Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (34 page)

“What? The thing about his family?” Joy lowered
her voice. “That was a bluff. I would never do something like that.”

“Ah,” said Gray. “So that’s what it sounds like
when someone is lying to themselves.”

Joy and Gray combined their efforts to get the word out
about Larch’s list of names. Joy let Gray handle FBMA contacts while she
handled GUMP, the New Zealand Police, and a few calls that were less than
official. It was two hours before they were free to talk to the next prisoner,
well past the designated time for interviews.

“I don’t know why you’d even bother with this
one,” said their Philly guard. “He hasn’t said word one since he was brought
in. They ask him what he wants in the mess, he just points. He wouldn’t even
speak to his lawyer.”

“I’m really sorry,” said Joy. “We wouldn’t be
asking if it wasn’t important.” She smiled. Joy couldn’t say whether or not she
had a nice face, but she’d been told that was the case, and she knew she was
fit. Flirting was pretty near the bottom of her list of work strategies, but
she needed to get this done tonight, before Flood caught wind of it.

The guard grumbled a bit more, but he made a
call to one of the guards on the fifth floor. “Take Interview Six,” he said
after he hung up. “You owe me one.”

“Thank you,” said Joy. “I appreciate you getting
that photo out on the wire too.”

The guard led them to Interview 6 and let them
in. “Same deal here; cameras, but no audio. This one’s quick, but at least he’s
human.”

“I know,” said Joy. “I already took him down
once.”

“That was you?” The guard’s tone changed. “Much
respect,” he said, and flashed her a grin as he locked them in.

“Remember,” Joy said, “you’re the lead on this
one.”

“I don’t have any questions for this guy,” said
Gray.

“I just mean that this is your interview, if
anybody asks.”

“Because you’re not supposed to be talking to
him.”

“You said you’d help.”

“I didn’t say I’d stop pointing out that it’s a
bad idea.”

Joy was tired, but getting into an argument with
Gray was counterproductive. She sat at the interview table and tried to gather
her thoughts. To get through to him she needed to have all her facts lined up.
She needed to believe what she was saying. She shut her eyes for a moment,
thinking of meditating while she waited, but she had barely begun to even out
her breathing when the door opened.

The guard—one from the upper floors, Joy assumed—held
his baton between the prisoner’s shoulder blades to walk him forward. The
prisoner took in Joy, Gray, and the room without any change in his expression
or his bloodred aura. Idly, Joy tried to recognize him, but whatever the
Emissary had done to her brain did not extend to her henchmen.

The guard maneuvered him into the chair opposite
Joy and locked his hands to the steel ring on the table. “Have a nice chat,”
said the guard, and left the room.

“Hello,” said Joy.

The man stared at her without interest.

“Would you like to tell me your name, or shall I
just refer to you as…assassin number one?” The geas wouldn’t allow her to use
the phrase “Sons of Order.” Joy was disappointed, but not surprised.

The man’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t speak.

“You were sent here by the woman who calls
herself the Emissary to kill me. You, or one of your brothers, were also
responsible for the death of Martin Shil.”

The man looked at his hands.

“I’m boring you, I suppose. You already know
these things. You already know that I know these things. But there are things I
know that I don’t think you know that I know.”

The man raised his eyebrows. Gray coughed.

“You know what I mean,” Joy said. “For instance,
I know that you are one of—how many? Dozens? Hundreds? Did you grow from a test
tube, or do…” She tried to say, “the goddesses of Order,” but the geas wouldn’t
let it through, so she tried again. “Do they give birth to litters of you, like
puppies?” She didn’t wait for him not to respond. “I know that you and your
brothers have made at least four attempts on my life by now. I haven’t figured
out what the idea was behind the Emissary trying to seduce me with her vision
of the worlds of order, and her…her face. Was she hedging her bets? Martin was
fairly easy for you to kill, I suppose.” She tried to say something about how
Bebe must have given them Martin’s name, but it wouldn’t come out; when she
tried to force it, she could only manage a cough.

“Other dimensions are real. That much has become
obvious.” She was relieved to get that one through. Her own deductions would
have led her to that conclusion even without the aid of the Thirteenth Rib, she
supposed. “You’ve come from one of them. One or both of my case objectives
bumps up against your organization’s goals. You—not as an individual, but the
people you represent—are responsible, directly or indirectly, for either the
actions of the Four Corners group or the disappearance of Carla Drake, or both.
You killed Martin in the hopes of derailing our investigation. When that didn’t
work, you came after me.”

The man sat up, licked his lips, opened his
mouth wide—and yawned.

“Do you want to know why I think you’re so
calm?” said Joy. “I think that…you”—she had tried to say “order,” but
couldn’t—“have a mole in the FBMA. Possibly more than one. Possibly you’ve
replaced some of our people with alternate versions of themselves, from one of
the dimensions that you control.”

“Joy,” said Gray. “Can we—”

“Just a minute,” she said. “I’m almost done.”
She stood. “We’re going to track you down,” she said. “Your own likeness is
already circulating. If there are any more of your brothers here, we’ll find
them. We’ll find your moles too. And your plans for”—she choked on the word
“invasion,” but kept talking—“your plans are going to fail. I’ll see to it.”
She turned back to Gray. “We’re finished here.”

He rapped on the door. The room was silent until
the guard came to let them out.

“Didja get what you needed?” he asked once the
door was shut.

“I think so,” said Joy.

The guard shook his head. “Didn’t look to me
like he said a word.”

“I think we’re good,” said Joy.

“Must be one of those body-language readers? Is
that it?”

“Something like that.”

Gray didn’t say a word until they were in the
lobby reception area.

“Nothing,” he said. “You put my name on that
interrogation, an interrogation that Flood expressly forbid you from ever
conducting, and we got nothing. Not a goddamn word.”

“Come outside,” said Joy. It was a breezy night
on Arch Street, so Joy stood close to Gray as she spoke.

“I didn’t expect him to say anything,” she said.
“That interview was entirely for your benefit.”

“What the hell does that mean?” he asked.

“How did I sound in there? When I was summing up
my conclusions. Did I tell any lies? Did I sound at all unsure?”

Gray crossed his arms. “Just because you believe
something—”

“Did I lie?”

He sighed. “You were a little shaky on that last
bit. Your threats and promises. Other than that…”

“Other than that, I was rock solid.”

“You seemed convinced, yes.”

“He didn’t argue, either, did he?”

“Please. He wouldn’t have argued if you had told
him his eyebrows had turned into caterpillars.”

“Fine. But you see that I’m convinced. Did I
convince you? Because that favor you just did for me in there—a favor which I
appreciate and will happily pay back when I can—is only the beginning. I’m
going to need more of your help.”

Gray shook his head.

“Tom. Please. For Martin’s sake.”

Gray flinched, but he let his arms fall to his
sides. “If there’s a mole in the bureau, why are you so sure that you can trust
me? We barely know each other.”

“I’m willing to trust my instincts in your
case.”

“Instincts? Fate of the world, you’re going with
instinct? Come on, at least tell me I have a nice, trustworthy aura or
something.”

“Honestly, the person I’ve met lately whom your
aura most resembles is the librarian-panther. I’m trusting you in spite of
that.”

“What is it you have in mind?”

“Before I can tell you that, we have one more
prisoner to talk to.”

The first recipe Zelda had ever mastered was for what was
widely known as an avoidance potion, something Zelda thought of as her
Leave-Me-Alone concoction. Invisibility as physical effect was a difficult spell
to pull off, and the spells were generally not safe to apply directly to humans—either
internally or externally—but avoidance was easy, effective, and made a nice
mixer with vodka, gin, or chocolate milk.

Avoidance magic basically meant that so long as
you weren’t drawing attention to yourself, everyone would simply fail to notice
you. Perfect if, say, you had been recently released from juvenile hall, were
working in a fast food restaurant while you tried to un-derail your life, and
didn’t want anyone from your high school to recognize you. There had been a
time in Zelda’s past when she drank three or four avoidance potions a day. In
her late teens, Zelda had wanted desperately to disappear, but didn’t really
have anywhere to disappear
to
.

Sitting in the intensive care unit in a chair
surrounded by wires regulating tubes that connected to plastic boxes that
beeped was an ideal spot. The nurses came and went without once glancing in her
direction. At one point a pair of doctors came in, had two simultaneous
conversations about Hector’s recovery and someone’s divorce, all the while
standing right in front of her. If she had stood and asked a question, they
would have had no choice but to notice her; avoidance magic only worked if you
didn’t want to be noticed and didn’t do anything that would set off an actual
alarm, like break into someone’s house or try to ransack a pharmacy. It wasn’t
a shield for illegal activity; it was just the ultimate accessory for
wallflowers-by-choice.

Zelda wasn’t sure how long she’d been here.
She’d gone home after speaking to Joy—even started to pack a bag—but couldn’t
figure out where she should go. She’d decided that she had better eat
something, but ended up throwing out a pot of noodles because the sight of them
made her sick. She’d gone to bed, knowing she had to work in the morning, but
she couldn’t sleep. So she’d thrown together a potion and come back to the
hospital, into the ICU, where no one but the staff and the immediate families
were supposed to be.

Hector hadn’t moved in the entire time she’d
been here. His breathing was steady, although it seemed shallow, even for a
sleeping person. The broken side of him was splinted and bandaged beyond
recognition. It was as if he were a man made out of cloth and plastic, just waiting
for the finishing layers of skin and hair on the right side of his body.

She started and realized that she had been
dozing in the chair, dreaming a Hector made out of bandages. She breathed deep,
uncurled her legs from under her, and stood next to the bed. She grasped the
cast that covered Hector’s hand in her own. The plaster was rough but warm. He
was breathing through a tube, still. His eyes moved beneath his eyelids, and
she hoped that he was dreaming of good things.

“Hey,” she said, and then she waited. She didn’t
expect him to respond, but she wanted to leave him a space in the conversation.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I…this is my fault. I
wanted you for a long time, long before you ever seemed to notice me. A long
time before that night we were together. But I got used to not wanting things.
I guess I learned to make my life small, to keep other people out. It was the
only way to live with the curse, and I didn’t have any choice but to live with
the curse.”

She paused for the response that wasn’t going to
come.

“But you got through,” she said, “and now you’re
lying there hurt because of me, and I’m thinking—I’m thinking that living with
the curse isn’t living. It’s something I’ve been carrying with me for half my
life, and it’s a punishment I deserve.
Deserved.
But maybe I’ve done my
time. I think I might…I think I might deserve a chance to be happy, and I think
maybe you are that chance.”

She kept on talking, because even if he’d been
awake she couldn’t have let him respond to that part. “Which is why I can’t
have anything to do with you until I figure this out. I can’t argue with you
about the curse, and I can’t listen to you try to talk me into things that I
already want to do. I can’t even tell you all of this when you can hear me, because
I’m terrified of what the curse might do. Because I’m going to get rid of it.
I’m going to find some way to lift it. And if it works, well, you’ll end up
seeing a lot more of me, I hope. If you…if you still want to. But for now I
have to say good-bye.”

She wanted to kiss him. His face was covered
with gauze and adhesive bandages, but that wasn’t what stopped her. She just
didn’t dare, after everything that had happened. She didn’t dare take the
chance of hurting him even worse. So she squeezed his cast and walked out of
the room.

The interview rooms at the United States Penitentiary at
Gooseberry Bluff were much older than those at the detention center in
Philadelphia: naked concrete crumbling in the corners, flickering fluorescents
above, cold radiating from the floor and ceiling.

Joy sat and clutched at her coffee, the only
source of warmth around. There was Gray, but he insisted on standing behind
her. “Sitting is bad for you,” he said. “Besides, you’ve kept me up all night.
If I sit down I’ll be snoring in a minute.”

It was no longer late; it was early, about five
thirty in the morning. Joy hadn’t yet had a call from Flood,
probably—hopefully—because the bureau was busy running down the names Joy had
extracted from Fredrick Larch. Joy hoped that the information would blow the
case open and put Four Corners out of business. She should be out there on the
front lines of this, whether Flood wanted her there or not.