“Tell me a story.”
I blinked. It wasn’t late—barely the afternoon—although the light which made its way through my office’s windows was weaker than grey coffee. I’d elected to sleep late, although I couldn’t burn the image of Zamir from my mind, and I was staring listlessly at a ream of papers and envelopes without making a move to address them. There didn’t seem to be much point; and I was chewing over the promise I’d made without any real idea of how I would accomplish it. If I’d need that precious deadly medicine Dragon or Jabberwock peddled, where the hell was I supposed to get it…?
So I was thinking about Robin without really considering her, and so it startled me when she spoke. She looked like she’d just woken up, half her hair plastered to the side of her face. “Can you?” she asked again.
“What? Why—you want a bedtime story or something? Not the time.”
“Not that,” she said. “You keep telling me how awful the Outscape is, right? How bad I’ve got it. But you grew up here, too, Starling—and you’re still here after everything and you know what you’re doing. You’ve never said how.”
“It’s not important.”
She crossed over to the desk. Bella was laying on top of a leather-bound journal I’d never opened, the ribbonlike bookmark still tucked between the first pages, and Robin picked her up before I could snatch the weapon away. “Don’t I need to know?” she said. “Don’t I deserve to know? I don’t want to die here, and now we’re not running away any longer. I mean, I’ve seen the edges of the city—that’s where I tried to hide from Fletcher, remember?—and there’s nowhere to go. I need to know how to do it, Starling, how you did it.”
I was watching her carefully. She had no idea how to use the gun, but at least she hadn’t pointed it anywhere dangerous. “Put that down,” I said, and took Bella from her. “You know why that’s dangerous?”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“Cause it kills people?”
“No,” I said. Then I thought for a moment. “Well, yes.”
“That’s what it should do.”
I shook my head. “When I said you were getting bloodthirsty, Robin, I didn’t mean it like this. You’ve never touched one in your life, I can see that—even if you did manage to point it the right way, the kickback’s like a lion up on that frame of yours. And it’s not a deterrent either,” I continued. “People get real antsy when they see a gun out. Antsy enough to stop talking and start shooting. I didn’t carry a gun when I was growing up here and Bella’s never killed anyone.” Robin’s eyes narrowed, so I spun the gun around to show her the handle. “Bella. The revolver.”
Her frown only deepened, so I guess I was doing something wrong. “You named it—no, never mind. How’d you grow up okay, then?”
“Still want that story?”
“Yeah.”
Shouldn’t have asked. “You know how I’ve been so nice to you, Robin—letting you stay in the office keeping people from killing you or ripping your head open for the juicy secrets inside, buying your clothes, right?”
“I’m not sure…”
“Well, I got lucky enough that someone found me, too. Usher. You’ve…not met,” I said. “He’s the mortician, and it seems like he’s always been. A nightmare obsessed with the dead and dying, a nightmare of the ethereal, out-of-body experience—but he’s not a killer like some. He found the dead Basil and he found me, and he let me stay at the morgue because he didn’t know what to do with me. There aren’t humans in the Outscape to make up the difference. You’re the—the only other one I’ve ever really known, Robin, and we’re the only ones anyone else knows.”
“What happened with Usher?” she demanded. “I know there must be more. You act like you know everything about me, about how I should live here, and so you must have learned it somewhere.”
I stared Robin down for a long, drawn-out second. She was right. Starling Hexel was a creation of everything that had happened then, a name and a face and an attitude molded like pottery. It didn’t take very long to be shaped by the Outscape, because you pretty quickly stopped being soft enough to shape. “Nothing worth telling,” is what I said after that long moment.
“Come on.”
“Sometimes there isn’t a story. You just get older and the city changes round you. And,” I said, to head off her anger, “there are places and people not worth revisiting. Nightmares are all too often cyclic—be glad that our stories keep moving forward.”