It starts when Pablo over at Casa Café figures out that you can fold a tortilla into a box, with origami instructions, and plunk it in a fryer to make it hold the shape. Vasily from Salsalito’s works out how to do the little squeezy-openy-boxes, and the arms race is on.
Pablo gets the paper crane first; Vasily starts selling Enchiladas Tigres. They accelerate quickly to self-opening ikebana, then butterflies with wings fried to translucence. But Vasily’s katanatillas are open warfare.
Squads of taco ninjas sail over Fourth Street now, blackly sombreroed, their delicious shuriken scenting the air.
Miss Chamuel’s CV lists her age as twenty-four, but in fact she came to teaching late in life. She never struck a child in her classroom, but there was something about the way she would hold a yardstick: balanced in a light grip, point low. Her students watched it very carefully.
Now she raps the hilt of her sword on a door deep inside a hot, dark warren. A great dingy white wolf emerges and growls.
“I’m the Guardian again,” she says, “and so you must be the Guide.”
Golden eyes go from hunter’s to hunted, without even a blink.
As long as the doors are locked the sun won’t rise. Channing has a vague idea that it used to be the other way around, but she’s been awake so long that she no longer remembers which came first.
There’s coffee and Coke, anyway. With enough of those, three hundred seventeen-year-olds can stay up for weeks. Everything will change tomorrow, but tonight there’s music and loud laughter and giddy exhaustion: the bittersweet magic of an imminent ending. Time. Just enough.
Channing looks at him across the room and sets her feet to start walking. Lock-in, she thinks. Unlock.
When Zach sinks into the first-class armchair on his flight to Budapest, he is wrong to believe he’s the only one on board connected to his mission. There’s Hidebound, for instance, incognito in aviators, crammed into two seats in the last row of coach. There are the three independent agents assigned to Hidebound at all times (FBI, CIA and FDA–it’s complicated). There’s Littleford, body stiffening slowly in an insulated camp cooler, down amongst the checked bags.
And in Zach’s black silicone wallet, a girl’s face, unaware that it’s being photographed: hastily xeroxed, in case they want the dossier back.
Pierrot remembers Franceschina in the morning, hanging prayers from the roofbeams, between onion and thyme.
“Who are they to?” he asked, bemused.
“Do they have to be to anyone?” She tiptoed to reach the doorframe. “Maybe they’re just prayers.”
“I think that defeats the purpose.”
“If you must know, they’re to everyone. Hera and Frigg and Ganesha and I Am, and Other Gods I Haven’t Heard Of But Maybe They’re The Real Ones.”
He grinned and kicked away coverlets. “You really think the smattering approach will work?”
“Nobody minds a little business mail,” she said, and hung one off his nose.
At night the loons bend the water with their wings and land, becoming sudden boys and girls in boats with oars and thrumming needs. Their skin is surface tension. Their hearts are mad red eyes.
They beach on pebbles and walk foolishly into wasp territory. One or the other will break hands and run; some will even find each other. Their original companions will wait until the wasps sting them to bursting. They are, after all, only bags of water. They leave behind the delicate bones of birds.
The boats crack in the sun, and flake, and get their pictures taken.
The dead are singing. Barlowe just hums.
They don’t seem to want to include him in their interlocking hexagons, but they don’t mind his tagging along. They’ll form up and shuffle after some whiff of blood (as strong to him, now, as the taste of blue cheese); if the source is behind any particular obstruction, they’ll complain and bump into each other for a while. On scavenging missions (never on hunts) Barlowe smashes the wall open and lets them feast.
They’re not really digesting when they eat–he’s figured out that much. They’re liquefying it, preparing it, like ants or pigeons.
Eventually he swaps prostheses and they have to call him Captain Force-Feedback Myoelectric Hand instead.
But he tires of that, and after one big haul Starkey buys out his share. They drop him at an island with a cabin. He reads books and plays the flute; he delights in the discovery of watercolors.
Years later the doctor makes troubled noises about his heart, and recommends a pacemaker. The Captain agrees on one condition: that it be made to tick.
On the beach, he lets it call across the water, wondering if sometimes he hears an echo. He hopes he will.
The truth of how the Justin became a sensei is simpler than the rumors, and less believable. It begins with his flight to another Memphis, the place called Ineb Hedj, White Walls: the desert city, once home to dead Ptah. He sought his friend’s resurrection. He carried the Martin and two silver dollars.
The ruins were sparse and stripped of stone, but the Justin walked unerringly to a simple hole in the sand. He waited. Memphis was also called Ankh Tawy, That Which Binds the Two Lands.
At twilight, the Justin stepped down into shadows, from this world to the next.
It’s no small thing to call for a harvestman.
Acari’s crops are long since brought in, but when her sister falls down the stairs the fourth time she finds herself back out in the field. She draws one hand along her sharpest scythe and whispers
Take my bleedin’
For the witchin’
Daddy Daddy
Come a-twitchin’
and the little ruby drops soak into the rich earth and he’s there, then, so tall and thin.
“Her husband,” trembles Acari. “Bring him his harvest.”
Daddy Longlegs nods.
“Do I owe you?” she asks.
“No,” he says kindly. “But someday you’ll reap this too.”