“He says that, but really it’s because he found the one.” A girl in a pencil skirt and cardigan that managed to be anything but demure walked up to the table. She slid onto Willy’s lap. “Isn’t that it, Papa Bear?”
She was wearing a lot of makeup, so she looked older, but Sadie thought she probably wasn’t even twenty. Which meant she and this girl were nearly the same age, but totally different species.
“You know it, kitten,” Willy said, kissing her hand. “Let me introduce you to an old friend.”
Finally, Sadie thought. A name. This was it.
Willy said, “Kansas, meet Little Ice.”
I’m going to strangle someone.
Kansas said, “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Ice.”
Two someones.
Subject 9 cleared his throat. “Nice to meet you too, Kansas. But actually, my name is Ford,” he said. “Ford Winter.”
Thank you, Sadie thought, with a warm surge of gratitude. Ford. She wondered if he’d been named for the car or the president. Nice to meet you, Ford Winter.
Kansas frowned and leaned toward Ford, giving him a view straight down her sweater. “Why do they call you Ice if your name is Ford?”
Ford moved his attention from her cleavage to her face, and Sadie sensed him trying to tell if she was joking. “I think it’s the way I play poker,” he deadpanned.
She nodded earnestly. “Oh.”
Nope. Not joking.
“He’s James’s brother,” Willy explained.
Her face and Sadie’s heart fell at the same time. James, the James who was dead, was Subj—Ford’s—brother. And the fact that he’d been asking about James’s girlfriend now meant it probably hadn’t happened that long ago.
Sadie heard a phone buzz, and Willy pulled his out, glanced at the screen, and lifted Kansas to her feet with one arm as he stood. “Kitten, I’ve got to go check on something for the boss. Will you entertain my friend Ice while I’m gone?”
“Of course, Papa Bear,” she cooed. She slipped into a chair next to Ford’s and said, “Do you work for Mr. P too?”
A low, quick spike in sound. “Who?”
Kansas shook her head. “I guess not. What do you do?”
Ford said, “Demolition. You?”
Demolition. That’s a job? Sadie was familiar with construction, but she didn’t know destruction was its own profession. Given what Curtis had hinted about her subject’s potential for violence, it sounded perfect for him.
“I’m an executive assistant,” Kansas said, with a coy smile. “They call us work mistresses.”
“Ah.” Ford’s eyes were moving like a tennis match, except the competition was between Kansas’s neckline and the door Willy and Linc had left though. The door was winning, and he was getting ready to stand up when Kansas blurted, “I was real sorry to hear about your brother. Dying and all that. James seemed like a great guy. And they looked like they were so happy together.”
Ford’s attention immediately focused. “They who?”
“Him and his girlfriend,” Kansas said. “We all spent New Year’s Eve together, me and Willy and Linc and James and… what was her name?”
The sounds in Ford’s mind spiked like a powerful radio burst, and Sadie had that feeling again of catching a glimpse of—something—out of the corner of her eye. She turned to look for it, and again there was nothing to see. She turned back slowly, and—
My god, she gasped. Focusing her eyes not through Ford’s but somewhere closer, she found herself watching as points of color, red and green and yellow and purple, hundreds, then thousands of them, materialized like a Georges Seurat painting into a shimmering image of a boy smiling blissfully while a girl, face hidden by a mass of dark hair, kissed the corner of his mouth.
It was dazzling, magical. As Sadie’s eyes adjusted to this new focal length, she saw that this image wasn’t the only one, it was happening all around her in his mind, millions of points of color, a massive, fluxing universe of shapes, images, and scenes forming and fading synthetically into one another. It seemed boundless, an endless stream, whipping by at the speed of thought and yet clearly visible to Sadie. A fall day at a lake, a crushed beer can, bunk beds, a hand reaching—
“Plum,” Kansas announced triumphantly. “That’s her name. Real pretty, right?”
The images—memories? Fantasies?—vanished. Sadie heard a low thump and realized the entire episode had taken place in the space of one of Ford’s heartbeats.
Amazing. Syncopy was exhilarating. Both space and time seemed rubbery, capable of stretching into new dimensions, unconstrained by normal boundaries, and she felt similarly unconstrained. Similarly capable of stretching to anything.
“I don’t have her number or anything,” Kansas went on, “but ask the guys, they all know her.”
Sadie caught a whiff of something that smelled like bleach and thought she must have underestimated the level of staff at the Castle since clearly they did have a cleaning crew.
Willy rejoined them then, trailed by a small clutch of Chapsters. “Papa Bear has to go to work,” he told Kansas. “You understand, don’t you, kitten?”
“Of course,” Kansas said. “I’ll wait for you at the car.”
“She’s great,” Ford told Willy as they both watched her bottom slalom out the door.
“One in a billion,” Willy said. He turned to Ford, and his eyes were sparkling. “Tell you a secret?”
“Sure.”
“I’m gonna propose.” He slapped himself on the leg. “Me, Willy. To a girl like that. What do you think?”
“I think you’ll be really happy,” Ford told him.
“Thanks, man,” Willy said. His expression softened. “James was the one who got me to ask her out, you know that? Did it as a bet. Never would have had the guts to do it otherwise. Great guy, your brother.”
Sadie felt Ford stiffen. “Yep.”
Willy put his hands on Ford’s shoulders. “And so are you.”
Ford laughed. “Thanks.”
“You’ve been a stranger at the Castle for too long. Guy could get his feelings hurt, his friends stop coming around. I was starting to think you’d pulled a Bucky and left without saying goodbye.”
Ford’s mind exploded with a fireworks display of images: a boy of about eleven with dark hair, huge intelligent eyes, and a tool belt slung around his skinny hips, staring earnestly at a hand-drawn map; the same boy a bit taller, wearing a helmet covered in aluminum foil and standing in front of a scraggly bush; taller still, now a gawky teenager, in the middle of a derelict factory building, grinning and holding up an old-fashioned beat box; finally, not taller but older, probably eighteen, with a beard and a backpack and a bandana tied around his head, his big eyes now wild and angry, jumping on a Greyhound bus just before its doors closed.
Ford said, “Bucky disappeared years ago. I’ve only been out of circulation four months.”
“Lot happens in four months around here,” Willy told him. “Practically a lifetime.”
Another burst of sound in Ford’s head. “Yeah, seems that way.” Big daubs of blue, black, and white swept together into a blurry image of Linc leaving the room earlier, and Sadie had the sense that Ford wanted to say more, but Willy cut him off.
“We all miss James, same as you,” he said, draping his massive arm over Ford’s shoulders. “But we’ve got to come together when bad things happen, right? It’s what we do. We’re family”—Willy brought his grin close to Ford—“the kind you pick yourself, so it really counts.”
A warm sensation washed through Ford, and he laughed. “Thanks, Willy.”