Welcome to Bordertown Read online

  No two alike:

  Each reflects the soul that dreams it

  Like a mirror in a fun house.

  And a third, to make up the spell:

  Mortals need mysteries.

  They may not like them, but they need them

  As vampires need blood,

  As elves need mortals.

  WE DO NOT COME IN PEACE

  BY CHRISTOPHER BARZAK

  I saw him again tonight, while out walking the streets of Soho: Alek or Aleksander, whatever it is he’s called now. He’s had plenty of names since I first knew him when he arrived almost a year ago, fresh and green from the World. One of the newcomers after the Way reopened. Mouse. Alek. Aleksander. Voice of the Nameless, voice for those who drink from the river whose waters curse them to return to it daily to forget their troubles, those who came and didn’t find what they’d been told would be a glorious place free of the World’s restrictions, where they could be themselves more than anywhere and wouldn’t have to fight for it.

  Right.

  I was out late tonight, wandering the streets, kept up by a weird urgency that made my thoughts move around like snakes inside me. I couldn’t stop thinking. Should I stay, or should I go? Living on the Border wasn’t the same as it was when I’d arrived five years ago at the age of sixteen, when life was a song and everyone listened to my music, in every club and on every corner of Soho. Fair Ones and humans and halfies alike, all of them. They loved me.

  Back then, I’d been like Aleksander: idealistic, still young. Youth is half of what anyone who comes to this city needs in order to make a way. The rest is a blend of luck, skill, and a friendly disposition. By the time you’re like me, though—edging into your twenties and things haven’t worked out the way you’d hoped—you might as well start looking for another way: ply your trade as a carpenter, clerk for the Fair Ones, open a business. That last one is what I just did, after I’d made some money and collected on as many owed favors as I could to establish myself.

  A sort of shop, of all things, is what I opened, just a month ago. People laughed when they saw the sign go up. “Art and Lies.” In red neon, as if it were a pub’s “Open” sign. “What are you up to now, Marius?” people ask me.

  “Paintings and sculptures and books,” I say. “And, of course, coffee.”

  “But what about your music?”

  “What about it?” I say. “I’m doing something else now, that’s all.”

  Which is true, sort of. I am doing something else, but in fact I’ve lost whatever connection I had to the music that used to simply be there, in reach, whenever I wanted, like a glass of water on a bedside table. When I reach now, I come back empty. I can play the notes, but there’s no joy in them. After a while I realized that if music had abandoned me, I would need another way to live.

  Should I stay, or should I go? was my refrain tonight, even though I have a store to run now, a secure life if I can let myself love it. The World may have changed since I left it at sixteen, but I could still go back to it. And then, as I turned a corner of a crowded sidewalk, I saw him. Alek. Aleksander. Mouse.

  He was leaving the Café Tremolo with a group of young people, hands in their pockets, pants sagging below their waists, faces pressed against the autumn wind. I nearly raised my hand, got it halfway up in the air like a sail before I realized what I was doing, then dropped it, embarrassed. I was going to call out, I was going to say his name. And then what? What would Mouse do when he turned and saw his first friend in this city? Twenty-one years old, a washed-up musician, selling used books and bad art traded by new arrivals from the World or from past Elfhaeme Gate, where the Fair Ones come and go freely. A dealer in abandoned items, things looking for a home with people who are occasionally afflicted with nostalgia for everything they’ve left behind.

  “It speaks volumes about you,” Mouse told me the last time we saw each other. That was just three weeks ago, right after I opened my shop.

  “Please leave,” I’d said. He’d been trying to hurt my feelings, and I refused to be hurt by a sixteen-year-old punk in whom I’d already invested too much time and energy and, well, even love since I’d met him nearly a year ago. Or so I told myself.

  But as I watched him and his friends tonight, their backs to me, going to whatever radical gathering they were probably late for, I had a terrible idea. It was terrible because as soon as I had it, I knew it was bad. But it was strong and grew to such a size so quickly it took hold of my mind and conducted me, as if I were its puppet, to follow, trailing them by a block or two, until I came to a run-down brick building on Hell Street where they must have been squatting, and there I stopped myself from going farther. Control reverted to me again. He’d always had that effect on me. Aleksander. Mouse.

  I stood outside, watching the lights go on in the windows of that shabby building, remembering why I’d liked him, realizing I still liked him now, even though it was clear he’d gone crazy.

  * * *

  It was in front of Danceland on the west end of Ho, ten months ago, where I first saw Mouse. That was where he’d landed after making a wish so strong back in the World, he’d opened his eyes and found himself here. In Soho, Runaway Central, where kids arrive with awe forming teardrops in the corners of their eyes, thinking, I’ve made it.

  I was across the street at my usual spot between the Hard Luck and Snappin’ Wizards, busking as best I could despite my still-recent disconnect from the music, money clinking into the violin case at my feet even though I heard every bad note step on a good one. Then, between blinks, Mouse appeared, with his arms crossed over his chest as if it were cold wherever it was he’d come from, bewilderment covering his face like a billboard.

  I snorted. He reminded me of myself when I’d arrived five years ago, thinking I’d just won a golden ticket. How long, I wondered, before his doe eyes acquired the squint of a person who knows they must assess everyone and everything they encounter? How long before his clean mop of soft brown hair was twisted with the filth of sleeping in abandoned corners?

  And then, as I ran bow across string, bringing my song to a close, I saw a Trueblood come from the direction of Oberon House, down Ho Street, with a gleam in his eyes and a cat’s grin creeping up his cheeks. He, too, had noticed the new mouse.

  In the next moment I found myself locking my violin in its case with the bits of money I’d collected and dashing across the street. Even then, without knowing him, Alek had that effect on me: my legs brought me to him without any input from my brain.

  Crossing the block at the same time, the Trueblood’s eyes focused on Mouse’s slight figure. Alek was small for his age, a bit pretty. Perfect for what goes on at Oberon House. I reached him first, though, and when I stood in front of him and asked, as kindly as possible, if he was looking for a place to stay, he nodded, held out his hand for shaking, said, “Yes. Yes, I am. I don’t know where I should go from here. Just arrived. Name’s Aleksander.”

  I grinned as the Trueblood came to a halt ten feet from us, his pearly smile fading as he realized I’d beaten him to his meal. “No,” I told Aleksander, warning him not to give away his true name so easily here. “No, your name is Mouse.”

  I put my arm around his shoulders and walked him away from the Trueblood, who wrinkled his pasty white nose and tugged at a silver ring looped through one of his pointed ears. As we followed Third Street up to the canal, I told Mouse about Oberon House and why he should steer clear of it.

  “They really keep human children in there?” he asked. “They make them … make them—”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s not much more than a brothel. A brothel for human storytellers.”

  I’d learned that the hard way, but I didn’t tell Mouse that. I hadn’t told anyone, ever, about my first few weeks in Bordertown. I’d managed to get out of there before I’d lost too much of my dignity. A girl who was in there with me had shown us all the way. She and some of the others still told stories on the streets of Soho. They call themselve
s the Bards. I hadn’t seen her in a while.

  “But I thought,” said Mouse. “I thought …”

  “All that glitters, Mouse,” I said, but I didn’t finish that either.

  “What you said about not giving my true name to strangers?” said Mouse. “I just … I thought it would be different here.” Wasn’t everyone here for the same reasons, he wondered: peace, love, happiness, equality, fraternity, et cetera, et cetera?

  “If that was true,” I said, “everyone would be leaving the World to live here, now wouldn’t they?”

  Mouse nodded, looked down at the black-gummed stains on the sidewalk as we trudged toward my neighborhood. He was naive but not stupid. A good chance he’d survive here, then.

  We crossed the canal and headed west into the quiet streets of Letterville, where I rented a small apartment only slightly better than a Soho squat. The electricity was off again. Probably would be until the landlord could get someone to come by to repair or recast. So we lit the candles I keep for that kind of emergency, which happens so often it doesn’t really count as one.

  “Thank you,” Alek said after we’d set the place glowing. “For helping me out.”

  I lifted his chin with the tip of a finger, trying to make him smile. But when he turned his face up to me, I saw from his glassy eyes that he was holding back tears.

  “Where do you want me to sleep?” he asked steadily. He glanced over at my bed, then back at me. Without the tears in his eyes, I’d never have known how scared he was.

  “No worries,” I said. Realizing he thought I wanted him to sleep with me as some sort of exchange, I pulled my hand away. “You don’t have to do anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.” I started making up a bed from an old mattress I’d found in the street and had used for a year before I’d been able to save up for a new bed of my own. “You’ll catch on to things soon,” I told Mouse. “I’ll show you the ropes.”

  * * *

  There are so many things to learn if a person truly intends to live on the Border. Nothing much is what you expect, nothing much is what it seems. Even when you hear your native tongue on the lips of others, rarely will the words mean what they did in the world you came from.

  An object lesson: There once was an elf who often stopped by my corner to listen to me playing. He came for three days straight, then a whole week. He never spoke, only smiled, clapped his hands after every song, and threw coins into my violin case like they were roses. Whenever he stood there watching me play, it was almost as if I could feel his eyes traveling down the length of my bow, over my body, under my clothes, as if they were his delicate, long fingers. Eventually one night he did speak to me, at the end of a long evening. I couldn’t help myself. The way he looked at me, I wanted to be seen like that even more.

  So he took me to his splendid home on Dragon’s Tooth Hill, where the streets are awash with the sheen of gold and the sparkle of diamonds, and there he covered me in kisses and told me he had never loved anyone as much as he loved me. My skin burned at his touch. The next morning, I woke beneath his silken sheets, alone, like someone in a bad romance novel. I wasn’t sure if I should be happy or sad. After locating the various pieces of my clothing and dressing myself, I wandered around until I found the dining room, where he was sipping coffee at the other end of a table as long as a corporate building’s hallway. When I cleared my throat, he looked up from his book, tucked his silver hair behind the spade-points of his ears, and said, “Good morning. Would you like some coffee before you leave?”

  They are like that, the Fair Ones. In the midst of passion, their love burns. In the light of day, the flame falters. His withdrawal could only be because of two things: I was human, and thus beneath him; and I lived on the coins others threw me, and thus was even further beneath him. So it goes.

  He was the son of a businessman-turned-councilman who wanted to make a bid for the position of High Councilor. I discovered this only after his driver dropped me on the corner where the elf had picked me up the night before. The driver pressed a bag of coins into my hands before he gave his horses a secret word, and off they went into the traffic of bicycles, cars, and floating rickshaws pulled behind the strong legs of street runners.

  Stitched upon the velvet of the bag was the elf’s family crest. It was easy to recognize. It appeared on the side of a reconstructed skyscraper in the business district. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that the night before had been a transaction.

  And when I complained about it a few days later at Danceland, where I’d gone to drink away my idiocy, the bartender, Valda, said, “I know exactly who you’re talking about. He likes his humans, he does, that one. The sillier, the better.” She laughed and poured me another drink. “This one’s on the house, love,” she said. “Go ahead. You earned it.”

  “Don’t let my mistakes be yours,” I told Mouse, giving him this story a few weeks after he’d settled in. I didn’t tell him that I was paying our rent each month with a coin from that bag, that I was buying our food with the coins from that bag. I kept it under a floorboard beneath my bed, like buried treasure—hiding it not just for its value, but because it shamed me to see it, to be reminded.

  “It doesn’t make any sense.” Mouse shook his head.

  “What doesn’t?”

  “The stories about this place—back home, I mean—made Bordertown sound wonderful. People who were here before the Way closed off for all those years. I’ve read this one blog—”

  “Blog?” I furrowed my eyebrows.

  “Yeah, a journal someone keeps on the Internet.”

  He was endlessly educating me about things that had occurred in the World since I last saw it. Planes had crashed into buildings, new wars had started. People kept private things like journals out in the open, for all to read on the Internet.

  “Their stories made this place sound like heaven,” he said. “But really, it seems like it’s hard to live here without joining a gang or turning tricks or thieving.”

  “I suppose it is wonderful here,” I said. “For some.”

  “Yes,” he said. “For some. And that’s the thing that doesn’t make any sense. It seems silly to run away from one world only to set up the same rotten systems all over again in a new one.”

  “I don’t make the rules, Mouse,” I said. “I just live here.”

  “But you’re wrong,” he said. “You do make the rules here. Because you live here. Don’t you see?”

  I ruffled his hair and laughed as I told him it looked like he was growing it long enough to pose as an elf. He shrugged my hand off as if I were a troublesome parent. “Sorry,” I said, and looked out the window over my kitchen table.

  From my grime-streaked window, I could see clouds of smoke rising from the mill stacks down by the canal. That view was the reason I rented that apartment. Back home, where I’d come from, there’d been smokestacks I could see from my kitchen window, too. So when I looked through this one, I could pretend for a moment that I’d gone home a year ago, when I still could have, before the Way between the World and the Borderlands closed for those mysterious thirteen days, before enough time passed to make me a stranger to my old friends and family. Time has a funny way of bending here on the Border. Thirteen days here had been thirteen years back in the World, as we discovered when people like Mouse started coming through with their new toys and new ways of thinking. By now, back home, nobody’s heard a word from me for thirteen years. I’d probably been declared officially dead. And if I’m not dead on paper, in the hearts of my old friends and family, I must be.

  “Sorry,” I said again, wishing things could be different for both of us.

  “Don’t be sorry, Marius,” said Aleksander. “Be angry.”

  * * *

  Over the short days of that winter, I showed him the city’s darkest corners, its best angles, and the wild Nevernever that surrounded it. I pointed out the neutral territories, encouraged him to stick to those. And by his fifth month in the city, when spring re
turned and washed the streets down, he said, “I think I’ve decided to stay.”

  “Where?” I said. “In town? Or with me?”

  That got a smile, a rare thing from Mouse, who had been carrying a frown around like an anchor.

  But disappointment is an odd emotion to witness in others. It comes and goes as it pleases, returns after you think you’ve beaten it. For weeks—even after Mouse decided to stay, even after that glint of a smile he’d offered—it seemed he wouldn’t speak unless I asked him a question. It was as if he lived inside the space of his own skull, and only occasionally would he come out, eyes blinking in the new light, mouth slowly opening to say, “I’ve taken a job as a bike messenger.” That was in his sixth month.

  “Where did you get a bike?” I asked, and Alek replied that he and a friend had gone in together on buying one. The friend paid for it, but Alek was paying his half off little by little with the job. Fair enough, I thought, hoping the work would be good for him.

  Or, a month later, when summer was starting to heat up: “I met this guy who says the elves want to push the humans and halfies out of the Bordertown High Council. Said they’ve been up to something. Said he could smell bad magic brewing.”

  “And was this guy staggering around?” I asked. “That would explain a lot.”

  “He was perfectly sober,” said Mouse.

  I shrugged. “Just don’t go getting caught up with anyone who worries about stuff like that too much.” Gang wars sometimes break out because an elf looks at a human the wrong way, or a halfie tries to pass for a Trueblood and gets caught. Already the streets were heating up early that summer with random spats of violence. “Don’t take any of that on yourself.”

  “Oh, Marius,” he said, shaking his head, his mop of brown hair rolled into dreadlocks by that point. “I wish you weren’t so afraid.”

  “Afraid?” I said.

  “You’re exactly the sort of human they desire.”