“Maybe I’m broken,” I offered.

“What?”

“Do you have any chocolate?”

“Yes, it’s—”

“Don’t tell me.” Question. Answer. “If it’s in the cupboard over the spoons, on the shelf next to the honey, I’m not broken.”

“Then you don’t know this drug well enough to find it after all?”

I shook my head. “I know it. Has the supply dried up? This is creepy.”

She gazed out the window past my head. She looked irritable—unexpectedly so, and I realized that she’d decided this really was her business. “How do we find out?”

“ ‘We?’”

“Yes, ‘we.’ Don’t make trouble for yourself.”

I knew that voice; I knuckled under. “We find out the hard way, I guess.”

“Which is?”

“We tramp around town asking until we find somebody who’ll tell us.”

“And if we find a great many people who don’t want to?”

“That’ll tell us something right there.”

Neither of us mentioned that there might be people who didn’t want us to ask.

I know Bordertown isn’t Utopia, and never has been. It’s riddled with old hates and grudges that people have brought to it from wherever they came from in the World, no matter how pointless and outdated those grudges might be in the strange new world of the Border. Worse, sometimes; sometimes old prejudices are as comforting as old clothes when you’re up to your lower lip in elves, in magic, in all-bets-are-off B-town weirdness. Some people, faced with the perfect opportunity to give their lives a complete makeover, turn tail and do everything they can to identify “our kind” and stick to it. This is why Dragontown exists, for crying out loud, and the whole silly two-block area stubbornly referred to by its inhabitants as “the Barrio,” and even the desperate attempts at suburbia that crop up in pockets around the outside of the city proper. Give them the choice between the familiar—even if the familiar is terrible—and the unknown, and they’ll take familiar any time.

And there are people who think they have brought their lives up to date, simply because they’ve put aside hatred of whoever or whatever it was they hated back home and replaced that with hating something they can only find in Bordertown. Once we started asking questions, I began to wonder if both kinds of immigrants were deeply and personally involved in the issue of drugs that promised to turn humans into elves. I suppose if I’d thought about it beforehand, I would have realized that the answer was yes.

There was the fierce, black-haired human girl with the broken nose, who glowered at Tick-Tick while she told us that if she did know where to get hold of something like that, she’d turn herself into an elf and cross the Border and beat the shit out of every elf in Faerie.