Chapter 4: Muir Lock and Key

The room over the back workshop had a slanted ceiling, an iron bed and one round window.

The window looked down on the side street.

The deadbolt was heavier than the door it was on.

Jem showed me how to throw it at one in the morning, then went across the landing to his own room without another word.

I lay on the iron bed with my blazer still on.

I heard him walking around over there for a long time.

Then I heard him stop.

I didn't sleep.

At seven, a machine started screaming under the floor.

I went down the back stairs in Jem's spare flannel shirt and my launch trousers.

The workshop was all pegboard and brass dust.

An old man in a canvas apron was cutting a key at a grinder by the window.

He finished it, blew on it, and looked me over.

"You're the one from the internet," he said.

"I'm the one from the internet."

"Coffee's on the hot plate. Don't touch the blanks on the left. They're sorted."

He went back to his grinder.

He'd cut keys for Jem's grandfather for forty years, I found out later.

He never once mentioned the slide.

The apprentice did.

She was twenty, with a nose ring and a lot of opinions, and she came in at nine.

"Oh my God," she said. "You're real."

"Mostly."

"I watched it half a dozen times. The mic thing. You put it down on the floor in front of his shoes."

"I didn't want to drop it. It's expensive."

"That's so much worse for him," she said, delighted.

Jem came through from the front counter with a tray of padlocks.

"She's here to hide," he told the apprentice. "Not to be a podcast."

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