Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls - Jane Lindskold [9]
Outside, I gulp the night air gratefully. The Jungle is one cylinder among a score which once held chemicals for a factory. It is vast, but by necessity it is enclosed and the air, seasoned by many bodies, is pungent and hot.
Abalone touches my hand and at her bidding I trot down the aisles. We walk into another deserted portion of the factory, cross through an underground tunnel, and emerge in a subway station that is deserted now, but once, Abalone assures me, was a busy place built to deal with the factory’s traffic.
From there we walk down the service walkways to an active station and catch a train uptown.
In the near-empty station where we disembark, Abalone unlocks a closed rest room with a key card. Inside, she opens a backpack, fills a sink with warm water, and proceeds to transform herself.
Skintight trousers and T-shirt go into a heap on the floor. She replaces them with a neat business suit—skirt, vest, and frill-trimmed blouse. Blue lips are scrubbed clean and tinted pale peach. Cheeks are discreetly rouged to highlight fantasy cheekbones. Eyes are resculpted with liner and shadow. A final touch dusts a couple of incongruous freckles across the bridge of her nose.
She winks at me and skins a wig over her fiery buzz and the fire is banked under a crop of close, dark curls.
“What do you think?” she asks with a proud smile.
I shake my head with amazement. “I have heard of your paintings, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.”
“Hamlet,” she replies to my surprise. “I did some drama before I left high school.”
She scoops up the clothing from the floor and into her pack, fighting down some emotion. When she looks at me, whatever it was is gone.
“Never make known what you have seen tonight,” she says, and I sense the nervousness behind her smile.
“The rest is silence,” I promise.
“Good. Now, in those jeans and that sweatshirt, you’ll be practically invisible if we cover your hair and you keep the dragon tucked down in your bag. I’ve brought you a baseball cap.”
Motioning for me to bend down, she tucks my hair up under the cap. The brim even shadows my pale eyes. Stepping in front of a mirror, I preen—this is one of the few times I’ve seen myself in the street clothes Abalone gave me and I like the look.
Normal. Mainstream.
“When we go up to the street, walk a little behind me,” she says, extracting a notebook computer in a slimline clutch from her pack. “If I get in a car, keep walking straight. I’ll pick you up. Otherwise, just follow me.”
“Thou shalt not steal,” I say, striving to make the words express my concern for her rather than condemnation of her craft.
The wicked smile blossoms, incongruous on peachy lips. “I’m not. If the work I’ve been doing with my tappety-tap here has done the trick, I own the car. I just need to find where the former owner has parked. C’mon.”
I follow and the world outside is one I have never known. Here the streets are straight and smooth. Well-kept shrubs and slim-trunked trees grow with metal grids at their bases. Tall buildings, threaded to each other with glass tubes as the Jungle is with rope and wire, make cliffs that threaten the sovereignty of the sky.
Abalone walks confidently onto the sidewalk and I wait a moment before daring to trail her. Although the hour is late, there are still some pedestrians on the night streets. We become fish in that stream and no one gives either of us so much as a casual glance.
When Abalone turns to claim a car parked in a metered space, only a warning hiss from Betwixt and Between reminds me to keep walking. I do, but now all the things that had seemed benign, even mildly amusing when I knew that Abalone was there to deal with them, become frightening and threatening.
A man looks my way. I tense and prepare to run. He goes by and I realize that his glance was for the clock