Page 66 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“Good.” Mary vanished.

“So what happened?” I asked, as we started walking.

Sally glanced anxiously around. “Isn’t it dangerous to talk about this stuff . . . you know, out in the open?”

“Don’t give away anyone else’s secrets, don’t say addresses out loud, especially not when there might be vulnerable people there, but talking, in general? That’s fine. Humans are notoriously bad at listening. It’s a side effect of being the dominant species for too long. We’re so complacent that whenever we hear something that doesn’t fit into the way we know the world works, we tend to ignore it.”

“Oh.” Sally looked down at the sidewalk. “As soon as you went inside, they pulled up in a van, and they surrounded me, talking loudly about how nice it was to see me again, how much they’d missed me, how it wasn’t safe for me to be out on my own, all sorts of stuff that didn’t make any sense. I was trying to figure out how to tell them they had the wrong girl when there was a needle in my arm and everything got fuzzy and weird. I woke up in that apartment.”

“That tracks.” If anyone had seen Sally getting snatched, they might have called the police, but seeing two young Asian women helping a third into a van probably wouldn’t have raised any alarms, and given there had been no one there when we arrived, I was willing to say that her abduction had gone frustratingly unnoticed. “One question, though: if they were so sure you were working for a group of theirs, why bother to knock you out before putting you in their van?”

“They kept asking me questions in Korean, and they switched to English when they realized I couldn’t understand,” said Sally. She shrugged. “I didn’t answer them. I think they were starting to get a little annoyed with me before you showed up. Is this sort of thing going to happen often? Because I can’t say I’m a fan.”

“Word,” I said, agreeably, and together, we descended into the subway.

Fifteen

“Holding on too hard is a fine strategy if you don’t mind potentially losing everything.”

—Laura Campbell

Manhattan, heading toward a former slaughterhouse filled with dragons, so a pretty normal day, really

THE SUBWAY RIDE WAS easy and uneventful, once we figured out how to swipe my card twice to get us on the train and which direction that train needed to be going. “Uptown” and “Downtown” were intuitive for the locals, not so much for us. We got off when we reached the Meatpacking District, and I led Sally back to street level, my sack of Lactaid and now-warm Coke tucked underneath my arm.

“I don’t think we have enough money for a second pizza, but we can grab you a slice if you’d like,” I offered.

Sally sighed. “Do I come off like a wimp if I say that at this point, I just want to lock myself in a bathroom and have a nice, ordinary panic attack where no one can see me falling apart? I’m freaked out and exhausted.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Let’s get you home.”

We walked all the way to the grungy convenience store that served as an entrance, stopping outside to lean against the wall, where I muttered, “Hey, Mary, if you could come and let us in, that would be real cool.”

“How long do we wait?”

“Give it about five minutes. That should be long enough for her to extricate herself from putting Olivia down for her nap, and not long enough to make anyone suspicious about us hanging around out here.” I pulled one of the warm Cokes out of the bag and passed it to Sally. “Drink this if you need something to do with your hands.”

Sally sniffled, twisting off the cap. “You don’t have to be so nice to me, you know.”

“Kinda do, though, since my husband adopted you while I wasn’t looking, which makes you my family, too. And massively effective skin-care regimens aside, we both know you’re young enough to be my granddaughter, so ‘daughter’ is only a stretch when we’re talking to normal people.” I shrugged, brick wall scratchy against my skin. “I fucked up having kids of my own. If Thomas wants to give it a go, I’m not going to get in the way, and that means I do have to be nice to you, if only so we’re not all miserable all the time.”

Sally looked at me as she took a sip of warm Coke, eyes wary. Finally, she said, “You mean that.”

“Life’s too short to go around saying things I don’t mean.”

“Says the twenty-year-old octogenarian.”

“I said life was short, not that life was logical.”

Sally was still laughing when Mary came rushing out of the convenience store and grabbed me by the wrist. “Verity needs you,” she said, pulling me sharply toward her.

Sally stopped laughing.

I dug my heels in and pulled my arm out of Mary’s grasp before she could pull me into the door, which she hadn’t bothered to open on her way out of the store. “You’re forgetting to stay solid,” I said, voice sharper than I meant it to be. “What’s going on?”

“We’ll explain everything once you’re inside,” said Mary, and beckoned for us to follow as she ducked back through the door, still not bothering to open it.

“See?” I said to Sally, as I opened the door and followed Mary into the convenience store. “People don’t pay attention. We’ve been at the top of the food chain for too long. We got complacent.”