The Lostkind (39 page)

Vincent took that in. "How you
reacted when fear didn't work, was to show me something incredible that was right in front of me the whole time."

"I don't mean you, I mean everyone." Yasi interrupted him, drying the dish in her hand compulsively. "I threw a man I've known my whole life into a deep dark hole, because it honestly didn't occur to me that he was a trustworthy friend. It's not any great personality flaw; I just... never put the effort into making friends. So now I don't have any... It sort of hit me just now that it's making me kinda... isolated."

"Yasi, I wasn't scared of you. I was stunned. I mean, I always knew you were dangerous. I saw the way Wotcha shuddered when she spoke about you. But knowing it and
seeing
it were different things. Connie is scared of you because of that, Yasi. I'm not."

She nodded. "That's because when we first met, I was trying to get you to like me enough to follow a total stranger down a long dark tunnel, in the middle of the night, at an empty subway station you'd never been to, while telling nobody where you were going."

Beat.

"Well, put that way I sound kinda stupid." Vincent said finally.

Yasi smirked and started drying the next plate. "I wasn't wearing the sword when we met. Most people who meet me for the first time see that sword and sort of forget there's someone holding it."

"See? When you don't lead with that, you're really quite charming." Vincent offered. "But for what it's worth... I was very glad you were there the other night, scary or not. You
did
save my life. Me and Connie would be dead if you weren't that dangerous."

She smirked, and set down the plate. "You know something? This is my first time drying dishes."

"Really?"

"You've seen how we do it. You've done it yourself." She pointed out. "You finish a meal in the Underside you throw the bowl away and some Gremlin pounces out and grabs it before it hits the ground."

"Yasi, welcome to the life of a dull surface dwelling kitchen."

The Lostkind's smirked, just a little. "You're still calling me Yasi?"

Vincent blinked, a little confused by that. "It
is
your name."

Yasi's face slowly transformed; blooming into an amazing, genuine smile. "Yeah. It is." She put the dish down, picked up another.

He was about to try and make sense of that, when there was a knock on the door.

"Who is it?" Called Vincent.

"Detective Ryan, NYPD." Shouted a voice from the hall. "We need to ask you some questions."

Vincent looked but Yasi had already vanished.

~oo00oo~

"You've never seen a garden before, have you Tecca?"

Tecca shrugged as she put the book away. "There are gardens in the Underside. We set some of them up; they clean the air, and the water. At least, a little bit. Algae and such. One of the Lostkind in California made glowing moss; and sent some to us long time ago. It's nice there, like light growing in all different colors."

"Yeah, but without the sun, you don't have things like roses and trees."

"No trees. No room for them."

Connie picked her words carefully. "What about Central Park? Ever been there?"

"Last year, I was part of a team that Borrowed some stuff from a plant nursery." Tecca offered. "Someone made dwarf fruit trees. You'd probably like it."

"Mm." Connie nodded, non-committal. "More cocoa?"

~oo00oo~

Once he was done answering their questions, Vincent left his apartment and went to the nearest coffee shop; pleased to see that the rain had passed. When he returned home, he ignored the door and went up the fire escape to the roof. Yasi was perched on the corner of the air conditioner, eyes closed, and legs crossed. She was meditating, or waiting for him. She didn't open her eyes when he approached, but she smiled when he placed the coffee next to her.

"Did you have any trouble with the police?" Yasi asked without opening her eyes.

Vincent hoisted himself up next to her, and took a sip of his own. "They had questions about a detective that was investigating the attack on Friday night."

"Officer Grey." Yasi said neutrally.

Vincent nodded. "Connie told them about my cell phone. That's why they came to ask me about it."

Yasi opened one eye. "What'd you tell them?"

"The truth." Vincent said with an innocent gleam in his eye. "I told them that my phone was stolen the last time I volunteered to help a bunch of poverty stricken homeless people, and I had no idea what happened after that."

Yasi grinned. "You've been hanging with a bad crowd Vincent. You've become a regular Artful Dodger."

"When we ran into Davidson the other day, it sort of hit me that I never had an alibi planned. You might want to warn Wotcha-oh." Vincent bit his lip, and a look of true pain crossed both their faces. "How's Tecca taking it?"

"I don't know." Yasi admitted. "He's a tough kid; he won't admit weakness to anyone, not even when his own grandmother gets it. But your cover was a good one. The cops will start looking toward the homeless, and they won't find anything."

Vincent hesitated, but spit out what he'd been thinking. "Detective Ryan; the cop that came to ask me questions? He said that Officer Grey hasn't been heard from in over a day. You think Owen and Vandark are cleaning up loose ends?"

Yasi nodded. "Could be."

Silence.

"Yasi;
you
don't know anything about what happened to Grey, do you?" Vincent challenged.

The Shinobi shrugged easily. "Nope. Never met the man."

"Well then..." Vincent sighed. "I'm a loose end too. And so is Connie."

"I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep over it. Probably Owen and Vandark making sure we don't have any leads to them. You only know Owen and Grey, and both of them have vanished. It's over."

Vincent nodded slowly. "It's over."

Yasi rocked back and let her legs swing freely, picking up her coffee. "We had the funeral."

Vincent winced. "That was quick."

"It's our way."

"I wish you'd told me. I would have liked to be there."

Yasi sighed and took a sip. "That sort of thing..."

"I know, it stays in the family; and outsiders ain't invited." Vincent murmured.

Yasi wanted to apologize, but couldn't bring herself to do so. "Well, be glad you weren't there; it was the most horribly depressing experience of my life. We kept telling everyone the danger had passed; but Wotcha was the first person we'd lost to our enemies in so long... And she wasn't the last one we lost that weekend."

Vincent nodded and squeezed her hand. She pulled it away carefully. It wasn't harsh or irritated; she was just keeping her distance from him. It suddenly dawned on him that he had never seen the Lostkind touch each other casually. Taps on the shoulder, hugging someone, shaking hands…

Of course
. It came to him.
People who live Underground in tight quarters would have different rules on personal space
. He pulled away. "Sorry."

"It's okay." She said, and after a moment, he thought he could see a tiny smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. "Vincent, this won't mean anything to you, but…" Yasi bit her lip. "I know who my friends are."

TWELVE: The New York Ninja

Vincent went back to work as normal, got a few ribs from Gill about being a klutz, and discovered his workload had doubled because of Owen's sudden departure. Everyone at the office was annoyed that he'd left without giving them warning, but nobody thought there was anything unusual about it. Vincent was struck again by how simple the deception could be. All it took was a piece of paper in his employers ‘In' tray, and the rest took care of itself. Not for the first time, Vincent wondered how often things like this happened and nobody noticed.

Two weeks after returning to the surface, Vincent went downstairs to the Archives Room at the City Planners Office… and found he had a message waiting, directing him to leave home for one specific hour, the next day.

~oo00oo~

The following day was a Saturday; and he made his way home after going out for one hour in the late evening as instructed. When he got back, he found his living room transformed. The walls were covered in old maps of the city. Vincent recognized several of them from the Archives. There were over a dozen more stacked on top of each other; blueprints of skyscrapers. They were stacked to surround his coffee table, which had notepads and a map of the subway system on it. His living room looked like a command centre for an urban expedition.

And perched at her customary post on the windowsill, was Yasi.

"Well, this is quite an operation." Vincent observed.

"Hope you enjoyed your 9 to 5 work week, McCall." She told him. "Because now your other job starts. It started the second the sun went down."

Vincent fought a sudden fit of nerves. He had no idea what this was, but it was what he'd been waiting for since he first fell down the rabbit hole. "What do you need?"

"The most dangerous, and most important part of any Secret City is the entrance." Yasi told him, not for the first time. "So we shift them from time to time. All entrances lead into the Labyrinth, which leads into the Underside. We need to scout some new entrances." She gestured to the documents all over his living room. "That's where you come in. You read blueprints like this for a living. Your job description is to know how a subway tunnel interacts with a building foundation, or a sewer, or an electrical cable."

Vincent nodded and shrugged his jacket off. "Okay. What do you need to know tonight?"

"Finding new entrances has three parts. Scout, Support, and Structure. One to go hunting for places, another to declare them good or not, the third to actually build what we need."

"And the ‘Support'? The one that decides whether or not it's a good place?" Vincent guessed. "That would be me?"

Yasi rose to her feet. "It's dark now, so we can work. I'm your scout." She drew a folded page from her bandoleer, and handed it to him. He unfolded it, surprised to see how large a page it was. It was map sized, easily.

Yasi didn't let go of it right away. "This is a map of the Labyrinth." She said seriously. "The list of people who see this is very short."

Vincent nodded, equally serious.

Yasi studied him and seemed to reach a decision, releasing the map into his hands. "I marked a few points on the city directory that I think might work. Your job is to overlay the city. Maintenance tunnels, sewers, subways, basements… find all the places that the Labyrinth and New York overlap, and we'll figure out where there's a place that would suit an entrance. I'll scout them for you as we go."

"How do I keep in touch with you?" Vincent asked curiously. "Do those pneumatic tubes stretch everywhere? Because I doubt those pigeons are going to come to me when I call."

Yasi grinned. "I thought we might try a cell phone."

Vincent snorted, feeling foolish. "Oh. Okay, well, that works too."

Yasi pulled a disposable cell phone out of her bandoleer and dialed. A moment later, Vincent's house phone rang. He hit the speaker as she hooked a hands free headset over her ear and went to the window. "I'll start at Brooklyn and work my way up." She reported, sitting on the windowsill. "Find places on the way; I'll be in touch."

Vincent compared the maps. "I'll start with trains and tunnels. We'll cover a lot of ground that way."

"Only way to fly." Yasi agreed. She gave him a wink and rolled backwards out his living room window. He didn't bother to check; she'd be long gone.

"You still hear me?" Her voice came through the phone. He could hear the sounds of traffic in the background.

"Loud and clear." Vincent responded, sitting down with the maps. "Okay, let's get to work."

~oo00oo~

After half an hour, they had an easy pace going. Yasi had come by a few times to educate him about his place as an outside friend to the Secret City, so the conversation was not awkward. They were working, so the conversation was not halted. It had the effect of them having two conversations at once, and the fact that they were a city apart didn't alter that at all.

"I'm just saying, one time, it would be nice to actually
pay
to see a movie." Vincent was saying firmly to the phone. "My treat."

"Of course it's your treat; I don't carry money." She retorted. "But I figured doing it my way would be more exciting. You weren't complaining at Museum."

"You don't ever talk about money on the first date." Vincent defended.

"I'm at the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel." Yasi reported. "First date huh?"

"No?" Vincent flushed a little.

"No." Yasi confirmed.

"Sorry. Whatever you want to call it then."