Man Made Boy (36 page)

“Ah, yes, of course.”

It was kind of difficult to get a sense of how he felt about things, since I couldn’t see his face. But then I realized it was a lot like my mom, who had a face, but couldn’t really express emotion with it.

“Speaking of Claire, and I suppose Sophie, I’ve shown them to their room. The police should be coming round to get a statement from me about Robert Jekyll in about an hour or so. That should give me just enough time to show you to your room.”

“I have a room?”

“We have a policy here.” He got up from his desk. “We never turn away a magical creature.” He motioned me with an empty sleeve to follow him, then walked briskly down the hallway. “But we only let them stay free for a month. Then they must pay rent. It isn’t much, of course, but we found people who pay for things take better care of them.”

“Ruthven doesn’t charge for living space,” I said as we walked through the building. It sounded more defensive than I meant it to.

“He also doesn’t pay anyone.”

“True,” I admitted.

We stepped out of the building and into the midday sun.

“Are you hungry?” asked Kemp as he pulled sunglasses from his pocket and put them on his invisible head. “Shall we scavenge the leftover catering before heading over to the dormitory?”

“That would be great.”

Kemp led me to one of the large windowless soundstages and quietly opened a metal door. Inside was a narrow lobby, empty except for a long table filled with cold cuts, bread, vegetables, and other little snacks.

“They’re filming,” whispered Kemp. His sleeve pointed toward a closed double door set into the wall.

I nodded and grabbed a plate. I suddenly realized that I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before. I started to pile up a plate, eating as I went.

Then the double doors opened and a human walked out into the lobby dressed in a loincloth. He was a really good-looking guy, all chiseled features and serious muscle definition. He looked at Kemp and his eyes went wide.

“Is that…an invisible man?” he said.

A tiny, winged girl about the size of a squirrel dropped onto his shoulder and patted his cheek with her little hand. “That’s Mr. Kemp, the technical director for the show,” she said in a piping voice. “He’s an aristocratic-looking Englishman, about middle-age.”

“Yes.” The human’s face went slack and he nodded three times rhythmically. Then he suddenly smiled. “Mr. Kemp!” He held out his hand. “It’s such a pleasure to meet you!”

“The pleasure’s all mine, Mr. Rains,” said Kemp as the actor gripped his invisible hand. “How’s filming going?”

“Wonderful! You work miracles at this studio!”

“I’m so glad you appreciate the art to the artifice,” said Kemp. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m showing our new tech whiz around The Studio.”

“Of course! I don’t want to hold you up. Just came out for a little snack while they’re changing sets,” said Rains. He turned to the table and looked down appraisingly at the desserts. The sprite whispered something in his ear and although he didn’t seem to be aware of her presence, he smiled, as if to himself, and moved on to the veggie section. I wondered if part of the sprite’s job was to keep him in shape for the show, or if she was just concerned about his health. Either way, it was hard to see the blatant manipulation as bad. But it
was
manipulation. Was it wrong to use magic on humans, no matter what? After all, in a way, the Siren, Medusa, and so many other monsters did it, and it didn’t seem to hurt anything. Well, most of the time, anyway. It made me think of VI. What if instead of getting mad at her for manipulating humans, I had tried to help her find less destructive ways of communicating? I wondered if it was too late for that. Obviously, she had a nasty temper. But maybe once she had some time to cool off…

“Coming, Boy?” asked Kemp.

I wolfed down the rest of my plate and nodded. He led me out through the exit and back into the bright sunlight.

“New tech whiz?” I asked we walked down one of the narrow streets.

“If you accept, of course. We are sorely in need of someone with some technical expertise. The digital age is not something many magical creatures have embraced.”

“Yeah, I know. It kind of made me unpopular at The Show.”

“Well, there will always be the old guard, I’m afraid. But I think you’ll find that creatures here on the West Coast are far more open-minded.”

“That would be nice.”

“If you accept the position, you’ll be paid, of course. As I was saying before, we pay everyone.” He led me off the street and onto a sidewalk that led to a tall building tucked away in the back of the compound. “With all due respect to Ruthven and The Show, television makes quite a bit more money than theater. We can afford this luxury where perhaps he must depend on a collective model. And with that additional capital, many of the creatures here have more autonomy than those in New York. With money of their own, they can choose how to spend it—on a car, clothes, whatever they like. Some creatures even live off Studio grounds in real houses with families and a complete place in human society.” He paused for a second. “Of course, that’s not possible for everyone.”

“Have you always been invisible?”

“Goodness, no. Could you imagine my poor mother trying to change nappies on an invisible baby? Strolling through the park with what appeared to be an empty pram?” He laughed. “No, I did this to myself, I’m afraid. Rather reckless, really. I learned the formula from a fellow named Griffin. He performed the experiment on himself, with tragic results. It made him invisible, but that specific compound was extremely toxic and it drove him mad. It took me years to refine the formula to a safe compound that I then administered successfully on myself. With the unexpected side effect of halting the aging process.”

“Really? Have you tried to isolate just that part? So people could halt the aging process without becoming invisible?”

“I tried.” And then he was quiet. He’d been so chatty up until then that the sudden silence was uncomfortable.

“It didn’t go well,” I said.

“No,” he said. “It didn’t.”

We walked on a little farther without talking until we came to the tall building.

“Ah, here we are.” He held the entrance door open for me. “The dormitory.”

The inside reminded me a little of the hotel where we’d stayed in Pittsburgh. A little impersonal, maybe, but clean and well lit. Kemp led me up a set of stairs and down a long hallway. Some of the rooms had open doors, and I could see creatures of all kinds hanging out inside, watching TV or asleep. Other rooms had closed doors. I could hear music coming through some of them.

We stopped in front of one of the doors, and Kemp opened it. The room was about the size of my family’s apartment at The Show, except there were windows, and it was furnished with cool, modern-looking furniture instead of old broken stuff salvaged from the junkyard. There was a living room/dining room area in the middle, and a kitchen area with a stove and fridge off to the left. Off to the right were a bathroom and bedroom.

“Well?” asked Kemp as we stood in my bright, simple apartment. “What do you think? Suitable quarters for a young bachelor such as yourself?”

“It’s nicer than anyplace I’ve ever lived.”

“And what do you think about the job?” he said.

I knew there was only one way I could make it work. Online friends, chat, email, coding, my whole connection to the hacker community I’d practically grown up with—it all had to go. If I accepted this job, I could only do the boring stuff: anonymous,
impersonal business emails, network monitoring and optimization, off-the-shelf software installations without any customization or tweaking. In other words, I’d have to treat computers like someone who didn’t like computers very much. The idea almost made me want to go back to cooking oxtail at the West Indian Delight.

But this paid a lot better and was in a community that seemed just about perfect for me. This was my chance to start my own life, for real, here in LA with Claire and Sophie, far from my mother’s overprotectiveness and my father’s domineering plans.

“I’ve been traveling a long time,” I said to Kemp. “I need someplace to call home.” I couldn’t help grinning a little bit, then. “Besides, I kinda miss show biz.”

I LOUNGED ON a deck chair next to the pool, my eyes closed against the bright California sun. I had to admit, my post-tech LA life was pretty great. It seemed kind of unbelievable that only a month before, I’d been hiding under cover of night at a travel plaza in New Jersey, living on food I pulled out of Dumpsters.

A shadow suddenly darkened the sky and I felt a drop of water on my chest.

“You are such a lazy git,” I heard Claire’s voice saying.

I opened my eyes and saw her silhouette leaning in, her wet hair hanging over me. She reached up and wrung it out on my stomach.

“Ah, cold!” I winced.

She laughed and flopped down on the chair next to mine. She had a deep tan now. Three decent meals a day, eight hours of sleep a night, access to a gym, and a job as a light grip had given her a perfect athlete’s physique. She seemed more relaxed, too. I didn’t know whether it was living at The Studio or because she didn’t have to worry about her brother anymore. What I did know was that the old Claire would never have worn a bikini, but the new Claire sported one all the time. And I wasn’t complaining.

Of course, I was doing pretty well myself. And it wasn’t like I was
completely
tech free. After all, I was the one man IT army for The Studio. First, I’d built myself some new custom interfaces. I’d tweaked the USB design quite a bit and expanded the scrambler algorithm way past spec. I didn’t know if it was even possible for VI to pick up some sort of identifying bioelectrical signature from my nervous system, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

When I was satisfied that I was completely untraceable, I dove into work at The Studio. I’d been afraid the business stuff would be boring, but I actually didn’t mind it too much. It was comforting to wake up every morning and have tiny problems that I knew exactly how to solve. Probably because I’d spent the better part of a year never really knowing what the hell I was doing, facing huge problems without solutions. And since there were lots of little problems to solve, I kept busy.

On a typical day, I worked for a while in the morning upgrading the servers, firming up the firewall, ordering parts for the new key fob security system, or cleaning up some actor’s computer. Then I’d go out to the private pool behind the offices. Two naiads, Nixie and Maura, lived in the pool. Naiads were nymphs, like the dryad wood nymphs who worked at The Show, but they lived in water, and had blue skin, webbed fingers and toes, and thin gill slits on their neck. When they found out I didn’t know how to swim, they offered to teach me. So I’d practice with them for a little while, then relax on the deck until Claire came out with food she’d snagged from the catering table on the set. We’d catch up a little, eat, goof around, and then go back to work for a few more hours. At night, we’d hang out with some of the other creatures who lived at The Studio. The mummy who managed the finances was kind of an asshole, but the sprites were hilarious, the gremlins offered
some amazing DIY tips, and the genie had some seriously crazy anecdotes. We’d have game nights and movie nights and other goofy stuff that made me feel like we were really part of a community.

Now I lay in a deck chair by the pool, with Claire next to me. The sun had already dried up the small bit of water she’d wrung onto my stomach.

“You going out to that club with Guilder and his mates tonight?” asked Claire.

“Haven’t decided yet.” Guilder was an elf Claire and I had become friends with. He lived off Studio grounds with a bunch of other elves. This was the first time they’d invited us out with them.

“I’m going,” said Claire.

“Really? I thought clubbing was more Sophie’s scene.”

She just shrugged her bare, tan shoulders. “You should go, too. I think it’ll be fun.”

“You, getting down at a club? How could I miss that?”

BEFORE THE ELVES picked us up, Claire and I met in the dorm lobby. She was dressed in tight black pants, black cowboy boots, and a purple, fitted button-up shirt open at the collar. She caught me checking her out and gave me a guarded look.