by Paula Guran
The girl eyed him, opened her mouth; closed it again, shrugged. “Sorry,” she said ungraciously. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“See that you didn’t,” said Bossman. “First rule around here’s same as the last. We got plenty people riding us. We don’t ride each other.”
“Sure. I said I was sorry.” And all at once, she looked sorry, and much younger than Socks had thought: dark and small and painfully thin, as if she’d never had a full meal in her life. Her wrists stuck way out from her rusty jacket, long and bony and covered with bright woven bracelets. She was incredibly grimy, her bare feet black and her skin gray with street dirt, her hair plastered to her skull, the leather of her jacket stiff and cracked. She was also, Socks realized, incredibly beautiful. When she turned against the window so that you couldn’t see the dirt and the bruises, the delicate molding of her head came clear, the sharp curve from wide temples to pointed chin, the graceful line of her neck and back.
Socks stared until the stranger’s eyes met hers.
By some trick of light, they glowed at her, bright as an animal’s caught in a car’s headlights, wild and curiously blank. Yet Socks knew that they saw her, knew her and what she was and all about her, all in an instant. She covered her own eyes with her hands and went away into a white place where nobody knew her and nobody could touch her. It wasn’t very interesting, but it was safe. Her feet pricked and ached with the cold.
After a moment, the pressure of the stranger’s gaze lightened. Socks returned to the crowded kitchen and Bossman’s voice saying, “I don’t know. We’re pretty stretched. Soup’s about as watered as it’ll go. And we’ll need another mattress, more blankets. Everybody pays their way here, much as they can. You willing to do that?”
“Yes, I’m willing,” said the stranger. Her voice was no longer a sullen growl, but young and determined—a hero’s voice. Bossman smiled.
Queen B., ever practical, said, “Doing what?”
“Turning tricks,” she answered in the same practical tone.
“Not out of this squat, you don’t,” said Queen B. “That’s our third rule. No ass-peddling.”
“How many rules this place got? I don’t like rules.”
“Four,” said Queen B. “One and three you know. Number two is that everyone has to work. Number four is, if you have a hassle with somebody in the squat, you bring it to Bossman or me and we decide what to do, no argument. You can’t live with that, you’re out.”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I don’t know either,” said Queen B. “If you decide you want to stay, we’ll have a meeting about you. Bossman’s got too kind a heart for his own good. In the meantime, you’re as dirty as a mudslide, and a Wharf Rat would be ashamed of those clothes. Clean yourself up—Socks will show you where—and get some clothes out of inventory.”
The stranger grinned, something between triumph and relief.
“And don’t be getting any notions that you’ve got around me, girl,” Queen B. added. “I’d do the same for my worst enemy’s ugly dog, and that’s the truth.”
A little while later, Socks was shuffling down the hall to the bathroom, hardly daring to look at the girl padding beside her. “Socks, eh?” said the girl. “Funny name for a kid. But it suits you, you know? Like a cat’s name. You look kinda like a cat.”
“Do I?” asked Socks, startled out of her shyness.
“Yeah. An alley cat—not the mean kind, the shy kind. You know what I mean?”
Socks nodded. A cat, even a stray cat, was a much nicer thing to be than a Baggie girl, and somehow right. She stole a look at the girl, who was smiling at her, not mocking like she’d smiled at Queen B., but open and friendly. Given how dirty the rest of her was, her teeth were remarkably white.
Socks felt herself blush. “Towels are here,” she murmured, indicating a crazy wooden cabinet. “The hot water spell’s kind of weird, so you got to go easy.”
“Thanks.” Without waiting for Socks to leave, the girl stripped off her jacket and grabbed the grayish undershirt under it to pull it over her head like a child. The woven bracelets shifted on her wrists, showing skin rubbed raw and bloody. Her back was marked in a checkerboard of thin, precise cuts.
Socks gasped, half reached out to touch one of the welts. “Was that the elves?”
“Shut up!” The girl tucked her wrists into her armpits and glowered. Socks covered her mouth with both hands and cowered.
The girl’s face softened. “Listen, kid,” she said, not unkindly. “I’m grateful you rescued me and everything, but I hate it when people ask me questions. You get behind that, we can be friends. Now, get out so I can use up some of that hot water.”
The squat had four rooms more or less, depending on whether you counted the big walk-in closet that was Queen B. and Bossman’s private space. No one slept in the kitchen unless they had a heavy case of the Garbos, which left two rooms for eight kids to sleep in. During the day the mattresses were piled against a wall.
Whenever people were tired, they’d drag a mattress to wherever they fancied, get a blanket from the pile, and go to sleep.
There were six mattresses. Christie and Pet always shared, as did the twins. Until Socks came, Baby, Hand, Map, and Eye had sometimes slept alone, sometimes not, depending on whether they were feeling lonely. After, Baby shared with Hand. No one wanted to share with Socks and her foot rot, nor, as it turned out, with the stranger girl.
“You can share with me,” offered Socks when Map and Eye had made it clear, by sprawling themselves kitty-cornered across their mattresses, that they intended to sleep alone. “I don’t snore. Honest.”
“What’s it to you, where I sleep?” asked the girl sharply. “You got the hots for me or something?” Then, awkwardly, at Socks’ look of blank incomprehension, “I didn’t say that. Thanks.”
They rolled up in their blankets, Socks politely curled on the edge farthest from her bedmate. In the faint glow reflected from the alley lamp, she lay listening to the sounds of the squat settling in for the night. Hand and Baby were asleep. Under the window, Christie and Pet rustled and murmured. A rhythmic tenor buzzing drifted out of the common room: either one of the twins or Map—Socks could never decide which. Tonight, she was aware of the stranger breathing quietly beside her, a warm still presence in the half-light.
Socks was dreaming. The girl had slipped from her hands, and they were clinging to each other’s wrists. Socks felt the woven bracelets rasping her fingers. The girl was too heavy for her, was pulling her out the window head-first into a pack of elves with chains around their necks and cars that came to sharp points above their long-muzzled faces. They whined eagerly beneath the stranger’s dangling feet. The girl’s lace was blank, almost serene with terror, her trembling so intense it was nearly imperceptible.
Her hands opened. Socks gripped as hard as she could, but the slender hands slipped through hers. The whining of the pack swelled. Socks’ eyes flew open.
She’d taken a deep breath and another, glad the dream was over, glad she wasn’t alone in the dark, before she realized that the whining hadn’t faded with the feral elf faces. Beside her, the stranger girl was curled into a tight ball, her chin tucked into the crook of her arm, the hand resting palm-up on her neck. Her hair trailed dark coils across her face. For a moment Socks listened to the thready, hopeless sound and watched the fingers work, curling, scrabbling, flattening as if against some invisible surface, repulsing something Socks could not see. Socks shivered. This couldn’t go on. Hesitantly, she touched the stranger’s shoulder.
The girl jerked and curled up tighter. “Please, please, please, please,” she begged. “No, no, please, no. I’ll be good. I promise. Please.”
Once she started, she said it over and over, breathless and low, punctuated by increasingly frantic whimpers and bleats of pain.
Socks grew cold, and her feet prickled and ached. She closed her eyes and wished, but the comforting white silence would not come.
; From under the window, a sleepy voice complained. “What the . . . ?”
“Whozzat?” That was Hand.
A twin called out from the common room. “Whoever it is, get her to shut up.”
“Yeah,” said the other twin. “We’re trying to sleep here.”
Baby began to whimper in sympathy.
“She’s still asleep,” said Socks, high and panicked.
“Then wake her up,” said Eye.
This wasn’t easy, especially since the stranger struggled and moaned whenever Socks touched her. And when at last she stopped, she didn’t really wake up, just uncurled, swore blearily, rolled over on her stomach, and was still. Socks was still, too, except for a tiny, constant shudder that lasted until at last she fell asleep.
Squat meetings were not called, they happened. Border magic, Science called it, how everyone knew when to turn up in the common room and why. Queen B. would laugh when he said so, and tell him he just didn’t know much about how communities work, which was true enough. But it felt like magic to Socks. Especially today, when she was logy with dreams that left nothing behind them but a foul taste in her mind.
The stranger girl had slept late and had been sullenly silent after she got up, taking her bowl into the common room to eat alone. She was perched in the open window licking oatmeal off her fingers when people started drifting in. Queen B. and Bossman pulled a pair of crates into a bench by the front door; Pet, Christie, Baby, and Hand piled mattresses into a sofa; Art, Science, Map, and Eye plopped themselves down on the floor. Socks found a corner by the window where she could watch without being seen. Nobody said a word as a beat passed and another before the stranger put down her bowl and turned to face them with the same calm she’d shown the elf pack.
“Well?” asked Queen B.
“Well?” The girl echoed Queen B.’s tone exactly.
Bossman sighed. “You wanna stay or what?”
“Don’t know. Depends.”
Pet spoke up. “Sure does depend. Mostly on whether or not we want you around.”
“Yeah,” said Science. “So far, you haven’t exactly blown us away.”
Art nodded. “What he said. You haven’t even told us what to call you.”
The girl hesitated. “My name’s Perdita,” she said at last.
“Damn fancy name for a Wharf Rat,” said Queen B.
“I’m not a Wharf Rat.”
“Your name’s not Perdita, either.”
The stranger—Perdita—cocked up her pointed chin. “It is, too, and who are you anyway, to say it’s not? You expect me to believe that your name’s Queen B.? What kind of a name is Queen B.? Or Hand, or Eye, or Socks? The only one of you with something that sounds like a real name is Christie, and I’ll bet all the tea in China that’s not the name she was born with.”
There was a silence. “Fair enough,” said Queen B. “Perdita it is, if you say so. But you have to show us some good will here.”
“Why?” asked Perdita. “I bet nobody else had to tell the story of their life for a lumpy mattress and a bowl of stone soup.”
“No. Nobody else showed up here with Claws on their tail, either.”
Bossman nodded. “You come carrying some pretty heavy baggage, girl. We gotta be sure it don’t blow up in our face.” Perdita shrugged. “Okay, but you won’t believe me.”
“You better tell us anyway,” said Bossman.
Perdita locked her hands behind her back and began her talc.
She kept her eyes steadily on Queen B. as she told them of her highborn mother who had run away out of her palace in Elfland clear through the Borderlands and out into the World.
“Aren’t there any lowborns in Elfland?” asked Pet wearily.
Perdita’s lips pulled back from her teeth. “Not as lowborn as you, rag-picker. What is it with you guys, anyway?” she said, her eyes darting from face to face. “You make me talk, then you won’t listen to me.”
“That’s cause you’re talking bullshit,” said Map, which started everybody arguing until Bossman clapped his hands.
“Hush up!” he said, his soft voice edged with impatience. The children looked at him sheepishly. He rubbed his face with both hands, and his rings caught the sun like mirrors. Socks saw Perdita blink and frown.
“She’s right,” he said. “Let her talk. Your mother was a runaway. Go on.”
And Perdita went on like a child trying to get through her lesson as quickly as possible before she lost her nerve or forgot any of it, telling them how her mother had fallen in love with a black saxophone player and borne him a daughter, Perdita. “I guess she went kind of crazy after I came along because she dyed her hair black and ran away with me. We ran for the next ten years, passing as human, begging, stealing when we had to. It was a little easier after she stole the van. At least then we always had a place to sleep.”
“What did she do about the license plates?” asked Science suspiciously. “Everybody knows you can’t steal something like that without they trace you by the license plates.”
“Magic,” said Perdita.
“Not out in the World, man,” objected Eye. “Magic don’t work in the World any better’n machines work in Elfland.”
Perdita grew sullen. “My mother could do anything, as long as she was straight. Anyway, I was just a baby. Seemed like magic to me. You want to hear this or not?”
“We want to hear it,” said Bossman.
“As I was saying. We drove at night, mostly. Mama would keep us both awake with old songs and movie plots.”
“What’s a movie?” asked Hand.
“A story you can see,” said Perdita, “over and over again.”
“Why’d you drive at night?” asked Map.
“We drove at night to outrun the humans. Mama said that humans slept at night because they were afraid of the dark and we weren’t because we were of the True Blood.”
“I bet your Mama was afraid of the dark herself,” said Pet. “I sure would be, sleeping in a stolen van with a kid that screams all night.”
“Shut up, Pet,” said Queen B. unexpectedly. “She’s not the first screamer we’ve had. As I recall, you were one yourself, once upon a time. Go on, Perdita. I can’t wait to hear what happens next.”
Perdita clasped her hands in front of her. “You don’t believe me,” she said, sounding very young. “You think I’m making all this up.” She started to play nervously with her gaudy wristlets; the welts showed red and purple between the woven bands. “I’ve made up my mind,” she said. “I don’t want to stay in your old squat. I don’t need anyone laughing at my mother.”
“Chill, girl,” said Queen B. impatiently. “Nobody’s laughing at your mother. Tell your story. We’ll decide later whether we believe it or not.”
Perdita hesitated, poised on the balls of her feet. Watching her, Socks remembered that she’d seen a fox once. Perdita reminded her of that fox, beautiful and vulnerable. She’d leave, go back out on the streets, get killed sure as anything, all because she didn’t understand that Queen B. was just doing her job.
Socks could hear the concern behind the hard words, but someone like Perdita might think that she was just being mean. So Socks, who never, ever spoke up in meetings, said, “I believe you, Perdita.”
At the sound of her voice, everybody looked at her. Ten pairs of eyes—brown, blue, gray, hazel, long, round, squinty—turned on her in surprise, as though a chair had spoken. Socks’ heart started to beat so hard it nearly suffocated her, but she repeated, “I believe you, Perdita. Every word. And I want to hear the rest.”
“Isn’t much more to tell,” said Perdita. “We drove around, I got older, she told me stories about Bordertown, she died, I found my way here.”
Her shuttered face dared them to ask her what her mother had died of. Queen B. cleared her throat. “And the Claws?”
All at once, Perdita’s face grew sharp and sly. “The Claws,” she said. “Fuckers. They did me real rough, so I fixed their leader so he couldn’t anymor
e.” An unpleasant smile bared her white, white teeth. “Made him madder’n hell.”
“I ain’t sure I follow you,” said Bossman. “Ain’t sure I want to. They likely to swear blood feud?”
Perdita shrugged. “How the hell would I know? I tied a knot in their leader’s dick. Want to see what made me do it?” She pushed the bracelets up her wrists with a flourish, displaying the raw sores. “There’s more where a lady don’t show in public. Want to see that, too?”
Queen B. gnawed her lip, then said, “Boychild, you think those pretty geegaws on your fingers can charm the Claws into calling it quits if our little sorceress here agrees to . . . ah . . . untie Beltane’s dick?”
“Maybe,” said Bossman. “You willing, Perdita?” He sounded like he wouldn’t blame her if she wasn’t.
“No way,” said Perdita, grinning.
“Then you’re out,” said Queen B., flat and final.
They glared at each other, black eyes against crystal, Perdita a shadow against Queen B.’s shining bulk. Socks wasn’t surprised that Perdita broke first, shrugged, and said, “Okay. If you can keep him off me.”
Bossman stroked the bare fingers of his left hand over the array of silver on his right. “As long as you’re under my roof,” he said, “you’re as safe as you can be in this town. Outside, Beltane can hassle you, but I’ll see he don’t hurt you. That good enough?”
“You’re just full of surprises,” said Perdita. “Okay. It’s a deal. I’m tired of running.” She glanced at Socks, smiled thinly. “I guess I have to stay anyway, work off my debt.”
“It’s not as simple as that, girl. You have to tell us what you intend to do to earn your keep around here. We have enough ragpickers, dyers, and menders. You have to come up with something new. Other than what you’ve been doing to date.”
“You mean tricking?” asked Perdita innocently. “Okay. I’ll tell stories.”
“You already do that,” said Science.
“I liked her story,” said Hand unexpectedly. “I’d give her a penny or a clover for it, if I had one.”