One of the creatures fell off me as I ran. I knocked off two more with my hat. The other three tenaciously hung on, one in my hair and the other two on my left arm; one of the latter pair bit me hard enough to pierce my skin near where I’d taken a scrape in the fall. Infuriated now as well as frightened, I yelped and stumbled, swiping harder at the things on my arm. The bite throbbed fiercely, overriding the other small pains along my body and flaring through my entire system.
For a few seconds my eyes welled with hot tears of reaction, blinding me. But even as I struggled to keep my feet, I heard the twig-creatures shrieking in alarm.
“Magic in her blood!”
“Great Fey! Smash us with magic!”
“No smash! Flee! Flee back to nest!”
Without warning, they let go of me, dropped down, and skittered along the sidewalk back to the laurel hedge. My vision refocused in time to show me the last three twig-creatures vanishing into the shelter I’d disturbed. They leapt into the laurel, melding with the leaves now uncannily weaving together until I could no longer spot the place where I’d fallen through.
I blinked, stared, and then wheeled around and sprinted for the bus stop. My bus arrived just as I came pelting up, and I could barely keep from clawing through the doors before the driver could open them. Once on board I found nothing out of the ordinary: route leaflets behind the driver’s seat, ads and random poetry high on each side of the vehicle over the windows, and passengers of various ages, dress styles, and levels of alertness. Profoundly relieved, I showed the driver my pass and toppled into the first empty seat I reached.
And I kept my eyes closed—refusing to look out any of the windows—all the way to work.
* * *
Microsoft is not the only software company around Seattle. It’s just the biggest, a lone giant sequoia in a forest of lesser pines and oaks and saplings that die off fast for want of the sunlight of profit. I worked for one of the lesser oaks: a company that boasted a modest office building overlooking Lake Union, several hundred employees, and products translated into three foreign languages. We specialized in Internet security and performance applications for Windows and Linux, a versatility that helped us stay afloat. My department developed a program that monitored network traffic levels, rerouting data across different servers to avoid overloading any single one. And I was one of the program’s testers.
If you’re not a computer geek, software testing is as engrossing as watching paint dry. But it had a kind of systematic, structured order that appealed to me. I needed that order today, needed to lose myself in making sure every feature of the program worked the way it should.
As I wobbled up to the door of my office one of our team’s developers bolted past me. Alex’s dark eyes were full of urgent frustration, and he dashed down the hall muttering “Crap, crap, crap!” with every step. He didn’t say hello, but I didn’t stop him; I knew better than to distract a developer in ship mode.
Within, my officemate Jude (‘not Judith, and please God not Judy’) Lawrence swiveled her chair around to me, saying breezily, “Hi, Kendis! I just found me a baby-muncher of a shipstopper, want to lay any odds on whether we’re going to get this thing gone today or—” Then she took a closer look, and her expression morphed from smug pride into bemused concern. “Whoa, babe, you look like hell on toast. Are you okay?”
What could I tell her? Jake and Carson were two of the three people in my life I could tell almost anything; Jude, my best friend as well as my officemate, was the third. But I hadn’t thought of a rational, ‘I don’t need a straitjacket, honest’ explanation for last night’s weirdness for the boys, and I couldn’t think of one for this morning’s weirdness for her either. I opened my mouth. I closed it. Then I mumbled, remembering the pseudo-story I’d babbled at the hospital, “I’m just dead tired is all. There was an accident on the Burke-Gilman trail on my way home last night. This guy got hurt…”
My mind spiraled off at the thought of Christopher. I wondered if he’d gotten my number, and if he was all right. With a jolt, it occurred to me that he might well have saved my life. That thought made my mouth go dry, and it took me a moment before I was able to finish, “Jake and Carson and I had to get him to the hospital.”
Jude’s eyes, good reliable brown eyes that hadn’t changed color since the last time I’d seen them unlike certain other brown eyes I could name, went wide in her heart-shaped face. “Holy crap! You’re okay, right? You must be okay, you’re here—why are you here? If I were in your shoes, I’d be home neck deep in a bubble bath right now!”
“I’m okay. And we’ve got to ship today,” I said lamely.
“Good grief, woman, the gods of software development can let a tester off the hook if she had to take somebody to the hospital!” Jude got up to give me a big, impulsive hug. “Was it anybody you know? Is he okay?”
I tried not to think of the troll nearly cracking Christopher’s head open, but I couldn’t pull it off. “He had a nasty concussion,” I said. “Had to have stitches. Him, I mean, not me. I hadn’t ever seen him before.”
“So you took a complete stranger to the hospital? You’re a better woman than I am, Gunga Din. I probably would’ve crawled into bed as soon as the ambulance showed up.”
Making a crumpled expression that wasn’t quite a smile, I shrugged. “There kind of wasn’t an option.”
“But he’ll be okay, right?” Jude plopped back down in her chair, and as I nodded, she gave me a critical frown. “Good, but how about you? You look like you fell off a ladder or something.”
“I, um, took a tumble on the way in this morning—”
That made her blink and then point a peremptory finger at me. “Say no more. Mama Jude will attend to your needs and get you through the day so you can go home and collapse as is your rightful due. Sit there and think peaceful, happy thoughts.”
With that, my friend sped off to the kitchen down the hall. She returned with band-aids and a packet of antiseptic from the first aid cabinet, two paper towels (one damp, one dry), and a soda and a breakfast bar from the vending machines. I patched up what damage I’d taken from my fall—and the twig-things, who stubbornly lurked in my thoughts along with the troll. The soda and the breakfast bar gave me enough energy to confront my email and run what would hopefully be my last round of tests before we called it a product and shipped it.
And with Jude’s aid, I slogged through the morning. I couldn’t have done it without her. Every time I finished a test and logged the result in the bug-tracking database, I promptly forgot what I’d done. Teammates showed up at our door, but I registered them only as faces and voices just outside a veil of weariness around me. Jude intercepted anyone who came to talk to us and shooed them off so I could have relative peace and quiet. She kept the soda coming and by the time the reminder for our 11am status meeting fired off on my computer, a caffeine buzz hummed along my nerves. It was no substitute for sleep, but for now, it kept me awake and more or less alert.
Jude never once remarked on my eyes. Neither did James, our boss, who drew me aside just before the meeting and solicitously murmured that he’d heard I’d had a rough night and morning, and was I all right? I assured him I was. Inwardly, though, the apparent invisibility of the transformation in my features was starting to spook me more than the troll or the things in the hedge.
I ducked into a ladies’ room before the meeting started, just to verify if a second mirror would show me what I’d seen at home. It did. My eyes remained an eerie, undeniable yellow.
So why couldn’t anyone else see it?
You can see ’em. See ’em with your shinin’ eyes…
Christopher’s voice again, echoing through my mind.
Luckily the meeting required nothing of me but my presence, for I couldn’t have uttered an intelligent word if my job had depended on it. No one else’s words made sense within my jumbled thoughts either. Everyone around me seemed insubstantial, like wraiths of people going about their workdays, as if some
power on another plane of reality had pulled them all off this one and left only their echoes behind.
Or maybe it had pulled me instead, I thought uneasily, and Christopher as well.
The instant the meeting ended I stopped in the kitchen where Jude had gotten my first aid supplies and the steady supply of soft drinks. Only part of the room was the actual kitchen. Shelves of office supplies, a copier, a fax machine, and a phone took up the rest. I aimed for the phone, and nervously punched in the number for the University of Washington Medical Center. I don’t know what drove me more: worry over Christopher’s condition, or the mounting need to find out the cause of the strangeness that had infected my existence. Neither was satisfied, for the hospital operator informed me that they’d released Christopher MacSimidh from care that morning.
Disappointment and dismay shot through me as I hung up. Both of them vanished, though, the moment I caught sight of two pairs of faintly glowing red eyes in the cramped, shadowed space beneath one of the vending machines.
With a hoarse whimper, I threw myself to my hands and knees before the big boxy snack dispenser, choking on my own relief and panic when I found nothing beneath it but dust and somebody’s forgotten quarter.
I’d wondered last night if I’d started hallucinating, looking into my bathroom mirror. I wondered that again now. Had I imagined my eyes changing color? Something lurking under the vending machine? The hedge creatures? The troll?
Surely I hadn’t imagined Christopher?
Was I losing it?
“Ken?” Jude’s voice and her hand on my shoulder sent me shooting upright with a yelp. In turn she jumped back a step and blinked up at me as she asked, “You okay, chica?”
Hoping I didn’t look as paranoid as I felt, I babbled, “Yeah, I, um… quarter. I dropped a quarter.” I stooped and snatched up the coin I’d spotted, trying to look casual.
Jude didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. She just grinned and waved me back towards our office. “Well, come on, then! James is springing for pizza, so let’s go tell him what we want and see if we can get this puppy out the door.”
The rest of the afternoon went by in a blur of pizza, soda, frenetic waves of email, and Jude and I repeating our test sweeps when builds came out with new bug fixes. By four-thirty, the last build passed testing. By five, cheers rang out up and down the hallway as James declared the product ready to ship.
Everybody cheered but me. I wanted to go home and hide.
“Ship party!” Jude crowed as she whirled in her chair to high-five me. But she hadn’t forgotten our exchange from that morning, and though she was grinning ear to ear, she gave me a shrewd once-over too. “Are you up to it? You want happy fun party time, or quiet comfy ‘wake me up in a week’ time?”
I started to say I’d just head home and crash. Then I remembered the walk to the bus stop and the things in the tree, on the lawn, in the hedge. If I went home, I’d have to take that same route. And I thought of the eyes under the vending machine, and my own eyes turned an impossible color in my reflection. But nothing out of the ordinary had invaded our office, and in desperation, I seized on a possible explanation. In our office, I’d had Jude for company all day.
Suddenly the prospect of a boisterous ship party was tantalizing indeed. I’d get a headache—even more of one than I already had—from the loud conversation, loud music, and free-flowing alcohol. But there would be people involved. Nice, safe, not-troll-type people.
I wouldn’t be alone.
“I’ll take door number one, Bob,” I joked, and dug up a crooked grin for added plausibility.
Jude slapped my shoulder in approval. “That’s the spirit! We’ll get blitzed, and you can tell me all about your adventure last night. It’ll be fun!”
My grin slipped a little at the reminder. But I fought off the jangling chord of disquiet in the back of my head, squared my shoulders, and let her lead me off as the team gathered to head out… praying as I went that I wouldn’t see anything else.
Chapter Five
Geeks are not the world’s rowdiest people. We’re quiet and introspective, and usually more comfortable communing with our keyboards or a good book than each other. Our idea of how to paint the Emerald City red involves light liquor, heavy munchies, and marathon sessions of video games of the ‘giant robots shooting each other and everything else in sight’ variety. We debate competing lines of software or gaming consoles with passion, and dissect every movie, television show, and novel in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.
With as many of us as there are in this town, people inevitably find ways to cater to us when we get in the mood to spend our hard-earned dollars. Downtown Seattle boasts grandiose geek magnets, like the Experience Music Project and the Experience Science Fiction museum, but it has much humbler and far more obscure attractions too, like the place we all went to for our ship party that evening: a hole-in-the-wall bar called the Electric Penguin on Capitol Hill.
The first time they see it, Linux geeks always burst out laughing at the name and the sign over the front door, a penguin in a red hat emblazoned in neon. The less technologically inclined still grin at the conjunction of a penguin and booze, and are more than welcome within as long as they can pay for the drinks, food, and games. It’s not hip enough for Broadway, Capitol Hill’s main thoroughfare; the Penguin’s too many blocks away, the atmosphere too geeky. And since it’s sandwiched on a narrow side street, it’s not easy to find unless you’re looking for it, or unless you’re a regular, like many of us.
We converged on the bar in an erratic wave, the swiftest arrivals scarfing the spots in the lot next to the building. The rest of us circled like vultures through the surrounding streets in search of somewhere closer than Tacoma to leave our cars.
I rode with Jude, which was always an adventure as my friend drives her pickup truck with the aggression of a tank driver navigating a war zone. She honked her horn at three unfortunate drivers who got in her way, slammed on her brakes with enough force to jolt her entire truck and the two of us twice, and kept up a stream of curses that spiked the air with particular color and verve whenever a curbside space proved too small for her vehicle.
“You know,” I deadpanned, keeping my eyes closed to ward off motion sickness, “we could just cough up five bucks and park in a pay lot.”
“Bite your tongue, woman! There’s a principle at stake here!”
“A principle of what? Parking in Spokane?”
“Quiet, you!”
That was Jude at the wheel. Her eyes gleamed with the same energy she exuded every time she argued with one of the team developers, an energy that was far less about anger or spite, and more about the pleasure of a difficult hurdle to conquer. Some people drive with road rage; Jude drives with road joie de vivre.
We eventually found a spot six blocks from the bar, which satisfied Jude’s sense of sport, but not my nerves. I hadn’t avoided the walk home from the bus stop only to have to walk to the noisy, people-filled haven of the Penguin. (Not that I could explain that to Jude.) As we locked up the truck and hurried off, I stuffed my hands into my shorts pockets and strove with all my might to ignore anything that wasn’t passing traffic or the friend at my side.
I was not successful. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted tiny, shimmering shapes like the one in the tree I’d seen that morning—but here there were more of them, flocking like pigeons in the branches of a fir tree. They might almost have been pretty, like Christmas lights, but their will-o-the-wisp glow was far more unearthly than entrancing. And I heard them chiming, faint airy sounds that rose and fell and made me wonder for an instant what they’d sound like if I listened more closely—
Then I caught their voices, thin and piping, like those of the creatures in the hedge—and strangely seductive, high and sweet.
“She listens! She fears!”
“We could sing for her.”
“No more fear. No more thought.”
“Come and listen. Come and l
isten. Come!”
More of that uncanny prickling swept over me, and with it, for just a second or two, the urge to go closer to the lights in the fir tree and let them spill down in a glittering rain over my head. All that kept me on the sidewalk was the sudden frightened thought that I was seeing something weird again, and this time Jude was with me—
Jude.
She poked my arm, jolting my attention back to her and the corner where we stood waiting for the flow of cars to break long enough for us to cross. “The coast is clear! C’mon, slowpoke!”
She didn’t look once at the firs as we passed them. And I didn’t dare ask if she’d noticed anything odd as I shook myself hard and hastened to keep up with her.
The last two blocks to the bar offered nothing else out of the ordinary—nothing, at any rate, that only I could see or hear. As we approached the bar, music wafted up to meet us: a tin whistle trilling out the measures of a jig in a major key. Music, I thought in a rush of surprise and pleasure. Grateful beyond words for the distraction, I scanned the block around us in search of the musician and found her sitting on a blanket on the sidewalk in front of the thrift store next door to the bar.
Small and wiry, even smaller than Jude’s five foot two, and tanned like shoe-leather, the old woman wore a ragtag assortment of clothing that said ‘street person’ from twenty feet away. Her faded camouflage pants had holes in both knees and contrasted jarringly with the heavy leather Native American vest complete with fringes and beads. Both of those clashed in turn with the bright red T-shirt with a picture of Sylvester the Cat and the caption ‘Theattle’. Snow-white hair surrounded her head in a cloud of curls in wild disarray, and resting upside down before her on the blanket was the hat that had probably caused her bad hair day: a battered brown fedora that looked like she’d swiped it off the head of Indiana Jones.
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