as if at a bitter taste in his mouth, and said, “Yes, sir. I’m going to check the perimeter.”
“An excellent idea,” Baldy said. “I’d rather not see you for a while.” Then he walked away from Fitz, leaning down to touch the shoulder of one of the young men, and muttered softly.
Fitz moved, quickly and quietly, getting off the shop floor and moving out into the hallway. There he hugged himself tightly, shivering, and began walking rapidly down a hallway.
“I’m not crazy,” he said. “I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy.”
“Well . . . kinda,” I said, keeping pace. “What are you doing working for an asshole like that?”
“You aren’t real,” Fitz said.
“The hell I’m not,” I replied. “I just can’t figure out why it is that you can hear me talking.”
“I’m not crazy,” Fitz snarled, and put his hands over his ears.
“I’m pretty sure that won’t help you,” I noted. “I mean, it’s your mind that perceives me. I think you just happen to get it as, uh . . . one of those MV4 things, instead of as a movie.”
“MP3,” Fitz corrected me automatically. Then he jerked his hands from his ears and looked around him, eyes wide. “Uh . . . are you . . . you actually there?”
“I am,” I confirmed. “Though any halfway decent hallucination would tell you that.”
Fitz blinked. “Um. I don’t want to piss you off or anything but . . . what are you?”
“I’m a guy who doesn’t like to see his friends getting shot at, Fitz,” I told him.
Fitz’s steps slowed. He seemed to put his back against a wall out of reflex more than thought. He was very still for a long moment. Then he said, “You’re . . . a, um . . . a spirit?”
“Technically,” I said.
He swallowed. “You work for the Rag Lady.”
Hell’s bells. The kid was terrified of Molly. And I’d known plenty of kids like Fitz when I was growing up in the system. I met them in foster homes, in orphanages, in schools and summer camps. Tough kids, survivors, people who knew that no one was looking out for them except themselves. Not everyone had the same experience in the system, but portions of it were positively Darwinian. It created some hard cases. Fitz was one of them.
People like that aren’t stupid, but they don’t scare easily, either.
Fitz was terrified of Molly.
My stomach quivered in an unpleasant manner.
“No,” I told him. “I don’t work for her. I’m not a servitor.”
He frowned. “Then . . . you work for the ex-cop bi . . . uh, lady?”
“Kid,” I said, “you have no idea who you’re screwing around with. You pointed weapons at the wrong people. I know where you live now. They will, too.”
He went white. “No,” he said. “Look . . . you don’t know what it’s like here. Zero and the others, they can’t help it. He doesn’t let them do anything but what he wants.”
“Baldy, you mean?” I asked.
Fitz let out a strained, half-hysterical bark of laughter. “He calls himself Aristedes. He’s got power.”
“Power to push a bunch of kids around?”
“You don’t know,” Fitz said, speaking quietly. “He tells you to do something and . . . and you do it. It never even occurs to you to do anything else. And . . . and he moves so fast. I’m not . . . I think he might not even be human.”
“He’s human,” I said. “He’s just another asshole.”
A faint, weary spark of humor showed in Fitz’s face. Then he said, “If that’s true, then how does he do it?”
“He’s a sorcerer,” I said. “Middleweight talent with a cult to make him feel bigger. He’s got some form of kinetomancy I’m not familiar with, to move that fast. And some really minor mind mojo, if he’s got to pick kids to do his dirty work for him.”
“You make him sound like a small-time crook . . . like a car thief or something.”
“In the greater scheme, yeah,” I said. “He’s a petty crook. He’s Fagin.”
Fitz frowned. “From . . . from that Dickens book? Uh . . . Oliver Twist?”
I lifted my eyebrows. The kid had read. Serious readers weren’t common in the system. Those who did read mostly seemed to focus on, you know, kids’ books. Not many of them rolled around to Dickens unless they got unlucky in high school English. I would have been willing to bet that Fitz hadn’t made it past his freshman year of high school,