“Best hiding place ever,” I agreed, opened the screen door, and stepped inside.

The Borderlands Café was a long, rectangular room, stretching past the kitchen area to meet with the back wall. The floor was polished hardwood, and the furniture was an eclectic mix of wooden tables, comfortable chairs, and even couches. It was surprisingly busy, considering the hour. People sat with their laptop computers, magazines, books, or in small clusters, sipping their drinks and talking. It lacked the hectic air of many of the local cafés—something that was probably connected to the signs saying “No Wifi.” People who wanted to hang out in a coffee shop would stay, people who wanted to get online for free would go find someplace more suited to their tastes.

We approached the counter, where a large blond man in a black T-shirt proclaiming “Carnies Need Love Too” was wiping glasses with a rag. He beamed when he saw us, showing a daunting number of teeth in the process.

“Hi!” he said, setting the glass aside. “Welcome to Borderlands. What can I get you?”

I glanced at the menu on the wall. “A large coffee.”

“Two large coffees,” amended Tybalt.

The blond man nodded, smile fading as he focused on our order. “Here or to go?”

“Here.” We needed time to figure out where Arden was, or whether the firefly had sensed my need for caffeine and simply led us to a coffee shop someone had, for whatever reason, decided to hide from most of the city.

“Should I leave room for cream and sugar?”

“Yes on his, no on mine,” I said, producing my wallet. “Hey—how long has this place been here?”

“Oh, a couple of years. The bookstore was here first, and then the owner got bored and decided to open a café.” The blond man beamed again, showing, if possible, even more teeth than before. “Alan gets bored easy.”

I paused. “There’s a bookstore?”

“Yeah, next door.” The blond man pointed to the wall where the menu was posted. “It’s through there. Alan says he’s going to open up a door between them any day now, but he’s been busy. You know. Owner stuff.”

“Right, owner stuff,” I said. “You know, I’d love to see the bookstore. When do they open?”

“Oh, they just opened.” He beamed. “You have great timing.”

“So I’ve been told,” I said, and smiled back. “Could we get that coffee to go?”

Unsurprisingly, it turned out that we could.

NINE

MY COFFEE WAS HOT AND STRONG and gone by the time we’d traveled the five steps between the coffee shop and the bookstore. Tybalt plucked my empty cup from my fingers, replacing it with his own, which was still full. I blinked at him. He smiled.

“I did not ‘profane’ the coffee with milk or sugar, much as I would have liked to,” he said. “Unlike you, I am capable of functioning without artificial stimulants.”

“I like artificial stimulants,” I protested. “They usually mean nobody’s trying to kill me. Unlike the natural kind.”

Tybalt laughed. I took advantage of the pause to study the front window of the bookstore, where a display of books about robots was arranged alongside a sign advertising the store hours. Inside, tall bookshelves were the order of the day. A woman almost pale enough to be nocturnal stood behind the register, a red kerchief tied over her near-black hair. She glanced up, saw me looking in, and smiled in the tired but welcoming way of early morning shopkeepers everywhere.

Tybalt stepped up next to me. “Have you any idea what comes next?”

“Yeah.” I took a long drink of coffee. I actually tasted it this time. “We go inside.”

The bookstore was even quieter than the café, probably because it didn’t hold as many people. The hardwood floors were older, softened by worn Oriental rugs, and classic rock played from somewhere behind the counter. The woman was still smiling at us.

“Welcome to Borderlands,” she said. “Let me know if I can help you find anything.”

She sounded like a California native. I smiled back and raised my coffee cup, using the action to mask opening my mouth and breathing in a brief taste of her heritage. Human. I lowered the cup. “Actually, maybe. My sister was here recently, and she said she was supposed to get a call from a lady who works here? Um . . . her name was Arlene or Denise or . . . something, I don’t know. My sister’s not too organized.”

To my relief, the woman grinned. “I’d be willing to bet you’re looking for Ardith. Give me a second. I’ll see if she’s ready to start her shift.”

“I’d appreciate that,” I said. I’m technically allowed to thank humans. That doesn’t stop it from feeling weird. I avoid it when I can.

“Just be glad you came in early—Ardith helps open, and then she’s gone until late afternoon,” said the woman. She moved out from behind the counter, heading toward a door at the back of the room and vanishing through it.

Her motion, meanwhile, had startled the store’s cat, which had been curled unseen on one of the chairs behind the counter. It leaped up next to the register, where it crouched, wrapping its tail around its legs, and considered us with eyes the color of Midori liqueur.

Tybalt recoiled, horror and shock in his face. “What,” he demanded, “is that?”

“It’s a cat,” I said. There was a sign next to the register. “It says her name is Ripley. She’s a Sphinx. They’re hairless cats from Canada. Huh. Who’d have thought hairless cats would come from Canada?” I gave the cat another look. “I wonder if I should get one for Quentin.”

“It’s naked,” said Tybalt.

He was right: the cat was almost completely hairless, with only a few stubby, half-curled whiskers and some patches of fuzz on her toes and tail. Her skin was pink blotched with black and orange, like part of her remembered, deep down, that she was supposed to be calico. She was still watching us. I’d been around Tybalt and my own cats long enough to interpret her expression as a smirk.

“She’s pretty, in a weird, alien life-form, probably steals souls in the night kind of way,” I said. I held out a hand. Ripley sniffed it with the expected gravitas before deigning to butt her forehead against my fingers. “I think she likes me.”