“Sure. We’ll talk about someone else. Do you want to know why I’m here?”
“Sorry, Frisk. I’m having a bad day.”
“I came to warn you that Father sent out scouting parties from the Heights to search for you. Well, not you exactly, but Sensibel. They mean to drag her home.”
“Good luck.”
“My sentiments exactly. Still, both of you should hide. Maybe swim over to Aunt Slypaws’s home.”
“If Mom finds out Sensibel’s with Meatbreath, she’ll take this city and shake it until Sensibella drops out. Then she’ll take her to her chimney and home school her till she can recite the gender positions of every tree in the forest.”
“She already knows that stuff. Never underestimate the sexual imagination of four sisters.”
“Where are they keeping her?”
“In an unknown place. Everyone can tell it’s unknown because it’s guarded by loads of soldiers. Up on the hill beyond the Strip. She’s in the steeple of an empty building where Primates go to sing to their Ancestor. Oh, please Bandy, not under this smelly bridge. It’s where Ne’er-do-wells hang out. There’s so many fleas here that your fleas will leave you to join their mates and party. Take me to the Strip – this is my first time in the city.”
“There’s nothing doing in the Strip now. It’s almost morning. Don’t you ever sleep?”
“No.”
“The bridge is the only place Sensibel knows where to find me. But she probably can’t go out without an escort.”
“Well, we’ll just go to where she is? I’ll tell the guards I’m her sister and I have an important message to give her personally.”
“What will I do?”
“You come too. You’re a cadet in the Honour Guard. I thought you looked handsome up there on the stage. I’ll say you’re my escort. They’ll let us in to see her. Besides you look like one of Meatbreath’s sons.”
36
“I’m sorry, but I need to wake you up.”
Touchwit heard his voice as if it was calling down to her from the top of a chimney. She was stuck in a crazy dream involving her mother floating by the island in the night, talking. Immediately, smells drifted in. Leafy decay. Dank water. Endless forests of pine. Pollen from goldenrod. Then came the sounds. Early morning traffic on the automobile bridge. A seagull calling overhead. Sights: Mindwalker, wide awake, concerned and wet. After the crisis meeting, they’d swum over here to Halfway Island and spent what was left of the day sleeping. Long ago, a homeless Primate had cleared a space in the saplings for a tent and a campfire. That was where she collapsed from fatigue. She must have gone on sleeping right through the night. “It looks like I’m caught in a diurnal sleep cycle,” she said. “Where’d you go?”
“I swam across to get the morning news.”
“What’s happening?”
“Serious scat! First, there’s gossip that No Name is going to make a Declaration tonight. Then there’s a news release from the City Elders saying the Occasion has been delayed: watch for it the night after tomorrow. But immediately counter-messaging starts up and says it’ll to be tonight. Of course. That counter-messaging is ours.”
She sneezed the pollen out of her nose. Her fingers hurt. For most of yesterday morning in the Root Cellar with other Makers, she’d fashioned identical images of Meatbreath until her fingers started to cramp. She ought to invent a technique for replicating likenesses so that a Raccoon doesn’t have to strain her paws. Multiplying the same image in countless Makings felt wrong. She got the idea from Meatbreath, so it must be wrong. There was something mindless about repeating the same Making. The activity was obsessive. But this was a crisis. She was taking the Protector’s thinking and using it back on him.
“No Name was sighted for the first time in the city. An hour ago. It’s uncanny how someone who likes to be in your face all the time can be so invisible.”
I saw him.
“He was at a dress rehearsal for the Declaration. So now we know the shape of the event, we just don’t know when it’s going to happen.”
“I’m awake. Let’s swim over and check the networks.”
“Funny, No Name’s two-sided like you. He’s diurnal-nocturnal. They say he never sleeps.”
I slept.
“We’ll have to move around quickly. Apparently, there’s a spy trying to track us.”
***
They made their way south from the café boat dock picking up news.
Help Make History – Join a Brigade. It’s Illegal to Join. Who sez? Don’t know. But it’s Against Custom. The Protractor’s Left Town. Untrue, Untrue. The City’s Unprotected? Bollocks! Have you seen the Peoples Corps? Bunch of Losers. Lost outside Uptown Tavern: Tail Ring with Elegant Stitches. P.C.s = Protecting City. Wrong! P.C.s = Politically Correct. Who’s the Protector’s Playmate? Don’t know. I’d follow her anywhere!!! Muster to Destroy Tonight’s Declaration. Watch for Time and Place. Moist-touch, please find me – I’m at our Favourite Tree. Alert! P.C.’s trying to shut down the Harbour Area. Moist got arrested, Sister – Very Sorry. Whoever’s destroying Protector statues, Please Stop. I’ve got your Tail Ring. Look for me at the Declaration, near the water.
“I don’t know if I like the sound of this Peoples Corps,” Touchwit said.
“The well-fed find a way to protect their place at the top of the food chain. They create a disgruntled, hungry population, then exploit their anger by recruiting them to fight imaginary threats from the sides, not the top.”
“Let’s go down to the harbour and see for ourselves.”
“I wouldn’t risk it. Anyway, what we need to find out isn’t there.”
“Which is …?”
“What No Name’s plans really are. Why are his High Guard slipping out of the city in ones and twos? Is there trouble over at the Creek? On the Southern Frontier?”
“That would explain why there’s a delay with the Declaration.”
“It smells like war,” Mindwalker said. “It’s the kind of confusion you get before conflict: unexplained delays, sudden reversals of intention, waiting and not knowing. It makes it hard to plan a resistance. I wish we could find out what’s going on.”
