The next time, the stone might stick up from the padded recess as solid and real and unexplained as anything else in their life.
As a child, Ginny had thought that their whole existence was some sort of magic trick, like the stone in its box.
When the pawnbroker, with her help, had opened the box, the stone was actually visible—her first real luck in weeks. The pawnbroker pulled out the stone and tried to look at it from all directions. The stone—as always—refused to rotate, no matter how hard he twisted and tugged. “Strong sucker. What is it, a gyroscope?” he asked. “Kind of ugly—but clever.”
He had written her a ticket and paid her ten dollars.
This was what she carried: a map on a piece of paper, a bus route, and ten dollars she was afraid to spend, because then she might never retrieve her sum-runner, all she had to remember her family by. A special family that had chased fortune in a special way, yet never stayed long in one place—never more than a few months, as if they were being pursued.
The bus pulled to the curb and the doors sighed open. The driver flicked her a sad glance as she stepped down to the curb.
The door closed and the bus hummed on.
In a few minutes the driver would forget the slender, brown-haired girl—the skittish, frightened girl, always looking over her shoulder.
Ginny stood on the curb under the lowering dusk. Airplanes far to the south scraped golden contrails on the deep blue sky. She listened to the city. Buildings breathed, streets grumbled. Traffic noise buzzed from east and west, filtered and muted between the long industrial warehouses. Somewhere, a car alarm went off and was silenced with a disappointed chirp.
Down the block, a single Thai restaurant spilled a warm glow from its windows and open door. She took a hungry half breath and looked up and down the wide street, deserted except for the bus’s dwindling taillights. Shouldering her pack, she crossed and paused in a puddle of sour orange glow cast by a streetlight. Stared up at the green slab wall of the warehouse. She could hide here. Nobody would find her. Nobody would know anything about her.
It felt right.
She knew how to erase trails and blank memories. If the old man turned out to be a greasy pervert—she could handle that. She had dealt with worse—much worse.
On the north end of the warehouse, an enclosure of chain-link fence surrounded a concrete ramp and a small, empty parking lot. At the low end of the ramp, a locked gate barred access from the sidewalk. Ginny looked for security cameras, but none were visible. An old ivory-colored plastic button mounted in green brass was the only way to attract attention. She double-checked the address on the map. Looked up at the high corner of the warehouse. Squeezed her finger through the chain link. Pushed the button.
A few moments later, as she was about to leave, the gate buzzed open. No voice, no welcome. Her shoulders slumped in relief—so tired.
But after all she had been through, no hope could go unchallenged. Quickly, she probed with all her strength and talent for a better way through the confused tangles of outcome and effect. None appeared. This was the only good path. Every other led her back to the spinning, blue-white storm in the woods. For months now she had felt her remaining options pinch down. She had never pictured this warehouse, never known she would end up in Seattle, never clearly foreseen the free clinic and the helpful doctor. Ginny pulled the gate open and walked up the ramp. The gate swung back with a rasping squeak and locked behind her.
Today was her eighteenth birthday.
CHAPTER 2
Jack Rohmer’s body was thirsty. Jack Rohmer’s body was tired.
Up one street and down another, the bicycle carried the slender, dark-haired young man with hardly any guidance. An occasional push on the handlebars, an uncaring flex of the shoulders, tongue poked through slack lips, brown eyes staring ahead—all that and the steady, monotonous pedaling told both the world and the bike that Jack Rohmer had gone blank.
Slung over the back fender, a saddlebag full of hammers rattled in the dips. By itself, even a young body is interested not in adventure or novelty, but in continuity. It prefers not to make important decisions. A casual turn, leaning into a curve, the slightly startled avoidance of cars and other obstacles—these form the sum of the body’s abilities, given the absence of its owner. It is the wakeful brain that is restless.
In an hour, Jack’s body had traveled miles from his intended destination. Had there been hills, no doubt by now the body would have slowed and taken a breather. But along the level streets in this harbor district of warehouses and factories, rolling over rough asphalt and brick paving, it was more trouble to stop than to go on.
The bike swerved around a rut.
A truck came out of nowhere and bellowed. Jack’s right eye twitched. The driver waved a ham-sized fist out the window. Jack rode on, oblivious. The truck roared through the intersection, missing him by inches.
Streetlights buzzed pinkish-yellow beneath gathering clouds. Jack’s feet pumped arched cycloids at a reduced rate through the shadows. Three miles per hour. Then two. One. The bicycle became unstable. The body dropped a leg. The leg landed early and he hopped and snagged the toe of his shoe, bending it back.
“Ow!”
The body had had enough.
Jack returned—above the neck. Panic crossed his face. He slid off the slim leather seat and jammed his groin down on the bar. That reunited body and soul in a painful instant. He tumbled and lurched up on both legs before the bicycle collapsed.
One foot plunged through the spokes of the front wheel.
“Ow! Damn!”
His voice echoed from corrugated doors and high, flat gray walls. Stunned, he caught his breath and looked around—he was alone, nobody had witnessed his predicament. Gingerly, he rubbed his aching crotch, then gave his watch a confused glance. He had been absent for an hour and five minutes. He remembered almost nothing.
There had been a high window and darkness; the most extraordinary darkness, filled with a blinding, knife-edged gray light and somethingwatching.
Over the roof of a warehouse he saw tall stacks of empty blue, brown, and white steel containers marked with the names of shipping companies. Somehow, he had pedaled deep into Sodo—south downtown—almost in sight of the docks and their huge red-painted cranes. Something skittered under a row of big Dumpsters.
Jack pulled his foot from the spokes and inspected the old running shoe and torn sock. The wheel was ruined but his leg was barely scratched. He lifted the bike and turned it around, ready to roll it back the way he had come.
A soft chirrup in the shadows—another scrape—and something long and low scuttled between strapped bales of cardboard boxes. Jack’s eyes went wide. For a moment he thought he had seen a snake—a snake with pliers on its tail. Curious, he walked toward the piles, bent over, and lifted a soggy layer from the concrete.
A staccato tapping vibrated a wide, flat bale on his left. With a grimace, he jerked the bale aside and let it flop over—just in time to see something long and shiny black, with many legs, and tail pincers the size of a lobster claw, scurry into a hole in some metal siding.
Jack leaped back with a yelp.
He thought he had seen an earwig as big as his forearm.
In the next hour, as he pushed the wobbling bike beneath the high-arching free way, as the sky turned dark and drizzle soaked him to the skin, he half convinced himself that what he had seen near the docks was the shadow of a rat, not a giant bug.
He returned to the third-floor apartment, replaced the bike’s wheel, stowed it in the storage locker, changed out of his wet clothes, and ate a quick supper of canned chili. Burke, his roommate, had brought up a stack of mail before going to work. Burke was a sous chef at a fancy steak house. He worked six days a week until midnight and came home smelling of steaks, wine, and brandy: the perfect roommate—seldom there, and Burke left him alone.