Chaos on CatNet, Naomi Kritzer [bill gates books recommendations txt] 📗

“Steph.”

“Anyway, once this is fixed up, it’s going to be glorious. Look at the carvings around the fireplace! And the inlaid designs in the floor. Aren’t those lovely?”

The fireplace has dark green tile but also a carved mantelpiece with faces. The floor in here is covered with a sheen of wear and dirt, but I can see darker wood forming an interlocking design against the lighter wood. I look up at the hole again. “Are you really going to be able to just fix this?”

“Well.” Parisa looks around and lets out a short laugh. “Eventually.”

There’s a loud creak from the stairs, and Bijan comes down into the living room. “Hi,” he says. “My father said your name is Bat?”

“Little Brown Bat, and I’m friends with Firestar.”

“Oh, yeah,” he says, even though no recognition flickers. He glances at his mom briefly, then says, “Do you want to come upstairs with me so we can talk while I work on wallpaper?”

“Follow the wastebasket rule!” Parisa calls after us.

“Mom, I am ace!” he yells down the stairs. “The wastebasket is staying under where I’m scraping.”

“Wastebasket rule?” I ask.

“It’s a rule that says I have to keep the door open the width of a wastebasket when I have a girl in a room,” he says.

We pass his father on the stairs. Zeke gives Bijan an amiable thumbs-up, which Bijan pretends not to see.

On the second floor, I follow Bijan into a bedroom that’s in somewhat better shape overall than the living room. It looks like he’s using it as an actual bedroom; there’s a futon in a frame here and a desk with a laptop on it. He closes the bedroom door and says, “Okay, tell me who Firestar is?”

“They know you from the RPG Clowder on CatNet,” I say.

“Oh, I bet you mean Quabbin,” he says. “The Elven bard. Nonbinary, very enthusiastic, lots of capital letters, basically human sunshine?”

“Yes!” I say.

“Summer sunshine,” he amends, glancing out the window at the bright blue sky outside. “I mean. Anyway. What … okay, I still don’t know why you’re here.”

“Quabbin said you might host these friends of mine who were looking for a place to stay, and I don’t know if they actually talked with you about it, but I’m trying to find those friends and I thought maybe they wound up here.”

His eyes get sort of wide and he says, “Oh.” And doesn’t say anything else.

Should I have started with, “Beware, the Mischief Elves are up to something creepy”? I wonder how best to explain that part.

“Is it true your house is haunted?” I ask, since Firestar mentioned that it might be.

“Well, maybe,” he says, relaxing a little bit. “Stuff gets moved around a lot. For a while, Dad kept blaming me for it, but eventually it happened while I was out for the night at a friend’s house, and Dad wasn’t going to blame himself. All I know is, it’s not me doing it.”

“Do you use the Mischief Elves app?” I ask.

“I did for a while,” he says.

“Is it still on your phone?”

“Yeah. Why?”

I give him the shortest possible version of the “let’s you and him fight” game the Mischief Elves and the Catacombs are engaging in. Bijan pulls out his phone as we’re talking and uninstalls the app. “What about CatNet?” he asks.

“CatNet is safe,” I say.

“You sound really sure.”

“The CatNet administrators saved my life last year,” I say. “I trust them completely.”

“Oh, hey,” he says. “I think Firestar told us about this. It involved robots and hacking and a driverless car…” He looks into space for a minute and then adds, “That was you?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Huh,” Bijan says. He puts his phone back in his pocket. “So, I don’t honestly know if your friends are here or not. Here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure people have been in and out of this house the whole time we’ve been working on it. I mean, unless it’s all poltergeists. It was being used as a squat before my parents bought it at the auction, and I think there are some ways in and out that aren’t the regular doors. Anyway, I didn’t personally hide your friends in here, but that doesn’t mean they’re not, in fact, hiding somewhere in here. And if you’d like me to help you look, I’m happy to do that.”

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

We start in the basement, because if we’re doing a thorough search, Bijan wants to get that out of the way ASAP. I can’t blame him. This is, hands down, the single creepiest basement I’ve ever been in. It’s enormous, first of all, and there are not nearly enough lights, although in part that’s because light bulbs haven’t been replaced. Bijan brought down an entire box of light bulbs, and we screw in fresh ones whenever we spot one that’s not on. About a third of the time, that adds more light; the rest of the time, apparently the fixture isn’t working, either. Bijan marks those with glow-in-the-dark tape and takes the bulb back out before moving on.

It’s cold down here, and more cold is seeping in through the stone walls, which are crumbly and shedding bits of dust and grime. The furnace is running, and it’s a regular-looking thing with vents coming off it, but there’s also an ancient-looking iron stove with latching doors just sitting down here that looks like the sort of thing the witch in Hansel and Gretel might have gotten shoved into at the end of the fairy tale.

“That’s a coal-burning furnace,” Bijan tells me. “It’s an antique. Usually, people had them broken up and hauled away when they replaced them with gas furnaces or whatever, but whoever owned this house then didn’t bother. Now it’s some sort of nifty antique and my parents are trying to sell it to someone, but they’re fighting over how they’re going to get it out of the basement, since of course it weighs as much as a medium-size car.”

“Do you think anyone