by Sean Platt
“My exile,” said Clint. “You say it’s legend?”
Finally, the stoic figure of Z gave a satisfyingly surprised reaction. He’d been standing in the corner, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, but when Clint had mentioned his exile, Z had slipped and had to put out a hand to catch himself.
Oliver looked from Z to Clint. “Yes,” he said. “But what does your exile matter in terms of finding the Red Room?”
“It matters,” said Clint, “because I think I’ve been there.”
CHAPTER SIX:
REALM, OTEL, AND SALAD
They left the ivy-covered building with a thankoo to the scholar (who found “thankoo” to be quaint) and walked out into the warm Realm air. Since his arrival in The Realm, Clint had never been too hot nor too cold. The temperature was always exactly perfect. He looked around at the others and took in their range of clothing, wondering if any of them were too hot or too cold. Somehow, he doubted it. There was magic in the air, and he suspected that if he were to strip naked, he’d still be plenty warm. If someone standing beside him wanted to don furs, that person would find him or herself cool and content.
They wandered off the edutorium grounds, to where the grass underfoot gave way to yellow stone.
The place of learning seemed to be in the city’s center — an oasis of green amidst glass, crystal, alloy, and stone. Yet the city didn’t have an odor like Meadowlands had. The air was fresh and new. Clint smelled vanilla — his favorite scent — and was suddenly sure the other six in his party were smelling their favorites, different though they may be. Even Churchill, perhaps, was smelling machine oil.
Clint stood where two streets crossed, looked up one and then the other, then marched forward.
He didn’t have the slightest idea where he was going. Not even an inkling. Both streets were equal to Clint — the buildings and vehicles shining with the same strange inner glow, and every citizen wearing a wide, pleased smile. Colors on both streets were vibrant. The music Clint seemed to hear — again his favorite: Joelsongs — came from neither street, but instead from every corner of the very air around him. He took in the music as he walked, having no idea where he was going or why. He thought of what Oliver had said about The Realm borrowing from other worlds, and how Joelsongs were among those borrowed items. Where had they come from? Who had first sung them? The gunslinger realized he had no idea. Joelsongs were like the sun and sand to him and everyone he’d ever known. They’d been in the world since always.
Clint led their group straight, right, left, left. They made a near perfect circle, but no one asked why or expressed any doubt. None of the citizens found the procession of helmeted guards and their uniformed escorts in any way odd. They passed several lesser paladins — those Oliver referred to as Hill Streets — and the paladins waved. They even passed one particular paladin thrice and he waved each time, apparently not finding it at all suspicious that the group was walking in circles. On the second and third pass, Clint grew curious about the paladin, and tried to determine what the man was doing with a pad of papers and some sort of pencil or quill. He’d seen lawmen in Meadowlands doing much the same. In Meadowlands, if a man left his stagecoach or motorized vehicle on the street for too long, a lawman would write a fine on a slip of paper and pin it to the vehicle. But the Realm paladin — the Hill Street, out on his rounds — wasn’t writing fines on his pad before adhering the notes to vehicles he passed. Instead, he was making small drawings: round smiling faces; flowers; once, a butterfly. Clint dared a greeting, sure even as he did it that it was unwise. The paladin raised his hand again and in reply said, “Beautiful day to you!”
They went up streets, down streets, up and down stairs to elevated walkways. Nobody asked about what he’d said about his exile, the Red Room, or their connection. There was a spell over the group, and the others seemed to think that Clint was homing in on something, or possibly in a trance. But Clint wasn’t in a trance. He was walking with faith.
Earlier, he’d had a flash — a tiny, tiny, infinitesimal vision of a room inside his mind. He hadn’t seen red walls, but something inside him said that the non-red room was the Red Room anyway. The flash was there and then gone. Clint had the memory hours before, in the tunnels of the Keep, but for some reason, he kept thinking on it: a single frame from a flicker of a thought. A whiff of smoke that went in one ear and out the other.
And then, there was another thought that was particularly sticky: Mai, and a bookseller. Clint had never, as far as he could recall, been to a bookseller with Mai. Solace hadn’t had one, and he’d only known her in Solace and Meadowlands and the border towns between, all of the last entirely too poor for a store solely devoted to books. Meadowlands had booksellers of course, but during their time there, Clint didn’t think they’d gone to one. By then, Mai was too sick with the magic. Too ready to burst from her body and become whatever it was she’d become.
A room that wasn’t obviously red, barely seen.
A false thought, involving he and his dead wife in a bookseller.
Those two things — and those two things alone — led him as he ushered the six Conspiracists through The Realm with nowhere to go.
But that wasn’t true, was it? There was a third thought, too… but that one was more of an impression than a thought. It was something he’d taken for granted, because it had become part of him. It was a recurring memory of something Mai had told him, over and over and over again.
She always used to say: “It will all work out.”
Telling Clint that it would all work out had just been one of those things she’d done, like how she mocked him when he grew too curmudgeonly. But as the years passed, as his guilt over Mai’s death grew worse, Clint found that he could almost hear her in his mind. Over and over, he would think that all hope was lost and that he couldn’t survive without her. And when that had happened — and when, three times, he’d turned his guns on himself and feathered the triggers with his big, callused fingers — he’d remembered her saying, “It will all work out.” Those memories felt like phantasms at the time, but now he wondered if they might have been more. Maybe she’d never left him at all. Maybe Mai had always been with him through those difficult times.
It will all work out.
Just like Edward telling him, Things always happen for a reason.
Coming from Mai, the platitude sounded like naive optimism. Mai could be crushed by a boulder, and in her last moment, she would tell the worlds that it would all work out. Coming from Edward, on the other hand, the idea that things happened for a reason sounded prophetic. Clint would flat-out believe it if Edward said it. Why? Because Edward was in touch with magic true. Yet wasn’t the sentiment exactly the same? And wasn’t Mai — mayhap even more than Edward — in touch with the magic, especially now? And on the heels of that thought, Clint became suddenly convinced that despite Mai’s silence inside him, she was still there. He was sure of it: She was still there. She was deep down, seemingly suffocated by white magic of The Realm. But she was there.
A room that wasn’t obviously red, barely seen.
A false thought, involving he and his dead wife in a bookseller.
And that assurance: It will all work out.
Clint walked and waited. Then he waited, and waited some more. Behind him, the wild bunch of conspirators kept pace and trusted their Chosen One. Two owls in a tower had told them that this old, disgraced marshal was special, and they had believed it. Clint couldn’t help feeling as if it were all a joke, but because he didn’t know what else to do, he kept walking, kept leading them. Was it really any less bizarre to pace in circles and wait for capture than to waste away in a cell? At least they were getting fresh air.
Something grabbed the gunslinger’s eye. A purple street sign, which he’d never seen before.
He turned left. Six people turned behind him.
At the end of the street, dead ahead, was a massive glass door on an enormous gleaming building. Like all buildings in The
Realm, this one glowed down on him, seeming to wish him well and welcome him inside. They walked closer. And as they did, Clint got the distinct impression that he knew this door. He didn’t know how he knew it, but was certain he did.
The building was some sort of an Otel, but the lower level looked like a glass and alloy saloon and had no beds in it. People watched Clint’s group approach, then held the doors and smiled. The people wished them well. Once inside, Clint felt less certain, but he saw a group of citizens to the left and followed them. The hallway narrowed. City people in fancy clothes surrounded them, all wearing sparkling jewels. Clint could sense their bliss hanging in the air like a smell.
To the right, a room with screaming bright red walls.
A woman held guard at the door, blonde hair piled high on her head. She wore a tight black dress and stood in front of a sort of half-desk with papers in a mountain on its top. Her hands were atop the papers, fingers sparkling with diamonds. Clint tried to see past the woman, craning his neck into the crowded room. It didn’t seem like the right place, so open and unlike what the scholar had implied of the secretive Red Room, but it had red walls, and Mai — or whatever — had led him here. So he approached, and he cleared his dusty old throat.
“Yes?” said the woman. The gunslinger studied her face, which added a P.S: What do you want?
“Is this the Red Room?” said Clint.
The woman turned, looked for a long moment at the bright red walls, and said, “Yes. It is indeed a red room.”
Clint turned. Oliver and Morph were already stepping forward, ready to enter. Boricio’s eyes were hungry, mayhap starving. But entering the building had been a mistake, and he knew it.
“It’s not right,” he said.
They left. Clint took a few steps down the street, disappointed. The doors had seemed so familiar. He could almost feel Mai deep inside him, struggling to fight her way to the surface.
This was it. It had to be it, even though it so clearly wasn’t.
He was about to walk back into the glass Otel to try anew, but before he could, something else caught his eye. To his right was a small, rusty staircase that seemed entirely out of character for The Realm. It wasn’t polished and clean and fresh and new. Instead, it was dirty and old-looking.
Clint walked over to the staircase and looked it over. The stairs went down, below the level of the street. Clint grasped the railing and put his foot on the first step, and was immediately assaulted with very non-Realm sensations. He could feel the grit and rust of the railing under his hand. He could feel the grinding of dirt under his feet. The noises were wrong. The walls around him as he led the group to the basement door were made of old brick, and the sounds of his footfalls bouncing around the space were too muted. Everything up top was crisp and sharp and bright and friendly and new and polished, but the space below the street was none of that.
He opened a squeaky, scratched glass door and entered a small shop at the bottom of the rusty staircase. The others followed.
The small room was filled with shelf after shelf of books. There was a counter at the store’s front. Behind it sat an obese old man — too fat for the The Realm’s polished glitz — eating a salad.
“I’m Clint Gulliver,” said Clint, unsure why he was saying it.
The old man was in mid-chew, his head bent low over his bowl to catch whatever lettuce he didn’t manage to shove into his maw. His lips were painted white with creamy dressing. He paused, fork out and face pointed into the bowl, and slowly his eyes rolled up to look at the gunslinger. He looked like he was in a standoff, afraid to move.
“I know,” said the man. “I used to work at the Ministry building. I cleaned the halls. On the day of your trial, they were one man short on the jury and pulled me in to sit. My vote would never matter. They were already decided and unanimous against you, but they needed a full jury to make it official.” He said it quickly, without stuttering or breaking pace, delivering the words without being asked. He said it as if singing a song he’d sung many times before — as if this were a story he was known for, that people who knew him rolled their eyes at when he lapsed into it like a seizure.
“I remember now,” said Clint.
“I was the one vote against your exile.”
“I never got your name,” said Clint.
“Ron House.”
“Ron, I know this will sound ridiculous,” the gunslinger said, sighing deeply and feeling stupid, “but we’re looking for the Red Room.”
Ron House set his fork on the counter. “This isn’t it,” he said.
Of course it wasn’t. The walls of this room, such that they were visible, were yellow and filthy.
“Oh.”
“This is the Reading Room,” he said, pointing to a sign that displayed the book shop’s name.
“Oh,” said Clint, feeling more and more like an idiot with each passing second. Was there something else he was supposed to do? He felt that Mai — or, again, whatever — had definitely led him here. The coincidence of finding a man who’d been at his trial seemed too large to ignore. So was there something else he was supposed to get from this man? Clint searched his mind, but found nothing.
Ron House stood and shuffled around the counter, knocking books from shelves as he went.
“The room you want is this way,” he said.
CHAPTER SEVEN:
THE ROOM YOU WANT
Churchill wanted to be the first to state the obvious.
“This room isn’t red,” he said.
Ron House had led them through the back of his small store, through a second room much like the first, then down a very tight-fit spiral staircase Morph had to adjust his body to fit through. Ron didn’t bother to close the shop or put a sign on the door. It didn’t seem like he got much business anyway. Or any business at all.
At the bottom of the stairs was a large, dingy room under a store that was mostly underground to begin with. If the Reading Room book shop didn’t look like it belonged behind the wall, then the basement room looked like it should have been forcibly ejected to its other side. It was filled with cobwebs (there were spiders in The Realm? Somehow that seemed wrong) and the paint on the ceiling was flaking. Every surface was thick with shelves, and every shelf was overcrowded with books that were packed so tightly Clint doubted he could force a single one out. Additional books were piled on top of the stacked volumes, their spines horizontal. Books were on the tops of the shelves and in piles on the floor. The room was large, but still the eight people in it had to watch their feet because there was so little room to stand.
“Not red like the color,” said Ron, looking at Churchill. “R-E-A-D. If you read a book today, then tomorrow, you can say you’ve read it. There is a ‘Red Room’ somewhere, I imagine — that one being red like the color — but nobody knows where it is.” He laughed. “There’s also a Reed Room, filled with reeds, in the Ministry. The people there always confused it with the Read Room —” This time, he pronounced it like reed. “— but only because the bathrooms are beside the Read —” (R-E-E-D) “— Room in the Ministry.”
“I’m confused,” said Boricio.
“Ain’ no doubt,” said Dylan Brooce.
Churchill was still appraising the room. He’d removed his helmet when, as Ron took them toward the back, the group was blanketed with an instant sense of trust. Ron House seemed to feel bonded to Clint because of his story (a story, Clint suspected, he told often but that nobody believed), so the portly shopkeeper had immediately begun spewing information it seemed unlikely he’d tell anyone other than close friends. Ron’s candor turned out to be catching, and the Conspiracists seemed to feel that their secret was safe with Ron.
“This isn’t what we meant, though, Mr. House,” said Oliver. He turned to Clint. “This isn’t the Red Room. Not the one that will help us, anyway.”
“Maybe it’s not the one everyone speaks of, but this place is just as forgotten, and it does the same,” said Ron. “You know why?” He didn�
��t wait for a response. “Well, have you ever seen another used bookseller in The Realm?”
“Of course we have,” said Churchill, seemingly annoyed. “There’s one on First, and one on Marsten, and one on…”
“Not antique stores,” Ron interrupted. “Actual stores that sell books. Only books. For reading, not displaying on a shelf as decoration.”
When Churchill looked confused and nobody answered, Ron turned to Clint.
“People in The Realm don’t read. They know how, but they don’t,” he explained. He shifted, putting one hand on his plump hip and another against a bookcase. “Marshal, the reason I was able to be in your trial was because I cleaned up at the Ministry. They need humans to clean there because they have an enormous magic generator in the building that does something to scramble thinking machines. So how do you get happy, joyous, bliss-filled citizens to scrub toilets in paradise? Answer: you don’t get those people to do it at all. Instead, you pick someone like me — someone who wasn’t happy to begin with and has become used to it. Someone who’s immune to PermaBliss, and to the magic in the grass.”
“Like Dave the Ruiner,” said Oliver.
“Yes, like him. In fact, people have tried to get me to join the resistance,” said Ron, tipping his head toward Oliver, “but I enjoy staying alive despite my station in life, and so I did what the rest of the immunes do: I took jobs that others who are blissed-out and won’t face the grit that still exists in the worlds’ corners refuse to do. The latest such dirty job is this — keeping an eye on a loose end.”
Clint stood in front of Ron House, then looked around the place to see if he’d missed something. “What do you mean by ‘loose end’?”
“The Realm is pretty close to perfect on the outside,” said Ron. “They’re able to fold things around pretty well, using magic like the Ministry and even the readers and scholars possess, keeping the gritty parts out of sight. But below the surface, The Realm is unraveling. If the wall ever fell, you’d see that our paradise is perforated with cracks and holes. They can cover most of it up, but there are still places where the worlds are thin and touching. And oh, I suppose they could find ways to cover those holes too, but then what would happen to the home flickershows? What would happen to the big flickerscreens? Where would we get our products? Most people here wouldn’t want to live without their BryCreem and their Revlons. If they closed all the thinning areas, where would they get Seinfeld? What of jingles and music? The people of The Realm would have to make all of those things up themselves, or we’d see some very polite riots. But do you know what, Marshal? I don’t think they can. People love Seinfeld, but I don’t think they understand it. I have a few immune friends, and there are things we laugh at when we watch that show that I’ve never seen another Realm citizen laugh at. Most things, really. Average Realm folks will laugh when someone wears funny clothes in a flicker, but not when George gets himself into trouble because he’s said something that bothers someone else. Why would they? They have no experience with feeling awkward, offended, or embarrassed.” He rolled his eyes. “Nobody says anything that bothers anyone else up there.”
