Blood Engines(52)

 

“Who wants to meet me?” Marla said.

 

“Mr. Dalton,” one of them said.

 

“Let me guess,” Marla said. “He’s the new pro-tem chief sorcerer, since Finch’s untimely demise?”

 

“You’ll find out who he is when he decides to tell you,” the other one said, clearly trying to be menacing.

 

Marla rolled her eyes. “Well, it’s another twenty minutes before we get back to the city, so why don’t you two sit down?”

 

“Don’t give us any trouble,” one said, as they both sat down on the seat opposite.

 

“Do I look like a troublemaker?” Marla said. “You two just saved me a lot of walking around and asking questions. Hell, I’m thankful. I want to meet your boss.”

 

“How’d you find us, though?” Rondeau said. “When we didn’t even know where we were going?”

 

The henchmen smirked. “We have our ways,” one said.

 

Marla snorted. “Sure you do. There’s a pair of you on every train, and probably on every street in the city, right? They’re homunculi, Rondeau, or heavy astral projections, or some shit like that. Just duplicates. Dupe One and Dupe Two here happened to be the ones who bumped into us.”

 

They weren’t smirking anymore. They were scowling instead.

 

“Ah,” Rondeau said. “I thought they were twins with that whole psychic-linkage thing going on.”

 

“That would explain the way they move in tandem, maybe, but it doesn’t explain the identical oozing pimple they’ve each got just to the left of their noses.” Marla tapped the side of her nose, and the henchmen reached up simultaneously and touched the spots on their own faces.

 

“This is the weirdest day of my life,” B said. “And that’s saying something.”

 

The henchmen squinted at B. “Hey,” one said. And the other continued, “Aren’t you Bradley Bowman?”

 

“Um,” he said. “Yeah.”

 

“I read a rumor online that you might get cast as the lead in an American movie version of Dr. Who. Any truth to that?”

 

“It’s news to me,” B said.

 

“I knew it was bullshit,” one said, taking out his laptop and opening it on his knees, presumably to spread the truth among the infidels online.

 

“Tell me about your boss,” Marla said, to the henchman who wasn’t tapping away at a keyboard.

 

He shrugged. “You’ll find out all you need to know soon enough. I’ll tell you, though—you should be more scared than you look. You’re in deep shit, from what I hear. Mr. Dalton isn’t the only one looking for you.”

 

“I’ve always had a gift for making friends easily,” Marla said. She had an idea of the accusations she was going to face soon, and tried to decide whether she should bother going through the tedium of explaining things, or just break Mr. Dalton’s kneecaps and extract the information she needed. Ah, well. No need to decide now. She could play it by ear when they arrived.

 

 

 

 

 

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.