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“What? He’s cute, seems smart, and he’s not at all my type, which means it might actually work.”
“Well, good luck. He is nice. You don’t mind playing messenger?”
“I love it! And, hey, anything that gets us out of here, right?”
After lunch, I updated Owen, and he said, with no enthusiasm, “I suppose I’d better update Mac.”
Taken aback, I said, “Why? You don’t report to him. I’m the leader of this little movement.”
“But it’s a sign of good faith if I’m not withholding information.”
“Seriously? You’re really going to keep updating him, even though he has no official authority over you, here or anywhere else? If he’s such a good monitor, let him figure it out for himself.”
Looking pained, he said, “It doesn’t work that way.”
“If you’re going to tell him everything I tell you, then I’m going to start treating you like any other member of the group and keep things on a need-to-know basis.” My words came out a little more harshly than I intended, considering my main gripe was with Mac and his bosses, not with Owen.
But Owen didn’t seem to take offense. He nodded and said, “Yeah, that’s probably the best policy. If I don’t know anything, I can’t share it. Only tell me what I need to know to do my part.”
“Okay, then,” I said, my anger fizzling from the lack of opposition. It was hard to fight with someone who was agreeing with me. “I was thinking of trying to find MSI people tonight—just going out and about. Maybe we’ll run across Dan again. There’s got to be some point behind an operation this elaborate, and if we know that, we might get somewhere.”
With a tentative smile, he said, “That seems like a minor enough development that I don’t have to share it.”
“So, when I get off duty, are you up for going to a different part of the neighborhood for dinner?”
“Come get me when you’re ready. The nice thing about owning what amounts to an imaginary bookstore is that I only have to sort of look like I’m bothering to run it.”
“Now I’ll go sell some more imaginary coffee and keep your imaginary bookstore in business one more day.”
I really did have to wonder why they’d bothered creating a fake neighborhood to house the prisoners in. If they’d just taken us to another world reachable only by portal, we still wouldn’t have been able to escape. Was it that important to keep us from even wanting to get away? I supposed it might be, now that I thought about it. If all your prisoners had magical powers, you’d want to keep them from using those powers, and it might have been more difficult to do that for so many people than to create a fake nonmagical paradise.
Besides, once they were through with it, they could always lease it to filmmakers as a setting for cheap romantic comedies.
*
It was difficult to find a place to explore that we hadn’t visited already, and it was like looking for a needle in a haystack to find one person in this entire neighborhood, no matter how confined it seemed. Still, it was a finite place, and there couldn’t have been that many real people there.
“I know the best way to find him,” I quipped to Owen. “I just need to develop a raging crush on him and then dash out to the corner store with no makeup on, my hair under a ball cap, and wearing a stained old T-shirt. Then I could guarantee I’d run into him.”
“You think that would work?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“It worked often enough in the real New York, which is much bigger. In fact, it never fails.”
“Do you think you can stir up a crush that easily?”
“That would be the difficult part, considering I’ve only met him twice, other than the one time here. He hasn’t given me much to work with, alas.”
Then I thought I saw a familiar figure ahead of us and clutched Owen’s upper arm hard enough to cut off circulation. “Speak of the devil!” I breathed.
“I think you’re right,” Owen said, and we followed him. There were enough people on the sidewalks that we were able to blend into the crowd, and Dan didn’t seem to notice he had a tail. I wasn’t sure how long that would last, though. If Dan’s persona in this world retained even a tiny bit of his security staff instincts, he’d be on to us in a heartbeat.
“How can we approach him?” I asked Owen. “We don’t know him here. Everyone else, we’ve had a reason to talk to them, and Mac at least had regular habits. This may be our one chance.”
“You said he was a customer.”
“I made him one latte. If I recognize him in public and try to talk to him, I’ll look like a scary stalker.”
We followed him to a coffee shop, where he entered and took a seat at the counter. I started to head inside, but Owen held me back. “Maybe what we need to do is find a stranger he’ll want to talk to.”
