All the Different Shades of Blue

(A City Between Novellette)

There’s a sharpness to the human world. An edge to the wind that bites, a piercing sensation to the jagged pieces of sound that litter the perilously light air, a poniard point to the sound of human voices duelling inside the confinement of a café or a restaurant.

It’s not like that beneath the waves. Beneath the waves there’s softness and peace and all the different shades of blue you ever saw or heard or smelled. A comfortable feeling of weight pressing against every part of you that keeps you exactly where you’re meant to be. Beneath the waves—ah, if I could, that’s where I’d live out all my days.

If I could—and there’s the rub.

There’s not much of a life Below for a half-breed merman; particularly one born without gills, or the lung strength necessary to stay below the waves for more than a couple of minutes at a time. I can thank my human mother for that—just like I can thank my merman father for the disjointed and utterly useless bones in my lower half. Neither human nor mer, those bones don’t join enough to be used for walking, though in my mer-form they make a serviceable tail. Enough to get by, if I could but breathe beneath the waves. Above the waves, I can breathe, and perhaps that would be enough to get by, too; if only I could walk.

To the rest of the Other Kind, there’s Behind, Between, and the human world. To us merfolk, there’s Above and Below—the airy side, and the real world. The only laws that really matter to us are the laws Below, even when we’re above. Perhaps that’s why I became a hacker when my parents abandoned me in the Above world; a combination of orphanly angst and an ingrained disregard for human laws.

Besides all that, my job means I don’t have to go out if I don’t wish to do so. It’s not a simple matter to navigate my wheelchair around the bends in the outdated and rusty ramp that runs around the outside of my building. Perhaps I could move to another flat, but there aren’t many places around North Hobart where you can have a beautiful view and space for a water tank the size I need—not within my budget, at any rate.

So I put up with the difficulty and go out every day for my coffee. Coffee and a smile, that’s the way I think of it.

It was a Thursday that day. Busy, as usual, and I had to be careful crossing the road because there are no zebra crossings there. The traffic is inclined to be savage and suicidal in North Hobart, and although there are small ramps for wheelchair access to the road, there’s a good chance the drivers won’t see you above the guard rails. If they do, there’s more than a chance they’ll attempt to drive over you regardless.

In spite of that, I made it safely to the other side, the momentum from my dash carrying me up the small ramp and halfway across the footpath. I was earlier than usual, as I had been for the past week at least. I usually take my coffee-and-a-smile at eleven o’clock, but when I accept a job I like to start as early in the day as possible. I should have known better than to take a job across the road from my house, but the money was more than usually good, and it wasn’t a difficult job.

Potentially illegal and most definitely Other, but not difficult. Perhaps you could call it delicate.

The café sat above a Behind club that didn’t quite exist in the human world—normal, warm, and reasonably popular. It had human owners, naturally, but whether or not they knew it, they paid a tax to the Behindkind beneath them. Lately they hadn’t been drawing as many customers as the Behindkind thought convenient for a cover, and I had been hired to alter the ancient protective spells around the cafe to allow something a little…extra…into the magics.

If it was only a matter of hacking the magic it would still have been illegal, at least by Behind laws—in law, if not in practise, Behindkind doesn’t approve of meddling with humans. But by human laws it was illegal, too; to run the program I would be hacking directly into the café’s internal network and accessing their music tracks. The club below and the café above might be linked Behind, but they certainly weren’t linked on paper or legally.

It could also, technically, be called fraud. Even if it wasn’t music, the track I would be threading through the café’s music was specially designed to make its patrons more open-fisted, not to mention more inclined to return. The club below would benefit not only from a larger revenue, but from the innocent front created by a bustling coffee house.

Goblins, it would seem, didn’t understand the correlation between selling good coffee and a bustling customer base. Not that I should be talking myself out of a job, but the coffee had always been good enough to bring repeat customers before the human management changed.

In any case, they gave me the ambient track, laced with magic, and it was my job to make sure it took. For a very good fee, naturally.

As a program, it needed to infect the system and all the computerised bits, of course; but my real hacking is the kind that isn’t limited to computerised systems. In fact, most of the hacking I do for Behindkind clients is the kind of hacking that involves infiltrating magical systems with malicious magic or hijacking them with load-bearing magic. Routine, human hacking jobs aren’t exactly rare, but when my client is Behindkind, the odds are my job will be one that involves magic.

I’d been working on this particular job for nearly a week now. And yet, it shouldn’t have been a difficult job. All I should have had to do was hack into the network and then into the threaded filaments of protection that hung around the coffee shop so that it would allow me to make potentially dangerous alterations in the magic of the cafe. The protection must have been from some long gone owner or patron, because the previous owners had run the café as long as I’d been patronising it, and they were no Behindkind. It was nearly impossible to detect; thin and delicate, and it should have been weak, too, but for some reason it clung to everything I tried to do, sticking like spider web to my attempts to break through it and fouling every magical hack I tried besides. It left me curious to know who had once loved this coffee shop enough to ward it against the kind of magic that needed such protections, and more than slightly irritated at the failure of every test run I’d tried so far.

I checked my watch as I worked. Nearly eleven: so that was why my magic had begun to feel sluggish. Eleven o’clock was coffee-and-a-smile time.

My fingers slowed until they were no longer typing. I would have to check the last few lines of script I’d input; there were bound to be mistakes, and though my typing wasn’t producing actual lines of code, it was producing something far more volatile—lines of magic. Far less dangerous to make mistakes with my computerised code than my magic code.

I sat back against the soft fabric curve of my wheelchair as the hour hand of my watch ticked over to eleven. If I cupped my hands around the coffee mug like so, it would look as though I was taking a natural break, cool and unconcerned. As though I wasn’t waiting for a flicker of dark blue jeans and black boots along the lower part of the window that would mean—

There was a flicker of blue, and I looked away immediately. I didn’t like to be seen looking when she walked up to the door. It was enough that at the tinkling of the bell, I couldn’t ever help looking up…

The bell on the door tinkled lightly.

I looked up, my fingers tightening around the coffee mug, and there she was at the door. Long-legged and thin, she had a kind of faun-like look about her. I wasn’t sure if that was because of her thinness, or if it was the hopeful, almost wide-eyed way she seemed to look at the world around her. Her mouth was thin, too, and just a bit crooked, which is probably why I didn’t seem to be able to help smiling at her when she came in for her coffee every day.

To a Behinder’s eyes, she could have been called ugly—to the constantly glamorous Behindkind, every other creature is ugly, and even among Behindkind there’s none so beautiful as the merpeople. Even for a human, she wasn’t pretty; her nose was too big, her mouth too thin, and her long, dark hair was perpetually untidy. But I couldn’t help smiling whenever I saw her face, just the same. Perhaps I’ve been in the human world for too long.

I smiled by reflex today, too, and she smiled back at me. I don’t know who she is, but she comes for coffee every day, just like me. She must have a tab set up with the human owner, because I’ve never seen her pay.

I probably should have tried to warn her away when the ownership changed and the profits shrank enough for those below to notice—goblins with a Behindkind clientele aren’t the safest combination for a human to be around. I didn’t warn her, because at heart I’m as selfish as the next Behindkind; and if I was telling the truth, I liked her smile.

Now she would continue walking, the smile still sitting lopsidedly on her face, and buy her coffee; three large, with lids. It happened the same way every day.

Except, perhaps, today.

Today, she didn’t keep walking, and I saw the smile fade from her face by degrees, replaced by a thoughtful, interested kind of look. It was an odd expression for such a young face to wear.

She glanced back at the door for the briefest moment, then around at the café; a quick, flickering look all around. As I watched, she blinked and began walking again. They say a human’s feet point in the direction they’re most wanting to go, but her feet never shifted, despite that glance at the door. She passed by my chair as she always did, and went to the counter for her coffee. She would have three coffees to take away, just as I always had my one in a mug, and I would smile at her once again when she turned to close the glass door. That was what had happened since she had started coming to the café.

To say that I was surprised, therefore, when she slid into the booth at right angles from me a moment later, would be to greatly understate the situation.

“Hi,” she said. Her hands were wrapped around a coffee mug; slender, capable hands, they were, but it was her eyes that were really arresting. I hadn’t seen her close enough before to know that they were such a light, luminous grey. “I’m Pet.”

I was surprised at the warmth that blossomed in my chest. She didn’t look shy, this girl; but she gave the impression of self-sufficiency that I would have said was at odds with the kind of personality required to make the first move on a stranger. Or was she making a move?

“Hi,” I said back, and started to close my laptop. It wouldn’t matter if I took a break. “I’m Marazul.”

“No, no,” she said. “No need to stop. You work here now? The last few days, you’ve been over here typing.”

I pushed the screen open again, and edged it just a little further Between the human world and Behind, so that it looked like the simple laptop it ought to look like. I do use the laptop bit of it for human-type hacking, but it’s really mostly an interface for the more tricky job of magical hacking.

“I don’t, in general. I’m freelancing for them this week.”

“Ah.” Pet nodded solemnly. “I thought you had a bit more stuff than you usually have. Where do you fit it all?”

She glanced over at my wheelchair, and I felt a touch of unease. My workbox usually stayed Between until I needed it: in the human world, it looked like a small laptop sleeve that I could slip into the seat of my wheelchair, between my outer thigh and the side of my chair. When I needed it, all I needed to do was bring it from Between into the human world. Unfortunately, I had just brought it properly into the human side to rummage for a particular piece of something that I was trying in an effort to help along my magical efforts. There was certainly nothing on my chair that could have been used to harness a workbox of that size, nor a compartment big enough to house it.

“Someone carried it over for me,” I said, with barely a pause, nodding at the building across the road that supported my apartment. “I only live across the road.”

“Ah,” Pet said again. The thoughtful look was back on her face, and if it had sat oddly on her face before, now it was something else again. Thoughtful, interested—and perhaps a touch wary?

I found myself, ridiculously, ashamed of myself for lying to her. Who ever heard of Behindkind being apologetic for lying to humans? It’s not only good policy, it’s almost tradition.

Oblivious, Pet sipped her coffee, sighing her contentment in rainbow-spangled steam. She let me work for a few minutes in silence before she asked, “Are you hurt?”

I looked instinctively at my hands. Sometimes I don’t feel it when I cut myself on the Airy side. “What? Am I bleeding?”

She stared a bit, and then grinned. “Oh! Right! Sorry. I meant the wheelchair. Did you have an accident?”

“No,” I said, and went back to my work. The spell hack hadn’t taken in any of my earlier tests, and I didn’t like that. That’s the most absurd thing about working magic through electronics—sometimes it takes up without so much as a pull, and other times it refuses utterly to work. “I was born like this.”

“Oh.” She nodded. “I thought it might be a cover.”

“A cover?” I couldn’t help smiling. Her tone was just the right mix of gusto and speculation to make me think she was the kind of human girl who snuck around the town hoping for dark deeds and nefarious characters.

“Yeah!” She nodded again, this time more enthusiastically. “A few of the merpeople I know don’t like to walk, so they go around in wheelchairs when they’re above.”

I kept smiling, but I had the distinct sensation that I couldn’t breathe. “Did you say merpeople?”

She actually shushed me. “What if someone hears you?”

“What are—What are you?”

“Me? I’m just a human.”

“That’s what I mean,” I said, frowning. My fingers hovered over the keyboard as I tried to decide where the greater part of my attention should be fixed; Pet, or my merger program. “You’re just a human. What do you know about merpeople?”

“Not a lot. I can’t breathe underwater, so I don’t meet many.”

“That’s not what I really meant.” I sat back in my chair, genuinely curious and just a little bit amused. “You’re very good at not answering questions, for a human.”

“Aren’t I!” she agreed, looking pleased and pink. “I’m getting a bit of practise, these days. I suppose your mother was human.”

I nodded, unobtrusively twitching something within the program right with a touch of magic and a tap at the keyboard. The merger program turned the electronic pulse into a magical one that faded seamlessly into the threads of protection around the café.

Wonderful! I would be able to run another test soon.

“She was. How did you know?”

“Athelas says that if the mother is human, problems always come out on the human side, and if the father is human, they come out on the Other side.”

My fingers curled away from the keyboard completely as a warmth of amusement sprang up in me. For a human, she really was adorable. How did she know these things—and why these things in particular?

My test, I thought, could wait a few minutes more. I asked, “Does he? What else does he say?”

“Mostly don’t do that, Pet, and must you, Pet?” she said. She leaned forward, edging her elbows onto the table, and asked, “What are you doing, anyway? Your computer is halfway Between, did you know? I’m not even sure it’s a real computer.”

If I had been looking down at my keyboard, my head would have snapped up. As it was, the café felt like it shook a little. I said in some shock, “I’m aware.”

It wasn’t what I had meant to say, but it didn’t seem to strike Pet as odd. She said, “Oh well, as long as you know. I suppose that’s how you got everything here.”

“It is,” I agreed, aware once again that I still hadn’t said what I intended to say.

“You lied to me.”

Was that a current of disappointment in her voice?

“Behindkind usually do lie to humans,” I pointed out; and this time, it was what I meant to say. I didn’t like the reproach in her eyes. Because of that reproach, I added, “If you knew, why did you ask me?”

“Wanted to see if you’d lie to me,” Pet said laconically. “Is it because you’re trying to push a spell through the protection around the café?”

“Do you really think it’s wise for a human who knows a little too much to be asking questions of strangers?” I asked her; and if it was a little sharp, well, I was still taken aback. A girl who smiled at someone so friendlily as Pet did had no business being so sharp—or so knowledgeable.

“That’s another thing Athelas says,” said Pet.

She really was very good at not answering questions. I would need all my attention if I was to find out exactly who and what she was. I set the latest test hack running with a few clicks of my mouse and a very small amount of magic to push it Between, where it would pull Behind and the human world a little closer than usual.

It wouldn’t work, of course—not when it still had that annoyingly sticky protection spell to contend with, not to mention the mistakes in the script that I had probably made due to Pet’s arrival and proximity. But it would give me some idea of what I needed to do next, and at least it would look as though I were still doing my job if the goblins thought to check on me.

I pushed the laptop slightly to the side, leaning back in my chair with an assumption of ease that I didn’t quite feel, and asked her, “Who is Athelas?”

“Flaming heck!” said Pet, stiffening. “What was that?”

I couldn’t help laughing. “That’s not even a deflection!” I said. “You can do better than that!”

“No,” she said, covering one ear with a grimace and opening and closing her mouth as if she was trying to pop that ear. “I’m not kidding. What did you do?”

“What do you mean?” She couldn’t be talking about my test hack, but I looked down at the laptop screen instinctively, anyway.

Much to my surprise, it was running perfectly, load-bearing magic and protective spell in perfect harmony. I frowned at it. I’d have to go through and see exactly what I’d written into the script that had finally gotten it past the threads of protection that had stalled every previous attempt. In my business, it pays to learn as you go.

Pet stood, still covering that one ear. “Rats,” she said. “I was hoping I was wrong. Hey, is your laptop connected to the internet, or is it only for Between magic?”

“What are you doing?”

She took a few steps away from the booth and tugged on the door handle. Much to my surprise, it didn’t move.

Pet jerked a thumb at it. “Checking this. It’s not locked.”

“If it’s not locked, why can’t you open it?”

“Yeah, well; that’s the point, isn’t it? That’s why I want to know what you just did.”

More defensively, I said, “I didn’t do anything.”

Her face was ridiculously clear to read. I saw her lips twist downward, the faintest suggestion of movement that brought a distinct tinge of sorrow to her face. Reproachfully, she said, “You’re still lying to me.”

“It’s just a test hack,” I said, before I knew what I was doing. “I didn’t expect it to work.”

Pet looked suspicious. “It wasn’t a computer thing,” she said. “It was—well, I don’t actually know what it was, but I know it’s not a computer thing.”

“It’s…” I paused, trying to come up with a way to explain it to a human, before I remembered that she already knew about the city Behind. “I’m a hacker. But I don’t just hack computers and networks.”

Her eyes narrowed over her coffee cup. “You hack magic? How does that work?”

“If I told everyone that, I wouldn’t be able to make a living,” I said.

Pet grinned. “Don’t have magic,” she said. “I’m human.”

“Then how would you know if there’s something going on or not?”

“Three things,” said Pet. “One, the counter boy was new today, and he’s nicked off while I’ve been talking to you. Two, I saw the bits of magic you’ve been trying—”

“What?”

“Said I didn’t have magic,” she said. “Didn’t say I can’t see it.”

I looked at her sideways, shaken but unwilling to be completely thrown off. “Magic isn’t visible to humans.”

“Yeah, that’s what Athelas says, but I can see it all right.” She thought about that, and admitted, “Well, not exactly the magic. More like the mess it makes Between when it isn’t done right. And I heard the thing that started up when you did something with your computer just now.”

“What thing?” I demanded. I layered my voice with just a touch of magic, and, more devastatingly, a combination of amusement and slight condescension. Older brother looking at a silly younger sister with a too-big imagination. “I haven’t even begun the proper program yet—just a test one.”

“Yeah?” said Pet again, and she sounded annoyed. “Well, what’s wrong with everyone here, then?”

“Nothing is wrong with them,” I said, flicking a look around the room. “They might want to buy a few more cups of coffee, but only when I feed the real thing through the hack.”

Pet took a sip of coffee and exhaled another variegated breath of steam. Her face wasn’t unreadable—there were myriad emotions and thoughts passing across that glass-like surface—but there were so many thoughts, passing so swiftly, that it might as well have been unreadable. Impossible to tell what she was thinking—what she might do. At least, I found myself thinking, in rather guilty relief, the door was shut, and she couldn’t get out.

She couldn’t do anything, either. A human couldn’t—a human couldn’t—

And then Pet reached out.

She reached out in the human world, and reached right through into Between. One finger touched the top of my laptop, pushing gently, and it began to emerge from Between space into the human world.

The laptop flickered, grew; expanded.

“Stop it!” I said, and shoved the laptop back Between. “It’s not—”

“I know,” Pet said, agreeably. “It’s not really a laptop. It just looks like one in this part of reality. What is it when it’s Behind? I can’t see all of it; it’s too big.”

“You can’t do things like that in public!” I said, too startled to sound anything else but angry. “Don’t you know better than make trouble in front of humans?”

Pet looked questioningly at me. “What d’you mean, public?”

“There’s a whole café full of—”

“Humans,” Pet finished for me. “Yeah, but d’you notice anything about them?”

“What do you mean?”

I looked around at the humans. They were talking relaxedly to each other, smiling and gesturing and sipping their coffee. As if they hadn’t seen my laptop grow, or change; or the space around us expand. It was lucky, I thought, that no one had been looking. The café looked perfectly normal; nothing was out of the ordinary.

Then I looked around again, a slight frown sinking between my brows. Nothing out of the ordinary, if it wasn’t for the fact that they were just a little bit muffled, or slow, or maybe just less sharp than usual.

“Try to talk to one of ’em,” advised Pet. “Bet they won’t hear you. That one’s eating the same bite of muffin every time he takes a bite, and the one over there has leant forward three times in a row while we’ve been talking, and done the exact same square with her fingers.”

I looked around again, and this time I saw what she meant. The humans, each and every one of them, were repeating the same cycle of a minute or two, over and over again.

A feeling of annoyance, edged with fear, welled up within me. Had the goblins been up to their old tricks? A long time ago, there had been a problem with humans slipping Between and eating goblin food, thus trapping themselves Behind for as long as the goblins chose to keep them. Goblins, the avaricious peddlers of the Behind world, had been luring humans through twilit Between markets, and selling them on to anyone who cared to have a thralled human. The scheme hadn’t ended well for the humans, but it had been a true disaster for the goblins—and anyone who had traded in human lives.

In those days, there had been a rumour of a lone revenger of human wrongs, and many injustices that wouldn’t have been taken up by the Behind courts had been dealt with in a quiet, savage way.

These days, there was a newer rumour. Even Behindkind like myself, living on the human side of Between, knew about the human trader offices that had been ripped apart and sunk into bloody oblivion a few months ago by a mysterious group of three known as the Troika. We all knew about it; we all knew we could be next if we allowed ourselves to be too free with the humans around us.

And I—I had just allowed myself to be used in a scheme to entrap humans, whether or not I’d known it at the time.

“This,” I said, with a dry throat, “this wasn’t meant to happen. It’s just a test run of a new program to encourage humans to spend a bit more while they’re here.”

“Reckon?” Pet gazed up at me. “What about the music, then? What’s that for?”

I was about to tell her that there wasn’t any music—even the track they’d given me was only ambient sound—when I heard it. It must have been working away in the background for so long that I couldn’t even remember when it started.

“Isn’t that the café’s music?”

“Nope.” Pet tipped up her coffee cup to catch the last drops of liquid and put it down on the tabletop with a small, precise tap. She was smiling; a glad, relieved thing that told me she hadn’t been sure I wasn’t the one doing whatever it was that was happening around the café.

She said, “Reckon it’s been going since I got here, but when you did that thing on your magic computer, it got really loud. Like it properly activated, or something. I reckon whatever was in your hack was half of whatever other half they were already playing. Think you can stop it?”

Stop it? I could barely hear it. Every time I thought I had an idea of what the melody was, it slipped away—or maybe just slipped through my consciousness—and I forgot what I was listening for.

“I don’t even know what it is,” I said. “All I was supposed to do was make sure it was woven into the trailing edges of Between. They didn’t say anything about it being half of a whole. It’s not even music.”

“Yeah?” Pet said. “You didn’t know it was gonna have an edge to it?”

“Of course I knew,” I said. “As I said before, it’s supposed to be a subtle buy more vibe, not a thrall!”

Pet snorted softly. “It’s subtle, all right. ’F’it makes you feel better, I don’t reckon the thrall is in what you did. All the humans were already pretty well lulled when I got in here. That was the third thing I was gonna mention.”

I may have breathed easier. “So, technically, I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Had I noticed how clear and stern those grey eyes were? Pet said, “It’s still illegal, you know.”

“I’m a hacker,” I said. “I might only be half-blood, but I’ve got enough of my own power to avoid the human authorities.” I wasn’t sure whether I was offended and showing off, or arrogant and showing off. Either way, I wanted her to know that I wasn’t someone who could be caught by a human.

“That’s the problem,” Pet said. There was a flare of annoyance to her nostrils, and it stung a bit more than I would have expected. “People like you—Behindkind—they don’t obey our laws because they don’t have to, and because there’s no one to make them obey. If you’re stronger than everyone else, you shouldn’t use it as an excuse. That’s when you need to make sure you obey the laws—when you don’t have to.”

I sank very slightly into my wheelchair. “I don’t disobey human laws simply for the fun of it. There’s a good deal of money in it for me, and no other work to be had for someone in my position. Besides, who in the human law is going to know what I do?”

“Yeah,” said Pet. “And I didn’t mean just human law, either.”

My eyes flicked up to meet hers. I didn’t swallow, but I wanted to. “What do you know about Behind law?”

Carefully unsaid, was the question What do you know about the Troika?

“Mostly what Athelas tells me,” she said. “And I know that most forms of human coercion are still illegal by Behind laws, even if it’s just to get a bit more money out of ’em.”

“If they catch you,” I told her. “And if they can bring you back. And if the courts don’t sympathise with them. Humans can’t represent themselves in Behind court, you know.”

“That’s if it gets to court,” Pet said, and I was hoping that she didn’t mean what I would have meant if I had said it.

I had another brief, unpleasant recollection of those human trader offices that had met with savage justice, and asked, “How do you know all of this?”

“I pay attention,” said Pet. “You’ve heard about the Troika, haven’t you?”

This time, I really did clear my throat. “They’re just a rumour.”

Pet grinned. “Is that what people say? Well, no wonder there’s still some Behindkind willing to take advantage of humans. Still, you shouldn’t do stuff like that.”

“I really—” I stopped, and finished somewhat lamely, “I really did think it was just an inducement to buy more; something to keep the business profitable and keep a constant stream of humans in and out the door.”

“Can you tell what else it’s doing?”

I flipped my laptop lid up again and signed in.

“Hey,” said Pet, in surprise. “How do you do that? Your computer just connected to the protection spell in here. Like it was wifi or something.”

“The same way you access Between and Behind,” I said. There was a lot more to it than that, of course—just like there was a lot more to bringing things that were Between into the human world. It was possible, but you needed to know how to do it, and not everyone could do it.

“What, so you use the computer as a kind of interface and just plug magic into the spell from there?”

I said, “Something like that.” I had already been surprised by this little human so often that I couldn’t bring myself to give into my curiosity and ask her how she knew the principles of Between magic.

“Cool!” Pet said, looking from myself to my computer with fascinated eyes. “You are actually hacking the magic! I wonder if Zero knows about this?”

“I certainly hope not,” I muttered to myself. I didn’t have the faintest idea who Zero was, but it was bad enough Pet knowing yet another thing a defenceless little human ought not to know. I had no desire to share my particular skills with another human—or any Behindkind, as far as that went. Not too many Behindkind knew about my particular skill set, and I preferred to keep it that way. I had enough work to keep me comfortable, and just enough anonymity to keep me safe.

“You can stop it, right?”

“It’s my script and my program,” I said. “I should hope so.”

“Yeah,” mumbled Pet, but her thin face was dissatisfied. “But I wanna know how you got through the protection spell, and I reckon Zero is gonna want to know how, too.”

Whoever Zero was, I thought as I double-clicked into my program, he wasn’t going to know if I had anything to say in the matter. The password screen flashed up at me and I typed a dash of symbols into the box.

An error box blinked at me.

“What?” Those clear, grey eyes were on me, uncomfortably shrewd. “Something wrong?”

“I must have typed my password incorrectly,” I said, typing it again, more slowly.

“Ye-eah,” said Pet slowly. “Bet you didn’t, though.”

The error box blinked at me again.

I typed the password a third time, this time a separate, distinct keystroke for each symbol, my jaw tight.

“Bet you,” said Pet, far too cheerfully, “bet you it’s not gonna work.”

For the third time, an error box overspread the welcome screen of my program.

“It’s not letting me in,” I said. I sat back, nonplussed, and stared at my screen. We were as trapped as any of the humans in the café, and that made no sense, because I was Behindkind.

My stomach dropped. I was Behindkind, but I was Behindkind who hadn’t yet been paid in full…

Pet, her eyes still sharp and on my face, asked, “They pay you yet?”

I laughed, and it sounded bitter. “Half. If they think I’m going to let them get away with this—”

Not that I could really stop it, unless I could hack back into my own program, which had so suddenly and mysteriously turned against me. I should really have had a closer look at that track they gave me before patching it in with my program…

And there was the issue of time, too—even if I could hack into the program, I would still have to do it before the music got to me, too. There was no one to miss me, no one to come looking for me—no one, unlike the humans with the Troika, to avenge me.

“I’ve heard music like this before,” said Pet, musingly. “It sounds strange but familiar.”

“So have I,” I said. There was still a pit of dread in my stomach, but with it was another emotion I didn’t readily recognise. A certain dryness to my mouth, or perhaps a lingering, unpleasant taste that shouldn’t be left behind when I had coffee to drink.

It took a moment, but it came to me that it was disgust I was feeling. A faint but certain edge of disgust.

Across the table, Pet’s wrinkled nose displayed the same sort of disgust. “Goblins,” she said, wrinkling that nose even more. “Why do they always wanna mickey finn everyone?”

“I suppose you know all about goblins, too,” I said. My voice sounded as resigned as I felt.

“Not much,” Pet remarked. “Just every time I meet one, it’s trying to drug me or knock me out.”

“Goblins are like that,” I agreed. Perhaps that was why, I thought, looking around at the Thralled humans, I felt so suddenly disgusted with Behindkind. It couldn’t be any other reason: Behindkind were meant to prey on humankind, after all. There was nothing unusual or even exactly wrong with that—unless you fell into the hands of the Troika.

“What can we do about it? I’m a bit inoculated against stuff like this, but it’ll get through to me if I’m trapped in here for long enough.”

I filed away for later the question of how exactly a human was inoculated against Behindkind music, and said, “Glasses.”

“What, like—” Pet nudged her chin at the waterglass stacks on the coffee counter. “—like those?”

“Yes. With water in them.”

“Okay,” said Pet, rising to her feet with a readiness that was pleasing, “but why?”

I savoured that feeling for a little while; that oddly surprising feeling of knowing something that she didn’t. “We can dampen the effect of the music with the water.”

“Cool,” said Pet again, with even more enthusiasm than last time. She called back across the café, “Is that because of the fae thing with water, or is it ’cos of the vibrations and stuff?”

I couldn’t help laughing, and that made her laugh, too; a bright, cheerful sound.

“Yeah,” she said. “I know weird stuff. Can’t help it; I just keep picking it up here and there.”

“Here and there as in here and there?” I called, with an amused look in her direction. If she said yes, I would almost believe her. Even though no Behindkind in their right mind would traipse through Between and Behind with a human in tow; even though no human could travel through Between and into Behind without help. I would still almost believe it, because she wasn’t boasting, or teasing—she simply knew things she shouldn’t know.

“This enough?” asked Pet, interrupting my thoughts. She had loaded a tray with half-full glasses of water, and now she staggered across the café toward me.

“Yes,” I said hastily, ducking my head away by reflex as the tray passed a little too close for comfort. I was far from objecting to being doused with water, but if we would eventually be affected by the music, it was best to waste no time. It didn’t escape my notice, however, that she had again avoided answering my question.

“Set them out around the outside of the booth,” I told her. “Around the outside of my wheelchair, too; I can’t hear the music all the time, and it can sneak up on me, too.”

“Pretty handy, isn’t it?” Pet said, laying out a semicircle of glasses. “All this stuff around, just waiting to be used. Reckon they wanted you to try and get out?”

I frowned. “I don’t think so. Even if they didn’t manage to catch me by surprise, they would have assumed I’d try to hack my way out without worrying too much about goblin music.”

“Yeah, but you don’t hear it properly,” Pet said. “Reckon you would have decided you could hack your way out before it sneaked into your mind, too? Seems to me that the hope of holding out long enough to hack your way out would be a good way to distract you for long enough to be caught by the music.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to hack my way out anyway,” I said grumpily. “And if I do, it’ll only be by the skin of my teeth. All this—” I waved one hand at the general, Thralled populace of the café, “will have to stay as it is. I might be able to give the two of us a way out, but I can’t save them. The goblins’ll be happy enough with that.”

Surprised, Pet asked, “What d’you mean?”

“They’re already lost,” I said. I didn’t want to explain to that big-eyed face that once we escaped from the café, each and every one of these humans would be lost to the human world completely. The only thing keeping the music from taking over completely was the last threads of the protection spell, which had woken to the danger of that load-bearing magic too late. Unfortunately, it was now also thing keeping us in the café. I could have broken the spell that originally kept Pet from leaving, but Protection spells tend to take the approach that once the worst has happened, containment is the only safe procedure. I could already see the layers of it around the café, now that it recognised the foreign, dangerous magic that twined around itself; it was drawing in on itself, tightening its hold on the café.

To Pet’s expectant face, I said reluctantly, “To escape—if we can escape—we’ll have to shatter the protection spell completely. No one will be able to get out, and it’s unlikely that anyone will survive. The thrall spell in the music will turn inward for power, draining the humans to keep itself running.”

“That doesn’t work for me,” said Pet. She grabbed two pots of pistachios from the counter and brought them back to our table. “Eat up and figure it out. If this thing is gonna turn on itself like a black hole, you’d better find us another way out. All of us.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but Pet didn’t give me a chance.

She asked, “Did it seem like they waited until I was in here to close off the exit?”

It was my turn to blink, then think. The timing had been, at the very least, coincidental. Pet was too regular a visitor to be unremarked. At last, I replied, “Perhaps so.”

Pet grinned. “Bit stupid, aren’t they?”

If there was anything I’d thought about the goblins who ran the club below, it wasn’t that they were stupid. But I couldn’t help feeling uneasy, because it occurred to me suddenly that despite being trapped in a café with fifteen or so enchanted humans, Pet hadn’t once shown any signs of panic—nor, if it came to that, succumbing to the same enchantment.

I drew in a breath through my nose, my fingers curling away from the keyboard, and turned in my chair to face her. “Who are you? Really?”

“I told you,” she said. “I’m a pet.”

“I thought you meant that your name is Pet.”

She shrugged. “That’s what they call me.”

“Why did you say they’re stupid? The goblins?”

“Well, ’cos of trapping you here without trying to immobilise you properly,” said Pet agreeably. “But mostly ’cos of trying to trap me when they should know whose pet I am.”

“Who—whose pet are you?”

“Well,” said Pet, lifting her chin at the window, “his, for starters.”

I followed her gaze, and let out an involuntary hiss, starting back in my wheelchair. There was a person there, his perfectly creased trousers and impeccably white jumper at odds with the dirty hostel wall across the road behind him. He could have been Korean or Japanese, I wasn’t entirely sure which; but of one thing I was absolutely certain.

He was a vampire. Unlike human kinds, which are always difficult for me to tell apart, Behindkind are very distinct.

The vampire rapped on the window, his eyes half-lidded, and pointed at the door. Much to my relief, his gaze seemed to be focused on Pet. I absolutely did not want the attention of this very well dressed and poised vampire. He already looked as though he was annoyed, and vampires aren’t the most well-adjusted Behindkind at the best of times.

“What?” Pet called through the window. The loudness of her voice made me wince, but none of the Thralled humans around us so much as jumped.

The vampire’s eyes flickered shut for a moment and then opened again with a distinct gleam of menace. He jerked his head at the door and said something that wasn’t English. It could have been something like, “Mun yolo.”

“Can’t,” said Pet, turning back to the glasses. The liquid in some of them had already sunk; she refilled those, ignoring the vampire entirely in a way that brought cold chills to my neck.

The vampire thumped at the window with the side of his fist and jerked his chin at the door again, then turned his head on one side, his eyes narrowly on Pet.

She stuck out her tongue at him.

I coughed a laugh into my coffee before I could help it, and thought that Pet might have grinned across at me briefly.

The vampire bared his teeth and rapped once more on the window, this time with distinct warning.

“It’s no good doing that,” Pet called to him. “I can’t get the door open.”

“Ku saramun—”

“He can’t open it, either. It’s magic.”

“Ssulmo obnun saramiya.”

Pet thumped the window with her clenched fist, startling me and the vampire equally. “Better than being a person without manners!”

“Noh, Petteu!”

“Oh shut up,” grumbled Pet. “It’s no good whinging at the window; something’s gone weird in here and we’ve gotta fix things before we can get the door open. Why don’t you make yourself useful and bring Zero here?”

The vampire shrugged and spoke again.

“Why don’t you know where he is? I thought you were all having a day off—he was still there when I left the house!”

“Why do you want Zero?” I asked, above the vampire’s reply. “Is he someone who can help open the door?”

“Dunno,” said Pet, frowning. “But he’s pretty good at breaking stuff, so probably. He’s usually around if I’m in trouble, so I thought he’d be here. Oi!”

I jumped, but she wasn’t addressing me.

To the vampire, she said, “If you had a phone, you could have called him.”

“Nega wae?”

“I didn’t bring my phone with me. I was just coming out to get coffee for you lot!”

The vampire shrugged again. “Nan obseo.”

Pet thumped the window at him and yelled, “Get a phone, you old fossil!”

He fixed her with a black look and said something I couldn’t understand. From the tilt of his chin, I guessed that he had said he did have a phone.

“Why don’t you carry it, then?” demanded Pet, confirming my suspicion. “It’s not like you lot can talk via telepathy!”

She made an annoyed sound, turned her shoulder to him, and said to me, “Sorry. It’s only really Zero that’s useful.”

The vampire’s eyes flashed, and I saw the snarl of two crossed incisors. He might not speak English, but he certainly understood it.

Perhaps he would have fulminated silently at the window if Pet had given him more attention. With her shoulder to him, he prowled across the footpath and leaned elegantly into a parking sign instead, his eyes dark and dangerous.

“Just ignore him,” Pet advised me. “He’s always stroppy. Funny, though—it’s not his dinner tonight, so I don’t see why he came looking for me. Want me to get a few more glasses?”

She jumped up and went to get them before I could agree, or ask what dinner had to do with anything, or even protest that I had no desire to be left alone with the vampire—with or without a good few centimetres of glass between us.

Failing that, I tried not to catch his eye. It’s foolish to catch a vampire’s eye in any circumstances, but this one was already significantly annoyed and I had the distinct feeling that I was somehow exacerbating that annoyance to an unwise degree.

Unfortunately, as soon as Pet left the booth there was a flash of movement in my periphery. I looked up instinctively, to find that the vampire was watching me with his lips pursed.

I would have cleared my throat, but I didn’t seem to be able to swallow. That amused him; at least, I saw his mouth curve up at the edge with malicious satisfaction, but there was absolutely no warmth of humour in his eyes. He displayed one wrist to the window, watch-face foremost, and tapped it lightly, one brow raised. Then he solemnly twitched that finger back and forth in the air, remonstratingly.

He thought I was taking too much time? But it had taken days of testing to have this hack catch on as it had, and I still didn’t know why it had. Even if I could wriggle back into my program, there was no way I could dismantle the hack in a single morning, if I could dismantle it at all. I had no idea what had made it work correctly in the first place; or what the goblinkind had already had working in the background before my own spell took, for that matter. My goblinkind employers had been trickier than I had anticipated.

Perhaps the vampire understood my panic-stricken look. The other brow went up, and he traced one long index finger slowly across his throat, the pointed tip of one incisor showing from the lips that still curved with such a lack of humour.

I swallowed, involuntarily this time, and ducked my head to my work once again. If Pet had a vampire at her back, who else did she have? She had said owners, I was sure—and that Athelas she mentioned; who was he?

I opened my mouth to ask her about it when she came back with a carafe of water, but before I could, she asked, “Oi. Can they can see us in here?”

“They can,” I told her ruefully. “There’s a system I’ve been wanting to try out—”

Pet’s voice was gloomy. “Bet you invented a magic-based security system and they paid you to install it.”

“I did, and they did.”

“Oh well, I reckoned you might have. Can they hear us?”

“No. I hadn’t worked that part out yet.”

“Oi.”

“What?” I asked. There was a note of hope, or perhaps interest, in her voice. What had she thought of?

“If they can see us, reckon we better play with ’em a bit.”

“How exactly can we play with them? If it comes to that, why do you want to play with them? I thought you wanted to get out.”

“Yeah,” said Pet thoughtfully, “but I reckon they know who I am, and I reckon they should know better than to try and trap me here. Anyway, I just meant that if we want them to think we’re starting to be affected by the music we’ll have to start doing things in a loop, sort of. Remind me to go get water again in five minutes.”

“Ah,” I breathed, my eyes lighting up. “So that they don’t look too carefully while we’re busy trying to get out, you mean?”

“’Zactly,” she said. “Oi.”

I couldn’t help the hiss of laughter. “Yes, Pet?”

“Remember how you said you could only save us two, and I said you’d better find a way to save us all?”

For some reason, that made me laugh again. There was little enough amusing about our situation. “I remember.”

“I s’pose you can’t hack back into your program now that it’s shut you out?”

My pride stung, I said a little bit shortly, “No. I’d have to get to the original program, and that’s on my computer at home. And if I tried from here, they’d notice as soon as I started fiddling with the system.”

“Ye-es,” said Pet, slowly. “Maybe we should try to call out, in that case.”

“Call out?”

“Well, I can’t get out to get help, so—”

“What help? How many more humans around here know about Behind?”

“Just me,” Pet reassured me. “But if we can do a sort of internet call out, maybe Athelas can help from his side.”

“I can do something like that,” I agreed. “But I’ll need to know where to make the, um…call.”

“Like a physical address?”

“Is Athelas Behindkind?”

“Yeah—fae.”

“Then a physical address will do.”

“Hang on,” she said, as if she’d only thought of it. “We don’t have a computer at the moment. Someone sort of blew it up.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Pet looked knowledgeable. “Ah, is that ’cos you’re using the bit of your computer that isn’t really a computer to do it?”

“Exactly so,” I agreed. I couldn’t help being impressed and a little bit charmed. There was more cunning to Pet than her trusting and trustworthy face at first let on. It was pleasant, moreover, not to have to explain things—even if it was also slightly worrisome. “If he’s at the physical address, I’ll be able to contact him.”

She glanced around the café suspiciously, then leaned in and whispered it in my ear.

For my part, I tried to pretend I hadn’t committed it to memory as I mirrored my magic to my typing, and laid in the directions for the call out. I shouldn’t really be thinking of anything but getting out of this café right now. It was bad enough that a pair of straightforward grey eyes had guilted me into doing things in a way that might see us all killed instead of escaping straight away and preserving at least my own and her life.

The protection spell, laced with my own hack and the goblins’ ambient track, considered the spike of information-laden magic, and allowed it through. Just an outgoing call. Just a normal function of the internet.

“Good!” I breathed, as the outgoing connection sought and found the right address. Now all I had to do was find something to attach the connection to—something or someone.

I could see him straight away, a single, powerful plume of Behindkind energy that crackled like lightening. I winced, but connected to it anyway, gasping when the strength of that fae touched the connection.

It seemed to me that someone said, “Dear me!” in a soft, interested voice; but just then, Pet said, “It worked!”

I must have been made of stone if I couldn’t be warmed and pleased by the brightness of awe in her voice. My smile must have caught the vampire’s eye through the window, because he looked coldly at me and smirked just slightly.

I looked away and back to the laptop screen, which now displayed a living room with two full, fat sofas and an old-fashioned, studded leather chair.

“Oi!” yelled Pet. “Athelas! Where’ve you got to?”

A murmuring of sound began to the edges of the vision, growing louder, then someone said, quite clearly this time, “Dear me! What trouble have you got yourself into, Pet?”

“I don’t like the way you say that,” Pet said, indignantly. “Actually, I’ve—well, I’m calling to see if you can help, so I s’pose that’s fair enough. You know that protection spell Zero put on the café?”

A slender, middle-aged fae came into the frame, holding a teacup and saucer. “I do,” he said. He looked very pleasant, unlike the vampire outside, and I felt, insensibly, relieved.

Then it struck me exactly what Pet had said. Her Zero had put in place the protection spell I had had such difficulties getting around?

“Yeah, well, someone paid ’Zul to hack it,” she said.

“Marazul,” I corrected her absent-mindedly. Good heavens! Who exactly was her Zero? And where had he gotten such ancient, powerful magic?

“Dear me!” said Athelas, a third time. “What an unfortunate time for Zero to have left the house. He was in rather a hurry, so I didn’t like to stop him.”

It didn’t seem to me that there was any particular meaning to the words, nor to the mild eyes that gazed at us, but Pet said, “It’s all right. ’Zul is a friend. He’s not holding me prisoner. That’s the goblins.”

“Can you not access Between?”

“She’s a human,” I pointed out. Of course she couldn’t access Between. Even touching it—even—well, she had touched it earlier, but that was a vastly different thing to accessing Between. Touching Between was impossible, but accessing Between was more impossible.

Athelas ignored me, his eyes on Pet.

“Nope,” she said. “Not for getting out; I already had a bit of a go. I can pull things through, but the protection spell has joined up with a thrall the goblins have started up. Reckon it doesn’t want to let anything out.”

“What a shame,” sighed Athelas. “This is really Zero’s field of expertise. I suppose JinYeong is there with you?”

“He’s outside. Mostly glaring.”

“He has been particularly sulky lately.”

“That’s what I thought!” said Pet, with the pleased air of one who has found herself unexpectedly in the right. Then, as if remembering her situation, she said rather more gloomily, “I suppose you’ll just have to send Zero along when he arrives, then.”

“I imagine he’ll arrive soon enough,” Athelas said. “Don’t you?”

Pet, slightly annoyed, asked, “He’s still got a tracker trace on me?”

“And isn’t it a good thing!” said Athelas, smiling gently. Then he pinched the connection away from himself, away from the house, and let it go.

“Ow!” I said, my head jerking backwards.

“That was a bit nasty,” Pet said, leaning forward to pat the apex of my head, where the recoil ached. “Sorry. Maybe I annoyed him this morning, too.”

There was a tap from the window again, this one decidedly sharp, and Pet stuck out her tongue at the window. I ducked my head back to the level of my laptop screen, but I could feel the point of the vampire’s glare. For the first time today, I felt myself utterly thankful to be trapped inside the café with a decent spell and inches of glass between myself and the outside.

“Reckon they’d snap out of it if they were away from the music?” asked Pet, absent-mindedly drinking from one of the water glasses.

“In general, yes,” I said. “The power of fae music is in its proximity.”

“Pity we can’t take everyone through the internet,” she said. “Like calling ourselves out instead of just speaking to Athelas.”

I stared at her for such a long time that she turned red and looked away, out the window. “Sorry,” she muttered. “Athelas says I talk too much sometimes.”

“No!” I said, suddenly and forcefully. “No! You’re exactly right! It didn’t occur to me—good heavens, I wonder if it’s possible?”

“What? You can really send people through the internet?”

“No,” I said again, and this time there was a smile growing on my face; big, bright, and wonder-filled. “But I think—I’m really very sure—you said you don’t have a computer at home, didn’t you?”

“Yep,” she said gloomily. “Athelas sorta blew it up.”

“What do you use when you want a computer?”

“The library. We sorta made a few adjustments to one of ’em.”

I could have kissed her. “It’s already fused with magic?”

“Well, sorta, I s’pose,” she said. “Zero put a few protection spells around it, and I fiddled with the bit of Between that seeps through the shelves so that—”

“Perfect!”

“Really?” Pet sounded cautiously optimistic. “Well, I s’pose you know what you’re talking about, but what good is the computer there when we’re here?”

I spread my fingers over the keyboard of my laptop, smiling blissfully. “Because it’s magic fused with electronics. And because it can receive magic that’s pretending to be electronics. Like a batch of emails that aren’t really emails.”

This time it was Pet’s turn to stare, and the admiration in her eyes brought a warmth to my cheeks I had thought I was past the age of displaying.

“You’re gonna send everyone outta here through your not-computer disguised as emails?”

“That’s right,” I said, and I wondered if it was possible that I had ever felt so euphoric before. I didn’t remember feeling this exhilarated, no matter how clever my hacks were.

Pet, grinning, rapped on the window and beckoned the vampire back over. He raised his brows at her, but after a moment where it looked like he was going to ignore her, he pushed himself away from the street sign and sauntered closer.

“Tell Athelas to go to the library and log in at our computer,” she called through the glass. “We’re gonna call him again. Got some email to send.”

I had told Pet that the goblins would notice if I hacked back into the system, but it hadn’t fully occurred to me to wonder what we would do when they invariably noticed what else we were up to.

Pet must have been thinking about it for some time—perhaps even since I first made the observation—because when she came back with the latest carafe of water, she asked me, “Is that door the only way in and out of this floor from the one below? The one behind the counter, I mean?”

I nodded, busy with the ticklish little bit of magic that would soon be worming its way into my email.

“How long d’you think it’ll take you? All of it, I mean—hacking the magic, setting up the email, and gathering all the people?”

I looked away from the screen in surprise, so see that Pet was half-beneath the table. “What, me? You want me to gather all the thralled people?”

“Reckon I’ll be a bit busy,” she said, in a muffled sort of way. “Ah! Got it!”

She emerged with two metal struts; twins of the ones that had been digging into my legs for half the day on this side of the table. As the sunlight from the windows hit them, they flickered and became something that was certainly neither as blunt nor as tubular as metal struts.

“Nice of someone to leave these hanging around!” Pet said cheerfully, casually feeling the balance of the twin short swords she now held.

“You can’t do that,” I said; which was ridiculous, because there she was, doing it—and there the swords were, fresh from Between.

“That’s what everyone says,” she said, even more cheerfully. “Don’t tell anyone. I’m not supposed to show people.”

“I’m not people,” I said, with an attempt at coolness. “I’m mer.”

That earned me a grin. “Anyway,” she said, “I’m gonna be a bit busy, so you’re going to have to get them all together.”

I gazed at her stupidly for far too long, and then down at my useless legs. “I don’t think I can. They’re thralled; I can’t round them up like cattle, and I can’t force them to move, either. If I could walk, then maybe—”

“You have to,” she said. “There’s no one else, and I can’t keep off goblins and round up humans at the same time.”

“How—?”

“Dunno,” Pet said. “But if you hack back into your program, can’t you do something a bit different with the ambient track they gave you? Sorta pied piper ’em toward the right spot?”

Someone laughed, and it wasn’t until Pet grinned back at me that I realised it was me. “Do you always verb your nouns?”

“I’m a scrapper, not a writer,” she said, still grinning. “I don’t have to speak properly. That mean you can do it?”

“Yes,” I said, and there was still a laugh curling in my stomach because while I had been thinking of my shortcomings, Pet had been thinking of my abilities. No wonder she was pet to a fae, a vampire, and a Zero. “It’s a pity you’re already adopted. We work very well together.”

Pet’s grey eyes danced a little, but she only said, “I come in useful every now and then. You ready?”

“Nearly,” I said.

Then I lowered my head and began typing magic into lines and blocks that grew until they moved and took on a life of their own, ready to do exactly what I needed them to do. When I had typed the second-to-last stroke, my fingers still poised over the keyboard, I paused for a moment.

I asked Pet, “Are you ready?”

She was by the counter—had been since she pulled those swords from the table, and I fancied I could hear the sound of something scratching, scratching, deep in the lower floor.

“I reckon,” she said, without looking back at me. She stood easily, as if she’d always carried swords, her balance slightly to the back foot. I hoped she was as good with them as she looked holding them, because if the goblins got through her, there was no hope for the rest of us.

“If everything goes wrong, it’s your fault,” I told her.

She laughed. “Yeah, I hear that a lot.”

But the tickling in my stomach was excitement, not fear. Had the human world always had such a warmth and life to it? I didn’t remember feeling it before. The easy way to explain it would have been Pet’s enlivening presence—bringing with it, as it had, danger—but that was too easy an answer. Something within myself had changed. Something within myself, after being so long used to pining for the velvet blue of Beneath, had grown to appreciate the sunshine of Above. At least for today, that sunshine was as beautiful as the blue of Beneath.

More, I felt alive. Or perhaps I merely felt that for the first time, I had had a purpose that I could serve, even with a body that was useless no matter which world I chose to live in.

“Don’t mind me,” Pet said. “Things are gonna get noisy for a bit, but it’s nothing I haven’t seen before. Just do your bit and we’ll be fine. I’m counting on you to get us out.”

This time she glanced at me for the briefest moment, and I saw the trust in her face. That was a dangerous face for a pet to carry around with her. It was the sort of face that made people—that even made Behindkind like myself—want to be worthy of that trust.

“Here we go,” I said, and started my dual-program running with the magic-laced press of a button.

I’m not sure if the program or the goblin attack began first. I saw the closest of the café patrons twitch, his foot edging toward myself and my computer; and as he did so, there came the first slash of steel against steel.

“Get back, you ugly little needle-pusher!” said Pet, in a growl.

Something hit the wall behind me with a sticky splatter, and the high wail of a goblin battle-cry rose in the air, wild and savage.

I looked over my shoulder, unable to help myself, and saw Pet meet the onslaught of goblins with a competent, scything double sweep of her swords, blood arcing high to flower on the ceiling. The arms and legs that had been faunish and inclined to a likewise faunish awkwardness were no longer awkward—lithe, quick, and beautiful, Pet danced forward and then back, the twin blades never still for a minute, her booted feet kicking away goblin needles, daggers, and teeth.

Something soft whispered by my arm, and I started badly, my wheelchair creaking. The first patron was at my right hand; his eyes were still clouded, but he stepped forward without prompting from me, and was caught within the influence of the second part of my program.

“Good luck,” I told him.

I clicked the new mail button and the patron flickered slightly as the magic assimilated him. My finger hovered for just an instant longer over mousepad, the cursor on the send mail button, but Pet was fighting for both of us at the other end of the café, so what else could I do but hit the button?

The patron vanished completely, and a moment later, the text at the bottom of my email client said message sent successfully.

I might have whooped.

“Good grief!” said Pet, her voice strained and just a little shocked. “I thought one of them had slipped past me! Working, is it?”

“Perfectly!” I said, relief blossoming bright and fragrant in my heart. I caught the next two patrons in the program; new mail, send mail; and they followed the first without a hitch.

Now this, I thought, grinning at my reflection in the computer screen, was what hacking life should always be. The delight of being always one step ahead of everyone else.

My fingers danced across the mousepad—new mail, send mail—and Pet swept the café clean on her side, until there was a kind of hollowness to the click of the mouse buttons, and Pet said from behind me, “They’re gone.”

I looked around in surprise to see who were gone, goblins or patrons, and found that we were entirely alone in the blood-soaked and magic-ridden café.

Pet threw the swords down on the seat next to me, where they made a sticky, bloody patch. Now that the time had come for our own departure, that patch of blood pointedly reminded me that there was a vampire waiting for me in the library—not to mention one Behindkind fae and, apparently, a Zero. What exactly would they say to my less-than-legal exploits today? It was very possible that they would report me, at the very least.

“Don’t reckon they’re game to poke their heads above the floor-line just yet,” Pet said. She added encouragingly, “We’d better go now while they’re still scared.”

I let out a slightly shaky breath as carefully as I could. I didn’t like to look like I was too frightened. “I may have misled you somewhat.”

“About what?”

“I might have given you the impression that some of what I do is allowed under Behind law…”

This time, Pet really did look impressed. It was a sop to my bruised ego. “Flaming heck!” she said. “You’re playing both sides, but in reverse.”

“Not very clever of me,” I said. “But it’s a good living, and I don’t particularly like either side all that much.”

“Don’t worry,” Pet advised. “Zero doesn’t care about stuff like that.”

“Who is Zero, anyway?” I was beginning to feel, somewhat desperately, that this skinny, apparently friendless little human was backed by far too many people. A fae owner and a vampire owner were bad enough—what type of owner was this Zero?

“He’s my other owner,” she said, confirming that uneasy suspicion. “There are three of them.”

“What’s this one? Trollstock?”

“Nope,” said Pet, without the kind of offence I would have expected from Behindkind, should I have said it to one. She added, “And don’t think I don’t know you were being rude, either.”

I grinned. “That doesn’t surprise me,” I told her. I was beginning to think that nothing about this human should surprise me any longer.

“Anyway, you don’t have to worry about them reporting you for stuff like that. Not if you’re not doing wrong stuff with it, anyway.”

Since this reassurance was paired with a slightly stern look that made it difficult for me not to smile, I said, “I certainly won’t be doing anything like this again in a hurry.”

“All right,” Pet said, satisfied. “Oi. When we go through and the program stops, it’s going to collapse on itself like you said, yeah? ’Cos there aren’t any more humans to feed on?”

“Yes,” I said. I had wondered if it would occur to her.

“Will it kill them? The rest of the goblins, I mean.”

“I doubt it,” I told her. “But it’s possible, if they’re weak enough.”

She nodded. “All right.”

“All right?” I was curious to know how she felt about that. I had known ruthless humans, and Pet wasn’t one of them. She had killed in self-defence, but I hadn’t seen any sign of enjoyment from her—just determination and a certain grim pallor.

“It’s better than what Zero and the others would do to them,” she said. “And it’s time I took responsibility, if I’m going to be protecting people.”

“Why should they be your responsibility? You said you’re a pet.”

“Because there’s no one else,” Pet said. “And there should be a human looking out for humans. You ready?”

“Ready,” I said. If I had before thought her adorable and slightly unnerving, I now found that I respected her more than a little. “Hold tight.”

“Yep,” said Pet, and her voice was slightly breathless.

“Scared?” I asked, over my shoulder, smiling.

“Never travelled by email before,” she said. “What about you?”

“Terrified!” I said, and clicked on the send mail button.

I had said I was terrified. Perhaps I even thought I was terrified. But when we rolled smoothly into the library, as safe and whole as if we had simply entered through the door, I knew real terror.

Because approaching through the shelves of books, a Between sword strapped crossways on his back, was Lord Sero; heir to half of the Behind world and leader of the Troika.

Blinding white hair, icy blue eyes, and a pale, severe brow I had seen last encircled by a band of white gold, danced before my dazzled eyes.

Zero? Her third owner, Zero, was actually Lord Sero?

He was so much bigger than I expected in real life, and so much icier. Looking up to greet him was Athelas—that Athelas?—his friendly smile no longer a thing to be trusted. JinYeong the vampire, his eyes malicious, cocked an eyebrow at me, but I couldn’t find it in my dazed being to look away from Lord Sero.

“Who are you,” he demanded, “and why are you playing with my pet?”

Pet made a small, grumbling noise, but she said to me, “Didn’t I tell you? It’s pretty stupid of people to imprison other people’s pets when they don’t know who the owners are.”

“That’s Lord Sero,” I said, resisting the urge to open the button that seemed to be choking me.

“Who are you,” repeated Lord Sero, “and why are you playing with my pet?”

“He’s ’Zul—”

“Marazul.”

“—and before you start getting blood-ragey and majestic, he is the one who started the spell that sealed up the café, but he didn’t know what the goblins wanted it to do. He didn’t trap me in there, either; I did that myself because I thought it would be easier if one of us was in there.”

“The advantage in one of us being in there, Pet,” said Athelas, his eyes amused, “diminishes considerably when it’s not one of us.”

“Rude,” said Pet. “I fixed it, didn’t I?”

Lord Sero opened his mouth again, but to my astonishment and terror, she didn’t let him speak a single word.

“It’s no use saying bad pet at me, either.”

Lord Sero closed his mouth, but his eyes narrowed.

JinYeong, his eyes dark and liquid, leaned over and bit Pet on the shoulder, lightly.

“Oi!” yelped Pet. She turned and glared at him, rubbing her shoulder.

“Bad. Petteu,” the vampire said, very distinctly.

“If you turn me vampire, I’m gonna spend the rest of my immortal life pinching all your left socks!” Pet said, still scowling at him. “I’ll make you so flamin’ sorry you turned me that you hand yourself over for voluntary immolation.”

The vampire shrugged and leaned back against a bookshelf. He radiated a faint smugness that was as irritating as it was subtle. It must have irritated Pet, too, because she stuck her tongue out at him again and turned her shoulder.

“Anyway,” she said. “We fixed it, and I think that means—”

“There’s no renegotiation of terms,” Lord Sero said, without allowing her to finish.

“The Troika!” I croaked, feebly gripping the arms of my chair. I should probably have kept quiet while they were talking between themselves, but the words forced themselves out.

“Yeah,” said Pet. “That’s what Behindkind call ’em, anyway.”

She rolled me forward again, and my hands frantically sought the wheel rims to stop a forward motion that only brought me closer to death.

“You didn’t—you didn’t tell me—”

“I did!” Pet’s voice was indignant. “I told you that the goblins were stupid for kidnapping me because of whose pet I am.”

“Perhaps you should lead with ‘Troika’ next time,” suggested Athelas.

Now that I knew it was the Athelas, I felt as though I should have known from the start. Who else is called Athelas, with a soft, deadly gleam to his eyes, and occasionally accompanied by a vampire? I hadn’t heard any talk of a pet, of course, but it felt as though I could have pieced together that much at least.

“You said his name is Zero,” I said, through numb lips. “That’s Lord Sero.”

“Maybe to you,” Pet said. “To me, he’s Zero. Oi. Where have all the people gone?”

JinYeong cocked his eyebrow at her instead. “Saramdul? Musen saramdul?”

She looked accusingly around at the three of them. “Did you let JinYeong eat ’em?”

“JinYeong is reformed,” Athelas said.

“What, since last night?” demanded Pet. “He took a bite outta the trolley boy! I saw him!”

The vampire grabbed her by the arm and jerked her close, covering her mouth as his eyes flew to Lord Sero. I tightened my grip on the wheel rims to stop the rocking her swift passage created, and looked up just in time to see JinYeong release her again with a disgusted noise.

“Don’t put your hand over my mouth if you don’t want me to lick it!” she said grumpily.

“Well, perhaps reformed is going a bit far,” Athelas allowed. “However, Zero saw the others out safely before they had a chance to notice anything else that they shouldn’t notice.”

“All right,” said Pet, but she still looked suspicious. “Anyway, like I said, this is ’Zul, and he likes to be called Marazul. He doesn’t like goblins much either, and he hacks magic.”

“Exactly how,” enquired Athelas, his voice mild but his eyes distinctly unnerving, “did the two of you meet? I can’t help feeling it was very…coincidental.”

Pet looked slightly pink. “We both get coffee from that café,” she said. “And it was the goblins who thought it would be a good idea to try and trap me too. They probably thought they could get a ransom for me. Stupid little twits.”

“I see,” said Lord Sero, looking down at her. “Perhaps a visit to that café will convince a few Behindkind of the danger of thinking like that.”

“Don’t think there’s much of it left,” Pet said. “And I killed quite a few of ’em when they were trying to stop us from leaving.”

The vampire JinYeong showed his teeth for the length of a rather sibilant sentence.

“Exactly,” Lord Sero agreed. “I don’t like the idea of leaving stragglers. Besides, I’m interested to see what has become of my protection spell.”

I swallowed as Lord Sero turned his gaze inevitably on me, his eyes thoughtful and just a bit considering. I didn’t like that look. It could have been the look of a fae who was trying to decide how many limbs he should remove in case of hurt to his pet, or it could have been the look of a fae who was trying to decide how useful I could be to him. I didn’t much care for either option.

“Don’t go too far away,” said Lord Sero. “We might have a use for you.”

Oh no.

“There is certainly a use for him,” Athelas agreed, those quiet eyes of his dwelling on me in a way that made me cold to the bone.

“I’m really very little use,” I told them both, gripping the wheels of my chair on either side. “I’m not fully mer—I can’t even swim beyond the light or remain beneath the waves more than five minutes.”

“We don’t have any use for a merman,” Lord Sero said. “But we do have use for whatever you call this spell you’ve been fighting for the last couple hours.”

“It’s hacking,” Pet told him again, helpfully. “Sort of magic, and sort of not. I didn’t know people could do that sort of thing.”

“They can’t,” remarked Athelas. His eyelashes had dropped a little, but I still felt chilled by his gaze. “That’s why we’re so very interested. I believe you have to resign yourself to seeing rather more of our Pet in the future.”

Lord Sero, with the slightest of frowns, said, “Yes. We’ll discuss that later.”

I had the feeling that we encompassed himself and me, not himself and Athelas. A little desperately, I said, “But your lordship—!”

“Don’t worry, they won’t hurt you,” Pet assured me. “I’ll make sure.”

I looked from Pet’s thin, waiflike frame to the whiplike JinYeong, and then further to the hulking mass that was Lord Sero, and felt a laugh bubbling up inside me. Best not to let that one out. I had the distinct feeling that it wouldn’t sound quite sane.

“Later, we will also discuss your unique use of magic,” said Lord Sero. “I want to know exactly how you got through my protection spell, and I very much want to know why you did it with my pet in the café.”

“Oh,” I croaked. “Well, your lordship, that’s—”

“Yeah, all right, all right,” Pet said. “Stop scaring him! He’s had a pretty bad day and he’s only been paid half of what he was owed. I’m gonna take him home now: you can ask him questions later.”

She grabbed the handles of my chair again and wheeled me straight at them. Much to my surprise, not one of them tried to stop her; they each merely took a step back to avoid being run over. Athelas looked amused, JinYeong distinctly annoyed but aloof, and Lord Sero might have looked—was it possible?—slightly fond.

I saw it all in a startled flash, and then we were in the elevator and somehow outside the library, the warm summer sun folding around us. I took in a deep, careful breath, and let it out a bit more shakily than I liked. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that there was a great deal more to Pet than merely being the pet of Lord Sero.

It also occurred to me that given that fact, and the fact that she was Lord Sero’s pet, it would certainly behove me to find a new place to live as soon as possible.

I couldn’t see that Pet had any magic to her, but she pushed me up the road so energetically that it had to have been magic that kept her going uphill the whole way back to my flat. Neither of us looked too closely at the café as we passed; there was a blankness to the windows that was unpleasant, and I was glad that Pet kept us to the other side of the street.

“At least there’s another café down the road,” she said a little bit hopefully, as we approached my flat. “They do pretty good coffee, too.”

“I believe I’ve lost the appetite for coffee,” I said, gazing up at my flat. What a shame. I’d gotten so used to living here, and now I would have to find somewhere else. The goblins knew where to find me—worse, when Pet got back to them, Lord Sero would undoubtedly know, too. I was under no illusions that she wouldn’t tell them everything they asked. She was their pet, after all.

“Oh,” said Pet sadly. “Does that mean I won’t see you anymore when I get coffee?”

I was tempted. For just a moment, I was very tempted. It was a long time since I’d seen a look like that from a woman, human or Behindkind. And she was such a nice little thing, too. It could be nice to get to know her little by little, over a cup of coffee, with a smile.

But there was too much hazard to my life to be sitting quietly for coffee and smiles—and if there was too much hazard in my life, there was an overabundance of it in Pet’s life. The kind of overabundance that spills over into the lives of those around them.

And then there was Lord Sero. I had seen the frown when he looked from myself to Pet, and it wasn’t the sort of frown I would have associated with mere fondness for a pet. I didn’t think it was a romantic interest, but it was certainly something. I could still feel that newness of zest to my life that I hadn’t felt in years, and I wasn’t prepared to end that at Lord Sero’s hands if I made a mistake with his Pet—nor was I prepared to end it at the teeth of a vampire, if it came to that.

“I’ll see you from time to time,” I said, even though I knew it was a lie as I said it. I would be gone just as soon as I could pack my things. “They’ll send you to ask me to do things.”

“They will, won’t they?” she agreed. “Athelas likes discovering new talents, and Zero loves using them. Don’t be too afraid of them, ’Zul. They look mean—yeah, well, they are mean—but they look after their own.”

“That will be more comforting when I feel that I am one of their own,” I said, though I had no intention of being on such terms with the Troika. “They’re not a particularly safe trio with whom to be on first name terms. They may be a necessary part of the Between world, but they’re not a comfortable part of it. Perhaps when I know them a little better I’ll be able to read them more clearly, but for now they’re a midnight blue I’d rather keep away from.”

That shade of midnight blue was the type that hid monsters in the deep with stars for eyes and spears for teeth.

“What about me?” asked Pet.

She asked it idly, but I knew the answer to that one straight away.

“You?” I asked, and found that I was smiling again. “That’s easy. You’re another shade of blue altogether. A deep, dark one with shiny patches that I didn’t know existed.”

Her face lit up, a brightness of happiness that brought the slightest tugging of regret to my heart. “I like that,” she said. “It’s not bad—being a pet, I mean—but sometimes it’s nice to be something else.”

I turned my smile up at her, hoping it wasn’t as sad as it felt. “Then next time we meet, you’ll have to tell me your real name.”

“Yes,” said Pet, and there was no sadness to her smile. As if she knew, better than me, that we would certainly meet again. “Next time we meet.”

The End

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