The Oddfits (11 page)

CHAPTER 10

Murgatroyd’s meeting with Ann had left him completely disoriented and dazed. Ann, on the other hand, had left the scene knowing exactly where she wanted to go. And she didn’t have much time to get there.

Immediately after bidding Murgatroyd farewell, she headed to the nearby MRT subway station, caught a train, alighted two stops down the line at Dhoby Ghaut, and strode expertly through a series of winding underground passageways, following signs directing her to the Singapore History Museum. Her hurry was certainly strange—a visit to the museum is rarely accompanied by such a sense of urgency. But stranger still was the series of almost unnoticeable but unusual occurrences that accompanied her brisk progress through the corridors. Out of a leaky pipe in the wall trickled a small stream of water—water that congealed into a pool right where Ann was about to take her next step. She didn’t even slow down as she stepped over the puddle and continued on her way. A man passing her in the opposite direction finished eating his banana and carelessly tossed the peel over his shoulder, right into Ann’s path. Without batting an eyelid, Ann stepped over that too. And she began to walk faster. It was a very good thing she’d chosen to wear comfortable shoes.

The lights illuminating the corridor suddenly went out, leaving everyone passing through it in pitch-black darkness
. . .
except for Ann, who whisked a small flashlight out of her bag and broke into a sprint for the stairwell leading upwards.

She made it to the surface and kept running. A crack of thunder sounded and it began to pour heavy rain. A powerful gust of wind struck an overhanging tree branch and sent it hurtling to the ground. It missed her only by a hair’s breadth as she dodged nimbly out of the way. She glanced quickly to her left and right before dashing across the street, but somehow managed to overlook the red and white double-decker bus that was now speeding towards her. Reflexively, she sprang into the air and executed a double somersault, landing herself out of harm’s way on the other side of the road.

She stopped running. Panting and soaked to the bone, she doubled over, clutching her knees for support. She looked up. From where she was standing, she could see the museum—its majestic colonial architecture, its gleaming whiteness, its solid rotunda capped with a stately tiled dome. At least that was what she imagined was concealed by the complex network of bamboo-pole scaffolding and netting surrounding the whole structure. It was closed for renovation.

Shit. (Ann rarely swore, but this seemed an appropriate occasion.)

Well, there’s no time anyway
,
she sighed inwardly.
But oh, how I do miss a good museum.
That was her last thought in the Known World. On this visit, at least.

About a minute before Ann thought this thought, up in the stormy skies above, a cargo plane pilot had accidentally pressed a button opening the ramp to the cargo hold. Luckily enough, only one item slipped out before he managed to close the door: a large wooden crate. From the heavens it descended, accelerating towards the earth’s surface, and crashed to the ground on the very spot where Ann had been standing right before she had vanished.

One of the worst feelings in the Worlds
, Ann thought to herself
, is waking up in a new Territory with a splitting headache
—which always happened to her when she transferred too quickly.

Of course, it also didn’t help when the first thing you heard was someone shouting at you.

“Are you mad?! What do you think you’re doing?”

Ann kept her eye closed and adjusted the patch over her right eye-socket. It was damp from the rain. Her head hurt. A lot.

“Past tense. ‘What
did
I think I
was
doing,’” she corrected the voice before opening her eye and promptly shutting it again in pain. The sun was shining a little too brightly in the Spain-Adroit Territory for her taste. “I was going to the museum. It was a stupid thing to do, I know. But I do miss them. That’s the one problem with the More Known World: you can’t have
really
good cultural history museums when the cultural history being documented is less than one generation old.”

“And that’s your measure of the More Known World’s worth?” the One said admonishingly. “Museums?”

“Of course not,” Ann sighed. “I just think it would be
nice
.”

Transferring accurately and with precision was already difficult enough, but transferring quickly was extremely difficult, even for an experienced Questian like Ann. She felt grumpy, sore inside and out, and soggy from the downpour that had caught her by surprise in the Known World; though the sun here was already doing a pretty good job of drying her out. As the effects of her haste wore off, she began to get a better sense of herself in relation to her surroundings. Even with her eye shut, she knew that she was sprawled flat on her back in the middle of the One’s laboratory. She’d been here many times before. This Territory was one of the longer-established ones, and the One had chosen it for her abode; that is, if one could call it an abode. The clouds in the sky served as her ceiling, the desert horizon her walls, and the windswept sapphire sand her floor. Ann saw all too clearly in her mind’s eye the scene of which she was now a part: the sun overhead, radiating a halogenish, ghostly light, unwavering in its constancy but gentle in its warmth; the undulating blue dunes stretching every which way as far as the eye could see; the ten enormous flat blocks of black granite surrounding her that served as laboratory counter space; and from the sound and direction of the One’s voice, the One standing directly above her.

Ann opened her eye again, blinking fast to accustom herself to the light. Sure enough, there was the One hovering over her, but looking not as angry as Ann had envisioned her being from the sound of her voice. Her big brown eyes—far too large for such a small, wizened body—expressed nothing but concern. She held a conical beaker of pale pink goo in one hand, and the other she extended to her younger colleague. It was brown and gaunt, but strong, much like the rest of its owner. Ann lifted herself onto her elbows and grasped it, letting the One pull her to her feet. She had indeed landed smack dab amidst the counters, though happily enough, not on top of any of them. Most of them were covered with complicated glass apparatuses containing different coloured liquids at various stages of simmering, dripping, flowing, and evaporating, except for the one to their left, on which sat a bunch of bananas and a half-eaten bowl of brown rice—most likely, the One’s lunch, or breakfast, or dinner.

From the deep pockets of the orange Bermuda shorts she was wearing, the One produced a small flashlight and began examining Ann’s eye for signs of concussion. Ann immediately felt sorry for being so snappish.

In response to Ann softening, the One resumed her admonishments. “Quite frankly, Ann, that was stupid. It’s been decades since I’ve stepped foot in a museum myself, but that was cutting it awfully close. You were almost killed. An Oddfit of your experience can’t stay in the Known World for more than, what? Four hours? What’s your maximum limit now?”

“Four and a half hours,” said Ann, wincing a bit as the One grabbed her eyelid, yanked it upwards, and examined the upper recesses of her eyeball. “Could you be more careful? It’s the only one I have left.”

The One switched off her flashlight, folded her arms, and raised a sceptical eyebrow. “Four and a half hours?” she repeated.

“Well,” Ann admitted, “without triggering any reaction from the Known World
at all
, two hours and fifty-six minutes. But if one is alert and quick, four and a half hours is eminently do-able.”

“And how long were you there this time?”

Ann mumbled something under her breath.

“I can’t hear you when you mumble.”

“Three hours. A little more.”

“‘Eminently doable,’ eh?”

“It’s all the exploring of new Territories I’ve been doing lately,” Ann sighed. “How was I to know it would shorten my time by so much?”

The One spoke gently, but sternly. “Because that’s the way it works, and you know it. The longer an Oddfit spends in the More Known World, the more severe the allergic reaction she induces in the Known World.”

Since Ann had joined the Quest, the One was the closest thing to a parental figure she had. As a result, Ann felt freer to emote when around her. She pulled a sour face.

“Don’t sulk, Ann. It’s not consciously trying to punish you for exploring; it’s merely reacting as any of our own bodies would to a bacteria or virus or any other foreign intruder in our systems. It sees you as a disease, so to speak. The Known World is merely protecting itself when it tries to exterminate you.”

Ann didn’t answer. In her logical fashion, the One concluded that she probably needed comforting words or something along those lines, but the One also knew that she wasn’t very good at that sort of thing. Instead, she offered Ann the beaker of pink goo. “Yogurt?”

“What flavour?”

“Chocolate.”

“No, thanks.”

“Well, it’s not very good anyway. It was an experiment,” the One said. Pulling a lid from the pocket of her oversized lab coat, she covered the beaker and let it go, allowing gravity to embed it in the sand. In the absence of cupboards or drawers, she had devised this means of putting things away. “Don’t be so glum. Would you rather not explore? Would you rather have it any other way?”

“No,” Ann replied. “I wouldn’t. And I know it’s impossible and impossibly spoiled of me to want it, but sometimes, I wish I could have the best of both worlds. Literally. Like Yusuf did.” She gave a great huff.

The One’s spine seemed to stiffen a bit in response to Ann’s words. “You know as well as I do that Yusuf was an anomaly,” she replied coldly. “Why and how he was able to live in both Worlds without losing any of his Oddfit abilities or provoking any adverse reaction from the Known World remains a thorough mystery to us all.” Turning her back, she began fiddling with the knobs on a machine that appeared to be made entirely out of small copper cogs.

Sensing the tension her remark had initiated, Ann changed the subject and brought up the actual reason for her visit: “I just came from my meeting with Murgatroyd Floyd.”

“And how did it go?”

“Very well. He’s agreed to join the Quest.”

The One nodded approvingly. “Excellent. He’ll come in tonight, then? Does he need a place to stay? He can sleep here on the sofa.” She motioned to a slightly raised mound of blue sand to her right.

“Actually, he’s requested five days to ‘wrap things up.’”

“Five days?” the One asked.

Ann nodded. “Yes, I thought it rather strange as well. I would have thought his oddfittingness levels too high for that kind of hesitation, but he seemed very anxious about how to tell his parents, what he needed to take care before he left, that kind of thing. Is there something wrong?”

“No, no, not at all,” the One said, looking as if she were worrying about something that had gone terribly wrong. Divergences from expectations tended to make her feel terribly intrigued and terribly fretful all at once. “It’s just
. . .
strange, as you say. Individuals as oddfitting as he is don’t hesitate once they find out who they are; they choose to leave immediately.” As she mulled over Murgatroyd’s situation further, she began to pace back and forth, ploughing a shallow trough in the sand as she did.

“Why
is
he still so oddfitting?” Ann asked. She’d been wondering about that since she’d been assigned to talk to Murgatroyd a week ago, but she hadn’t had the chance to ask. “Shouldn’t he have become a Sumfit some time ago?”

The One, still half lost in her own thoughts, nodded abstractedly. “To tell you the truth, when we found him mentioned in,” she paused infinitesimally before bringing herself to say his name, “Yusuf’s personal documents, I didn’t have much hope at finding any oddfittingness left in him at all.” She stopped pacing and began tapping her left foot contemplatively, sending up clouds of blue dust. “And when one imagines how oddfitting he must have been when he was born, before the adaptation process began
. . .
it’s not just strange, it’s extraordinary.”

“Perhaps his attachment has something to do with how long the adaptation process has been going on?” Ann suggested. “We do usually find them when they’re much younger. Twenty-five years really is a long time to spend in the Known World. It might have affected his sentiments anyway, however oddfitting he may still be.”

“Well,” the One reflected, “whatever the explanation, if he’s still an Oddfit after twenty-five years, then five more days certainly won’t do him any harm.”

At these words, Ann started a bit. “But he
has
already spent more time in the More Known World than usual for an undiscovered Oddfit. Will the Known World
. . .
”

“. . . try to exterminate him?” the One said, finishing Ann’s thought. “No. It takes months of exposure to the More Known World for one to come anywhere close to being an irritant.”

However, being the thorough person that she was, the One folded her arms and concentrated, performing an intensive analysis of Murgatroyd’s situation in her head, just to make sure. Two minutes later she came to a conclusion: “He’ll be just fine.”