Fitting In

by Max Gladstone

  When he turned the corner, he stopped and began to curse.

  A pile of tracksuits and masks lay on the corner of Prince and Mulberry. And Mulberry was wall-to-wall people: eating arepas, dancing to indie folk, lining up at the Korean barbeque burrito stand, drinking beer while doing all of the above. He’d walked through the street fair two days before. He hadn’t forgotten about it. He just hadn’t thought at all.

  Jan skidded to a stop. “They must have changed shape. After reptoids shed their skin, they glisten in direct light for a few minutes after—we can still catch them.”

  He sagged. “No. We can’t. We should have called the cops. They would have caught one of these guys. We should have done something, anything even remotely effective.”

  “We saved the shop.”

  “Great! Good. We were real heroes for two minutes! And what now? Do we wait for them tomorrow night, and the night after that? These guys aren’t amateurs. They could have killed us. Next time they’ll bring something to handle your buffalo buddy. This isn’t about reptoids, or mind control, or, what, wacky hijinks. Octavia’s real. We got into this to help her. And we just fucked it up.”

  Jan took off her sunglasses. Without them her eyes were large and glowed softly. “You think I don’t know that?”

  This was all wrong. That is, it wasn’t wrong, he wasn’t wrong, they should have called the cops, they should have done everything he said, but still somehow he’d just messed it up worse. Like always. He reached into his pocket for his phone. “I’m tired. I’m calling 911, and I’m going home to sleep. Some of us have work tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Thursday after school, Robin went to rehearsals. He still felt like he’d been crushed by a steamroller—he actually had been once, on the show—but he liked to see how the kids spent the time they could control. After a school day when he’d felt all eyes swivel toward him as he wandered through the hallway, only to swivel back to their own business when he turned, after even Ms. LaJolla pursed her lips across the lunch room table in what he felt certain was judgment, he needed to sit in a dark room and watch someone else take the spotlight.

  He clapped. He couldn’t stop himself. The kids were good. When he’d been in high school theater, he’d been so impressed by how his friends transformed from the dressing room to the stage, melted by the lights into their roles. Now it seemed staggeringly obvious the girl playing John Wilkes Booth was just fifteen, her mustache pasted on. There was something pure about that, though femme Booth would probably have been mortified to hear him say so: the clarity of performance, the person revealed underneath.

  After the rehearsal, he congratulated the director—Mr. Cho—and the kids, and ended up in the empty theater with a Broadway actress named Baker (“Like Tom, or Josephine,” she’d said with a half smile in a British accent he couldn’t place, “but Abigail”) who’d come in as a vocal coach, on what he’d heard whispered was a sort of public service/time-off-for-good-behavior gig. “The kids love you,” he’d told her after Mr. Cho introduced them, and it was true. Part of that was the Broadway mystique, and maybe the slight lawbreaking edge, but she was glamorous and handsome and tall and had hair like she should have been in Cabaret, with tattoos on both arms. Booth had blushed and gone corpse-still every time Baker so much as glanced in her direction.

  “They’re perfect,” she said. “I mean, they’re fabulous. Working with young talent like this, with no agents or managers, is sort of the dream, isn’t it? Pure theater. And I say that from the point of view of someone who’s in the wrong line of work. Dealing with them every day, though, probably like ice cream for breakfast all the time, if you’re lactose intolerant. Slightly. Sorry, metaphor needs work. Anyway. Assassins in a high school—bit of an odd choice?”

  “I don’t know. Less so here than most places.”

  “I suppose.” She stretched her arms over her head, and they kept stretching until they reached the ceiling, then snapped back. “Ow!” She rubbed her shoulders.

  “I hate it when that happens to me,” Robin said. “Once I threw my jaw out yawning. How long have you been stretchy?”

  “Just since a few minutes ago,” she said. “That’s me, you know, Abigail Baker, the Understudy.” When she sketched a bow, her arm swooped elongated behind her. “Your talents are my speciality.” When she looked up, her eyes widened in an expression Robin dreaded. “Just a mo. Stretchy. I remember you. Ruttiger—Mr. Rubberband, right?”

  “Just Rubberband. And I don’t go by that anymore. Just Robin, these days.”

  She really was a good actor, Robin thought. Her expressions were transparent: he could read her trying to stop herself from speaking, then deciding she’d rather not pass the chance. “I watched American Hero religiously. I watched a lot of TV between auditions. When you retired from public life I was so bloody furious. At you, I mean. Yes, we have just met, and it is terribly unfair of me to say, and, obvs, you have no idea who I am, but, new policy, honesty at all times. Back then, here were my thought processes: I’m trying to break in; no luck whatsoever; big debut, gloriously romantic, also an enormous storm of bollocks—and here was this guy who lucked out, got the golden ticket. Only rather than appreciate it, off he goes. Oh thank you so bloody much. I mean, have you seen the world? We don’t really have love, do we? Instead we have celebrities. Those were my thoughts at the time. However. Adulthood. One sees mistakes were made. I was a child. I was being unfair. Now, I really get it. You were right. So, well done there. And thank you for remaining still for all that.” She set her hand on his arm, and his experience of British people was too limited to know whether that felt as forward for her as it did for him—they did the cheek kissing thing over there after all, didn’t they, or was that France? “It’s good to see you happy. To see anyone happy. Well, that is my portion of Too Much Information today, and now I shall retreat—”

  “No,” he said, “it’s all right. Thank you.” And he meant it, more or less.

  Was he happy? He walked the halls to his office, unsure.

  His hand was on his office door and his mind on home, sleep, solitude, when a voice like crushed granite interrupted the quiet of his skull. “Mr. Ruttiger? Me and the guys were talking and, um. There’s something you got to see.”

  * * *

  “Look, Mr. R, you gotta understand, my jokers and me, we’re not into anything bad, right? We just keep an eye out. Take care of each other. But soon as you start to, like, you hang around, and you get so’s you know each other, and you make up a handshake, a special kind of nod, not meaning anything by it, people get ideas. We’re not doing wrong, right? Like okay maybe once in a while there’s some jokers want to get scrapping on your block, so you scrap back, and sometimes nats come down to start shit with little jokers who can’t defend themselves. Squishy people. I don’t mean you, you’re okay, Mr. R, you got your own back, I’m talking about, like, Smalls, who’s small, or Gabby who don’t have a mouth so she can’t call for help. God made me a rock so I got to be a foundation, you figure?”

  “I figure.” There were parts of Jokertown not even realtors went, buildings that had been rat traps and fire hazards long before the virus, and after that turned weird, shellacked by three generations of joker inhabitants, crumbling masonry glistening with slime, veined by crystal, studded with papery nests for wasps the size of toddlers.

  By itself, those hazards wouldn’t have kept the street safe. New York realtors had bulldozed and built over worse, and lied about it on the environmental impact statement. But the locals were fiercely loyal, and no one yet had worked up the entrepreneurial gumption to offer enough money to break that bond for an apartment wallpapered with its previous owner’s cast-off skin. Robin had walked most of Jokertown on one lunch break or another, but never this four-block stretch. They didn’t have places like this in Ohio.

  “But you start that and then the police gall you, right, like every group of jokers is a gang or some mafan shit like that. But we heard you and Miss Jan scr
apped them tracksuit guys who came for Octavia’s last night.”

  “You heard about that?”

  “Shit yeah, everybody heard! Why you think all and them was watching you all day? Some badass shit man! Wha!” Slade mimed a channel 5 kung fu movie pose, and an uppercut. The ground shook when he bounced on his feet, and rock flour drifted from his joints. “Yeah. So I added it up and thought maybe you’d like to know your tracksuit boys hang out here.” He nodded across the street and down: a building with broken windows boarded up, a weathered illegible sign bearing a picture that might have once been of a car. “They moved in six weeks back. Real serious tough guy shit. We spied ’em, didn’t want people bringing poison onto our street, that’s how jokers get hurt, you figure?”

  “Yes.” It was an ideal hideout: near their target, and cop-free.

  “But they kept quiet. Scoped up by the school—but nobody starts mafan by the school, that’s how jokers get sent up federal. We figured it for okay. But they can’t be hurting on Miss Octavia. I’d go to the police, the Fort Freak crew’s okay, but maybe I go to them and they ask me, Slade, why you coming to us with this now, right? What else you got? And maybe Big X or one of hers sees me going into Fort Freak and asks, Slade, why you in with police now? But you, Mr. R, you’re okay.”

  “Would you be willing to talk to the cops? If I made the introduction?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. R. For Miss Octavia, maybe.”

  But it wouldn’t be enough. Arresting the tracksuits might slow Mikhail’s plan—if it was in fact his plan—but if they wanted Octavia’s place safe, they needed more. They needed to tie the man to the trouble. “Have you seen a guy in a suit with them? A big guy, with an Eastern European accent?” Slade looked confused. “Like Dracula?”

  “Mr. R, man, they all talk Dracula. And nats all look the same. Me and my jokers, we gotta go to school or else they send for us, so if they do things during the day, we wouldn’t see nothing.”

  Shit. Okay. Think, Ruttiger. We’ve got a street cops don’t patrol, close-knit community, outsiders will be noticed, but good luck getting anyone to testify. You need documentary evidence. But this was the kind of place where city cameras would keep getting mysteriously eaten. Think harder. Take in your surroundings. There’s the building covered in the thin layer of ooze, there’s the apartment walled in crystal, there’s the wasp’s nest making an uneasy humming noise, and there’s—

  “Slade?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s with that apartment there? With three sets of bars over the windows, and aluminum foil?”

  “Mr. R, you don’t want to be bothering her. That’s Mama Salva, she’s straight up paranoid, man. She thinks everyone’s out to get her. You talk to her, and it’s all, the government, and the aliens, and like the Kings of France and shit. My mama says she’s thought there was people out to kill her for at least twenty years. She paid some of my jokers to paint the hexes on, and they said she got the place all wired up, mics and cameras and junk.”

  “Any of them pointed at the street?”

  Slade’s eyelids ground down over his eyes, then up again. “You can’t be going in there, Mr. R. Mama Salva don’t talk to nobody. She’s going to hex you.”

  “No,” he said. “You’re right. She won’t talk to me. But I think I know someone who speaks her language.”

  * * *

  He didn’t need to jump the fence to reach the stairs down to Jan’s apartment—Jan, it seemed, just lacked patience for the gate. The basement door was unlocked, and the lights weren’t on, so he fished out his phone and soft-shoed through the cluttered dark tool room with its dripping pipes to a shut door beside a washer-dryer, half-hidden behind paint cans, wishing the whole time that he hadn’t been such an unreconstructed dink the night before. The door handle turned, but the door stuck. He leaned into it, pressed harder, shoved. The door gave. He tumbled through into blinding light, and landed on a bear.

  The bear wasn’t alive, but a bearskin draped over a chair oozing foam out the remnants of its upholstery. The fake fur smelled like dust, but the room was full of sage and incense and weed smoke—not to mention, as he forced himself back to his feet, bulletin boards, twenty of them, on the walls, in freestanding easels, festooned with news clippings and website printouts. The room was a spider’s mess, multicolored yarn lines sagging from pushpin to pushpin across the space between corkboards, and in the heart of that web stood Jan Chang, wielding a broken pool cue as a pointer. A man sat on the couch: squat and broad, the kind of big that didn’t need to suggest muscle beneath the flesh and the ripped jeans and the gold chain and the stained tank top—the muscle was as broadly stated as the rest of him. The big man’s eyes got narrow, and he rumbled up, dislodging a red piece of yarn that linked Queen Margaret to Prince Charles, which was silly, because there wasn’t a Prince Charles unless the royals had shuffled while he lost track. “Hey, buddy. This is a private residence here.”

  “Ruttiger! No, Fred, this is Robin Ruttiger. Remember? The guy from last night.”

  “That guy?” Fred didn’t seem encouraged by the association; Robin didn’t blame him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, hands up. “Jan, I was a jerk last night. But I need your help.”

  “It’s cool, Robin, you were right. I wasn’t thinking about the bigger picture. I sat down to thinking, and that’s where all this came from.” She waved her hands to include the corkboards. “Fred, remember, Robin saved Octavia’s shop, he saved me—he’s okay.”

  “It all gets a bit fuzzy,” Fred mumbled. “You know, the horns and all make it hard to concentrate. Buffalo brains are tiny.”

  Robin blinked. “You were the buffalo?”

  Jan frowned at the distraction. “Right, sure. Ruttiger, meet Fred Minz. Fred can turn into animals he eats. Fred, meet Robin. Stretchy guy. Rubberband, Chowdown. Chowdown, Rubberband. Can we get on with this, or do we have to have a crossover special?” No one answered. “Good. Now, as I was saying, after some substantial digging I’ve assembled two competing theories. The first has to do with reptoid manipulation of the Rosicrucian sect and internal Freemason magipolitics which affected the pre-grid street layout of southern Manhattan, interfacing with secret Majestic 12 experiments conducted here through the ’70s and ’80s when Jokertown was an undisclosed federal testing ground for psychoactive weaponry. The other has to do with the fact that our good friend Mikhail Alexandrovitch is a mid-level operator for Ivan Grekor of the Brighton Beach mob. That explains why the goons were so well-trained: the Russian mob has access to a lot of ex-Spetsnaz guys. Good thing Spetsnaz are notoriously weak against buffalo." Frank chuckled. "Anyway. Alexandrovitch a semi-legit errand boy, emphasis on semi, and real estate development is a great vehicle for money laundering. Our man’s assembled a collective of investors currently operating under the name of the Twenty-First Century Retail Group, who’ve committed a large amount of capital to build a high-rise luxury condominium complex in Jokertown, provided Mikhail acquires the free and clear rights to demolish Octavia’s building. The other owners in the building all accepted down payments over the last year from puppet organizations I’ve traced back to Alexandrovitch—he’s not as good at covering his tracks as he thinks—because they assumed Octavia would never sell. They were right. But now the Twenty-First Century Group’s run out of patience, and Mikhail’s taken matters into his own hands. They’re both compelling theories; I’m not sure how to choose.”

  Robin boggled as his brain raced to catch up with Jan’s mouth. “How did you put all that together?”

  “I was a financial analyst before my card turned and I had more important things to worry about. But even with the paper trail, we don’t have anything to tie Mikhail to the attacks.”

  “That,” Robin said, “is where I think I can help.”

  * * *

  “Back up,” Jan said when they stood in front of the door, with its six locks and chains, its pasted prayers, and the poorly disguised reinforced plates to either si
de that would have stopped a prospective burglar from just sawing through the wall.

  Robin retreated a step.

  “I meant, around the corner. The fewer people she sees through that peephole, the better. Plus, all due respect, I look more like a joker.” He didn’t think his expression was that skeptical, but her frown suggested otherwise. “Come on. I can take care of myself.”

  When he was safely down a flight of stairs, Jan knocked. The locks were heavy, slow and vicious to unlatch. Some of those high-pitched whines you never realized you were hearing until they stopped, stopped. The door opened on at least two heavy chains.

  The woman’s voice was sharp and cold. “Who are you? Who sent you? What’s the secret?”

  “We don’t have time for the usual protocols.” Jan was talking fast. “I’m with the resistance. We’re being monitored. I need critical information from a secure facility. I was told you’re the person in this district I could trust.”

  “Told by who? What’s the secret?” “You of all people should understand that I can’t divulge my contact’s identity.”

  A considering silence. “What’s the secret?”

  He held his breath.

  “Blood and gold,” Jan said. “Isn’t it always?”

  The door slammed. Chains clanked. The door opened again. “Come inside. This hallway’s only Lavender secure.”

  Footsteps, and the door slammed shut, and locks engaged.

  Robin sat on the steps and waited. He pressed his thumbs together. A stooped gray woman lurched up the stairs under a layer of groceries; he helped her with them. Two kids came home from school and let themselves into their apartment. On the first floor, someone started practicing trombone.