Free The Last Days by Scott Westerfeld Page B

guitar chops and drumbeats filtering out, bouncing up and down the block. Sixteenth is a narrow street, about thirty-five feet from wall to wall, so it takes a tenth of a second for sound to cross over and jump back. At 150 beats per minute, that’s a sixteenth-note lag.

    I clapped my hands and listened to the echo, then drummed softly on my jeans in tempo as I watched.

    From the stoop of the empty FedEx office down the block, I could catalog all the faces going in, concentrating so I’d remember the new people I was meeting upstairs. I always try to see people before they see me, same way as animals want to be upwind, not down.

    At the school I went to, where we all had special needs, some of the other kids couldn’t recognize faces very well. They learned to identify people by their posture or their walk, which seemed like a good idea to me. I can understand faces just fine, but I don’t trust people till I’ve seen the way they move.

    A long gray limousine slid up in front of the Warehouse. A big Jamaican guy in a gray uniform got out and glanced up and down the block, making sure it was safe. But he didn’t see me.

    The bulge of a shoulder holster creased his jacket. Times Square was getting more like that every day, armed guards appearing at the entrances of the big stores. More policemen too.

    Satisfied, the driver opened the limo’s door for two girls.

    They looked about the same age as the boys who’d hired me nearly two weeks ago, seventeen or eighteen, but I figured these limo-girls couldn’t possibly know them. Those dog-walking boys didn’t have limo money—not even taxi money.

    Also, the boys hadn’t been druggies, and one of these girls definitely had a problem. Skin pale as an oyster, she unfolded from the limousine and stood there holding on to the door, shaky from the ride. Though her long arms were thin and wiry, her muscles were almost as defined as mine.

    What kind of junkie works out? I wondered as she made her way around the car to the entrance of the Warehouse. Her movements were slow and pointy, articulated in the wrong spots. I couldn’t take my eyes off her: it was like watching a stick insect walk along a branch.

    A minute later the two dog-boys showed up, and it turned out they did know one another—or at least the boys knew the other girl, the little one with eyeglasses. She introduced them to the junkie girl; then they all went inside except the boy who’d hired me. He waited outside, like he’d said he would.

    His name was Moz: M-o-z. I remembered that because I’d written it down.

    I watched him wait, doing a nervous little dance, never putting his guitar case down. His fingers ran through practice patterns, flickering against his thigh, and I matched his tempo for a while on my knees.

    I wondered how they’d come together: a junkie, a rich girl, two scruffy boys, all of them younger than me, probably too young to be serious about their music. Maybe they were all rich, and the boys had dressed down just to hire me cheap.

    That was a dirty trick if they had, and I don’t play with people who trick me. But I wasn’t sure yet.

    When my watch said sixteen seconds left, I picked up my duffel bags and crossed the street.

     
    “Hey, Alana,” he said. “You made it.”

    “Alana Ray,” I corrected him. “Nine o’clock on Sunday morning.”

    “Yeah. Pretty messed up, huh?” He shrugged and rolled his eyes, like the time had been someone else’s idea. Someone annoying.

    “You got my eighty bucks?” I asked, still drumming two fingers against the strap of one duffel bag.

    “Sure . . . um, eighty?” His eyes narrowed a bit.

    I smiled. “Seventy-five. Just messing with you.”

    He laughed in a way that said five bucks meant something to him, and the money came out of his pockets in crumpled singles and fives, even ten dollars’ worth of quarters rolled by hand.

    I relaxed a little. This boy was dirt poor. There wasn’t any kind of rich person