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

was terrible and pervaded everything, no matter which
direction the wind blew from.

Adam was nearly home when he realized that his place and his lover and
everything he cared about in the entire world were *also* on fire, which
couldn't possibly be a coincidence.

#

The flames licked his porch and the hot air had blown out two of the
windows on the second story. The flames were lapping at the outside of
the building, crawling over the inside walls.

No coincidence.

Kurt coughed hard, his chest spasming against Alan's back. Alan set him
down, as in a dream. As in a dream, he picked his way through the flames
on his porch and reached for the doorknob. It burned his hand.

It was locked. His keys were in Kurt's door, all the way up Augusta.

"Around the back," Bentley called, headed for the fence gate. Alan
vaulted the porch rail, crashing though the wild grasses and ornamental
scrub. "Come on," Bentley said.

His hand throbbed with the burn. The back yard was still lit up like
Christmas, all the lights ablaze, shining through the smoke, the ash of
books swirling in it, buoyed aloft on hot currents, fragments of words
chasing each other like clouds of gnats.

"Alan," Kurt croaked. Somehow, he'd followed them back into the
yard. "Alan." He held out his hand, which glowed blue-white. Alan looked
closer. It was his PDA, stubby wireless card poking out of it. "I'm
online. Look."

Alan shook his head. "Not now." Mimi, somewhere up there was Mimi.

"Look," Kurt croaked. He coughed again and went down to his knees.

Arnos took the PDA in hand and peered at it. It was a familiar app, the
traffic analysis app, the thing that monitored packet loss between the
nodes. Lyman and Kurt had long since superimposed the logical network
map over a physical map of the Market, using false-color overlays to
show the degree to which the access points were well connected and
firing on all cylinders.

The map was painted in green, packets flying unimpeded throughout the
empty nighttime Market. And there, approaching him, moving through the
alleys toward his garage, a blob of interference, a slow, bobbing
something that was scattering radio waves as it made its way toward
him. Even on a three-inch screen, he recognized that walk. Davey.

Not a coincidence, the fires.

"Mimi!" he called. The back window was blown out, crystal slivers of
glass all around him on the back lawn. "*Mimi!*"

Billy was at his side, holding something. A knife. The knife. Serrated
edge. Sharp. Cracked handle wound with knotted twine, but as he reached
for it, it wasn't cracked. It was the under-the-pillow knife, the wings
knife, Krishna's knife.

"You forgot this," he said, taking the PDA.

Then Davey was in the yard. He cocked his head and eyed the knife
warily.

"Where'd you get that?" he said.

Adam shifted his grip for slashing, and took one step forward, stamping
his foot down as he did it. Davey retreated a step, then took two steps
forward.

"He set the fires," Bentley said. "She's as good as dead. Cooked. Won't
be long now, she'll be cooked."

Darren looked at him for the first time. "Oh, yes," he said. "That's
about right. I never found you, no matter how I looked. You don't get
found if you don't want to."

Brent shook his head. "He set the fire, he used gasoline. Up the stairs,
so it would spread up every floor quickly."

Aaron growled and lunged forward, slicing wildly, but Davey's scurry was
surprising and fast and nimble.

"You're going to stab me again, cut me again? What do you suppose that
will get you?"

"He's weaker than he was, then. We got six years, then. He's
weaker. We'll get ten years. Twenty." Billy was hopping from foot to
foot. "*Do it*."

Alan sliced and stabbed again, and the knife's point caught Danny's
little bandy leg, like cutting through a loaf of stale bread, and Danny
gasped and hopped back another step.

"He gave you the knife, didn't he? He gave you the knife last time. Last
time, he took me to the school yard and showed me you and your
girlfriend. He explained all about girlfriends to me and about what it
would mean once our secret was out. He taught me the words, taught me to
say *pervert*. Remember, Billy? Remember how you taught me?"

Andrew hesitated.

"He taught me the ritual with your thumbtip, how to make the little you,
and then he took it away from me for safekeeping. He kept it in one of
his rabbit cages, around on the other side of the mountain. It's not
there now. Have you seen it? Does he still have it?

"He never liked having a little brother, not me or the others, but he
liked having that little thing around to torture."

Billy hissed. "She'll be dead in minutes," he said. "In seconds. Another
one dead. His doing!

"Killed her, cut her up, buried her," Benny chanted. "Sliced her open
and cut her up," he shrilled.

Alan let the knife fall from his hands. Benny leapt for Danny, hands
outstretched. Danny braced for the impact, rolled with him, and came up
on top of him, small hands in Benny's eyes, grinding.

There were sirens out front now, lots of sirens.

A distant crash, and a rain of glass fell about his shoulders. He turned
and looked up, looked up into the dormer window of his attic, four
stories up. Mimi's head poked out from the window, wreathed in smoke,
her face smudged and eyes screwed up.

"Mimi!" he cried.

She climbed unsteadily onto the windowsill, perched there for a
moment. Then she leaned forward, ducked her head, and slipped into the
sky.

Her magnificent wings unfolded in the smoke, in the hot ash, in the
smoldering remains of all of Alan's life in human society. Her
magnificent wings unfolded and caught the air with a sound he heard and
with a downdraft of warm air that blew his hair off his forehead like a
lover's hand, smoky smell and spicy smell.

She flew.

The sirens grew louder and she swooped over the yard. She gave two
powerful beats of her wings and rose higher than the roof, then she
circled the yard in great loops, coming lower and lower with each
pass. Davey and Benny watched her. Kurt watched her.

Alan watched her. She was coming straight for him. He held out his arms
and she fell into them, enfolding them both in her wings, her great and
glorious wings.

"Come on," she said. Kurt was already limping for the alley. Benny and
David had already melted away. They were alone in the yard, and the
sirens were so loud now, and there were the reflections of emergency
lights bouncing off the smoke around them. "Come on," she said, and she
put her arms around his waist, locking her wrists.

It took five beats of her wings to get them aloft, and they barely
cleared the fence, but they banked low over the alley and she beat her
wings again and then they were gaining altitude, catching an updraft
from the burning house on Wales Avenue, rising so high into the sky that
he felt like they would fly to the moon.

#

The day that Lyman and Kurt were on the cover of NOW magazine, they
dropped by Martian Signal to meet with Natalie's boss. Lyman carried the
pitch package, color-matched, polyethnic, edgy and cool, with great
copy.

Natalie met them. She'd grown out her hair and wore it with bangs
hanging over the scar on her forehead, just over her left eye, two
punctures with little dents. Three surgeries had cleared all the bone
fragments from the orbit of that eye, and she'd kept her sight. Once she
was out of the hospital, she quickly became the best employee Martian
Signal had ever had. She quickly became manager. She quickly undertook
to make several improvements in the daily operations of the store that
increased turnover by 30 percent. She slowly and reluctantly hired her
brother, but his gimpy knee made it hard for him to bend down to
reshelve, and he quickly quit.

Kurt and Natalie hugged, and Lyman formally shook her hand, and then
shook her boss's hand.

It took less than an hour to convince her boss to let them put up their
access point. On the way back, three different people stopped them and
told them how much they liked the article, and swore that the first
thing they'd do when they got home would be to open up their networks
and rename them ParasiteNet.

Lyman handled the thank-you's for this, and Kurt smiled and fiddled with
his PDA and watched the sky, looking for a girl with wings as wide as a
house.

#

I went to the house,

(she said, as he tended the fire, turning the yams in the coals and
stirring the pot in which his fish stew bubbled)

I went to the house,

(she said, resting up from the long flight she'd flown from Toronto to
Craig's distant, warm shores, far away from Kensington Market and
Krishna and Billy and Danny)

I went to the house,

(she said, and Andy worked hard to keep the grin off his face, for he'd
been miserable during her long absence and now he could scarcely contain
his delight)

I went to the house, and there was no one home. I had the address you'd
given me, and it was just like you'd described it to me, down to the
basketball hoop in the driveway.

It was empty. But it was as I'd remembered it. They'd lived there. I'd
lived there. You were right, that was the house.

That was the house I'd lived in. I rang the doorbell, then I peeked in
through a crack in the blinds. The rooms were empty. No furniture. Just
blinds. It was night, and no one was looking, so I flew up to the third
floor, to the window I'd stared out all those times.

The window was unlatched, and I slid aside the screen and let myself
in. The room was empty. No carpet. No frilly bed and stuffed animals. No
desk. No clothes in the closet, no hangers.

The only thing in the room was a small box, plugged into the wall, with
a network cable snaking away into the phone jack. It had small lights on
it, blinking. It was like the one you'd had in your attic. A wireless
access point.

I remembered their names, then. Oliver and Patricia. They'd been my
mother and father for a few years. Set me up with my first
apartment. This had been their house.

I slept there that day, then, come nightfall, I set out again to come
home to you.

#

Something woke Andy from his sound sleep, nestled in her wings, in her
arms. A tread on Craig's inviolable soil, someone afoot on his brother.

Slowly, he got himself loose of Mimi and sat up and looked around.

The golem standing before him was small, and its eyes glowed red. It
bent over and set something down on the earth, a fur-wrapped bundle of
smoked meat.

It nodded at him. He nodded back.

"Thank you," he said.

Mimi put her hand on his calf. "Is it okay?"

"It's right," he said. "Just as it was meant to be."

He returned to her arms