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"Hi!" she said brightly, and slid off the hood "You must be Sal Ooo, and that ht you’d be taller I bet you get that a lot, don’t you? That you should be taller Not you, I ured you’d be, but I’ve also seen you before, so I guess that’s cheating I’m Tansy Did you know that SymboGen totally tried to follow you here? Because they totally tried to follow you here, even though you’re not supposed to have a following detail anynal when you crossed Treat Boulevard, but you should be careful about that sort of thing if you’re going to be sneaking around behind their backs, which you so are at this point Congratulations!" She stopped talking, finally appearing to realize that she wasn’t pausing long enough to let either of us get a word in edgewise "Oh, and also, you know Hi Welcome, and all that stuff"
"Who are you?" asked Nathan
Tansy sently "I just told you, silly You should really try to keep up if you want to come out of this with all your sane bits still in the order they started out in What’s the password?"
"We don’t have a password," I said "We came here because--"
"Oh, I knohy you came here, and I knohat you want to learn while you’re here, but what I need to knohether you knohat the password is, because that’s what starts the next phase, which is… hang on a second, I’ a hand into her pocket and producing her phone She checked the screen before bea you inside"
"And if we don’t know the password…?" I said slowly
"If you don’t know the password, that et to decide what to do with you I don’t knohat that would be, exactly, but I’m pretty sure it would hurt Did you know that nerves are like, really densely packed on certain parts of the body?" Tansy’s eyes greide and earnest as she spoke Her irises were two different colors, one brown, one a slightly unnerving shade of blue "It’s cool, because itif you focus there Other places go numb ay too quickly Like the fleshy part of your thuiven how s there way too fast"
"Uh," I said
" ‘The broken doors are open--co the words out quickly
Tansy beairl, be careful now!" she said It didn’t sound like she was quoting It sounded o out alone You remembered the password!"
"You provided excellent incentive," said Nathan
"You know, that’s what Doctor C says? She says I’before I had a chance to react "It’s so nice to finallyfor this for ever and ever and ever, but Doctor C kept saying I had to wait, and so I waited, but it was hard" She pushed rave "It was so hard Don’trestrained by people who clearly weren’t operating under my definition of "sane and balanced" was a new experience for ood idea "I’ll doyou wait this tiive you!" She pulled o, she let go co alley She produced a key from the pocket of her overalls and unlocked the door before turning to beckon us forward "Well? Coer out here!"
"I suppose the broken doors really are open now," Nathan said, looking unsettled
I took his hand "You’re not going alone," I said
Together, we followed Tansy into the bowling alley
She closed the door behind us
Inside the bowling alley turned out to be a dark, less antechaht of any kind Nathan squeezed ers, hard I had to wonder whether he, like me, orried about the fact that ere shut in with a worip on reality and had already threatened to hurt us both if we didn’t say what she wanted to hear More andlike a bad idea
"Don’t move," said Tansy "The floor’s a little rotten in here, and you wouldn’t want to wind up in the baseets htful," muttered Nathan
"Doesn’t it just?" said Tansy There were footsteps to hts cah a thick layer of dust Tansy was standing on the far side of the roohts "Do you like it? Helps your eyes adjust, since we don’t want to flash-blind anybody, and leaving the dirt on ed to break in wouldn’t realize there was anyone in here Until they hit one of the rotten patches on the floor and went to the basement to visit the spiders, and then I bet they wouldn’t care that there was anyone in here The spiders can be really distracting when they want to be Anyway, coot here" She opened another door, this one h