Chapter 19: An Apology, Sincerely Offered

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a story in which everyone says exactly what they mean, close this book now. Dear Reader, here is a riddle to carry with you through the pages ahead. What can be offered with both hands, accepted with a thank-you, and swallowed down to the last drop, and still leave somebody waiting to be paid? By the end of this Chapter, one of its characters will have the answer. I would like to think you will beat her to it.

The buses of Nowhere were yellow, and they did not so much travel as change their minds about where they were.

They stood in a long, patient row behind the main building, past the parking lot where the repair crews were still hauling the last of Beatrice onto a flatbed under a gray tarp, like a patient being wheeled away after a very bad night. Each bus had a number on its nose and, above the windshield, a placard that clattered over to a new place every few minutes, with the sound of a deck of cards being shuffled by someone in no hurry. OSAKA, JAPAN. LAGOS, NIGERIA. REYKJAVIK, ICELAND. MEXICO CITY, MEXICO. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA.

The cadets of the Academy came from everywhere, and so did their teachers, and this was how every one of them got home. Nobody walked out of Nowhere. The road forgot anyone who tried it without permission.

Hadjer’s bus was the Number Two. Its placard read PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, in white letters that had been repainted so many times they had grown a little fat.

She climbed the steps behind Carter and Arthur, into the smell of warm vinyl and dust and, faintly, of blueberries, because half the cadets who rode it had visited Room Four that week. The seats were the color of old mustard and cracked along every seam. Carter took the front bench, as far from her as the bus allowed. Arthur dropped into the seat across the aisle from hers and tucked his hands in his jacket, whistling something with no tune.

She set a paper bag in her lap. Inside, wrapped in a napkin gone soft with grease, was a blueberry muffin that had been warm six hours ago. Take one for later! Mr. Fred had said, glowing, as if later were a real place and he had bought her a ticket. The first muffin had not survived the corridor. The second she had no plan for.

Just as the doors began to fold shut, someone slipped aboard.

She was a girl in a gray hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled low, and she moved down the aisle without a sound and sank onto the last bench, as if she had been standing behind the building the whole time. She turned her face to the window and did not move again.

"Is that Lyra?" Arthur said, very quietly.

Carter twisted around in his seat, found the back bench, and turned forward with an expression like he’d swallowed a lemon. "She wasn’t with us at the lot."

"She wasn’t anywhere. I haven’t seen her in weeks," said Hadjer with a certain voice, like she was keeping an eye on her absence.

"None of us have." Carter’s voice dropped. "She didn’t come with us. She just... was there. She always dressed to stand out. I would have noticed."

Hadjer said nothing. She kept her eyes on her window. In the glass, a small hooded shape did not stir.

The doors sighed shut, and the driver, a heavyset woman with a thermos and a half-finished crossword, who had never once been seen to touch the wheel, touched it exactly once: to ease the bus onto a gravel road that had not been there a moment before.

The tires crunched. The pines of Nowhere slid by on either side, dark and tall and very close. Then, softly, the whole picture stuttered, like a film slipping its sprockets. The pines flickered. A trunk became a palm trunk. A hillside folded over onto itself and came up the color of dry California grass. For a few seconds, through the window, half the world was one place and half was another, and the seam between them slid past like a zipper being drawn.

The sound changed too. It was like someone turning a radio dial through a hundred stations at once: a snatch of Japanese, a flurry of Yoruba, a gull’s cry, a stadium roar, an advertisement for a mattress sale. The gravel hissed and thinned and was, all at once, asphalt. Then the dial stopped on an old pop song from a Pasadena oldies station, with a soft, clean click.

The bus was just a bus.

It stopped at a red light. A man with a golden retriever crossed in front of it. A billboard for a personal injury lawyer slid by on the right, and the driver turned the radio up a notch and went back to her crossword. Nothing about the world outside was strange except that it had not been there ten seconds ago.

Some roads you walk, and some you ride;

the strangest have a seam inside.

The Number Two made three stops inside Pasadena, and the Academy had picked every one of them the way a cat picks a sunny windowsill, wherever somebody Awakened was already sleeping.

At the first, on Alder Street, Carter stood up. He paused beside Hadjer’s seat, not too close, with his eyes on a dying flower on a girl who was sitting close to Hadjer.

"I don’t know why!... but, her eyes look like she wants to jump you, don’t let her." he said.

"I wasn’t going to."

He did not say it kindly. He did not say anything kindly to her. He got off and walked away down a street of boarded-up houses, toward the one at the end that nobody had claimed in nine years, and did not look back.

At the second, Arthur got to his feet. He stopped in the aisle and looked at her. She met his eyes and gave the smallest shake of her head, and after a moment, he nodded, tucked his hands in his jacket and stepped down into the golden afternoon.

Only after the doors had hissed shut behind him did the girl at the back stand up. She came forward slowly, a hand on each seat back, the way you cross a frozen pond, and sat down directly behind Hadjer.

She said nothing for the whole rest of the ride.

Pasadena at twenty to five in October was gold all the way down.

The sun hung low over the San Gabriel Mountains, which sat at the end of the street like a bruise someone had painted in watercolor. Sycamore leaves had begun to curl along the curb, brown at the edges and crackling underfoot. Somewhere a sprinkler ticked. Somewhere farther off, a leaf blower argued with a mockingbird, and the whole street smelled of hot asphalt, cut eucalyptus, jasmine, and onions frying in oil.

The last stop was a bench with a sun-bleached ad, a shelter with one cracked panel, and a small square beyond it with four plastic tables and a food cart under a faded striped awning. The cart sold fruit cups dusted with chili and lime, carne asada fries in paper boats, and tall glass bottles of lemonade sweating in a cooler.

Hadjer stepped down onto the curb and took out her phone. I’m at the stop, she wrote to her driver. Meet me here. Then she stood in the warm light, hoping, quite sincerely, that he would be early.

She had taken three steps toward the curb when someone said her name.

"Hadjer."

It was said carefully, like a word practiced in a mirror.

Lyra stood at the end of the shelter in a dress that was a little too bright. It shimmered at the hem like a screen with a loose cable. For a moment it was silk, then something that looked like silk, then silk again. Her shoes were pale leather and her bag smelled, from ten feet away, like the inside of an expensive car. Hadjer knew Glamour when she saw it. She also knew what it cost to keep running, and from the shadows under Lyra’s eyes, it had been running a long time.

"Can I have a minute?" Lyra said. "Just one. To apologize."

Every sensible instinct Hadjer owned told her to keep walking. Her driver would be here soon. She could be in a car, with the windows up and the radio on, before this conversation had properly begun.

She stayed where she was.

"Go ahead," she said.

Lyra drew a breath. She looked, for the first time in Hadjer’s memory, like someone who hadn’t slept in a bed she’d chosen.

"I took your coins," she said. "I said terrible things. I cut your hair once and told everyone it was an accident." A small, wet laugh escaped her. "I was awful. You didn’t deserve any of it. I’m sorry."

Hadjer waited. There was always more.

"And I need help." It came out smaller than the rest. "I can’t live like this anymore, Hadjer. I don’t even get to choose what I eat."

Hadjer looked at her for a long moment. Behind her, the sprinkler ticked. A bus hissed at the far corner.

"Let me buy you lunch," Lyra said, quickly. "Please. Something small. So I can say I did one thing right."

And Hadjer smiled.

They sat at the table nearest the shelter, in the shade of the awning, where the light came through the stripes in long gold bars. Under the table, Hadjer’s thumb moved once against her phone. Change of plans. Don’t come. I’m with a friend. She did not need rescuing from an apology.

The man behind the cart was thin and sunburned and cheerful, with a smile that stopped politely before it reached his eyes. His apron was stained from collar to hem. Hadjer was too busy refusing a straw to notice his hands. A turtle somewhere, she felt, owed her one.

She chose the fruit cup. Mango, jicama and cucumber, dusted with chili, a wedge of lime pressed into the top. She watched it being made. The man bent behind the counter, took a bottle from a shelf set slightly apart from the cooler, wiped its cap with a cloth, and set it in front of her chair.

"For the lady," he said. "That’s the coldest one."

Beside the register, in a jar of water, a sprig of mint stood upright. By the time Hadjer sat down, it had begun to droop. It did that near her. She was used to it.

Lyra took a bottle from the cooler for herself. It had the same crimped cap, the same beads of cold water running down the glass. She counted her money out from a bill folded in thirds, paid with exact change, and carried the paper boat of fries back to the table like something that might spill.

For a while, neither of them said anything. It was almost companionable.

"Do you remember the salon?" Lyra said.

"What salon?"

"Oh, no." Lyra put a hand over her heart. "You’ve blocked it out."

She told it the way a person tells a story she has told a hundred times, with her hands.

It had been a lazy Saturday in July, the kind where the air itself seemed to be yawning. Hadjer’s mother was at a charity luncheon. Her father was at the club. The housekeeper was vacuuming the far wing with headphones on, and there was no adult within three miles who could be called on to stop anything. Lyra had found the good kitchen shears in a drawer, the ones meant for poultry, and had announced, with a level of confidence she had not earned, that she was opening a salon.

"You said, ’Absolutely not.’"

"I did."

"I said, ’Three minutes.’"

"It was an hour and forty."

The client had been pushed onto a breakfast stool with a bath towel around her neck. A little off the top had become a little off the side, and then a little off the other side to match, and then a little more to match that, until Lyra stepped back and found that Hadjer had a forehead where there used to be bangs.

"You had a hairline," Lyra said, wheezing.

"I had a forehead," Hadjer said, and found, to her own surprise, that she was laughing.

Then Lyra had gone upstairs to the vanity.

It was Hadjer’s mother’s, an enormous thing with a ring of lights, and on it sat a velvet case of imported makeup that cost more than both their life put together. Lyra had opened it with the reverence of a surgeon, and gone to town. Electric-blue shadow up to the eyebrows. Blush in two round patches like stoplights. A lipstick the color of a traffic cone, applied well past the border of the lip.

When she turned the chair around to the mirror, both of them had gone silent.

"And then I said," Lyra said, and her voice dropped into a perfect, solemn imitation of her twelve-year-old self, "’No, wait. It actually looks... edgy! Very European!’"

Hadjer put her face in her hands and howled.

"You looked like a clown that had been in an accident!"

"I looked amazing!"

"We fell off the stool!"

"And then the door opened," said Lyra, "and your mother stood there in her pearls and her sunglasses, and she looked at the vanity, and she looked at the empty case, and she looked at you, and she almost fainted straight into the umbrella stand."

"’That,’" Hadjer wheezed, in her mother’s voice, "’was imported.’"

They laughed until the people at the next table glanced over, and then they laughed at that. Hadjer wiped her eyes with a napkin. It had been a long time since anyone had made her laugh without wanting something.

They went on like that. A school trip to the aquarium where Lyra had lost a shoe. A sleepover where they’d talked until the birds came, and Hadjer’s mother had found them asleep in a heap of cushions with a flashlight still on. Lyra remembered everything. She told it so warmly, with such small, specific details, that Hadjer felt something that had been clenched in her chest for a long time begin, very slowly, to let go.

Charm, Hadjer would think later, is a bill that arrives smiling.

At the time, she only thought it was nice.

"You always did take the 4:40," Lyra said, offhand, stirring ketchup into a paper cup.

"Mm."

"I used to think that was so grown-up. A bus all your own."

Somewhere across the plaza, a clock on a bank tower struck the three-quarter hour. Hadjer glanced at it, then at her fruit cup, then at Lyra, and gave a small, easy smile.

"Tell me about the contract," she said.

"I can’t." Lyra’s fingers stilled. "I told you. I can’t say."

"Say it differently."

"There is no different." Her mouth opened, and the word slid out of it. It did not stammer. It was as though she’d reached for a stair and found there wasn’t one. Her throat worked. Under Hadjer’s sleeve, her own mark warmed, a small, polite reminder, and she knew exactly how it felt.

"It’s all right," Hadjer said gently. "You don’t have to."

"I just want you to know I’m not..." Lyra’s voice cracked. "I’m not choosing this, Hadjer."

And then she began to cry.

It was not loud. The tears came one at a time, each one arriving exactly where the light could find it, tracking down through the shimmer on her cheeks. She pressed the heel of her hand under one eye and tried to laugh and failed. Her shoulders shook. The dress at her collar flickered like a candle in a draft.

Hadjer was out of her chair before she had decided to be.

She set her bottle on the table to free both arms. She went around to Lyra’s side and folded the other girl into a hug, tight, one palm flat between her shoulder blades. Lyra smelled like jasmine and fried onions and, underneath, like the inside of a very old closet.

"Hey," Hadjer said softly. "Hey. It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay."

A bus hissed at the corner. Somewhere a sprinkler ticked. Glass touched glass, once, and was forgotten in the traffic.

"I promise," Hadjer said.

She held her a moment longer. Then she let go, collected her bottle from the table, and sat back down.

Lyra uncapped hers and drank, long and thirsty, with the gratitude of the nearly forgiven. She wiped her eyes on a napkin and laughed at herself.

Hadjer unscrewed hers and drank too. Three small swallows. It was cold, and sweet, and sharp with lemon, and she set it down with a small, pleasant sigh.

At the cart, the vendor had been polishing the same glass for a very long time. He watched them both tip their bottles back. When the glass came down, his smile did something that was not quite a smile, and he nodded once, to no one.

"I’m sorry," Lyra said. "I’m a mess."

"You’re fine."

"It’s so hot." She pushed her damp hair off her forehead. "Isn’t it hot? Is it me?"

"It’s October in Pasadena," said Hadjer. "It’s always you."

Lyra laughed, a half-second early, as though she’d been told where the joke would land. She stifled a yawn behind her hand.

"Tell me what my mother did," Hadjer said. "When she saw my hair. I don’t remember."

"You don’t remember?" Lyra stared at her. "You were standing right there. With half a head."

"I was in shock."

"That’s fair." Lyra settled back, delighted, and took the whole thing in both hands. "She didn’t scream. That was the terrifying part. She set her purse down on the hall table, very calmly, and took out her phone, and called her stylist in the voice of a hostage negotiator. ’We have a situation,’ she said. ’There are bangs.’"

Hadjer laughed, and under the table, her thumb moved twice against her phone. She did not look down. Lyra, wiping her nose, did not notice.

"Then she took us for ice cream, and told us not to speak, and her stylist drove across town in his bathrobe on a Saturday, and he took one look at you and said, ’Avant-garde,’ and charged us triple. Hazard pay, he said."

The mint in the jar by the register wilted a little further. The bank clock struck five.

She asked about the shoe at the aquarium again. She asked about the morning after the sleepover. She asked, in a bright and idle voice, who had thought of the cart.

"Oh, I just walked past," Lyra said. "It looked nice."

It did look nice. That was the thing. Everything about it looked nice.

They did not live far.

Carter’s boarded-up house was one stop back, and Arthur’s, with its crooked mailbox and its garage that smelled of solder, where his mother kept her workshop, was one stop after that. In a city of sprinklers and cut-through alleys, that was a few minutes at a determined walk. Which meant that when two figures turned the corner of the square, one in a gray hooded jacket and one in a hoodie with dust on its knees, there was nothing about it that was not perfectly natural.

Except that Carter, three steps behind, walked in a careful curve around the nearest planter, where a row of begonias, wish was a fancy word for a type of plant, had gone limp and brown. Everything near Hadjer died, sooner or later, and he had made a private study of how far away was far enough. He stopped at exactly the distance a man stops from a hot stove.

Hadjer had heard the rumors about him. That he had stood by while a teammate bled out, then left them to die to save his own life. She had never asked. She did not like what she did not ask about. He did not like what he could not stand next to.

It was a very stable arrangement.

Lyra’s face went through three expressions in the time it took them to reach the table. The last was alarm.

"What are they doing here?" She turned on Hadjer. "You can’t stand Carter."

"I can’t," Hadjer agreed.

"Then why did you call them?"

Hadjer smiled. It was the same smile as before, and for the first time that afternoon, Lyra seemed to see the difference.

"Because I don’t trust you," she said pleasantly. "Silly. And because whatever you put in my drink might need a healer."

Lyra stood so fast her chair scraped. Color flooded her cheeks. She put on a mask of wounded dignity, with real pain underneath it, which was the cruelest part.

"I came to apologize. I offered to pay for your lunch, and this is how you..." She snatched her bag. "Forget it. I’m leaving."

"Sit down, Lyra."

"I’m not—"

"What?" Hadjer tilted her head. "Are you worried that whatever you put in my drink is going to kick in? Don’t worry about that."

Lyra stopped.

"What are you talking about?" Her voice was a half-step too high. "I didn’t do anything."

Hadjer laughed. It was a clean, unhurried sound, and behind her chair, Carter looked like a man who had just learned his least favorite person was holding a sword.

"Then answer a few questions," she said. "Humor me."

Arthur’s whole face lit up. He looked like a father watching his firstborn say her very first word, and he clapped his hands together once, softly, so as not to interrupt.

"Why," said Hadjer, "would you, for the first time in your life, offer to pay for anything?"

Lyra blinked.

"I was always the one who paid. Always. The days when I was naive enough to be too friendly to you."

"It was an apology," Lyra said, offended. "I said so."

"Last time I knew you, and it wasn’t that long ago, you couldn’t have cared less about me." Hadjer’s voice stayed perfectly even. "And I noticed your vendor. He took my bottle from a shelf apart from the others and handled it like it was special. His apron was filthy. His hands were clean."

She watched the color leave Lyra’s face, one shade at a time.

"But don’t worry about me," Hadjer said. "Worry about yourself. I switched them."

"You’re..." Lyra laughed, thin and wrong. "You’re bluffing."

"When I hugged you." Hadjer’s voice softened, and it was almost kind. "I meant it, by the way. Everything is going to be okay. I just didn’t say for who." She tilted her head. "And I remember what my mother did. I remember all of it. I just needed you talking."

For a second, Lyra only stared.

Then she swayed.

It was a small movement at first, like someone standing in a current. Her hand found the edge of the table and missed. Her knees folded. She wiggled in place like a body trying to remember how to be one, and the whole shimmering, expensive dress flickered once and went out.

Arthur caught her head an inch before it hit the plastic.

What lay across his arm was a gray hooded sweatshirt with a hole in the cuff, and a pair of borrowed shoes.

Nobody said anything about it. Nobody needed to.

Don’t mistake the quiet for the slow;

the ones who watch are the ones who know.

Arthur found Lyra’s pulse and held it, counting. "Steady. Slow." He glanced up.

Carter crouched by her, as close to Hadjer as he had been all afternoon, and put two fingers to the girl’s throat, and a thumb to her eyelid. "Sedative. Not poison. She’ll be out for hours and wake up with a headache." He exhaled, and his voice lowered. "It would have worked on you."

"That was the idea," said Hadjer.

At the corner of Arthur’s vision, a window opened for him alone.

LYRA — IRON — GLAMOUR.

STATUS: UNDER CONTRACT.

EMPLOYER: [SEALED].

He closed it without a word.

"I told you not to let her jump you," Carter said, rising, still half a step too far away.

"I didn’t. She talked. I listened. It’s different."

"When did you plan this?" Carter said.

"On the bus. The moment she sat down behind me." Hadjer looked at her phone. "I wrote to Arthur from the table. He answered before I’d lifted my thumb."

Arthur beamed. She had stopped checking whether his hands were empty. It was, he felt, a very healthy sign.

"Good job, Hadjer," he said. "I’m proud of you."

She opened her mouth to answer and found that she had nothing in it. She had just outplayed a Game employee in public, in broad daylight, with an audience. She had no idea what to do with this one small sentence.

Her ears went warm. She looked at the napkin dispenser. She looked at the mint.

In the end, because her hands could think of nothing else, she reached into the paper bag in her lap and held it out to him without a word.

Arthur peered in.

"It’s a muffin."

"I know what it is." Hadjer said, trying to hide her shy voice.

"It’s cold."

"It’s from a ghost who wanted nothing from us," said Hadjer, to the napkin dispenser, "and I’ve been carrying it around all day while a girl tried to drug me. Eat it." She said, all annoyed now.

He ate it. He conceded, in the end, that cold or not, it was very good.

Carter watched all of this with the expression of a man revising a long-held opinion and finding the revision unpleasant. He had heard that Hadjer Lotus was a walking graveyard, but nothing about the sharp tongue. No one had mentioned that she was clever either.

"That was actually good," he said, at last, like it cost him money.

"Careful," said Hadjer. "That sounded like a compliment."

"It was an observation."

It was Arthur who turned first toward the cart.

The striped awning flapped. The grill still hissed. A paper boat of fries sat steaming beside the register, beside a jar with a single dead sprig of mint in it.

The vendor was gone.

At the far end of the square, a plain gray car with its engine running pulled away from the curb, without hurry, the way a car does when it has just realized it is no longer needed.

Nobody spoke.

Dear Reader, if you have been thinking about the riddle, you may keep your answer. If you have not, I suggest you look at the bottle.

"He didn’t handle my bottle like it was a drink," Hadjer said at last, very quietly. "He handled it like a delivery."

"Somebody had a car waiting." Carter’s voice had thinned. "That wasn’t a prank. That was a kidnapping."

"Then it was an order." Arthur looked at the girl lying slack across the plastic chair. "Nobody builds this much for a girl in a gray sweatshirt on her own idea. I think the Game told her to. Stage Two, probably." He tilted his head. "She’s pretty much their minion now."

Hadjer didn’t answer. She was looking at Lyra’s wrist.

The sleeve had ridden up. Beneath it, the mark was flickering, once, then again, like a screen losing its signal.

"It’s blinking," she said.

"It’s a check-in," Arthur realized slowly. "She’s supposed to report."

Under Hadjer’s own sleeve, as if in answer, her mark gave one slow, patient pulse.

Somewhere across the city, someone was about to notice that Lyra had stopped answering.

TO BE CONTINUED...