We don’t know who you are.
We don’t know what you want.
Gonna be honest,
we barely even know
 what we want.
If you are looking for ransom,
I can tell you we don’t have money,
but what we do have are a very particular set of skills.
Skills we have acquired over a lifetime of fucking shit up,
both individually and as a group.
Skills that make us a nightmare
for people with plans and intentions.
If you give Erik back right now,
there is a slight chance we'll get distracted by him
and whatever help he needs.
We might stop looking for you,
we might let you escape relatively unscathed.
But if you don’t, we will keep looking for you,
we will find you eventually,
and we will ruin your goddamn day.

The insane blonde woman in the puffy red coat scurried into the lobby like a squirrel investigating a bird feeder, sniffing and startling at every step, but ever closer to her obvious goal. She detoured and poured herself five paper cups of coffee first, covering each with a lid.

Miss Mila Fiala, the day clerk, had never seen the crazy blonde woman consume anything other than the lobby coffee, not even the stale cookies offered beside it. She might’ve lived on coffee, like a hummingbird lived on nectar. It would certainly explain some of the woman’s behaviour.

The crazy woman had a hideous, nasal accent, and seemed to have learned Prokovian off the backs of cereal boxes, or postage stamps, or some other absurd medium. She could barely read.

Which was an incredible shame, as Miss Mila would’ve liked nothing more than to hang a largish sign off the front of the desk that said YES, YOUR ROOMS HAVE BEEN CLEANED! FEEL FREE TO COMMENCE YOUR DAILY GOAT SACRIFICE, OR WHATEVER IT IS YOU DO, so the crazy woman could just take her coffees and go.

The truly horrifying thing was that the insane blonde woman appeared to be the most normal person of the group. Miss Mila had always heard the Marselline were rude, ugly, and out of their goddamn minds, but she was used to dealing with tourists; most of them were like that, from wherever. Marselline moche had seemed like just another convenient insult for people who don’t know how to dress, drive or speak, and take way too many pictures — even in the churches.

But then these jackasses had rolled up like a live-action political cartoon. Nevermind dressing, driving and speaking! Sometimes Miss Mila had to wonder if they were aliens from another planet who’d cribbed their idea of human behaviour out of a comic book.

The fat, bulldog-faced creature in thick glasses was at least dressed as a human female, but it had a most aggressive stare. The woman, if it was a woman, always had her teeth clenched behind her tight frown. It reminded Miss Mila of a book she’d read; some fool had taught a load of animals to talk and dress like people, but they all ended up snarling and tearing each other to pieces anyway. A shaved tiger in a dress was still a tiger; it would snap your neck if you annoyed it.

The other two, definitely two, were even more determined to ignore the natural boundaries that Miss Mila assumed must exist for good reason. The girl was an evident reformed-cannibal with weird hair, elephantine proportions, and the dirty complexion of a savage. She must’ve been only recently introduced to the concept of shoes, and she wore men’s clothing. Then there was a… a…

No. Miss Mila didn’t even like to guess what that thing was. Obviously some kind of sex pervert; it had acres of red hair like a vampire, and appeared equally comfortable dressed as a man or a woman.

It was a regular freakshow. See the Dog-Lady, the Cannibal Queen and the Half-Man/Half-Woman!

She steered clear of all three freaks, and they of her, conducting all their business through the insane blonde woman who could barely read or speak.

Miss Mila did not consider herself at all backwards or provincial. She knew she wasn’t exactly checking people in at the Hotel Grand Cimbria, or even the Vesely. She didn’t give herself, or her place of employment, airs.

The Elysium Inn did have an interesting quality of air. She told herself the tourists would rather burn incense than do laundry or bathe. Yes. Incense.

The Elysium, also known as the Asylum, was a hostel. They had six total private rooms, each with two double beds and no bath. The rest had dormitory bunks catering to young idiots with backpacks who wanted to get some culture before settling down and being responsible. As such, their clientele were uniformly loud, drunk, hormonal, and brief.

However! The drunks who spent a few days hopping in and out of each other’s beds had simple, reasonable desires, habits, and difficulties. The freaks who’d been squatting in rooms 405 and 406 for the past six months were too weird, inexplicable, old, and quiet. People like that might do anything.

People like that might be… Spies!

Andrej, the night clerk, thought it was rather exciting.

Andrej was such an idiot.

Miss Mila had forty years of experience and forty pounds of intimidation on that oily little people-pleaser. She thought they’d had enough excitement lately.

(She also thought Andrej bore every resemblance to a dark smear left in a toilet bowl by a stubborn turd, but she rarely had to deal with him herself and she was not expecting any company who would care, so there was no point trying to flush him away.)

Whenever the blonde woman appeared, and casually tried to make certain they could return to their rooms and remain undisturbed for the rest of the day, Miss Mila found her hand creeping towards the fire-extinguisher they kept under the desk.

For incense-related emergencies, usually. Yes. Darn that incense.

The crazy blonde woman smiled, casually sipped one of her coffees, and said a rough equivalent of: How’s it hanging? All done cleaning? Everything in order?

Miss Mila wordlessly pushed a single crumpled potato chip bag across the desk.

The blonde woman regarded it as if she’d never seen a potato, let alone a chip of one, in her life.

“No food in rooms,” Miss Mila said, as loudly and simply as possible. “Kitchen.” She indicated the door helpfully labelled KITCHEN in about fifteen different languages. There was also a picture of a cooked chicken and vegetables on it. Just in case.

“We don’t eat,” the blonde woman replied.

Not, “we don’t eat chips” or “in our rooms.” A total negation of the concept of ingesting food for nourishment. Period.

The blonde woman stood there, smirking, as if thinking, Your move, little fishie.

Miss Mila sighed. “Sure. Rooms all clean. Have nice day. Enjoy your goat sacrifice, freaks.”

The blonde woman bowed like a gentleman, then shooed the rest of the freakshow in from the street outside.

They walked past the desk, single-file, and did not look towards Miss Mila or otherwise engage with her, as if they had been instructed. The blonde woman juggled the coffee and handed a cup to each of the others, keeping two to herself. She summoned the elevator with a push of a button. The doors opened mercifully swiftly, and they all piled in.

The vampire with the glasses and suspenders made what Miss Mila thought was a religious gesture, shut its eyes, and hid behind its trembling coffee cup.

It isn’t stupid, thought Miss Mila. The counterweight on that deathbox had fallen through the basement ceiling about ten years ago. Their lives were literally hanging by a thread.

Unless, of course, the freaks could fly.

She scoffed and switched the radio back on, in search of her stories.

◆◇◆

Maggie reached into her pocket and wordlessly offered Milo a folded paper bag, either to breathe into or throw up in. Milo accepted it and decided to use it for breathing. He was feeling extra brave today!

The elevator made a thumping noise like an unbalanced washing machine, its lights flickered on every floor, and the whole thing swung like a pendulum if you did so much as wiggle a toe in your shoe. So, of course, it stalled out and stopped elevating if the people inside of it stopped moving for one instant.

Rather apologetically, and only because Milo and the General and Hyacinth wouldn’t, Maggie clicked her heels together and began to march in place. She was not a little girl anymore, she was almost as tall as Ann — and quite a bit heavier — and the elevator bounced with her as if hanging by a rubber band. After three bounces, it reluctantly shuddered to life and did its job.

At the same instant, Milo began to hyperventilate, so he breathed into the bag.

The hell of it was, he could fix the damn thing. Yeah, he’d have to sneak out in the middle of the night, steal some tools or convince Hyacinth to help him, but he could fix it. He could make it work better. Smoother. With nice music and a fresh vanilla scent.

And cinnamon. Like the good doughnut shop on the corner. Yeah.

But they were trying to keep a low profile and not get thrown into jail or a gulag, so there could be no miraculous healing of the terrifying elevator in this shitty hotel. It would be allowed to kill them at its leisure.

He was very careful not to touch the elevator. He had touched it once, felt that it was missing several essential components, and begged Ann to warn Hyacinth.

Ann, somehow, didn’t think Hyacinth would care.

But she was a good friend and she wanted them all to be safe, so she told Hyacinth anyway.

Hyacinth didn’t care. “Eh. Then we’ll ride with Maggie or the General. I’m not going to slog up and down four flights of stairs the whole time. They won’t let it hurt us.”

Dumb, practical Hyacinth and her weird anxiety that did not extend to perfectly sensible things like deadly elevators, meteor strikes, or ocean plastic. She had no imagination.

Maybe she was worried about possibly never finding Erik, but it was hard to tell. She often seemed more concerned with annoying that angry old floral print walrus at the front desk.

It was… really hard to think about Erik too much. For all of them.

Maybe it was better to be terrified of the elevator he couldn’t fix.

When the doors opened, the floor of the elevator was a full six inches below the floor of the dark, stuffy hallway. As they filed out, it rebounded to three inches above.

Milo sighed, shut his eyes again briefly, and folded the paper bag. He handed it back to Maggie and signed THANK YOU subtly.

Hyacinth didn’t know sign language, and he had no idea whether the General did or not because he hated her. He often felt rude excluding them, even though Hyacinth decided not to learn sign because she’d promised never to pressure him to talk.

It was still a big help, even now. She didn’t bludgeon him with language until he coughed up a whole sentence. She didn’t judge. He could just hand her a premade card and sign OK, like she was a stranger on the bus. No pressure.

Not that he minded being able to talk with the rest of his family, but he was very aware it wasn’t normal talking. Calliope and the kids had helped him modify Marselline Sign Language so much that Calliope’s deaf friend, Helen, could barely understand him.

And it wasn’t any good for talking on the phone! Ann had to do all that for him. It was almost like when Calliope had first moved into the house and he was too scared to even hand her a card. It was really awful. He thought once he decided to let Lucy call him “Da” they’d never be that way ever again. He thought he had his loving family all sorted out.

Now here he was on the other side of the damn continent and missing a little brother.

With no job. Oh, no…

His dismayed expression failed to register with the others. It was not too different from his default look of mild concern.

Maggie smiled at him and signed, YOU’RE WELCOME, with a [SLOPPY] tag, so more like, «hey, no problemo!»

He attempted a smile and covered it when he felt it twitching. Maggie didn’t mind him smiling wrong, and there weren’t any strangers in the hallway, but he preferred to look a little less deranged in public.

There might be cameras in the hall.

Or, conceivably, Hyacinth was foreign-people-racist and paranoid. Like, she’d seen too many spy movies with pretty girls. You know?

Ann didn’t think he was being very nice (also, he should just say “xenophobia” if he meant xenophobia, he didn’t have to dumb it down) but he didn’t think there was much point being nice when Hyacinth had no idea and wouldn’t care if she did. He made her nice cards and brought her doughnuts and debugged the rooms whenever she wanted and never complained even a little! …That she was aware of.

Hyacinth pushed open the door to Room 405. There was a connecting door between the two smaller “private” rooms at the end of the hall. They had chocked it open. Privacy wasn’t as important as the ability to run back and forth and yell at each other. It was, she thought wistfully, almost like home.

Luckily, Hyacinth’s household contained multiple magic-using virtuosos. Competitive magic-using virtuosos. The layered spells for silence and protection had sucked up all the ambient energy in both rooms, and they still needed an animal sacrifice every day. There was nothing left for anything else — if you wanted to do so much as heat up a grilled cheese, you had to kill something to power it, hook up a battery, or go into the hall.

A mouse or two always presented itself, for the sake of the protection spells and an occasional grilled cheese. This hotel was a nest. That was why food wasn’t allowed in the rooms.

Goats? Hyacinth would’ve said, if she understood Miss Mila’s suspicion. I haven’t noticed any goat-holes, mademoiselle, but I’ll keep an eye out!

The day clerk might’ve been wandering through a paranoid fog, but the goddamned cleaners were wandering through the rooms. The cleaners were going through their closets, drawers, and maybe even the suitcase, every single day. Hyacinth had been scolded over too many food wrappers to believe otherwise.

The suitcase already had a false bottom that had fooled customs on more than one occasion, so that wasn’t really an issue. If they ever found what was hidden under the false bottom, Hyacinth was pretty sure the police would show up right away.

Or the military.

Or whatever you wanted to call those well-polished individuals in grey uniforms she’d seen skulking around the train station. Prokovian “intelligence” seemed even stupider than the Marselline kind.

She was always careful on her approach after a cleaning. If the day clerk screamed for help instead of looking annoyed, Hyacinth wanted to be near enough to the door to escape.

She motioned Milo into the room first and showed him a card he’d made for her, for those awkward situations when someone who spoke Anglais might be listening and disapprove of what they said. Mainly touristy restaurants and the potentially-bugged hotel rooms.

He read it politely, in case she wanted something different this time.

She shook her head at him with a smile. It was really cute how he over-designed everything, but she didn’t have much use for anything beyond the default:

…in his handwriting, because he made it and wordlessly handed it to her the very day they arrived, after she’d whispered to him, Can you see if it’s bugged? Like the spy movies?

Milo trudged into the room, head down and trying like hell to be patient. He tapped a hand on the wall and activated a spell he’d designed to inform him of any new magic or technology. It was Pascha every day, and nobody ever hid him any eggs. Just one disappointment after another.

Oh. Well. It was nice that the police weren’t after them. Or the government. Or whoever. Yes. It was totally fine that no one had ever left him a Prokovian surveillance device to play with. Really.

The General tapped her hand on the wall and triggered her own spell that did the exact same thing as his, but in a different way.

Milo glared at her, thinking, STILL?!? But he made no attempt to say it.

Maggie gave her a nudge. “Mom…”

“I will cease checking Mr. Rose’s work the day after he finds a device and I do not,” the General replied.

“It’s bad for morale,” Maggie muttered.

“Mr. Rose has no morale,” said the General. She nudged the door shut and locked it. “We are free to speak, Hyacinth. Provided the Prokovian government is not better at magic than I am.”

“And Milo?” Hyacinth asked, diplomatically.

Milo signed OK. Only then did Hyacinth allow everyone into the room.

They unbuttoned and unzipped their way out of coats and snow boots. The General slopped her ugly civilian coat on the floor in a puddle. Maggie shook her head and hung both their coats to dry, then she removed her large hoop earrings and tucked them in a pocket. She enjoyed freaking out the day clerk every morning, but the clips made her ears sore.

The glittery nose stud and punky pink hair colour remained, to the General’s evident, yet patient and understated, displeasure.

Milo removed a bag with a half-dozen doughnuts from under his coat, and indicated it to Maggie and Hyacinth with a grin.

“All right, let’s rescue the contraband and feed it breakfast,” Hyacinth said. She headed for the connecting door, and the closet of Room 406, which held the suitcase. They all followed after. Rescuing the contraband was a full-family job. The contraband was easily bruised.

Milo totally understood. He was super glad he wasn’t illegal. He wouldn’t be able to stand it.

Okay, he wanted to put his head in the suitcase just briefly and check it out, but Mordecai and Hyacinth and Ann said no. Well, he did love his brain. He didn’t want it damaged. But Calliope used to play hide-and-seek in those things and she was okay.

…Although, he was always catching people staring at Calliope and her whole perfect family like they were not okay. Oh, yeah, he used to just stand there all embarrassed and not say anything, but when he got home, he was just going to start punching people, first thing. Ann thought that was a terrible idea, but he thought she was being a crummy sister. Ann ought to protect her adoptive family — like he was trying to protect his! Oh, man, and if whoever took Erik had hurt him, there were going to be murders. He’d build himself a gun…

While Milo wandered comfortably through his own little world (they understood him there), Hyacinth opened the closet and pulled out the suitcase. The embroidered plaque that indicated it was a Fermé-brand suitcase had been removed with a sewing scissors and replaced with an innocuous iron-on patch of a kitten.

Hyacinth scuttled aside with the false bottom and its camouflage of socks and underwear. She abandoned it on one of the freshly made beds.

Maggie knelt beside the suitcase and put both hands inside, past the filmy black lining that led to a limitless pocket dimension that you could stuff with as many items as you could reach. A Fermé suitcase offered plenty of room for clothing, shoes, small furniture, a bomb, a Gatling gun, or an endless succession of murder victims, even if they weren’t quite dead yet.

Yeah, it was really no wonder they didn’t make these things anymore. Like lead soldiers and automated lawn mowers.

Fortunately, that meant they were very rare, and the people in charge of searching luggage weren’t looking for a hidden void.

Maggie found two jacketed shoulders right about where she thought they’d be. Objects in slipspace always waited patiently where you’d left them, like fruit chunks in an aspic salad. She didn’t know what the hell she’d do if she reached in and he wasn’t there.

She had often imagined pranking everyone by pretending she couldn’t find him, and she revisited the fantasy now. But it really wasn’t a good time for jokes about missing family members. If there ever was a good time for that.

She said, “I got him,” and slowly pulled the elderly red gentleman in the grey herringbone suit out of his unlikely hiding place. His hair was entirely white, but it had been so since the day he was born. You could only tell time by the wrinkles and the dated cut of his suit.

Maggie thought the wrinkles looked a bit worse than usual, but that was only to be expected under the circumstances.

Far away, and distracted by the latest plot twist in her favourite soap opera, Miss Mila had no idea her freakshow was short one freak: An Invisible Man!

“Hooray, it’s a boy,” Hyacinth said acidly. “Would you slap him so we can hand out the cigars, please, sir?”

The General crouched beside her daughter and laid a hand on the top of the man’s head. “Awaken.”

Mordecai gasped and scrambled upright. “Oh, gods! Oh, gods!” He glanced around and saw the staring faces of his variously bored and concerned family, not a timeless, brain-melting black void. “Basic math! Quick! Somebody!”

“Three-X plus one equals sixteen,” Maggie said. “Solve for X.”

He just stared at her.

The General rolled her eyes.

“An ape hates grape cakes,” Hyacinth said.

“An ape hates grape cakes!” he spat. “I haven’t been drinking, Hyacinth!”

“Who’s the Prime Minister?” she said.

“Fuck off.”

“You’re fine,” she said.

Milo signed: FOUR ADD ONE.

“Five,” said Mordecai. He blinked. “Also,” he flung a gesture at Milo, “apparently I still understand that.” He winced, clasped a hand to his chest and signed, SORRY.

Milo signed, I UNDERSTAND. He managed a vague smile and offered the bag of doughnuts, and a coffee.

Maggie pushed up to her knees and delved into her pants pocket, which also held rather more than it should, due to clever sewing in this case. “I got a sandwich, a bag of chips, two sodas, an apricot kolach…” The local trousers were baggy and had a lot of untapped potential!

Mordecai put up a hand. “Please. I haven’t had breakfast yet, and I prefer Milo’s coat doughnuts to your pants sandwich. At least let me wait until it’s not warm.” He stood slowly, with a little help from Hyacinth. He pointed a finger at Maggie, “But save the kolach. Thank you.”

“You want a cold panini?” Maggie said, holding up the grill-marked paper wrapping.

“Everything out of those trousers is a panini.” He sat on the bed. There weren’t enough chairs for everyone to have one while they ate, at least two had to sit on the bed. He assumed someone would pull the desk closer for him.

Maggie snickered and stowed Mordecai’s lunch on the dresser. “I’ll zap it for ya later, if you want.”

Milo dragged the desk over to the bed, and they all sat to confer over the doughnuts, such as they could.

“Did I miss anything?” Mordecai asked weakly. He thought, if he’d missed anything good, they would’ve told him right away, instead of unpacking the food. But maybe there had been something…?

Milo began a detailed recounting of how the doughnut shop owner’s daughter was doing quite well at the secretarial school and…

Mordecai slammed a hand on the table, “I don’t care about the doughnut lady! Ever since you learned how to talk, you are worse than Ann! I swear!”

Milo drew back. He signed, SORRY, quickly.

Hyacinth had elected to sit on the bed as well. She put a careful hand on Mordecai’s back, “You know we don’t like to go very far while we’re waiting for them to clean around your vulnerable, unconscious body. This sucks, it sucks for all of us, but we’re not trying to slack off. We just don’t want to lose you too.”

“I checked the two closest movie theatres again,” Maggie offered.

“I sat down in the nearest and consumed the newsreel,” the General added. “I have limited information from the Anglais-language segments, which are rarely dubbed. Our Prime Minister continues to deny responsibility for the bombings, in the broadest possible terms, up to and including a rejection of recorded history and the existence of trains.”

“I got the Anglais paper and a couple of the real ones,” Hyacinth said. “I’ve only been through the headlines, but I can confirm more dead trains just from the photos.” She sighed and shrugged. “Not that it makes any difference, but maybe we can put some more pieces together if you help me…”

“Do you honestly think there is anything in the news that will explain why we’ve been in this stinking city for six months,” said Mordecai, “based on a single note from a dead man that you…”

Hyacinth nodded once, patiently.

“…happened to find in your sock drawer after nearly a decade? And he was not a nice person!” Mordecai overrode his own delicacy, shaking his head, “He was insane! You knew him longer than any of us, he practically raised you, you know I’m right! We are following up on a ten-year-old note from an insane, dead jackass!”

“You’re not wrong,” said Hyacinth.

“All we know is that Erik is probably somewhere in a city of a million strangers, being held by someone who does not want to be found! Not at the movies!” cried Mordecai. He tipped back his head and yelled at the (not soundproofed, but thankfully on the top floor) ceiling, “The insane, dead jackass saw the future and he could’ve given us an ADDRESS if he wanted! I refuse to believe he did not omit an address ON PURPOSE!”

“You’re not wrong,” said Hyacinth. “But you’re not being fair. He may have left off the address because this way is the best way we have to find Erik.”

“Or the funniest, or the stupidest, or the most entertaining!” Mordecai snapped. “That… that jerk thought our lives were his own private situation comedy! He just tuned in to clouds and tea leaves instead of the radio. He sat up in that attic and laughed at us, and… and he’s probably gazing up from Hell and still laughing!”

“Sure,” said Hyacinth. “But it’s not as fun for him if we don’t find Erik eventually. I know Barnaby’s sense of humour. He did practically raise me, so you just have to trust me on that.”

“Pardon me,” said the General. “We also know Erik is being kept by someone who has sufficient magical skill to hide him from every location and summoning spell we’ve been able to devise…”

“We do not know that,” Mordecai said. “Erik can, and does, call any god he wants.”

“There is no sensible reason he would call a god to help kidnap himself.”

“They know where we live and they threatened to hurt us,” Mordecai said dully. “I’ve said that from the very…”

“How fortunate that we find ourselves in Cyre,” said the General, dryly.

“That doesn’t…”

“The gods give the boy any information he desires, and he picks up even more on his own, I would think he must suspect we’re here by now.”

“Then why doesn’t he rescue himself?” snapped Mordecai. “Who at this table has ever been able to stop Erik when he really wanted to do something?” He swept a hand at the General, “And YOU were in charge of a war!”

Maggie touched a hand to her chest, “I’m peer pressure and he likes me, I outrank her.”

The General nodded.

“Well, you either!” said Mordecai.

“My preferred theory at the moment,” said the General, “is still that it is something to do with whatever situation has removed all the innate magic-users from this city. We cannot ignore that solely because it is inconvenient. This apparent teleportation happened less than five months after we lost Erik, and nobody wants to tell us how it was accomplished.”

“He didn’t do it,” Mordecai said, dully again, as if by rote. “I don’t know how you got it into your head…”

The General did not think it would help her argument to bring up Erik’s childhood history of attempted murder. It had never helped before.

“He didn’t have to do it,” she said. “All he has to do is know about it and want to do something about it. We have no idea what ‘it’ is, so he may be helping or burning it to the ground even as we speak. And unless he has an incredible disguise and fake papers, he’s going to be hiding exactly as you are, because everyone who looks like him in this area is gone, and there is no way in hell he can blend in.”

“You never made a habit of calling gods, General D’Iver,” said Mordecai. “I spent most of the siege doing nothing but. You don’t seem to have grasped what you can accomplish when you have a disposable coloured person you do not care about…”

“But Erik is not disposable, Mr. Eidel. Unlike all those others you sent so casually to their deaths, his talent is evident and extraordinary. He is like his mother…”

Maggie cringed and began waving an urgent hand, detecting an obvious raw nerve, but her mother seemed to feel the point was still worth making and ignored her.

“…whom I am given to understand all of you bent over backwards to protect. All sentimentality aside, her strategic value alone would have saved her, no matter who had the care of her. We must operate under the assumption that whoever is using Erik has kept him alive and intact up until this point and will continue to do so, or else what are we…”

“They don’t have to kill him to ruin him for the rest of his short…”

Maggie gave the desk a light bang, “Excuse me! If we want to know what happened to the immies, we are going to have to find another immie, and I…”

“Oh, gods, not that word,” said Mordecai.

“Shut up,” said Hyacinth. “You think the rest of us weirdos are thrilled with being ‘lemmies’? They’re going to call us something, and eye-mew and el-mew just sound…”

Mordecai pushed up from the bed and stood. This was not easily accomplished with the desk in the way, and he edged sideways to stand comfortably as he spoke, “Erik and I are not emus or whatever-the-hell flightless bird they want us to be! I don’t know why we have to pick a new, stupid word for coloured people to help the government sort us into a box! They’re always trying to sort us into boxes, like that damn empty ghetto down the street!”

He pointed in what he hoped was the approximate direction, given that he had never been out of the room: “They sort us into boxes so they can throw us away!”

Maggie broke in again, “Can we please focus on something actionable instead of relitigating this dumb…”

Milo cleared his throat and subtly (well, not very subtly) rolled back his sleeve to show a small gold imprint on his scarred wrist: LC-0419-SRO. Hyacinth had to redo it every week, because his passport said he had it, and it was supposed to be a tattoo.

The General had a real one. She didn’t need one, but she had passed all the exams with smug determination and earned herself an X-0012-SRO, in black mineral ink, for being dangerous.

Maggie and Hyacinth were lucky enough not to require a number and designation for their jobs yet, as was Mordecai. So who was sorting who into boxes, huh?

Maggie signed at him, YOU HELP [NO]. BAKA.

Milo glanced aside, ashamed.

“It’s not a competition, Milo!” said Mordecai. “I can be pissed off about the words AND the Registry!”

Hyacinth raised both hands, signalling the children to calm down, “All right, all right, everyone is extremely pissed off about everything all the time, but we can’t…”

“I’m rather thrilled our government has decided to acknowledge my existence by coining new terms for me and writing my abilities on my arm,” the General said. Her expression tightened into a snarl, “Now, if we can only force them to acknowledge that they knew exactly who we were and what we could do when they invited ‘mews’ like me to help fight their wars, and then to take this new understanding of theirs and pay us accordingly, I shall be over the moon…”

“Mom, will you help me divide the nearest countryside into a grid?” Maggie said, offering a folded map. “Or do you have a better idea? I don’t think the farms…”

“I am not an unruly toddler and I do not require an activity,” the General said.

Milo silently snapped fingers over his head, as if summoning a waiter. He signed, PIGEONS [DEAD] OR PLACEMAT [CRAYON, MUSHY [SARCASTIC] ASK]? smugly. «garçon! can we get some dead pigeons or a cwayon pwacemat over here?»

“I know everyone is frustrated as hell that we’ve been failing to find Erik for over a year, but I want to express that by doing something!” Maggie cried, upstarting. She was in a better position for it, but her chair did fold up and fall with a clatter. “This thing I want to do is new and less-stupid — it makes sense and I can justify it! I would’ve found him by now if all you meatheads didn’t make me turn around and go backwards to drag you along!”

She slumped, panting, and put both hands on the desk to hold herself up.

Hyacinth reached across and patted one hand with a smile. “There, there. I think you idiots are holding me back too.”

ONE CELL [BRAIN] HERE, MINE, Milo signed, nodding.

“I become frustrated with you because you are younger and less experienced,” the General told Maggie. “Your head is of perfectly sound construction.”

She had nothing whatsoever to say to the other meatheads to soften the blow.

“Maggie?” Mordecai said softly. “What do you want to do?”

“Stop looking in the city,” Maggie muttered. “Even if we can’t find it in the paper or get anyone to say it, people who look like you and Erik are illegal somehow. All the coloured people in the city are gone or hiding, so we need to look elsewhere. It’s harder to herd farmers into a set of apartment buildings and disappear them all in one go.”

She looked up at them, shaking her head, “There have got to be immies somewhere in this gods-forsaken country who know what’s going on and have some idea where their relatives have gone. Yeah? We find immies, we find out what’s going on, and we start making better guesses about what Erik’s doing that’s got him so tangled up he can’t get back to us. Can we do that? Does anyone have anything else?”

“A lot more of the same stuff that hasn’t been helping,” Hyacinth said, still smiling, though a bit more pained. “I mean, I’m not saying we should quit.” She flipped desolately through a few pages of the incomprehensible Prokovian newspaper. “You know. Maybe they’ll slip up and print something we need to know. Or maybe Erik’ll take out an ad in the one local paper in our language. I dunno. Maybe it’ll all fall into place without us pushing.” She smirked. “If we keep plodding along like that racist tortoise I heard about.”

RACE [GO], Milo signed.

SHE KNOWS, Maggie signed.

HE KNOWS SHE KNOWS, Mordecai signed, with a small, exasperated smile. JOKE FOR US.

Milo twitched a smile of his own.

Hyacinth politely disregarded the rapid, subsidiary conversation under her nose. As usual. “But I feel better pushing,” she said. “I’m used to it. Do you need help with the map or can the rest of us peel off and try to figure out the news?”

“Mom?” Maggie said.

The General shooed a hand at her. “You know how to conduct a grid search. I am retired. I do puzzles now.” She swept the same hand towards the papers. “But since you are looking for farmers, do pay attention to the terrain. They do not terrace or terraform in Prokovia.”

Maggie regarded the map with a relieved, somewhat shamefaced, grin. “Yeah.” That made the huge swaths of land look a little more manageable. No farmers in the hills, only between them!

She wandered back towards the connecting door, intending to use the space on the other desk to plan.

Mordecai stopped her, just for a moment, “Thank you, Maggie.” He put forth the effort, she knew it was an effort, and smiled.

She turned and wrapped both arms around him. She spoke into his ear, “We will figure this out. He can’t hide forever.”

He nodded and let her go. But as he returned to the desk, he couldn’t help thinking of that neighbourhood of empty buildings, just next door. Could those people, people like him and Erik, hide forever?

Hyacinth put a hand on his shoulder and spoke into his ear as well, “I see two untouched doughnuts and an empty coffee sitting in your space. One thing you do not need is caffeine on an empty stomach, old man. Eat something.”

He swatted her away, winding up to cut her with something really insulting. Maybe a comprehensive list of her failures to save the people she loved, that would hit an ex-medic with attachment issues right where she lived.

Or he could say something cute, and funny, like, “Your hair is greyer than mine,” so she’d know her fragile old friend was okay, not really mad.

He wasn’t okay. He wasn’t really mad either.

He just didn’t have the strength.

“All right,” he said.

He sat on the bed and tried to get through the physical act of consuming a doughnut, as Hyacinth and the General began dissecting the papers, and Milo retrieved Ann’s dress from the closet so she could help too.

I know why I’m hiding, he thought, chewing with grim determination. This is as close as I can get to someone I lost, and I’ll keep hiding until I find him. But why is he hiding?

What is he doing?

If they really do need him alive and intact to do it, why doesn’t he just come home…?