The Night Market (15 page)

“Actually, this might take some getting used to. I’m
not accustomed to having company.”

There was a roughly circular pool dug out of the floor
of the bathhouse, lined crudely with uneven concrete and river-smoothed rock.
The spring came trickling out of a copper pipe inset in the base of the tub, so
that the water was almost unbearably hot near Yael’s feet but comfortable at
neck level.

“Why? Oh, I get it,” Jenny said, laughing and standing
up in the bath, soap bubbles scattered across her torso, between the stars
tattooed across her collarbone and the water dripping from the edges of her
hair. “Am I making you nervous, Yael?”

“What? No, not at all.”

Jenny sank bank down into the water with a grateful
sigh.

“I didn’t think that much of bathing until recently. I
took a shower when I needed to, and that was that. Until the Waste. After a
week out there I had dust everywhere, you know?”

Yael did know, intimately. She nodded with genuine
sympathy.

“That stuff is like chalk. It’s horrible. Friction
burns, rash, the whole nine yards. And the things it did to my hair...”

Jenny squeezed the water from her hair and examined it
sorrowfully. Yael had to come to much the same conclusion when she had examined
her parched hair and split ends, and had allowed the maid who had shown them
into the bath to cut her hair with a pair of kitchen shears in a straight line
across her neck, level with the base of her ear. She had experienced a moment
of doubt when the first of her dry and tarnished locks fell to the ground
beside her, doubt and insecurity bubbling up along with unfortunate memories.

That all faded, however, when Yael looked in the
mirror – because her stepmother would never have allowed her to wear her hair
so short. Her stepmother would have hated it, which was reason enough for Yael
to decide that she liked it.

“I could cut your hair short for you...”

Jenny shook her head emphatically, sending drops
flying from her sopping wet hair.

“No way. Tried that before. I can’t make it work. I’m
not cute like you, Yael. I end up looking like a boy.”

Yael busied herself with a pumice stone, removing
grime from beneath her toenails. She clipped them already, but the dust from
the Waste, as Jenny mentioned, seemed to get everywhere.

“Hey, are you too hot or something? Because you are
kinda red...”

Occupied in working over the callus on her heel, Yael
ignored her. Jenny went back to splashing about and generally making a mess of
things.

“Jenny, how did you convince the hotel to let us stay?
And use their bath and everything? This place is pretty nice...”

“Pretty nice? It’s fu – it’s amazing! The room has
electric lights! The bed sheets are clean. This bath is deep enough for me to
dunk my head under,” Jenny paused to demonstrate, then came up sputtering with
hair in her eyes. “What more could you possibly want?”

“All right, the hotel is
very
nice. Now will
you tell me how you arranged it?”

Jenny pouted, squeezing water from the sponge on the
back of her neck.

“You still don’t trust me.”

“Should I?”

“No.”

“Well?”

“Okay. I traded your...”

“Be serious, please.”

“Fine. I had a talk with the guy who runs this place.
Turns out he needs a favor. So, I cut a deal. We get to stay here for a couple
nights. In return, I gotta take a little walk later, work out a dispute the
hotel owner has running with a local merchant. I won’t be long.”

Jenny closed her eyes and sank down until the nape of
her neck rested on the mottled lip of the pool. Yael waded closer, moving
slowly, as if she feared disturbing the water.

“Jenny?”

Her voice squeaking, little-girly, ridiculous echoes from
the arched ceilings of the bath.

“You didn’t promise to do anything bad, did you?”

“It actually ties into some business of my own, so
it’s really not a big thing. Don’t worry about it.”

“You are avoiding the question. What did you agree to
do?”

Jenny didn’t bother to open her eyes when she
answered.

“I didn’t break your rules. I’m sure this can all be
worked out with a conversation,” Jenny said crisply. “Nobody gets hurt.”

“Not – not even you, right?”

Jenny cracked an eye. Yael couldn’t be sure through
the steam, but she thought Jenny looked surprised.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Yael could feel the weight of the things she wanted to
say pressing in on her like a landslide. Her words, however, chose that
particular moment to fail her. By the time she found an answer, Jenny was
floating on her back with her ears beneath the water, deaf to anything Yael
might have wanted to say.

***

“Secrets cannot be kept.”

The ladder is really just a set of
metal staples driven into the concrete walls of the air shaft, and the bent
steel has rusted and become fragile over the years. The staples are cold, and
they stain her hands red with oxidized metal. Yael is careful not to look down
as she climbs.

At dinner with her family, Yael is
horrified by the food, which appears to be made up of raw organs, still
impossibly pulsing with life.

At temple on Friday, she watches the
light fade through stained glass windows while the cantor sings Shabbos
prayers. The congregation will not stop talking, exchanging business cards and sharing
cell phone photos, infuriating Yael. She turns to whisper as much to her
brother, but his presence is a blank in her mind.

PE class, sixth grade, playing
volleyball. The sound of sneakers on a wooden floor in a vast gymnasium. Her
arms are red and stinging from the impact of the ball. She dives for a long
serve but her save goes to waste, bouncing on an empty court. She cannot
understand where everyone has gone.

Home alone for the first time, torn
between fear of whatever is making noise on the second floor and a perverse
desire to see, to be frightened.

“Grateful for the morning.”

Yael is tearing through her school
bag, trying to find her persistently ringing phone. The teacher is shouting at
her,  fuming and red-faced, and the other kids in class are laughing and
pointing, but no matter how many things she pulls from her bag, she can’t find
it.

The sun rising through the window in
her brother’s room. He is reading to her from one of his ancient books in his
shaky, quiet voice. She holds absolutely still, as any rustling of clothing or
clearing of her throat will drown him out. It is the story of a terrible alien
color that consumes the minds, and eventually the lives, of everything
surrounding it.

Late. She is going to be...

There is a train. She has forgotten
the time, she has misplaced her ticket. By the time she arrives at the station
the train is already moving, her brother’s face vague behind the train window,
sliding smoothly out of sight.

There is a train. A Black Train, iron
and menace under a layer of soot. Wherever it has come from, Yael knows that no
one comes back. There are only departures from this station, and it is too late
for her to change her ticket. There are only departures, and she does not want
to go where this train will take her.

A Black Train, but to what
destination?

“There is no destination. There is no
sanctuary save the heart.”

Warm water and lavender-scented bath soap, skin that
stubbornly insists on freckling in the summer despite a small fortune invested
in cosmetics engineered to prevent exactly that. Walking the hallways of a
slumbering house, a deadbolt sliding home with exquisite slowness. Uneven
illumination and the smell of the poisoned Atlantic, salt and ozone with an
underlying hint of mineral oil.   

“Wake up, Yael. We
need to get going.”

Tobi,
minus his left eye and a chunk of his ear, sat on the pillow next to her head,
calmly licking one of his paws clean, full of practiced nonchalance that Yael
saw through immediately. Yael transitioned from fast asleep with her arms
around a pillow to kneeling on the bed with a startled cat held to her chest in
seconds flat.

“Yael!
Stop that! Put me down!”

“Oh,
thank God, Tobi! I knew you would make it! I knew that you would find me.”

“I
am very glad. Now, let’s not ruin the occasion by smothering me, please...”

Yael
reluctantly freed the cat, who quickly scampered well out of reach before he
resumed the conversation.

“Yes,
well, I am sorry that I took so long. There were unavoidable delays.”

“I
would think so,” Yael said, beaming at Tobi. “I assume the delays that you are
referring to include the tentacle monster?”

“I’d
rather not get into that,” Tobi said, shaking his head as if to dispel a bad
memory. “We don’t have time right now. We have to move.”

Yael
flicked the switch at the base of the lamp, blinking at the harsh light, then
went to the sink in the corner of the room to splash her face with cold water,
the only option the corroded tap offered.

“Where
are we going?”

“To
the station, naturally. We have a train to catch. But you know that already. I
could hear your dreams a mile away.”

Yael
dried her face with one of the ancient and faded hotel towels, then sorted
through the pile of cleaned and folded clothing by her bedside. She was glad
that Jenny had thought to ask the staff wash them, because her clothes had
turned the color of the Waste. They weren’t exactly sparkling now, but they
were an approximation of clean, at the very least. Yael selected what she needed
for the day, tucking the remainder into her duffle bag.

“Alright,”
Yael said, pulling on her tights. “I need to get dressed and comb my hair, and
then we can go find Jenny...”

Tobi
froze and his eyes narrowed.

“Please
tell me,” Tobi encouraged, claws digging into the bedding, “that you are not
referring to Jenny Frost.”

Yael
froze in the act of putting a t-shirt on.

“And
if I am?”

Tobi
sighed. Yael was mildly surprised to learn that cats could sigh.

“I
heard rumors when I was tracking you across the Waste. But I had hoped that they
were not true.”

“Why
is that?”

“Surely
you have noticed by now? Jenny Frost isn’t to be trusted. She isn’t even human,
in fact.”

Yael
had to sit back down on the rumpled bed cover.

“What
do you mean?”

Tobi
hopped up to the windowsill, glancing outside at the empty street.

“We
all come from somewhere, Yael, and that marks us forever, regardless of the
choices we make. Jenny Frost came from a terrible place.”

“I
don’t understand.”

“You
can’t. No more than I understand your motivations,” Tobi said, arching his
back. “An inherent difficulty with interspecies communications. You are rather
remarkable, actually, in that you can hear me speak. Most of your kind have
separated from the world to such an extent that they are no longer a part of
it.”

“You
aren’t making sense!”

“I’m
telling you that Jenny Frost is inherently unsafe,” Tobi explained tersely.
“How did you find yourself traveling with her?”

“Bribery,”
Yael admitted. “But...”

“But
nothing,” Tobi said, obviously satisfied. “She is acting in her own interest. Surely
there will come a time when that means betraying you.”

“None
of that makes sense to me,” Yael complained. “Jenny is my friend.”

“What?”
Tobi looked appalled; something else Yael hadn’t known that cats could do until
that moment. “You must be joking, Yael. She has treachery encoded in her very
DNA.”