John nodded. “The lack of a red crow only makes us different.”
“If we weren’t real, we wouldn’t care so much about each other, would we?”
John gave her a long thoughtful look. “I think that’s what makes us real,” he said finally.
He stood up and wiped the palms of his hands on his jeans.
“How will we find the dark man?” Cosette asked.
“Isabelle will know where he is. He left a piece of himself in her when he went away. It’ll tell her where he is.”
They closed their eyes, waking their own connection to Isabelle. Cosette opened her eyes in alarm to find a similar worried expression in John’s. “She’s already found him,” Cosette said.
“Or he’s found her,” he said grimly.
Cosette’s newfound courage faltered. “We really have to kill him, don’t we?”
“We have to try,” John said. “Though I don’t know if it’s possible for us to actually kill him. He’s a maker and makers will always wield a certain power over our kind—even if he didn’t bring us across himself. Maybe only Isabelle can kill him.”
Cosette shook her head. “Isabelle could never hurt anyone.”
John gave her an odd look. Then, without waiting to see if Cosette would follow, he set off down the alleyway at a brisk pace, heading north toward the burnedout tenements and abandoned buildings that made up that part of Newford known as the Tombs. Cosette hesitated for only a moment before hurrying off to join him.
X
Across town from her numena, Isabelle was as frightened as Cosette, but for another reason. She had no idea where her captors were taking her, or what was going to happen to her. All she knew was that it would involve Rushkin, and seeing him again made her feel even more afraid.
Cowardice, she remembered Rushkin telling her once, was a crime like any other. “The difference is,” he explained, “is that it’s boring. You don’t so much commit cowardice as surrender to it. We live in a world that seems to celebrate cowardly behavior, Isabelle, except we call it compromise. We call it getting along. Not making waves. We don’t stand by our convictions anymore because we’re too busy trying to make sure that we don’t upset anybody. I don’t care if it’s with our art, or confronting injustice, nine out of ten times the average person will let the world run roughshod over them because they’re too intimidated to make a stand and stick to it.”
“But where do you expect people to find that kind of courage?” Isabelle had asked. “This is the world we live in. If we didn’t get along with each other all that would be left would be chaos.”
“Who wants to live in a world where you have to be a coward to get along?”
“The world isn’t so black and white,” Isabelle had said.
“No, but it could be if we stopped compromising our values. We have to confront evil, no matter where we find it, and then stand up to it.”
Isabelle had shaken her head. “The world isn’t like that. People aren’t like that. How are they supposed to become brave when the best most of us can ever seem to to manage is to avoid a confrontation?”
“By not surrendering,” Rushkin replied. “It’s that simple. If you believe in the truth of what you’re doing, why in god’s name would you want to compromise?”
“But—”
“We owe it to our art to face the truth without flinching. We owe it to ourselves. Every so-called advantage that evil has can also be used against it. The world isn’t fair, in and of itself. We have to make it fair.”
Rushkin had always remained true to his ideals, but at what cost, Isabelle had remembered thinking more than once when she saw the way he lived. Alone and friendless, with only his art.
Kathy had always remained true to her ideals, as well, though unlike Rushkin, she was willing to compromise when necessary. Still, there were some things that remained forever sacrosanct to her.
She’d fought injustice wherever it confronted her; she’d never compromised the vision that drove her to write; she’d created the Newford Children’s Foundation and worked on its front lines, dedicating herself to what she called the four C’s necessary for successful guerrilla social work: cash, contributing, counseling and consoling. You gave what you could. Money, if you didn’t have the time.
Kathy wouldn’t have found herself in her own present situation, Isabelle thought. They’d both taken a self-defense course, but here it was, the first time Isabelle had found herself confronted with actual violence since taking that course, and she’d surrendered. Kathy wouldn’t have. Kathy would have booted Bitterweed between the legs and made a break for it. She wouldn’t be sitting here, allowing herself to be driven to god knew where.
Isabelle sighed. But she wasn’t Kathy, was she?
The car pulled over to the curb in front of an abandoned tenement and Scara killed the engine. She turned in her seat and leaned her arms on the backrest, hunger glittering in her eyes.
“End of the line, sweetheart,” she said.
Isabelle shivered. I could still try to stand up for myself, she thought as Bitterweed pulled her from the car. I could still fight them. But what was the point?
She knew where she was now: in the Tombs. That vast sector in the middle of the city that consisted of derelict buildings, burnedout structures and empty, rubble-strewn lots. Streets that were often little more than weed-choked paths, most of them too clogged with buckled pavement and abandoned cars to drive through. Deserted brownstones and tenements that served as squats for Newford’s disenfranchised, those who couldn’t even cling to the bottom rung of the social ladder. The area stretched for a few square miles north of Gracie Street, a ruined cityscape that could as easily have been Belfast or the Bronx, East LA or Detroit.
She could fight her captors, Isabelle thought. And she could run. But to where? The streets of the Tombs were a dizzying maze to anyone unfamiliar with the rubble warren through which they cut their stuttering way. Many of its inhabitants were easily as dangerous as her present captors: wild-eyed homeless men, junkies, drunken bikers and the like. Desperate, almost feral creatures, some of them.
Sociopathic monsters.
So once again she surrendered. She let the two numena lead her into the building. They stepped over heaps of broken plaster and litter, squeezed by sections of torn-up floor. The walls were smeared with aerosoled graffiti and other scrawled marks made with less recognizable substances. The air was stale and close, and reeked of urine and rotting garbage. It was the antithesis of her home on Wren Island.
And the opposite of those worlds once brought to life by the paintbrush of the man into whose presence she was led.
She saw him in a corner of a room on the second floor, lying on a small pallet of newspapers and blankets, his bulk dissipated, his features sunken into themselves. No longer the stoop-backed, somewhat homely mentor now. Not even a troll. More like some exotic bug, dug up from under a rotted log and left to fend for itself in the harsh sunlight. An infirm, helpless thing, weakly lifting its head when Bitterweed and Scam led her into its room. But there was still a hot light banked in the kiln of his eyes, a fiery hunger that was even more intense than what burned in the gazes of his numena.
“It’s time to make good the debt you owe me,” Rushkin said. Even his voice was changed—the deep tones had become a thin, croaking rasp. “I don’t owe you anything.”
The wasted figure shook its head. “You owe me everything and I will have it from you now.”
Isabelle knew all too well what he wanted. She just hadn’t wanted to believe it.
“John was right,” she said. “All along, he was right. You really do feed on my numena.”
“Numena,” Rushkin repeated. “An interesting appellation. Effective, if not entirely apt. I never bothered to give them a name myself”