Liyla only tossed her head, but the word wares made Susan go cold. She looked at Max, who seemed to be having trouble recovering from the sight of the fruit seller. He kept rubbing his face and blinking his eyes, as if he were testing his eyesight. But Nell had heard the word.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded.
One of the browning apples might have spoken, given the way the man jumped at the sound of her voice. He shot Liyla a look, but she only shrugged.
“Nothing,” he said after taking a minute to collect himself. “Only wondering how you got lost, is all. And who might be looking for you.”
Susan found herself liking this conversation less and less. She scuffed her shoe against the dusty ground, scattering some hay that had been pressed into the dirt. “We need to get in touch with our parents,” she said firmly. “Could you tell us how to do that?”
Even on the man’s malformed face, she knew a look of profound pity when she saw one. He shook his head.
“Such a pretty thing,” he said. “It’s a shame. I don’t like to think the stories are true, but it seems they are.”
“What stories? What are you talking about?” she asked him.
He ignored her. From his back pocket he pulled a stained handkerchief, spread it over his hand as if he were going to do a magic trick, then used it to wipe his face from forehead to chin. He repeated the procedure on his neck. When he was finished, he stuffed the sodden cloth back into his pants and looked over at Liyla. “Listen, lamb,” he said. “I like you, you know it, so take my advice. Get these to your mama fast as you can, and by the side streets. Red cloaks are busy with the crowds today, so you’ll have a little space from them. Just don’t go through the main market like you do. You’ll do well to hear me.”
The girl bit her lip but nodded. “Thought of that myself, anyway,” she said. “Just came here to get my due.”
Pull smiled at her. “Of course you did.”
He reached behind the stall and brought out a deep wicker hamper with a hinged top. It smelled strongly of mold, and Susan wrinkled her nose as Liyla poured out half the bright plums. They thudded dully to the bottom.
The man inspected the fruit and then, with a certain amount of huffing effort, extracted a leather pouch from the belt he wore, half hidden by the great ledge of his stomach. It took him a moment, searching, to find it. From its smooth mouth he produced what looked like two small iron rings and several coins that might have been brass. Liyla squinted at them.
“You shorting me? It’s supposed to be a full ven I get!”
The man shrugged. “Had to pay extra to keep the reds out of this space today, and me to get an early slot for the wash. We split that, don’t we?”
The girl frowned but scooped the coins from the counter, pulled a pouch from her dress pocket, and put them inside.
“Seems to me I ought not to split it when I do all the climbing and scrounging,” she grumbled, dropping the pouch back into her pocket.
The man only shrugged. “There are plenty who’d pay me to know where you get fruits without being dunned by the Purity, wouldn’t they? I think fair’s fair, isn’t it?”
A look of mild alarm crossed the girl’s face, and she hitched up one shoulder. “I guess so,” she said. “Fair’s fair.” She seemed to think of something then, and looked swiftly at the children.
“But this lot, this isn’t something you heard about, right?”
He folded his arms and shook his head. “Oh, no, Liyla. Like I said, I like you, and there’s no sense in me getting mixed up in all that. You see what your mama says, why don’t you? That’ll be her think, not mine. I’m just a fruit seller, and happy to stay that way.”
She gave him a curt nod. “Right. Good, then. We’ll take the side streets. Thanks.”
She led them from the square, and Susan looked back to see the man watching them as they went. He didn’t stop looking until they’d turned the corner.
A line of mournful rectangle-faced houses with close-set window eyes and awful complexions of peeling paint sat on this side of the square. Porches hung off the front of them, drooling trash into the street.
The roads were paved here, but whoever did it might as well have left the dirt. So many of the flat stones were broken or missing that the children had to hop over the gaps as they walked.
Occasionally, what ought to have been a block of houses turned out to be only the remains of them, a clearing full of splintered wood, iron tubs, wagons missing wheels, and dented worktables.
Almost no one was outside, but once or twice they spotted someone sitting on a porch, and to Susan’s dismay, these people looked no different from Liyla and the fruit seller.
“Getting crowded,” the girl grumbled after a man fiddling with a broken wheelbarrow stood up to get a second look at them. “Keep your heads down.”
She led them into the back alleys after that. If anything, it was worse there. Every few steps they’d pass through a pocket of rancid humid air. Susan gagged.
“Outhouses,” Max said, pointing to the wooden huts behind the houses. “They must not have indoor plumbing!”
The marvelous city kept getting less marvelous, Susan thought bitterly.
“What happened to the people here?” she asked Max. “They can’t all be mutants, can they?”
He shrugged. “Shouldn’t be possible, I don’t think.” He looked over quickly at Jean and lowered his voice. “But if this isn’t a dream, then
