Welcome to Bordertown by Ellen Kushner, Holly Black (editors) Read Free Book Online

go.”
    “I don’t want to go to any party. Not like this.”
    “Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s at night. You’ll be beautiful. Again.”
    *   *   *
     
    I’m starting to know my way around Soho. I walk and walk as I search for Trish, which is harder on Rosco than it is on me, but he trots along gamely, wheezing as he goes but refusing to stay back at the House. At night I rub Ms. Wu’s Special Magic Healing Salve into his aching old joints. The stuff makes him sneeze, and he smells like cherry candy, but it seems to be helping.
    We go to the places I think Trish might go to: the music clubs and the galleries, the free concerts in Fare-You-Well Park. Yeats Night at the Changeling Theater and the poetry slams at Café Tremolo. I’ve tracked down every bookstore and library this side of Water Street, describing my sister to the clerks: brown hair, blue eyes, and about this tall; a lover of myths, medieval ballads, Celtic harp music, and fantasy trilogies. It finally dawns on me that it’s not exactly a unique description in this town.
    I’m
the one who stands out here, a long-haired redneck with a scruffy old dog and a heavy old duffel that I carry everywhere. (My tools are in that bag, and I’m
not
letting them get stolen.) I packed up my tools with more care than my clothes, so my wardrobe is kind of limited, just two pairs of jeans, an old flannel shirt, and a couple of T-shirts from Mr. Fix-It, the repair shop where I used to work. Some of the kids at the Diggers’ House are calling me Mr. Fix-It now. I’d been quietly making repairs at the House—just simple things, carpentry and plumbing jobs that don’t need any weird magic. If a hinge is sagging or a tap is leaking, it will bug me until I get out my tools.
    At night, in my closet, I sleep like the dead, with Rosco stretched out and snoring beside me. The next day we’re up and back on the streets: We walk and we walk and we walk and we walk. I stare at strangers; I scan every crowd; I ask everyone I meet if they’ve seen her. “Maybe,” they tell me. She’s got that kind of face that you think you’ve seen somewhere before. And maybeyou have. So I follow every lead I am given, and it’s never my sister.
    Berlin, at the Diggers’ House, is sympathetic but not optimistic. She tells me that finding one runaway girl in a city this big will be no easy task. “If she’s down here in Soho, then maybe you’ll get lucky. But, honey, she could be anywhere—traveling with the traders, or working Uptown, or tucked away in some fancy love nest on the Hill. What are you going to do, spend the next five years knocking on every door from Letterville to Elftown?”
    Yeah, I know, needle and haystack. But I’ve got to try to find her all the same. My family has been broken for thirteen long years now.
    And fixing things is what I do.
    *   *   *
     
    Should I stay or should I go?
    A solitary violinist was busking mournfully on the southern corner of Ho and Third. Even he was fiddling that same tune. Playing it like a lament.
    It was too much. Trish felt like she was going crazy—like the city itself was attacking her, mocking her indecision, magnifying her pain. She whirled around in a circle on the sidewalk in front of Danceland, looking for an escape that wasn’t there. She couldn’t breathe. She was going to faint—she was going to die—
    “Hey.” Trish felt a hand on her arm. “You okay?”
    It was an elf, tall and blond—a girl with a ponytail and a Changeling Theater T-shirt. It was Cam, the halfie waitress from the Hard Luck Café.
    “Here …” Cam tried to ease Trish’s backpack off her.
    For some reason the lifting of that tiny burden made Trish want to burst into sobs of relief, as though Cam were lifting all her troubles off her back. But she didn’t want to cry on the street, in front of some stranger—
    “Hey,” Cam said again, helping her sit down on the curb. “It’s okay. Really. Everyone from the World is