Welcome to Bordertown (17 page)

A servant—a human servant, a middle-aged lady—padded into the room carrying a silver tray, which she set down on the long, lustrous table. The woman gave Jetfuel a warm hug and gave me a suspicious look before offering me a cup of tea. She fussed with small biscuits and cakes but didn’t bother us as we moved around the painting, which dominated one wall, using a spell-light to cast a bright spot on each leaf, each of us writing down each number in turn, checking each other’s work. My network operators did this all the time, but it had been years since I’d had to do it, and I’d lost track of how tedious it was. My people earned their pay.

We sat down to eat our biscuits just before her father’s keys rattled in the front door lock. Even before the knob had turned, Jetfuel’s back had stiffened, all the fun going out of her face. She
set down her cookie and pursed her lips; then she stood and crossed to the doorway, looking down the hall as the front door swung wide. I trailed after her.

Her father looked like your basic Business District suit: conservative hair, a Worldly suit cut to emphasize his long, slender torso and limbs and neck. But for the silver eyes and pointed ears, he might have been a skinny banker on his way to Wall Street. He stepped into the cool dark of his hallway, already unbuttoning his jacket, and was just turning to hang it on a burnished brass coat hook when he caught sight of Jetfuel.

The war of emotions on his face was unmistakable: first delight, then sadness, then irritation. “Sweetheart,” he said. “What a nice surprise.” He made it sound real enough. Maybe it was.

Jetfuel jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Dad, this is Shannon. I’ve told you about him. Shannon, this is Baron Fenrirr.”

He snorted. “You can call me Tom,” he said. He stuck out his hand. “Heard so much about you, Shannon. Good things! What you’ve done for our city—”

I shook his hand. It was cool and dry, and the fingers felt as long as patch cables. “Nice to meet you, too.”

And then we all stood, a triangle of awkwardness, until the baron said, “Right, well, plenty to do. Will you stay for dinner?”

I thought he must be asking Jetfuel, but he was looking at me. I looked at Jetfuel. She shook her head. “Plenty to do,” she said. “Got to get back to BINGO.”

That look of sadness again on his face, and then he nodded. He took one step toward the staircase that led to the upper rooms, where, I suppose, he kept his study. Then he turned again and shook my hand goodbye. “Nice to meet you. Don’t be a stranger.” After he let go, he turned and grabbed Jetfuel in a hug that was so sudden she didn’t have time to back away. She stiffened again,
as she had at the table, but he kept squeezing, his face lowered to the top of her head, where it smelled, I knew, of bread. He kept on holding her, long beyond what a normal parental hug might have demanded. She slumped into his arms and then, tentatively, hugged him back.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, enough.”

He let go and she slugged him in his skinny shoulder, and they smiled an identical smile at each other. He went upstairs. We grabbed our notebooks and our cookies, and Jetfuel called out a goodbye to the maid, and we stepped out into the day and started the walk to BINGO, where we would send back the third part of the protocol.

*   *   *

I thought Jetfuel’s poem was funny:

Jetfuel squinted at the sheet of paper and scowled at it and made ready to ball it up and toss it to the bedroom floor along with the previous fifty attempts. I stopped her hand, grabbing it in
mine and bringing it up to my lips. “Stop already. Enough. It’s a funny poem.
I
think it’s beautiful. As beautiful as a financial report, anyway, and tons of those get across the Border.”

She shook her hand away from my lips and glared at me, then flopped against the pillows and nuzzled her head into my chest. “Financial reports aren’t contraband. This needs to be beautiful enough to pass on its own merits.”

I shook my head. “It’s beautiful. Enough. You’ve written a hundred poems. This one’s got everything—sex, midgets, and math jokes!
That’s
what I call beauty.”

“ ‘Six’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘trick.’ ”

“Sure it does. Six trick, six trick, six trick, six trick. Rhyme.”

She looked out the window at the twinkling Faerie dust streets of B-town. “I’ll take another crack at it in the morning,” she said.

“Put it in an envelope, affix postage, and give it to a runner downstairs to bring to the couriers on Ho Street.”

“You are the world’s worst boyfriend,” she said.

“And yet here we are,” I said, and kissed her.

*   *   *

How beautiful was the poem? I don’t know. Maybe it was beautiful enough to traverse the Border, and maybe Synack received it at Caer Ceile and stitched a beautiful embroidered frame for it and hung it on the wall, or maybe she burned it by moonlight or fed it to the unicorns or something.

Maybe Synack never received it and will spend the rest of her days as the mistress of Caer Ceile, attending Elf Parliament in gossamer dresses and tabling motions to increase the Faerie dust allotment to Narnia.

Maybe Synack received it and clutched it in her hand tightly and set off for the Border to hand it back to us, to prove that a single bit could traverse the invisible barrier that separates two
worlds—two universes—but as she approached the Border from the Faerie side, she pricked her finger on a spinning wheel and fell into a thousand-year sleep. Or perhaps no time has passed for her as she crossed the Border, but the years have stretched by here.

In case you’re wondering, we still haven’t heard back from her.

Jetfuel’s dad installed a peecee in his study, and he sends Jetfuel email three times a day, which she almost never answers.

Some kid from the World just showed up with his own Wikipedia server that he’s running out of a Net café on Hell Street, and he’s maintaining the canonical B-town pages. Farrel Din is
pissed.

I still think Jetfuel’s poem was beautiful. She gets up earlier than I do, and her pillow smells of warm bread, so I get to bury my face in it until the smell of the coffee and Tikigod’s shouting rouses me every morning.

T
he trouble is, I ran away when I was fifteen. Everyone knows you run away when you’re sixteen. That’s the proper age. At sixteen, a long golden road opens up before you, and at the end of it is this amazing life. A sixteen-year-old runaway walks with an invisible crown—boys want to rescue her and they don’t even know why. Girls want her to rescue them. She smells like peaches or strawberries or something. She’s got that skittish, panicky beauty that makes circuses spontaneously sprout in the tomato field outside of town, just to carry her off, just to be the thing she runs away to. Everyone knows: you run away at sixteen, and it all works itself out. But I couldn’t even get that right, which is more or less why I’m sitting here telling you all this, and more thanks to you for the ear.

My name is Fig. Not short for anything, just Fig. See, in eighth grade my school did A
Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and for some reason Billy Shakes didn’t write that thing for fifty overstimulated thirteen-year-olds, so once all the parts were cast, the talent-free got to be nonspeaking fairies. I’m not actually talent-free. I could do Hermia for you right now. But I was so shy back then. The idea
of auditioning, even for Cobweb, who barely gets to say “Hail!” felt like volunteering to be shot. Auditioning meant you might get chosen or you might not, and some kids were always chosen and some weren’t, and I knew which one I was, so why bother?