A Local Habitation od-2

by Seanan McGuire

  “So even though this is a second- floor window, it’s actually on the ground floor.”

  “Yes.”

  “That makes no sense.” I shook my head. “I’ll trust you, though—it’s not like I have a choice. Which brings me to my next issue—it’s night out there.”

  “Yes,” Elliot said. “It is.”

  I glanced to Alex. “What’s going to happen to . . . ?”

  “Guess we’ll find out,” said Alex, wanly, and slid out the window.

  It was a six- foot drop to the ground. We heard a thump as he hit the ground, followed by silence. Elliot and I exchanged a wide-eyed glance, rushing to lean out the window. Tybalt stayed where he was and yawned.

  “Perhaps he’ll stay dead this time,” he said, nonchalantly.

  “Tybalt,” I snapped. He gave me a look, as if to say “what?” then began studying his nails.

  Terrie was lying facedown in the grass. I grabbed the windowsill with my good hand and vaulted outside, landing next to her and checking her wrist for a pulse. It was weak, but it was there. “She’s alive,” I reported, looking up.

  Elliot was leaning out the window. “What happened?”

  I slid my arms under Terrie’s shoulders and stood, balancing her limp form against my knee. “Alex is alive, and Terrie isn’t. I guess he’s going to be having a lot of early nights.”

  “We could put her back inside . . .” said Elliot, sliding awkwardly out the window.

  “The shock might kill her again,” I said. “Tybalt, get down here and help me with her.”

  “Ah, it’s time for the ‘here kitty, kitty’ again,” he said mildly, and jumped from the window, making it look effortless. He grabbed Terrie’s legs. “What shall we do with her? Is there a wood chipper available?”

  “Tybalt, behave.”

  “Why?” he asked, sounding honestly interested.

  “I don’t have time for this. Come on.” With Tybalt’s help, I was able to shift her into the brush along the building, looking back at Elliot as we got her out of sight. “How is it night out here? The sun just came up.”

  “The land is suggestible in a Shallowing. If we went back in and came out a door, it would be daylight.”

  “Right.” I straightened, stepping out of the bushes. “Lead the way, and keep talking.”

  Elliot started to walk. “I mentioned that there were problems, yes? They were mostly in the upload process. We were planning to copy people into the machines without killing them or changing them in any way. We’d just have an extra ‘version’ of them, and of everything in Faerie, that would live inside our computers.”

  “How would that save Faerie?” asked Tybalt, pacing me.

  “Our ideals and culture would endure, even if nothing else did.” He shook his head. “It didn’t work. Yui was in charge of magical integration. She said the system refused to release the data. She could make it copy, but she couldn’t make it interact.”

  “It was frozen?” I asked.

  “Basically. I don’t quite understand where things went wrong—I worked in an administrative capacity, and I never used the actual equipment.”

  Cats were slinking out of the bushes, falling into formation behind Tybalt. I ignored them, saying, “Somebody might have come up with a new process.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Would Yui have volunteered to test it?”

  “Absolutely not. Barbara died before Yui; even if her death was caused by the development team, Yui wouldn’t have agreed to test a process that had already killed someone.”

  “What was Terrie’s involvement?”

  “She worked on the software with Jan, creating the virtual environment. Gordan designed the hardware interfaces.”

  “Gordan’s the one who determined how the machines hooked up to the subjects?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I see.” The pieces of the puzzle were fitting together. I didn’t like the results, but they were the ones that fit. “That’s where you had the most problems, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was.” Elliot stopped walking, staring at me. “Oh, Oberon’s teeth . . .”

  I glanced to Tybalt, trying to read his expression. It had gone completely neutral, but his eyes were locked on Elliot. Still, I pressed on. “You tried with cats first, didn’t you? They remember everything. They were perfect.”

  “I knew there was a plan to try with feline test subjects, but I was never involved.”

  “Yeah, well, if you ask the cats, the ones who went to be ‘tested’ never came back.”

  Elliot licked his lips nervously. “Barbara was very upset.”

  So was Tybalt. His shoulders were locked, and the smell of pennyroyal and musk was rising in the air around him. Reaching over, I took hold of his wrist, keeping my eyes on Elliot. “And you never asked?”

  “I . . . it didn’t seem . . .”

  “Did you know that half the cats in a Cait Sidhe’s entourage are changelings?”

  “No. I never . . . no.” Elliot seemed to realize he was on thin ice, even if he wasn’t sure how he’d ended up there. “Barbara never said . . .”

  “You broke Oberon’s law, whether you knew it or not,” I said. Glancing up to Tybalt, I asked, “Is the Court of Cats going to demand recompense?”

  “That remains to be seen,” he said, in a voice that was surprisingly level.

  I let go of his wrist. “Okay. Elliot, start moving. We need to get inside.”

  “We did it for Faerie,” Elliot protested, as he began to walk again.

  “Will that make it easier for you to sleep at night?” asked Tybalt.

  I couldn’t blame him for his anger. I shared it. “What happened after the problems were brought to light?”

  “We were going to rebuild the physical interface,” Elliot said, in a small voice. I could finally see a door on the wall ahead; it took everything I had to stay calm and keep walking.

  “Was Gordan still going to be in charge of the project?”

  “There was going to be a review.”

  “Did she know?” He nodded. “Was that when the deaths began?” He nodded again. “Did the recording device always connect at the wrists and throat?” So help me, if he said yes, I was going to throttle him.

  “No.” He opened the door. The familiar hall past the cafeteria was waiting on the other side. Quietly, he added, “The wounds are new.”

  “You know it was Gordan, don’t you?” I asked, as we walked slowly down the hall.

  “Yes. I do.” He sighed. “I just don’t want to believe it.”

  “Did you know all along? Did you suspect?” I wasn’t shouting; I was too angry. My voice was quiet, calm, and level as I asked, “Did you even care?”

  “Look at Yui’s body, or Jan’s, and ask me if I cared,” said Elliot, wearily. “We screwed up. We made mistakes. But we were here of our own free will, and we made those mistakes on our own. Everyone I love is dead. Is that enough? Or should I grovel?”

  “It is enough,” said Tybalt, as gravely as a judge passing sentence. He was a King of Cats. The people of Tamed Lightning wronged his people. In a way, he really was passing judgment on what Elliot had done.

  Elliot met his eyes, and nodded, accepting the sentence. “We’re almost there.”

  “Good. I—” My foot hit something damp and I slipped, nearly falling before I caught myself against Tybalt. I looked down, and went cold.

  “Are you all right?” asked Elliot.

  “No,” said Tybalt. “She isn’t.”

  The blood I’d slipped in was still fresh enough to be wet and red. There wasn’t much of it, and I hadn’t been expecting it; that explained why I hadn’t caught the smell of it before. Now that I was “looking,” it was everywhere, almost overwhelming me.

  Pulling away from Tybalt, I sprinted down the hall toward the futon room with an energy I hadn’t realized I still had. Dizziness and panic fought a brief war for control of my actions, and panic won, spurring me to run even fas
ter. I’d told myself Connor and Quentin would be safe where they were . . . and we had a killer who killed her best friend, working with an accomplice who could walk through walls. I’m an idiot. All I could do was hope that I wasn’t already too late.

  Sometimes hope is the cruelest joke of all.

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE FUTON ROOM DOOR WAS OPEN. I skidded to a stop as I turned the final corner, staring, before beginning to walk slowly forward. It felt like I was moving in a dream.

  That only lasted as long as it took for me to realize just how much blood had been spilled, and that there was a dark, torpedolike shape lying motionless in the middle of the floor. There was no sign of Quentin. “Connor!” I exclaimed, almost falling over myself as I dropped to my knees next to the seal. “Don’t be dead, don’t be dead, come on, baby, don’t be dead . . .” My hands fumbled across his blood-tacky fur, looking for a pulse. “How the fuck do you find a harbor seal’s pulse?”

  “He’s not dead.” Tybalt was standing in the doorway, studying the blood splattered on the walls and floor as casually as a man studying the menu at his local diner.

  “How do you know?”

  “He doesn’t smell dead.”

  That would have to be good enough. I stood, wiping my hands against my jeans as I looked around the room. I hadn’t wanted to believe that they could be in danger. I’d wanted to believe I was just panicking, paranoid as always, and everything would be fine. You can’t always get what you want.

  “He went to seal form when he was injured,” I said, my voice sounding distant to my own ears. “It must have been a shock. That’s usually what triggers an involuntary shift in Selkies.”

  “You mean like this?” Tybalt stooped to pick something up, holding it up to show me.

  A stun gun. “That’d do it,” I agreed. I walked over to the futon, running my fingers along the mattress. The blood matted on its surface was sticky and still warm. Once again, we’d almost made it in time.

  Quentin wasn’t Gean-Cannah; there was nothing special about his blood, nothing I could use to save him. He was going to die, just like all the others. Just like Dare. I was going to have to bury another one. I was . . .

  I stuck my fingers in my mouth, trying to break that train of thought before it reached its inevitable destination. I was rewarded with a brief, unfocused flash of blackness and silence as the blood-memory flickered and broke. Oh, thank Maeve. He was asleep when he bled. Not dead, not yet. Just sleeping.

  “Toby?” Elliot was standing in the doorway, face gone whey-white. “What happened here? Where’s Quentin?”

  “Gordan took him.” I was starting to see the blood trail on the floor, marking out the way in blotches and streaks. Only half of it was real blood. The rest was potential blood, ghost-blood, made visible by the magic I inherited from my mother. I could track him. As long as he was bleeding, I could track him. “She messed Connor up, too. Pretty badly.”

  “What can we do?”

  “We go.” I looked squarely at Elliot. “We go now, because there’s no time to wait. Tybalt, can you—”

  “I’ll guard him. I should be able to coax him back to human form.”

  “Good.” I started to follow Elliot back into the hall. Tybalt caught my hand, stopping me, and I turned to stare at him. “What—?”

  “Be careful,” he said, voice pitched low. His eyes searched my face until finally, with a sigh, he let go of my hand. “I’ll keep the seal-boy safe. Go. Find your charge.”

  I nodded, and turned, following the blood trail into the hall. I followed the blood; Elliot followed me. We made our way through the knowe and out onto the lawn, my eyes never leaving the floor.

  All the cats in Tamed Lightning seemed to have gathered while we were inside, waiting for us on that lawn. Tabby faces peered out of corners and calico bodies covered picnic tables; all of them fell into step behind us as we passed. I ignored them. They were there because they’d been betrayed by one of their too-rare Queens, and they’d lost her as a consequence. They wanted revenge. More importantly, they wanted to know that justice had been done.

  There was a slight wind blowing, but it wasn’t enough to distract me from the scent of blood. I paused to taste the air, making sure the wind hadn’t somehow shifted the trail, then grabbed Elliot’s arm. “This way. Come on.”

  “The cats—”

  “Let them come,” I said, opening the door to the entry building. “They have as much right to see this end as we do.” And if we failed, they’d tell Tybalt what had happened. He’d avenge me. I hoped.

  The lights were off in the cubicle maze, but I didn’t need them; the blood trail was all the guide I needed, and even in the dark, it was bright and clear as day. I put a hand on Elliot’s shoulder, motioning for him to be quiet. Gordan was somewhere nearby, and the Coblynau have some of the best night vision in Faerie. I, on the other hand, was practically blind while my eyes adjusted. That put us at a dangerous disadvantage.

  “Where’s the light switch?” I whispered. If we could make a bright light, we might be able to turn Gordan’s night vision against her.

  “Other side of the room,” Elliot whispered back.

  So much for that idea. “Stay down. We’re taking this slow,” I said, and stepped away from the door. Elliot followed me, his footsteps echoing. I winced. I’m not as stealthy as, say, Tybalt, but at least I’ve had a little training. It was clear that Elliot hadn’t had any.

  “Elliot, be quiet,” I hissed.

  “I—”

  There was a flash of light as the gun went off ahead of us. I shoved Elliot backward, diving for the floor. There was no new pain; she missed. That didn’t mean she’d miss again.

  “Cover your mouth!” Elliot shouted.

  The smell of lye rose in the air, hot and insistent. I covered my mouth and nose, closing my eyes just before a tidal wave of hot, soapy water washed over me. The cats yowled, caught in the flood. This was no simple steam cleaning; I felt myself lifted off the floor as the water rose. I shuddered and squeezed my eyes more tightly shut, trying to pretend I wasn’t floating. Repressing the panic attack was taking my full attention. I don’t like water. I don’t even like baths; just showers where the water never comes up past my ankles and there’s no chance of going under. But now I was submerged by a magical wave I couldn’t escape or control. I just had to hope Elliot knew what he was doing, and wasn’t going to drown us both.

  The water swelled and then receded as the wave broke, leaving me as soaked as the rest of the room. Elliot’s magic hadn’t extended to drying this time. I raised my head, gasping, and turned toward him. He was staring into the distance, hands still raised. “Elliot . . . ?”

  “Did I get her?” he asked. There was a dark stain spreading across his formerly pristine shirt. Gordan didn’t miss after all.

  “Yeah, you did,” I said.

  “Ah, good,” he said, and smiled, before pitching forward onto the floor. I started to move toward him, but stopped as I heard the sound of footsteps on the catwalks above. Gordan was still on the loose.

  Elliot was bleeding out; he needed medical attention. But he was inside the knowe, and I couldn’t get him outside for the ambulance to find, even if I could explain where he’d gotten the gunshot wound. He’d flooded the room to drive Gordan back, and there was a chance the water had made it into the chamber of her gun, clogging the firing mechanism. It was a stupid chance to take: I knew that. It was the only chance I had.

  The cats were clustered on filing cabinets and desks, wailing. Using the cacophony as cover, I ran to the ladder on the far wall and began to climb. Half the cats fell silent, watching me. They couldn’t follow, but they would watch. I found that oddly comforting; whatever happened next, it wouldn’t happen unseen or in secret. The cats would see, and they’d tell Tybalt.

  Being soaked didn’t make the climb any easier. The ladder ended just as I started to feel like my knees were going to give out, and I stepped onto the catwalk, my wet shoes making
a marshy slapping sound. There were footsteps ahead of me, just around the corner. I leaped forward in a wild dash. “Stop right where you—”

  April was standing over Quentin’s body, looking back over her shoulder. Her eyes were wide and sad.

  “—are,” I finished, sliding to a stop.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and disappeared.

  Something pressed against the small of my back. Behind me, Gordan said cheerfully, “Maybe the gun works, maybe it doesn’t. Now put your hands where I can see them. I’d say this wasn’t going to hurt, but we both know I’d be lying.”

  Oh, great.

  THIRTY-TWO

  “YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE FOLLOWED. I’d have taken good care of him,” she said. “Walk until you hit the wall, then turn and put your shoulders against it. Keep your hands away from that knife. It wouldn’t do you any good, anyway.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked, walking forward. I couldn’t count on the gun being waterlogged, and if it wasn’t, there was no way I’d get Quentin clear before she shot one of us. For the moment, I needed to go along with her and hope for a chance to turn the tables.

  “I need to be able to reach your wrists, and I can’t trust you to hold still without incentive. Hence your pretty boy.” She sighed. “Honestly, I haven’t been able to trust you to do anything. You don’t follow directions.”

  I reached the wall and turned, stealing a glance at Quentin. He was breathing. I covered my relief, looking back at Gordan. She was smiling and relaxed; the tension of the past few days had melted out of her like it had never existed. I’d have been relaxed, too, if I was the one with the gun.

  “That’s better,” she said. “I’m glad you’re being so agreeable. It hurts the data if you’re damaged before we begin.”

  “Haven’t we already invalidated your data, if you need us undamaged?”

  “I’m a little worried, yeah—are you always this fond of trying to get yourself killed?” She shook her head. “I was starting to wonder if you’d last until I got around to you.”

  “You were the one that kept trying to kill us,” I snapped.