Page 79 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“Great.” I grabbed his wrist, dragging him with me into the women’s bathroom. “Let’s get moving.”

The bathroom had three stalls, and the one farthest from the door was occupied when we arrived. I shoved Ryan into the first one with a quietly muttered “Strip” before taking up a position outside the stall door, trying to look nonchalant. Ryan said something I didn’t quite catch about pushy blondes. I chose not to argue.

The sound of clothes being removed was mostly drowned out by the sound of the toilet in the last stall flushing, and a woman emerged.

She was a little taller than I was, with chestnut-brown hair pulled into a tight ponytail. If not for the familiar angle of her cheekbones, I might not have noticed her. See, the Covenant treats people like lines of livestock, arranging marriages to avoid genetic bottlenecking while also circling useful traits that they want those people to pass along to their children someday. It shouldn’t work. That it does makes me wonder if they don’t have a little something extra on their side, something that would explain why their carefully tended breeding lines still throw sorcerers like my husband every so often. But Covenant bloodlines produce people with similar talents, similar temperaments . . . similar appearances.

My mother looked a lot like me: petite, blonde, and very, very sweet, right until she decided it was time to stop with the sweetness. My grandmother was similar. I’ve always wondered if Mom and Dad didn’t wind up together in part because of that old cliché where the sheltered boys are looking to marry their mothers. It would explain a few things, that’s for sure.

What I have, that neither one of them had, that all five of my biological grandchildren have, are my grandfather’s cheekbones. Apparently, that part of the Healy bone structure was bred in so completely that it kicks the crap out of all competing genes and asserts itself all over again. (Doesn’t hurt that I went and married Thomas Price, a man with cheekbones that could be used to cut glass. Once, when Dad had been drinking, he said Thomas was so pointy that we already knew what he’d look like as a skeleton. He wasn’t entirely right, but he wasn’t entirely wrong, either.)

It’s the one thing I’ve got in common with every other Healy I’ve ever seen a picture of. My father, my grandfather, my kids, even the aunt and uncle I never met, whose pictures I didn’t find until after my grandparents were both dead, we’ve all had those cheekbones.

This woman had them, too.

She moved toward the sink, not seeming to pay me any attention, but I could tell by the reflection of her eyes in the mirror that she was watching me closely for any motion. I stayed where I was, doing a slightly better job than she was of looking nonchalant. She washed her hands, watching me the entire time, scenting the air with harsh soap.

I knocked my elbow against the stall door behind me. “Take your time in there, babe, the sink’s busy,” I said.

Ryan made a questioning sound.

“I know we have theater tickets, but we have plenty of time, and anyway, I hate to get there early. You know that.” I tried to sound bored, like getting to the theater with more than five minutes to curtain was the worst inconvenience I could possibly imagine.

The woman was focusing a little more on her hands now, washing them meticulously. Finally, she straightened, ripped a sheet of paper towels off of the dispenser, and left the bathroom. I exhaled, tilting my head back until it was resting against the stall door.

“That was close.”

“What was close?”

“Pretty sure I just saw one of my cousins. Pretty sure she got a good look at me, too. And if she’s as smart as I suspect she’d have to be in order to get sent to New York with a Covenant team, she’s going to put two and two together and figure out that I’m something she ought to worry about any minute now.”

“Oh, that’s just Margaret.” Ryan cracked open the stall door long enough to shove a bundle of clothing at me. I took it, tucking it up under my arm, and he closed the door again. “If she’s in the bookstore, that means we’re in the right place. Good job.”

“You’re being awfully casual about ‘We were just in a small bathroom with one exit and a known Covenant operative,” I said, before taking another look around the room. “Scratch that. I think that’s technically a window, even if Verity would have trouble squirming out of it, and that’s an air vent. I could have gone through there if I’d had to, but I couldn’t have taken you with me.”

“Out of all the Covenant people in this city, Margaret’s probably the best one for you to run into,” said Ryan, and cracked the door open again, passing me his shoes. “She was with Dominic’s original team. She thinks he’s dead, and after the whammy Sarah put on her brain the first time she was here, she doesn’t seem to be able to see him anymore. I’ve seen her looking straight at him without realizing he was even there. Since she’s never met Istas or me, we’re in the clear, and you’re obviously new to her.”

I decided not to point out the family resemblance. That plus “blonde” was likely to cause some issues, especially after Verity’s little stunt on the dance show. There was no way she wasn’t going to figure out that I was family, if she hadn’t already. For all I knew, she was out there gathering the rest of her team.

One Covenant operative, I could take. A team of four or five, not as easily. I still might win, but there was a decent chance I’d get seriously hurt in the process, and I had to heal the ordinary way if that happened. Healing takes time. I’d been seriously injured a few times in my teens, and I hadn’t enjoyed the recovery process. Signing up to do it again when I was trying to help Thomas and Sally get reacclimated and trying to acclimate myself just felt like a recipe for disaster.

So no soloing the field team, got it. I gave the vent another look. “Ryan? You still a biped?”

A strange chirping sound was his only answer. I opened the stall door, looking down at a perfectly ordinary tanuki, maybe a little larger than the average, but still small enough for me to lift. Looking at him, a new plan clicked together in my head, beautifully simple and perfectly straightforward, and a truly terrible idea. Which meant, of course, that it was the only logical way to go.

“Change of plans,” I said. “We’re going into the vents.”

Ryan made a slightly more quizzical chirping sound.

“Margaret may be whammied not to recognize Dominic, but there’s nothing stopping her from recognizing me, especially with as much as I look like my grandparents,” I said. “She’s going to realize I shouldn’t have been here, and come looking. If we go into the vents, we can try and find the rest of her team. You’re small enough like this that you shouldn’t have any problem.” The first person to figure out the scientific method by which therianthropes change their size so dramatically is going to win some sort of an award. Of course, tanuki can also turn themselves into stone at will, so it may take a while. Their biology makes no sense. “I’m a little bigger, but I’m bendy.” A “little” bigger was a mild way of saying that I was larger than a small carnivore that looked like it weighed forty pounds, tops, but Ryan seemed to accept this, as he nodded and combed the whiskers on one side of his muzzle with a paw.

The vent was in the wall above the sink. I put my hands on my hips for a moment, looking up at it, then grasped the edges of the sink and hoisted myself up, balancing on the edges of the basin. It groaned but didn’t snap off the wall; as long as I didn’t do anything too enthusiastic, it would hold my weight, even if only briefly.

Briefly was all I intended to need.

Like most older vents, it was covered by a plain grate, screwed into the wall with standard dome-head screws. I pulled a multitool out of my pocket and got to work undoing them, tucking the first three into the front of my bra for safekeeping and leaving the fourth in place to keep the grate attached to the wall.

Problem: the grate had about an inch of additional metal on the inside, presumably to keep people from doing exactly what I was doing. I let go of the edges and unscrewed the fourth screw before easing the grate away from the wall, bending to set it in the gap between faucet and mirror. It barely fit.