by Holly Black
“Who’s they?” I asked. “And what sort is that?”
“The self-policing sort,” said Mouse. “The sort that, in the back of their minds, really do believe the pointy-eared bastards are somehow better.”
“You’re a very rude boy,” I said.
“I know you’ve been here longer than me, Marius,” he said, “but don’t do what they do. Don’t try to pretend you’re better than me just because you’re a few years older.”
“Do you hate me that much?”
He shook his head. “I don’t hate you, Marius. I feel bad for you. I want to help you.”
“And how are you going to do that?”
“By convincing you to believe you’re worth something.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“You’re just not ready to hear the truth,” said Alek.
“Why are you still here?” I asked.
He looked shocked at the question. “Here with you?”
“Here in Bordertown,” I said. “I mean, you seem to not like it here very much. So I don’t understand. Why are you staying? The Way back to the World is there for you if you want it.”
We looked at each other, then awkwardly away. He put his hand over mine on the table. Finally he said, “I do like you, Marius. I do. You’re so very good. You’re much kinder than I am. Thank you for everything. I don’t say that enough. And there are things I like here. There are. And that’s why I talk the way I’ve been doing. There are good things here. But they’re threatened.”
“It’s almost evening,” I said, looking out the window. The sky was tending toward violet poured over a red horizon of buildings. “I need to get ready to go down to Ho Street and stake my corner. Coins are waiting to be tossed.”
“I may still be out when you get back,” he said as I got up from the table.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Down to Soho, too, with some friends from work. We’re going to the Magic Lantern to see a movie. Hopefully one will be playing.” He laughed. The Magic Lantern wasn’t a very reliable theater. Sometimes they would put on a live show so that if the movie cut out, you could keep watching. And you could never tell if the projector would show the intended film or some nonsensical silent movie that was a cross between watching a stranger’s family videos from the middle of the twentieth century and a surrealist experiment in green dogs and unopened umbrellas during winter. I sometimes went hoping for the stranger’s home videos, especially now that the twentieth century was so far behind me, sealed away, impossible to go back to. I was relieved to hear Mouse make a noise like that, though—a laugh—and also relieved he’d recently been saying words like friends and hopefully.
“Have fun,” I said, tucking my case under my arm to leave.
“Wait,” said Mouse. I waited with my hand on the knob as he stood there searching for the words to tell me something. After a while, he seemed to give up and settled for: “Be safe while you’re out there. I worry about you sometimes.”
I smiled. I didn’t know if he was somehow saying he loved me. And though I saw a possibility of love in him, I couldn’t help but feel he was too young, that I’d be no better than the Trueblood who’d spotted him when Mouse had first arrived. I couldn’t help remembering that Mouse had been a baby when I was already a teenager back in the World, thanks to the Way closing and screwing up time.
“No worries,” I said, my voice low in my throat, holding it in as if it might escape me. I was a master of self-restraint. It was my new art form. “I’m a big boy,” I told Mouse. “I’ll be careful.”
* * *
I’ve said that the music had left me. Although I didn’t know it then, I realize now it was right around the time the Way between Borderland and the World closed that it began to slip away. First for a night, as if it were just flaking out on me, not showing up where we’d arranged to meet. Then a week went by, and no matter how many times I placed myself on my corner across from Danceland, no matter how many times I put bow to string, I couldn’t catch a song. I could play my old music, but nothing new would come, and the songs felt funny all of a sudden, as if they were too old-fashioned. A change was in the air around that time, a big one—you could see it by the banners of shining lights that stretched over the city like the aurora borealis—but I had the strongest feeling that I was somehow being left behind. As if the bus I needed to catch had stopped while I’d fallen asleep on the bench, then continued on without me.
I started to toss in my sleep during those long nights, and inevitably my thoughts would return to the world I’d left behind. I’d think of all the good things first. My mother’s voice in the morning, waking me for school. My father’s hand on my head like a hat, after I’d brought home straight As. My friends in the school orchestra. My teacher, Mr. Humphrey, who told me I had talent and that I should go to college, that I’d get a scholarship for playing the violin the way I could. Did. Then I thought of all the bad things. A heart broken by a boy who didn’t love me. The way my parents’ faces fell when I told them who I really was, how all they could do was blink. Their silence. Their retreat from me. Thinking back on it, the things that had made me unhappy might have faded over time if I’d stayed. When I realized I was playing the game of regrets, though, I made myself stop and do other things.
I’d pace my apartment by candlelight, trying to think of something—anything—to make the music come back. That elf who had smiled and applauded and threw coins, who had taken me home and used me, I wondered if what he’d done had been the killing blow, because I’d already been bleeding confidence for a while.
Even after Mouse arrived—an event I’d hoped meant my fortunes were changing—I played my old-fashioned music on the streets only to keep the apartment and to keep us fed, to make the money from that elf last a little longer. Mouse’s arrival hadn’t changed things, not in the way I wanted. It didn’t bring the music back. I’d been closed off from it, the way the World had been closed off from Borderland—but it didn’t return after the Way was clear again.
* * *
For most of that summer, Mouse was gone during the day more and more. Delivering messages, I figured, on his shared bicycle. In the evenings he’d come back for a few hours, for dinner, some conversation, to ask how I was doing, to give me things he’d gotten on the job: a bag of coffee beans, a bar of dark chocolate, a package of cigarettes, though I never smoked as a rule. “You can trade them, then,” he said when I rejected his offerings, and I realized he was, in his own way, paying me for room and board.
“You don’t owe me anything, Alek,” I said. “I’ve got the place covered. Do for yourself instead.”
“No,” he said. “We do for each other.” He smiled, happier than I’d seen him since he’d arrived. I nodded and offered a smile of my own. That was our currency. No teeth. Just upturned corners.
I was happy for those offerings, but I was worried about where they’d come from. I wasn’t stupid. I knew he must have been running something illegal on that bike of his—messages or drugs or black-market items from the World or the Fair Lands—but I traded his offerings anyway on the streets of Soho, for food and clothes and to keep the roof over our heads.
After Mouse started giving me things, I stopped playing my violin altogether. The must had gone out of me. Instead of playing on my corner, I started walking with my case under my arm, my collar up and my chin tucked against my chest. Rarely would I meet the eyes of a stranger, rarely would I do more than say hello to an acquaintance who stopped me to ask how I’d been doing. “Fine,” I’d say, and keep moving. I didn’t want to trap myself in a situation where I needed to explain why people no longer saw me out playing. I didn’t want to admit I could still eke out a song but they all sounded labored now, awkward, as if I were a beginner all over again.
So I stopped trying, avoided my old haunts for a while, walked in other directions, my violin case tucked under my arm like a bunch of useless flowers. I looked like
I was going somewhere, but I was hiding out in the open. And months later, in the summer, when I finally got up the nerve to go back to Ho Street—to what had been my corner—I found a girl with green spiky hair standing behind a table with a strange machine hooked up to two tiny speakers. She sang a song I’d never heard—the streets were full of them now more than ever—into a microphone attached to the machine. Her voice drifted down the block easily. I stood there listening, until she brought her tune to a close. And then I went up to her and said, “I’m sorry, but … what is all of this?” I waved my hands at the equipment on her table.
“This?” She pointed at the main piece of machinery. “It’s a laptop.” When I didn’t respond, she said, “You know, a mobile computer? I can play downloaded karaoke songs on it? Well, as long as it’s been spelled. Live and learn. This place rocks, but it has its downsides.”
“Downloaded?” I said, vaguely recalling a word like this that Mouse had used.
The girl nodded but didn’t explain. Instead, she tapped the keyboard and stroked her fingertip across its bottom edge, tapped a few more keys, and soon a new song was playing and she was singing it. Another song I didn’t recognize. She smiled around the words. It wasn’t my idea of music, but I placed a few coins on her table before leaving.
On my way home, bemused and a bit melancholy, I stopped in a café, hoping a strong cup of coffee might change my mood. But when I sat at a communal table, where a halfie with a long coat and scraggly teeth poured tea from a pot into his cup, he looked me up and down before asking, “What’s wrong? Someone murder your sister?”
“Excuse me?” I said after swallowing a bitter sip.
“You look like you need a beer.”
“I don’t drink,” I told him.
“Name’s Billy Buttons,” the halfie said. I didn’t offer him mine. “New arrival, are you?”
“No. I’ve been around for a while. Why?”
“You look like you haven’t got a clue what’s going on,” he said. “That’s why.”
“I just saw a girl singing karaoke songs from a miniature computer. When I left the World, computers took up an entire desk.”
“Now they sit pleasantly on your lap like a cat,” said the guy. “Some in the palm of your hand. Must be one of the new kids. They’re bringing all sorts of nifty things with them from the World these days, aren’t they?”
“Seems so.”
“Well, you roll with the punches,” said Billy. “Otherwise, you get knocked down. I’ve been around B-town long enough to learn to make adjustments when the World changes. Of course, it’s worse for you younglings who were here before the Pinching Off. You’ve got all these kids coming through now who look like you but don’t think or act like you. Makes you old before your time. It’s a shame.”
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 f
rom 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.