Page 63 of Backpacking through Bedlam

Mary led the way up a long, uneven stairway to the street, and when we emerged into the open air, no one gave us a second look. Unless we did something blatantly touristy, we’d never stand out, and even if we started gawking and pointing, we were close enough to the theater district that I couldn’t imagine tourists were uncommon here. Mary didn’t hesitate as she ploughed through the crowds and straight ahead, barely looking left or right. I grabbed her arm before she could walk into traffic, and she gave me a betrayed look.

“What?” she asked. “I’m going to Sally.”

“Yes, and I’ll die if I walk in front of a crosstown bus,” I said. “So please remember that you have someone with you who isn’t immune to traffic, okay?”

“Fine,” said Mary, sullenly, and stayed on the curb until the light turned and gave us permission to walk.

When she started up again, she was moving even faster, forcing me to almost jog to keep up. It was fast enough that I didn’t have the breath to ask her where we were going.

We whipped around a corner, and she made a beeline for a residential door crammed in between a loading dock and an accounting firm, the sort of tiny place that had a hand-painted sign in the window and probably got ninety percent of its business through direct referral. The sign was written in English and Korean, reflecting the character of the neighborhood around us. Most of the businesses I could see had similarly bilingual signs.

Mary tried the knob on the door and, finding it locked, turned to me. “She’s in there,” she said.

I eyed the door. It was metal, either steel or aluminum, with a pretty solid lock. Worse, it opened outward.

“I can’t open that,” I said. “Can you walk through and open it from the inside?”

“I can, but it might attract attention, so I thought I’d see if we could do it the living way first.”

“Oh, because standing on a street out in the open, picking a lock, is way easier to overlook.”

Mary rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to be sarcastic,” she said, and walked through the door, vanishing. A moment later, the interior door swung open and Mary undid the latch on the security door, pushing it far enough out for me to grab hold of the edge. “I know it’s a talent of yours, but it’s still impolite.”

“Civility, absolutely my primary concern right now,” I said, and stepped inside.

The hallway on the other side was narrow and dingy, and smelled distantly of a dozen unidentified fried things, all of which were probably delicious before they withered into the ghosts of meals past. Apartment doors lined the walls to either side. Mary walked ahead of me, head cocked, until she suddenly stopped, attention fixed on one door.

No way forward but through. I looked at her, exchanged a nod, and turned back to the door, raising one hand to knock briskly. Seconds ticked by. No one answered.

Well. That was going to be a problem.

I looked at Mary, eyebrows raised. “You sure this is the right place?”

“She’s in there,” she confirmed.

Right. I turned back to the door, took a step back, raised my foot, and slammed it into the door directly above the knob. The door shuddered but didn’t give. I kicked it again, harder this time, and was rewarded by seeing it swing inward, the lock snapped in two.

Exterior doors are usually harder to kick down. Interior doors, especially in residential apartments, tend to be flimsy things, barely better than cardboard.

The room on the other side was small, square, and meticulously clean. It looked like the storage space for a rock-and-gem shop, the walls lined with geodes in a dozen shades of purple, rose, and gold. Small tables held more, and the largest crystals sat directly on the floor, quartz spires jutting toward the ceiling. A small cluster of women occupied the center of the room, surrounding the velvet couch where Sally sat, her wrists and ankles zip-tied together, a furious expression on her face. She shot a furious glance at the door as it opened, only thawing a little when she saw me standing there.

The women followed her gaze, frowning in near-unison. I amended my first impression from “possibly not human” to “almost certainly not human,” because they were all virtually identical. They could have been septuplets, pretty, Asian, young, and female, dressed in simple, well-worn clothes as meticulously clean as the room around them. Their hems had been patched in several places; I could see the worn spots along their seams. Frugal, inhuman, surrounded by precious minerals . . . right.

“Excuse me, ladies, but I believe my pizza has been misdelivered,” I said, and stepped into the room.

The women fell back, none of them reaching for weapons or moving as if to defend themselves. This was weird. Sally, on the other hand, perked up, sitting taller on the couch.

“Alice,” she said, with visible relief. She looked past me, and frowned. “Where’s the boss?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I thought you might like to ever be allowed out of his sight again, so I didn’t tell him you’d been snatched the second I turned my back on you,” I said. “If these nice ladies want to let you go, and maybe explain what the hell they thought they were doing in the first place, we might be able to leave without horrible violence.”

One of the nice ladies threw a chunk of quartz at my head. I ducked, letting it hit the wall, and sighed as I straightened. “Or it could be time for the horrible violence.”

The other women mostly looked dismayed as the one who’d thrown the rock grabbed a quartz spire and rushed for me. None of them had done anything they deserved to be shot for, yet, and so I stopped her with a kick to the chest, knocking her off balance and causing her to drop the quartz at the same time. She staggered. Before she could recover her balance, I grabbed her by the arm and yanked her against me, spinning her around so that her back was pressed to my chest. I let go of her arm and locked my own around her throat, pinning her in place, not quite cutting off her air.

“I’m not opposed to horrible violence, as a rule, but you seem like perfectly nice ladies, apart from the abduction of my adopted stepdaughter, so maybe this is where you back down.”

The woman I was holding tried to thrash. I put more pressure against her throat, and she stopped. Not a trained combatant, then. I could think of six ways to break my own hold, and most of them would have left me at a disadvantage.