Brat went into one end of Quidd's Market and came out the other end with his fingers greasy from a bag of fried dilky roots he'd polished off, an ice cream cone now in his fist. His mission hadn't blotted his sense of curiosity, nor his hunger. He still had the ice cream in hand and was beginning to gnaw the cone itself when his wandering legs finally brought him to Steward Gardens.
That was the name given on the large plaque outside the structure, its letters deeply recessed into a slate-gray background, like an epitaph carved on a tomb: STEWARD GARDENS.
"Huh!" Brat said as if in surprise, though he had come here in search of a place by that name. As if he hadn't truly expected to find it. As if this place-and Smirk's voice on the phone-had only been figments of a dream.
"I'll be at Steward Gardens," she had said to him, her voice all but lost in a storm of static. "He'll bring me. Steward Gardens."
He had shouted into the phone, pleaded for more, but there was only the static after that. He? Who was he? Someone who had kidnapped her? When the chill had left Brat's flesh, he'd had the notion to turn on his comp and look up Steward Gardens on the net. He hadn't found much, but he had learned its whereabouts. Beaumonde Street.
Now that he had in fact located the place, he didn't know what to make of it.
Punktown was filled from one border to the other with as many diverse buildings as it was varieties of intelligent beings. There were certainly far more unusual, inventive edifices in this city. For instance, he liked to stare at the exterior walls of the library on the subterranean or B Level of Folger Street, into which were set sizable aquarium tanks swarming with jellyfish from a number of planets (an especially mesmerizing sight when he was high on purple vortex). A skyscraper one could see from the upper level of Folger Street was lit at its summit with a flickering green flame, like a titanic candle, though he didn't know whether the flame was fed by gas or merely holographic.
This building was less showy, more somber. Still, it held his eye and made him run his gaze over its surface, into its more shadowy corners and creases. He found himself drifting nearer as he unconsciously nibbled his cone. How much should he search for her now? How wary should he be of kidnappers? She'd be here, she'd said. But not yet?
He walked up the front path, through what passed for the gardens. These front grounds, which set the building itself back from the street, had once been landscaped with flower beds and shrubbery, and there were even trellises made from black wrought iron that enclosed metal benches, spaced along the sides of the front walk. But the flowers had wilted and decayed, the shrubbery was bristling into chaos with dead leaves snagged in its branches like the husks of flies in a spider-web, and the vines interwoven through the iron trellises were brittle and leafless. The grass was in need of trimming, but looked matted down and yellow, except where the flotsam and jetsam of colorful trash had blown onto the lawn.
Still, for Brat, whose neighborhood of Folger Street's B Level was lucky to see a weed teased from a crack in the sidewalk by the artificial lighting, this aspect of Steward Gardens alone was enough to capture his attention. It was even a little disorienting, like venturing into a verdant jungle with a mysterious ruined temple secreted in its depths.
The wide front walk branched off into little strolling paths, and in the center of the walk, not far from the front doors, was a circular pool that had once been a fountain. Now the water was oily looking and black in the spaces that showed
through its epidermis of fallen leaves. With its vile stink, he figured the water was probably full of algae. He knew about algae from VT, too.
From the edge of this basin, prodding the water with a gnarled stick he'd picked up, Brat again lifted his eyes to the structure itself.
Two wings of three floors each flanked a lower central section, no doubt a lobby, though he couldn't see through the opaque black glass of the front doors (or were they clear, and the lobby unlit?). What it lacked in height it made up for in its sprawl. Along the fronts and sides of the two wings ran three levels of covered balconies that gave access to rows of black metal doors. The surface material of the building proper was the same dark slate-gray color as the plaque that had told him the place's name.
Maybe a hotel, but more likely an apartment complex, he guessed. Its three areas of roof were flat, and likely provided parking spaces for heli-cars, though from here he couldn't see any. There was a parking lot to the right of the building, which curved around behind it, but this was vacant as far as he could tell.
Intending to break off onto one of the branching lesser paths, Brat first tossed the remnant of his cone into the fountain pool. The disturbance caused the water to bob and he noticed an object floating on the surface. He poked it with the stick he still held. It was a decomposing bird, its remaining metallic blue feathers identifying it as a species nicknamed a pig-hen, which made itself a pest in the city, speckling statues and tripping up pedestrians, snuffling about for morsels of food with little tapir-like snouts. Now he understood the source of the fountain's stench.