Welcome to Bordertown (50 page)

I nodded but didn’t say anything. Quickly I drank the last of my coffee, then excused myself. The weird halfie said to keep my chin up, said that things change in ways we can’t expect, and didn’t I know that, after living in Bordertown as long as I have? He laughed loud and long, and was still laughing as the door of the café closed behind me.

I decided to take the long way home, to walk off my bad mood. So I turned down empty streets and abandoned alleys that took me around the perimeter of my neighborhood. But as I turned down one of those alleys, I found a crowd farther in, clogging the path. The people had their backs to me, so I couldn’t see what they had gathered around. Suddenly their arms went up and they let out a collective cry and shook their fists in the air. I’d seen plenty of odd gatherings during my years in Bordertown, but not in a back alley with a crowd who raised fists and cheered in unison.

The alley was lit with lanterns people carried, and several bespelled fire globes hung in the air above, casting an orange glow over faces and shoulders. When I reached the back of the crowd, I stood on tiptoe, but I still couldn’t see beyond their heads. And as the cheers began to fade, a lone voice remained at the center.
A familiar voice—I knew it as soon as I heard it—and this is what the voice said:

“They take the goods we bring from our World, those are fine enough for them, and they take your rent and they’ll take your children in trade. They take and take and take, that’s what they know how to do. And yet we are beneath them. And yet our World is a garbage pit compared to their One True Realm. Why, then, are they so interested in our World? Why, then, do they want what our World produces? And why have we allowed them to take possession of our streets while we cannot even
tour
their precious Realm beyond Elfhaeme Gate?”

“They’re liars!” someone from the crowd shouted.

“They’re cheats!” another sent up like a rocket.

Then the voice at the center resumed speaking.

“We will send them a message, my friends. We will make them know that we will no longer grovel like worms at their perfectly molded ivory feet. And when we come for them, my friends,” said the voice at the center, “what will we tell them?”

A hush fell over the crowd for only an instant, allowing them to collect enough breath to shout, “We do not come in peace! We do not come in peace! We do not come in peace!”

I pushed myself into the mass of people and threaded through the bodies until I reached the front of the crowd. I put my hands on the shoulders of two men to lift myself up and look beyond them, to put a face to the voice—the Voice of the Nameless, I would learn some people called him. Alek, Aleksander, Mouse.

Our eyes met briefly, and in that moment, he recognized the shock on my face, and I recognized how much we were strangers despite living together, despite taking care of each other.

He said, “Marius …”

I turned away.

*   *   *

I don’t think of myself as stupid or naive. After all, I was the one who saw Mouse and the danger he was in when he first arrived. After all, it was I who taught him how to survive on the Border. But I must have been under a spell for at least one of these conditions when it came to Mouse. Stupidity, naïveté, it doesn’t matter; both lead to the same result: blindness to what’s happening right in front of you.

I was blind, then. Blind most likely because I’d fallen into some kind of love with Mouse despite my efforts not to. Maybe it was because he reminded me of myself when I first spotted him. And in caring for him, I believed I was somehow protecting that younger version of myself that no one had taken the time to protect when I first arrived. Maybe it was because I thought I could make him into a little brother. But despite all my efforts to box him into some other kind of relationship, I had failed. Now the jury had returned with a verdict: clearly I was guilty of perjury. I had lied to myself, over and over again.

When he returned later that night, clicking the door shut quietly, he scuttled over to where I lay in bed pretending to sleep. He nudged my shoulder and whispered, “Marius? Marius, are you awake?”

I rolled over, sighing. “It’s late, Mouse,” I said. “What do you want?”

“I’m sorry.” He sat down beside me, the mattress dipping. He put a hand near mine, but I didn’t take it.

“Sorry for what?”

“For not telling you what I’ve been doing. For keeping secrets.”

“You mean forming another gang? The streets are full of them. Do you really think another one is going to solve any problems? They just make more.”

“It’s not a gang,” said Mouse.

“Then what is it?”

“A group,” he said. “A group of freedom fighters.”

“You’re not free here?”

“Not necessarily that,” said Mouse. “But it is unfair.”

“Welcome to the world,” I said, and moved to turn over on my side again.

“No,” said Mouse. “I left the World for a reason. It doesn’t have to be like that here.”

“It’s like this everywhere, Mouse,” I said into my pillow. “Grow up. I had to.”

“Only because people like you allow for it.”

I felt his weight lift from the bed. And a moment later: the sound of the door clicking shut quietly.

*   *   *

Only so much truth can exist between two people until it becomes too much, and then they can’t bear to be around each other. I didn’t hold it against Mouse that he’d been keeping secrets from me. I had secrets of my own. When he’d been gone for a few weeks after that midsummer night when I’d discovered
his
secret, I decided I couldn’t go on living as I was.
This apartment is too small
, I told myself.
And the music has gone to wherever it wants to be. And anyway, isn’t it time to move on to something different, something real
?

Also, when I took out that bag of elf money from beneath its floorboard, it no longer rattled.

An object lesson I never shared with Mouse: I stood on my old corner later that day, holding that empty bag with the crest of a powerful Trueblood family embroidered on it, and had a terrible idea. It was terrible because as soon as I had it, I knew it was bad. But it was strong, and grew so quickly that it took hold of my mind and conducted me, as if I were its puppet, to return to that elf’s
crystal mansion on Dragon’s Tooth Hill, where I’d once spent a night thinking I was in love with someone, and once there I waited outside until that elf finally appeared and came to meet me.

“What do you want, Marius?” he asked with no hint of emotion.

“What I’m worth,” I told him. I held the bag up and he looked away, embarrassed. I knew he would be. They have no scruples about doing shameful things, the Fair Ones. They only wish not to be reminded.

“You cannot blackmail me, Marius,” he said, stiffening his back, lifting his chin, looking down his nose at me. “I’ve done no wrong here.”

But an election was on the horizon, and his father’s name had been on the tongue of every elf, human, and halfie all summer. Even Mouse had mentioned their family name once, when he’d come home with another bit of gossip he’d heard about the elves trying to edge humans out of the High Council. His father couldn’t afford to have a reckless son paying street rats like me for a night of lust. It would be so … 
tasteless.

I reminded the elf of this and of the occasional bursts of violence that had flared in the streets once people realized the Way had closed. It made people nervous, even after it reopened, as if the entire city had been under a spell of magic. “And we all know where magic comes from, don’t we?” I said. I stared hard until he looked away.

“You humans,” he said, but didn’t finish. Instead, he sighed and said, “If the money wasn’t enough for you, what is it you want?”

I looked back at the gleaming facade of his father’s mansion beyond his shoulder, smiled—no teeth, just upturned corners—and made my proposal.

*   *   *

Art and Lies.
That’s what I got out of a night spent as an unwitting prostitute. I’d meant to save my dignity, go my own way, but after Mouse left I couldn’t save anything. No Mouse to bring home coffee and chocolate from his mysterious delivery service. No music to play for coins on a corner. Nothing left to trade for a roof and clothes and meals. It was either I collect on that spell-promised favor, or I join the Wharf Rats and start drinking from the Mad River.

The elf sealed our deal with magic this time: I got what I wanted, and he got a spellbound promise that I would never return, never bother him or his family again.

It was only after I’d walked away from Dragon’s Tooth Hill and back into Soho that I felt like I could release the breath I’d been holding.

When I moved from my apartment, I took the things Mouse had left behind and boxed them up. I stuck them in a corner of the crumbling Soho building the elf had restored for me. It was on Carmine Street, where I knew people, and I put up flyers advertising what I intended the place to be. People responded by bringing me paperbacks with dog-eared pages, CDs in plastic cases, vinyl records lurking in the corners of their attics, VHS tapes, VCRs covered in dust, flimsy comic books, paintings and sculptures from local artists. I paid for the used items and arranged for the art to be sold on consignment. A bit for me, a bit for the makers. Then I hung my sign in the window and pretended to be proud when people who knew me as a street violinist rang the bell over the door as they entered for the first time, smiling, congratulating me on my new venture.

And then, three weeks ago, I turned at the sound of that bell to see him come in, looking around cautiously as he stepped up to the counter, where I’d been pricing a set of semitattered books
about teenaged love-crazed vampires someone had brought in. Alek, Aleksander, Mouse.

I didn’t waste any time asking how he’d been or what he’d been up to. I just went to the back room to collect his box of left-behind things. When I pushed it across the counter, he said, “It’s good to see you doing so well, Marius. Your place, it’s really impressive.”

“Thanks,” I said, and tapped my finger against the counter.

“Don’t you want to know how I’ve been?” he asked.

I could only shake my head.

“Then you don’t want to know what’s going to happen soon? Not far from here?” he asked.

I looked up, frowning. “Please say what you came to say.”

“We’re going to take it,” he said. “We’re going to take that bleeding Oberon House by storm, and then burn it to the ground.”

“You’ve been drinking Mad River water,” I told him. “You have no idea what you’re saying. There are
children
in there,” I added through clenched teeth.

“I know what I’m saying,” he said. “I know what I’m doing, Marius. We have a plan. We’re going to take the building first, then burn it down after we get the kids out, so those bastards know they can’t abuse us any longer.”

“You’ll be killed,” I said. “It’s not possible. They’re too powerful.”

“We’re powerful, too, Marius. You’ve always underestimated us. Underestimated yourself.”

“I could turn you in to one of the elf gangs,” I said, hoping that the threat would scare him off his plans. “I could warn the Silver Suits.”

“You won’t, though,” said Mouse. “I know you, Marius.”

“No,” I said, “you don’t, actually.” Then: “Why are you telling me all this?”

“So you can tell others,” he said. “Afterward, when it’s over, we’ll need a song, like all important battles and revolutions have. So people will know what was meant by it. You should be the person who does that.”

“You shouldn’t count on me for that,” I said. “I don’t want anything to do with your schemes.”

“They’re not schemes,” said Mouse. “They’re acts of justice. It was you who first taught me I couldn’t trust them. Why are you trying to defend them? They wouldn’t do the same for you.”

My mouth dropped open for a long moment. Now
I
was at the root of his crazed revolution. “Stop,” I said. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

He stood in the doorway holding his box of things, looking around the place with a squint in his eye. “It speaks volumes about you, Marius, this place. But I’m not sure you know that, do you?”

“Please leave,” I said.

And he did leave, as soon as I turned away. I knew by the sound of the bell.

*   *   *

Tonight I waited in a doorway across the street from that shabby building his group had holed themselves up in, watching their silhouettes pass by windows, Mouse and his new friends. I couldn’t help myself, I couldn’t make myself go home. And later, after nearly two hours had passed, I watched the lights in the building go off, floor by floor. Then the door they’d gone through opened, and the same group of kids spilled out again. I pressed myself into the shadows of my alcove and gasped when I saw the full backpacks slung over their shoulders, cans of gasoline in their hands, bricks clenched in their fists, baseball bats, trash can lids buckled across their arms like shields. They were going to do it after all. They were going to do what he’d said.

I stood there, unable to move. What could I say? What could I do? I couldn’t bring myself to go to the Silver Suits about it. It wasn’t just elves I distrusted. And anyway, I reasoned, they’ll be caught. Surely they can’t walk into Oberon House, take out the Truebloods running the place, and burn the place down. It would never happen.

I thought about going home, doing my best to pretend I hadn’t seen anything. But even after I was halfway home, I found myself turning around, going back the way I’d come, back to Hell Street, then north to Ho, the street I’d seen Mouse and his gang go down. There were my feet, taking me to him as usual.

By the time I was a block from Oberon House, I knew I was already late to their party. Shouts and screams filled the air. Gunshots and spellblasts sounded off at random intervals. The scent of smoke reached me before I walked into a fine cloud of ash and found a mob moving down the street toward me; and at their backs, Oberon House loomed, smoking, creaking, tufts of fire eating the windows. Sirens wailed. Silver Suits were arriving. Truebloods and humans and halfies stood in the streets, some fighting, some looking up at Oberon House as it burned. The voice of the mob boomed above the smoke and fire: “We do not come in peace! We do not come in peace! We do not come in peace!” as they marched toward me, fists pumping in the air.