Page 1 of Practical Boots

THEY CAME FOR her the moment she stepped into the Waste.

Later she would berate herself for her foolishness. There were reasons to enter the Waste at the same point every time, good reasons, but she should have known that sooner or later, habit would do her wrong.

Later, she could examine her anger at the mistake at her leisure. In the moment, though, she needed to survive.

* * *

Survival defined her, and had for as long as she could remember. Since before the first time she'd been dumped in the Waste beneath the watching gaze of a glittering inhuman court. Then, they had told her theyhonoredher with the opportunity. That she, a half-mortal child, could attain power—could attain legitimacy—by surviving the empty, ruined space between the World and the Torn.

They had left the unspoken part hanging: that children born of both the World and the Torn never did survive this particular honor. That she, like all the others, would die, and leave her father's bloodline to be rebuilt with a woman of the Torn, instead of the World.

Cat had sworn, as the host faded away, that she would survive, and that she would do so with the express purpose of killing the son of a bitch who had fathered her, raised her, and dumped her there.

Driven by that promise, she shaped her first Artifact from the very stuff of the Waste itself. Later, she learned that—in human parlance—the first hit was free. Artifacts, those objects of power so coveted by the people of the Torn, took both power and sacrifice to create. But that was later; the price always came later.

Cat had some ideas about what else it took, but she kept those stuffed down deep in her mind, where 'browsers'—those whose power allowed them to snoop out thoughts—couldn't touch lightly on it, and where their truth couldn't show on her face in an unguarded moment. But those thoughts, like so much else, had come later.Later, where her life always seemed to hang, waiting for her to catch up to it. At the time, she had taken her will to survive and taken the shapelessness of the Waste, and molded them together to build an escape, because nothing could long survive in the shifting space between the World and the Torn. She drew on her need, and on the true threads of ancient stories, and on the bloodline that had, as it turned out, both condemned and saved her.

She fashioned boots from the grey of the Waste, and when she put them on, when she stepped with them, she traveled seven leagues and more.

She traveled into the World, into loudness and brightness and swarms of humanity. Terrified, she stepped back into the Waste and left again at a different angle, desperate to come out elsewhere. Still in the World, but in a place of peace. Meadows, with birdsong and silence and soft wind that ran on forever. There, no distant sound warned her of what she would learn to call cars, or airplanes, or even of the hum of electricity rushing through wires.

The Torn was built of such places, and their peace lied.

Stomach clenched, Cat thought again of the loud place, and stepped backward into it. Vehicles screamed by, kicking up dust and water and making violent wind of their own as voices rose in anger, as flaring red lights washed her vision away, as the scent of machines and too many people assailed her. She reeled, buffeted by the speed and sound of the World her mother had come from, and thought at least she would die here, and not in the Waste.

Someone seized her nape, hauled her backward, pulled her out of traffic. Knocked her on her ass, too, doing it, and stood above her, shouting in panic that rang with worry and relief. Shouting with the kind of care reserved, in the Torn, for the rare childrenofthe Torn, when they had mis-stepped and endangered themselves. An angry care, one born from frightened love.

Not since her very young childhood had anyone shouted at that like Cat, and here, in the first seconds of being in the World, a stranger cared enough to shout at her like her life mattered.

Sitting on the sidewalk with puddles soaking through her trousers and rain dragging hair into her eyes, with all the sound and chaos and mess and mass of humanity around her, sitting in the World mortals had built as the Torn stretched farther and farther away, Cat Sharp looked at her feet and thought:ah. They arepracticalboots.

The mortal who had pulled her out of traffic rode away on a bicycle through the rain, shaking her head and still swearing at the stupidity of people. Cat, sodden, had risen, pushed wet hair out of her eyes, and, commanding the boots not tostep, went into the World to build a place for herself.

It hadn't, in the end, been all that hard. There were couriers, in the Torn. Messengers, servants, underlings whose job involved running information from one place to another. The World had a use for such people as well, and more, the Worldpaidtheir couriers. Paid handsomely, even, for discretion and speed.

Cat could provide both, with her practical boots.

Most jobs didn't require them. Most jobs involved a bicycle and a reckless abandonment of self-preservation. But once in a while, someone came to her with an item, or a question, or a promise, and for the right price, she delivered those things through the one space that no mortal could follow. Through the Waste.

Through the one place, as it turned out, that her father could find her, if she used the same entrance point time and time and time again.

* * *

Her first instinct, naturally, was to run. One didn't fashion seven-league boots out of the ether if one's base instinct as a living creature was to fight. Cat drew a picture in her mind, hardly more than a sketch of lights and shadows that meanthometo her, andstepped.

Except she didn't step. The Waste held her like tacky glue, not quite stopping her, but certainly slowing her down enough that somebody could punch her in the face while she got used to the idea of the power deserting her.

Being punched in the face, though, clarified a few things. Mostly that if flight wasn't going to work, she had better get down to the hard task of fighting. Just like everything else, the why of it not working could be figured out later.

Good news was, there weren't very many of them. Nobody from the Torn wanted to spend time in the Waste if they could help it, so the task force sent to fetch her was made up of a mere half-dozen people, one of whom had just punched her in the face, making them the obvious first target.

Bad news was, she only had one hand to fight with. She hadn't planned to be in the Waste for more than a few seconds; hadn't planned for her delivery to take more than a few minutes. Putting her courier's backpack on, under those circumstances, hadn't seemed worth the effort.

That had been then, though. This waslater, when the price always came due.

She couldn't put the pack down. Things put down in the Waste tended to disappear forever. Cat didn't know what she was carrying, but she did know the money waiting for her on the other end was very, very good, and it would be a real shame to explain it had gotten lost. Plus it would wreak havoc on her courier rating.

So she grabbed her opponent's shirt with one fist, pulled her close, and slammed her knee up into her crotch. The woman paled, shock slowing her enough that Cat had time to seize the back of her neck and bring her face down on Cat's rising knee. Bone crunched and blood squirted as Cat shoved her unresisting assailant backward and forgot about her for a while.

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