I am at the practice rink, exterminating rats. Two other girls are with me, Sacker’s co-captain Irrita Belle, a fireplug-shaped blocker, and the massive Dom-De-Dom-Dom. They have poodle canes, same as me, but what they do not have is super-hearing and super-smell. They move slowly along the baseboard, tapping the walls, hoping to drive the rats toward their escape holes and out into the space where they can zap the little beasts with their poodle canes.
I walk slower, my hand against the wall. listening for their heartbeats. When I feel a warm spot, hear the patter of their blood in motion, I stop. I lean against the wall, trying to decide how far inside they are. The gap behind the wall is so narrow, they can’t be more than two inches away. That’s within my reach.
Pitty-pat, little rat. I hear you living.
I’ve found the jackpot, a whole nest, warm and rat-smelly. Momma and one, two, three, four babies. I crouch at the baseboard and lay my palms against the wall. My hands are only three-quarters of an inch away from their lives, the thickness of the drywall plus the derby padding.
I close my eyes and breathe in.
The sounds of blood pounding grow dim. I get a tiny rush of panic, belated adrenaline, and I hear a faint squeak — Momma rat cussing because her judgment has fatally betrayed her.
Her squeak spooks another rat I haven’t noticed yet, about four feet down the wall from where I squat. It erupts out of its hole onto the track, twelve feet away. Tude is onto it with her poodle cane in seconds.
Now there is a dead rat on the floor, along with some rat diarrhea and rat pee. And inside the walls, five dead rats have dissolved into a light, fluffy dust that will eventually find its way into the ventilating system and shiver down onto the floor and onto any sweaty derby girls who happen to be there, falling like gray snow, coating our wheels and making our skin sticky.
The poodle cane method is actually less messy. But my way is more secret.
I am thinking about secrets.
Jilly’s big secret, that she is utterly in the grip of alcoholism — wow, there’s a no brainer, that was easy — but it’s a secret all the same, never spoken, the invisible five hundred pound canary in the room. Blew that one yesterday. My stomach hurts with guilt for saying it to her and rage at her for making me have to say it.
My own secret is so huge that, like Jilly’s, it floods my life like a broken sewer main, poisoning everything until I can’t believe nobody else knows.
The trouble with secrets is that they are like rat-dust in the walls. You think they’re out of sight, but really they’re just floating out into everything else, attracting other dirty little secrets. Poisoning everything.
Nick is right. Magic has compromised the world, even my world, to the point where I am twisted like a pretzel trying to live with it. The way I eat, or don’t. The jobs I take, the way I’m not paid, not promoted. Even little Breck and his helpless mommy have problems that they are treating, God help us, with magic, not with medicine. Not that medicine has done Breck a whole lot of good so far.
And I’m part of the problem.
I’d love to talk this over with Dr. Springe, but she is away this week at a conference.
The hour for practice arrives. Dom and Belle and I put away our poodle canes and put on our skates. Pound of Venus shows up in a terrible mood. I recognize it instantly — she feels just like I do — and I wonder what rats in the walls she has been dusting.
I do not ask. I leave Venus strictly alone.
Nick and his Federal agency and the Hinky Policy, all these are threats, yes, but Venus can put me away the fastest. I wonder if Nick would defend me against a city authority.
Maybe.
But only if he doesn’t know what I really am.
Once he knows the truth, he’ll hate me, and I’ll be in even more trouble than I am now, because I can’t see Nick tolerating being fooled. Or having fooled himself.
So I’m distracted at practice. I forget to push my speed, and I don’t bother evading blockers, and I go down a lot. The prana in the practice rink tastes glum and defeated. I wonder where that mood is coming from.
It’s probably me.