Fringe merely stared stupidly. Who did this … this thing think she was?
“Owldark,” said Jory. “Your new name. The letters of your old name spell your new name: Fringe Owldark—a totally different person from Fringe Dorwalk, don’t you think? Say it.”
Fringe, too stupefied to argue, said it obediently, watching the shadowy something shift and move. “Fringe Owldark.”
The old woman nodded to herself. “Fringe Dorwalk had an uncertain future. Ways were closed to her. She was anxious. She chewed her fingers and cried herself to sleep. But Fringe Owldark is one of my people. I told you that long ago, didn’t I? One of my people, chosen by me to … to do wonderful things. To become something special. Yes, Owldark has a totally different future before her! All she needs to do is go find it.” The old woman patted her cheek, turned, and was dissolved into the shadow. Fringe took a step forward, but the doorway was empty.
Perhaps she had dreamed it. Likely she had dreamed it. Hunger dreams. Visions. Sometimes she had those.
“Fringe Owldark,” she said aloud, no longer crying, suddenly wanting to tell Zasper all about it.
She went to him full of the story, but when she got there he greeted her by thrusting a plate full of food at her and quoting a remark some friend of his had made, touting Fringe’s skills at weapons repair. He said yet again that she was wasted in the repair shop, a remark at which Fringe Dorwalk had always flushed and bridled, not sure how to react.
Fringe Owldark, however, her mouth full of succulent roast meat and the juices running down her throat, knew with absolute certainty she had indeed been wasted up until now. She was not going to be hungry again!
“I want you to sponsor me to the Enforcer Academy,” she said firmly, surprising herself as much as Zasper.
“Ah, Fringe,” he said with a pang, the expression in her eyes reminding him suddenly of Danivon Luze, “nah, nah, you don’t want to do that.”
Fringe Dorwalk might have equivocated, but Fringe Owldark did not. The request had come from a spewing well of desperation that could not now be capped and ignored. “I have to do something, Zasper. I can’t go back home and I’m barely making it on my own. I’m tired of being hungry.”
“You can always come here to me! Never a day I’d let you go from this place hungry!”
“I don’t want to have to go to anybody, don’t you understand! I don’t want to go to anybody for anything. I don’t want to have to depend on anyone. I want to be on my own. I want a place, food, clothes I don’t have to ask for. I’m tired of people feeding me and clothing me and all the time resenting me because I’m not what they had in mind.”
“I’d never—”
“I know that! But it would still be you, Zasper, not me! What I want is your sponsorship. Help me. Sometime I’ll pay you back.”
He sat her down, gave her a glass of black ale, and begged her to listen to him. “Fringe girl, I’ll help you any way I can, but listen. There’s something … something changing on Elsewhere. Was a time when everything was clear and plain, even for Enforcers. These days, things are cloudy. It’s like, like something …”
“You’re not saying anything, Zasper,” she cried. “I need help and you’re not saying anything!”
“All right, all right, listen! Pretend I’m a flea living on a dog, all right?”
“You’re a flea, Zasper. I can believe that.” She choked with hysterical laughter, tears running down her cheeks.
He pounded her, forcing her to listen. “Right. And I begin to think something’s wrong. And all the other fleas laugh at me, because there’s nothing different. The sun comes up, the sun goes down. The dog eats his breakfast and shits on the grass. Then, one day, the dog falls down dead, and I suddenly realize: That was it! The dog was sick!”
“So?”
“So there’s something sick happening to Elsewhere, Fringe. Something sick and dangerous.”
She stared at him, shaking her head. “Life is sick and dangerous, Zasper. You try and tell me different!”
That wasn’t what he meant, but he couldn’t make it any clearer. “Being an Enforcer, it’s hard, Fringe.”
“I don’t care how hard it is.”
Sometimes Enforcers failed of their duty, he said. He himself had sometimes not come up to the mark. He had never learned to operate a flier well. And there was a little boy he had once saved from certain torture and death, against the rules. And he had opinions all the time. “You will either break your oath or you will hate yourself sometimes,” he said.
“I hate myself all the time now,” she replied. “Hating me just some of the time would be an improvement.”
She insisted, overriding his warnings, his confessions of what he said were his failings, wondering at his telling her, telling anyone, for if someone reported him, he’d be in trouble. Not that she would. Never. Not Zasper. She came close to him, put her hand on his arm (something she seldom did or allowed), told him she knew it wouldn’t be easy, she knew some of the work was hard and unpleasant, but no matter how hard or unpleasant, it was better than where she was now.
Zasper shook his head at her, opened his mouth, then shut it. He had no more arguments and nothing to offer her instead, any more than he had had anything else to offer Danivon Luze. Zasper had been an Enforcer for decades. He knew what being an Enforcer had done to him. After years of doing it by the book, he’d asked himself what he was, what was this Zasper Ertigon? A man with ugly feelings hidden away, emotions he couldn’t express, judgments
