He sighed. “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”
A flicker of a smile. “Why would I?”
“Because—” Imp met her gaze, and gently pushed. “Tell me what’s going on? What’s the catch?”
Something was wrong and he barely noticed at first, but then his sister beamed at him, blood-red lips pulling back from polished ivory teeth like fangs, and there was a buzzing in his ears and a tingling in his hands and feet as everything went very far away for a few seconds. “Ah, some fighting spirit at last!” Her smile broadened. “I’m warded,” she explained. “Good try, but don’t do it again—you’ll hurt yourself.”
Imp gasped and dropped the connection. The relief came as instantly as letting go of a live wire. “Damn that’s a sharp one.”
“We have the best of everything here. Best coffee, best cars, best occult defenses.” She smirked as he shook his head roughly. “At least as good as the toys the New Management hands out to its favored minions.”
He gulped. “Are you—”
“No! I work for Mr. Bigge, not the Prime Minister. But,” she side-eyed the surveillance cameras, “unanticipated State Level Actors are popping out of the woodwork everywhere. New ones, and not-so-new: Advanced Persistent Threats, the security people call them. Like your little found family of waifs and strays, for instance.”
“What? We’re not a—”
“Don’t underestimate yourself, Jeremy, false modesty is unbecoming. Also, don’t underestimate your team: the whole is greater than the sum, et cetera. So great, in fact, that it’s just your damn good luck that the first Very Important Person you’ve come to the attention of is your ever-loving elder sister, rather than, say, the Baroness Sanguinary, or the Thief-Taker General.”
Imp’s skin crawled. “You’re threatening me again.”
“No I’m not. I’d happily leave your friends alone. But if you want to protect them from the Black Pharaoh’s agents, you’ll need to do a lot more.” She hesitated. “Do this one thing for me and I’ll teach you how to protect yourselves. Not just you, I mean all of you. How not to attract the things that hide in shadows. I hope I’m not going to regret this offer,” she added with evident foreboding.
This reticence did more to convince Imp that she was on the up-and-up than all her previous offers combined. That, and the blood they shared: all the heartache and resentment and loss that only a family’s shared experiences could inflict. “Tell me what you need and when you need it by,” he said. “I can’t promise anything until I’ve had a chance to talk to the gang.” Eve reached into her drawer and withdrew a slim envelope. She slid it across the desktop and Imp took it. Going by feel, it contained something small and hard. “A memory stick?”
She nodded. “And some other stuff: a bank card, some paperwork. There’s an explanation in the README.”
Imp tucked it into his breast pocket. “Okay. And how long have we got?”
She squared her shoulders. “Five days.”
“What—”
“That’s when the boss gets home. He’ll expect results, and he gets annoyed when he’s thwarted.”
Imp drained his coffee mug, and rose. “I’d better get going, hadn’t I?”
Eve nodded, then stood and walked over to the door, which opened at her approach. “Follow me.” She led him back to the lobby. The butler and receptionist cringed at her approach, as if she were royalty, or at least minor nobility. Secretary, indeed. Imp smiled at them in passing and they flinched, avoiding eye contact.
“Good luck,” Eve said as they parted company on the doorstep. But he couldn’t help noticing that at no point in the encounter did she try to hug him.
Game Boy had slept badly, tossing and turning in his sleeping bag on the floor of the games room, his feet warmed by the toasty exhaust from his PC, and his head chilled by the draft from the sash windows behind the cardboard Ames room cutouts. He suffered from claustrophobia dreams, albeit less frequently since he’d moved in with Doc and Imp.
The commonest, least malignant version resonated with their explorations the day before. He opened a room in a new home, one his parents had just moved into, and discovered rooms and rooms and more endless rooms, an infinite manifold of branching spaces populated with charity-shop furniture and secondhand G Plan suites, windows opening onto impossible light wells between tight-packed buildings. The dream echoed stories his grandmother had told him of life in Hong Kong before reunification with the motherland. It was like a bizarre procedural animation, an infinite dungeon generator populated with 1960s castoffs, Dwarf Fortress in the grip of a hostile takeover by the Gnomes of IKEA.
The dreams themselves weren’t unpleasant, but waking from them on an acquaintance’s sofa, or in a hostel bunk—or, worse, in his cramped bedroom in his parents’ house—invariably crushed him.
(Less frequently, but more distressingly, Game Boy dreamed of being claustrophobically crammed into feminine mode, tucked and laced into an outgrown little girl’s identity, deadnamed and shamed and shouted at for wanting to live as himself. And the worst dreams were the ones where he was back in the Church-run gender boot camp his parents had sent him to—they called it a cure for trans kids, not talking about the ones who killed themselves—lost in a maze of ever-branching, ever-narrower corridors, unable to escape the suffocating burden of his parents’ rigid expectations.)
What he’d dreamed of this night perplexed him, but left him with an edgy and unusual sense of agoraphobia. He’d been upstairs, exploring the new space they’d found, getting increasingly uneasy because it wasn’t the same dream. His recurring nocturnal real estate visitation was temporally and spatially consistent, unlike this one. He wasn’t accustomed to drilling down into the twilight of history, through layers of furnishings at first quaint and then antique, with doors that opened onto giant rooms that paid no heed to the floor plan. The further in he went
