While the coffee brews, I chew my oatmeal and study her more closely. She must have been wearing white make-up last night, because in the morning sunlight, her complexion is reddish-brown and bit blotchy. She’s got her hair piled up at the back of her head, secured with a lime-green plastic clip that I’ve seen Felicity wear before. Other than that, she’s dressed like she was last night—leather pants, pinstripe vest with, I now see, a flesh-colored tank underneath.
“Glad you’re doing okay this morning,” she says, catching me staring. “Your mom and I had a fuck of a time getting you home.”
“Felicity’s not my mom,” I say automatically. Catch myself before I can add something embarrassing, like my mother is dead. “Anyway, thanks. I appreciate it.”
She pours two cups of instant, one for me and one for herself. While I’m stirring in a packet of artificial sweetener, she spreads a small scrap of paper on the counter between us. I recognize my sketch of the ship.
“Did you draw this?”
It was in my pocket, I remember now. Must have fallen out when she was helping me into bed.
“Yeah. I mean, I copied it from somewhere. From some graffiti I saw in—” I stop myself just before I can say “Cat-piss Park.” This is really not my morning. “All around the University.”
“I know,” she says. “I put it there.”
She drums her fingers on the sketch. Long nails, enameled perfectly black.
“Good advertising,” I say after a pause that stretches a fraction of a second too long. Thinking back, looking for something Viking, Scandinavian about Gray City’s performance. Not finding it. Though I’m no expert, and I wish Cloud was here.
“Friday, I need to ask you a question.”
I stir another packet of sweetener into my coffee.
“I think you can help me find a friend of mine. She’d be living near the University now. Her name’s Vanessa, Vanessa Novak.”
“What makes you think I know her?” I suck a drop of too-sweet coffee off the end of my spoon
“Last night, in the van on the way home, you told me to listen to the water.”
I keep my voice carefully neutral. “Why would I say that?”
She slides her hands across the counter, back to her sides, drawing herself to her full height. Which isn’t unimpressive. But I’m not sure she’s trying to be intimidating. Her eyes, deep yellow-brown, narrow thoughtfully. “My friend, Vanessa, she thinks there’s something in the rain. Not acid. Machines.” Wets her lips with the tip of her pale pink tongue. “Like microscopic, mechanical viruses. Always looking for the minerals, the elements they need to make more of themselves. She says you can hear them working on the city. Digesting, not eroding.” She raises her coffee cup to her lips but doesn’t take a sip. “Did she ever tell you that?”
“Didn’t say your friend ever told me anything.”
“I’m worried about her, Friday. We were—friends—in Colorado. She disappeared pretty suddenly when the rain started. Ran away from her lab just when the government paid out a big chunk of money, if you believe the rumors. People think she knew something. Or the stress drove her crazy.”
Especially loud this morning, aren’t they? Vanessa had said. It had sounded crazy to me. And this woman, with her blue-black hair and her tats like a city eaten by acid, is sounding just as bad. Driving on the edge. Missing guardrails.
“So is she right, your friend?” I ask. “About these machines?”
“Maybe. I’m a musician, not a scientist. I don’t know.”
A musician who’s friends with Vanessa. Machines digesting the city. I don’t know which sounds more likely. “Well, that’s fucking terrifying,” I say. I grab my sketch and leave her and my over-sweetened coffee at the counter.
The room I’m staying in opens right off Felicity’s front door, like an architectural afterthought. There’s a little tile foyer there, a coatrack, a leather barstool with a shoebox on top where Felicity throws her gloves, her wallet, her keys. At the top of the pile sits an unfamiliar ring with a black leather tab, a tiny nickel sword charm, a single key with a plain black bow. I pocket it on my way out the door.
Gray City’s van, parked across the street, is empty. Which means we’re planning another night in the same venue: One of the team must have spent the night at St. Mary’s to keep an eye on the equipment. I sweep Styrofoam cups and cigarette boxes off the front seat, watch the needle on the gas meter swing up to the halfway mark as the engine sputters to life. Nice, I think, and maybe I even say it out loud.
Then down four blocks, around the corner, stop in front of a particularly sketchy-looking brownstone with tattered green awnings over the first story windows. I toss a handful of gravel up at the bay window over the door until someone leans out. Identical stoner number three, this one a girl.
“I need Cloud,” I call up.
“Jesus, lady, look at the sky. It’s going to rain soon.”
“I got a van.”
Shaking her head, she slams the window closed behind her. Thirty seconds later, Cloud is jumping down the front steps, half in and half out of his windbreaker.
“You know Vanessa Novak?” I ask as his arm finds the other sleeve. He slides into the front seat next to me.
“Felicity’s smart friend? Fixes shit, hates parties?” He peers into the back seat. “Oh, God, Friday, tell me you didn’t steal Gray City’s van.”
“I’ll give it back later. And yes, that Vanessa. Gray City’s DJ—” I realize now that I didn’t get her name, and wonder if Cloud knows it— “She says they were friends out west. She’s looking for her.”
“And?”
“And? Can you imagine Vanessa being friends with her? The whole thing gives me the creeps. We’re going to see what Vanessa thinks about it.” And God bless him, he doesn’t ask why he’s along for the ride. Just grins and offers me a cigarette scrounged from the floor.
For the first time since I’ve known her, Vanessa has locked her door. Locked and barricaded, from what I can make out from pressing my face against a loose pane of window glass, fogged with humidity. Wooden pallets, terra-cotta plant pots stuffed with something indistinguishable, gallon jugs of filthy water piled up against it. I’m in the middle of congratulating myself for my accurate intuition about Gray City’s DJ, her poison yellow ship-with-two-faces on the sidewalk out front, when I feel the first drop of rain on my hand.
Cold, cold, cold, worse than snow melting down the back of your collar or scraping your knee on icy asphalt. Temperature has nothing to do with it, I know—it’s nerves dying, flesh corroding, Jesus Christ. I’m slapping the back of my hand on my jeans, hearing Cloud’s muted little gasp from the step below me, when the next drop hits my forehead. Hood up, just in time. Then fucking buckets.
Cloud leaps up next to me on the balcony, an arm stretched over my head. Trying to shelter me with his windbreaker, I realize: sweet, but pointless. Quickly, kneeling, I shake out the contents of my backpack—ancient CDs, iPod with a dead battery, leather wallet with an Illinois ID card and not much else—wrap the blue canvas around my fist, and punch the window. Glass already weak, scoured by the rain, it sprays inward beneath my hand, glass shards all over anemic tomato plants and sparse tufts of chive. We scramble inside. Behind us, the fringe of glass hanging at the top of the windowpane drops like a guillotine blade.
Jacket off, I dry my face with the lining. A spot on the back of my hand looks nasty, leprous gray, starting to flake at the edges, but I tell myself it’s my imagination.
“Good thinking,” Cloud says, “with the window.”