Authors: Matt Stephens
The Gangs of New York were tough as any young people could get, but Yasi had five of them completely outdone.
They rushed her, all at once, trying to keep her from getting around them through mass of bodies. She dashed backward two feet and planted her foot on the wall, flipping over them like an acrobat, sending the biggest of them sprawling down the alley, the smallest of them running into the brick itself.
Mohawk got to his feet first, and pulled out a switchblade.
The click of steel springing open drew Yasi's attention instantly. All of a sudden there was a break in the combat, leaving Yasi and Mohawk staring at each other, with four bodies writhing at their feet.
There was another switchblade click, and Mohawk suddenly had two blades, one in each hand. He flashed the switchblades back and forth over his knuckles, clearly experienced with them. It was a show meant to frighten the opponent, showing off the blades in elaborate ways.
Yasi sized him up as the Gang Leader settled into a combat crouch. Her eyes blazed at him demonically, and she reached over her shoulder. An instant later the streetlights flashed off a samurai sword, gleaming wickedly in the night.
Mohawk took in the blade and quickly realized he was outclassed. Putting his knives away, he drew back two feet and held his hands out, palms up. Yasi lowered the tip of her sword, and made no move to stop the five of them as they rolled to their feet and retreated. They all stayed well away as she moved to stand between them and Wotcha. Message sent, Message received.
Yasi kept her sword low, the shining blade covering the entire width of the alley, gleaming against her shadowy silhouette, as they retreated with as much dignity as they could muster.
Once they were gone, Yasi sheathed her blade and turned on the elderly Watcher. "You missed the meeting." She said lightly. "I wondered what was going on, but now I understand you were doing
this
!"
Wotcha ducked her head, nervous before the younger woman. "I am… sorry Shinobi."
"What the hell were you doing here?" Yasi demanded, waving at the deepest end of the alley. "The entrance is right there. Why didn't you take it?"
"Solving a mystery." Wotcha defended. "By now you'll have heard that there's trouble on the lower levels, on the way into Market."
"The Riverfolk? What about them?"
"They aren't coming from the lower levels." Wotcha cracked. "They're coming from up here."
"From the Above?" Yasi repeated, shocked. "How is that possible?"
"There are bodies… At the Hudson." Wotcha reported. "They're Riverfolk."
Yasi reacted. "Are you sure?"
"Positive. I let myself in to look at the reports. They died of nitrogen narcosis."
"They got the bends?"
"Result of pressure change. Nobody can figure out how they died, so they're writing it off as amateur scuba divers being stupid, but the one thing they can't explain is why the three bodies are so pale. Three corpses that never saw sunlight before."
"Riverfolk." Yasi agreed. "How did those monsters get to the surface?"
"I don't know. They don't even come up four levels in the Underside, let alone to the Hudson River. Someone had to drag them up. Which means someone had to get to them." Wotcha waved to the entrance. "And as you say, the entrance is right there."
"Someone found an entrance to the Underground?" Yasi got to the point. "Vincent?"
"No, I can't believe that."
"He may have been starstruck, but he's not one of us." Yasi countered. "It's been a year. A lot of things can change in a year."
"More than you know." Wotcha said. "Vincent… he's different."
"Different how?"
"Well, back before you went and kidnapped him, I was the one watching. I can tell you, seeing our world changed his whole view."
Yasi was more interested in that than she should have been. "Oh?"
~oo00oo~
The cold snap that year was very harsh. More than a few who were caught out in it did not survive. Vincent felt awful for ordering pizza that night, forcing the delivery boy out onto the street during such a night. The ice was getting thick on the roads and the radio was reporting fatal accidents all over New York. The City was hunkering down to wait it out, and Vincent fully intended to do the same once he collected the Pizzas at the door.
The building Super had handed over the key when Vincent asked to lock up the Laundry himself that night. Vincent knew the reason he gave wasn't convincing anyone. The last year had seen a swift change in Vincent's method, and everyone saw it. The building Super was not unsympathetic, and as long as nobody complained and nobody caused trouble he would turn a blind eye.
Vincent had promised his temporary charges would behave themselves for one night, and took the stack of warm pizza boxes downstairs himself to make sure of it. The biting cold seemed to suck the warmth right out of the food, but it was far worse outside in the wind.
He left the laundry door unlocked. They would have to let themselves out early. It wasn't likely anyone would be near the laundry room until well after dawn, but better safe than sorry.
"We know your neighbors wouldn't like it." Checkov had promised him immediately. "We won't let you down. Besides, Wotcha vouched for you, and her friends are scary as hell."
The comment caught Vincent short. He didn't know what the connection between the regular homeless and the Lostkind was, but apparently some of them knew more than the general population. It reminded him of when Wotcha had screamed out the truth for all to hear and been avoided because of who was saying it.
Such thoughts chased him all the way back to his apartment, and he let himself in. The second he opened the door, his nose twitched as he picked up the smell of food. He was surprised to find cardboard take-out boxes on the coffee table in front of him. Someone had brought over Chinese food in the three minutes he'd been downstairs.
"Hi."
Vincent spun. Yasi was sitting on his windowsill, pressed up tight against the glass, looking out at the slush. Somehow she managed to do so sitting cross-legged on his windowsill. "Something we don't have a lot of… is windows." She admitted quietly. "You've seen our living spaces. We have huge openings in the walls. Our view is our window and door. I've never looked out over a space and had something in the way. If I want to see the city while it rains, I have to get wet. I want to see the city on a winter's night, I'll get cold. Never had a window before."
Vincent stared. She hadn't changed a bit. Her slender silhouette was as intimidating as he remembered it. She had simply appeared out of his memory like the last year had never happened. Her teeth shone palely in the darkness as she smiled over her shoulder at him. "I came up to find some friends of our Watchers, see if they had somewhere to ride out the cold. Apparently, they're all here now."
Vincent flushed for a reason he couldn't really define. "Are you going to get in trouble for coming here?"
"Maybe." Yasi admitted. "You're not going to tell anyone though, are you?"
"Of course not, but I meant..." Vincent waved out his window. "I meant, are you going to get in trouble for coming up?"
"Up Above?" Yasi blinked. "It's... it's uncommon for Shinobi, but it's not forbidden. People from my world come and go all the time. Look at it this way. You live in New York. How often do you go into Jersey City?"
"Not often." Vincent admitted.
"It's only a bridge away; there's nothing stopping you. It's just unusual, because you don't usually have anything there to draw your attention for long." Yasi explained. "In the Underground, on the lowest levels, there are people who can never come up to the surface. They've lived too deep too long, they get the bends. On the higher levels, like me? We try to move as much as we can, so that we can come and go as we will. But we stay invisible."
"Go places without windows?" Vincent smirked.
"Oh no, plenty of windows, but we're usually on the other side of them." Yasi shrugged, answering the question honestly. Vincent suddenly realized that she wasn't wearing an overcoat. The cold didn't seem to touch her at all. Yasi looked back to the window. "Sometimes on clear nights, I walk out by the river. When the air is still, the water reflects the city like a mirror. The reflection turns the city lights upside down, like the towers are reaching down instead of up."
"Reminds you of home?" Vincent quipped.
"You've seen it. My home is like a domed honeycomb. One thing I don't have is a skyline."
Vincent came over to the window, sat down next to her. The streetlight outside struggled mightily to shine through the slush and sleet that was riding the howling winds. "Wotcha says that people who come to your world from above, choose names for themselves when they get there. Your name isn't a profession, so I'm guessing you were born Below."
Yasi nodded. "I remember the first time I came to the City. First time I ever saw the sky. It was beautiful."
"How old were you?"
"Six or seven. We've got lights and lamps for UV, so we're not… allergic to the sun. The first thing any child of the Lostkind is taught, even before we learn to read or do sums… We learn to be invisible. To come and go without being caught. For all that, it would only take one person with their eyes open."
"You told me that once." Vincent said. "I've had my eyes open ever since."
Yasi turned away from the window enough to glance at him from the corner of her eye. "Yeah. Yeah you have."
It was a sincere compliment. She seemed awkward about it. Vincent was suddenly quite certain that Yasi had never had a conversation that lasted this long with someone that was not already a part of her world.
"Lostkind are talking about you." Yasi said finally, as if to water down what she had said a moment before. "They have places to go when the cold snap comes, but... most of the Homeless in this town aren't us. We can't take in everyone; because sooner or later word would get out about us, but... We try to help where we can, y'know?"
"Yeah. Yeah I do." Vincent agreed.
The lights went out. The streetlight too; and with it the whole street. For a moment, the wind was the only thing they could hear in the pitch black. It seemed to strengthen as it howled defiantly, exulting in the powerless reality of the city.
After a moment, there was a gentle clicking sound, and Vincent's face was bathed in a light blue glow from the lantern.
"You've still got that?" Yasi seemed surprised.
"Of course." Vincent said with a smile. "It's a memento of a place I will never forget."
Yasi just turned back to the window. For a moment, Vincent wondered if she was laughing at him. "We use them all over the place." She said. "They get made out of scraps, and metal that gets polished up to look new, and… We go through about thirty of them a year. They're so… disposable. Replaceable."
"Really?" Vincent asked in surprise. There hadn't been a day in the last year that he hadn't looked at the lantern and wondered about it, thought about the place. And now it seemed he was idolizing a light-bulb.
They sat silently for a while till Vincent noticed the takeout still sitting on his table. The cold was creeping in through gaps that he'd never known were there, and he knew the food would likely be getting cold quickly. "Stay for dinner? Looks like you brought enough for two; and if you're not in a hurry to be somewhere…"
Yasi hesitated. "I… I'd like to, but I'm not…"
"Yasi, if I'm not going to send strangers out into a storm like this, you think I'm going to let you go?"
Yasi glanced at the takeout and bit her lip.
"Will you even make it home?" Vincent asked. "The last thing I heard from the weather report suggested it's time to start buying survival gear."
Yasi grinned. "Worried about me?"
"I find I worry about a lot of people these days."
Yasi rose from her cross-legged crouch. "So I hear."
Vincent reacted. "Is that… why you're here? In my apartment I mean, not the city itself. You came to visit because you heard my… conduct has changed since meeting you?"
"Did you think we hadn't noticed?" She said, sounding eerily like Archivist.
"I know you noticed. I bought five bottles of skin lotion in the last year; they've all vanished out of my bathroom within a day or two."
Yasi laughed musically. "You don't strike me as the type to use it yourself."
Vincent laughed too. "I thought about tossing them down the sewers, but I figured people may talk." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Your guys don't go looking through… everything, do they?"
"Of course not." Yasi said instantly, with a smile on her face. "Especially not the back of your closet."
And they stayed like that a while, laughing in the small freezing apartment, with a Lostkind Lantern between them to hold back the darkness.
~oo00oo~
"Evening Miss Connie."
Connie Harnell looked up from her roster. "Wotcha." She greeted warmly. "It's good to see you. I was worried when you didn't check in at the shelter. It's going to be a bad night to be outdoors...."