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"Scrounged it. I'm the prince of refuse, the lord of litter."
Lolli laughed and Dave's smile broadened. He seemed more pleased by his joke now that he knew Lolli liked it.
"You didn't want to be a librarian," Luis said, shaking his head.
"Luis knows all about mythology." Lolli took a sip of coffee. "Like Hermes. Tell her about Hermes."
"He's a psychopomp." Luis gave Val a dark look, as if daring her to ask what that meant. "He travels between the world of the living and the world of the dead. A courier, kind of. That's what Lolli wants me to say. But forget that for a minute; you asked about rats getting Polly. What do you know about rats?"
Val shook her head. "Not much. I think one stepped over my foot on my way in here."
Lolli snorted and even Dave smiled, but Luis's face was intense. His voice had a ritual quality, as though he'd said this many times before. "Rats get poisoned, shot, trapped, beaten, just like street people, just like people, just like us. Everybody hates rats. People hate the way they move, the way they hop, they hate the sound of their paws skittering all over the floor. Rats're always the villains."
Val looked into the shadows. Luis seemed to be waiting for her to react, but she didn't know what the right response was. She wasn't even sure she knew what he was really talking about.
He went on. "But they're strong. They got teeth that are tougher than iron. They can gnaw through anything—wood beams, plaster walls, copper pipes—anything but steel."
"Or diamond," Lolli said with a smirk. She didn't seem at all unnerved by his speech.
Luis barely paused to acknowledge Lolli had spoken. His eyes stayed on Val. "People used to fight them in pits here in the city. Fight them against ferrets, against dogs, against people. That's how tough they are."
Dave smiled, as if all this made sense to him.
"They're smart, too. You ever see a rat on the subway? Sometimes they get on a car at one platform and detrain at the next stop. They're taking a ride."
"I've never seen that," Lolli scoffed.
"I don't care if you ever saw it or not." Luis looked at Dave, who'd stopped nodding. Then he turned to Val. "I can sing rats' praises morning, noon, and night and it won't change the way you feel about them, will it? But what if I told you that there were things out there that think of you like you think of rats?"
"What things?" Val asked, remembering what Lolli had said the night before. "Do you mean fa—" Lolli sunk her nails into Val's arm.
Luis looked at her for a long time. "Another thing about rats. They're neophobic. You know what that means?"
Val shook her head.
"They don't trust new things," said Luis, unsmiling. "And neither should we." Then he got up, chucking his stub of a cigarette out onto the tracks, and walked up the steps and out of the station.
What an asshole. Val picked at a loose thread on her pants, pulling at it, unraveling the fabric. I should go home, she thought. But she didn't go anywhere.
"Don't worry about him," Lolli said. "Just because he can see things we can't, he thinks he's better than us." She watched until Luis was out of sight and then picked up a small lunchbox with a pink cat on it. Opening the latch, she took out and unrolled a T-shirt to spread out the contents: a syringe, an antique silver-plated spoon with some of the silver worn off, a pair of flesh-toned pantyhose, several tiny press-and-seal baggies containing an amber powder that glimmered a faint blue in the dim light. Lolli shouldered off one sleeve of her dressing gown and Val could see black marks on the inside of her elbow, like the skin there was charred.
"Chill out, Lolli," Sketchy Dave said. "Not in front of her. Not this."
Lolli reclined against a pile of pillows and bags. "I like needles. I like the feeling of the steel under my skin." She looked at Val. "You can get a little buzz off shooting up water. You can even shoot up vodka. Goes right into your bloodstream. Makes you drunker cheaper."
Val rubbed her arm. "It can't be too much worse than you scratching me." She should have been horrified, but the ritual of it fascinated her, the way all the tools were laid out on the dirty shirt, waiting to be used in turn. It made her think of something, but she wasn't quite sure what.
"I'm sorry about your arm! He was in such a mood, I didn't want him to get started about the faeries." Lolli made a face as she cooked the powder with a little water over the hibachi. It bubbled on the spoon. The sweet smell, like burnt sugar, filled Val's nose. Lolli sucked it up through the needle, then tapped the bubbles to the top, pushing them out with a squirt of liquid. Tying off her upper arm with pantyhose, Lolli inserted the tip slowly into one of the black marks on her arm.
"Now I'm a magician," Lolli said.
It came to Val then that what she was reminded of was her mother putting on makeup—laying out the tools and then using them one by one. First foundation, then powder, eye shadow, eyeliner, blush, all done with the same calm ceremony. The fusion of the images unnerved her.
"You shouldn't do that in front of her," Dave repeated, signaling in Val's direction with a bob of his chin.
"She doesn't mind. Do you, Val?"
Val didn't know what she thought. She'd never seen anyone give themselves a shot like that, professional as a doctor.
