Elizabeth curtseyed. The clouds parted just long enough for a beam of sunlight to make her white dress and crown sparkle, I guess in case she didn’t look princessly enough. “Welcome, travelers. I am Princess Madrigal, and you are the first visitors to my new city.”
Of the half a dozen people sitting in the cars, the first one who climbed down was a teenage boy. Brass and leather goggles perched in sandy white hair, and he wore what looked to me like a white full-length lab coat and leather pants. He was, without a doubt, the coolest geek I’d ever seen in person. He stared at Elizabeth like she’d clubbed him, but that seemed like a fair reaction.
“And I’m Prince Jacob of the Tinkers, Your Highness,” he returned. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. More than a pleasure. This line was supposed to take us to the city of iron and yellow smoke. I’m not sure if that’s where we are, or if this is a happy accident.”
He reached out a gloved hand, obviously nervous, and Elizabeth laid her hand on top of it. “This was the city of iron and yellow smoke. My city may need a new name, now. And new people, so I hope you’ve come to stay.”
“So do I.”
Oh, geez. That could not have been more corny.
Rat crept back to my feet, and I asked him, “What am I seeing?”
“Happily Ever After, Miss Mary,” he answered.
“No way,” I snapped. “No. No way. Rat, you have to do something. Are you in love with her, or not?”
“He’s her prince. The story’s over, and she will be happy forever after,” Rat replied. He sounded so calm. No, he sounded fake calm.
I gritted my teeth, not calm at all. “Don’t give me that. You’re the expert. Start a new story. You can get yourself turned into a human. I bet you could get her turned into a rat, but I know you’d enjoy being human more.”
Prince and Princess didn’t pay us the slightest bit of attention. Especially the Prince, whose eyes were all on Elizabeth. “We’re an expedition. So much was lost when the city of iron and yellow smoke was abandoned. We were hoping to uncover its secrets.” If he puffed his chest out any further, he’d explode.
“They’re in love already. I’m not going to risk her happiness for mine. She has her Happily Ever After and she doesn’t need me anymore,” Rat said. He still sounded so calm. His heart must be breaking. He wouldn’t even look back at the happy couple, he just kept staring up at me.
Staring up at me. Right. Get the hint, Mary. “Yes, okay, I need you. But I’d rather you be happy.” My tongue felt like lead, but I forced the words out.
“I’ve chosen, Miss Mary,” he replied.
The blankness in his words tore at me, because I knew what they had to hide. His beautiful princess was making cow eyes at a pretty boy she’d just met as he showed her the size of his monkey wrench.
I guess we were both Eponines together. We didn’t have to be completely alone. I reached down, and Rat jumped into my hand and clawed his way up my sleeve.
Now it was me trying to keep my voice blank. I didn’t want him to hear the relief and delight washing across me as I said, “We might as well get going, then.”
“Can I come?” Scarecrow asked.
That brought me up short, but it shouldn’t. “Why would you want to come with me?”
“I was hoping I could get a Happily Ever After, too. You make those, right? You made one for her.” Scarecrow pointed at Elizabeth, who was busy helping the prince fill in a map. Oh, no, wait, they were tearing it up instead. No maps around here, I supposed.
Elizabeth was too busy with her own story to help anyone else with theirs. And you know what? That was fine by me. Someone ought to be happy. “It gives me a direction other than ‘running away.’ You’re the expert, Rat. How do we make Scarecrow a real girl?”
“By going that way. There’s a river on the other end of the city. We start there,” Rat answered. He sounded confident. He really did know his job. Da—no, I wasn’t falling into that again. A promise was a promise.
I left the happy couple, heading for the waterfront with a rat on my shoulder and a wooden girl following behind me. A wooden girl who spun like a top with every step for no particular reason. I had to get her made into a real girl before I strangled her.
he smell told me I was getting close to the waterfront. Everything smelled wet, like it had just rained. Maybe I’d been following that smell and didn’t realize it, but it had just seemed obvious which way the water was. Down the road in front of me, the buildings stopped, and then I reached the last pair and the river lay in front of me.
The river was big. I could see the far shore, and that’s all I could say about it. The smell of the water struck me overwhelmingly as I stepped out onto the boardwalk. Faint overtones teased me, of smoke and rotting garbage and something else I didn’t know. A smell like mist rather than the wetness after it rains.
River or no river, the view reminded me vividly that I was still in the city of iron and yellow smoke. I couldn’t see a shoreline. A metal boardwalk wider than a freeway stretched out of the water, with metal railings. Stairways and ramps led down to docks, and to the right of me a giant construction of girders and metal poles loomed over the wharf. It didn’t serve any purpose I could see, and looked like a skyscraper’s worth of scaffolding all bunched up like a spider’s web. It must have done something, because there was another way down to the shore off to my left.
I reached up and rubbed the top of Rat’s head with my thumb again. I’d been doing it off and on the whole walk, and it was getting a little too touchy feely for me, but the poor guy had been so quiet. Maybe he couldn’t get the girl, but leaving Elizabeth had to be tearing him apart.
“Which way?” I asked him.
He lifted his head and sniffed around, then answered, “It doesn’t matter yet.”
I shrugged, turned left, and walked down the boardwalk. I drifted out to the railing, and stared over the water. So much water, muddy blue and rippling as it flowed down the channel. It didn’t have the manufactured schizophrenic look the city had, but I liked the view. It was peaceful, right up until Scarecrow ran past me to a black metal bell on a post along the railing. She rang it over and over, yanking the chain as gonging smashed the silence.
I rolled my eyes. “You don’t know what that does! You can’t just go around pulling and pushing everything that catches your eye.” Setting my shoulders, I stepped faster until I reached the bell myself. Pushing her aside, I grabbed the chain and gave it a few yanks myself. I grinned. Scarecrow couldn’t grin, but she clasped her hands behind her and swung from side to side in a way that looked pleased to me. Rat crawled into my hood and put his hands over his ears. I couldn’t blame him. The bell was loud.
Even after it stopped, my ears rang, and I swatted Scarecrow’s hands away before she could take another turn. Hardly bigger than my head, the bell had been so deafening I didn’t hear the seagulls squawking until they were almost upon us.
Was this river big enough to draw seagulls? Useless to ask. Maybe the bell was magic. Maybe I didn’t know a thing about seagulls. Here they were, descending around me like a flock of huge pigeons, flapping their wings and waddling around on the boardwalk peering every which way. If they thought I had any food to give them, they were out of luck. The ground wasn’t good enough for some of them, and one landed on the bell itself, and more on the largest fence posts. A huge white gull flapped ponderously and then landed with surprising daintiness on top of Scarecrow’s head.
Scarecrow didn’t notice it. She wasn’t moving. She was staring right at the seagull on the post next to her, and it stared up at her. Seconds passed, while seagulls squawked and pecked at my shoes. Probably blunted their beaks, little monsters. Scarecrow swiveled her body right, then left, but she and the seagull never broke eye contact. She was having a staring contest with a bird.
I didn’t like the look the big one on her head was giving me, myself. I glared at it, and it glared at me. Those perfectly round yellow eyes looked like they were aiming its p
ointed beak right at my face. I had a pretty good scowl myself, and I gave it to the fat white sea turkey. He thought he could intimidate me? No way.
We glared at each other. And we glared at each other. Just as I felt my cheeks tug and I had to start fighting the urge to grin, the huge seagull flapped its wings again and leaped off Scarecrow’s head, flying away. I’d won a staring contest with a seagull. That shouldn’t have been nearly as satisfying as it was.
“Miss Mary! I found it!” Rat squeaked from behind my head. Leaning out the side of the hood, he pointed over my shoulder. I followed his little pink claw, or tried to. Seagulls took off, seagulls landed. Amidst the white, the black bird didn’t fit.
When I spotted it, the crow took off. I ran it immediately. Seagulls squawked and milled around my feet, but they couldn’t quite cover up the crow’s cawing. Scarecrow abandoned her gull and swung around to follow me as I followed the crow. It landed on the corner of a building, but when I got within throwing distance, it flew into the alley.
I didn’t like to be led. The idea made me feel itchy between the shoulders. Still, I’d asked Rat to find me a way. This had better be it.
Instead, I got an alley. By far the most ordinary alley I’d seen in the city of iron and yellow smoke. Brick walls flanked both sides, and the crazy pipework consisted of a few steam pipes that might have appeared behind buildings in any regular city. Windows were small, but made of ordinary glass or boarded up.
The only light came from the sun, and this late in the afternoon, there wasn’t much of that. It would have been easy to miss the steps going down to a plain door in a plain brick wall, except the crow sat on the lintel pecking at the wood.
What the heck? I tromped down the stairs, and as the crow stared at me, I knocked on the door, hard. The crow took off. Any fears I’d had of a wild goose chase disappeared instantly, because a little window slid open on the door. Yeah, it had one of those rectangular windows for someone to peer out of suspiciously at me, just like someone did now.
“Password?” a man’s funnily-accented voice demanded. He knew his cue.
“I’ll kick the door and scream my head off if you don’t open up,” I answered. After all, nobody asks for a password unless they think there’s someone to hide from.
I’d made an impression. He kept staring at me. “I cannot let a girl your age inside.” Didn’t sound very sure of himself.
“I know the password,” I replied.
Another stare, and the door swung open and the noise hit me. Okay, so this was a nightclub. Shades of the rave that had got me into this mess, but more coherent. I lifted my chin so the guard would know who’d won, and walked into the club with Scarecrow close behind me.
Actually, the guard seemed to be gone, and the door swung closed by itself. He might just have been hard to see, because it was dark as night by the door. Shadows bathed the whole club. Drowned it, more like. To make things worse, the one lit area was the dance floor, and the lights focused on it glared like searchlights, messing with my eyes and making the rest of the room look black.
Continuing the ‘better than Jennifer’s party’ theme, the dance floor wasn’t any kind of rave pit filled with awkwardly gyrating teenagers trying to pretend they didn’t look like idiots. Only half a dozen couples fit on this floor, because they each took up a lot of room as they spun and jumped like a high speed ballet. Jazzy, loud music accompanied them, muffling everything else in the room.
Everything else. Right. The bar stools were empty, so I wandered over to the bar and pulled myself up onto one, looking around. Shadows hid the customers pretty well, but not perfectly. Men and women, mostly in small groups, lurked in scattered booths and tables. The women’s dresses tended to be gaudy and showed off a lot of everything. Some of them had to be paid for their company, but I couldn’t tell which ones. Most of the men wore suits, although I saw coats too long, pants too high, shoulders too broad, and bewildering arrangements of buttons. No two people dressed alike or were the same age. A couple of guys even wore ragged tank tops and jeans. It didn’t surprise me that I was the youngest person here, but there wasn’t anyone else so young I could even place them for sure as high school age.
Oh, and everyone was drinking. No surprise there. And most of them nodded their heads or tapped their feet to the music. I couldn’t blame them. This was the best jazz I’d heard. Fast, loud, pulsatingly vibrant. My head twitched from side to side with the blowing horns.
“I wish I could dance like that,” I said, staring at the twisting dancers under the lights.
I could barely hear myself, but Scarecrow answered, “Why don’t we try?”
Why? There were too many reasons. I’d look like an idiot. No, who cared? I didn’t know where to start. I wanted to do what those people were doing, but their movements were bewilderingly complicated.
“Knock yourself out,” I said, pulling Rat out of my hood and dropping him in her outstretched hands.
“Miss Mary, I should stay with you!” Rat protested.
We both ignored him, and Scarecrow scampered off onto the dance floor. She spun and jumped around like a jumping jack, holding Rat out at arm’s length in both hands. It wouldn’t have satisfied me. She looked painfully out of place among the real dancers, who were so good that they twirled right around her as she lurched across the floor. Still, it felt good to see her having fun, and bathing in that wild, passionate music.
A hand tapped the bar by my elbow, and I tightened up. I turned a glare up at a dark-skinned man in a loose white button shirt and suspenders. What trouble was he going to give me?
“I ask you, girl, and please, I am serious. Not an improper suggestion. Take off that dress. It’s bad magic, a dress like that. I don’t want you getting into the kind of trouble a red dress and hood can bring. I want it so little, I will give you some of my daughter’s old clothes and a room free for the night to change in, if you’ll take them. Please.” All of this came from a thick French accent and worried eyes behind circular glasses.
I gave him a grimace. “Too late.” That was already more than I wanted to say about my Wolf.
Geez, I might as well have slapped the guy. He had that kind of expression as he leaned closer and told me all slow, “Then, it hurts Phillip to say this to a girl your age, but you get out of his bar.” My eyes tightened as I scowled up at him, and he looked guiltier still, but he went on, “That kind of trouble I can’t afford.”
I opened my mouth to yell at him, and second thoughts hit me just in time. My Wolf could be right behind me. If he caught me here, people would die. Probably including this poor idiot, who could just barely force himself to be enough of a jerk to make me die where he couldn’t get in the way.
Man, thoughts like that sucked all the fun even out of music like this. I’d split the difference. “Sell me some food, at least.” I had that coin in my bodice, right? Yeah, amidst the layers I could feel the hard little shape.
The guy’s horrified stare was starting to make me feel guilty. He was kicking me out to die, but I felt guilty. “I’ll give it to you,” he finally answered. He pulled a bag out from behind the bar. Not a crude tied rag like I’d had before, an actual satchel. “You can’t stay here, but I can do this for you. I’m sorry, girl.”
Much as I wanted to hate him for kicking me out, that horrified and sad look made perfect sense for the mess I was in. He was pretty generous with the food, too. The whole bread, cheese, and sausages thing I was starting to see would be a staple, but I saw him throw in an onion and several cans and even a can opener. He tossed some brown bottles in, too.
“No booze,” I snapped.
“Root beer. Just root beer. La Petit Chapon Rouge needs all her wits together. Phillip wouldn’t give you alcohol if you were twice as old.” He dropped a bottle of water into the bag and buckled it closed, and dropped it on the bar. Bright red, the same as my dress. Hooray.
“Go. Please,” he repeated, turning his head to stare meaningfully at a little door on the far
side of the bar from where I’d come in.
I sighed. I really wanted to stay and listen to the music, but it wasn’t going to happen. I hoisted the bag onto my shoulder; it weighed a ton. I snapped my fingers at Scarecrow. Useless. She couldn’t hear me. I couldn’t hear me. She must have seen it instead, because she stopped swinging Rat in circles and skipped off the dance floor after me.
I stomped over to the back door, shoved it open with my foot, and stormed out onto a street that was almost a party itself.
was still on the waterfront. I was just on the waterfront in a different city. The crazy metal additions of the city of iron and yellow smoke were nowhere to be seen. I stood in front of the only nondescript door on a street of wood and brick buildings made surreal by bright paint and colored lights. I couldn’t see the other side of the river, and the last sliver of the sun crept under the horizon as I watched, leaving me at the mercy of the local lighting. Shops glared with colored electric bulbs, streetlamps fought to keep circles of white sanity, lit torches stuck out of buildings that hadn’t gone in for electricity, and children walked past holding paper lanterns in which glowing blue things buzzed.
I watched one of those kids, an elementary school girl holding her lantern high. I wasn’t sure she was human. Part of it was her blankly calm expression. Part of it was that in a busy street, the children with the lanterns were given space. Part of it was that being human did not seem to be a major requirement here. I did not know how you found an eight-foot tall linebacker to make a zombie out of, but the sickly green middle schooler sitting on his arm looked vampirey to me. A mermaid swam from one side of a tank to the other delivering orders to the customers of a fish and chips restaurant. Lightning arced off the guy in bandages’ legs and buried itself in brick paving. It was quite a place, and if everyone wasn’t drunk, so many of them were that I could smell the nasty tang of alcohol in the air.
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