Points of Departure (26 page)

(Now there’s a secret of the fireborn and the shadowborn. The world is really only a few years old. Some say five years; some say three. It really doesn’t matter that I tell you this. You won’t believe it
anyway. People rarely believe important truths.)

“What do you do, Lucy?” he asked.

“I’m a firecatcher on the Starlight Run,” she said—and it sounded very important when she said it. Well, firecatcher is an important job, I suppose. Someone has to catch the light of distant stars and guide it down to Earth. But really, the Solar Run and the Lunar Ricochet Run (with the tricky reflection) are
more important to folks on Earth.

The Starlight Run is simply longer and lonelier.

Lucy had been put on the Starlight Run younger than a firecatcher usually was. She had many people fooled into thinking that she was stronger and smarter and tougher than she was. She was on the Starlight Run, and there are many ways that a firecatcher can make that run and be lost forever.

(You want to know
how and when and why? Who are you to ask for explanations of things that even people of power don’t understand? And explanations will do you no good anyway. Trust me.)

“Interesting job,” Mac said. “Not an easy one.” And Lucy grinned and set her pint on the table as if she would stop for a while. You know how it is when you meet someone who seems like a friend? You don’t know? You should. But
even if you don’t, just trust me: that’s how it was. He seemed like a friend.

“Hey, Lucy,” a firecatcher called from the bar.

Lucy laid a hand on the shadowborn’s shoulder and said, “I’ve got to talk to that one. I’ll be back.” And she ran away to talk and never did get back to the shadows. Parties can be like that.

And that night, Lucy left the city, running up and away to the far-off stars.
And after a time, she came back. She went away, and she came back. And each time she came back, the world seemed a little brighter and the space between the stars a little darker. But she was a firecatcher and she went away and she came back, and there was another party.

The gathering was in the phantom subway station at Ninety-first Street, where the train never stops anymore. The old station
was lit by fireballs that Lucy had placed in the rafters. Laughter and voices echoed from the tiled walls.

“You seem a little tired tonight, Lucy,” said Johnson, a jovial man who knew everyone’s business but managed to keep it all to himself. He lived by the stone lions at the public library and had the look of a fireborn but (some said) the twisty mind of a shadowborn. He was not all sparkle—he
governed the sky over the city and some of that sky was clouds.

“I am tired,” Lucy said. “Could you do me a favor?”

“What’s that?”

“Make it cloudy tomorrow night. I need a holiday.”

Johnson frowned. “It’s not in the schedule.”

She watched him silently. Did I tell you—it’s hard to say no to Lucy.

“All right, I’ll fix it,” he said at last. “We’ll have rain.”

“Thanks,” she said and her eyes
studied the crowd.

“Who are you looking for?” Johnson asked.

“Looking for trouble. What else?” Then her eyes stopped on a shadowy alcove beneath a stairway. “I think I found it.” She grinned at Johnson and started to turn away.

“Hey, hold on,” said Johnson, laying a hand on her shoulder. “He’s a shadowborn and—”

“I talked to him at a party a while back,” she said. “He seemed interesting. I
always wanted a friend in dark places. Besides …” She let the word trail away, she shook the restraining hand from her shoulder, and she headed for the stairway. There never was any explaining Lucy’s “Besides …” And explanations would do no good anyway.

She headed for the shadows.

On the edge of the bottom step of the stairs, a spot of white fluttered in the darkness. Another spot of white crouched
nearby.

“Hello, cat,” Lucy said to the crouching whiteness, but the young animal was intent on the white scrap of paper that twitched on the stairs.

There was no wind.

Lucy watched and the paper moved—a slight twitch and a bit of a tumble. The cat’s eyes grew wider and she inched forward. Again, the scrap moved, fluttering like a bird with a broken wing. The cat flattened herself to the floor,
staring.

Not a breeze. But the paper fluttered again and the cat pounced. She held the scrap down with one paw and waited for it to struggle. And waited. Batted at it gently with the other paw.

Lucy heard the darkness ahead chuckle, and she chuckled too. She had a nice laugh, or so folks said. Despite her nose and her chin and her voice, she had a nice laugh. She raised a hand in the darkness
and the glitter from her rings became brighter. Still, it was difficult to see him in the dim light and easy to see that he liked it that way.

A cap like a ragpicker, boots like a rancher. Lucy grinned and he grinned back.

“Give up,” she said to the cat. “It’s not what you think.”

“Things hardly ever are,” said the man in the shadows.

He looked back at the cat and the bit of paper fluttered
away, flying like a bat to disappear in the darkness.

The sound of a train in the distance interrupted further discussion. The train never stopped at the Ninety-first Street station—not anymore. But it passed through with a rush of displaced air and a shriek of metal wheels on metal tracks and a headlight like a blaze of glory. The light flashed over peeling advertisements and mosaic tiles obscured
by graffiti and empty spaces and a wide-eyed cat who crouched low to the floor.

The rumbling train passed, leaving a great silence behind. Then party guests emerged from behind pillars and from shadowy corners.

Lucy sat in the alcove beneath the stairs. “So what have you been up to, Mac? I haven’t seen you since the party in the pub.”

“Manufacturing things that never were,” he said. “I’ve been
over on the East Side, laying in a fossil bed that should complicate the history of life by more than a little. All sorts of inconsistencies. They’ll be confused for weeks. Serves them right for trying to find explanations where there aren’t any.”

“There’s nothing wrong with explanations,” she said.

“Ha! They only muddy things,” he said. “If only people would accept fossils as interesting art
forms. Or the bones of dragons.” He shrugged. “What can you expect? They wear lab coats and never see past one kind of truth to another kind. So what have you been doing, Lucy?”

“Going on the Starlight Run.” She grinned and her eyes sparkled. “I’m off again, day after tomorrow:”

“It’s a dark and lonely run,” he said.

“Ah, but it’s worth it,” she said. And she told him about the Starlight Run
and about how she dodged through time to jump vast distances and how she caught the light. And he talked to her about the dark ways beneath the city. I can’t tell you all that was said.

But they weren’t just talking. This was something else and it’s hard to say just what. No, there was no crackle of sparks, no ozone in the air. But there was a bright chill that was not just the chill of the unused
air of an ancient subway station. There was a tension that was something more than the tension of a party.

Lucy, the fireborn, and Mac, the shadowborn, talked and chuckled. Around them, the party died down. The fireballs were fading when Mac said, “Hey, I’ll show you the project I’ve been working on.”

They walked hand in hand. He found his way confidently through the darkness and their footsteps
echoed in the tunnels. They stepped into a cavern—she could tell by the change in the echoes. Lucy lifted her hand and her rings glittered with light.

They stood at the edge of a pit. Mac waved at the bones below. “I’m having trouble with this one,” he said. The skull looked vaguely crocodilian; the rest was a jumble of bones. “I don’t mind making a creature that can’t walk, but this one won’t
even stand. I was playing with the joints and ways of putting them together and—” He stopped, shaking his head.

Lucy frowned, looking down at the bones. “Let’s see,” she said. She reached a hand toward the pit and the bones began to glow. The heavy skull seemed to shift a little in its resting place, then a shining replica of the head lifted free. The beast raised itself slowly, bone by glowing
bone. Each bone was a duplicate of the jumble in the pit.

The beast—a giant lizard of a sort—hesitated, its belly on the ground, its legs bent at an awkward angle. “Thigh bones should be shorter,” Mac muttered.

The glowing bones shifted and the beast held its head higher. “Larger feet,” he said, and the bones that formed toes stretched and flexed. The beast twitched its tail impatiently. “The
back’s too long,” Lucy said, and shortened a few vertebrae. The beast shook its heavy head, and glared up at them with its empty eyes. “I wish it didn’t have so many teeth,” she said.

“Leave the teeth,” Mac said. “It needs teeth.”

The beast gathered its legs beneath itself, still staring at them. It lifted its head further up and its mouth gaped wider. “I don’t like the teeth,” Lucy said. And
the glow began to fade from the pit. The beast lay down to sleep, as if it had never lived.

Mac and Lucy sat side by side on the edge of the pit.

“Why does it need teeth?” she asked.

He shrugged. “The world requires them.”

“Not that many,” she said. “Not always.”

“Just that many,” he said. “Always.”

Only the faintest glimmer remained on the bones. Still, they sat on the edge, holding hands.

There are things that happen between men and women—even those of the fire and the shadow. Some have names: friendship and love and lust and hatred. Some have no names—being complex mixtures of the named ones with additions of other elements, like curiosity and happiness and wine and darkness and need.

This was one of the second kind of thing. But who knows which and at the time it did not seem
to matter. Don’t worry too much about the particulars—as I said before, who are you to know how and when and why?

But understand that Lucy, the firecatcher on the Starlight Run, woke up on a hard bench in the phantom subway station.

Hadn’t there been a softer surface the night before with a hint of sheets and pillows and warmth? Maybe. The memory was blurred and she could not say. She was puzzled,
for she had not often gone to bed with warmth and awakened in darkness.

It was all very sudden; it was all very odd—and I suppose that’s where the story really begins. With sudden chill and darkness. Lucy lifted a hand and tossed a fireball into the empty station. The white cat watched from a tunnel that led to the Outside. “Odd.” Lucy said. “Very odd.”

Best not get into her thoughts at this
point, for her thoughts were neither as coherent nor as polite as “Odd.”

Best that I let Lucy retain some of her mystery and simply say that she wandered through the tunnel to the Outside and that her feet left glowing prints on the tile floor and her hand left bright marks on the wall where she touched it.

She blinked in the light of the Outside. (Surely you didn’t think I’d tell you of the
secret ways beneath the city, did you? You were wrong.)

Business people—men and women in neat suits—hurried past her with averted eyes. They saw only a bag lady in a disheveled dress. People do not see all that is there.

People do not see much.

Now, Lucy was a mean and stubborn woman. Folks who knew her well did not cross her because they knew that she didn’t let go of an idea or a discontent.
She would take it and shake it and worry it—usually to no avail, but that didn’t stop her. She did not like dangling ends and she would tie herself in knots to get rid of them.

Johnson, who always knew where to be, lounged in a nearby doorway. Lucy looked at him and he shook his head before she could even speak.

“Very odd,” Lucy said again, though I know that was not what she was thinking. She
glanced back at the tunnel behind her and she frowned.

Johnson fell into step beside her as she headed for the East Side. “You’re heading for trouble,” he said.

“Why should today be different from any other day?” she asked and kept on walking.

“So he stole your heart, eh?” Johnson said after a moment. “The shadowborn can be—”

“You know better than that,” Lucy interrupted. “I’m just puzzled.
I know we were friends and it doesn’t seem …”

“Very friendly,” Johnson completed the trailing sentence.

“Hey, he’s a shadowborn. He’s different.”

“Yeah?” Lucy shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t understand and they don’t understand. It always amounts to a lack of understanding.” He walked beside her for a while, then said, “So you’re going to try to track down an explanation?”

“I am.”

“Don’t be disappointed if he doesn’t have one,” Johnson warned her.

“He must know where he went and who he is,” Lucy grumbled.

“Maybe not. But good luck,” he said, and he stopped walking.

Lucy continued through the city alone. The day was overcast; Johnson had kept his word and there would be no starshine that night…

In the tunnels on the East Side, Lucy found Mac directing the placement
of fossils by several shadowy figures. One skeleton had a lizardlike head with too many teeth. “Hey, I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “I—”

“I thought you might want to,” he said. “It’s simple really.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I thought we should maybe just be friends.”

“Yeah? Well, that’s all right, but …” she began, but he was gone. Directing the positioning of a complex skeleton with legs all out
of proportion to its body. Then he was back.

“Yeah, friends. Things get too complicated otherwise,” he said. He looked at her, but she could not see his eyes in the shadows.

“Well, it seems to me that things don’t need to be complicated ….” But he was gone again, grumbling at the workman who was laying down the creature’s neck, explaining with words and gestures that the neck had to be placed
as if the animal had fallen naturally, not as if some hamhanded workman had laid …

Lucy left quietly.

There was a tension in the city that afternoon, a current, a flow of power. It was the kind of day when the small hairs on the backs of your hands stand on end for no reason.