George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

Anyway if she was wrong she’d be back in position in a couple of minutes. No harm no foul. As she passed the man in the dashiki, he stopped covering Jimmy Buffett and stood up abruptly. She made a curious, contorted sign with her fingers and whispered a word in Farsi. He sat down again and face-planted gently into his steelpan, his sticks clattering on the cement. Some people claim that there’s a woooooooman to blame …

Now she was moving around and in play it was all different. The scene had unfrozen, it was no longer a photograph but a movie — starring her. She could breathe again; it was like she’d taken a hit off an inhaler. The early morning fog was burning off. This was the good part. And when the going was good, nobody was better at it than she was. She tried to keep her eyes glazed and empty like everybody else, but she was full of crazy energy. She wanted to grin like a loon. Everybody else looked so normal. Even the freaks were freaky in a normal way. She slowed her pace with an effort. Walk like a regular person, asshole.

The flow of the crowd bore her up the iron-shod cement stairs to the concourse level. At the turnstiles she did a mirror-image buck-and-wing dance with a guy wearing Prada and a novelty beard who wanted to come in the same turnstile she was going out. That took an amazingly long time to sort out, by which time the clock in the token booth already read 8:11.

The hallways of the concourse radiated out around her in all directions. She counted five exits and they all looked wrong. No time. Pick one. She stopped. The crowd was thinning out around her. No one was giving up any obvious tells. The turnstiles clattered and chirped incessantly in the background, at slightly different pitches, like a chorus of peeping frogs.

She felt a stab of panic. She could double back to the platform, it wasn’t too late. But the turn would be over soon. There were rules.

“Shee-it,” she said out loud.

She lifted the brass and mother-of-pearl opera glasses that hung on a chain around her neck, so tiny they looked like a toy, and scanned the crowd.

And you know what? She’d been one hundred percent right. Young man, mid-twenties, sandy hair, olive houndstooth jacket with leather elbow patches, could pass for a pussy-chasing editorial assistant at Simon & Schuster except for the crowd of glowing icons over his head, bobbing along in time with his steps: numbers and Greek letters and sundry more obscure symbols in fluorescent green. He was trudging up the concourse with the rest of the straights, not a care in the world.

And on the same bearing, about ten feet in back of him: an upper east side matron, complete with pearls and fur jacket. Full civilian drag. A dense configuration of ochre italic writing hovered above her quaffed, steel-grey head, with two satellite stars spinning in place over her shoulders. They’d sent a captain.

They couldn’t be working together. It was practically impossible. There were rules, rules, rules. Well, either way they only had two options from where they were: stairs up to the street or revolving doors to the left, which led into the basement lobby of an office building. Houndstooth stepped into the revolving doors, and bless his pussy-chasing heart because she loved revolving doors. Her heart was racing now, but she could step back from it — it was like she pressed some mental clutch, disengaging it from the drive train, while her fingers calmly did the walking. Throw in some archaic Dutch expletives and just like that the door jammed with Houndstooth inside. He did a hilarious involuntary mime-trapped-in-a-box routine, made all the more hilarious by the fact that he actually was trapped in a box.

The crowd began backing up against the jammed door, murmuring discontentedly. It would take him a minute to figure out what she’d done, because she hadn’t done it the way you’d think, which why would she have? But it always took them a minute to figure it out. And a minute was all she needed. The Matron knew something was up, she had turned around, still walking but backwards, trying to spot her in the crowd, but she didn’t have the benefit of those fancy glasses. There was a moment’s grace. She began to put the Matron to sleep the same way she had the busker: a Persian fainting charm, it only stings for a second. But this was apparently a much more senior magician than Jimmy Buffett back there because before she could finish, something invisible hit her hard in the chest and she went right down on her ass.

Maybe she actually should have read that writing over the Matron’s head. That woman was a captain at least. Probably more. Shocked commuters went to help her up, but she shrugged them off, taking deep breaths and massaging her breastbone. The Matron was already off and running, sprinting up the stairs like a champion, surprisingly spry in those heels. She should give chase. But first, what to do with Houndstooth? She could feel him unpicking her charm, loop by loop. A little of the rough stuff, she decided. With a gust of force she blew the whole revolving door off its axle and back into the office building basement. The crash it made was incredible.

That would hold him for a minute or two more. No broken bones, but it would shake him up and tie him up. Maybe even knock him out. Crude but effective, and most important, legal. The crowd went shrieking crazy. The noise faded as she pounded up the steps into the sunlight. The Matron was heading for the same office building that Houndstooth was now in the basement of, a monolith with a double-height green glass lobby. The game was well and truly afoot.

Fast-walking in parallel, on opposite sides of the street, she and the Matron tried to trip each other, then make each other forget where they were going, then give each other heart palpitations. They messed with each others’ vision and steered pedestrians into each others’ way, which was somewhat off the reservation ruleswise but they were both doing it so call it a wash. Then, on a lark, she reached out to the lights on an idling town car and made them flash, much too brightly, so brightly that the older woman had to stop for a minute and press the heels of her hands against her eyes and lean on the hood.

Set and match. She darted across the street, between the cars and right past the wilting Matron and straight at the green glass and through it and there — the most beautiful sight she had ever seen — was Houndstooth coming up the escalator, right on time, still rubbing his head and arguing with a security guard over whether or not he was okay.

She could capture him and go for the tie, or try to follow him to the goal and go for the win. The next best thing to knowing where something was was knowing who knew where it was, and she knew that Houndstooth knew. Though what beyond-asshole had decided to hide the Blue Cube in a midtown office building? Just a lot of extra hassle and cleanup for everybody.

Precognition was sort of like body English in pool: there was no good reason why it should work but sometimes it did anyway. With her eyes closed, groping around with some nameless mental extremity in some nameless direction, she dredged one simple fact out of where it lay mired ninety seconds in the future: an elevator number. So she was ready, right behind him, when Houndstooth stepped into it. Just as the doors were closing she karate-chopped her hand in between them, they shuddered back open, and she marched into the little box with him with a shit-eating grin all over her face.

Let’s be honest: the ride up was awkward. She really did feel sorry for him. He was a rookie, and it was just dawning on him who she was. He made the Pax sign with thumb and forefinger, indicating that they could dispense with hostilities. Like downing a football at the twenty. He wasn’t going to fight. Disappointed Houndstooth! With his narrow face and his wavy chestnut hair that was just getting thin at the temples.