my side,” I whispered, much more quietly than I intended. Some hero. “Come on, John.”
I slung her bag on the same side as mine and reversed out of the room, not wanting to turn my back on them. They watched us go, till I fumbled at the door, emerged into the cool night air, shut it behind us. The last I heard was a soft voice, so quiet I didn’t know whose: “No. Let them go.”
I didn’t know which way we were supposed to go, but I needed to get Johnny away from there; she was wheezing, half-canted over, as if with cramps. I walked as fast as I dared, making sure she kept up. Wherever Omar had taken us, it was as busy as the bus station—despite it being long past midnight, there were still people up, talking, smoking, eating, haggling, turning to look at us. Two kids in a dark alleyway. Great.
But no one approached us—maybe I didn’t look touristy enough, I thought hopefully. Maybe I looked like a guide, like one of the guides who had yelled and gestured at us when we’d first gotten into the city, trying to get us to come with them. And if that was the case, Johnny looked like my customer, and they wouldn’t horn in on that. Thank Christ, if it was true.
When Johnny’s breathing finally eased, we turned down another alleyway, into the meager yellow light from an all-night tailor, printing its list of prices in shadow on her face. It was just enough for her to look at her map and for me to check my hand. I was sure there would be a cut, or at least a burn-mark, but there was nothing. “Weird,” I said.
“How did you know?” Johnny said, looking at my open palm as I held it between us.
“I have no idea. I think it was the smell coming off it.”
“The smell?”
“You didn’t notice? Like Theirs, under all that air freshener?”
She looked up at me, obliquely, like the cat, and then got her laptop out, balancing it on one forearm while she used the other to scroll and tap.
I said, “Do you think they’ll turn us in?”
“I don’t know. They don’t like interacting with authorities, they like to fly under the radar. Maybe they’ll get someone to do it anonymously.”
“Who were they?”
“Tariq lives here—he’s been head of the Fes chapter for four hundred years. I wasn’t expecting Helen at all; she lives in Prague now, she was there when I spoke to her. When she came in the room, I thought... I mean, she’d come all this way because of what I told her. I got excited, thinking she’d come here to help us.”
“Guess not.”
“Thanks for getting us out of there,” she said. She was really rattled, despite her casual tone; her hands shook on the keyboard. I tried not to let on how utterly horrified I was in turn. Whatever had happened in there, she had expected none of it, and they had expected all of it—everything she’d said, everything she did, even me being there.
“What were they doing to you? Us? Just you?”
“Immobility spell, I’d guess; meant to keep me there till they got the answers they wanted. That wouldn’t have worked a week ago. Those fucking liars, they know there’s magic pouring in, they’re even using it. Background my ass.”
“Jesus. It’s like Harry Potter up in here.”
“Nothing so organized, I’m afraid.” She clicked the laptop shut. “The Ancient Ones and all Their servants have senses we don’t have, their consciousness, their bodies work in different ways from ours. When they move They aren’t moving like us. Parts of Them can be places, Their consciousness can be split up, some awake, some asleep, even their memory, even their desires; some of Them can control people, some of Them can’t even control how solid They are, how They interact with our world, our rules, gravity, inertia, time. We can’t understand Them. We never will. We cannot, not if everyone on Earth dedicated the rest of our lives to studying them for a million years. They can’t be understood, even by each other. Only obeyed.” She glanced back at the direction we’d come. “You have to wonder about people who spend all their time thinking about Them. About proximity effects.”
“They said… my name was…”
“No. It might look that way because you’re traveling with me. Layers overlap and blur; things become hard to distinguish. Don’t worry about what he said. Anyway, we’ve been walking in