Free Soul Song by Marjorie M. Liu Page A

Pocketing the rest, she grabbed one of the idling cabs waiting in the cramped drive just outside the glass doors.
    The cabbie was a swarthy man; dark beard, sharp eyes, white turban. He had an Indian accent. He looked at the address on Alice’s business card and said, “That’s right off East Hastings. Not a good neighborhood. You sure you want to go there?”
    “Have to,” Kit said. “You won’t take me?”
    “No, no,” he said, handing back the card. “Just a warning. You stay in this place, you have money. People with money don’t go to that street. Not on purpose. Too much shit.”
    Kit did not say anything. She knew poor. Poor did not frighten her. Finding Alice dead with a knife in her eye, on the other hand, did. Ending up like Alice, or worse, scared her even more.
    The cabbie drove fast. Downtown spirited by in a rush, sleek and tall and modern. It was a Saturday, and the sidewalks were full of youthful athleticism, cool charm. Vancouver felt like a young city. Kit wanted to stand on some street corner and play her fiddle, to busk as she had on the sidewalks of New York and Nashville with her father.
    Good training, he liked to say. Nothing keeps an artist sharper than trying to reel in folks who don’t want to be reeled.
    Kit wondered what else she needed to sharpen up on. Maybe kickboxing. Swimming. Running like hell. Or better yet, shutting off her mind so she never saw another murdered man or woman in her life.
    They drove through Gastown; all brick and cobblestone, buildings that reeked of the historic, spilling over with shops and restaurants; quaint, elegant, hip. Just like any other tourist-trap shopping district in any other city in the world. Kit thought it needed music to make it click.
    Then the neighborhood changed. Several turns down some narrow streets and the city crumbled, right before her eyes, transforming like Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage at midnight into a street of torn façades and broken windows, boarded-up restaurants plastered in paper advertisements of indie concerts and movies. There were some signs of life: several 99-cent stores, some diners, a liquor depot. Billboards painted on tall buildings declared them to be hotels—rooms rented by the week or the hour. Nothing Kit hadn’t seen before. Or hadn’t lived in.
    Templar Street appeared to be in the heart of the Hastings district, a block down from a long line of homeless people waiting to enter a soup kitchen. It was chilly out, overcast, but women trawled the street corner in short skirts and high heels, jacket collars piled high with fake fur rubbing their cheeks. Some of them were marked as dead—strangled, beaten, shot. Hard to look at; visions of murder swam hot in Kit’s head.
    Kit glimpsed their pimp sitting on a folding chair just inside the old arching doorway of an apartment building. He had long blond hair, a pale skinny face, hard, narrow eyes that reminded her of Dutch. No future murder for him, but that didn’t mean much. There was a girl in his lap. He watched the cab as it drove by—Kit felt like he watched her, too.
    The cabbie stopped less than a hundred feet away, beside a pale white building with a low roof and tall windows. It looked old, probably historic; a folding placard sat outside the tinted glass double doors. YOUTH CENTER, it said, but the cheerfully painted balloons, hearts, and flowers would have given that away even without the big letters.
    “You want me to wait?” asked the cab driver. “Might be hard to get another ride.”
    “I’ll be fine,” she said. “But thanks.”
    The air outside the cab smelled like piss and vomit. A lot of piss and vomit. Kit glanced down the street. The pimp was watching her. She hardened her expression and walked into the Youth Center.
    It was clean inside, and large, like a warehouse. Smelled like vanilla and candy and tennis shoes. The walls had all been turned into long, sprawling murals, one of which was currently in the process of being