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He nodded again. “I had assumed the shop was sealed off from the world entirely, but
then the snake you sent arrived, and I realized it was still possible to enter. It is, alas,
impossible to leave. The door is gone. I am no longer trapped in the dark box where the
new master kept me, and I am no longer trapped by threads of compulsion, but I am still
trapped, here, in this shop. That is why I could not heed your summons.” He hung his
head. “That is also why there is so much wreckage. In my wrath, I smashed the shop. I
regret the outburst. It was unseemly.”
“Well, fuck,” Marla said after a moment. “Let me look into this.” She went into the
main part of the shop, where B and Rondeau were already standing by the place where
the main door should have been. “Guess you overheard, huh?”
“Yep,” Rondeau said. “It turns out that B doesn’t know any special action-movie tricks
for escaping a space-time pocket that’s been cut off from its real-world umbilicus.”
“I never did any of my own stunts,” B said apologetically, and Marla thought with
something like exasperated affection that Rondeau’s sense of humor was rubbing off on
him.
Marla stared at the wall of the shop, the blank wooden wall where a door should have
been. “But we aren’t cut off from the umbilicus,” she said. “The Chinese guy didn’t cut
the cord entirely. After all, we got in. It’s more like we’re in a—”
“Humane mousetrap,” Rondeau said.
“Exactly. Except no one’s going to repatriate us to a distant grassy meadow.”
“Can’t you throw a fireball at the wall or something?” B said.
Marla raised an eyebrow. “I could, though to get the energy I’d have to suck away most
of yours and Rondeau’s body heat. If I did that, I wouldn’t accomplish much more than
setting this place on fire.”
“No one wants to be trapped in a burning box,” Rondeau said.
“So…we’re fucked?” B said.
“Hey, it could be worse,” Rondeau said. “There’s plenty of stuff to eat here.” He
prodded a jar on a nearby shelf, then squinted at it. “Okay, this is dried sea-horses, bad
example. But there’s plenty of, ah, ginger and ginseng and mandrake and lots and lots
of tea. Think of this place like a bomb shelter. When Mutex raises a giant Aztec frogmonster
and ravages the city, we’ll be safe here.”
“Except that stuff can still get in,” Marla said. “And anything bad that comes in here
can’t get out again, and we’ll be stuck with it. So it’s not much of a bomb shelter,
really.”
“Hmm,” Rondeau said. “Okay, point. How do we get out?”