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“So where to now?” B asked. “Into the darkest, cankerous, pee-smelling heart of the
Tenderloin, where the damned and the poor college students dwell?”
Marla pulled the printout she’d gotten from Dalton’s mirror-self out of her pocket.
“Looks like this sorceress, Bethany, lives in the Tenderloin Station.”
“The what?” B said.
“Tenderloin Station,” Marla repeated. “It says it’s underground.”
“Somebody’s fucking with you,” B said. “There’s no such thing as the Tenderloin
Station. No trains run here. There might be a bus station….”
“I’ve got an address,” Marla said. “A corner, at least, so we’ll find out.” She took a step
toward the intersection, paused, pivoted on her heel, paused again, and huffed an
annoyed exhalation.
“Oh, right,” Rondeau said, and began unfolding a map. “Marla doesn’t like not having a
map in her head,” he said, in an aside to B, which was, of course, perfectly audible to
Marla. “And I’m not always as psychic as I should be when it comes to providing some
external directional guidance.”
Marla leaned over the map Rondeau held, muttering, tracing streets with her fingertip.
“Why didn’t you just ask the cabdriver to drop you off at the appropriate corner?” B
said.
“Because discretion is an impulse in me that extends beyond habit into irresistible
force,” she said. “In my city, every cabdriver reports to someone, often without even
being conscious of it. I can’t imagine things are so different here. It probably doesn’t
matter if my movements are being tracked right now, but I find it’s best to always act as
if things are as bad as they could possibly get. That way, you can only be pleasantly
surprised. So I gave the cabdriver a random address on one of the streets mentioned in
the directions. Now I’m just trying to figure out which direction I should be walking in.
And it’s…this.” She pointed, and set off, B following along with Rondeau, who was
trying to fold the map back into some semblance of pocket-sized convenience.
They walked past liquor stores with iron grates covering the windows, past peep shows,
bail bond emporiums, and pawnshops without number; past vagrants who didn’t even
bother panhandling, heaps of reeking trash, broken glass, and cigarette butts, and alleys
that smelled of wine and urine. They reached the corner indicated in Dalton’s directions,
an intersection dominated by a burned-out building that had once been a residential
hotel, to judge from the faded sign. The walls of the building were intact, but the firstfloor
windows and doors were boarded over, while the second-story windows were
broken, and opened onto fire-blackened walls. There were bas-reliefs of mythological
creatures on the walls above the highest windows—gryphons, unicorns, and other beasts
so faded by weather and vandalism that they could no longer be identified.
“Nothing here,” Rondeau said. “No train station anyway.”