A Local Habitation by Seanan McGuire Page A

nice smile. I upgraded my estimation from “cute” to “damn cute.” “Anyway, I’m Alex. Alex Olsen.” He held his hand out for me to shake, the other hand smoothing his bangs away from his eyes. His hands never seemed to stop moving. It was like they might get tired of our conversation and start performing sign language arias at any moment. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”
    “Finally?” I arched an eyebrow, shaking his hand. “I’ve been sitting in the cafeteria.” He was almost a foot taller than me, with the comfortable sort of solidity that only comes from too many years spent playing sports and doing a certain amount of heavy lifting. He was dressed casually, in jeans and a T-shirt that read “Nobody Does It Like Sara Lee” in bright red letters.
    Alex laughed again. “Not quite that short term. When I start hearing stories about changelings coming back from the dead and tearing San Francisco apart, I start thinking, ‘Now there’s a lady I’d like to meet.’ ”
    “That shows an interesting way of picking your friends.”
    “At least you know it’s not going to be boring.”
    “That’s true.” I reclaimed my hand, using it to tuck my own hair back behind my ears. “Still, I’m surprised you heard about all that.”
    “News spreads fast these days. There’s this amazing invention called ‘the Internet’—have you heard of it? We use it to tell each other things.” I wrinkled my nose at him, and he shook his head. “Oh, come on. We’re sandwiched between two major Duchies. You really think we wouldn’t have the best rumor mill in the Kingdom?”
    He had a point. Dreamer’s Glass was gaining a reputation for strangeness when I vanished in ’95. Being considered weird by a race of people who don’t see anything wrong with turning their enemies into deer and hunting them through downtown Oakland is an achievement. From what I understood, the Duchy just got stranger as Duchess Riordan, the local regent, became more paranoid about insurrection. Eventually, it got to be too much, and one of the larger fiefdoms declared its autonomy and split off, forming the County of Tamed Lightning.
    The politics almost make sense. The technological advances behind them, not so much. Faerie was just starting to dip its toes into computer science and the Internet, and Tamed Lightning wanted autonomy partially so they’d be free to push those borders even further. I don’t get it. The world I’m used to is simpler than the one I’m living in. There’s too much steel and silicon these days, and I’m still not sure whether that’s better than iron; I can barely handle my answering machine, much less all these strange new methods of keeping in touch. The technology that was in its infancy when I left had grown into a spoiled teenager by the time I returned, complicating everyone’s lives and making a nuisance of itself down at the mall.
    “Not that anyone bothered to tell us you were coming,” Alex continued. “If we didn’t have a picture of you in the database, we still wouldn’t know who you were.” Pausing, he asked, “Where are you?”
    “What?” I snapped back into the present. “I’m right here.”
    “You weren’t a moment ago.”
    “Oh. Sorry.” Now that I was paying attention, I really was sorry; I hadn’t meant to zone out. “I guess I didn’t expect anyone to know who I was.”
    “You can’t go around pissing off half the nobles in the Kingdom and expect to go unnoticed,” he replied, cheering up again. “I swear Jannie was more excited by the trouble you caused with that Goldengreen affair than she was by the concept of fiber-optic Internet connections. And that’s saying a lot.”
    “Hang on—Jannie?”
    “Yeah, Jannie. The lady whose company you’re standing in?”
    “You mean Countess Torquill?” Maybe this orange-eyed Ken doll could point me toward Sylvester’s niece.
    “Who?”
    Or maybe not. “Aren’t you talking about Countess January