Page 53 of Backpacking through Bedlam

Based on size and general construction, the room she led us into had started its existence as a slaughterhouse—it could easily have qualified as a warehouse, or a ballroom for people who liked to throw really unnerving balls. The heavy iron chains that had been used to suspend cuts of meat still hung from the ceiling, ending in sturdy hooks. The floor was plain polished wood, and the walls, while they had been painted a cheery shade of yellow with cream trim, were clearly bare brick under that thin layer of home improvement. A catwalk ran all the way around the second floor, with plain metal stairs connecting it to the space where we were standing. The ceiling was at least twenty feet up, and the only windows were high ones, set along the very top of the walls. Most of the sun was coming in through the large skylights in the ceiling itself. All in all, it was a stark, austere space.

The people who were clearly living here had done their best, using secondhand furniture and DIY partitions to create a variety of sectioned-off areas in the open space, little living rooms boxed off by freestanding bookshelves, tiny fairylands of bright rubber blocks and cheerful dinosaur rugs. The exposed walls were softened by hanging rugs and tattered tapestries, or covered up by more bookshelves. It was an industrial environment. It was also a populated one.

And then there were the people themselves. I had never seen this many dragon princesses in one place: there were at least twenty adults, and as many little girls, filling the designated play areas with noise and laughter. There were five more of the large lizards that I now recognized as the males of the species, and given what the species had been through, that alone was an embarrassment of riches.

There were non-dragons in the crowd as well: several people whose grayish skin marked them as bogeymen, an Inuit woman in a remarkably frilly black-and-pink dress sitting on the lap of a Japanese man who had his arms looped loosely around her waist, and a pair of dark-skinned men who were working in a makeshift kitchen area, remarkable mostly because of the cloud of bees that danced and wove around their heads. I didn’t stare. Thomas, eyes still damp and a bit too bright, didn’t stare. Sally, though . . .

Sally was getting a crash course in the fact that humans had never actually been the only sapient species on the planet, despite having always been told they were. It had to be jarring. I had trouble, sometimes, remembering just how jarring that sort of thing could be, since I’d grown up in this world, despite my father doing his level best to push me out of it. Discoveries like hers had never been a revelation for me.

“This used to be the primary Nest for the Manhattan dragons,” said Mary. “It’s sort of a refugee camp now. Has been since the Freakshow burned.”

“When did that happen, exactly?” asked Thomas.

Mary looked at him steadily. “Two thousand and fifteen. They torched the place, then left for a while, thinking they’d pulled off their goals. They came back. They haven’t gone away since.”

To his credit, he didn’t flinch. “And what year is it now?”

“Two thousand twenty-two,” said a new voice, from the other side of the room. I turned, breaking into a wide smile at the sight of a familiar face.

Even after five years away—I’d last been home in twenty seventeen, right after we’d sent Antimony off to go undercover with the Covenant—Verity looked essentially the same. Still short, still blonde, still built like someone who’d been dancing and doing gymnastics every minute since she’d figured out how to walk. She had what Thomas used to call “the Carew look,” a certain shape to her face and features that made it clear to anyone who saw us together that we were related, even if it wasn’t always quite as clear precisely how.

She was wearing jeans and an ombre sweater that faded from pink to orange, lingering on peach, and she looked somewhat warily at the three of us as she approached.

“You’ve aged,” she said, focusing on me as the most familiar face in the bunch. “I didn’t know you knew how to do that.”

“I kind of got out of the habit for a while, but I’ve decided to start again, for the sake of the people who love me,” I said.

“Uh-huh. Who are your friends?”

Kevin would have told the rest of the family about our brief appearance in the kitchen in Portland. Even if he hadn’t wanted to, the mice would have passed the news along to the other clergies in no time, and then there would have been no hiding it. We’re not a family that keeps secrets well. She had to know. And still, she wasn’t looking directly at Thomas.

“My friends . . . All right. This is going to be awkward every time I have to do it, so we might as well get on with it.” I stepped a bit to the side, putting myself between them, and took a deep breath. “Verity Price, meet your grandfather, Thomas.”

Sally didn’t protest her omission. She was more than smart enough to see that this wasn’t something she wanted to be in the middle of.

The mice that had been riding quietly in my bag up until this point lost their ability to be quiet when they heard an introduction happening, and announced their presence with a resounding “HAIL!” before quieting down again, the better to observe and record.

Verity didn’t react to the mice. She just shifted her gaze, slowly, to focus directly on Thomas. She tilted her head very slightly to the side, then looked back to me.

“Are you sure?”

I blinked. “What?”

“I asked, are you sure? Because anyone who knows you knows that you’ve been looking for him for the last fifty years, and it would be easy as anything to set up an imposter.”

I fought back the urge to laugh. “Believe it or not, he had basically the same reaction when I showed up. Thought I was an assassin sent to impersonate his wife and get close enough to kill him.”

“How’d you convince him you weren’t?”

“I beat the living crap out of him.”

Sally made a small sound of protest. Thomas took his eyes off of Verity for the first time since she’d entered the room, looking at me.

“Now, dear, I wouldn’t characterize it precisely like that,” he said. “I believe the beating was mutual.”

“And while I don’t recommend hitting your partner, it was the only way we were going to resolve that particular conflict,” I said. “I convinced him, and he convinced me at the same time.”

“If she hadn’t convinced me by telegraphing her punches the way she always has, she would have when she helped to break us out of the bottle dimension where we’d been trapped,” said Thomas. “She’s truly Alice.”