note: Thanks to Harmony for figuring out how to get around FFN's silliness, and to B for spreading the word!
nineteen: fault
"What are you talking about?" I said quickly, taking just one step forward. "She's not gone. She's just not back yet. What's the matter with you?"
"She's gone," he repeated, shaking his head. "Fuck, we're in trouble."
"Calm down, you'll wake Dutchy up," I snapped. But now I was starting to feel a little worried myself. "What happened?"He hadn't bothered to take his jacket off, or his shoes. He stepped out of the puddle of water that had been forming at his feet and ran a hand through his hair. It stayed slicked back. He looked at the window, at me, at Dutchy, unable to focus on anything.
"What happened?" I asked again, and took another step forward.
"Nothing!" he seethed. "Nothing! That's just it! She's gone for chrissake!"
"She's not… how could she be… Swify, Sofia's… she's not gone," I said, but my words had no strength behind them. "How do you know?" I asked dumbly."Race, she left hours ago… Jesus… she's not here, ok? I looked everywhere. I went everywhere. Something happened, Race. She's gone."
Sofia had been hiding for the past few days. But who had she been hiding from? We knew now who had Cursed Specs… did that mean…"Brooklyn," I said quietly. It was still more of a guess than anything, though.
"Does it matter?" Swifty said bitterly, gritted his teeth. He hit the wall with a fist and then just rested his head against it, letting the rain drip down his face. I sighed and ran a hand through my own hair, feeling a headache coming on.
"It's gonna be okay," I said wearily. "We can't be sure she's gone. What if she's just hiding? Maybe they knew she was here. Or maybe she had a close call, has to lay low for a few hours." Swifty, still leaning against the wall, shook his head again and again. "She can take care of herself, you know," I added with a frown. "She's okay. I know it." But I didn't feel it. And he didn't believe me.
"She's gone," he said, and I sensed real pain in that voice. It spooked me, even more than his appearance had. But how could he be so sure?
Swifty turned against the wall and slid down it until he was sitting, his knees almost to his chest but splayed open, his elbows resting on them and his hands covering his head as if he were about to rip his hair out. "I told her to stay here," he groaned. "I promised I would protect her, in my mind I… and I had to keep her safe." I shifted my feet, at a loss for what to do or say or even think, and glanced over at Dutchy. His eyes were closed and he was still paler than usual, but his breathing wasn't as deep as before. For a split second I was concerned, but then I realized. Dutchy wasn't asleep. He was eavesdropping. I turned back to Swifty and tried to forget about it.
"It's not your fault," I said needlessly, then, "You know she'll probably be back in the morning."
"She's not coming back," he hissed, taking his hands away from his face and throwing me a steely glare. "She can't come back. She's gone." I sighed again and went to the window. Nothing had changed; I still couldn't see out, but at least it was something to do. The room grew very still. Idly, I wondered if Dutchy was holding his breath. Swifty's breathing was heavier though, as if he were in pain. I looked at him, torn between pity and concern, despite all feelings to the contrary he'd shown me.
"I can't see her face," he said then, his voice cracking. I abandoned it all, the ill will and the grudges and the sour history, if only for just that moment. I approached him and dropped to a knee, leaning in as close as I could get without startling him.
"Swifty?" I said. His hands were over his face again and he was shaking ever so slightly. I resisted the urge to put a hand on his shoulder, just to do something to let him know that I was there. But I also didn't entirely understand. "Swifty, you… you saw her today, what do you mean you…"
"I see her every day," he said, voice low. "Fuck, I see her every night. I close my eyes and there she is. I look around, look across the street or inside a window and she's there. But I can't see her face. I can't remember her face." He let himself look at me, and his eyes were red, redder than Dutchy's. "I had to look at a picture, Race. The other night. I had to look at the fucking picture to see."
I sat down with a thump and looked at the floor. This wasn't about Sofia at all, none of it.
"Every day," he moaned.
"It wasn't your fault," I said quietly. "That wasn't your fault and this wasn't your fault, Swifty. We'll find Sofia. She's out there. She's fine."
"Fuck do you know," he said and I winced as he turned his anger on me. "You know you said that last time, too, that's what you do, you say things will be fine and everything will work out but what do you do about it? What do you ever do to see it through? Nothing. You say it'll be fine and then you sit back and wait for it to straighten itself out but guess what Race. It doesn't. Instead it fucks up but you're still on the other side of the glass. It's not your fault because you never did a goddamn thing. You just pretend you weren't involved and…" he trailed off as if exhausted. I was still staring at the floor but I could feel his gaze hot on my forehead. I was reeling. I didn't bother to defend myself, because he was convinced otherwise and had been convinced for a while now and nothing I could say, not even at his most vulnerable moment, would change that. So I shut up and I let him tear me apart for something that had hurt me as much as it had hurt him. But he couldn't believe that, he couldn't believe that because he thought he was closed in his one private world where no one felt the things he felt or had the pain he had. He was wrong. And only the threat of losing a few teeth kept me from saying it right then and there.
I stood up. The moment was over. I looked to Dutchy, who snapped his eyes shut as soon as he noticed. I turned to go to the stairs, but when I was about a step away, there was a loud and frantic pounding at the front door. Swifty got up and went to answer it and I returned to the window. I heard muffled voices, then Swifty returned with someone familiar in tow. He was a mess – wet, dirty, and high strung.
"Skittery," I said, rushing forward to shake his hand. He didn't smile when he saw me, just nodded a little and took my hand and then crossed his arms and accepted with a nod of thanks the seat that Swifty showed to him. Swifty disappeared into the kitchen and I moved Dutchy's feet a little and sat on the couch. Skittery was busy trying to get the goose bumps on his arms to fade.
"What's wrong?" I asked immediately, now glad that Dutchy was awake, even if he was still pretending not to be. Skittery waved me off.
"I'll wait for Swifty," he said. "It's bad." He stopped rubbing his arms and noticed Dutchy for the first time. "What's with him?" he asked.
"Long story," I said. "He's okay."
Swifty returned and thrust a steaming mug into his hands, which he accepted gratefully, but still eyed Swifty a little warily. Skittery was a mess. Swifty was a mess. Dutchy was a mess. I was fucking high class when compared to the lot of them.
"Bad news," he said after he'd taken a few sips from the mug. "Shit, guys, what's taking you so long anyways?"
I frowned. "Have you talked to Bumlets?"
"Bum- no. None of them. Except... well, you'll hear about that later."
"Some Brotherhood you got there," Swifty muttered. I deflated a little. Skittery didn't seem to have heard.
"Well, if you haven't noticed, things haven't quite gone as planned," I said. "Sofia's place was burned down. We've been all over the city finding the ingredients to this Cure that we don't even know how to put together." Now that I said it, I realized how pathetic it really sounded. Skittery just stared.
"Well you better hurry the fuck up," he said. "Or else you're going to come back to the Lodging House with your pretty potion and no one to give it to."
I felt Dutchy stiffen.
"We're going as fast as we can," I said levelly. "We're getting close, real close."
Swifty didn't comment.
"Sorry," said Skittery, and then he sighed a little, and his shoulders slumped down. "I'm a little nervous, is all." It wasn't really that he was relaxing; he was more resigning himself to the situation at hand.
"Yeah, well," I began, but Swifty cut me off.
"How bad is it, then?" he asked. Skittery shrugged, gulped down some of the mug's steaming contents.
"I'm no doctor," he said. "I mean, he's sick. It's getting worse."
"It hasn't been that long," I pointed out, though our time in the Dark seemed an eternity to me. "Last I heard, he had at least two weeks – and that's your time. How long's it been over there anyway?"
"Got me," said Skittery. "I been all over the place. Three days? Three and a half?" I frowned. It didn't all add up.
"Listen, if this were some normal bug, I'd say Specs'd be fine. Kid's healthy as a horse, and he's got the spirit, too, yeah? Some of the others – kids like Jack, I mean – they been stayin away from him. They think it's contagious. Who's gonna bother to tell em otherwise, right? Anyways. We know it's different. We thought it was bad. Now we know, we know for sure." He looked me straight in the eye now, not bothering to brush the hair out of his face. "He's not gonna last much longer."
"I think I know what's wrong," Swifty said after a few moments. "I think I know why it doesn't fit."
"What, the timing?" I asked. My brain had been trying to work around the same problem.
"Right, yeah. That's the thing. I think he's on Dark time." We were silent after that. If Specs was on Dark time, suddenly we were looking at a different schedule entirely. Suddenly Sofia's disappearance had even more consequences.
Skittery nodded slowly. "That would explain it," he agreed. "I mean, he's goin downhill fast. But not so fast, if we're judgin time by this place. How long you been over here anyway, Race?"
"Near a week, maybe," I guessed. I didn't have the patience to figure it all out. It didn't seem important – in the end, it was all the same. We were going to have to work even faster than before. I let out a breath and leaned back against Dutchy's legs, at that point not really caring if he was cramped.
"Christ," Skittery muttered. "What'd we get ourselves into, eh Race?" he said with a trace of dry humor. My lips twitched into a half smile. I missed that everything-be-damned attitude. It was a little harder to attain with so much at stake.
I thought he finally relaxed a little, then, and we sat in a comfortable silence for a couple minutes, listening to the rain.
"That sunk in yet?" Skittery asked. He had finished his drink and was now staring at us intently. I realized that he'd never relaxed at all, and I felt stupid for letting my defenses down.
"Why?" said Swifty. But Skittery ignored him and focused on me.
"It gets from bad to worse," he said. "Don't shoot the messenger, okay?"
"Sure, okay," I said, confused. How could it get worse?
"I don't know if I'll be seeing you guys again, not on this side," he began. "I don't even know if I'll be on this side at all, come a few days."
"Why, what happened?"
Skittery didn't answer at first. He tapped his head below his left ear. That, I remembered, is where the mark from Kid Blink's knife would be. I reached my own hand up to mine. The scab hadn't yet fallen off, but it was close, and beneath it would be a shiny pink scar.
"We're in trouble," he said. The "we" in this case meant the lot of us that'd made that pact, now at least a couple centuries ago.
I felt a little queasy, but nevertheless again asked, "What happened?"
"…it's Kid Blink. He got in some trouble." Skittery winced. "A lot of trouble. He tried going through the Paseo with a boxful of something. I don't even know. It's not important, seeing as he don't have it anymore anyways."
"Roque's been watching that door for weeks," Swifty remarked.
"You and I know this," Skittery agreed. "Kid didn't. And you think he'd bother to ask? Of course not. Kid, he thinks he knows everything. Hell, even if I'd known about his plan and warned him, he would've done it, just to spite me and to prove a point."
"He's good," I admitted. Kid Blink had the kind of power most anyone into smuggling would kill for – he could come and go from the Dark as much as he wanted to without any ill effects. For the rest of us, like I'd explained to Dutchy earlier, running in and out produced the kind of effect only a long night and three jugs of moonshine could procure: extreme dizziness, poor eyesight, and the contents of your stomach all over the street.
"He's not that good," Skittery said sharply. "He got caught. El Roque wasn't happy. He knows about Kid, he tried to get him to work for him. Of course, Kid said no, like he's said no to everyone else, but el Roque wasn't too pleased about that. So he figured, why not teach him a lesson, right?" Neither Swifty nor I answered, but I swear the temperature in the room dropped a good ten degrees. "On top of that, while he's got Kid right where he wants 'im, he sees the scar. Figures it's gotta mean something. Figures it's some group, some upstart that Kid's sided with, so he's even angrier cause he thinks he was rejected for someone else. Starts asking a lot of questions. Course, Kid didn't say nothin – or so he told me – but el Roque, like I said, he wants to teach a lesson, so he gets real… persuasive…"
I felt my skin prickle a little. I had to keep reminding myself that if Kid Blink had told Skittery all this, it meant he was alive. It meant he was okay.
"Listen," he continued, still looking hard at me. "That's nothing we need to get into, el Roque had his fun and in the end he let Kid go because he got a few things in return. Words. Three of them. Fever… Pact… Cure… he says that's all they got out of him. He says. And another thing." He hesitated, his face twisting into something between disgust and pity. "An eye."
I blinked, Swifty sat back, shaking his head. Kid Blink had worn his eye patch forever, but he'd never needed it. He thought it made him look helpless when he was selling papers and rakish when he was chasing skirts. But now… it was horribly ironic, the kind of thing only someone like Roque would appreciate. I felt sick, picturing my friend stumbling back to the Other side bloody and broken. I had a hard time meeting Skittery's eyes, after that. I mean, he had actually seen Kid. He had had to deal with it.
But Swifty's mind was somewhere else entirely.
"I told you," he said to me. "She's gone."
"Who?" Skittery asked.
"Sofia," I said. "She… she left this morning and she's not back yet."
"Fever. Pact. Cure," said Swifty. "She's gone. They kidnapped her. You know it. You just can't admit it."
"Why would Roque care about Sofia?"
"Who says he does? Who says it was him?" Swifty challenged. "Even I can't keep track of alliances. Who knows what they know that we don't. Roque connects the three words, plus whatever else Blink screamed out. It's not hard. Some group of people are looking for a Cure. To the Fever. Who does he pass the information to? Anyone. He doesn't care, he's had his revenge on Blink. But someone else might not want that Cure to be found. Someone else might not want a group of dumb kids to be messing around with their business."
I tried to interrupt but he didn't even give me that.
"You marked yourselves," he said, referring to our scars, "and that was your first mistake. How hard is it going to be now to find you, all of you? Skittery is right. You have to lay low."
"Skittery wants to lay low," I said firmly. "He can lay low. I don't have to do anything. Except I have to see this through."
Swifty shrugged. "I'm just sayin. It's gonna be harder. You have to be more careful. No more parties with Petey."
"No surprise there," I muttered.
"Listen, I need to go," Skittery said, antsy, and stood. "I'll keep my ears open about Sofia, but I'll be hanging around the Lodging House until this blows over. I think Swifty's right. Sofia's been in the middle of this since the beginning. Whoever burned her place down must have found out she was still alive, and I guess now he's found his second chance."
I said nothing. I was having a hard time admitting that we'd lost her like that. Just like that.
"Thanks for coming, Skitts," said Swifty. "Thanks a lot."
"Someone had to tell you," he said with a shrug. "Kid's out, obviously. He'll be out for a while. Bumlets didn't know, and Snoddy, well, no one's heard from him since that morning we were all together in the park." He sighed and started for the door. He let himself out, and I don't know why, but no one really bothered with good byes.
"You get all that, Dutch?" Swifty asked once we heard the door close. Dutchy twisted around and sat up a little.
"I think so," he said sheepishly, his voice still raspy.
"Bed now," I said, turning to him and fighting a yarn, "for real. Are you up to leave for Brooklyn in the morning?" He nodded. "Swifty, you coming?"
Swifty shook his head, stood, and stretched. "No. I'm staying here. I can't leave this place open, not after all that news. And I need to be here in case Sofia… well… and if anyone comes by."
I resisted the urge to raise an eyebrow. Who was the hopeful one now? I had no idea what we were going to do about Sofia, and Swifty apparently didn't, either, or else he would have stayed in the chair, taking the entire night to plan everything out. So I stood as well.
"Come on," I said to Dutchy. "Let's get you upstairs. Maybe it won't be raining tomorrow."
"Maybe," Dutchy agreed. He got up with some difficulty and waved my offered arm aside.
We made our way to the stairs and when we were about halfway up I realized that Swifty wasn't behind us. He was back in that chair, settling in for whatever remained of the night. I guess I'd been wrong after all.