Rondeau nodded.
“Ah,” B said. “The fun just doesn’t stop. Does she even know how to get there?”
Rondeau shrugged. “She’s got a bus schedule. We’re probably heading for a bus stop.”
“I thought time was of the essence here? Shouldn’t we take a cab?”
Rondeau waved his hand in a be-my-guest gesture. “Go. Convince her. She doesn’t like taxis. Because the drivers could be taking you anywhere.”
“Like bus drivers can’t steer you wrong?”
“I do not claim to endorse her logic,” Rondeau said. “I am merely reporting it. She mostly travels on foot back home. We could have a limo driving us around here, but Marla likes to keep her feet on the ground.”
B sighed, steeled himself, and lengthened his stride. He fell into step beside Marla and said, “Would you like me to flag down a cab? They’re not too hard to get on Market.”
“We can get a bus, can’t we?” she said.
“It’ll take longer,” B said.
She frowned, then nodded. “Yeah, all right. But only since we’re in a hurry.”
B raised his hand to the next passing cab, which was, fortunately, dented, battered, and in need of a wash. He could tell Marla approved. B and Rondeau got in the backseat, and Marla rode in front. She told the driver the address, reading from the piece of paper.
He grunted and drove on without comment.
The three of them stood on a corner in front of a liquor store with barred windows, dirty newspaper pages and discarded ice-cream wrappers blowing around their feet, the sidewalk permanently mottled and discolored with spit, vomit, ground-out cigarette butts, and ancient blobs of chewing gum. Marla inhaled, deeply, taking in the scent of piss and spilled beer, and, yes, she could have been in Felport, in the darkest part of the urban core, where she lived alone in an apartment building that would have been condemned if not for her influence. This was the neighborhood of easily gratified baser appetites, where sex and booze and drugs were just a quick cash transaction away, where the distance between want and have and have-not could be cut down to nothing in a moment. Every city had places like this, though some cities took pains to hide them. Marla liked it here. She understood its logic and its brutal grace. This was a place of simple motivations. Marla suspected she would get along with the sorcerer who had taken this neighborhood as her own.
“Now, this is almost like home,” Rondeau said, looking up at a sign advertising “Live Nude Girls.”
“Except around here, some of the strip clubs are employee-owned co-ops,” B said, slouching against a light pole. His eyes were shadowed, and Marla wondered if he’d slept at all the night before, or if he always looked this much on the edge of being used-up. She suspected he did. It must be difficult, being half ordinary, half magical. Chimeras had short life spans. The strain of being more than one thing at once could tear anyone apart.
“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.