there’s somewhere in Sweden that makes a cheese with moose milk and that’s a couple of hundred dollars a pound.”
“Yeah. A grilled cheese sandwich with moose cheese and truffles and gold,” I said, pushing the remnants of my meal around on the bamfoam plate. “That’s what we should be eating.”
“I would destroy a civilization for a grilled cheese sandwich right now. I’d go full fucking monster.”
“Me too.” I smiled at her, dragging it up from the depths with muscle-tearing effort. “But actually, let’s not call this our last supper.”
“Of course it isn’t. We’re not gonna starve over there. All the stereotypes about the Middle East are wrong except one: they want to feed you. All the time.”
“Have you been where... where we’re going?”
“Sort of.” She jerked a thumb at my bag, where she’d stashed a double-sided wad of her printouts, drawings, and notes, as thick as my forearm, like a book manuscript. “I’ve been to Morocco twice, but not Fes, which is where we’re going.”
“Morocco. That’s amazing. Jesus. I’ve never been to...” I trailed off. I’d never been anywhere, really. Incredible to think this would be my first real trip.
She said, “A library there might have documents about the alignment. Right now all I know is it’s close, it’s breathing down our necks. There’s so much magic in the world I can almost taste it.” She lowered her voice. “So much that Drozanoth might be able to start using human agents to do its dirty work. And then the rules go haywire and we are in the shit.”
“We are already in the shit.”
“We are currently shin-deep in the shit. If that thing starts conscripting people, we will be chin-deep and treading.” She took a pen from her bag and scribbled briefly on a napkin, then turned it to me: Man in blue coat behind me.
I jerked my head up, then immediately pulled it back down, pretending to scrape the last noodles off my plate. A nondescript white man in a blue and white Adidas jacket, head down, dark hair, a fragmentary memory of a pair of intensely blue eyes staring at us in the millisecond before we had both looked away. “Well,” I said, pitching my voice as low as I could while I tore up the napkin, “people stare, you know? I mean you were just in the paper two days ago and you got moshed by photographers right in this airport. Or did you forget that you were famous?”
“Look at his face, his skin,” she said, so softly I could barely hear her. “Like something’s being taken out of him, moment by moment. Look how pale he is.”
“There’s a lotta pale people in the world.”
“Yeah, there are. But remember his face. Don’t forget it. Watch for it, later.”
“All right.”
“If there’s one, there could be others.”
“All right, all right.”
“Hey. This isn’t paranoia,” she said.
“After what I’ve seen today, nothing is paranoia,” I said.
“Write that down somewhere,” she said. “Nothing is paranoia.”
I WAS WORRIED about the passport setting off some kind of alarm when it was scanned, but it didn’t—Rutger did good work. My God, these days I couldn’t imagine what would happen if I had tried to get on a plane with a fake passport and got caught. The private room, the rubber glove, a million years in jail. It was traveling with Johnny that got us through, I realized, even though they had given her some flak for the ticket purchase because she was under eighteen. It was traveling with a white girl, traveling with money. I would take it.
It wasn’t till we were on the plane, buckled into our first-class seats, that I let myself relax. Nothing could get us up here. The man in the blue jacket hadn’t been in the line to board. And he sure wasn’t in first class—we were separated from economy not by a curtain but a sturdy door, and there were only six passengers for twenty seats, none of whom seemed to alarm Johnny the way he had. First class even had its own bathroom, which I proceeded to destroy ten minutes after takeoff. I half expected the flight attendants to wear hazmat suits as I sheepishly crawled back to my seat.
“Are you okay?” Johnny whispered. “Do you have the anxiety poops?”
“I have not got anxiety. I’ve just got the poops.”
“Uh huh. Drink some water.”
My stomach is too damn sensitive; it’s like a burglar alarm that goes off when a bird lands on the house. I wondered how it would react