Sara just looks at the camera.
“Sara!” it says in a bandpassed version of Nasser’s voice. “I didn’t know you were in the city. Please–” The barred door buzzes and two very clean men in sunglasses step out to pat her down.
She lets them. When they stand up, István breaks the left one’s knee and takes the other through the door by his throat. Sara follows placidly.
“I don’t know what you’re upset about,” says Nasser, scrambling back with a tight rein on the tone of his voice.
“You never do,” Sara says, “but I’m starting to think it’s congenital.”
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Emilia’s familiar is a happily twitching thing of spring steel and tin, bounding ahead of them on its three legs and bending to clank inquisitively against a storm drain. It makes her sigh.
“Hey, cheer up!” says Gruntham. “I don’t know anyone else who’s managed to bind a clockwork.”
“You mean you don’t know anyone else who’s tried,” Emilia mutters. “For reasons that are becoming obvious.”
“You should be proud.”
“When are you going to summon your familiar, anyway?”
Gruntham, smiling, doesn’t answer, letting the city speak to him in scent and rumble: vast and old, innocent, soon to be his.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Aldous begins to hurry, then to jog as she follows the yarn back toward the entrance–not rewinding the ball, just wadding it into her hands. She comes to the room with the chair in the corner and stops.
The yarn is cut.
The games one plays in dreams are never fair. Aldous grasps this knowledge hard, pulse pounding, as she stuffs the yarn back into her bag and turns away from the lie of its origin. She’s still not hungry. Her watch has stopped.
A labyrinth is a device for holding monsters. Aldous sets out to look for its heart.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Aldous steps from a room empty and innocent into one that is not.
The walls are covered in gouges–no, she sees after a moment, hash marks in groups of five. A prison calendar (though the door has no lock). The corners are grimy, the smell strong. Rust runs in dark blobs down to the basin of the old water pump near the wall.
Aldous summons her times tables and tries to count the days: ten thousand? Tens of thousands. What happened here? She picks up a wadded paper from the corner and smooths out a child’s drawing of a cat.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Inside are three more doors and a trap leading down. With the rising certainty of dreams, Aldous avails herself of the secret of Ariadne, and takes the ball of yarn from her bag. She was never going to finish that scarf anyway.
Room opens upon room; some are furnished, most bare. Windows hint at a dim moon, though she’s sure she shouldn’t see it in that many directions. The widely-spaced floorboards mewl beneath her weight.
It smells like dust and childhood. Unraveling her way through the labyrinth, Aldous remembers her father paint-stripping, bare-chested, a kerchief on his head.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Once Aldous has made up her mind to leave the train at the next stop, it seems to be a long time in coming. They plunge into a tunnel, or so she assumes; but when the train brakes, she understands that the darkness is open and infinite. The platform floats in a pool of black.
But a decision is a decision. Aldous steps out into the glow of an old lamp, before a bench and a sign that just says 12.
There’s a door. As Aldous walks toward it, a moth pings feebly off the globe one more time, and falls.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009