The ghosts didn’t even wait for me to clear the building before exploding into chatter. Honestly, I was lucky they’d given me until I got out of the room.
“So Miller’s, like, totally on the run,” Christopher said. He was doing a weird thing where he was pacing across the hall but still moving with me as I bolted towards the exit. “Gotta be looking to lay low. Wait out the search.”
“Him and what money?” Joni asked. Her tone was impossibly measured, almost robotic, as she tried to keep her emotions level. Didn’t want to send a buncha old monks into heat stroke. I appreciated the effort, since I was running about as fast as I felt comfortable doing indoors and also did not want to be sent into heat stroke.
“Honestly, fair. His cards and phone have gotta be frozen,” Christopher said, sliding back and forth across the hall perpetually three feet in front of me, no matter how fast I ran. “His apartment’s gotta be under watch. He probably has some cash, whatever he was gonna pay Cara, but that’s only gonna last him so long. No way is he looking to stick around here.”
“Northbridge is isolated,” Joni said, words still forcibly monotonous as I rounded the last corner before the exit. “You can’t just walk to the next town over.”
“What’s he gonna do, hitchhike out?” Blair wrinkled her nose. “No one takes hitchhikers these days. It’s impossible to bum a ride.”
At this point, I’d finally reached the exit and exploded outside like a hellish piece of popcorn being expelled from a sacred kettle of holy oil.
“Maybe he took the bus,” I said, half panting. “Or a train. Do we have a train? We gotta have a train.”
“Closest train is in Johnston,” Christopher said. “Over an hour drive.”
“Okay, bus,” I said, pedaling back to my first suggestion. “I know we have a bus station. I used to take it to work.”
“You used to take the bus station?” Joni asked, all measured robotics gone from her voice now. I don’t know if it was magic or just her tone, but I felt her snide comment stab me like a shard of ice.
“I took the bus, Joni.” I rubbed the back of my shoulder where I could feel her eyes glaring holes into me. “My car broke back when I still worked at Peppy’s, and the station is five minutes from my place.”
“You’re thirty minutes walk from Peppy’s.” Blair’s face was contorted in a deep frown. “How come you didn’t just walk?”
My cheeks flushed. “I was lazy?”
“Yeah but the bus from the station to Peppy’s is an hour and a half.” She still looked like she was putting a painful amount of thought into this, debating whether taking the bus would have actually saved me any time.
I wouldn’t. It hadn’t. Even back then I knew it, but like I said, I was lazy.
“How do you even know how long the commute from my house to Peppy’s is?” I asked, trying to delay her realizing that I’d wasted hours of my life on that commute just to avoid a walk. We didn’t need a sassy, ‘I’m smarter than you’ Blair twice in such a short period.
“Why are we having this conversation?” Joni asked, sparing me from Blair’s judgment with some judgment of her own. That was fine. I could take Joni’s judgment. “We need to go to the bus station and see if anyone fucking saw Henry Miller there at any point. If not, then he either stole a car or is still in Northbridge.”
“Perfect.” I waved a hand in the air, alerting Tina, who’d been leaning against my car, smoking.
She jumped when she saw me and ground out the last of her cigarette. “We ready to go?” she asked, pulling open the car door. “Back home or somewhere else?”
“Somewhere else,” I said. “The bus station, specifically.”
The car whirred to life as she twisted the key in the ignition. I was always a little surprised at how clean it sounded when turned on. My old beater–may she rest in peace–always took at least two tries with the key.
“Which bus station?” Tina asked as we pulled out of the dull little parking lot surrounding the monastery. “The one by the school?”
“Uh, the downtown one I think,” I said.
She nodded, tapping on her GPS. “Upper downtown, right? The little station by your place?”
I frowned. Since when was the station little? Then I realized she meant my new place. “No no, the big one,” I said. “Lower downtown.”
Tina grimaced. “Oh that one. The fucking brick goliath?” A shudder ran down her spine. “The one that always smells like piss next to the shitty cement apartments? I hate that corner of town.”
“Hey that’s where I used to live!” I said, protesting before I even really put together what or why I was protesting. “I lived in a shitty cement apartment.”
She squinted at me in the mirror, an eyebrow skewed. “Really?”
“Yeah.” Then a thought tickled my brain. “We should stop by and pick up my old shit. I’m only technically a week behind rent, so it’s not like the landlord would have evicted me and thrown all my stuff out.” The old geezer was notorious for threatening eviction, but in my experience, you really had to be a good two months behind rent before he started the actual process.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“You’re a week behind rent?” Tina asked.
I put up my hands, deflecting her question. “I might have made a few questionable decisions with my last paycheck. But I was gonna square up once I got my next one, swear.”
“No no, I’m not… That’s not what I was asking.” The squint and skewed eyebrow were back. “Just, like, you paid rent for last month?”
“Well yeah. I’m not that kind of criminal.”
She nodded. “So you went from a cement apartment to a penthouse in a few weeks?”
“Just tell her to can it,” Joni said. “We need a plan of action for when we get to the bus station.”
“How hard can it be?” I asked. “Just bug a few employees, see if they saw Henry.”
“How hard can it be?” Joni echoed. “Sammi, I’m surprised every day that you haven’t tripped over your own feet and joined us in the afterlife. You need a plan or you’re gonna walk out of the station with a stolen bus and a new felony under your belt.”
“Ooh, it would be fun to steal a bus,” Blair said. “We could make it a party bus! Hashtag van life but cooler. With neon.”
I could kinda see it. What if we ever needed to leave the city but didn’t want to cram up in a car or train or little airplane seat? Having a decked-out bus would be sick.
“Neon would be pretty cool–”
“We are not stealing a bus,” Joni said. “We are looking for Henry Miller.”
I snorted. “Duh. Obviously. One step at a time.” But I gave Blair a subtle wink, just to let her know that I had heard her and a bus was higher on my list than it had been before. “No one is stealing a bus today.”
“Uh.” Tina sucked a breath in between her teeth. “Dunno if I gotta say it, but I do know how to drive a bus. Not that I wanna be part of stealing one, but, like, if you get your hands on one…”
“Is it different from driving a car?” My thoughts were solidly back on stealing a bus now. “Just longer?”
Tina chuckled. “Oh lordy let me tell you, there’s a world of difference. The length is a huge part of it though.”
I spent the rest of the ride to the bus station half listening to Tina ramble about bus driving and half listening to Joni unspool a needlessly complicated plan of attack. The whole time, I just kinda nodded and said ‘mhm’ a bunch. It wasn’t clear who was overcomplicating things more, Tina’s insistence that the ‘passive steering third axle complicated turns’ or Joni explaining that passenger data was probably ‘super controlled and would need a careful set of lies to navigate.’
Sure, I’ve been bit by this before, but after hospitals and police stations and monasteries, a bus station was gonna be a cinch.
–
I really need to stop saying that. ‘How hard can it be?’ ‘This’ll be easy.’ ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ Especially ‘this’ll be a cinch’ cause honestly, who actually says ‘cinch’?
In this case, the real problem was that I had stupidly agreed to Joni’s plan. It’s not that her plan was bad. Or good. Or too complicated or too simple or not well enough thought out or too well thought out.
The problem was that I didn’t know what Joni’s plan was cause I was too busy mentally comparing the words ‘sitch’ and ‘cinch’ in my head while she was talking. I’d been thinking about how, two decades ago, Kim Possible had said ‘so what’s the sitch?’ and then I was wondering what sitch even meant, and then I realized I had no idea what the word cinch meant. So instead of listening to Joni’s marching orders, I was googling word origins, finding out that sitch was short for situation (painfully obvious in hindsight) and cinch meant something about tightening clothes with a belt. The subject eventually lost my interest cause I wasn’t about to start researching too too much, but I did feel rather pleased with myself for learning something new. I’m not exactly the academic type, so it was nice to feel smart about something once.
Except I wasn’t feeling so smart standing in a thirty-five degree bus station while the walls made ominous moaning, creaking, and hissing noises. A lady at the front desk was talking furiously into her clunky wired landline, and I caught the words ‘maintenance’ and ‘evacuation.’
“That’s your cue,” Joni said in my ear, words so sharp I got goosebumps on top of my goosebumps. “Step 7, go.”
How were we already on step 7? See, part of why I thought I could get away with ignoring Joni was cause I hadn’t quite gotten used to the fact that my familiars could interact with the human world. Normally I could just, you know, ignore them. Worst case scenario, Joni insults me, Christopher laughs, and Blair finds a new human to imprint on and tells me I’m a bad person for not helping. And really, it was Blair, not Joni, whose words usually got to me. Maybe it was her persistence or maybe it was my conscience, but I was kinda starting to feel like a bad person. I should probably visit Noah at some point, ease my guilt a bit.
“Sammi!”
Shit, I’d been ignoring her again.
“Remind me step 7?” I asked, already wincing at the onslaught of negativity I was about to get.
Joni’s eyes narrowed to slits, and steam seemed to radiate off her, despite her own powers plunging the room into arctic chillines.
“Tell the lady at the desk to evacuate the station.” Her words came in seething little bursts. “The whole fucking point of us making the station seem unsafe is so you can evacuate it without it seeming like too much of a lie.”
Right. “Uh, okay. Why are we evacuating the bus station?”
“Oh boy.” Christopher took in a deep breath, holding it for a second, before letting it out, his face relaxing into a chill smile. “Hey, Joni, girl, you’re doing great. Why don’t you focus on your job, and I’ll handle Sammi.” Joni opened her mouth to protest, but Christopher held up a hand. “Look, I have, like, nothing to do anyway. No powers or nil. So let me be Sammi’s handler, and you keep an eye on Blair.”
Thank God this worked. Joni gave me one more enraged glare before looping up to find Blair, who was busy making the building sound ready to collapse.
Christopher gave me the cliffnotes. Once the building was evacuated, we’d wait until someone with higher clearance than the average desk clerk showed up. Joni figured whoever was barking orders the loudest probably had the highest level of security access. That would be the person to ask for a copy of all surveillance videos from the last few days. I would just need to tell a lie to get my hands on it, tell another few lies to erase my presence, and boom. Or, not boom cause there wasn’t actually any gas leak, but I’d be in the clear.
It was a good plan. Minimal witnesses to watch me tell lies and get confused. A real reason for people to be getting their hands on camera feeds, so no one would get in trouble if one extra person got a copy. And because I’d get a hard copy of all the feeds, I wouldn’t have to worry too much about asking the wrong question and maybe not getting all the information I needed.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s a pretty smart plan.”
“Boy you were checked out while Joni and I put this thing together, huh?” He grinned.
I fought down the wild urge to tell him what I’d learned about the words sitch and cinch because it would definitely not make me look smarter in the slightest right now, and instead focused on step… 7 was it?