Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

the story, maybe. Short and
sweet. A kind of lady or the tiger thing. Let the reader's imagination
do the rest.

There on the screen, it seemed awfully thin. Here in the house he'd
built for it, it seemed awfully unimportant. Such a big and elaborate
envelope for such a small thing. He saved the file and went back up to
bed. Mimi was asleep, which was good, because he didn't think he'd be
able to fall asleep with her twice that night.

He curled up on his side of the bed and closed his eyes and tried to
forget the sound the Allen had made.

#

"What is wrong with you?"

"Not a thing," she said. Her brother's phone-call hadn't been
unexpected.

"You're fucking insane."

"Maybe," she said.

"What do you *want from me*?"

"I want you to behave yourself."

"You're completely fucking insane."

He woke to find Billy gone, and had a momentary panic, a flashback to
the day that Fred had gone missing in the night. But then he found a
note on the kitchen table, terse: "Gone out. B." The handwriting sent
him back through the years to the days before Davey came home, the days
when they'd been a family, when he'd signed Brad's report cards and
hugged him when he came home with a high-scoring paper.

Mimi came down while he was holding the note, staring at the few spare
words there. She was draped in her wings.

"Where did he go?"

"I don't know," Alan said. "Out."

"Is this what your family is like?"

"Yeah," Alan said. "This is what they're like."

"Are you going to go out, too?"

"Yeah."

"Fine," she said. She was angry. She stomped out of the kitchen, and
stepped on her own wing, tripping, going over on her face. "Tomorrow,
you cut these tomorrow!" she said, and her wings flared open, knocking
the light fixtures a-swing and tumbling piles of books. "Tomorrow!" she
said.

#

"Good morning, Natalie," he said. She was red-eyed and her face was
puffy, and her hand shook so that the smoke from her cigarette rose in a
nervous spiral.

"Andy," she said, nodding.

He looked at her across the railing that divided their porches. "Would
you like to join me for a coffee?"

"I'm hardly dressed for it," she said. She was wearing a pair of cutoffs
and house slippers and a shapeless green T-shirt that hung down past her
butt.

"The Greek doesn't stand on ceremony," he said. He was hardly dressed
better. He hadn't wanted to go up to the master bedroom and face Mimi,
so he'd dressed himself out of the laundry hamper in the basement.

"I don't have *shoes*, Alan."

"You could go in and get some," he said.

She shook her head.

Her shoulders were tensed, her whole skinny body a cringe.

"We'll go barefoot and sit on the patio," he said after a moment,
kicking his shoes off.

She looked at him and gave a sad laugh. "Okay."

The sidewalk was still cool enough for bare feet. The Greek didn't give
their bare feet a second look, but brought iced coffees and yogurt with
walnuts and honey.

"Do you want to tell me about them?"

"It's been bad ever since -- ever since Mimi left. All of a sudden,
Krishna's Link's best friend. He follows him around."

Alan nodded. "Krishna beat Mimi up," he said.

"I know it," she said. "I heard it. I didn't do anything, goddamn me,
but I heard it happen."

"Eat," he said. "Here." He reached for a clean napkin from the next
table and handed it to her. She dried her eyes and wiped her nose and
ate a spoonful of yogurt. "Drink," he said, and handed her the
coffee. She drank.

"They brought those girls home last night. *Little*
girls. Teenyboppers. Disappeared into their bedrooms. The noises they
made."

"Drink," Alan said, and then handed her the napkin again.

"Drunk. They got them drunk and brought them home."

"You should get out of there," Andrew said, surprising himself. "Get
out. Today, even. Go stay with your mom and find a new apartment next
month."

She set her cup down carefully. "No," she said.

"I'm serious. It's a bad situation that you can't improve and the more
you stay there, the worse it's going to get."

"That's not a practical suggestion."

"Staying there, in potential danger, is not practical. You need to get
out. Staying there will only make things worse for you."

She clenched her jaw. "You know, there comes a point where you're not
giving advice anymore. There comes a point where you're just moralizing,
demonstrating your hypothetical superiority when it comes to doing the
right thing. That's not very fucking helpful, you know. I'm holding my
shit together right now, and rather than telling me that it's not
enough, you could try to help me with the stuff I'm capable of."

Alan digested this. She'd said it loudly, and a few of the other morning
patrons at the Greek's were staring at them. He looked away, across the
street, and spied Billy standing in a doorway, watching. Billy met his
eyes, then looked away.

"I'm sorry, Natalie," he said. "You're right."

She blew air out her nostrils.

"What about this. You can knock on my door any time. I'll make up the
sofa for you." He thought of Mimi and cringed inwardly. She'd have to
stay upstairs and be quiet if there were strangers in the house. Then he
remembered his promise about her wings. He bit his lip.

She let out a harsh chuckle. "Will I be any safer there?"

"What does that mean?"

"You're the weirdest person I've ever met, Alvin. I mean, sorry, no
offense, but why the hell would I knock on your door?"

She stood and turned on her barefoot heel and took herself away, walking
at a brisk and gingerly pace.

Barry moseyed over and sat in her seat. "She'll be okay," he said. He
picked up her spoon and began to finish her breakfast. "You know, I
can't watch the way I could yesterday, not anymore. Too visible. What do
I do now?"

Aaron shrugged. "Find a job. Be visible. Get a place to live. We can
have each other over for dinner."

Brett said, "Maybe I could get a job where I got to watch. Security
guard."

August nodded. He closed his eyes.

"She's very pretty," Barry said. "Prettier than Mimi."

"If you say so."

"Kurt's awake."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. You could introduce me to him."

I did it for your own good, you know. She couldn't bring herself
to say the words, for the enormity of what she'd done was
overwhelming her. She'd found three of his friends and treated
each of them to an evening of terror and hurt, and none of them
would tell her where her brother was, none of them knew. Maybe
they'd been innocent all along.

"Where are you?"

"Far from you," he said. In the background, she heard a girl
crying.

#

"It's going to happen, we're going to cover the whole Market," Kurt
said. He had the latest coverage map out and it looked like he was
right. "Look at this." The overlapping rings of WiFi false-colored over
the map were nearly total.

"Are those our own nodes, or just friendlies?" Alan asked, all his
confusion and worry forgotten at the sight of the map.

"Those are our own," Kurt said. "Not so many friendlies." He tapped a
key and showed a map of the city with a pitiful sprinkling of fellow
travelers who'd opened up their networks and renamed them "ParasiteNet."

"You'll have more," Buddy said. Kurt looked a question at Alan.

"My brother Brent," he said. "Meet Kurt."

They shook.

"Your brother?"

Adam nodded.

"Not one of the missing ones?"

He shook his head. "A different one."

"It's nice to meet you." Kurt wiped off his palms. Adam looked around
the little private nest at the back of the shop, at the small, meshed-in
window on the back wall. Danny watched at that window sometimes.

"I'm gonna send a screengrab of this to Lyman, he'll bust a nut."

It made Anton smile. Lyman and Kurt were the unlikeliest of pals, but
pals they were.

"You do that."

"Why aren't you wearing shoes?"

Anton smiled shyly. "No volunteers today?"

Kurt shrugged, a jingle of chains. "Nope. Slow day. Some days just
are. Was thinking of seeing a movie or something. Wanna come?"

"I can't," Anton said.

"Sure," Brett said, oblivious to the fact that the invitation hadn't
really been directed at him. "I'd like that."

"O-kaaay," Kurt said. "Great. Gimme an hour or so and meet me out
front."

"It's a date."

#

He was half a block from home when he spotted Natalie sitting on her
porch, staring at the park. Kurt and Link were gone. The patio at the
Greek's was full. He was stood in his bare feet in the middle of
Kensington Market on a busy shopping day, and he had absolutely nowhere
to go. Nowhere he belonged.

He realized that Natalie had never put him in touch with her boss at
Martian Signal.

Barefoot, there wasn't much of anywhere he could go. But he didn't want
to be home with Mimi and he didn't want to walk past Natalie. Barefoot,
he ended up in the alleyway behind Kurt's again, with nowhere else to
go.

#

Blake and Kurt got back around suppertime, and by then Alan had counted
every shingle on the roofs of the garages, had carefully snapped the
sharps off of two syringes he found in some weeds, and then sat and
waited until he was ready to scream.

Blake walked confidently into the shop, through Kurt's nest, and to the
back door. He opened it and smiled at Adam. "Come on in," he said.

"Right," Alan said. "How was the movie?"

"It was fine," Kurt said.

"Incredible," Burt said. "I mean, *incredible*. God, I haven't been to
the movies in ten years at least. So *loud*, Jesus, I've never heard
anything like that."

"It was just A&E," Kurt said. "Asses and explosions."

Alan felt a wave of affection for his friend, and an indefinite sadness,
a feeling that they were soon to be parted.

Kurt stretched and cracked his knuckles. "Getting time for me to go out
diving."

"Let's go get some dinner, okay?" Andy said to Brad.

"G'night guys," Kurt said, locking the door behind them.

"I'm sorry," she said. There had been five minutes of
near-silence on the line, only the girl crying in the background
at his end. She wasn't sure if he'd set the phone down or if he
was listening, but the "sorry" drew a small audible breath out
of him.

"I'm really, really sorry," she said, and her hands felt sticky
with blood. "God, I just wanted to *save you*."

#

Mimi was back in bed when they got home. Alan took a shower and scrubbed
at his feet, then padded silently around the shuttered bedroom, dressing
in the dark. Mimi made a sleepful noise.

"I'm making dinner," he said. "Want some?"

"Can you bring it up here?" she said.

"Yeah, sure," he said.

"I just can't face --" She waved a hand at the door, then let