Welcome to Bordertown (53 page)

She creeps through the darkened theater and through the heavy velvet curtains at the back of the stage. As she walks toward the green room, she hears a rustling coming from the wardrobe area. Curious again, she slips inside and goes toward the back of the room, where the three-way mirrors are.

There she stops, ducking instinctively behind a hanging row of old-fashioned dresses. Peering between them, she can see Tristan—tying on the black, long-sleeved outfit of the Rowan Gentleman, complete with flowing cloak. The berry-red half-mask hangs around his neck.

“What foolishness is this?”

It’s Alain’s voice. Ashley jumps and pulls farther back into the shadows. Alain, striding into the room, seems not at all surprised to see Tristan dressed like a lunatic who’s not supposed to be real. “We planned no—” he says.

Tristan cuts him off. “I thought I could handle things with Lydia. All this is happening because of me. It’s my fault. I’ve got to make it right.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Robert,” Alain says, and Ashley has to swallow her gasp, because if Alain knew that Tristan was really Robert all along, why did he hide that from the Silver Suit? From her? “We have all made mistakes. Going after Nigel Barrow alone will solve nothing.”

Alain knows the name of the man who grabbed me
, Ashley thinks in a daze.

“We’ve got to do something, or more kids are going to die,” says Tristan.

Ashley refuses to start thinking of him as Robert. She’s confused enough as it is.

Alain paces back and forth. He moves with a restless energy, so utterly unlike his usual self that, for a moment, Ashley wonders if it’s him at all.

“We don’t know what he’s doing,” Alain says languidly. His voice, at least, is the same. “Lydia was supposed to be the one who would tell us, but she never got the chance. You want us to just go in there unprepared? We’re supposed to be saviors of the
lost, not punishers of those who do wrong. The Silver Suits can sort them out.”

“He roughed up Ashley,” says Tristan. “In an alley near Mock Avenue. Tried to get her to tell him where I—Robert—was.”

Alain turns. There is real concern on his face and in his voice, making it sharp. “Is she well? How badly was she hurt?”

Tristan looks surprised at the vehemence in Alain’s tone. “She wasn’t hurt—just shaken up. But it means he’s coming after us. Our best chance is to go after him first.”

“I told her I’d walk her home,” Alain mutters, and Ashley realizes he is still talking about her. She wouldn’t have expected him to care that much.

“Are you listening to me, Alain? We have to go after Barrow and his crew before he comes to the Magic Lantern and burns it down.”

“I hear you and I agree.” Alain sounds grim. “Meet me tonight by the Mad River. There is an alley across from Dragon’s Claw Bridge with lots of useful shadows. We’ll search Nigel’s warehouse, see what he’s been up to. Tell the other eighteen to be ready in case we have need of them.”

The other
eighteen
? Ashley is so stunned she barely hears Tristan’s muttered acknowledgment. She presses herself back into the shadows just before he rushes past, letting himself out the theater’s back door. When it closes behind him, she peeks out again, but Alain is already gone.

Everything looks like it always does, except for a trunk shoved haphazardly back in place. Nothing she would have noticed before. She drags it out from the wall. The loose floorboard is obvious, and when she pulls that up, more than two dozen Rowan Gentleman costumes are revealed.

Ashley slips out the door after Tristan, her heart pounding in her chest, a cloak and mask in her arms.

*   *   *

Having barely slept the night before, Ashley naps fitfully through the day before rising at sundown. The apartment is empty—everyone else is out taking advantage of the night off. Everyone but Tristan, and she knows where he is.

She dresses herself carefully in a Gentleman’s outfit—the material is soft and flexible, the trousers only a little too long. She folds them over at the waist and ties her hair back, tucking it up under the hood of the cloak. In Kit’s cubicle, she finds a prop sword that could pass for the real thing and tucks it against her side, beneath the cloak. She feels the same shivery excitement she often feels before stepping out onstage, ready to throw herself into a part, to embrace someone else’s life.

Ashley finds Dragon’s Claw Bridge easily, and the alley across from it. It is as shadowy as Alain had promised—so shadowy that at first she doesn’t see him. When he steps out from the darkness in his black cloak and red mask, she nearly yelps out loud. He actually does look frightening.

He ducks his head in greeting. “Tristan. Are you ready?”

Ashley is speechless. This is not how she thought it would go at all. She had thought she would arrive and confront them both, not that Alain would mistake her for Tristan. Where
is
Tristan? She opens her mouth, but no words come out.

Alain takes her silence for agreement. “All right, then. I’ll take point.” He steps in front of her. What she had thought of before as a lazy stride now has a fluid and deadly grace.

Ashley follows him through the street, copying the way he tips his head forward so the hood of the cloak hides the mask. Her fingers go to the pommel of Kit’s fake sword, closing around it as though it were real. Unless Nigel Barrow is afraid of splinters, the sword is useless—and so is she.

Just as she convinces herself to tell Alain the truth, he slips into a doorway.

“I walked by before,” he says, sticking a pin into the lock. “No one home. Lucky us. Remember, we touch nothing. We’re just here to find out what’s going on.”

Ashley nods once and then Alain turns the knob, leaning his shoulder against the door and is inside.

“Alai—” she whispers, trying to make her voice sound low, like Tristan’s.

“Shhh,” he says, cutting her off and motioning her inside.

It’s a big, mostly empty room, lit by moonlight. There is the reek of sweat and the strong smell of Mad River water. It’s hot, almost swampy, and it’s not hard to see why. There’s a row of fireplaces along one wall. Fires burn in each of them, heating the bottoms of massive iron cauldrons.

“What
is
this?” Alain says, clearly baffled. “What are they doing here?”

Ashley shakes her head and shrugs, not daring to speak. She’s in it too far now, she realizes. She has to keep pretending to be Tristan unless she wants to endanger them both. Instead, she points at the long wooden table that runs the length of the room’s center. Stacked on the table are glassine packets of reddish dust—the same substance the girl in the theater coughed up when she died.

Alain moves gracefully over to the table, running his hands over the packets. “Could it be …” He looks up, and though his expression is hidden by the half-mask, Ashley can tell he is angry. “They’re dehydrating Mad River water,” he says. “Processing it—turning it into a drug you can easily smuggle into the World.”

“Lydia, the halfie girl,” says Ashley. “They must have been using her as a mule. That’s why she coughed up powder when she died.”

Alain stands frozen, staring at her, and Ashley realizes with a sinking feeling that she has forgotten to disguise her voice. “Ashley?” he says, in a voice that does not sound like his own. He stands stock-still. “Is it you?”

She is trying to think of how to reply when the doors burst open and Nigel’s crew swarms into the room.

*   *   *

It is her fault, all her fault. As Ashley sits in the hot, stinking darkness, pulling at the rope binding her wrist, waiting for Alain to wake up—hoping Alain will wake up—that’s all she can think about.

He was shocked, staring at her, off-balance. One of Nigel’s men ran at Ashley, and instead of trying to get out of there, Alain threw a knife at him. It hit, but a moment later, the rest of them were on him. It was shocking how many he took down. Maybe ten, some of them looking as though they might not get back up again.

Ten wasn’t enough.

Alain stirs, finally, and groans a little. They are tied to sturdy wooden posts in what Ashley has guessed is a storage room. They are only a few feet from each other. Alain raises his head and looks at her; his face is bloodstained, bruises blooming on his cheek.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, her voice breaking. “So sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t mean to—”

Alain makes a harsh sound that it takes her a moment to recognize as laughter. “Not much surprises me these days,” he says. “But you, Ashley, are always a surprise.”

“I overheard you and Tristan—Robert, I guess—talking in the wardrobe room,” she says. “First I thought he was the Rowan Gentleman; then I thought maybe you both were—”

“There are twenty of us,” says Alain matter-of-factly. “Nineteen members, and one to lead them.”

“And that’s you,” Ashley says.

“And that is me.”

“And all this time I never thought you cared about anything,” she marvels.

Alain says nothing to that.

“Why do you do it?” Her voice drops a level, as if someone might be listening, as if she’s asking him to tell her a secret, which, she supposes, she is. “I mean, you’re helping humans, right? Humans and halfies, you’re getting them out of Bordertown when they’re in trouble. Why?”

He’s quiet for a long moment. “Where I grew up, my parents had no use for humans, save as servants. They treated those servants very poorly, though the servants seldom complained of it. Glamour can make a bare closet seem like a bed heaped in silk. It can make the most meager, most foul food taste like roasted duckling and spiced cake. But I saw them as they were: thin, covered in sores, some worse than that. Eventually, it was a game between my parents and me—how many servants could I smuggle out without getting caught? I got quite skilled at it. So skilled they asked me to leave. They procured me the Magic Lantern on the condition that I never return.”

Ashley shudders. Sure, her mom had been a drunk and a mess, but she’d never thrown Ashley out. Never paid her to leave. “Why there of all places?”

“When I was very little, I would ask for stories from my human nannies. And I was told marvelous ones, big epic, grand adventures. Sometimes a nanny would get maids or the butler to help her act them out. It was only later that I realized those stories weren’t written down in any book. They were films.
Casablanca
.
The Wolfman
.
Star Wars
.”

Ashley laughs a little at that last one, but it isn’t really funny. It’s sad. She thinks how lonely he must have been, a child up in
one of those big houses on Dragon’s Tooth Hill, left alone most of the time with no one but humans—who must have been half crazy by then—to take care of him. She hopes they loved him, more than his parents did. They must have, to have made him so determined to pay them back somehow.

Ashley wishes she could reach across the darkness and touch his hand. His eyes have a silvery shine as he meets her gaze. “Why did you give me all those presents?” she asks.

Before he can answer, the door swings open. Ashley yelps in surprise. A tall man in the costume of the Rowan Gentleman is there, mask over half his face.

“Tristan?” Ashley says quietly.

The Gentleman looks from Alain to Ashley and then back again. Finally, he pulls off his mask. It’s not Tristan, but Kit.

“You told her?” Kit asks, sounding surprisingly petulant.

“She followed me,” Alain says. “And seems to have stolen your sword, too, so please don’t start on how I should have been more careful.”

Kit raises his eyebrows. “When you didn’t show up, Tristan called in the troops. I think we got most of them. Quite a laboratory downstairs.”

“I wonder how much of the stuff made it to the World already,” Alain says. “Or if it works so far from the Realm.”

“Let’s hope not,” Kit says, “because Nigel is no genius. If he’s thought of it, others have, too.”

Alain grunts. “Now perhaps you could untie me?”

“Got him,” Kit calls back into the hallway, and two more masked Gentlemen—one slight enough to be a girl—come into the doorway.

Kit makes quick work of Ashley’s bonds, and the other two cut Alain free. Ashley watches him get up, grabbing for the window
frame for support. Under the cape, she is sure he is a mass of bruises.

He moves carefully out into the hall and down the stairs, a parody of his affected laziness.

Nigel and a few other men are tied to chairs, blindfolded and gagged. Another Gentleman is carefully writing a letter to the Silver Suits on the wall, with arrows pointing to the no-longer-boiling cauldrons, to the bags, and finally to the men.

As Alain steps into the center of the room, the dozen or so masked Gentlemen walk toward him, exclaiming loudly. Then they see Ashley—see the cloak on her shoulders and her bare face—and stop. Alain just smiles and reaches into his pocket.

“You were a Rowan Gentleman tonight,” Alain says. “Would you like to cast the berries?”

It’s intimidating to be stared at by a bunch of masked people. “Uh, sure,” Ashley says.

Alain passes the handful to her. They are bright red and hard, like rubies.

“I just throw them?” she asks.

“You just throw them,” says Tristan, looking slightly aggrieved. She can’t blame him; he probably panicked when he got to the meeting place and there was no sign of Alain. She’ll have to apologize to him properly later.

Ashley casts the berries, high and wide, and they land near one of the fireplaces. That is the signal for the group to disperse, for one by one they slip quietly out the doors, until only Alain, Ashley, and Kit are left.

“I’m heading back to the apartment,” says Kit, leaning around the door. “Do you want to come?”

“Let me accompany Ashley home,” says Alain, in a voice that brooks no disagreement.

Kit shrugs. “Have it your way,” he says, and is gone.

Ashley walks slowly, matching her pace to Alain’s. He is still wincing, but he doesn’t seem to have sustained any serious injuries. It’s close to dawn, and the sky is lightening, the Mad River turning from black to red.

“I’m sorry,” Ashley says, after the silence stretches too long. “I guess I never really believed in the Rowan Gentleman because I just couldn’t believe there was someone like that—someone who helps people just for the sake of helping them. I think I came here tonight expecting to find out it was some kind of elaborate joke. But it isn’t. This is really what you do.”