FINDER

Emma Bull

Contents

About this book

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Finder

Chapter 1. Falling Out of Paradise

Chapter 2. Chance of a Ghost

Chapter 3. Valid I.D.

Chapter 4. And Miles to Go Before We Sleep

Chapter 5. Special Deliveries

Chapter 6. The Consequences of Thataway

Chapter 7. Street Smarts

Chapter 8. Talking Heads

Chapter 9. The Transformation Blues

Chapter 10. Ghost of a Chance

Chapter 11. Paradise Lost

Chapter 12. Getting On with It

About the Author

The Bordertown Books

About this book

FINDER: A NOVEL OF THE BORDERLANDS

Copyright © 1994 by Emma Bull and Terri Windling

Bordertown and the Borderlands were created by Terri Windling, with creative input from Mark Alan Arnold; from Will Shetterly, author of the novels Elsewhere and Nevernever; and from the authors of the stories in the anthologies Borderland, Bordertown, and Life on the Border: Bellamy Bach, Steven R. Boyett, Emma Bull, Kara Dalkey, Charles de Lint, Craig Shaw Gardner, Michael Korolenko, Ellen Kushner, Will Shetterly, and Midori Snyder. Borderland is used by permission of Terri Windling, The Endicott Studio.

"Genesis Hall" copyright © 1969, 1994 by Richard Thompson. Lyrics printed courtesy of Warlock Music Ltd.

Edited by Terri Windling

Smashwords Edition.

Dedication

To Lynda, who was the first to meet the people in this book

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Terri Windling, for letting me mess around in her town; to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, for telling me it would be All Right; to Fred Levy Haskell, for answering the question I was supposed to ask, instead of the one I did; to the Scribblies (Steven Brust, Kara Dalkey, Pamela Dean, and Will Shetterly) for reading duties above and beyond the call; to Sunnyvale Syntactic and IssaQuery Ink (Gordon Garb and Jon Singer, respectively) for reading the next draft; to all the Borderlands writers for drawing the circle and calling the quarters; and to Will especially, for everything.

Finder

My father he rides with your sheriffs

And I know he would never mean harm…

—Richard Thompson, "Genesis Hall"

Chapter 1. Falling Out of Paradise

I remember where I was and what I was doing when Bonnie Prince Charlie was killed. Not that I knew it at the time, of course. But while Charlie was travelling the distance from the Pigeon Cloisters belfry to High Street with all the dispatch that gravity can muster, I was sunbathing.

If the weather had held, I’d have been on the roof of my building the next day, too, spread out like a drying sweater. But it promised rain. (If the forecast had been different, would the past be, too? Would a lot of people still be here? This town is strange and has weather to match, but I never imagined it was a matter of life and death.)

So when Tick-Tick pounded on the frame of my open front door, I was in and washing dishes. She poked her head in and shouted, “I am the queen’s daughter, I come from Twelfth and Flynn, in search of Young Orient, pray God I find him!”