her areas of expertise. Several times she rephrased Linn's questions, when she caught on to what he wanted to know and had a better idea than he did how to get it out of me. I think she was impressed by his attention to detail. I certainly was.
When he finally had everything out of me that I could remember, Linn said, "So we may have a witness to the art."
"We may?" I asked, startled.
"The early riser, working on the roof, the one you sought to hide your presence from. There is some chance the one who set the blast was o'erlooked as well." He coughed again. He'd done it several times during the round of questions, but this time it went on a little longer.
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Tick-T
ick rose, filled a glass with water from the jug by the sink, and set it down in front of him. He
drank the whole thing, with grea
t concentration, and thanked the Ticker in the
language of their mutual
homeland. I think if he hadn't been distracted he would have picked another language.
The Ticker smiled and said, "
De nada
." Linn looked up, startled and, I'd swear, apologetic. The sudden motion made him cough again, and Tick-Tick refilled the glass.
To forestall a repeat performance of the whole thing, I said, "That sounds awful."
Linn shook his head. "It is only smoke, I think, from Felkin's house. And little sleep, and some distress of mind."
I could count my acquaintance with Linn in hours, but admitting to distress seemed completely out of character for him. I stared. Tick-Tick ambled away, down to the first level and her workbench, and that made me stare, too. Had I missed something? I must have, because Linn was visibly relieved when she passed out of earshot.
People in the World may claim that in Bordertown, all bets are off when it comes to manners, but that's ridiculous. Etiquette is much more complicated here, and the residents learn it faster, because we'd all go crazy otherwise. Bad enough in the World, where one culture's respect for privacy is another's
standoffishness. Toss in the customs from over the Border (various and contradictory), plus the lot of us who came here from one culture or another too young to have been properly socialized anyway, and it's a zoo. Anybody who's fit to stay in town figures out in the first fifteen minutes that good social skills are worth more than a late-model tank in most neighborhoods, for defense
and
offense. And the first and last rule of B-town etiquette is, if all else fails, keep your mouth shut and your eyes open. Having mastered that one, I waited for Linn to give me a hint.