Free Pandaemonium by Ben Macallan Page A

boots?”
    “Second-foot, I think you mean – but probably not. This isn’t charity gear. This is the stuff the charity shops don’t see.” I tugged at him tentatively, but he still wasn’t moving. I may have rolled my eyes a little, but it wasn’t really his fault. He’d probably never had to consider putting something on his precious body that had been used before. So I bit back well, if you’d really rather go barefoot – no point giving hostages to fortune; it would be all too easy for him to say yes, I would – and instead I said, “What you don’t know, Jacey” – among the vast scads of things that you don’t know, a few of which I guess I get to teach you – “is that everything that gets lost or dropped or left behind anywhere in the London transport system is all routed to the same place. Tube, buses, black cabs, it doesn’t matter. Some of it goes through the police first, some of it sits in local offices for a week or so; then it heads for Baker Street. There’s a normal-looking storefront at street level and vasty underground rooms beneath, all stuffed with stuff.
    “They keep things for three months, and do what they can to reunite them with their owners; but you’d be amazed what doesn’t get claimed. Eventually, that all goes for auction or else to charity.
    “Except that Reno has her own people in the system, people who passed through here themselves until she found a place for them outside. Savoyards, we’re everywhere. And the Baker Street Irregulars divert what they can, what they think she can use. It’s another kind of charity, I guess, but – no. Not second-hand boots. You’ll see.”
    He was still looking unconvinced. I just opened the door and beckoned him through.
     
     
    O NE THING ABOUT building underground, there’s plenty of space. That unassuming door led into a long windowless store-room, lined and mazed with shelving. Shelves and shelves.
    There were boxes and boxes all along the shelves, and every box was labelled. Shirts and jeans and skirts and underwear, all scrupulously clean. We knew; we did the work, picking and sorting and laundering, pressing and folding and boxing away. With labels. Often the laundering wasn’t strictly necessary; much of this was new. Fresh from the shop, in its original wrapping, mislaid or forgotten and somehow never asked for. Of course people lose brollies and bras, but they lose ballgowns too. And wedding-rings and keys and brooches, yes – and telescopes and dartboards and voodoo masks and wheelchairs and you wouldn’t believe what else.
    We all knew our way around in here. We all did our stints, helping newcomers to find what they needed, hunting things down for ourselves. Making free, dressing to impress or dressing up to play, whatever. It wasn’t always solemn and it surely wasn’t uniform.
    On the lower shelves, boxes and boxes of shoes and boots. Most of them new, unworn; many of them costly. Men’s and women’s and children’s too, divided that way just for convenience. Some who came this way were indeterminate or uncertain or very certain indeed about how they meant to dress. Not all the skirts and stilettos went to girls.
    Poor Jacey, he was still very uncertain. Charity boots. I didn’t suppose for a moment that he’d ever tried to walk a step in someone else’s shoes, and now he thought he had to. But we found his size and he picked through a few boxes reluctantly, and then with growing enthusiasm as he began to understand, as brand names peeped through tissue-paper. Soon enough we found one pair that he allowed that he could bear to wear; and he sat on the floor in new socks and gamely tried them on, laced them up, held his hand out to me for a teasing tug up. I just gripped him palm to palm and let him do the work, pulling against my solidity.
    He blinked a little, as he rose. His body still remembered how mine used to be; he hadn’t bargained for my Aspect, even that shred of it I was holding on to. I was