“Don’t know about friends,” snorted a girl who was at least half warthog, two tusks and a snout protruding from her face, “but if you pay good, we won’t be enemies.”
Then came another legless lady—this one apparently unable to float, because she moved by taking great leaps forward on her hands. Then, with the litheness of a cat she jumped into the burly warthog girl’s waiting arms. I could see her properly there: She lacked not only legs, but hips, waist, and half a torso. Her body, and the black satin blouse she wore, were cropped in a neat line near her belly button.
“Hattie the Halfsie,” she said, giving us a little salute. “Which one of you is the famous feral?”
“Don’t call her that,” snapped a teenage boy with a huge, pulsating boil on his neck. “It’s derogatory.”
“Fine, uncontacted.”
“She’s not that either, anymore,” said Dogface. “She’s had to learn fast.”
The warthog girl let out a snorting laugh. “Not fast enough, from the looks of her!”
Noor’s jaw was locked tight, as if through sheer force of will she was forcing herself forward.
“These curious souls are the Untouchables,” Dogface said, turning to walk backward for a moment, like a tour guide. “The ones no other clan wanted.”
“Too peculiar to ever pass as normal,” said Hattie.
“The most appalling, most unspeakable, most disgusting peculiars anywhere!” the boy with the boil said proudly.
“I don’t think you’re disgusting,” said Bronwyn.
“Take it back!” said warthog girl, scowling.
Dogface twirled like a dancer and slid through an open door. “And this is our sanctum sanctorum. Well, the front door, anyhow.”
We followed him into the room, and then Noor and I stopped cold. In the middle of the floor was an operating table, and honeycombed into the back wall were a dozen small freezer doors. This room was not only a dead end, it was the hospital’s morgue.
“It’s okay,” Bronwyn said to Noor, gentle but urgent. “It won’t kill us.”
“Oh, hell no,” Noor said, backing away. “There’s no way I’m hiding in one of those things.”
“Not hiding,” Hugh said. “Traveling.”
“She don’t like it,” said the warthog girl. “She’s scared!”
The Untouchables all tittered in the doorway behind us.
Noor was already out of the room, crossing to another open door across the hall, the last alternative before going back the way we’d come.
Bronwyn and Hugh started after her, but I blocked them. “Let me talk to her,” I said.
Climbing into a morgue freezer would’ve been a hard sell for anyone, peculiar or otherwise, but especially for someone so new to this world. I didn’t particularly relish the idea myself.
I ran across the hall to join Noor in the other room. There was a bare metal cot lit by a beam of sunlight from a barred window. The corners were stacked up with discarded personal items that had belonged, presumably, to people who’d lived and died in the institution. Suitcases. Shoes.
Noor was agitated, turning from side to side. “I could’ve sworn I saw a door here. When we were running by before . . .”
“There’s no other way out,” I said.
Then I saw it, and my stomach sank.
“You mean this?”
She turned to look, and when she registered what it was, I thought she might cry. It was part of a mural on the wall. A trompe l’oeil; a door made of paint.
And then we heard the piano clang—once, twice, three times. Leo’s men had climbed through.
“We have a choice,” I said. “We can either . . .”
She wasn’t listening. She was focused on the barred window and the sun beaming through it.
I started again. “We can either stay here and wait for them to definitely find us . . .”
She swept the air with both hands but succeeded only in scraping finger-trails of darkness through it, which quickly filled in again with light. I’d seen this sort of thing before: Some peculiar abilities function like muscles, and they can be strained, exhausted. Others get shy when the pressure’s on.
She turned to face me. “Or I can trust you.”
“Yes,” I said, willing her toward me with every fiber of myself. “Me and a bunch of weirdos.”
Leo’s men were thundering down the outer hallway, searching rooms, rattling locked doors.
“This is absurd.” She shook her head, then met my eyes, and something in her steadied. “I shouldn’t trust you. But I do.”
She’d accepted so much absurdity already. What was a little more, in the balance, when it might save us?
Bronwyn and Hugh were waiting at the door, looking panicked. “Ready?” Hugh said.
“Better be,” said Dogface, leaning in. “By the way, if we have to cosh one of ’em for you, that’s a thousand.”
“Or Miss Poubelle can memory-wipe ’em for two,” said the boy with the pulsating boil.
The men spotted us darting across the hall. I didn’t look back, but I could hear their shouts and footfalls. The Untouchables had disappeared—they clearly didn’t want to tangle with Leo’s men, or make enemies of them, if they didn’t have to.
In the morgue, one of the lower body freezers was now unlatched and hanging open. Hugh was standing beside it—and when he saw us coming he called to us, waved us on, and dove in.
We ran to the open freezer and squinted into the blackness inside. It wasn’t just a cabinet for a corpse: it was a narrow tunnel that seemed to go on forever. Hugh’s voice echoed from somewhere deep within, receding quickly. “Whoooaaaaa!”
I waited for Noor to go first. “This is stupid I’m so stupid this is so so stupid,” she was chanting, but then she took a deep breath, steeled herself, and climbed in headfirst. She slid in partway but then got a little stuck, so I grabbed her feet and pushed, and in a moment the little compartment in the morgue wall swallowed her up.
Bronwyn went next, at my insistence, and then it was my turn. It was harder to make myself climb in than it should’ve been, considering I was the one who had convinced Noor to do it. It was such an unnatural action, shoving oneself into a morgue tray, that it took a few seconds of special effort for my rational mind—which knew that horrible, dark tunnely places made excellent loop entrances—to overcome my natural instincts, which were saying no, no, no, you’ll be eaten by zombies, nooooo. The sound of angry men bursting through the door behind me helped a great deal, though, and before they got to me I was in, wriggling deeper and deeper as fast as I could.