“So, when I get off duty, are you up for going to a different part of the neighborhood for dinner?”
“Come get me when you’re ready. The nice thing about owning what amounts to an imaginary bookstore is that I only have to sort of look like I’m bothering to run it.”
“Now I’ll go sell some more imaginary coffee and keep your imaginary bookstore in business one more day.”
I really did have to wonder why they’d bothered creating a fake neighborhood to house the prisoners in. If they’d just taken us to another world reachable only by portal, we still wouldn’t have been able to escape. Was it that important to keep us from even wanting to get away? I supposed it might be, now that I thought about it. If all your prisoners had magical powers, you’d want to keep them from using those powers, and it might have been more difficult to do that for so many people than to create a fake nonmagical paradise.
Besides, once they were through with it, they could always lease it to filmmakers as a setting for cheap romantic comedies.
*
It was difficult to find a place to explore that we hadn’t visited already, and it was like looking for a needle in a haystack to find one person in this entire neighborhood, no matter how confined it seemed. Still, it was a finite place, and there couldn’t have been that many real people there.
“I know the best way to find him,” I quipped to Owen. “I just need to develop a raging crush on him and then dash out to the corner store with no makeup on, my hair under a ball cap, and wearing a stained old T-shirt. Then I could guarantee I’d run into him.”
“You think that would work?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“It worked often enough in the real New York, which is much bigger. In fact, it never fails.”
“Do you think you can stir up a crush that easily?”
“That would be the difficult part, considering I’ve only met him twice, other than the one time here. He hasn’t given me much to work with, alas.”
Then I thought I saw a familiar figure ahead of us and clutched Owen’s upper arm hard enough to cut off circulation. “Speak of the devil!” I breathed.
“I think you’re right,” Owen said, and we followed him. There were enough people on the sidewalks that we were able to blend into the crowd, and Dan didn’t seem to notice he had a tail. I wasn’t sure how long that would last, though. If Dan’s persona in this world retained even a tiny bit of his security staff instincts, he’d be on to us in a heartbeat.