“Unless you’re SOF, and you track it down,” I said.
There was a little silence. Jesse sighed. “It’s not that easy. I mean, tracing something off the net is never easy—”
“There are all those boring laws about privacy,” I said.
“—which even SOF has to make an effort to break,” said Pat.
“—but a lot of the usual rules of, um, physics, don’t work quite the same with Others as with humans,” Jesse continued.
Yeah, I thought. How does a hundred-and-eighty-pound man turn into a ninety-pound wolf? Where does the leftover ninety go? Does he park it in the umbrella stand overnight?
“Geography and vampires is one of the worst. Where they are and where we are often doesn’t seem to, uh, relate.”
Vampire senses are different from human in a number of ways…It is not the distance that is crucial, but the uniformity…. Evidently this worked in both, um, directions. Einstein was wrong. I wondered if it was too late to give my skeggy old physics teacher a bad day.
“So even if we got a good read off a cosmail that we were sure was lobbed by a sucker we still might not know any more than we did before we wasted some of SOF’s tax blinks cracking it. We can use all the help we can get.”
“Which I think I said to you already not long ago,” added Pat. “You might also keep in mind that the guys who don’t want to be found usually have the edge on us guys who want to find them. Even the human ones, and they’re usually easier. Sunshine, give us a break. We’re not trying to ruin your life for fun, you know.”
I stared into the bottom of my mug. Not Jesse or Pat’s fault that I was bound to a vampire. I didn’t think they’d be real open to the idea of making an exception for him. I wasn’t happy about it myself. But I could hardly tell Pat that the reason SOF was so full of covert partbloods now made me feel worse, not better.
I was getting to a pretty bad place if I was beginning to wonder if maybe going bonkers and having to be bagged for my own good might be my best choice.
What if what I had pointed toward was Con?
No. The answer came almost at once. No. What I had pointed toward was something…something in itself sick-making, antithetical to humans. To anything warm and breathing. Betrayal would be a different sort of sick. I was sure.
I was pretty sure.
A human shouldn’t be able to think in terms of betraying a vampire. It didn’t work. Like those nonsense sentences they used to wake you up when you are supposed to be learning a foreign language. I eat the hat of my uncle. I sit upon the cat of my aunt. Depends on the cat of course.
It didn’t work, like being able to see in the dark didn’t work. The bottom of my mug was in shadow. I hadn’t drunk the last swallow because it had a fine dust of tea leaves in it. Even they threw shadows, tiny shadows within the shadow, floating in the shadowy dark liquid. “Okay,” I said.
It might have been Bo I’d found. That I’d felt through the globe-net. That was about as sick-making a thought as I could have. Bo, that Con was supposed to be finding so we could go spoke his wheel before he spoked ours. Again. Permanently.
“Then you’ll come with us?”
I thought about it. There wasn’t much to think. “I have to be back at six,” I said.
“You got it,” said Pat.
It was just Pat and Jesse and me. Aimil went back to the library. When we awkwardly said good-bye, her face was full of bright shadows I couldn’t read. I looked at her, trying to resettle her in my mind as a partblood and a SOF. Did it take that much effort? I didn’t know. It was taking me a lot of effort to be whatever I now was.
While Pat did some shifting-papers-around things and Jesse disappeared for a few minutes I moved over to the sunlight falling through the gray window of Pat’s office. The sunlight felt thin, but it was sunlight. SOF windows were all gray because of the proofglass: proof against bullets, firebombs, kamikaze Weres, glass- and steel-cutting demon talons, spells, charms, almost everything but an armored division with howitzers. Proofglass had only come on the market about ten years ago, just after the Wars, which might have been a little less fatal if it had been invented a few years earlier. All high-risk businesses and the military and most other government departments, plus a lot of paranoids, both the kind with real enemies and the other kind, now had proofglass in their windows and their vehicles. Proofglass upgrader was a popular new career among young magic handlers. You didn’t have to be a magic handler to get hired as an upgrader, but you’d probably live longer.
Nobody had figured out how to make it less gray though. Gray and depressing, like being in jail. Hadn’t they done studies that humans really need sunlight? Not just light. Sunlight. And all humans, not just me. I hoped Charlie’s wasn’t going to have to put in proof-glass.
I hoped I was still human.
Pat drove and put me in the front seat with him. “Can you still feel—whatever?”
I thought about it. Reluctantly. I poked around for that feeling of Here. I found it. It was like finding a dead rat in your living room. A large dead rat. “Yes,” I said.
“West?”
“Yes.”
We drove. Old county buildings quickly became Old Town, which turned almost as quickly into downtown and then rather more slowly into nothing-in-particular town, blocks of slightly shabby houses giving way to blocks of somewhat seedy shops and offices and back again. It wasn’t a big city; we went over the line into what most of us called No Town far too soon. In the first place I didn’t want to go there at all, in the second place I didn’t like being reminded that it was so close. New Arcadia’s only big bad spots are in No Town, which did compel a certain amount of evasive driving. Even a SOF car can only go where there are still roads, and urban bad spots get blocked off fast. But we weren’t going nearly indirectly enough for me.
Here moved out of the back of my mind into the front, like Large Zombie Rat getting up off your living room floor and following you into the kitchen where you realize that it’s bigger and uglier than you thought, and its teeth are longer, and while zombies are really, really stupid, they’re also really, really vicious. They’re also nearly as fast as vampires, and since they don’t just happen, they’re made for a purpose, if one is coming after you, that’s probably its purpose, and you’re in big trouble.
Here was getting worse. It was going to burst out of my skull and dance on the dashboard, and it wouldn’t be anything anyone wanted to watch. “Stop,” I said. Pat stopped. I tried to breathe. Zombie Rat seemed to be sitting on my chest, so I couldn’t. I couldn’t see it any more though—there didn’t seem to be anything left but its little red eyes—no, its huge, drowning, no-color eyes—
“I—can’t—any—more—turn—around,” I think is what I said. I don’t remember. I remember after Pat turned around and started driving back toward Old Town. After what felt like a long time I began breathing again. I was clammy with sweat and my head ached as if pieces of my skull had been broken and the edges were grinding together. But Zombie Rat was gone.
That had been far too much like the bad spot the SOF car hadn’t protected us from, the day Jesse and Pat took me back out to the house on the lake. (Those no-color eyes…both mirror-flat and chasm-deep…if they were eyes…) But we hadn’t tried to drive through a bad spot. And this time it was just me. Pat and Jesse hadn’t noticed anything. Except my little crisis.
I didn’t know if I was angrier at their making me try to do— whatever—or at the fact that I’d failed. I’d been to No Town when I was a teenager. It wasn’t like I had no idea. Any teenager with the slightest pretensions toward being stark, spartan, whatever, which I’m afraid I had had, will probably give it a try if it’s offered, and it will be offered. And No Town is a rite of passage; quite sensible kids go at least once. I’d been there more than once. Some of the clubs were pretty spartan by anyone’s standards. Kenny said (out of Mom’s hearing) this was still true. And it was also still true (Kenny said) that you dared each other to climb farther in, over the rubble around the bad spots, although nobody got very far. But I hadn’t got any less far than anyone else, when I was his age.