Finally, Jacob looked around.
In Melbourne, midnight and noon were little different. It rained through the day and pissed down all night. The illumination at three a.m. was pretty much the same as three o’clock in the afternoon, there were no seasons aside from this single, humid one, and there would never again be any cicadas. This was the sum total Jacob had known since his earliest rememoration.
The rain wore down buildings as much as it did the people. Gutters overflowed; there were sometimes corpses in stagnant ponds. Children starving to death after their parents were rounded up and disappeared.
The boy wandered back streets on the way home, through the downpour and bumper-to-bumper traffic, and people with umbrellas — suicidal, as they flew past on bicycles. Some shops shuttered, others bearing smashed windows and vandalized signage. Deals and beatings and sex going down in laneways, police glaring at everyone but ignoring everything.
When, finally, the next afternoon the two-day deadline neared, Jacob set off at a run.
Frequently checking over his shoulder, doubling back and crossing busy streets to ensure he wasn’t followed, Jacob wound up on the verandah of the Victorian terrace house and rapped at the door with the lightning bolt knocker.
He was dripping wet (again) but that didn’t matter. The short, queasy silence was followed by a furtive voice coming through damp wood. Not the Rat’s, of course — this was female.
“Hello?”
“Comicbooks.”
Someone coughed. “Who killed Professor Abraham Erskine?”
This question took Jacob by surprise. He stared at the door, at the peeling pain and specks of mould, thinking about the Prof and his shock of white hair. He’d promised to look out for the old man — had he failed that too?
“Well?” the voice asked, on edge. “Don’t you know your Captain America lore?”
“You’re talking up in the comic?”
“What else would I be talking about?”
“Thank crap.” The boy leaned against the doorframe, pulling himself back together. “Okay, I know this — a Nazi spy, Heinz Kruger.”
The door was unbolted and a pale girl’s face peered out, hard to see in the shadows. “What d’you want?”
“Heropa.”
“Heropa’s finished.”
“Not so far as I’m concerned. Let me in.”
“Why’re you here?”
“I told you.”
The door swung open and Jacob marched through. There was a gangly, teenage Asian girl standing sentry, pretty enough from what he could see under a mop-top fringe that covered most of her face, but the most striking aspect was that she looked bent in the middle, like someone had folded her waist sideways and forgotten to straighten it out. This girl refused to engage in eye contact and had an anorexic edge — then again, he was equally malnourished, so nothing new there.
As Jacob entered, the girl slipped awkwardly to one side. “Haven’t you heard?” she said, in a flat voice that pushed inaudible. “The system’s down.”
“I heard. What’s your problem?”
“Huh?”
“Your posture looks off.”
“Gee — subtle. Thanks.” The girl momentarily looked up and her bangs parted. Jacob saw one iris grey, one brown. “Didn’t your folks ever teach you discretion?”
“I don’t see the point anymore.”
“No beating round the bush for you, then?”
“The last time I did so, it caused a lot of pain to someone I care about.”
“Oh.”
Jacob sighed. “Do you have a towel? I’m leaking on your floor.”
“Sure. Come with me.”
While he followed the limping caretaker, it dawned on him that this was the person the Rat had truly been mimicking the first time Jacob came to the house. Meanwhile, the girl was humming something Jacob recognized. He’d heard it that night he spied on the Brick and his paramour in the dance studio.
“What’s the tune?”
She stopped briefly to glance back. “Johann Strauss II — the pas de deux shared between Bella and Johann after he’s freed from prison in Act 2 of Die Fledermaus, ‘The Bat’. You wouldn’t know the ballet. Why?”
“It’s beautiful.” And so it was.
The girl detoured into a grungy bathroom and pulled down a towel that she tossed to her guest. It was threadbare and stank to high heaven, but did the job.
“Anyway. Heropa,” he reminded her.
“Thought you said you knew the problems? Safeties offline, passwords dysfunctional. Even though they’re patchy, expletives appear to be the only escape route — that’s the way I got out.”