At first she couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. Her best guess was female. Thin scraggly hair hung past the ears. Asian heritage hinted at the epicanthal folds. Wrinkles of age suffused its complexion. The eyes seemed like they were set too low in the face. There was just too much forehead there. It was not a face anyone would call pretty. Borderline grotesque.

She looked at Alex with an expression of frank amusement and curiosity, one eyebrow raised, head slightly cocked. The look went far toward making the face attractive. A lot of the wrinkles were at the corners of her eyes. She scanned Alex from head to toe, then back up to look her in the eye, the barest hint of a smile playing on her lips.

Alex stepped forward, flustered. “Please. I…I’m sorry. I needed a place to hide. I… I can leave soon.”

The woman (if it was a woman…) paused for a long moment. Then she nodded once, hopped down from the high chair she was perched on, and stepped out from the behind the store counter. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. She walked past Alex to the door, pulled back the edge of the roller shade and peeked through, scanning the hallway outside. Then she turned and stood facing Alex, crossing her arms and still wearing that slightly annoying look of amused perplexity. The clothes gave no hint to gender – baggy blue trousers and a buttoned-up long-sleeve cotton jacket.

The room they were standing in, barely larger than a large, high-ceilinged garage and only dimly lit by three high, wide and heavily barred windows on the street side, was almost equally odd. Shelves, racks, and cubbies covered every wall and extended out into the room, leaving little more floor space than the two of them could stand in. Every available surface, horizontal and vertical, was covered and filled with an astonishing array of objects. Thousands of them. Alex noticed a stylized mask that looked Asian or maybe South American, bearing an expression of wide-eyed surprise. Next to it was a clockworks-like machine covered with knobs and levers, whose purpose she couldn’t imagine. Most of one wall was filled with bookshelves to the ceiling, the volumes lined up two, sometimes three deep.

The woman glanced at Alex’s arm and paused — maybe wondering whether to do something about it – then apparently decided it could wait. She looked Alex straight in the eyes.

“Okay, what’s going on?” Her voice was rough and gravelly. Not much clue there either.

“Some men are chasing me. I…I don’t know why.”

The eyebrow ratcheted up another notch. “Really. This happens to you often?”

“Of course not! They tried to grab me an hour ago outside my rooming house, but I got away. Then when I came here they were waiting for me. I don’t know how they knew where I was going.”

“Not a clue?”

“Not a clue.”

The woman looked at her skeptically, then seemed to make a decision. She took a look at the cat, still scrunched back in its corner, glowering, then turned toward the back of the shop. “Come with me.” She moved past the counter, towards a curtained doorway in the back wall. Alex glanced at the store door, thought twice about running for it — but where would she go? — then followed her.

The woman walked over to a large enameled cast-iron industrial sink and turned on the hot water. Steam rose around her, then dispersed as she adjusted the cold tap. “Cats are nasty things,” she said. “Who knows what filthy diseases they’re carrying around.” She beckoned Alex over then grabbed her wrist and brought the savaged arm up and moved it back and forth under the tap, sending rivulets of blood swirling.

Sirens wailed by on the street outside, then stopped. Not surprising, Alex thought. Impaled cars gushering clouds of steam were not everyday occurrences, even in this neighborhood. But you never knew with the cops here. They were just as happy holed up in their precints, no matter what mayhem was playing out on the streets. On the other hand, about all they’d have to do here was call a tow truck and run the plates, then get back to their doughtnuts.

The woman gave Alex a sidelong glance as she worked, and gestured with her shoulder towards the street. “What’s that all about?” Alex just shrugged and threw her an exaggeratedly unconcerned expression.

The woman held Alex’s gaze for a moment longer, then reached for an industrial-sized container of bottled soap and looked another question at her. Alex grimaced then nodded, and grimaced some more as the sting of the soap hit her wounds and the woman scrubbed the mess with a handled brush. She rinsed off the soap and remaining blood, then unfolded a clean towel from a stack on a shelf above the sink and wrapped it around Alex’s arm.

“That should deal with any plague virus that bloody thing was into.” Alex almost smiled. Anyone with that attitude toward cats got points with her.

“Have a seat. You’re looking pale.” Alex realized that she was feeling pale, and not just a little bit shaky. The adrenaline rush was collapsing. The last hour, and especially the last ten minutes, were not the kind of thing she’d ever experienced, and it wasn’t surprising she was shocky. She dropped into the one chair in the room, an old roller desk chair facing away from an ancient-looking computer.

This room was even smaller than the other, and had even less room for humans. The only empty space aside from the few square feet they occupied was a neatly made-up bottom bunk in one corner of the room. The top bunk was filled with more goods, with even fuller shelves extending up the wall above it. Racks, stacks of boxes, and assorted decidedly odd items consumed every other corner. A heavy steel door with multiple locks, and a dusty, nearly opaque, wire-embedded window — also heavily barred — looked out on the back alley.

The woman leaned her shoulder against a rack, crossed her arms, and examined Alex for a moment.

“My name’s Anyanda. My friends call me Anne. Or at least they do when they’re not mad at me.”

Anne. Okay. Right. Definitely female.

“I’m Alexa. Alex.”

“And what brings you, Alex, to my little shop? Why are people chasing you?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

That skeptical look again.

“There was a car sitting with the door open in front of my rooming house, and when I came out that man who was chasing me grabbed me. I stomped on his instep and ran. I’ve never seen him before.”

Not totally implausible. Alex was wearing heavy Doc Marten-style boots, and most people wouldn’t expect a girl her size to put up that kind of fight.

“You live in a rooming house? Where are your parents?”

“I don’t have any parents.”

Anne let that hang. “Okay, so why aren’t we calling the cops right now? ‘Man Attempts Abduction of Young Girl on City Streets. Twice.’ Seems like they’d get right on it, don’t you think?”

“I can’t. They think I…” A beat. “They’d make me go back to my foster home. And they’d make me go to school every day.” Alex looked embarassed. “The cops are actually looking for me too.”

“And that is for…why?”

“I…” Alex glanced away. “It’s just that I’m supposed to be living at this foster home. But I haven’t been there for a while.”

“Is there something wrong at your foster home?”

“There wasn’t, much...not until I left, anyway.” Alex gave what to Anne seemed like an exaggerated shrug of unconcern. “I just don’t have time for the whole foster-family thing, and school’s stupid and annoying.” She turned her gaze back to Anne, and Anne looked another question at her.

Alex paused. How to explain? “School’s like…it’s like swimming in molasses, or living in a movie that’s running in slow motion. They spend an hour teaching you something they could explain in a couple of minutes. Lit and history classes are pretty good sometimes, if they’d just go faster, and I’ve gotten a few good tips in math class. But couldn’t they just email me the list of tips? The science classes are annoying. Like…watching plants grow in plastic cups on windowsills? Really? Do they think kids can’t understand how genetics works, or space-time?”

Anne didn’t do a very good job of hiding a smile. “What about the other kids?”

“They’re okay. I don’t pay much attention to them. A couple of the teachers are really great. But I’d rather be reading, or working. I have stuff I need to get done.”

Anne looked surprised. “What kind of work do you do?”

“I help people out with stuff. Computer stuff mostly, but whatever they need doing.”

Anne examined her even more carefully. “You’re pretty darned independent for a young girl. What are you, about thirteen?”

Alex nodded and shrugged. She’d heard that before.

Anne raised an eyebrow. Lots of people were knee-jerk averse to getting involved with this city’s finest, and with good reason. But attempted abduction? “I don’t know. I think this is too big for you. If I was watching this in a movie I’d be screaming at the protagonist: ‘Just call the goddam cops!’”

Alex didn’t answer.

“Okay, so what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I guess I need to figure out why they’re chasing me.”