I tried not to show nothing in my face when she said real people. It seemed almost like she was testing me to see what I knowed, or didn’t know, about her and Paul.
“Will Ursala be with us?” I asked.
“No, Ursala is working. We’ll be stopping by the lab though. She says she’s got some medicine for me to pass along to Cup. Would you know anything about that?”
“It’s medicine to keep her voice and her face and her body from changing. Cup is crossed.”
“She’s what?”
“Crossed. She’s got a body that’s like a boy’s, but Ursala was able to make the hormones that—”
Lorraine put her hand across my mouth. I run out of words all at once, shocked at that touch that I didn’t want and didn’t see coming. She was shaking her head, with her lips all pursed up like she had tasted something bad. “All right,” she said. “That’s enough of that unpleasantness, thank you. You’re our guests here, and I wouldn’t dream of interfering, but really! Don’t you think boys should be boys and girls should be girls?”
She took her hand away, so I guess she meant for me to answer. “I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “People is people.”
“But god shows us what we are by the way he makes us.”
It was such a strange thing to hear, I didn’t know for a moment what to say to it. “Well,” I said at last, “then I guess he made Cup knowing she’s a girl.”
We stared for a few seconds longer, each at other. Then Lorraine laughed. She took my hands in hers and give them a squeeze.
I wished with all my heart she was not so ready to touch me. “The weight of the world on your shoulders,” she said. “You’re a good friend, Koli. But shake a leg now. You’ve got a busy day ahead of you!”
She waited outside again while I changed my clothes. When I come out, she inspected me, head to toe, brushing my shoulders and twitching the front of my shirt so it would hang right. “I’m sorry to take the uniform away from you,” she said, “but these things have to be done the right way. The next time you wear Albion blues, you’ll have come by them properly. You’ll be youth troop at first, but not for long. And I bet you’ll be a squad leader before you’re seventeen. Okay, by the left, quick march.” She walked on down the hallway, lifting her legs up high and swinging her arms backwards and forwards. When she seen me staring, she only laughed. “Don’t worry, Koli,” she said. “You’ll pick it up.”
The way we went was a new way, at least at first, and it took us through a great many doors that opened when Lorraine come to them. Well, oftentimes they opened, but not always. Some of them didn’t do nothing at all, and some tried to open but then stuck halfway. When that happened, Lorraine pushed them the rest of the way with her own two hands. There was a great grinding of metal as she pushed, but her face stayed calm as if she was not straining herself at all.
I was looking at all this a mite closer than I did on the first day. I seen that when the doors opened they didn’t do it all by their own selves. There was something Lorraine done when she come to them. She touched her hand to the door, close to where the handle was, and then the door would spring open as if it only just then come awake and seen her. Whenever we come to a door of a shaking room, that didn’t have no handle, she touched the silver plate on the wall next to the doors instead.
The second or third time she done this, I thought I seen a piece of metal, flat and round, sitting in the middle of her palm. I wasn’t certain sure, since I only seen it for a half of a moment, but after that I kept on looking and I seen it ever and again. One time, when the door didn’t open right away, Lorraine did the same thing three times over. She ended up by pressing her whole hand to the door until at last it opened up.
All the rooms we went through was either very full or very empty. There wasn’t one that was in the middle, like a room where people might choose to live. Some of them was open onto big empty spaces like I seen before, where something had ripped the ship open – and there was two rooms together that was open to the outside. That was the biggest surprise of all. I stood there staring out at just nothing but sky and ocean until Lorraine bid me go on with some joke about how I was dawdling and she was shocked at my laziness.
This was how she behaved the whole way – just as bright and as cheerful as she was the day before. She kept up the same chattering talk about how sweet and clever I was, and kind of pretended that there wasn’t no hair or hint of a quarrel between us. Like Cup and me hadn’t been shut up in our rooms with threats and curses. Or like setting drones to wander round your house at night and shoot people that was walking there was a task you might do in the way of things – like drawing water or chopping wood. Or beating your son.
“Do you and Paul follow Dandrake?” I asked. For it seemed to me that would be a peg that fit in the hole.
“Who’s that, dear?” Lorraine asked. She didn’t break her stride or even look at me.
“Dandrake. The messenger that was sent down out of Heaven after people stopped recking the dead god’s word.”
She tutted her tongue and put on a sour face. “Oh,” she said. “That one. The rabble-rouser who thinks he’s the second coming. No, we don’t have any truck with all that nonsense. Anyone who names himself Daniel Jesus Mohammed Moses Drake and expects to be taken seriously is tainting the good fresh air as far as I’m concerned. And that’s before he sticks his big fat nose into politics.” She shaked her head. “No, we’re Presbyterians. My great-grandparents were Scots, and very low church. They broke into a rash at the sight of a stained-glass window.”
I had give up trying to make sense of all this, and was trying my best to remember each turn we took so I could find my way back if I needed to. It was hard because a lot of the halls and rooms on Sword of Albion had the same look to them, with broke and burned things all piled up. What I done, though, was to use a trick my friend Spinner Tanhide teached to me one time. I choosed one broke thing in each room and give the room a name to fit with what that one thing looked like. One room would be stovepipe, the next one birds’ nest and so on.
But we was come by this time into some rooms that had a familiar look to them. There was a room full of white cupboards, and then a room full of shelves. I was near to being certain what the next room would bring, and I was proved right. The door opened on the room with the big bench, and the dagnostic lying out on the bench, and Ursala working at it.
There was something new there besides. Paul Banner’s drone floated high up in the corner of the room with its red light winking. It turned in a circle or rocked from side to side from time to time, but it didn’t move from its place.
I seen at once that Paul and Lorraine wasn’t bothering to make no more pretences. We was prisoners here, all three, and they meant for us to know it.
19
Ursala looked up when I come in. She seemed really pleased to see me, but she only showed it by giving me good day. I think I told you already that she was not one for hugging or kissing or any such show. “It’s good to see you, Koli,” she said. “I’m making great strides here. This is a treasure trove.”