Authors: Finder
She didn't say anything for a few moments, so I turned to see what was going on. She was leaning up against the counter looking at me, with an expression that, except for a certain amount of amusement, was hard to sort out. "When you and Tick-Tick are working together," she began, gently, "don't you ever give each other orders?"
"I don't—"
"Duck? Hold this? Watch out? Grab that end, quick? And are you telling me that if something happened to Tick-Tick, especially when she was in your company, you'd say, 'Darn shame, but she wasn't my
responsibility'?"
"No. I'm not telling you that."
"Good. Because I wouldn't have believed it. Linn and I give each other orders, and we're responsible for each other. That's what
I'm
in the habit of doing, and I'm not likely to change the way I work, either. I'm not asking you to shuffle and roll your eyes. I'm asking you to do what I tell you, when I tell you, in any potentially dangerous situation, on the off chance that my experience might tip me off to trouble before you spotted it."
"Does it work both ways?"
"I promise you, if you tell me to duck, I'll do it. Don't abuse the privilege."
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I looked
back out the window, but this time, not at anything particular. "I don't know," I said.
And I really didn't.
I'd thought I'd have to browbeat her into letting me help again, and I'd thought that without considering why it was I was so hot to do it. Then, when she'd turned high-handed on me, I wanted to prove to her that I deserved better—and I wanted to walk out after I did it, and wait for her to browbeat
me
into changing my mind and helping. I obviously hadn't thought about what I was doing, because nothing was less like Sunny Rico than that.
Now she'd presented me with an option that, somewhere in the back of my head, I realized was exactly what I wanted. Or had wanted, not so long ago. And I couldn't say yes.
What she was asking me to do was to be her new partner. She was asking me to be a cop. Unofficially, temporarily—but she'd as good as said that she considered what she was asking of me to be the
equivalent of what she expected of Linn. She just didn't expect me to be as good at it, that was all.
Maybe that was what rankled, though a second's worth of thought told me I wasn't, and wouldn't want anyone to believe I was. Maybe it was that I didn't, even temporarily, want to be considered police officer material. Well, that was true enough.
But it occurred to me that what I wanted her to ask was something different. I didn't exactly know whatùmaybe something with more of a sense of high adventure in it? No chance; she'd already pointed out that this wasn't the Hardy Boys, and I didn't think that she'd call
it
the Three Musketeers, either. This was her job—her hard, nerve-wracking, intermittently sordid job. No high adventure.
"You can think about it," she said. Her voice cut through my confusion and made me jump.
She was still leaning against the kitchen counter. In the huge shirt and a pair of skinny jeans with the knees worn through, and her brown hair rumpled, she looked younger than I'd ever seen her. Until I looked
at
her face. There were lines at the corners of her eyes, but her age lay in something other than wrinkles, in the sternness that set her features even now, when she was smiling a little.
"Twenty-five? Twenty-six?" I asked.
"Stubborn bastard." The smile widened. "It's something like that."
"Don't you know?"
She tilted her head a little to one side, not in the coy, fey gesture I'd seen other people use, but as if she wanted to see me with the light a little different. Very serious person, Sunny Rico. Her age was in that, too; even when she smiled, even when she was witty, she was very serious. "Have you ever been back to the World since you first came to B-town?" she asked.
I shook my head.
"I have, a couple of times. Never for very long, or very far in. Every time, the calendar surprised me."
"What do you mean?"
"You know that time in the Elflands runs differently—
lots
differently, sometimes—from the way it does
I nodded again. My friend Strider had told me once of slipping back across the Border after he'd been in town for six months (I didn't ask him why he'd done
it
, because I think he was taking a risk by telling me as much as he had; Strider's exile, enforced or self-imposed, had a whiff of politics about it). In the Elflands, only two months had passed. Another friend said she'd run away to Bordertown for two weeks, when she was very young, and come dragging home to the Elflands to find it was a little over a year later and her parents had staged her funeral
in absentia
the week before.
"It's also true of the Borderlands and the World. The discrepancy isn't as big, but the longer you're here, the further off you'll find you've gotten from World Standard Time. I'm probably anything from twenty-three to twenty-eight at the moment, depending on when I leave the Borderlands, and you don't know how old you are, either."
"That's silly. You know how long it's been for you, so that's how old you are."
"Maybe. You can count years. You can count days. You can even count hours. But how do you know those hours are as long as the ones where you used to live?"
"They
fee
l like it."
"They would, wouldn't they? This is the Borderlands. If everything wasn't different when you got here, why would anyone bother to run away to it?"
"I've forgotten what we were talking about," I said irritably.
"No, you haven't. Go home and think about it. But for God's sake don't take too long."
I stood up and walked past her, down the hallway, through the dining room, to the bright, pleasant parlor. I stopped at the door. "Why did you become a cop?" I asked her, though I hadn't meant to.
"My dad was one," she answered promptly.
"My dad," I said, taking care to get it right, "was a division vice president for a company that designed medical appliances."
"Did he do it well?"
I blinked. "I think so."
"That's the difference, then. Let me know what you decide."
Before I could think of an answer, I was on the other side of the door, and it was closed.
I wandered around town for an hour or two (how long were they? How could I tell?), thinking. To help me think, I bought a fish taco at a stand near Chrystoble and Delight. The guy who ran it, a tall, thin human with brown hair and dark eyes under tortoise-shell glasses and the kind of long, bony face that a lot of women like, fried the fish while I waited, and gave me my pick of other ingredients. It was, as best
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I could tell, authentically Mexican, but his accent was
authentic Eastern European, and his faded T-s
hirt
was letter
ed in Cyrillic. The fish was absolutely fresh.
"Where's this from?" I asked, gesturing at the fish.
"From the dock. I buy them there in the morning, and I keep them very cold. It is terrible when they are not fresh."
"What dock?"
He looked over the tops of his glasses at me. "The one on the shore. These are ocean fish. I would not use river fish."
I'd heard rumors about this—that Bordertown was, on some days, in some neighborhoods, when the
wind was right, an oceanfront property—but I'd never seen it for myself. I said so.
He shrugged. "Two years ago, I ran away from my uncle's house in Bratsk, in Irkutsk. I struck out across country, thinking that I would join the road far from anyplace where I would be known as my uncle's nephew, and beg a ride west. I did not know where I was going, except that I was going away from
Bratsk. I became lost, of course. I was two days in the woods without food, and very cold, when I came out of the trees to find myself on the banks of Lake Baikal. Its closest part is more than four hundred and fifty kilometers east of Bratsk. I could not have walked so far in two days. But there it was, the great lake like oil in the darkness, and on the shore far to my left a city, shining with lights and strange towers like none I had seen in pictures of Moscow or St. Petersburg. I walked toward it, and at last entered it, hungry and tired, and it was Bordertown.
"In these two years, I have not seen Lake Baikal again. But I think that is because I have not wanted to."
I'd never seen Bordertown's ocean; but then, I'm an inland kind of guy. "Why Mexican food?" I asked at last.
"I like it best."
The only sensible reason, now that I thought about it. I thanked him and finished my taco as I walked.
I had no idea what I wanted anymore. For a moment I wondered what Sunny Rico wanted, what she
hoped I'd decide. I would almost have gone back to ask her, except for a nagging feeling that it would be embarrassing, and that it would bother me more to be embarrassed in front of Rico than in front of most other people. And what had she meant about her father, anyway? That he'd been an inept cop? That he'd died at it, maybe? Surely that would warn his offspring away more than anything else.
The problem was, my head was too full. I decided to walk back to Tick-Tick's and see how she was, and run some of this by her.
When I hollered under her window and nothing happened, I didn't know whether to be worried or
relieved. She was inside delirious with fever; she felt so much better that she'd gone out. I hollered again.
This time she stuck her head out. She smiled at me, but it was a tired smile. "What, you again?"
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"I think
so. Which makes two of us."
"C'mon up." She pulled the ring that unlatched the front door.
The picture part of the tapestry that Tick-Tick's neighbor was weaving in the atrium was done. Young Andrew sat sprawling at the base of his tree, his arms and legs in painful-looking attitudes. The bag on his lap had partly spilled into the grass, and the rope weaving was accented with metallic fibers there.
The brothers were leaving the clearing at one end—one of them taking a last glance over his shoulder at his handiwork—as the wolves prepared to enter from the other. The border was in progress, but I saw that if Weegee had found his skull, he hadn't installed it.
All the bamboo blinds were let down over the windows on the west side of the Ticker's big room, which made it a little dimmer than I was used to.
"Hope you aren't trying to read in this," I said.
She was stretched out on the couch. "The light hurts my eyes. You can raise them, though, if the gloom weighs on your spirit." She smiled when she said it, but followed it up with a fit of coughing. It was a dry cough, and sounded painful. I filled the kettle and put it on the heat.
"My spirit can take it for the sake of your eyes. How do you feel?"
She didn't answer immediately. I put the first herb tea I could find in the teapot and got the honey out, along with a spoon and a mug. Then I went over to the couch.