Welcome to Bordertown (6 page)

I’m
the one who stands out here, a long-haired redneck with a scruffy old dog and a heavy old duffel that I carry everywhere. (My tools are in that bag, and I’m
not
letting them get stolen.) I packed up my tools with more care than my clothes, so my wardrobe is kind of limited, just two pairs of jeans, an old flannel shirt, and a couple of T-shirts from Mr. Fix-It, the repair shop where I used to work. Some of the kids at the Diggers’ House are calling me Mr. Fix-It now. I’d been quietly making repairs at the House—just simple things, carpentry and plumbing jobs that don’t need any weird magic. If a hinge is sagging or a tap is leaking, it will bug me until I get out my tools.

At night, in my closet, I sleep like the dead, with Rosco stretched out and snoring beside me. The next day we’re up and back on the streets: We walk and we walk and we walk and we walk. I stare at strangers; I scan every crowd; I ask everyone I meet if they’ve seen her. “Maybe,” they tell me. She’s got that kind of face that you think you’ve seen somewhere before. And maybe
you have. So I follow every lead I am given, and it’s never my sister.

Berlin, at the Diggers’ House, is sympathetic but not optimistic. She tells me that finding one runaway girl in a city this big will be no easy task. “If she’s down here in Soho, then maybe you’ll get lucky. But, honey, she could be anywhere—traveling with the traders, or working Uptown, or tucked away in some fancy love nest on the Hill. What are you going to do, spend the next five years knocking on every door from Letterville to Elftown?”

Yeah, I know, needle and haystack. But I’ve got to try to find her all the same. My family has been broken for thirteen long years now.

And fixing things is what I do.

*   *   *

Should I stay or should I go?

A solitary violinist was busking mournfully on the southern corner of Ho and Third. Even he was fiddling that same tune. Playing it like a lament.

It was too much. Trish felt like she was going crazy—like the city itself was attacking her, mocking her indecision, magnifying her pain. She whirled around in a circle on the sidewalk in front of Danceland, looking for an escape that wasn’t there. She couldn’t breathe. She was going to faint—she was going to die—

“Hey.” Trish felt a hand on her arm. “You okay?”

It was an elf, tall and blond—a girl with a ponytail and a Changeling Theater T-shirt. It was Cam, the halfie waitress from the Hard Luck Café.

“Here …” Cam tried to ease Trish’s backpack off her.

For some reason the lifting of that tiny burden made Trish want to burst into sobs of relief, as though Cam were lifting all her troubles off her back. But she didn’t want to cry on the street, in front of some stranger—

“Hey,” Cam said again, helping her sit down on the curb. “It’s okay. Really. Everyone from the World is going through it. I see it all the time, these days. You’re all in shock.”

“What about you?”

“I was born here. I’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Well, um, thanks for worrying about me, then.”

“No worries!” Cam grinned. “That’s what the kids from Brisbane say all the time. ‘No worries!’ I think it’s cute.”

Trish smiled shakily back. No worries.

“So, listen,” Cam said. “I’m on my way to work now, but you wanna come over to our place tonight? We’re at the Chimera, over on Carmine Street. You know, the big place down from Wish You Were Here, across from the Pumpkin Coach?”

She’d heard of the galleries and shops and clubs on Carmine Street. She’d thought there’d be nothing for her sort of person there. But now, it seemed, there was.

“Okay,” Trish said. “Chimera. Do I need a special pass to get in or something?”

Cam laughed. “Hell, no. It’s just a squat—well, a squat and a little more. You’ll see.”

*   *   *

“You will like this party of Windreed’s,” his lady said. “Have you ever even been to Dragon’s Tooth Hill?”

Anush remembered his disastrous early attempts to collect data there, and kept his mouth shut.

“You will meet and mingle with the finest of our kind. I can show you off, and you can ask all Windreed’s Trueblood guests your most impertinent questions. It will be vastly amusing: They will all be furious, but none will dare retaliate, as you’re under my protection.”

“Protection?” Anush looked up between his hairy hands. “Is that what you call it?”

“Well …” He shivered as she stroked his hideous head. “You cannot be spelled by two of the folk at once. It’s beyond rude, and Windreed’s crowd are very point-device.”

“Well, that’s a relief. I’d sure hate to be ugly day and night. I’d sure hate to upset any more Truebloods. I’d sure hate for my questions to be—”

Her silvery laughter silenced him like a slap. “It’s so funny, when your voice gets all squeaky like that—”

“Then fix it!” he shouted—or tried to. He sounded ridiculous, even to his own ears. She was laughing again. He jumped for the table (jumping was something he did well) and swept off a candelabra that only last night had lit a feast for them both, sending it crashing to the floor.

“Beware,” she said coldly. “Just because you wear a beast’s form does not mean you may behave as one in my presence.”

“You want questions?” Anush cried. “Well, here’s a question for you! Did you know all along about this thirteen years thing? Was it you? Was it your pals in the Realm, just finding a new way to mess us up and ruin all our lives?”

The woman looked coolly at him. “That was three questions, my creature. You will never thrive in your quest for the truths of the Realm if you do not learn to count.”

Anush took a deep breath. It was true; he’d grown up on a diet of myth and fairy-tale books. He did know better. And he dimly remembered being that promising young student out in the World, believing that he’d be the one to crack the secrets of the Realm with his fabulous bicultural understanding of myth and magic. It was just that, when it was real, it was so complicated. He’d landed in the middle of a story himself. And the Truebloods hadn’t read the same books.

He tried again, as calmly as he could: “Was it the Truebloods
who made thirteen years in the World pass as thirteen days here in Bordertown?”

She walked to the other end of the room. He was learning that when she didn’t look him in the eye, didn’t face him directly, she was most likely to be telling the truth.

“We do not meddle in the World’s affairs. And I know of none with such power, in the Realm or on the Border. This little spell”—she waved her fingers at him in that irritating way—“is the strongest that I can work here. And even that will break when you pass out of the Borderlands.”

And there it was.

The crux of all his problems.

He could go home, be free of this whole mess … and then land in another one: home again, free all right, free to be Anush Gupta, Total Failure. Failed scholar, failed grad student, the world’s biggest disappointment to his family, the biggest disgrace that the Indian community of Sunnyvale, California, had ever known. Not to mention the fact that every girl his age would be thirteen years older than him.

He pulled on his T-shirt. “I’m going out.”

“By day? Like this?”

“Why not?” he said bitterly. “It’s not like anyone will recognize me.”

*   *   *

Trish watched Cam walk off down the street. How did you get to look like that? It wasn’t the willowy, angular blondness—that, you had to be born with. It was the bounce in the mismatched shoes, the striped socks, and the Faerie charms dangling from her belt. That was pure Bordertown. Trish could stay here till she was thirty, and she’d never look like that. Would she? She was a jeans-and-T-shirt kind of girl, a simple, serious person. Even at home, she
hadn’t been much for dressing up; that was for nonserious girls—and besides, if she could, she would dress in velvets and lace and skirts that swept the floor, nothing you’d ever find in Milltown.

But this was Bordertown. There were vintage shops on Carmine Street. Not that she had anything to buy with, but maybe she’d go there early tonight and just look around to see what was there.…

“Heads up! Monster on the loose!”

The shout rang up the street. Everyone was turning, staring at the thing that ran, scuttling, along the curb, waving its hairy arms and howling. It wasn’t a monkey, but it wasn’t human. Its face was hidden in a tangle of matted hair. Its hair was white—or whitish gray, anyway—and its arms and legs were skinny, the arms and fingers long—

“Gurgi!” Trish shouted, startled. The creature looked (and moved) just like Gurgi from
The Chronicles of Prydain
! She took off after him. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only one. Whether they were scared or just mean, other kids were after the creature, throwing garbage and even rocks. She saw one hit the creature, heard him give a cry of pain.

“Cut it out!” Trish cried. She stopped, turning, to stand between the creature and the crowd.

“Fuckin’ noob!” a guy cursed her. “Get outta the way!”

“It’s a monster from the Nevernever, bitch! Get it out of Soho before it goes toxic and destroys us all!”

“You goddamned illiterate wastrel,” Trish yelled, so mad she didn’t care that she wasn’t sure how to pronounce it (was it
waste-rel
or
wahss-trel
?). “You ignorant peasant jackass! It’s Gurgi from the Prydain books! Now back off, you brainless wonder, before I rip you a new one!”

Even Gurgi had frozen in the tirade of her wrath. He stood
behind her, shaking and whimpering—it almost sounded like giggling laughter.

And the other kids backed off and away, leaving Trish in command of her prize.

The creature peered up at her through matted hair.

“Crunchings and munchings?” it asked hopefully.

Trish grinned. She’d said it was Gurgi, but she hadn’t fully believed it. Nothing in Bordertown was like the books she loved. Until now. But that clinched it; that was exactly how Gurgi talked. She’d fallen into the right story at last.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

He had his arms crossed protectively over his chest.

His arms were skinny but strong, just like Lloyd Alexander described him.

“Come on, let me see,” Trish coaxed.

His arms fell to his sides.

What is Gurgi doing wearing a Harvard T-shirt?
Trish thought. “This is so weird,” she said. “You’re the second … um … guy I’ve seen this week in one of those.”

The shirt hung on his scrawny frame like a nightshirt on a little kid. “Noble lord was kind to Gurgi,” the creature said, his head bobbing up and down.

“
Anush
gave you that? Where— How was he?”

Gurgi pointed to her pack. “Noble mistress give crunchings and munchings to poor Gurgi now?”

Trish said, “Well, I don’t really have any food. I was on my way down to Riverside; I heard you can pick up some work by the docks, like, carrying things. We could do it together, and then they’ll give us both crunchings and munchings.”

The creature looked dubious. “Noble mistress saves Gurgi’s poor tender head from fightings and smitings?”

“Of course I will,” Trish said. “Come on—I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

That was what she used to tell Jimmy. As she walked downhill with Gurgi trotting by her side, she remembered Jimmy’s first day of kindergarten, when he’d been so scared.
I won’t let anyone hurt you. I’ll never let anyone hurt you.

What had happened to her little Jimbo? She hadn’t meant to leave him there. Sure, she’d been planning to go away to college, to the banks of the Charles, but she would have come back as often as she could. Hadn’t she promised to be home for Christmas? She would have made sure Jimmy had an escape route, too. That he didn’t have to go work down at the factory like Grampa and Dad and her three uncles if he didn’t want to. That nobody crushed the magic out of him.

*   *   *

I meet a guy in the stacks at Elsewhere Books who thinks he might have seen Trish. He studies the picture, then passes it to his companion, an Asian girl with her hair in many braids. “I’m sure I’ve seen her. It was at a music gig. Deki, what’s the name of that harper?”

“You mean Ossian?”

“Yeah, Ossian. I can’t remember where we were that night. At Sluggo’s, maybe? Or The Grand Conjunction?”

I add these names to my list of possible leads and thank them for their help.

I stop by the Poop at least once a day to check the message board. Still nothing there, but on the way out, I see a poster with the name Ossian. He’s playing an afternoon concert in Fare-You-Well Park, so I head in that direction.

I enter the park through the Ho Street gate, pass the buskers (good and bad) and the sidewalk artists (ditto), the mobile health clinic in its horse-drawn Winnebago, and a demented-looking guy
who is standing on a soapbox ranting about the Bordertown High Council. The park’s bandstand sits on a patchy stretch of lawn beyond the playgrounds and the bowling green. I reach it, and a hippie-looking girl in a “Respect the Realm” T-shirt hands me a concert flyer: “Traditional Music for the Elfin and Celtic Harps, Performed by Sashamia Leaves-upon-the-Water-at-the-Harvest-Moon and Ossian Feldenkranz.”

The audience spread across the grass is small, and it doesn’t take long to see my sister isn’t in it. We’re west of the Old City now, and this isn’t a Soho crowd; it’s mostly old people, a cluster of silver-haired kids from the Elfhaeme Musical Academy (it says so on their bags), and two skateboard punks who look like they belong here about as much as I do.

The concert has already begun. It’s the tinkling kind of music Trish likes, not me—but it reminds me of her, so I stay to listen, stretched out on the grass beside Rosco with my head propped on my tool bag. The sun pours down like honey, and the harp music floats upward (
plonk
,
plonk
,
plonk
), drifting over the grass and trees and the background roar of the surrounding city.…

*   *   *

The Fish and Farmers’ Market was all hustle and bustle, but Trish found work with a fishwife who was desperate to fill a huge last-minute order for a party on the Hill.