-Chapter Seven-

The further they walked, the more Karlene sank into herself, and it wasn’t entirely pretend. The glittering beauty all around her was becoming false and mocking, the harder she looked. The myriad of emotions she’d been through began to coalesce in the pit of her stomach as something hard and sharp. The knot of hunger it resided next to didn’t help. She felt the rumble a moment before it became audible, her innards twisting in on themselves in search of nutrients that weren’t there.

“We’ll eat after,” Rowe promised, and damned if he didn’t sound like he was trying not to laugh. She felt anything but amused, but nodded anyway, as if acknowledging his words might help him keep them. She was too hungry at this point to do anything that might prevent them from feeding her.

They stopped in front of a huge blue building, its domed roof capped in brightly mosaiced panels that glinted. The steps in front of it were full of people, most of them carrying packages or cases or boxes. Inside, the organized chaos reminded her of Central Station in New York.

Her comparison was a better one than she’d thought, she realized, when she figured out what the place was for. On the far end of the cavernous room, wide sets of ornate steps led up to a platform half as big as the room below. As far as she could tell, it utilized the same anti-gravity trick the buildings and people outside had, since it had no visible supports.

On top of the platform, she saw when they ascended the steps, were dozens and dozens of smaller circular raised platforms. They were the precise size needed to house more of those strange runic circles. Each platform had a line of people corralled by brass and velvet stanchion. Admittance to each circle was controlled by universally bored-looking staff members in red uniforms and pill caps, complete with gold braided details at the shoulders and sleeve cuffs.

Rowe’s hand on her neck guided her to the far end of the second level, where a booth was surrounded by people peering intently at raised boards bearing what could only be travel schedules. It was all both very bizarre, and yet very familiar. If she replaced the circle platforms with subway train doors, she could almost pretend she was at a station.

“Pardon us,” said Nix to the harried looking yellow-and-blue haired woman standing behind the booth. “We found this one standing outside. Has anyone filed a missing report for one?” He jerked his head towards Karlene, who knew a story when she heard one being spun. The woman leaned over the booth and looked Karlene up and down.

“Not one with this one’s description,” she replied. “The Astix family is missing one of theirs, but it’s male.”

“Are you sure? Maybe the report would have been filed yesterday? She could have been standing around for awhile before anyone noticed her.” Nix had put an audible note of hopefulness in his voice.

“We’re just hoping to return her,” Sid piped up. He winked. “Purely out of the goodness of our hearts, of course. We’d be very grateful if you could help us.”

The booth woman snorted, then glanced around. Surrounded by people close enough to sneeze on, and yet they were nearly alone for all the attention they were being paid. Just another bunch of travelers with their own issues.

The woman reached beneath the counter, and brought back up rectangle of thin brass, like an empty picture frame. She pinched something at its corner, and it’s hollow middle filled with light that formed an image. Karlene blinked at it, her head rising a fraction before she caught herself. Now there was something she -sort of- recognized. Steve Jobs, eat your heart out, she thought.

“Quickly,” the woman said, her voice tense but her posture and expression the same stressed-bored as before. “The Izihal family reported one missing a week ago, and it hasn’t been found.” She glanced back to Karlene, then down at the image and script glowing on the ‘screen.’ “Dye and cut her hair, and she could pass.” She pinched the corner again and the frame went dark. “I better see you back here tomorrow with my cut, or I’ll suddenly remember that after a long shift I forgot to mention the suspicious characters I saw.” Her stare shifted to Karlene. “With a clearly very expensive, very stolen-”

“How about I pay you now and we consider the matter settled?” Nix leaned forward. To anyone watching but not listening, it would look as if he were begging her; surely she could help this poor lost traveler? He’d slid a hand across the desk, imploringly. When he pulled it back, he left something black and glittering in its wake. The woman planted her hands firmly on the counter, leaning forward in a posture of the clearly done and finished. One of her hands landed squarely on the thing Nix had left, without looking at it.

“This is all I can give you,” she said, loudly, with exaggerated impatience. She’d pulled something else from beneath the counter as she’d stood, a brochure of some kind. It bulged oddly, as if something were hidden between the pages. “Now, if I see you here again, I will call security,” she threatened, loudly.

Nix grabbed for the brochure and then pushed away from the counter, scowling. “Fine!” He shouted. “Someday, I’ll come back here in silk and with my own dropling and then we’ll see who’s so sorry they can’t help me!”

Rowe pulled her away to follow Nix and Sid, the latter two whispering too low for Karlene to hear.

She let Rowe guide her while she tried to puzzle out what she’d just seen. Except for the obvious, that it had been illegal, or at least something that would have gotten the yellow-and-blue haired woman in supreme trouble, she had absolutely no idea what had just transpired. She’d been referred to; as an ‘it.’ A female ‘it.’ Aside from being insulting, it didn’t make sense. She couldn’t be a ‘she’ and an ‘it’ at the same time.

“Almost done,” Rowe promised, speaking softly for her ears alone.

Their group stopped at the end of one of the lines of people waiting for their turns at one of the platforms. Despite herself, Karlene watched with no small amount of curiosity as, at the head of the line, a man in a burgundy suit with a gold cane handed over a gilded slip of paper. The attendant fed the paper into a slot at his podium, and waved the man through.

The man tipped his cobalt blue top hat to the attendant, and climbed up the few steps to the platform. At the platform’s edge, a contraption of brass gears and glass containers spun to life. A reticulated arm of interlocking brass and copper plates unfurled from the machine and reached out.

Instead of charcoal, the eerie circular pattern was etched directly into the metal of the platform. The reticulated arm’s tip reached into a compartment within the machine’s base, and withdrew a small glass ampule that glinted like a ruby.

Karlene watched as the arm carried the ampule to the platform, watched as the three prongs at its end rushed the tip of the ampule and began to let red droplets fall from it to land on the sigils around the burgundy-suited man’s feet.

When the last drops fell, the now familiar column of smoke and ash and embers flared up around the man, who had vanished by the time the air cleared. For the first time, Karlene noticed that this particular type of smoke didn’t have a scent.

A few long, dazed moments later, and it was their turn at the platform, and Karlene stiffened.

“Token or ticket?” asked the attendant. His hair was a shocking blend of orange and purple that did not belong with the red uniform, in any situation, ever.

“Ticket,” Nix said, and pulled three slips of gold paper from his pocket. The attendant glanced at her, looking surprised, but took the tickets.

“Not ours to use,” Sid explained.

“None of my business, sirs, whether you pay to use the Station’s Drops or just pay to use our platforms.” the attendant responded. He fed the tickets into the slot on his podium, then reached into his pocket and removed a crystal dongle. He inserted it into a contraption of glass and little gears that sat at the edge of his podium, something Karlene hadn’t been able to see until now. Clearly, it had something to do with the machine at the edge of the platform, with its articulated arm.

“Up we go,” said Rowe, and he could have been speaking to anyone but she knew he was speaking to her. Propelled by his hand, she stepped up onto the platform. A few moments later the drops of blood -someone else’s blood- had fallen, and the odorless pillar of smoke and embers was rising around her feet.