Sanaam Sadiq was holding two lengths of intimidating black-and-orange extension cord in his large hands, which barely reached each other even so, and waiting for some indication of when he ought to connect them.
“…This entire Kafkaesque nightmare was designed and assembled by aliens from outer space, who have little idea how magic works and NO idea how human beings THINK!”
That didn’t sound like an issue with the cords, at least not specifically.
“Aliens exist, Cap! Aliens exist and there is NO MAGIC IN SPACE! I am holding the proof IN MY HANDS, AS WE SPEAK!”
Sanaam knew, somewhere under the floorboards of his consciousness, where he stowed the irrelevant things, that he was technically in charge here. This was his boat, for the duration of the journey. In the middle of nowhere, outside of any particular country’s jurisdiction, with no access to courts, cops or jails, he could probably get away with keel-hauling a couple guys — if they were shitty guys nobody liked.
He certainly looked like an evil pirate, right out of central casting — huge, dark, and obvious against the pale horizon like a distant mountain, with a bellow like a foghorn when he required it. On warm, moonless nights, his gleaming gold tattoos and disembodied white teeth floated around the deck like an apparition from a dark ride. Piloting the Marselline Army’s insane flying boats, with their anachronistic sails and rigging, and swift access to an entire planet of cuisine, had carved his body into a solid mass of muscle and fat. Only now was he beginning to notice a little softness around the middle, more like a beach ball than a football. And he was sure that was not so much a matter of age, but more a result of the new additions to the Sunrise East Trading Company’s fleet. The “Messer” boats were a bit more, or less… Well…
“Fuck Karl Brodbeck, fuck his whole family, fuck Alemanian efficiency, AND FUCK THE CONCEPT OF BUSINESS DEALS ITSELF! THIS ISN’T A ‘MESSER’ IT’S A FUCKING MESS!”
Technically, he had the authority to fine Bill for insubordination, or drag him to the head and wash his mouth out with soap. He was big enough to put the wiry, alleged ex-cowboy over his knee and snap him in half like a dry twig. But, despite his intimidating appearance, he’d always had more the aspect of a friendly kitchen god, complete with stretched earlobes, belly laugh and wide open smile.
Bill knew it well, so it wasn’t like threats or bombast would make any dent.
Besides, he did want the damn thing fixed, as did everyone else, and Bill would inevitably do that — while spitting and steaming like a malfunctioning tea kettle. And if anyone else were down here holding the cords, they might report him or punch him in the face, so there was nothing for it but to stand there and wait.
“Oh, hell,” Sanaam muttered. He could see the problem and wasn’t sure how to address it. The cords had him pinned right where he was. “Bill? Bill!”
“If you drop those fucking cords, I will NEVER find them again! You don’t need a bathroom break! I am ORDERING you to PISS YOUR PANTS for your own sake and the sake of your crew!”
“No, Bill, your hair…”
“Fuck my hair!” He swept it back with an absent hand. “Fuck off out of my culture, paleface!”
That particular slur was absurd in context. In the brief, doubtful silence that followed, Sanaam studied his favourite first mate’s snarling, orange countenance for any indication of irony or good humour. There was none.
He sighed, set down the cords, blocked the wild punch that was flung at him, ignored the scream, and pulled back Bill’s long, white hair — before the whole damn pile of it fell into the grinding, greasy, open gearbox he’d been leaning over. The broken elastic was still clinging to a few errant strands. Sanaam tweezed it between two rough fingers, and showed it.
“What? What?” Bill snatched the elastic with a groan. “Oh! Fuck this little piece of shit too! God-damn it!” He pulled another two out of his hip pocket and tied up his hair again. “Alright, I lived. Now help me find the fucking cords. Those dumb bitches retract on automatic, you ass…”
Thus, Sanaam was groping through the oily, dusty and cobwebby underbelly of the ship, with Bill, when a familiar voice piped up in his ear, “Captain, are you free to speak?”
He shrieked and banged his head on the jagged underside of a cabinet. The knowledge that his whole family were doing spy shit in a hostile foreign land was also under the floorboards of his consciousness, but it had just become extremely relevant. He hadn’t heard from them since they’d been gearing up to un-kidnap Erik by re-kidnapping him, and the plan they’d related to him was utter madness. He had no idea when or if they were going to get back to him.
And now Bill was speaking in one ear, “Are you bleeding? Let me see it!” while his wife was saying… something in the other ear. “Shut up, shut up, I can’t hear!” he cried.
“Standing by,” said General D’Iver.
“What?” said Bill. He dragged Sanaam out from under the cabinet, into the light, to some protest.
“No! I don’t want you to shut up, you shut up! Oh, hell…”
“I’m getting the doctor,” Bill said.
“Belay that!” Sanaam snapped. He shook his head and held up his left hand. “It’s the ring! Sir, I’m not alone and I sound like I have a concussion, let me explain to Bill…”
But Bill backed off with his hands up. “I know who ‘sir,’ is, Cap! I’ll zip it and button it. Talk to her!”
“I’m free to speak!” Sanaam cried, three-fingers reflexively pressed to his ear, deadening all sound but the magic-induced vibrations. “What’s going on? What happened? Did you get him?”
After a pause, his wife’s voice responded with the mild, condescending irony he knew and loved, “Erik says ‘hi.’”
Sanaam clapped his hands, a crack like a gunshot. “Yes!”
“They got…?” Bill began. He muzzled himself with a hand.
Sanaam nodded silently, beaming, as the General went on, “…and he can hear you, apparently, so we must try not to be too upsetting. He’s been through a lot.”
“Hi, Erik! Welcome home!” Sanaam bellowed.
Another pause. With tightly controlled irritation, “A ring of sending does not work that way, Captain.”
“Sorry,” he whispered. “Sorry!” he added, louder. He winced and reiterated, “Sorry,” at conversational volume. “Is he…? Erik, how are you?”
“He would like you to know that he is fine. I would like you to know that he is delicate, and mere moments ago, he had a difficult encounter with a boy not unlike himself… Pardon me. I have caused an emotional reaction with my phrasing and I can no longer hear you, but I am not wrong. The boy recovered from a traumatic injury with unheard of new abilities and he was able to communicate mentally with Erik somehow — Erik is having difficulty recalling it. As I’ve said, he is delicate.”
“Where are you guys?” Sanaam said weakly. “Are you safe?”
“Quite possibly, none of us are safe, Captain. If Marsellia is complicit in this, ‘safety’ will be difficult to find. As Erik is having another amnesiac emotional fugue…”
“What?”
“Please, I only have a moment. We are not at liberty to discuss the situation in Prokovia, or Erik may have a mental breakdown that will prevent him from returning home safely. We are still at the Elysium Inn and relatively secure, although we have dealt with… I hesitate to call him a ‘real’ spy, but he had a governmental association of some kind.”
Sanaam straightened with urgency. “Just one? Are you sure?”
Another long pause. Sanaam stifled a whimper with one hand and Bill patted him hesitantly.
“…Don’t patronize me, Captain.”
Sanaam slumped with a sigh and brushed Bill away. “Right. Sorry. I’m, uh, one or two sheets to the wind about this, sir. I’ll try to straighten myself out.”
“Please do. We were hoping you might pick us up from Cyre, or somewhere near there?”
Sanaam shrieked and punched the console. A puff of purple smoke emerged from a vent five feet away. Bill narrowed his eyes at it.
“Captain?”
“This fucking, pig-ignorant outer-space technology makes me SICK!”
Bill drew a step back, started but not entirely displeased. “Sucks,” he agreed.
“We’re in a Mess, sir!” Sanaam cried, wide-eyed with anguish. He shook his head. “Uh, uh, a Messer, sir. They put us in a Messer boat this time. It has a preprogrammed route, it logs every deviation, and it barely lets us steer it… It really is a Mess!”
“What’s going on?” Bill said softly.
“They want us to come get them and we can’t!”
“I’ll fix it.” Bill snatched up a socket wrench at random and brandished it like a hammer. “What do I need to do? Where do we need to go?”
“You CAN’T fix it! We’ve just spent THREE HOURS failing to plug in the fucking COFFEE MAKER!”
“Captain?” the General’s voice said softly.
He returned to conversational volume with a wince. “Sorry.”
“Think nothing of it. I gather there is something wrong with the boat?”
“There is everything wrong with the boat. I think they stuck us with it hoping we’d fix it, but we haven’t yet. It’s unfit for human habitation. If they could just load up the cargo and let it sniff its own way across the ocean, it wouldn’t matter, but it can’t. It needs human beings with human brains, but human beings need to eat, and sleep, and shit — and go pick up their families when they’re in trouble!”
“The trouble is at a reasonable level at the moment, Captain. We’ve handled worse. To be honest, I didn’t expect you’d be able to do much but ferry us back on the last leg.”
He was shaking his head. “I don’t think I can do that. I don’t think I can even do that…”
“I can fix it!” Bill cried. He swung through the open floor panel and once again disappeared under the stainless-steel galley counters and state-of-the-art appliances — all of which were hardwired and welded in place and none of which brewed the industrial amounts of coffee needed by a cargo ship’s crew.
“Console yourself, Captain. We remain competent as a team… Somehow.” He could hear her rolling her eyes. “I do wish to see you and discuss our situation face-to-face, but that conversation will be a difficult one. I don’t mind putting it on hold.” She chuckled. “…and having a short vacation. You have always been able to wander home on your own, I assure you, your daughter and I will manage it as well. Do you mind if she says ‘hi’?”
Sanaam smiled. “Hand it over, sir.”
“Hi, Dad!” Maggie’s voice said brightly. “Don’t worry about us! We’ve got a buttload of money and we’re gonna have a blast getting home!”
He blinked. “Where did you get a buttload of money?”
“Well, I cleaned everything out of the spy’s wallet, but most of it’s from Carolina Bow…”
“Wait. That’s that actress Mordecai has a thing for, isn’t it?”
Her smirk was audible, much like her mother’s eye-roll. “Oh. So he told you about that, huh? He never mentioned it to me, I thought he was into Josephine Baker.”
“I think he has a type,” Sanaam hedged.
“…In order to maintain my own sanity, I’m gonna say he likes ladies with long legs and leave it at that.”
“Probably for the best, Mag-Pirate. Yes. But, uh, you met her and she gave you money?”
“She’s working with the Rainbow Alliance in Ansalem and we kinda extorted it out of them, but they deserved it. I don’t want to get into that now. Look, an old movie star teleporting into our hotel room with bribe money is not the weirdest thing that I’ve ever had to explain to you.”
“Top ten, Mag-Pirate. It’s definitely in the top ten.”
“Dad, a couple years back, I had to explain why I work for a cult now. A polygamous sex cult.”
“It’s just an Apparent Cult, I already knew that.”
A sigh, and a laugh. “Okay. I’ll explain everything when I see you, I promise. We’ll keep you posted on our way back. I love you. And Erik wants to say ‘hi’ too.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that’s fine. I love you, too, Mag-Pirate. Pass me along!”
“Hey, Sam,” Erik said casually, maybe too casually, under the circumstances.
“Erik! Hi…”
“I think It’s just ‘cos folks like you look a lot like us on black-and-white film, ya know? And there’s not a lot of us on black-and-white film.”
“What?”
“Josephine Baker and Carolina Bow. Anyway, he likes tall ladies. He was super into Diane Desdoux, and she was blue.”
“Um. Okay.” He was used to Erik being a little all over the place — and that was probably all it was! It was just all that other stuff about “delicate” and “mental breakdown”… It was distracting. Also, Bill was banging on something with the socket wrench down there, and every time he did that, the lights flickered. “Um. How’s it goin’?”
“Kinda rough, but I’m bouncing back from it. John and David tried to break my brain on purpose, but I’m already broken, so…”
If Sanaam had been holding a phone, he would’ve dropped it. “John Green-Tara and David the god?”
“Yeah, I guess, but when I think too hard about the scary stuff my brain resets, so I’m trying to take it easy.”
“That’s an excellent idea, you should definitely do that. You just get home safe and we’ll all help sort you out. You sound fine!”
“Cool. But, uh, I’m definitely not.”
“That’s fine too. You’ve got your family there, all the best bits. They found you and they’ll take care of you.”
“You’re a good bit, too, but I’m not in love with the no-coffee, stainless-steel hellscape boat, Sam. I think I’d rather take the train. We can afford first class!”
Sanaam snickered. He thought he’d mentioned the coffee maker, but he hadn’t breathed a word about all the goddamn stainless steel — which was a total misnomer. Every surface was already scratched and speckled with rust, and the boat was barely a year old. “Same old Erik. Keep rolling with the waves and give my daughter a nudge if she’s heading off course, yeah?”
“Will do! Here’s the trouble and strife!”
The mild, condescending irony returned: “Are you satisfied with our wellbeing, Captain?”
“No,” he replied. “Never. I worship you, but you drive me absolutely bananas. Prove me wrong. Get home safe and call me an idiot right when I come in the door.”
“I outrank you, Captain, but I will take your request under advisement.” She lowered her voice and the condescension evaporated, “I will keep them safe. I have… a moral imperative. This is bigger than us, but we must guard our piece of it. I will do so. I’ll explain it when I see you. I will see you soon.”
“Thank you, sir. Godspeed.”
“To you as well. I will call again as time and privacy allows — this device is not legal in Marsellia or Prokovia.”
He heard the faint click of the spell disengaging. Apparently, she considered that enough of a send-off. Well, after being married to her for over two decades, he did too.
He sat down on the floor and put his head in his hands.
Bill popped up from the hole in the floor like a psychedelic gopher. “What? Did you ring off already? You didn’t even give me a chance!”
“I don’t think they’re safe where they are and they can’t wait for us to clean up our Mess,” he muttered. “If you figure out some way to break us out of this steel cage, I’ll call her back, but until then, we need to let them go.” He shook his head, looking down and away. “They didn’t want to talk about it, and I don’t understand what’s going on at all, but I think something’s wrong. I think something’s really, really wrong. She thinks it’s big enough to hurt all of us, you and me, too, whatever it is. But I’m just terrified for them.”
“Those people?” Bill said, blinking. “Maggie? Your wife? Erik vanished off the face of the earth and they found him. It sounds like they found a bunch more stuff, too, but whatever it is, they’ll deal with it. Your family are like the right hand of the Dreamer Spirit — when they will it, it’s done. They’ll get home to you, Cap, so you’d better focus on getting home to them.” He gave Sanaam a nudge. “So pick your face off the floor… and hold onto this damn cord.”
He offered Sanaam another — or possibly one of the previous — black and orange auto-retracting cords, the only electrical power source they’d managed to drag anywhere near the outlet-free galley.
“Come on.” He poked the cord at Sanaam’s hand. “I need coffee for this!”
Sanaam wrapped his fingers around the black plug. “For what?”
Bill grinned. “For hacking into the piece-of-shit navigation system, and the piece-of-shit auto-log. I’m gonna break this putain de merde like a wild horse!” He dove back into the hole with a clatter.
“Hey, fuck off out of my culture,” Sanaam said weakly.
“It’s my culture too!” Bill said, muffled. “Ain’t we brothers after all this time? If you need an adoption, I’ll make it official — although, traditionally-speaking, I gotta pull out all your fingernails for that, and teach you my ways while they grow back. I’m just sayin’, I haven’t been able to teach you how to rope a cow or rewire a circuit yet, so maybe we better wait a couple more decades…”
Sanaam obediently held the cord and listened to Bill natter on. He didn’t really have to listen, and he was seventy-five-percent sure that “cowboy” thing was a running gag Bill would admit at some emotionally significant point in the future, such as shortly before one or both of them died. He had gotten curious and confirmed the thing about the fingernails from a few history books, but lots of places had heinous pasts, and heinous presents. Mutilating someone to teach them your ways was practically quaint, compared to some. Marsellia didn’t have a toenail to stand on.
He turned his wife’s words over and over in his mind. A moral imperative. Bigger than all of us. If Marsellia is complicit…
Oh, gods, he thought. What have we done now?
But, she’d also said, We’ve handled worse. And they had. Of course they had. When Erik got hurt, he couldn’t even remember who they were. Now he was talking and cracking jokes and coughing up random information just like normal! He was coming home!
If they did that, they could do anything. Bill was right about that.
They were going to have a perfectly safe, first class, luxury train trip home, and everything was going to be fine.
◆◆◆
Erik regarded the small room with four seats, two bunks that folded down, and heavy blue curtains tied on either side of the single, large window.
He turned on his heel and tried to duck past everyone and leave. “Nope. Not going in there. No thank you! Excuse me…”
He was already tall, green, and visibly disabled. David’s ridiculous outfit was designed to get attention, and Erik had gone after it with scissors, employing Milo’s assistance to get “a perfect fray” — as described by numerous Marselline fashion mags. (The fashion mags recommended a razor blade; Milo just used magic, which was much perfecter.) Every hem had been chopped and distressed, and the seams at the sides of the striped trousers had been embellished with safety pins from knee to ankle. (Erik had purchased a box at the train station and Mordecai had been willing to allow it as “a quiet activity,” not fully cognizant that Erik’s appearance was getting louder and louder.) The skirt of the frock coat had been torn into four ragged tails and the lapels had several extra notches, all of which were gleefully frayed. Before even leaving the Elysium’s lobby, he had pinned a daisy from the desktop floral arrangement to the right lapel with Maggie’s Rainbow Alliance pin, which said he was a girl who liked boys and magical enough to blow your fucking head off. (It was fortunate nobody in Cyre knew the colour code.)
He had also seen and demanded the tall, smashed hat John left for them; the top of it was canted forward “like a cartoon villain,” in Erik’s opinion, and he would not be dissuaded. He had not, so far as the others could tell, seen or absorbed the knowledge of any of the papers that had been packaged with it, but the potential for discovery and whatever emotional reaction he might have was constant. His entire family kept staring at the hat and trying to banish all other context for it from their minds. They were understandably distracted. And Erik’s transition from “kid in a white T-shirt that says DAMAGED, and boxer shorts” to “carnival float, but still DAMAGED” had been gradual, over the course of hours.
Anyway, nobody had realized that Erik looked like a deranged lunatic until he turned around in the narrow train hallway and started acting like one, trying to squeeze past them, the porters, and the other sleeping car passengers behind them, with an increasingly panicked expression.
Maggie’s loud, frantic response, “Erik! It’s cool! I’ve got your ducks in the suitcase!” didn’t help matters. By Cyre’s standards, she didn’t exactly look sane either. None of them did.
“Train phobia!” Hyacinth cried, no more helpfully. But she followed it up with her best effort to make it intelligible in Prokovian — “uh, uh, uh… Very large fear of train!” more or less — which did have some effect. It got the porters and the other passengers out of the way, anyhow, though Erik had already made considerable progress on that front. “I’ll deal with it!” she added, in Anglais, as she plowed after him. “Sit down and get settled!”
Maggie and Mordecai said, “No,” in tandem, and Milo signed it.
The General snagged Mr. Rose by the suspenders, from behind, and arrested his progress. She also took the suitcase from Magnificent. “We shall allow them to introduce us to both rooms and deal with the ducks,” she said firmly, right in Milo’s ear.
Milo turned with a visible snarl and a flurry of signs, which she ignored, dragging him backwards by the convenient handle his fashion choices provided. “Oh, look, Mr. Rose. Train things!”
LET GO [MAD X3] HELP [E]YEBALL PULL [NO] TOUCH [NO] RUIN TROUSERS [NICE, WOOL] BITCH!
“This washbasin faucet looks extremely train-specific. Perhaps you’d like to play with it?”
[E]YEBALL LEAVE TRAIN [CONDITIONAL] WE GO MARSELLIA WITH MONEY [ALL, COND.] THEY [STRANDED, COND.] YOU WANT GO LEAVE [COND.] I/ME SUITCASE MONEY [/CONDITIONAL] LET GO LET GO LET…
Meanwhile, Hyacinth had caught Erik in the loading area at the middle of the car, now empty of people and only containing a few oversized bags and a folded wheelchair. “Whoa, kid! Whoa-whoa-whoa! Don’t flip out! We’ve got you. What’s the problem?”
He wheeled on her, darting a finger. The coattails flew. “If you think you’re going to cram me into a tiny room where all I can do is pace back and forth, look at a duck picture and… and eat peanut butter sandwiches — you’re crazier than I am!”
“There’s a club car and a dining car,” Hyacinth said, blinking. “Do you want a hamburger? Or soup? We can hit up the club car right now, they’ve probably got snacks, and liquor…”
Mordecai pressed his hand over her mouth and shoved her behind him. “Dear one, what’s wrong with the room? What can we do to fix the room?”
Hyacinth backed off, preparing to tackle him from a running start, but Maggie grabbed her and hissed in her ear, “He can’t eat in the goddamn racist dining car or the club car until we change trains in Piastana, and then they still don’t want him in the club car. And I don’t want him in public like this, these people are looking for an excuse to arrest him and do him like that mentalist with the cracks!”
“Nothing,” Erik said firmly. He folded his arms and turned away. “It’s not fixable. It’s evil. I’ll ride here, there’s room here.”
“Goddammit,” Hyacinth muttered. “Barnaby lives.” She shooed Maggie aside and began trying to discern which of Erik’s six known senses were offended by the nicest available sleeper room, in between Mordecai’s attempts to catalogue every possible new trauma trigger that Erik had acquired.
Meanwhile, a porter accosted Maggie with a grim smile, and a hand raised, inviting a ticket as proof she — or any of these weirdos — belonged there. “May I show you to your seats?” he said, in Anglais.
Apparently, their particular brand of crazy looked Marselline.
Well, he wasn’t wrong.
The grim smile was now surmounted by two narrowed, determined eyes. “We’re about to be on our way!”
Maggie aimed her own, significantly pointier and more terrifying smile in its direction and held up her ticket, which she did not hand over. “We’re in this car, the rest of our family are in our rooms already, and we don’t need your help. People are allowed in this space while the train is moving, the bathrooms are here and there is no other way to get to the club car or the dining car. If there is a button you need to press or a lever to engage, we will step aside and allow you to do so, of course.” She bowed. “Otherwise — I’m afraid I will need you to explain the nature of the problem,” she flicked his gold name tag with a fingernail, “Boris.”
The porter’s smile evaporated.
Meanwhile, Erik was addressing Hyacinth in a loud, desperate voice, “Put me on an airship! We can afford an airship! I’ve never been on one, I bet it’s cool!”
“Kid,” Hyacinth said tightly, “you’ve never been on one because they won’t let you board one looking like that. We’d have to stuff your uncle in the suitcase with the comatose cat and keep you painted up like an aging hooker the whole time….”
“Dear one,” Mordecai said, more gently, “we can’t know whether an airship or a boat or a bus would be any better if you can’t figure out what the problem is with the train. Can we go back and try it with the ducks…?”
“I don’t want it with the ducks — you’re gonna ruin my ducks! I won’t like them anymore!”
The porter’s gape-mouthed disbelief resolved itself in a scowl. “Do you have permit… papers. Do you have papers for those… those… those…”
Maggie inclined her head with a grin. “No, no. Pick a word. I’m not going to help you, please pick a word. And could you follow it up with the name of your superior?”
“Papers!” shrieked the porter.
Maggie felt something big and loud blow by her, like a subway on track that had a different stop to make. An express, maybe. But she thought she only heard it at all because he let her.
(Careful, Boris. Crazy is contagious. You’re already hearing voices, aren’t ya? Oh, no…)
She clapped a hand over the resulting smile and the burgeoning laugh.
She didn’t have to stifle it for more than an instant, if at all. The porter screamed, staggered backwards, and fell out of the open doors behind him. The helpful yellow step stool went flying — he must’ve caught the corner of it on his way down. His walkie-talkie squawked blurred words in Prokovian, and he did not move to answer it, or at all.
Erik brushed past Hyacinth and Mordecai. He peered down at the 3-D, live-action chalk outline plastered across the concrete with a wince. A small crowd had already gathered. Presumably, the crime-scene guys with the real chalk would turn up soon. (Oh, gods, Maggie. I killed that guy. Don’t tell.)
Maggie wandered over and had a look for herself. “He twitched.” She pointed. “He moved. He’s fine.” She grinned at Erik. “Well, we are no longer ‘about to be on our way’!” She clapped her hands and leaned towards him, crouched with her hands on her thighs. “We’ve got some time to play around with the room and see what works for you. Wanna give it a try?”
Erik shook his head.
Behind him, Hyacinth nudged Mordecai. “Did she…?”
“If she did, he deserved it.”
Maggie took Erik’s hands and formed a loud, clear thought for him to swipe off her, if he was paying attention: There! I’m the murderer! This is you! She pictured Erik at age six, frail and damaged like a Dickensian orphan, with angel wings and a slightly crooked halo. He had a hospital gown instead of a robe, and a bandage over his socket. You can get away with ANYTHING!
He breathed a weak laugh, so she knew he got it.
“Come on,” she said aloud. “You don’t have to go in. You can wait in the hall and pet the cat…”
His lip curled with disgust. “He is literally in a coma. You wouldn’t let me call Greg and explain what trains…”
She pressed two gentle fingers over his mouth, and he broke off without getting any louder or more upset. “Shh. You can play violin, then. Maybe you’ll pick up some tips!”
“I’d like to have her,” he admitted, looking away. “Just… Yeah, I’d like that better.”
“Come on.” She pulled him by the hand, and he took a single step. She smiled. “We’re going to find a bunch of other stuff you like better. There will be no pacing back and forth or peanut butter sandwiches, or anything else you don’t like. You’ve got this. We’ve got you.”
Erik sighed, nodded and followed her back towards the room. Mordecai followed him. As for Hyacinth, Maggie heard her holler, “Don’t move the victim! Ne dvigay trup! Idiots!” just before the door closed between them, so she’d probably be along in a minute.
