Untitled

They rode the escalator up to street level, one henchman in the lead, the other bringing
up the rear. They were in the heart of downtown San Francisco (or, rather, one of the
hearts), right on Market Street, with gleaming office buildings rising on all sides. Marla
felt instantly more at ease here—it was almost as good as being home. A few rusting
iron bridges and an oil refinery or two, and she would have felt completely at peace.
They walked along Market to an apartment building, down a short flight of stone steps
to a bare metal door, painted green, just below street level. Marla took note of the
location. Some sorcerers liked to get high above the ground, in penthouses and aeries.
Others preferred more subterranean dwellings. There were crucial differences between
those two sorts. Those who lived underground were usually more willing to get their
hands dirty and deal with things personally.
The henchmen ushered them into a low-ceilinged room with bare concrete floors.
Rondeau, looking around, said, “Wow. Modern Geek Eclectic.” There were three
battered couches in various colors, a steel bookshelf overspilling with paperbacks, an
enormous rear-projection television screen against one wall, huge speakers in the
corners, a DJ booth with multiple turntables on a raised platform, and a bar along
another wall, done up in full bamboo-and-fringe tiki-bar style. Various movie posters,
mostly for vintage sci-fi and horror movies, were thumbtacked to the plaster walls.
There were also five or six computers and monitors scattered around the room at untidy
workstations, and miscellaneous piles of cable and computer components heaped here
and there on the floor.
“Back here,” a henchman said, and led them through a door into another low room, this
one filled with several rows of lab tables, each with flat-screen monitors and humming
computer hard drives. They passed through that room and into another, this one a
sprawling office with dark blue carpeting, a foosball table, a pinball machine, and a
huge oaken L-shaped desk with its own complement of oversized black flat-screen
computer monitors. The back of a leather captain’s chair faced them from behind the
desk, and Marla rolled her eyes again. What a James-Bond-villain gesture this was
going to be.
“Mr. Dalton,” a henchman said. “Your guest is here.” They stepped back, standing on
either side of the door.
The chair swiveled. The man sitting in it (with his elbows on the armrests, and his
forefingers steepled together, even) was identical to the henchman, though he wore a
different T-shirt, ragged khaki shorts, and bulging red-tinted WWII-style aviator
goggles. “Have a seat,” he said. “I’m Dalton.”
“I gathered that,” Marla said, and sat in one of the mismatched chairs on her side of the
desk. B sat down, too.
Rondeau wandered over to the pinball machine. “Sweet!” he said. “It doesn’t even need
quarters!” He started to play.
Dalton frowned.
“Don’t mind him,” Marla said. “He’s got the attention span of a canary. I’m Marla, by
the way.”