That evening, Viv found herself scouring her limited wardrobe for something that looked effortlessly attractive in an oh-this-old-thing-I-just-threw-it-on way; or, failing that, dressy and cute in a we’re-just-friends way; or, as a last resort, somewhat acceptable in a not-completely-ridiculous-when-worn-with-a-beret way. Silk was choosing to make herself very much underfoot, twining between Viv’s legs as she pulled various outfits on and off. Eventually she settled on jeans and a black satin blouse with baby-doll puffed sleeves. Then with a shock of horror she realized that Auterre might think she was trying to look European to impress him. She snatched off the beret, exposing her shaved patch of hair and hideous stitched-up cut—
—and heard a knock at the kitchen door.
Biting her lip, Viv jammed the beret back on her head and went to get the door.
Auterre was there, in a leather jacket, with a motorcycle helmet tucked under his arm. His dark eyes sparked with amusement as he looked down at her, and Viv found herself immediately stuttering: “Hi, you can make fun of my hat if you want, everybody does, I fell down some steps and I’m only wearing it to cover up the cut.”
“You look very sweet,” he told her, and somehow the trace of his accent made the compliment warmer. “I brought this, you may want to wear it instead. Or we could take BART if you prefer.” He held out the helmet, and Viv saw that the bike itself was leaned up against a building on the other side of the narrow alley. She didn’t know enough about motorcycles to identify the type, but it was a sleek-looking machine, with just a small amount of black casing at the top, and the rest of the enginery exposed and aggressive beneath.
“I’ve never ridden on a motorcycle before,” Viv said, accepting the helmet, and then added immediately: “but I’m not afraid or anything.”
His smile crooked. “Good,” he said. “It is the best way to get around in the city. And I think you will like it. Have you got a heavy jacket?”
“Yes, inside. Come in,” she invited, stepping back from the door. “I just moved in, so it’s pretty stark in here.”
She fetched her pea coat from the closet, and when she turned back saw that Silk had gone into the kitchen to investigate the intruder. Auterre grinned and crouched down, extending his long-fingered hand: Silk sniffed, and crept closer, allowing him to touch the side of her face and the soft fur under her chin. “What a beautiful animal,” he murmured.
Viv smiled. “She’s still mad at me because I had to put her in a kennel while I was looking for an apartment. But she’s a sweetheart as long as she’s absolutely getting her way.”
Silk looked from the visitor back to Viv with half-lidded eyes, and Auterre laughed. “A very catly cat,” he commented. “Are you ready then?”
Viv twisted the jacket in her hands. “Well,” she said, “I’ve got to tell you something. I’ve learned that I work with—someone I think you used to date. Jennifer?”
“Jennifer Gupta?” Auterre said, recollecting himself to his full height.
“Yeah,” Viv said. “She’s my supervisor.”
Auterre studied her face. She couldn’t read his. “Yes,” he said slowly, “we were together for a little while. A year ago. But there has been nothing between us for a long time.”
“Still,” Viv said. “I think it might be awkward, you know? If you and I were more than friends.”
He nodded gravely. “I understand. But you are new here, yes? Maybe you could use a friend.”
“I could,” Viv agreed. “Definitely.”
“So, then. Let us go out and be friendly.”
He gave her a little smile, and she smiled back with relief. “All right.”
“Ready then?” he asked again, and this time she assented. She followed him back out into the street, although she realized as she was turning her key in the lock that she’d left her sword in the bedroom. Well, she couldn’t think how to bring Excalibur on the motorcycle anyway. Still, she felt a little anxious without the weight of the blade at her side: in just a few days she’d grown accustomed to having it always at hand.
Auterre held the helmet as she buttoned up her coat. He had another for himself hanging over the handlebar of the bike. Viv turned away self-consciously, hiding the wounded side of her head as she doffed the beret and pulled on the helmet. She stuffed the cloth hat in the pocket of her coat. Auterre reached beneath her chin to adjust the strap of the helmet; Viv held still, feeling the little thrill of contact as his fingers brushed her skin. This is not a thing, she reminded herself sternly. He didn’t seem at all upset by what she’d told him—just looked into her face and asked if the helmet felt snug. She nodded back, sliding up the front visor so she felt a little less like an astronaut.
Auterre wheeled the motorcycle out into the alley and swung up onto it with an easy motion of his angular frame. Viv scrambled up behind him somewhat less gracefully. She gingerly placed her hands on his side, but he grabbed them firmly and pulled her forward, wrapping her arms securely around his waist. “Get a good strong grip and hold on tight,” he told her, his voice muffled by the helmet. “That is the most important thing. Second is your balance. You are going to be surprised by how much the bike moves, especially by how low we get when we go around curves. It is not like a car, it does not stay upright all the time. It is not supposed to. You have to lean into the curves, all right? Don’t fight it by trying to lean the other way. Move as I move. Your weight is very, very important, so I need you to move with me, not against me. Even if it seems frightening. Trust me; the bike will not drop so long as you put your weight where I need it to go.”
Viv nodded, then realized he couldn’t see her. “All right,” she said.
“Move as I move,” he said again.
“I’ll try!”
The engine roared to life under her, and they leapt into movement. Viv, who had thought she had a firm grip on Auterre, felt her arms tense with their full strength as the rock of inertia hit her, pulling her backwards: she pulled herself against Auterre’s back and ended up pressed as closely against him as was humanly possible. Auterre picked up speed as they pulled out onto 24th street. He was right, it was nothing like riding in a car. Here, the sounds and smells of the street were immediate, all around, the rush of wind from passing cars smacking against her face, and the roar of the road engulfing her. She wanted to pull down the visor on her helmet, but she didn’t dare loosen her grip on Auterre.
The bike weaved through traffic, still gaining speed, and when they peeled onto Mission she discovered what he’d meant by the challenge of curves. The bike dipped alarmingly sideways, the asphalt coming closer and closer to her face, and she gasped involuntarily and screwed her eyes shut, clinging to Auterre with all her might. In another instant they’d rounded the corner and the bike rose up, level again. Viv opened her eyes to the sight of storefronts rushing past. She wondered how fast they were going, and saw that they were only keeping pace with the cars on the road: apparently speeds that would seem leisurely in a car felt much faster when it was just her unprotected body hurtling through space.
Traffic got thicker as they neared Market Street, backed up at stoplights. Rather than stopping, Auterre pulled into the center of the road, the motorcycle sliding neatly between lanes to arrive at the front of the queue. When the light changed the bike leapt into full speed as the first car’s engine was still engaging, and they left the whole jam in their wake. Viv thought the maneuver had to be illegal, but as Auterre weaved nimbly through traffic they crossed the city faster than she would have thought possible: they were downtown in about five minutes, and blazing through Chinatown shortly after that.
They took a hill at speed, the power of the bike’s engine thrumming through Viv’s whole body, and on the other side of the slope she couldn’t help but yelp with surprise as they abruptly plunged downward. Then she laughed aloud, at herself, and at the thrill of surging motion: it was like an amusement-park ride, scary but exhilarating. The wind tore the sounds away as they left her throat. Above her strings of red-paper lanterns advertised Tsingtao beer, and golden dragons curled around the iron streetlamps flanking the road.
Auterre pulled the bike to the curb, kicking down in front of a row of red brick storefronts—a Chinese bakery, an electronics store selling equipment and DVDs imported from Hong Kong, and a shop filled to bursting with everything from cheap-looking kimonos to sandalwood soaps to incessantly twittering plastic birds perched on bamboo branches. He pulled off his helmet, and Viv relaxed her death-grip on his waist. He looked back at her, shaking his dark hair out of his face. “Well? How did you like the ride?”
“It was fun,” Viv grinned, fumbling with her own helmet.
“I thought you were the adventurous type,” he said approvingly.
They hopped off the bike and Auterre fastened their helmets to the handlebars with a small lock. “Do you like dim sum, I hope? This is my favorite dim sum place in the city.” He guided her towards a staircase wedged between the bakery and the DVD store, so dark and narrow that she’d overlooked it at first glance.
“Probably?” Viv said tentatively. “I’ve never had it, but I like Chinese. I mean, in general.”
The claustrophobic staircase opened into a surprisingly vast and brightly-lit second story restaurant. Red was the dominant color, with the carpet and tablecloths and interior columns all done in slightly different shades of crimson. The walls were a dark stained wood, and four monstrous chandeliers hung from the ceiling. As it happened, they were seated directly beneath one, and Viv eyed its dangling glass shards rather warily.
“The way this works,” Auterre explained, “is they come by with carts, and you just point to whatever you want to eat. The only trick is not to let yourself get full from the first cart that comes by, because there is always something worth holding out for later.”
A waitress came around with a pot of steaming amber tea, which she left on the table, and asked if they’d like beer or wine: “I never drink when I am riding,” Auterre said regretfully, and Viv also declined. Auterre checked to see whether the tea had already steeped: pronouncing it sufficient, he filled both their cups.
“So,” Viv asked, cradling her porcelain teacup in her hands, “what happened at the party after I left?”
Auterre made a face. “I don’t know,” he said. “My eyes glaze over after the second or third PowerPoint.”
“Did you ever find out what E-Coconut.com actually does?”
“E-Coconut.com is the power behind the solution,” Auterre said. “E-Coconut.com is a disruptive technology.”
“I guess not, huh.”
He smiled. “I was not paying careful attention. But where did you run off to?”
“I fought a lion,” Viv said demurely, and when he blinked at her she told him the story of the mountain lion in the parking garage—minus, of course, any reference to Excalibur, or to the fact that the cat had actually spoken.
Auterre scrutinized her closely. “Are you putting me on?”
“No, look,” she said, pushing back the beret to show him the scar.
His breath hissed between his teeth. “The cougar did that?”
“It knocked me down the stairs,” she said, “and then it ran away.”
“So there is a wildcat still at large in the city!” He patted down the side of his jacket, fishing out a small notebook and a pen. Viv laughed as he jotted down a note.
“Wait, are you going to write about this?”
“Of course I am, it’s a brilliant story. You say you filed a police report?”
“Janet and I both, but we’d both been drinking and I don’t think they believed us.”
“But you only had two drinks, I saw you. You never even finished the second.”
They were interrupted by the arrival of the first cart of dim sum. It was mostly breaded, fried things, and Viv had no idea how to choose among them, but Auterre gave the whole cart a discriminating once-over, and pointed out three small plates with quick assurance. “Let’s share,” he told her. “See anything else you want?”
Viv shook her head. “I don’t really know what any of it is.”
“We’ll start with this,” he smiled at the waiter, and the cart was briskly wheeled away.
Viv picked up a round fried thing at random: biting into it, she found it had a soft layer of something mushy and faintly sweet, like potato, surrounding a pocket of juicy pork meat. “That’s a taro dumpling,” Auterre told her, and she reached for another quite happily. She noticed then that Auterre was using chopsticks to handle his food, and belatedly she picked up her own.
“I’m not really good with these things,” she admitted.
“Here,” he said, reaching over to take her hand in his. “Put just the first one in your hand, under your thumb, like this. This one doesn’t move, so get a firm grip. The other one you hold like a pencil.” He moved her fingers into the right position, her hands nearly disappearing beneath his. “Make sure the tips line up—there you are. Now you can use them like pincers.”
He released her, and she gingerly lifted up the dumpling. To distract from her own clumsiness, she asked: “So I thought you told me that you couldn’t write any new stories, because of your water-rights exposé?”
He gave a shrug that involved his face as much as his shoulders. “I’ve hit a snag on that. My source doesn’t want to talk anymore. They will come around,” he assured her. “They are just scared of what the bosses will do.”
She munched into the dumpling. “You never did tell me,” she said between bites, “what the scandal was. I mean, I understand the fight over the dam, but that’s old news, right? And the drought—that’s just an act of God?”
Auterre leaned forward, dropping his voice. “The scandal is that the power company is fully aware that there will be a power shortage this summer. And instead of attempting to ramp up the supply to meet the demand, I believe they are intentionally cutting back, to provoke a crisis, and create the ability to manipulate prices to their own profit. If I can prove it before it happens, we can stop them. You must understand,” he told her, his dark eyes now fixed on her face and his voice low and urgent, “when there are blackouts, people die. The elderly, the infirm—those on home dialysis machines, for example. What the company plans is murder.” He straightened, breaking off as another dim sum cart came by, and Viv sat quietly as he picked out a few more plates, impressed by the strength of his passion. She was also glad to notice that he skipped over a plate of what appeared to be barbequed chicken feet.
“You will think I am paranoid,” he said once the waiter had withdrawn, “but I should not talk about it here. I will tell you more in a quieter place.”
“No, that’s fine,” Viv said quickly. “I mean, jeez, it sounds like the sort of thing that the crusading reporter gets killed for. You know, in the movie version.”
He laughed, pushing forward a plate of shrimps wrapped in glutinous rice-flour skins. “Try these, they’re my favorite.” She obediently maneuvered one onto her plate, although it was very slippery and almost wiggled out of her chopsticks. But when she managed to get it to her mouth she found it worth the trouble, the firm shrimp-flesh bursting with flavor and contrasting pleasantly with the chewy wrapper.
Over a succession of small dumplings, bits of meat in rich sauces, and the rare green vegetable, they talked about what had brought them each to the city. Auterre was, it turned out, a Berkeley graduate, though he’d grown up in Normandy. “I am a terrible Frenchman,” he told her cheerfully, “not because I love San Francisco—that is all right, it’s the most European of American cities—but because I love the parts of it that are so very American. The gluttony, the tawdriness, the naked lust for wealth—everything that is left over from the old West. You have come a few years too late, you know. San Francisco is a boom town, she has always been, and in the ages when there is no boom she is a little sad, like a dancehall girl done up in all her feathers and sequins standing alone on the stage. But when she has many partners to dance with, she is drunk and wild, and everything is as it should be.”
Viv laughed at his flight of fancy, and he joined in easily, then demanded to hear about Ohio. When she protested that it was too boring, he assured her that he wouldn’t find it so: “What you think is normal would probably seem bizarre and fascinating to me.” So she told him how Akron was the airship capital of the U.S., the place where the largest blimps and dirigibles were built, and how if it were not for the Hindenburg disaster there might today be busy lines of airships streaking across the Akron sky.
The little plates kept coming until Viv protested that she could eat no more. Auterre settled the bill: Viv realized suddenly that she ought to at least offer to cover her own part, but she had a terrible suspicion that dim sum might be expensive, and her credit card was almost maxed out. She pulled out her wallet, opening her mouth to explain and apologize: but he waved her off before she could even begin. “No, no, let me,” he said. “You can pay when you pick the restaurant.” So she subsided, grateful and relieved.
It was dark out when they returned to the motorcycle, though it was a rare clear night, the yellow moon shining down brightly over Chinatown’s pagoda rooftops. “I will take you straight home if you want,” Auterre said, “but I would like to show you something, if you have time—it is a bit of a long ride, but it is the best place I know to show you how important water is out here. Short of going to Hetch Hetchy itself, which is much too far.”
“A longer ride sounds like fun,” Viv said. “What’s the place?”
“The Pulgas water temple. It is a monument the city built, to celebrate the completion of the work that brought the Hetch Hetchy water more than a hundred miles, over the Sierra Nevadas, costing a hundred million dollars—and that was during the Great Depression. It was the longest tunnel in the world when it was built. But after the fire that destroyed the city—you know that, right, that it was not the 1906 earthquake that leveled the city, but the fire? After that, it was an amazing thing to the people who lived here, to know that they would always have plenty of water. So they built a real temple over the spot where the water passes into the city. You can see it going by, millions of gallons. It’s an incredibly powerful thing. A friend of mine called it God’s drinking fountain.”
“Sounds neat. I want to see it.”
This time she kept the visor down when she strapped on the helmet, and was glad of it when they broke free of the city streets onto a south-flowing highway: at these speeds, the wind was a crushing force, chilling her even through the protection of her coat. She rested her head against the back of Auterre’s shoulder and watched the dark shapes of trees rush by, illuminated sometimes by the lights of passing cars. The bike roared into the night like an iron dragon, something immensely powerful and free.
After a long stretch of time, Auterre turned off the highway onto a smaller road, easing onto the shoulder when they’d gone about a half mile. To the left, across the road, was a tangle of woods. To Viv’s right, a grassy hill sloped downward. She unfastened her helmet, only to find that the roar of the road was still in her ears. No: the sound was rushing water, from somewhere down the hill.
Auterre didn’t bother to lock up the bike. They left it leaning at the side of the road as they set off down the slope. There was a parking lot, but it was gated and locked. They kept to the mowed grass and, as the ground leveled off beneath their feet, Viv saw a faint glimmering of something stretched before her. It was a shallow reflecting pool, flanked by two rows of manicured evergreen trees, and beyond it a looming structure of pale marble. The roaring noise was much louder here, so overpowering that a human voice could not be heard; she glanced at Auterre, and he only gestured forward.
They skirted the little pool, making for the marble temple. It was circular, with grooved Greek columns set upon a stepped dais and supporting a modest rotunda. There was a low-walled circular structure at the center of the temple, like a well. Viv climbed the steps and looked in.
And she was rocked by a surge of energy, a flood of power. She might have imagined herself lightning-struck except that the electric rush flowed up from the ground, rushing through the soles of her feet into all her bones and out through the tips of her fingers, the ends of her hair, her eyes and mouth and nose. All she could see down the well was movement, a rushing flood of dark waters going by beneath the temple, beneath their feet. She gaped soundlessly and involuntarily stretched out a grasping hand. The air rippled visibly at her touch, and for an instant she saw a wavy reflection hanging in empty space. In that distorted vision she was looking as if into a mirror—no, it rippled a little, like vast still waters—and the reflection gazing back at her was not her own. Viv had only a glimpse of glossy raven hair framing a starkly beautiful face, something mad and passionate in her eyes, and a crown of silver on her high pale brow. The air was filled with a spicy, herbal scent. “Morgan!” Viv cried out—but her voice was drowned by the roaring waters, and the vision faded.
Auterre had caught her elbow, looking at little concerned at what must have appeared to be Viv’s effort to throw herself headlong down the cistern. There was, she saw now, a grate at the bottom, separating them from the water flow. She could also barely make out words etched around the inside of the circular wall, but it was too dark to read them.
She knew what had happened. She could not explain the knowledge, but she was certain of it. She had found the Lake, or at least one of those places in the ordinary world that Piper had described as “tributaries.” She had power in this place; it continued to flow through her, electric, exhilarating. She strongly suspected that if she brought Excalibur here, she’d be able to focus that power, do something with it. She didn’t know what, but as she smiled reassuringly at Auterre, she felt the conviction that the entire world was hers for the taking.
He relaxed, loosening her elbow. She caught his hand as it dropped away. He searched her face as she stepped forward, her body pressing against him. “Arthur,” she whispered, though she knew he could not hear her; and then his arms went around her and he pulled her into a long, deep kiss.