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My head was down as I read through one of Connor’s magazines in a chair off to the side, trying to pretend I was okay. That I wasn’t on the brink of another breakdown. That the smell of bleach didn’t make me want to bawl my eyes out. Connor, Dice, and Cookie were spread out among the couches, being quieter than normal, as if no one wanted to be the reason the pin on the grenade got pulled.
The sound of the door to Nowhere opening and closing barely registered until I sensed someone else in the room. A woman with purple and pink striped hair was standing just inside the lounge, trays in her hand.
She looked at me. I looked at her.
Cookie’s gaze flitted between the two of us. “Wanda, that’s Billie. Billie’s new on the crew. Wanda is our caterer.”
Wanda nodded toward me, and I returned it. She walked out of the room, and there were sounds of her dropping things off in the kitchen before she returned.
“I’m heading out,” Wanda said to the gang before turning to me. “Billie, if you’d like anything in particular to eat, leave a note on the table and I’ll add it to the order. See you tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” I said.
She nodded and headed toward the door to Nowhere.
Nowhere. I wasn’t going to get answers on how to get out of this place in Topside. These people didn’t have any inclination to help me, either. But Nowhere was filled with people who would know all sorts of things. That was where I had to go. Maybe they were trying to keep me out of there on purpose, because that was where all my answers lay?
I got up, trying to maneuver to a spot close enough to see what was beyond the door. What was this Nowhere place all about? That weird yellow phone probably called someone there.
The door opened and closed so quickly that it was hard to see more than a glimpse of a city.
“So what’s Nowhere like, exactly?” I asked, looking around.
Cookie was the only one who glanced up from what she was doing. “Nowhere is the place you go when you’ve seen behind the curtain and don’t like the game, or playing by the rules. It’s where you make your own rules and everyone is free in the purest sense. In some ways, that’s good.” She made a point of looking me up and down. “But if you aren’t prepared, you won’t make it a day.”
Dice decided this was his moment to chime in. “Until you transition, I wouldn’t get anywhere near that door. You think Topside is uncomfortable? What you felt there will be a minor tickle in comparison to what setting foot into Nowhere will be if you go before you’re ready. I wouldn’t even get close enough to that door to accidentally trip.”
Scary words to keep me from going in? Stall tactics? Possibly. It would be idiotic to trust anything that came out of the mouths of people who had been willing to kill me not even a week ago. They’d been ready to toss my body in the river, the way others brought out the weekly trash to the curb.
There certainly wasn’t any urgency on anyone’s part for this mysterious transition to happen.
“If I’ve already tinkered, wouldn’t I have transitioned?”
Dice glanced at the other two like he was hoping they’d field this one. When neither were forthcoming, he said, “No. Remember the whole boiling conversation? Just because you can stir the water, doesn’t mean you won’t still boil if you go in there.”
“How much longer do you think this is going to take?” I stared at that door, wondering how much of what they said was true.
“Not sure. We can test your progress if you want,” Dice said.
“You can?” I swung to face him, wondering why no one had mentioned this before. It was the phone all over again. Or was it?
He got up, looking at the door and then me, as if he were ready to pull me away from it. “Yeah, come on. I’ll hook you up to the machine and see how you’re doing. You’ve been hanging around for a few days now. We can see if there’s any progress.”
He walked toward the hall, waiting to see if I’d come. I did.
He led me into the aptitude testing room and this time went to a latch high on the wall. A panel dropped down like a Murphy bed, except it wasn’t a bed but a small platform. A couple of wires hung with finger sensors, like the kind they used to test your heart rate or oxygen at the doctors. There was also a row of lights, like that punching game where you could see how strong you were.
“Step right up and try your hand,” he said, as if he were a carnival barker.
I did, and he attached wires to my pointer fingers. “This might tingle, but it won’t hurt,” he said, then flipped the switch on the wall.
There were twenty lights in the row, and only the bottom two lit up.
That might be good, or bad.
He hummed, rubbing his knuckles over his jaw. “Maybe it’s acting up. I’m going to power it down and try again.”
Okay, that was bad.
