“They?” Cal shakes his head.
“Them.” Sammy shakes his head. “Shit, you’re freebies, aren’t you?”
Sigh. And me without my handy Traveler’s Guide to PostApocalyptic Slang.
“What the hell are you doing?” The female voice is as chill and biting as Chicago’s normal winter weather.
We look up and gawk like a herd of startled deer. I hear Howard snuffle and assume he has found something to hide behind.
She stands four steps above us in the open door of Rose’s Tearoom, dressed impeccably in a charcoal-gray wool pantsuit, hair and makeup perfect, expression outraged. “Why are you harassing my people?”
Her people.
Cal smiles his most clean-cut, all-American litigator smile and says, “Just asking for information. We’re from… out of town.”
We watch her reaction with great interest: the widening of the eyes, the arching of the brows, the lifting of the head. Her eyes go immediately to Magritte, and the expression in them changes. Then the She-Suit checks each of us over carefully, picking at this and that, lingering on the armament, which most of us carry in plain sight.
She focuses on Doc, perhaps because he is unarmed, or perhaps because he stands so close to one of “her people.” “Are these your bodyguards, sir?” she asks him.
I swivel my head toward Doc and mouth, Say yes.
He does, without batting an eyelash.
Her whole manner mutates, going from challenge to chagrin in the turn of a phrase. “I apologize if I was rude, but armed as they are, they tend to intimidate. Then again, I suppose that’s why you have them.” She offers an uneasy smile.
At this point, Doc, God bless him, sees a window of opportunity for his particular passion. “I could not help but notice,” he says, “that this woman’s color is not good. She is dehydrated and her glands are swollen. If she is in your employ, I would recommend that you allow her several days of rest and that she see a doctor. I don’t know what the state of medicine is here, but surely something can be done for her.” The she-suit reddens and glances from Lily to Doc. “You … you want her to see a doctor?”
Doc smiles. “I am, myself, a physician. Unfortunately, I have nothing with me that might help.”
I don’t know which reaction makes me the queasiest, the She-Suit’s nostril-flaring, eye-rolling expression of silent fury or Lily’s abject fear.
“You want her to see a doctor,” she repeats.
Doc hesitates, puzzled. “It would be for the best, yes. And her diet-if she could have leafy vegetables it would be very good, although I realize they may be hard to obtain.”
Not according to the menu posted in the tearoom’s front window. Spinach salad is right at the top of the leafy green list. I don’t grok the price units. There are symbols in column B, but none of them are dollar signs.
Faces have appeared in the window to peer out at us, and an animated dialogue is taking place behind the glass. I catch Colleen’s eye and incline my head toward the window.
She looks, steps to Doc’s side and lays a hand on his arm, but he’s too involved in the task of saving Lily to notice. She gives the arm a gentle shake. “Viktor, we need to go.”
Doc nods and looks back to the she-suit. “My friend reminds me that we have an appointment. Please, if you are able, see that Lily gets to a doctor.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” She glances from Doc to Magritte and adds, “sir.” She watches as we move away up Randolph.
When I glance back, a man has joined her on the steps. Without a word to Sammy or Lily, they fade back into the tearoom.
Okay, that was disturbing. I find my legs are suddenly heavy and loath to move the farther we get from the tearoom and the two unfortunate people left waiting and starving there.
“Why was that woman so deferential to me?” Doc wonders as we drag our demoralized bones up the block.
“You were unarmed,” suggests Cal. “She took us for bodyguards and figured you must be the VIP we were protecting. Also, of the lot of us, you’re arguably the most presentable, except for Magritte.”
True enough. Doc, even in his fleece-lined, buffalo plaid jacket, still looked the part of a distinguished, if shaggy, professor.
“Her people,” murmurs Colleen. “God, that makes me sick.”
Cal chews his lip and worries his sword hilt. “Sammy seemed completely convinced there was no way out of here.”
Colleen puts a hand on his arm. “Yeah, what was all that about a firewall?”
Cal carefully describes the opaque red goo that ate Jackson Street and I repeat what Magritte said about it not being real.
Colleen echoes Sammy. “Not real? What’s not real that causes third-degree burns?”
“Oooh, is this a riddle?” I don’t mean to sound glib, but sometimes glib just pops out of my mouth.
Colleen ignores me and Cal looks uneasy. “Magritte,” he says, “when you went back up Jackson into the … the cloud, did you feel as if you might be in danger?”
“No. It was a mirage.”
“Maybe it’s only a mirage if you’re a flare,” says Colleen. “Maybe for normals like us, it’s a one-way street.”
Chilling words.
“Normals like us,” repeats Cal softly.
“Maybe that’s why we haven’t seen any twists in here besides Howard and Magritte,” I say. “They’ve all split… or been redeemed.”
“It goes further than that,” says Cal. “I don’t recall having seen anyone in here do anything that wasn’t a hundred percent pre-Change mundane.”
“Which means?” asks Colleen.
I hold my breath and my tongue. TMI. Too much information. My head is swimming in it-in pieces of meaningless flotsam.
“I don’t know what it means,” says Cal. “But we’re almost to Dearborn. Let’s focus. Let’s get this done, okay?”
I don’t know which one of us sees it first. Irrelevant, I suppose. I only know that when we turn the corner onto Dearborn and walk into the shadow of the Chicago Media Building, a great, black, oily wave of horror breaks over me. Time, light, reality, life, all stop and I am nailed to the sidewalk by the weight of sheer terror.
This is hell, I think. We have turned the corner into hell.
The Tower stands fifty stories tall, slick and gleaming, beneath a canopy of dark, inescapable radiance. We’ve all been here in our worst nightmares. We have visited this spot in a landscape we each imagined, prayed, hoped, was entirely internal.
I’m aware of Magritte clinging to me, warmth in a suddenly frozen world. Her sobs fill up my universe for a stunned instant, then other, alien voices come screaming through my head like a gale-force wind. They tear at me- at us. They are at once sweet and sad and hungry.
And familiar.
Magritte twists in my arms. “Make them stop! Oh, God, Goldie, make them stop!”
But I can’t. I’ve been ambushed-with no chance to regroup.
It’s Enid who makes them stop, rolling homemade, heartfelt melody off of his tongue, weaving a field of sound. The alien voices fall silent, but only for a moment, then they are back to batter at Enid’s shield.
I hide my eyes from the Tower, afraid that if I look at it, it will devour me from the inside out. I look anywhere else. At Magritte, burrowed tight to my side.
At Colleen, who herds us back into the shadowy canyon that is Randolph Street.
Doc’s face is a Siberian wasteland, and his eyes are windows into a variety of death I have never seen, for all my time on the street.
Cal, blank-faced and stoic, pulls us along the sidewalk, urging Enid to sing, to keep singing. And Enid sings, the tracks of tears gleaming wetly on his dark cheeks. I don’t think they’re for the Tower, or even for what it represents. They are for those he can’t see, but who will be touched by his music in ways he never intended.
It is some time before it sinks in that Howard Russo is gone.