Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls - Jane Lindskold [75]
“Crazy? Or at least autistic?”
I see that Betwixt and Between have found a bag of French fries and concentrate on helping Jersey to see my addition to our consensus reality.
“Yeah, that. You know he could talk normally.”
“Yes, I seem to remember that.” I look at him and shrug. “I was pretty small when I left the Institute and they blocked my memories or something because I didn’t remember him or them until I heard Betwixt and Between telling Conejito Moreno about Dylan.”
“Conejito Moreno?” Jersey shakes himself. “Sarey, Dylan’s ‘accident’ was probably pretty deliberate. You see, he drank some corrosive; I think it was a cleaner. It made a mess of his throat when he started throwing it up. He didn’t die, but he couldn’t talk.”
I wince, wrapping a hand around my throat, understanding the silence and pain whenever I found Dylan’s memories in the inanimate. Betwixt and Between have stopped eating and large tears are rolling from their bright ruby eyes.
“Dylan killed himself?” I ask, gathering my dragons close.
Athena lands near, cooing and hooting softly. Jersey seems to see, but does not allow himself to become distracted.
“Yeah”—he pauses—“He did. I don’t know exactly why he did it when he did, but he hung himself. They didn’t have cameras in his room like in yours.”
Much makes sense now. I fight back my grief for the pale-eyed boy, for the man I would never know and soothe my wildly sobbing dragons. I wonder if he was permitted any other inanimate friends and if they weep for him in some dark closet or if they were tossed along with the rest of the trash.
Jersey’s face goes blank and slack for a handful of heartbeats; I know he is getting some message from outside of the interchange. Then he refocuses, notices for the first time that a rope ladder again leads into the strung reaches.
“They want to know if we’re ready,” he says. “Shall I give the go-ahead?”
I nod and he fingers his screen. When he reaches into the chest this time, he extracts two plastic slips, much like cred slips except one is pink and the other a painful chartreuse.
“These,” he explains, “are access cards for an account—more accurately, one is the access card and the other is a dummy. Your job is to figure which is which—only the man who carried them knew for sure and…”
“He’s in no position to tell,” I complete. “I get the picture. This shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Make it hard,” Jersey suggests. “I mean, when you know don’t tell right off. I’ll signal that you’re working and we can talk without making them suspicious.”
“Okay.”
I reach out with my inner hearing and almost instantly can tell. One card is dull and mute. The other chuckles steadily. A moment more confirms that the silence is indeed inertia and not a layer of concealment. The pink card is effectively “dead” the chartreuse is our target.
Without telling Jersey my discovery, I put the cards on the table. “Want to see the Jungle? I’ll show you my hammock and tell you all about my Pack.”
As his answer, Jersey stands and grasps the ladder. I go up in front to show him the ropes. He follows more slowly. When we get up to a Cub’s platform in the lower reaches, I look down.
The sitting room is gone and Head Wolf’s tent is pitched in its customary spot. Only the emptiness is atypical of the Jungle I knew, for even at the busiest parts of the night there would be someone around: sleeping, eating, screwing, singing softly.
I sigh with longing and spin tales for Jersey—carefully mentioning only those of the Pack the Institute already knew. He listens with fascination.
“Sounds like a primitive paradise,” he says when I pause, “a simple—if brutal—Law, a patriarch, survival of the fittest.”
“We weren’t primitive!” I object indignantly. “We had lights and running water and even computers.”
“Computers.” Jersey’s interest banishes his doubt. “How odd!”
“Not really.” I smile, remembering the soft, happy murmur of