CHAPTER TWENTY

I managed to get through the rest of the night without messing up my apostrophe hair too badly, and Syd had given me extremely explicit instructions on the care and management of it. There were manuals for Microsoft products that were less detailed. So, I’m saying I looked pretty good.

I dressed for the airport of course, which meant that I was business-professional. I felt that security was going to be looking at me askance, given my hair, so it was best to compensate with the rest of my clothing. The result was confusing. Was I an extremely conservative and homely-faced supermodel? A successful businesswoman for a company that sold E? I tried to carry off confidence and normalcy as well as I could, but this was certainly made more difficult by Charice, who was in full Griselda garb, minus the neon lights and wings. Even without the wings, she was disturbing and harpy-like. She had fangs, which is never what you want to see next to you on a passenger plane.

And you have never lived until you have gone through airport security with pink hair and a traveling companion wearing fangs. My greatest fear, however, was that Detective Shuler was going to show up yet again, and I would have to explain (1) why I was not only spending time with Jonah’s friends but doing so extravagantly and at great personal expense and (2) what was going on with my hair.

Probably I should have listed those things in the opposite order.

It was strange that I should have been quite so excited on the plane to Phoenix, but there was a palpable sense of something growing in me. Anticipation? Fun? Whatever it was, it made me nervous and excited and simultaneously embarrassed and proud of my pink hair. I both was amused and mortified by the looks we were getting from our fellow passengers. It was fun to be an oddball. And it was even more fun to be an oddball on a mission.

This was more than just a convention I was going to. This was a showdown—the thief would be here, Chtusk would be here, possibly Orchardary would be here—and I would have two days to piece everyone’s lies together. Plus there would be a costume parade. I could handle this.

There were a series of steps from the plane to the Games Summit, and each step made a little clearer why I was excited. On the plane, we were utterly out of place. Two clownishly dressed people in a world of business travelers. At the Phoenix airport, we were almost entirely out of place—but not quite. A careful eye would notice things. A Zoth T-shirt. Someone with ridiculous hair. A man with a papier-mâché shield. By the hotel we were not out of place anymore. We were a contingency. Fully a third of the people here were like us—twentysomethings with elaborate costumes and geeky T-shirts. One third of the people at the hotel were people in African garb, and someone in a kitenge asked me what all the crazy costumes were for, and I told her a computer-game convention. I asked her what all the kitenges were about and she told me a Swahili ESL convention. It’s exchanges like these that make me love America.

By the time we got on the hotel bus, the inmates had taken over the asylum. There were still some folks in plain clothes, but the looks we got were not of shock or concern. Instead we were given cool nods of recognition or outright smiles or thumbs-ups.

Charice had put on her full regalia for the bus, even though the wings were terribly impractical, and no one complained. Rather, people moved out of her way and gratefully gave her as much space as she needed. “Oh, excuse me, Auctioneer Griselda!,” “I’m glad to see you here, Auctioneer Griselda!,” and “Have you seen my lamb, Auctioneer Griselda?,” the last of which was some Zoth in-joke that I never did quite understand. It was suddenly as if I was traveling with the queen of England.

I am not a Zoth player. Truthfully, I wasn’t. RedRasish was only level two, and I did not understand half the references that were on people’s T-shirts, and yet. Zoth had dominated my life a little bit, with the spear and even before that with Erik’s obsessive raiding. Maybe it was Stockholm syndrome, but I was happy to be here. It was enough to just be among their number. Maybe I wasn’t a queen or demigod of Zoth, but I was at least a citizen. And for once, I was just happy to be on the pilgrimage.

While I’m sure there are nicer convention centers—and nicer halls somewhere—at the particular moment in time that I entered the Games Summit, I couldn’t imagine one. An enormous black dragon battled with a phoenix in the main lobby, and even though they were just enormous balloons, really, it somehow filled you with a sense of scale. Charice, whose last-minute cosplay really was turning a lot of heads, instinctively knew that she did not want to tour the main floor with me and quickly ditched me with an only half-interested “good luck with your case.”

This was perhaps fair, because I had all but pretended to not know her at airport security, but too soon, Charice, too soon.

I texted Clemency shortly after I left. “RedRasish is in the building” was the message, which should give you some sense of the giddy rush I was feeling. After a few exchanges where we tried (unsuccessfully) to figure out where we were relative to each other, we managed to meet up at a snack bar.

“What’s happened to your hair?” she said when she saw me, not even bothering to mask her surprise.

Clemency was not dressed up at all. Well, she was wearing a white dress that could be said to be slightly fancy, but she was certainly not dressed up in healer garb, with a gnarled staff and a headdress. Frankly, I was a little disappointed. I was also disappointed that Threadwork wasn’t around. It wasn’t until I saw Clemency without him that I realized how much I had imagined them as a sort of old married couple. But no matter.

“I had my hair styled like RedRasish,” I told her.

“Ah.” I had expected a little more warmth from Clem, but although she clearly registered an opinion of dismay regarding my new pink coif, she quickly returned to form and hugged me anyway.

“I’m glad you came,” she told me. “I always wanted to come to this event, but now that I’m here, I’m a little sad. It’s a little like a second funeral for Jonah.”

“It’d be his third funeral,” I told her. “Although it’s not going to be as grim as all that. It’s a party. Jonah would have wanted a party.”

I didn’t ever know Jonah terribly well, but from what I had put together about him, I think I was on the right track. Certainly Clemency seemed to think so, because her face brightened right up at the idea.

“There’ll be food, at least.”

I needed to ask Clemency about the business with Jonah’s parents. I didn’t want to, and every pore in my body was telling me that, truthfully, it wasn’t relevant. But I had to ask. So I did.

“Why did you see the Longs the night before the funeral? You told Threadwork you were going to the grocery store.”

Clemency gasped audibly at the question, which I had asked without any kind of preamble. I suppose it’s these sorts of gasps that the Sam Spades and Inspector Alleyns live for, but I found it embarrassing. Sure, I wanted to catch Clemency unaware—not give her a chance to create a cover-up story if she were hiding something. But that’s just it—if she wasn’t hiding something, then I was kind of just being a jackass. A lot of detective work involves being a jackass, actually, which is maybe why it plays to my strengths.

“I know Mrs. Long. And Jonah, years ago. I used to be his babysitter, many thousands of years ago, back when they lived in New Hampshire.”

“Why didn’t you tell Threadwork? Or me?”

“Jonah had invited me to be in the guild, you know. He’d always sort of kept in touch with me, like I was his older sister. But at the same time, he was also embarrassed about it. He never introduced me to anyone as his former babysitter. Actually, he sort of pretended to not know me.”

“That’s it? I don’t see why you couldn’t tell Threadwork about it.”

“It’s not that I couldn’t tell Threadwork about it. It’s that I didn’t. I just didn’t feel like it was my secret to tell. Jonah was cool about it while he was alive, so I didn’t feel right to make a big deal about it the day before he was going to be buried.”

“Sylvia was glad to see you?”

“Sylvia adores me. I think she always had some scheme that I was going to fall in love with Jonah and start a family, which seemed really bizarre to me when I was younger but has started making more sense to me lately.”

“You’re getting the motherhood thing?”

“Don’t even start with me, Dahlia.”

“And that was the entire extent of your relationship with Jonah.”

I could tell that Clemency was holding something back—I hadn’t the slightest idea what it was, but I knew it was there. When you confess, you relax, or at least slump with embarrassment. I knew from what I was speaking. Three months earlier I had run into an ex-roommate at a greasy spoon, where I had been applying for a job. I had an entire lunch with her at that damned diner, the job application hidden under the place mat the whole time. When I got home, my back was so stiff I had to take a muscle relaxant.

Clemency was still tense and nervous and looked like she hoped a waitress might come and bring the check. There was still something under her place mat.

“You’re a horrible person, Dahlia Moss.”

This was undoubtedly true, but I was at least a horrible person who was going to get to the truth.

“Go on,” I told her.

“I think I was Jonah’s first kiss. He was fourteen, I was eighteen. Which is probably illegal somewhere, somehow. But it’s not I like planned anything. He just came out and kissed me out of nowhere!”

“You didn’t date him after.”

“No. Honestly, it was a pretty poor kiss. I’m embarrassed I’m talking about it now.”

And thus concluded my digging into innocent people’s lives. Oh sure, I could have dug deeper—checked times and dates to see if the story checked out. I could have interviewed Jonah’s high school friends for mention of a hot babysitter, and God knows what else, but I let it go. Clemency didn’t look nervous anymore; she looked freed.

“Let’s go downstairs,” I told her. “And enjoy the floor.”

I won’t go into the details of the floor at the Gamers Summit. There were vendors selling geeky T-shirts, some of which I understood, some of which I didn’t. There were voice actors, there were design artists. There were giant videos of PvP tournaments.

Truthfully, I didn’t understand most of it. I got the gist, but not the details. But sometimes, enough enthusiasm for something becomes infectious. And you don’t need to understand it; you can just enjoy it. It is for this reason, I believe, that soccer is popular anywhere.

As Clemency and I were waiting in line to have a painting of hers signed by a gaunt-faced man (he’s the voice of Jaelin Thorn, Clemency explained in an absurdly reverential tone) we were texted by Oatcake:

“Horizons, time to converge. North End, Level 2. By the beanbags. With smiles on please, gents, this is a funeral.”

Through a combination of haste and the good fortune of being close to the North End, we were able to get there before anyone else. Oatcake was someone who I had imagined looking a little more imperious than the fellow before me. He had a small face with short hair and delicate features. He also wasn’t wearing any sort of geek T-shirt, which marked him a little in the crowd, opting instead for a plaid overshirt that was entirely too hot for Phoenix in the summer.

And true to form, he had brought food for everyone. He handed a cupcake to Clemency when she arrived, whom he seemed to recognize.

“Are you Dahlia?” he asked me with concern in his voice.

“Yes,” I said, suddenly wondering if I wasn’t welcome here. I was not, after all, a Horizon.

“I didn’t make you a cupcake,” he said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go without.”

This did not concern me. And I had suspicions that Chtusk and Orchardary weren’t going to show anyway, which would leave me two cupcakes to eat. I told Oatcake not to worry about it.

The next person to show up was Wayne, who was a lot more handsome than I had imagined, with wavy blond hair and quarterback good looks. Plus he was wearing a fancy gray suit, and I’m a sucker for that sort of thing. But then he spoke with that awful Southern accent of his, and the spell was broken.

“Dahlia Moss? Is that you? Jesus, you didn’t change your hair to look like your level-two character, did you?”

“No,” I told him, “my hair looked like this all along. It’s just one of life’s funny coincidences.”

There was chortling, not so much at my joke as at my hair. My hair was going to be the source of amusement for many of the Horizons, but I just took it in stride. Somewhere, sometime, my hair would have been considered wonderful.

Ophelia and Kurt arrived together, and it struck me that they were conspicuously trying to not act like a couple. They walked apart, they didn’t touch, but if you left your eyes on them for any length of time it was impossible to miss the little looks, the shared smiles. Well, good for them. Kurt was wearing that same devil hoodie I’d spotted him in the other day, and Ophelia—who had dressed in full battle regalia for Jonah’s online funeral—now wore a funereal dress to his after-party. Or maybe it was how she always dressed—I recalled the picture of her in the Globe in a similarly subdued outfit.

I also noticed that she was wearing a costume jewelry bracelet—with a gem missing from its inset. That explained that.

“How’s the viola?” I asked her.

“How’s your hairdresser?” she asked me. “Still vomiting up pink hearts?”

There was something about Ophelia’s crabbiness in the face of aggression that I admired, so I just tipped my lovely pink head at her.

There was a gap of time before our next Horizon arrived, and we all awkwardly stood around and talked about how nice the cupcakes were. Except for me, having no cupcake. I also learned that the cupcakes were some sort of inside joke that I did not understand, despite it being explained to me by three people consecutively.

No one mentioned Clemency’s baby bump, for reasons that weren’t clear to me, aside from a guess that if everyone ignored it, it might go away.

The next to arrive was Threadwork, who I could still not quite get used to seeing outside of Clemency’s company. The reason he was late was clear—he was rolling over in his wheelchair, talking to a dark-skinned woman in African garb also rolling over in her own wheelchair. The old dog had picked up a groupie.

“What’s up, everyone? This is Frances—she’s my ladyfriend.”

Frances laughed and said, “I can’t believe you just used the word ‘ladyfriend.’”

“That’s how I roll,” said Threadwork.

Threadwork was emphatically not using his “Threadwork” voice and, in fact, introduced himself as Garrett. While no one else seemed impressed by this, I was having the same reaction I had had the first time I had met him, only now in reverse. I had gotten so used to that tepid Alec Guinness voice of his that now that he spoke in an American accent, it seemed utterly wrong.

But from the looks of it, everyone else was taken aback not by his voice but by Frances.

“You’re not in our guild, are you?” asked Oatcake, with less certainty than I had heard from him to date.

“Oh, no,” said Frances. “In fact, I don’t completely understand what any of this is.”

“Typing All-Stars?” asked Kurt.

“I don’t know what that is,” said Frances agreeably. “All these people in amazing costumes. I just met Garrett at my hotel, and one thing led to another.” She trailed off, leaving us to connect the dots ourselves.

“Well,” said Wayne, amused with himself, “the hookers here in Phoenix certainly are specifically tailored!”

Which earned him a hard punch in the arm from Tambras. Ophelia, rather. Although I do consider her more Tambras-like while she’s punching someone.

“I’m kidding,” whelped Wayne, who certainly took a punch like an elf. I shouldn’t be too smug, though, because I thought his joke was pretty funny, and I had to stifle a smile to avoid getting smacked in round two.

Frances did not seem to mind, however. She seemed, well, happy. “Forget it. It’s just that Garrett and I have so much in common, it feels wrong to at least not spend the day together.”

“Or the whole weekend,” said Threadwork.

From the anticipatory look on Frances’s face, I had the awful feeling that this was going to spiral into some sickly sweet new lovers annoying everyone with their treacly nonsense soon, and so I said, realizing it only as I said it:

“You’re here for the convention on teaching Swahili!”

“Ndiyo,” said Francis, which I assumed was Swahili for “yes.”

“You’re ditching the conference for this?”

“Well,” considered Frances, “a bit, yes. But I’m teaching Garrett Swahili, so I figure that mitigates it a little. He’s very good at mimicry.”

I thought about the veering inconsistency of Threadwork’s accent and said, “Not that good.”

At which point Tambras socked me. The woman was a walking beatstick. Probably years of playing second fiddle (ho!) to violinists. I was amused enough at this joke that I considered saying it aloud, but I decided that it would only get me socked again.

Instead, Garrett said. “Are those cupcakes? How lovely!”

And his Threadwork voice was there again, just around the edges. He can move fast for a guy in a wheelchair, and before anyone could object, he and Frances were each eating cupcakes. Well, damn.

Oraova, the drunken fire mage, arrived in a Megadeth T-shirt that was so lame that I assumed it had to be ironic, and apologized to everyone, explaining that he was extremely hungover. This looked to be true. He looked exactly like I had imagined him looking—lean and mean and with very badly cut hair.

At this point, we were all here except for Chtusk and Orchardary. And Jonah, obviously, but no one was much expecting him to show. I was eyeing that last cupcake, which really did look pretty good, but the damned bug showed up.

Chtusk was a plain-looking girl, with long, straight, almost waist-length hair that managed to be both very simple and yet somehow very badly cared for. She was wearing a green heather T-shirt, which hung over her limply. Kate Moss thin, this girl, like a ghost. But not in the way that guys find alluring. She seemed like your classic wallflower.

It took me a double take to put it together, but this was the girl from the fish-eye lens.

“Hello, everyone,” she said, even meeker than I had expected. “I suppose you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here.”

We all looked at her blankly.

“That was a joke,” she explained. “Are those cupcakes?”

I nearly knocked the cupcake out of her hand, but what could I do? Scarbati ruin everything.

“You ditched me the other night,” I told her, quietly enough not to embarrass her in front of everyone but forcefully enough to let her know that I wasn’t past having Tambras punch her by request. “And you abandoned me at my own doorstep. What’s your story, lady?”

“I did,” she said quietly. “You and I should talk after this.”

Which appeased me for the moment. We waited around for what felt like forever for Orchardary to show up, but it never happened.