Episode 06
First world tour
She'd sent him home.
That was how he'd say it afterwards, to himself, in the bad hours: she sent me home. Ilse had a job in Bushwick and Rose had a wall at the end of a corridor and he wasn't in it, and so on a Tuesday in Cleveland he'd got on a plane with the last three dates of the leg going on without him, and had stood in a bottling plant in front of two girls who could see tomorrow, and had asked them about bunks.
He'd been in the water off Red Hook, with a harpy, when it happened. He'd been, at the exact moment, under.
She'd known for two days. That was the rule. That was the only rule.
For months it had been a wall at the end of a corridor, getting clearer without getting closer, and then on the Tuesday, in a hotel in Toronto, she'd woken up at four in the morning with the small quick knot in both hands at once and it was two days out and it was here, the last night of the first leg, twenty thousand people, and she couldn't see what and she couldn't see where, she never got pictures, she got that, and that was the worst thing she'd ever felt.
She told Teo. Teo told four people and the four people told the venue and by Wednesday afternoon there were dogs on the concourse and men in jackets opening every case in the building and Marguerite on the phone to Ilse in the language Ricky had never asked about. They found nothing. They found nothing twice. On Thursday morning, the day of, Marguerite stood in the doorway of the hotel room with her coat on and said, "Cancel."
"And then what?"
"And then it doesn't happen."
"No. And then it happens somewhere I'm not." Rose was sitting on the bed with her hands flat on her knees, the way she sat before a show, except it was ten in the morning. "That's the thing about the wall. It's not here, Marguerite. It's at the end of me. Wherever I stand tonight, that's where it is. I've been walking toward it for eight months. If I stop walking it just waits."
"You don't know that."
"I don't know anything. I've never known anything. I see." She looked up. "Twenty thousand people have tickets. If I cancel, they go home, and something happens to a different twenty thousand people on a different night, and I don't get to see that one coming, because I won't be standing in it. At least tonight I'll be standing in it."
Marguerite looked at her for a long moment, and then said something short in the other language, that sounded like a prayer or a curse or a word that meant both, and went to make calls.
She was perfect that night. Everyone said so, afterwards, in the way people do, as if it mattered.
She stood on a stage the size of a house with a runway going out into the crowd like a pier, and twenty thousand faces turned toward her like a field in wind, and she sang Broken Off and Wishingwell and the new one nobody knew yet, and the whole time, under everything, the way Ricky felt floors, she was looking. Row by row. Face by face. Two days out and then one and then hours and then minutes, and she couldn't find it, and she kept singing, because singing was the thing that made them all look at her, and while they looked at her she looked at them.
It wasn't in the room.
That was the thing she'd understand later and never forgive herself for. It was never in the room. The room was the one place on earth she could see, and whoever had done this had known that, exactly, the way you know a person's blind spot by standing in it.
The show ended. The lights came up. Twenty thousand people who'd been a field turned back into individuals and picked up their coats and moved toward the exits, toward the foyer, toward the concourse where the dogs had been, laughing, hoarse, holding their phones up, and she stood at the end of the runway with the sweat cooling on her and the knot in both hands so tight she couldn't feel her fingers and thought, where, and then the wall arrived.
She didn't hear it. That was strange. She'd have said, before, that she'd hear it. What she got was the floor. The whole building took a breath in and didn't let it out, and the air in the arena went thick and then thin, and then the sound came, late, wrong, the sound of a very large room being changed, and then a silence that went on so long she thought she'd gone deaf, and then, from the direction of the foyer, the other thing. The thing you don't write down.
She was standing at the end of the runway, alone, untouched, in a spotlight nobody had turned off.
Of course she was. She was lucky.
They came out of the walls.
Teo saw it first and told nobody for a year, because how would you. He was running toward the stage with his arm across his face and the screaming starting behind him and he saw the concrete of the arena floor go soft in a ring around the end of the runway, and things come up out of it. Small things. Knee-high, hip-high, the colour of the floor they'd come out of and then, as they straightened, their own colours, brown and grey and a green like old copper, with faces that had been left out in the weather for a thousand years and hands too big for them. Twenty. Thirty. They came up out of the concrete and the seats and the steel of the runway itself, and they didn't look at the foyer, they didn't look at the smoke, they looked at her, and they made a ring, and they stood in it, facing out.
Teo stopped running.
The one nearest the steps, taller than the rest, which wasn't saying much, with a face like a boot and a ridiculous amount of hair, turned and looked up at the girl in the spotlight, and said, in a voice like gravel being cheerful:
"Evening. Don't move. Nothing's getting through this lot, they've been waiting eight hundred years for something to be worth getting through." A pause. "You're smaller than I thought."
Rose looked down at him. She had not moved. She could not have.
"What are you," she said.
"Kobold. Bobbelknecht. Of the Harz, originally, but the Harz has gone very quiet." He put a hand the size of a shovel on the edge of the runway, gently, the way you'd touch a church. "Bob's fine. Nobody manages the whole thing."
"Why are you—"
"Because you're you," said Bob, as if that settled it, and turned back to face the smoke.
Dash drove. Ricky didn't remember the airport. He remembered the twins on the dock, and Marguerite's voice on Dash's phone saying it wasn't in the room before she said anything else, as if that were the most important thing in the world, and finding out later that it was. He remembered Noor in the departures hall at four in the morning putting a coffee in his hand and saying nothing, exactly, in a way that was worth more than anything anyone said to him for the next week.
Twenty-two people. He'd know the number for the rest of his life the way he knew his own birthday.
She did the benefit nine days later. Everyone said she shouldn't and she did it anyway, in the same city, in a park, sixty thousand people who'd come to be told it was all right to still like music, and she stood on a stage with no runway and sang, and the wind took the sound out over the grass, and behind her, in a loose ring that the crew had been told was a new security detail and had somehow accepted, thirty small figures in borrowed hi-vis vests stood facing out with their hands too big for them.
Ricky watched from the wings. He'd been back four days. He hadn't been allowed near her for three of them, by Teo, by Marguerite, by something in her face when she'd seen him across the hotel lobby that had said not yet more clearly than any word.
The kobold found him before the encore. It came and stood next to him in the wings, hip-high, in a hi-vis vest that fitted it like a tent, and looked out at her with an expression Ricky couldn't read, and said, "You're the dragon."
"Yes."
"You weren't there."
"No."
"Good," said Bob. "She'd sent you away. She's very good at that. She'll do it to me next, and it won't work, because I'm not the sort of thing you can send." He scratched under the vest. "Fire doesn't work on us either, before you get ideas. Nothing much does. That's the point of us."
"What are you the point of?"
Bob looked at him then, up, with the boot face, and for a moment the cheerfulness went somewhere and what was left was very old.
"Her," he said. "Ask her what she is. Not Ilse. Not the council, they don't know, they think she's one of theirs. Ask her. She's known since she was eleven and she's never once said it out loud, and I'd like to be there when she does, because I've been waiting in a hill for eight hundred years to hear it."
He went back out to the ring. Rose finished the song. Sixty thousand people were told it was all right.
She let him in on the fifth night.
A hotel room, the curtains shut, the sunglasses on the table like something taken off a body. She was in the hoodie, the tent-sized one, and she looked twenty for the first time in a year, and she looked eleven, and she looked older than Ilse, all at once, and she said, before he could:
"Say it."
"You knew."
"I knew for eight months. I knew for two days. I knew for the last hour of the show, row by row, and it wasn't there, Ricky, it was never in the room, I looked at every one of them—"
"You sent me away."
"Yes."
"You sent me away."
"Yes." She stood up. Small, exact, furious in the contained way, and then not contained, and then, for the first time since he'd known her, not exact at all. "I looked at the wall for eight months and you weren't in it, and I thought, good, good, that's one thing I can do. I can't stop it, I can't see it, I can't do anything, I've never been able to do anything, I'm not a Kralle, I don't have a—" She stopped.
The room was very quiet.
"What did you say?"
"Nothing."
"Rose. You said you're not a—"
"I know what I said." She sat back down. She put her hands flat on her knees. Outside, in the corridor, something hip-high shifted its weight against the door and was, pointedly, not listening. "You want to know what my luck is? Everyone always thinks it's a gift. Cables move, lamps miss, cars stop. Twenty-two people, Ricky. Twenty-two people were in a foyer and I was in a spotlight and not one piece of that building touched me. That's not luck. That's not mine. Everything near me is unlucky instead. It's been happening my whole life and I've never done it and I can't stop it and the only thing, the only thing I've ever been able to do with it, is stand somewhere on purpose so it happens where I can see." Her voice went. It came back. "And I couldn't even do that."
He sat down on the floor. It was the only thing he could think of. The carpet was soft in the way of hotel carpets and the floor under it was soft in the other way, the way of the whole world, and he put his hands flat on it, the way she put hers on her knees, and felt for her.
New. Still. So new it came up through the boards like light under a door. And around her, faint, continuous, the room being arranged. And under the arranging, for the first time, because he was listening for it now, because a kobold had told him to, something else. Something that wasn't luck at all. Something that a hill in the Harz had felt from four thousand miles away and had come up out of concrete to stand in front of.
"What are you?" he said. Quietly. Not Ilse's question. Not the council's. Just his.
Rose looked at him for a very long time, from two days in the future, and from eleven years old, and from the end of a runway in a spotlight nobody had turned off.
"Not yet," she said. "I've said it to nobody. I'm not saying it to you first because you sat on the floor." Something that on another night would have been a smile. "Ask me again when you've found out what's wrong with the floor. Then we'll trade."
Ilse Varga came to the hotel on the sixth night with a cold coffee and Vovô, who had flown, which he did not do, and who stood in the corridor for a long time with his hand on the back of Ricky's neck and said nothing at all, which was the wholest thing anyone had said to him all week.
"It wasn't in the room," Ricky said. "Marguerite said to tell you. Before anything else."
"I know." Ilse looked down the corridor at the door with the hip-high shape against it. "They weren't trying to kill her."
"Twenty-two people—"
"I know the number. I will know it longer than you will. They weren't trying to kill her, Ricardo. If you want to kill a girl who sees two days out, you don't put a bomb where she'll be. You put it where she can't look." Ilse's eyes, the not-quite-person ones, were on the kobold. "They wanted to see what would come out of the walls. Now they have."
Vovô's hand tightened, once, on the back of his neck.
"Who," said Ricky.
"I don't know," said Ilse Varga, and it was the first time in his life he'd heard her say it. "And that, more than the floor, is what frightens me."
She turned to go, and stopped, the way she stopped, the way Vovô stopped.
"The twins," she said. "You went through the skylight."
"She said I would."
"She said you'd fall. You went. That's the second thing I'll remember about this week." Her eyes on him, not unkind. "The first is that you asked those girls eleven questions about your own life and not one about theirs, and on the night it mattered you were asleep on a sofa. I want you to remember that too. Not because you were cruel. Because it was so easy." A pause. "Your friends did well. They've been in since the day you stopped. I don't recruit people, Ricardo. I wait for them to notice."