The Lost Plot

by Genevieve Cogman

  “And if he disagrees?”

  “Then I’ll listen to what he has to say and make my decision based on that.” She spread her hands. “We don’t know. We’re speculating. All that we do know is that he’s not here on Library orders. This is a matter of internal dragon politics at the highest level, and if Evariste has involved the Library, then he has to answer for it.”

  And if I mess up, the thought ran through her head coldly, then I’ll be answering for that too, and taking as much blame as is necessary to keep the Library safe. Evariste’s not the only one who’s gambling with high stakes.

  “Just a moment,” Kai said suddenly, turning to peer out of the window. He switched to English. “Officer! Is that car following us? The green one, back and to our left?”

  Irene turned to follow his gaze, but it took her a moment to pick out the car. She hadn’t noticed it before—it had been lost in the sea of long-bodied cars and heavy taxis, or shielded by one of the passing buses packed with people on both floors. She wasn’t used to judging this place’s rhythms yet, or spotting what was unnatural.

  The cop in the right front seat swore and stepped on the gas. “Those damn reporters must have gotten on our tail after all. Sorry about that, ma’am, sir. You’ll just have to run for it, the moment we get to the subway.”

  “How far is it now?” Irene asked.

  “Just around the corner, ma’am. You all ready to go?”

  “Ready and waiting,” Irene said. She reached into her handbag and pulled out a few ten-dollar bills, passing them forward into the hand that was already extended to accept the bribe. “Thanks for the assistance.”

  The car pitched around the corner and screeched to a stop against the curb. Kai scrambled out almost before the car had finished braking, pulling the door open for Irene. As she jumped out, she saw the green car weaving through the traffic to pull in behind them.

  Its windows were rolled down and something metallic glinted in the sun.

  Kai swept her legs from under her and dropped her to the sidewalk, throwing himself protectively across her as the first few shots rang out.

  CHAPTER 10

  Irene plastered herself against the pavement as bullets whined through the air above her head. They chewed holes in the car they’d just left and scythed into the crowd at the station entrance. Screams mingled with shrieking car wheels as every bit of traffic in the vicinity attempted to get out of the vicinity.

  Including, she suddenly realized, the police car that had brought them here. And it was the only thing between them and whoever was firing the tommy guns.

  “Car wheels, lock!” she shouted with the speed of panic.

  Every single car within the range of her voice squealed to a stop. The air was thick with dust and exhaust fumes. The two cops abandoned the car, scrambling out to run for cover. But the bullets didn’t stop.

  “Jam the guns?” Kai suggested. He wriggled sideways, trying to get farther out of the line of fire.

  “Yes, I was getting to that!” Irene snapped. She should have done that first, rather than clog up the entire area with stopped cars. Panicked decisions were rarely good decisions. “And then we run.”

  “We should deal with those gunmen.”

  “No guns, no gunman problem. If we get away, that’ll defuse the situation.” A bullet whined just above her head as she prepared to move. “Get ready. Guns, jam!”

  Kai pulled her to her feet, and they were running before anyone realized the shooting had stopped.

  Irene had assumed people would take cover in the subway station entrance. But she hadn’t considered the impact of two men with tommy guns, indiscriminately hosing the street with lead. Now that she could see the bodies, she forced herself to carry on, ignoring the copper stench of fresh blood in the air. She didn’t have time for it if she wanted to get out alive.

  The turnstiles inside the subway station were deserted, apart from the guard hiding in his booth. Everyone had, quite sensibly, chosen to run away rather than wait to see what was going on. It drew a very clear picture of this America—or at least this New York—when it came to guns and violence. Irene had to admit that Captain Venner had been justified when he told her to leave town.

  A flood of people were streaming down the tiled stairs beyond the turnstiles, hurrying down corridors and piling into any trains that were leaving the station. Men and women jostled shoulder-to-shoulder, abandoning any semblance of politeness in their urgency to get away from the gun-fire. Women in narrow knee-length skirts and thin draping jackets were pushed up against men in wide-shouldered suits, staggering to keep their feet in the mob. The wide entrance-hall was full of voices screaming and re-echoing, curses cut short, and pleas to let someone through. A group of sailors in blue and white formed a flying wedge, punching their way through like an arrowhead. Kai swerved to one side to grab something from a magazine stand, and Irene had to struggle against the crowd to catch up with him.

  “Which train?” he shouted, catching her wrist and pulling her closer.

  “Any!” she called back. “But we want the end carriage.”

  He didn’t ask why, but instead forced his way through the crowd, dragging her behind him. The New York subway was no place for weaklings under normal conditions, and the shooting outside had pushed it towards a new level of pandemonium. Unlike the normal semi-civility of the London Underground, this was a morass of screaming, elbows, and trampling feet.

  Still, she thought grimly, it would make it very difficult for anyone to follow them.

  The two of them staggered onto the next subway train that came along, then—before it left the station—scrambled through the door at the far end, and exited onto the track, carefully avoiding stepping on any rails. Irene wasn’t sure which rails were electrified and didn’t want to find out the hard way.

  A quarter of an hour later, they were hiding in a maintenance room. A single light bulb dangled from the ceiling, casting a dim light over the cans of paint, mops and buckets, and other dust-shrouded impedimenta that filled the place. There was barely enough room for the two of them. But it was the first time in hours that Irene had been sure they were safe and unobserved.

  And hopefully there weren’t any werewolves in this underground railway system.

  “This wasn’t what I planned at all,” she said. She raised a hand to brush dust and soot from her face, and noticed that her fingers were smeared with blood. That must have happened outside the station. When she’d been crawling on the ground as the bullets whipped by above her. Irene wasn’t a stranger to violence: she’d been shot at before. But this casual level of overkill, with absolutely no regard for civilian casualties, was disturbing. “I knew we should expect trouble from dragons, but I hadn’t planned on being shot at by organized crime, or chased by the police.”

  “The level of surveillance is worrying,” Kai agreed. “And it seems to be intensifying. I don’t think we can afford to stay in any one place for long.”

  “Then let’s get this over as fast as possible, before anyone else gets shot,” Irene said. “I’ve had enough of being reactive. Time to get proactive. We need a map.”

  “Done,” Kai said, pulling a folded street map out of his jacket.

  Irene blinked. “How on earth did you get hold of that?”

  “When we were coming into the station. I saw some maps on that bookstall.” He frowned. “I regret not being able to leave any money for it, but under the circumstances . . .”

  “We were in a hurry,” Irene agreed, taking the map eagerly. She upturned a couple of buckets to make a makeshift table. “Very good job, Kai. Seeing as we’re in New York, have a cookie.”

  “I’d settle for cocktails and a dance,” Kai said hopefully.

  “They’d probably recognize me as ‘Jeanette Smith’ the minute I walked into a nightclub by now.” Irene unclasped the locket with Evariste’s name in it
and dangled it over the map. “You too. As an imported English mobster, that is. You were standing right behind me when the reporters were taking photographs.”

  “I managed to hide my face more than you did. Which is probably a good thing.” Kai frowned. “If Qing Song is here, and if he or Hu recognizes me . . .”

  “That would be inconvenient,” Irene agreed. She focused her thoughts and held the pendant over the map, as she’d done before. “Locket, indicate the place where the Librarian whose name you contain is to be found . . .”

  • • •

  A couple of hours later, Kai was assisting Irene off a streetcar in the middle of Brooklyn. Brown-stone buildings three or four storeys high walled the streets and turned them into canyons, rising high enough to block off most of the sunlight. The entrance doorways were higher than street level, and little flights of steps ran down from each one to the sidewalk. Ranks of windows looked down at the people hurrying below, blank eyes in shadowed faces watching the crowds of New Yorkers going about their business.

  Nobody had spotted them yet—or at least nobody had pointed at them and yelled, “Hey, aren’t you Jeanette Smith, the famous English mobster?”—and Irene was tentatively starting to relax.

  The brown-stone on the street corner they’d located on the map looked like any of the other brown-stones in the area. It had been a single building once, before being converted into apartments: Irene could just make out the row of door-bells inside the porch. There was a convenient corner shop opposite, giving Irene and Kai an excuse to look in the window while they pondered their next move.

  “The front door would be too obvious,” Kai said quietly. “If anyone’s watching it, they couldn’t miss us.”

  Irene nodded. “But the back’s suspicious to any watchers.” Their route had taken them all round the block while they scouted the place. There was a fire escape visible up the back of the building, but that approach had its own risks. “Better to walk up to the front door, as if we’re regular inhabitants.”

  “As long as you let me do the talking,” Kai said. “Your American accent is . . .” He looked for a tactful way of phrasing it. “Unconvincing.”

  Irene glared at him in the shop window, and adjusted a wrinkle in her stocking rather than look at him directly. “Oh, very well,” she agreed.

  Kai tilted his fedora, inspected his reflection, re-tilted it, then led the way to the brown-stone. He mimed fumbling in his pocket and finding a key, then unlocking the door. Irene stood behind him and, just loudly enough to be audible, said, “Door-lock, open.”

  The door swung open and Kai held it for Irene before closing it behind them. The hallway inside was sparsely furnished, with only a numbered set of letter boxes to break the entrance corridor’s monotony. It was floored in battered linoleum, and the old wood that panelled the walls was scarred and dented by years of casual punishment. There were two doors on the left-hand wall, and a flight of stairs at the end of the corridor. Irene glanced at the letter boxes, but none of them had names next to them, just apartment numbers. A pity: it would have made things easier.

  The second door on the left swung open and a woman poked her head out. She was in her mid-fifties, her hair a brassy orange and her shawl-collared dress a battered purple. “Have you got the— Oh, sorry.” She looked over Kai and Irene. “I figured it was someone else.”

  “Sorry,” Kai said, managing a rather convincing New York accent. “Hope we didn’t bother you.”

  “Nah, not a bit. I was waiting for my Tom to get back from the store. You new here?” Her eyes were bright with curiosity.

  “Just here to see an acquaintance,” Kai said. “I think he’s on one of the upper floors. He gave me his key but not his apartment number.”

  “What’s his name?” the woman asked.

  “Evariste,” Kai said. They couldn’t be sure he’d be using his real name, but one had to say something. “He won’t have been here long; a month at most.”

  “Oh, him.” The woman pursed her lips in disapproval. “I don’t know his name, but there’s this new fellow who’s been here only a couple of weeks. And everyone else has been living here for years. He’s on the fourth floor, left-hand side. I have got to say, while I’m not prejudiced, a boy like him would have done better taking rooms in Harlem. I mean, it’s only natural, isn’t it?”

  Irene was sharply reminded of the prejudices of 1920s America. But if they wanted information, unfortunately they’d have to play along. “That’s what we told him, wasn’t it?” she said to Kai, struggling to match his accent. “We said he should have taken rooms there.”

  Kai nodded soberly. A glint in his eye showed that he’d caught Irene’s direction. “I hope he hasn’t done anything to disturb you while he’s been here,” he said to the woman.

  “Well, no, not so much,” she admitted, in a tone of voice suggesting that she wished she had something to complain about. “It’s not as if he even leaves his apartment that much. Just sits there all day and does I don’t know what, and only goes out to get some food and a glass of something from around the corner. What does he do for work? It looks real shifty—know what I mean? I’ve heard about that sort of thing on the radio.”

  This was interesting. It sounded more like hiding than active cooperation with a dragon partner. Irene filed it away thoughtfully and nodded. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” she said to the woman.

  “Not a problem,” she said reluctantly. Clearly she’d been hoping for a longer gossip about their new tenant. “Have a nice day.”

  As the door shut behind her, Irene and Kai trotted up the stairs.

  They paused on the third floor. Irene unclasped the pendant from her neck and looped it round her left wrist. “Point to the Librarian whose name you share,” she instructed it softly.

  The pendant jerked and pulled at her wrist like an impatient puppy, pointing upwards and to the left. She and Kai quietly began ascending the stairs.

  On the fourth floor the pendant’s pull became horizontal, tugging towards the left-hand apartment. Just as the woman had said. There was no obvious sign of anything out of the ordinary. No swarms of flies, no smell of corpses, no suspicious noises . . . Irene forcibly jerked her mind away from trashy detective-novel tropes, and glanced at Kai to see if he had any thoughts.

  Kai mimed knocking and raised an eyebrow.

  Irene considered it. If Evariste was guilty of something, then even knocking at the door might panic him into trying to escape. Perhaps she should have had Kai wait outside, beneath the fire escape.

  Oh well, hindsight always had all the best ideas. Be ready to open the door, she mouthed at Kai.

  He nodded.

  “Door, unlock,” she said softly.

  The lock clicked audibly. Kai kicked the door open: it swung back to crash against the wall, giving them a clear view of the apartment lounge.

  The room was full of books. Volumes had been piled up against the walls in gaudy slices of colour, and bags and boxes of yet more books turned the floor into an obstacle course. There were no pictures hanging on the walls, no furniture other than a table and a couple of chairs, no rugs, no decorations—nothing except the books.

  It reminded Irene of her own rooms back at the Library.

  The man sitting at the dining-table jerked his head up from his arms, looking at them in bleary-eyed shock. He was in his shirtsleeves: his tie hung unfastened round his neck, and stubble made his dark skin even darker. He looked at Irene, his attention skipping over her as unimportant, and then at Kai, and his eyes widened with shock. “Books, hit that dragon!” he shouted, pushing his chair back and shoving himself away from the table.

  Kai threw himself back from the doorway with a curse as books came tumbling from their piles and rising from the floor, slicing through the air towards him.

  “Books, down on the floor!” Irene shouted, abandoning all hope of
silence. She couldn’t see past the books, but: “Trousers, hobble Evariste!”

  The crash of books hitting the floor—and a few of them hitting Kai—echoed through the building. Another crash from inside the apartment suggested that Evariste had gone from vertical to horizontal. “Clothing, release me!” he ordered. “Door, close!”

  Irene dived into the room, rolling across the floor, just as the door slammed shut behind her. That was the problem with duelling in the Language: the longer you spent talking, the more opportunity you gave your opponent to take action. Evariste shouldn’t have wasted time disentangling his legs. “Tie, choke Evariste,” she said quickly. It was cruel, but it was the quickest way she could think of to silence him. “Table, pin Evariste to the wall.”

  The table slid across the floor, catching Evariste between it and the wall behind, and his tie rose to circle his throat and twist round his windpipe. He struggled with it, his fingers clawing at the fabric, but he didn’t have the breath to say anything in the Language.

  Irene rose from her crouch and walked across to him. “Stop fighting me and we’ll talk,” she said. “Nod if you agree.”

  Evariste jerked a tiny nod. It wasn’t a gesture of surrender, just a temporary accommodation.

  “Tie, release Evariste’s throat,” Irene said. She felt a twinge of guilt as she saw the red mark it had left behind. “Sorry. But we need to talk. I’m from the Library.”

  “That much is obvious,” Evariste snapped. “And I see that you’ve sold out too.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Him.” Evariste pointed at Kai, who’d entered the room and was kicking aside the fallen books that littered the floor as he stalked towards them. A trail of blood streaked Kai’s temple where one of the missiles had connected. “So much for the Library’s neutrality!”