Chapter Text
The payphone rings like a tap on the shoulder. On the street that's too empty, in a city that's too quiet, from a row of three-sided plastic boxes all alone on the corner comes a noise that should be impossible, and inside that noise the whisper: For you.
Four days--almost five, now, actually--since the Eldest went back underground. Three days since her avatar dragged her backwards through the thorns of her own mind and into a seeking, and her head still feels like the inside of a bell somebody just rang. Like there's something hanging over her by a thread, sharp and ready to drop. But then again, everybody feels like something's about to go wrong, because something's about to go fucking wrong, so that isn't exactly special.
The thing hasn't made its next move yet, but its constructs keep pushing on the perimeter--and then there are the parts of it outside. They could get encircled, if they're not careful, and she's not sure they're being careful. Not enough. She's been telling anybody who'll listen how bad it is and so's Roke; not clear how well the information sunk in or how far it's spread. (That blacksuit who made her, the same time she made them, they understand, which is probably the only useful thing the Union has done this century and still might not be enough.) Nobody knows who's in charge of everything, nobody knows who everybody else is, but also, nobody's shooting each other yet.
And now the phone's ringing.
Pippa leans on the grimy, gum-sticky shelf to take the weight off her bad ankle--darts a glance behind her, even though she knows the only people here are the road crews blocking off the manholes and shift change on the barricades--and picks it up.
"Hello?"
"Kiddo?"
The familiar smoker's rasp on the other end halfway drowns her in relief. Pippa tips her head back against the booth, eyes sliding shut. She did what she always does and put her fear about what could be happening back in Philadelphia, how bad she knew it could get, away somewhere safe, tucked up so she wouldn't trip on it. Now it hits her all at once, full-on, a delayed fist in the gut. Of all the people in the world she most needed to know are safe--one's been with her. Here's the other. "Vinny." Her voice cracks; she barely cares. "You're okay? Everybody's safe?"
Nguyen Thi Vinh, finest magesmith on the East Coast, ranking Hollower in Philadelphia as much as Hollowers count that kind of thing. Picker-up of waifs and strays and random shit in the gutter. Her teacher.
"Yes, we're all fine, I wouldn't be on the fucking phone if we weren't--where the fuck are you? And don't say New York."
She gave Vinny a heads-up she was going, although not exactly where or why. She knows it must've been a hell of a time, back there, seeing this happen and not knowing if Pippa's in the thick of it or not. The whole eastern seaboard's a fucking mess, to start with. Nowhere else seems much better, from what news is getting through--not enough--but nowhere else except Dhaka is worse. And New York...everywhere that still gets news, they know about New York.
Pippa says, "Not on an open line."
"It's not an open line, I called in a favor with the VAs and they put their cyber-shit on it. Answer the question."
"Yes, I'm in New York. Aunty--"
A half-beat of silence, so dead for a second she thinks the line's gone out. Then, with her accent blurring back into French the way it almost never does, Vinny says, low and sharp, "Don't Aunty me, tell me you have a fucking goddamned good reason."
Pippa can't see her, but she can imagine the expression on Vinny's face, her grinding a cigarette viciously down, the tightness in her jaw, and her own stomach twists. It's a familiar feeling, this. Usually it's easier on both of them, the work she does; but usually was then. This is now. "I...got intelligence this is where I needed to be. A vision."
(Your hand, your eye. That smile. The most beautiful smile in the world, the most beautiful thing she's ever seen--the only thing she remembers of that face, so bright it blotted everything else out. Dead neon sign, cracked asphalt. Weeds bending in a wind that dies. Remember this.)
When she was younger, Vinny would ask, you're sure this is real? Now she doesn't, but Pippa can hear how much she isn't. (Part of her wants Vinny to ask anyway--she wants to be able to lay it all out, to say, what the fuck was that to someone who can at least understand what it's like to ask the question even if she doesn't have an answer. There are so many things she wants to tell Vinny, no, put it better; the thing she really wants is to be there somehow and have Vinny tell her what she should do, a little-girl kind of want she hasn't felt for a long time, or at least to hear Vinny say I don't fucking know, you figure it out, and she's too old for that by about times ten and they don't have time.)
Instead Vinny says, "It has to be you?"
"It has to be me. I'm fine, the place I am is--secure enough. They're being careful. What's going on down there?"
Vinny sighs, crackly down the wire. It's such a tired sigh, and Pippa's reminded, this isn't her teacher's first time watching a world fall apart. Between the two of them, Pippa isn't the only one who doesn't tell all her stories in full; but she knows, Nguyen Thi Vinh cut her teeth on the backstage wars of the '50s, and she didn't hop the Atlantic because she wanted to. "The power's out everywhere south of City Avenue so we're on the generator, a bunch of the kids are hunkered down at ours." (To Vinny kids means anyone under about sixty.) "There was a mess in the River Wards, but we locked it down before it got too big, kicked the cops out when they tried to start shit. Things keep kicking off and then going back down again. We're lucky."
The fact Vinny brought it up at all means it was more than a mess, but if anybody got hurt, especially anybody from their Callowhill knot of mystics and mad scientists and general weirdos, Rae and Thuan and Dulcie and all the others, she would've said. Vinny doesn't believe in soft-pedaling. Vinny also doesn't add for now because she doesn't believe in stating the obvious.
"Tell me you at least have backup," Vinny adds. "And I don't mean the army, fuck the army, if the Union's not so far up its ass it's a handpuppet yet they will be--"
"Oh, they are."
"--fucking exactly, do not be a hero with these people, if they even look at you sideways, if you think they did, you get out--I mean do you have backup."
"Yes, I have backup."
And when she doesn't elaborate--because the way she doesn't give details, times like this, her teacher can read like a book--Vinny adds, "Extended family?" Sharper edge in that voice now.
Vinny knows--some of the truth. Pippa told her. Operational decision. The kind where you break the rules because when the field hits chapter and verse, the field wins. Not very much and still more than she should ever have said, but something'd gone wrong and she didn't have an active handler and her last order had been for radio silence, and her mind was cracking at the seams again. And when it comes to magic, there are times you can't lie because a lie will shred you. There are people you can't lie too. If she was going to live, if she was going to be able to use her power instead of breaking under it, if Vinny was going to be able to teach her anything, she had to stop pretending.
(And even that little was dangerous. There aren't many people Vinny hates with this deep rich vein of venom, and almost everyone else on that list is dead.)
"Just the one," Pippa says.
"Do you--" Vinny lets out a soft, humorless snort. "Nah, strike that. Would I trust whoever it is to look after you?"
Pippa considers. Then she considers again. "Yeah, I think you would, actually."
"Well. That's not nothing."
"Ladies, I hate to cut in, but we're about to lose our encryption," says a Midwest-flat voice she doesn't know. "Thirty-second warning."
"Pippa—"
"I know, don't do anything you wouldn't do."
"Yeah, that. I'll be in touch. Watch yourself. Be careful."
"You too," and there's only a dead line.