“Enid tells me you tracked him here,” says Mary.
“I did. We did-my friends and I.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“I’d like to hear it in your words, if you please.”
“We have a rather special interest in Enid’s music.”
“You wouldn’t be the first. Enid’s ability is quite exceptional and rare. What’s your particular interest?”
“One of the men I’m traveling with-Cal Griffin-has a twelve-year-old sister who is now a flare.”
“A what?”
“Like Magritte,” says Enid quietly. “A firefly. The Storm got her, too, he said. Like in Chicago.” He lowers himself to the arm of the chair.
Mary’s sharp eyes soften just a bit. “I’m truly sorry, Mr. Goldman. But if the Storm got your friend’s sister, how can Enid possibly help her?”
“We’re headed west to where the Source-what you call the Storm-is gathered. If Enid really can shield flares from the Source, maybe he could help break them free of it.” Maybe, I think, he could do more.
Now Mary’s eyebrows shoot straight up into her fringe of salt and pepper hair. “You’re tracking the Storm? How?”
“It’s a little talent I have, I guess. I’m like a compass. It- um-pulls me.” And the sign on that door says: Do not enter.
Mary nods and glances at Enid. “And your ability to see through our defenses-to walk through our defenses-is that also a ‘little talent’ you have?”
“Ah … apparently.” I don’t like the way this conversation is going. Especially since I now suspect that the others aren’t right behind me after all.
“You’ll understand, perhaps, if I tell you this concerns me.”
She slides off the desk and meets me eye-to-eye though I’m sitting. She is shorter, I realize, than Tina, but her stature is not a matter of physical size. This is One Big Woman.
“Usually, people don’t come here without an invitation,” she tells me. “In fact, since Enid and Maggie and I came here, no one has come through that portal that we haven’t led through. This is a place of refuge, Mr. Goldman. A preserve of human life. And your ‘little talent’ could put its very existence in jeopardy.”
I look over at Magritte. Her eyes are wide with what I think is concern (though flare eyes can be hard to read, and that little puckering between her brows could be annoyance). Enid is examining a knot in the floorboards. No help there.
“I’m no danger to you, Mary.” I try to reassure her. “My friends are no danger to you. All we want is to talk to Enid in the hope that maybe he can help us.”
“This compound”-she makes a sweeping gesture with one arm-“is locked in a vault that is somehow folded up in space. We don’t understand how. All we understand is that to keep it hidden, we have to bar the doors and windows and mind the locks. You picked my locks, Mr. Goldman. How many more like you are there at home?”
Several things flash through my mind at once. One is Mary’s choice of words; these are her people, her place, her locks, her gates I have crashed. Second is a quandary: Do I tell her there is one of me or many?
I opt for the truth. “There aren’t any more like me. At least, not among the people I’m with. None of them saw Magritte until Enid let them. None of them can see through your defenses or pick your locks.”
“No?” She turns on her heel, starts to pace. “But you could let them in.”
“I was kind of hoping you’d do that.”
“So they can talk Enid into leaving us to find this Source?”
“Not necessarily. He may be able to share his talent with us in another way. He might know something we don’t, something we can learn. Pardon me, but I kind of got the idea from Enid that helping people in need is your shtick.”
“My shtick.” A smile lifts one corner of her mouth. “Well, it’s a nice story, Mr. Goldman. It touches the heart.”
Her pacing brings her back into my face. “I have over 120 souls here. And more coming, by invitation, every day. What if you’re not what you advertise yourself to be? What if you have other motives that I can’t begin to divine? Or even if you’re sincere, what happens if the only way Enid can help you is to go with you?”
I hold up my hands in surrender. “Fine. I’ll leave.”
She grimaces. “So you can gate-crash again with reinforcements? Try to put yourself in my place. Would you trust you?”
Well, now. Given what the world is coming to, she has a point. Lesson number one in post-Change reality is that if it was ever true that nothing is what it seems, it now goes double.
“If there’s anything I can do to prove we’re harmless…”
Her mouth curls up at one corner. “And how would you go about doing that, Mr. Goldman? How can you be sure you are harmless?”
I can’t.
She’s silent for a moment, her eyes on my face, poking, prying, scanning. Then she steps back a pace. “Enid, find our would-be friend something to eat. He is not to go near the caverns. I’m going to call Council.”
“Yes, ma’am,” says Enid, docile as all get-out. He beckons with his dreadlocks.
I am dismissed into the care of the Bluesman and the flare. They lead me to a large, bright kitchen where the wood stove puts out too much heat and where a pot of tea is boil-ing-eternally, I suspect. I pull off my ratty coat and get a bowl of some sort of grain porridge and a cup of the industrial strength tea. While Enid and Magritte huddle at the kitchen table and speak in muffled tones about something- most likely what they should do with me-I stare moodily out the window, down the hill to the center of the camp, where the rhythm of early morning activity has established itself.
It’s like watching a dance of insects. They beetle around the fire pit, stop and chat, exchange containers of some sort. Near the residences, people are also busy, beating rugs, hanging laundry, tending animals, scratching at the ground. Very normal in a bucolic, medieval sort of way.
While I watch, the rhythm of the dance changes. From several of the cabins, people emerge as if propelled-two here, one there, another over there, a fourth and a fifth. They converge on the camp center, homing. On their way, they tag and draw along a woman hanging laundry, a man weeding neat rows of something green, another man deep in conversation with a group near the fire pit. From there, they start up the hill toward the Lodge. The people around them, the people they pass by, take note, following their progress, pausing to comment on it.
Call me squeamish, but this display of synchronicity makes my hair stand on end. I swallow a suddenly tasteless mouthful of porridge and set down my bowl. Okay, it’s not Children of the Corn-the people coming up the hill are chatting and smiling as they approach-but I am seriously weirded out, nonetheless.
“She called Council,” Magritte says from beside me. Her voice reminds me of the wind chimes. She seems slightly ill at ease.
“Is that a bad thing?” I ask.
“Not a bad thing,” says Enid. “The Council protects us, is all. They’ll do what’s good for the Preserve.”
“Ah. Which may not be what’s good for me and my friends.” Or the rest of the planet. I turn to look at him as straight up as I can. “Look, I meant what I said. Let me go and I’ll take my friends and get out of here.”
Enid drops his eyes. “That’s not my decision.”
“What about the little girl?” asks Magritte. “You ain’t just gonna abandon her?” Her eyes, for a moment, show me as deep and dark a maze as the one I traveled to get here. It doesn’t take special powers to see that Tina’s plight has some special significance for her. After all, she was close to becoming Megillah-fodder herself.