Chapter 23: Cool runnings_NYC Questing Guild

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> “William’s wife suddenly became too ill to travel, the poor thing, and I just happened to be there, waiting for him, when he arrived in Philadelphia. His rooms are much nicer than my own.”

I began to run.

Not too fast at first. I was still somehow sore from spinning, despite it being five days later, and my body was threatening open rebellion after it realized my intentions.

The West Side Highway path was practically empty, it being December and Sunday morning and all. Only the most fanatical people would think it was a good idea to run in these conditions and normally I wouldn’t be one of them. But after a fruitless afternoon spent tearing those 12 numbers apart while at the same time trying to forget the freezer of mind-reading apples, I decided to take Beatrice’s advice and clear my head.

The wind swept up suddenly, blowing back my hair, and the icy breeze off the water made my insides turn, but I pressed onward up to the Whitney and turned into the grid. I slowed to a walk and pulled out the lilac buff, which had been tucked in the small pocket of my workout pants, along with a piece of paper with the numbers from the tattoo.

I hesitated.

Curing a hangover had been a neat little parlor trick and even the apples seemed quaint compared to what Beatrice said this buff would do. How would it feel, I wondered. Would anyone notice me or would I be an unrecognizable blur? And what about my mind? I held the buff up to my nose and breathed in. A sweet aroma of citrus hit my nostrils and that gave me the last sliver of confidence I needed to step over the Rubicon.

The taste of the buff matched its smell: it was like chewing an orange slice after a soccer game, almost refreshing and nothing like Steve’s buff. I quickly swallowed it, started a five-minute timer on my sports watch, and resumed my previous pace.

A block or two passed and I felt the same. Maybe Beatrice’s alchemy skills weren’t all she made them out to be.

I kept jogging and started to cross Eighth Avenue, when, all of a sudden, a biker going the wrong way appeared out of the corner of my eye. I turned and locked eyes with him and it was then that the entire world, except for me, slowed to a crawl.

I considered the biker. He was only a foot away and his face wore a mask of fear, but I had nothing to worry about. At his current speed, it was as if he was ten blocks away and how could I not move a few feet forward to let him pass behind me?

The biker dealt with, I ran out of the crosswalk and into the oncoming traffic. The cars inched forward as I deftly weaved in between them. If they noticed me, I wasn’t sure, but after a block, I grew tired of that game and jogged back onto the sidewalk and into the West Village.

I then set my mind to work on the numbers. They appeared in my vision, as if they had materialized into the real world. My mind moved them around in a circle, jumbled them out of order, reversed them, and then put them back in order. It was a neat trick but not all that useful to the problem at hand.

I pushed the numbers onto the various storefronts as I passed them. It was too long by two digits to be a phone number, but maybe the first two were a country code? Also how long were foreign phone numbers supposed to be? This wasn’t a good use of my expanded brain power, so I moved on.

Next I decided to multiply each individual digit of the sequence together to see what happened. But all that got me was a large and meaningless number.

Maybe it was a set of IP addresses. I could check those later though.

Or a substitution cipher. That was a possibility. I blinked and each digit turned into its corresponding letter. Except the second digit was a zero. And what about all the letters after I? That couldn’t be right. There were too many ways to separate the digits. And I could do that on paper at home later anyway.

I looked down at my watch. Only three minutes had passed and I had run across the West Village, down through NYU, and was now about to enter SoHo.

Insanity.

And I still felt like I could run all the way back up to the tip of the island and not be worse for wear.

The SoHo shops were of a different character but still offered me no clues as to the numbers’ meaning. I decided to head down to Battery Park and then hope that I still had enough juice left to make it back up to the coffee shop. I passed an art gallery displaying an entirely white canvas except for the word “Baaaaah” in sloppy red ink, a store with columns of yogurt cups on rotating columns, and then finally a random dessert shop which had a line out the door for some reason.

Just as SoHo was beginning to melt away into Chinatown, I spotted an old hand-drawn map of Manhattan in a heavy wooden frame suspended precipitously from a piece of wire. It was one of those maps that was so old that its approximation of the dimensions of the island was quite laughable. 20 feet past the map I still could not get the neatly laid-out grid out of my head. As I progressed to the bottom of the island, the gridlines suddenly overlayed themselves in my vision. Numbers floated at every intersection, decreasing slightly each time.

I stopped running.

Could the numbers be a location? A latitude and a longitude?

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I turned around and began running back uptown, the numbers on the grid slowly ticking up. I needed to slow down, to find a map so I could confirm this theory. But the world still moved in its nearly frozen state around me and I looked at my watch, which showed 30 seconds remaining. An eternity in my current condition.

Another 20 seconds had elapsed by the time I got to the coffee shop. Thankfully, there was still one chair and table out front despite the weather and I inched forward, trying to mimic a normal speed. I stood with my back facing in front of the chair and watched the seconds slowly tick down to zero, before closing my eyes and collapsing.

“Jen.”

The word almost roused me from my slumber, but I was content to remain in this dream version of the coffee shop. The sun was warm and my drink was cold. I looked down at the newspaper I was holding and read the story above the fold.

“Kate O’Laughlin, 19, found dead facedown in dorm room,” the headline on the page read. I folded the paper and put it on the table, as the chipper redhead I had already seen in the prior replay of this memory around ran up the street and sat down across from me.

“JEN.”

The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place where I knew it from. The redhead in front of me’s name was Laura, that much I knew.

“Sorry I’m la-”

A hand smacked me hard in the face and I opened my eyes.

Beatrice stood above me. No, wasn’t I Beatrice? And where did Laura go?

“W-hat’s going on?”

Beatrice frowned.

“What’s going on is I found you here in front of the coffee shop, your head tilted back and drool dripping down your mouth.”

“Oh,” I said. I looked at her. She was wearing a full-length jacket with a fur-adorned hood, a stark contrast to my own outfit. A cold chill suddenly swept through me and my teeth began to chatter.

“Come on, let’s get you inside.”

Beatrice extended her hand and I took it but nearly fell forward into her. She steadied me with her other hand, before hooking her arm around mine and guiding me into the shop. After setting me down at a table, she returned a few minutes later with a steaming mug, which I slowly brought up to my lips.

“So, it looks like you’ve had an interesting morning. Please tell me you didn’t take the focus and speed buffs at the same time.”

“No,” I said softly. “Just the latter. It ran out just as I got here. But I think…”

I tried to recall what had happened during my run, but it was like someone had hit fast forward times 10 in my mind, whole scenes skipping by in an instant.

“You figured out what the numbers mean but now you can’t remember. It’s my fault. I should have told you. Your brain at normal speed can’t process what your brain at superspeed was experiencing. It’s all a big blur, isn’t it?”

“Y-yeah. Exactly. I can make out bits and pieces. I think I ran through most of lower Manhattan. It was incredible. Like I was the Flash. There were lots of stores and ... “

“Take your time. Keep thinking. Maybe a detail will crystallize and that will be the trigger.”

“OK, I’ll try.”

I tried again. I remembered there was a biker, and he had run into me? Well, almost. But then I was blocks away in SoHo and there had been a window and…

“A map,” I said.

“What?” asked Beatrice.

“I saw a map. In a window. It was … it was old. Wait a minute.”

I pulled out my phone and brought up the twelve numbers.

“I think it’s a place,” I said. “A set of coordinates. Maybe a latitude and a longitude. The first six digits are one and the second six are the other.”

Beatrice’s eyes widened.

“You may have something here. Try putting them into your phone and see what happens.”

“OK. Hold on.”

A map of the world soon stared back at me, and I entered the two sets of digits carefully. With a tap of my finger, the digits went off into the ether. Then they came back with a big red X.

“Error. Specify N or S, E or W,” the screen read.

“Crap,” I said. “We need to specify which quadrant. So that means the numbers could stand for four places, not one.”

“Well, maybe it will be obvious which one is the right one after we go through all four.”

I nodded and began inputting the four combinations. First, N and E, which brought back a mountain in Kyrgyzstan. Then S and E, which landed in a random spot in the Indian Ocean. Then, moving to the Western Hemisphere, I typed in S and W, which was just off the coast of central Chile, before finally putting in N and W and crossing my fingers that the location was somewhere even remotely close to New York.

I looked down at the screen.

It was Queens.

“It could still be the wrong one,” I told Beatrice as we left the subway platform an hour later. She didn’t seem to care and was practically running down the sidewalk. “It’s almost too much of a coincidence that the location is in the city,” I added.

“Maybe, but it’s doesn’t hurt to check. Besides, do you want to fly halfway around the world to climb up a mountain or jump in the ocean?” she said, and I struggled to catch up, my legs still on fire from this morning’s earlier activities.

We were in an industrial area of Long Island City, the gentrification line holding steady, at least for the time being, further north. Large warehouses lined the streets and even on Sunday, trucks were loading and unloading, crowding the pot-marked sidewalks and forcing us out onto the street several times to maneuver around.

Finally, we reached our quarry: a two-story brick building, covered in colorful graffiti. Garage doors dotted the exterior, sporting more artistic renditions, like a menacing eagle face and a head sliced open to reveal the artist’s tag.

Beatrice had cut her frantic pace to a crawl and held out her phone like it was a homing beacon. We passed several more garage doors before finally reaching a regular wooden door. A spray-painted street number was tagged above and various writing dotted the surface of the door, including the words “Pull hard to close.”

Beatrice frowned and tried to open the door. Unsurprisingly, it was locked.

“Are you sure this is the place?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Yep. A direct hit on the coordinates.”

“Oh. Was hoping maybe it was actually that door a little further down. One that we could actually open.”

I waited for her snippy retort but instead Beatrice had closed her eyes and was mumbling something slowly to herself. An incantation of some kind? She hadn’t mentioned anything about being able to cast a magic “spell,” but maybe she didn’t trust me enough to reveal all her secrets yet.

It was then that I saw her amethyst ring start to glow. This wasn’t the pale flicker from before, when she broke the rock in her apartment. No, this was bright and nearly blinding and I tried to step back when I realized what was about to happen, but it wasn’t soon enough.

Her fist collided with the wooden door and I brought my arms up to shield my eyes from the spray of wood I was expecting. But after feeling nothing but a gust of wind, I slowly lowered them and looked at the scene before me.

The door knob had fallen off but the actual door was still in one piece. Not even a crack or a dent or even a splinter of wood was visible where Beatrice had made contact. I slowly looked down and it was abundantly clear what had borne the full force of the punch.

Chapter 23: Cool runnings

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