“Well, may they bless you, too,” I said.
“Oh, they already have.” She smiled, a thing of pure joy, like a small child’s grin when she sees a Christmas tree all lit up, utterly caught by the moment of delight. I envied her, but only briefly. Faith: the best drug in the world.
We walked on down the long rose-colored hallway, cool
and shadowed after the hot sun outside. A hand-lettered sign on the closed door to Dr. Dave’s clinic room gave the times that he’d be present. At the foot of the stairs, Ari paused and glanced around him. I ran a quick SM:L.
“No one’s nearby,” I said. “What—”
“Hush.” He took something out of his shirt pocket. He slid a small square of clear gel under the framed portrait of Sophia. When he took his hand away, the square stayed behind.
“Safety precaution,” he murmured. “Tell you later.”
We proceeded up the stairs. Major Grace’s office door stood half open. I could see her crouching down in front of a wooden filing cabinet while she stowed papers in the bottom drawer. When we walked up, she heard us and rose, smiling, to toss the last few papers onto her desk. I noticed that she’d left the drawer open. She had nothing to hide, I figured.
“Ah, Rose and Eric,” she said. “Well, I do have news for you, and it’s not as bad as it could be.”
“That’s something, huh?” I sat down in a chair facing her desk, but Ari stayed standing. He leaned against the wall just inside the open door, next to a framed poster of the Ten Commandments.
Major Grace sat down behind her desk and took the red ledger out of a drawer. She flipped through it, then opened it at Sean’s page.
“I asked around at dinner last night,” Major Grace went on. “As I suspected, some of our regulars heard things. Your brother is in the hands of Storm Blue, which is the very bad news. However, he’s still alive, which is good, and even better, one woman who has dealings with the gang says she’s sure they won’t kill him or sell him. She doesn’t know why he’s valuable, but she says that he is. She thinks that one of the men in the gang may have taken a fancy to him, but that’s only her guess.”
“That don’t surprise me if it’s true. Sean’s like that with guys.” I was expecting her to have some reaction, but I saw none. “I guess she don’t know where he is, huh?”
“No. Storm Blue has a couple of safe houses, but if your brother’s valuable, he’s not likely to be in one of those.
Mostly they use them to sell drugs. No one knows where the Axeman himself lives. Some say it’s down near the beach, but that covers a lot of ground.” Major Grace took a piece of scrap paper from the wastebasket beside her desk. “I’ll give you the addresses if—” She paused. “Eric, you’re leaning against the Commandments. They’re not hanging straight anymore.”
“Sorry. I’ll just fix that.”
Ari turned around to fiddle with the picture frame. While he did, Major Grace wrote down the addresses. She held up the scrap of paper.
“Rose, before I give this to you, you’ve got to promise me you won’t just go barging into these places. I don’t want you to end up in the same predicament as your brother.”
“I won’t. I know it’s real dangerous. Maybe Eric could, like, pretend to want to make a buy. He’s kinda dangerous, too.”
“No doubt.” Major Grace rolled her eyes toward heaven. “I don’t want to know, actually, what Eric may do.”
Ari grinned at her. I took the scrap of paper from her and secreted it in my bra.
“Thanks,” I said. “But I feel sort of hopeless.”
“So do I.” Major Grace considered me with sad eyes. “I’m sorry, but you probably won’t be able to get him back, not without a great deal of help from Above, and I don’t mean Chief Hafner.”
“Yeah, I figured. I just want to know what’s happened to him. I don’t got enough money to buy him back.”
“If they’re even willing to sell. I’m sorry.”
I let my eyes fill with genuine tears, then brushed them away. “Thanks,” I whispered. “I’m sure grateful.”
“You’re very welcome. I’ll pray for him.”
“Thanks. If anything’ll get him out, that will, I bet.”
Major Grace smiled and raised her hand to bless or dismiss us, I wasn’t sure which. I thanked her again, and we left.
I waited to ask Ari about the gel square until we were several blocks from Mission House. Or squares, I should say, in the plural, because I could guess that he’d slipped another one under the Ten Commandments.
“Listening devices,” Ari told me. “They’ll pick up noises of a certain volume, like a scream or an argument with raised voices, and relay it to Spare14’s office and my comm unit.” He patted a jeans pocket. “By helping us, Major Grace has upped her danger quotient considerably. I don’t like that.”
“Neither do I. Where did you get those things? From Tzaki?”
“No, from Spare14.
TWIXT
is so far ahead of us technically that I’m amazed. They can set the nano-mechs in those squares to respond to a number of stimuli and report in to a variety of devices. The gel that holds the nano-mechs can match any color and be placed anywhere, nearly invisible.”
“It’s amazing, all right. And dangerous.”
A puzzled Ari glanced at me.
“What if the police want to spy on their own people? Big Brother’s watching you. I wouldn’t want to live under that kind of surveillance.”
“You have a point, I suppose.” He sounded unconvinced. “Depending on the government in question. Most people would value the safety the surveillance offers.”
I baa’ed like a sheep. He gave me a dirty look but argued no further.
We returned to the apartment to find Jan reading a newssheet on the couch and Spare14 at his desk talking on his landline phone, mostly in numbers. I sat down on a chair near the door while Ari went to the window, drew the Beretta, and began his stone-faced watch on the street below. Spare14 hung up the phone.
“That’s step one completed. The court has approved the modification in your father’s terms of parole.”
I tried to smile and failed.
“You must be very nervous,” Spare14 went on. “It’s quite understandable, O’Grady. No need to be embarrassed.” He swiveled his chair around to look at Ari. “Any new intel?”
“Oh, yes.” Ari turned from the window. “We need to discuss a possible operation.”
Jan tossed the newssheet aside and sat up straight to listen. I dug into my bra, retrieved the paper with the addresses,
and handed it to Spare14. While Ari explained about the safe houses, I fetched a pencil and my pad of oversized paper from the bedroom. Ari broke off what he was saying to the other agents.
“Nola, you shouldn’t be—”
“I’m not going to try a scan. I just want to diagram out the IOIs and other clues I’ve gotten. Sometimes I can see a data pattern that way.”
“Very well, then. Wait for Javert’s backup before you run procedures.”
“That’s what I’m doing.” I may have snarled. “Waiting.”
Ari winced and let me be.
I let myself sink to the edge of trance to work the pattern. On one sheet of paper I jotted down all the psychic clues I’d received since Sean and Michael had gone off. I’d had some big scores, such as the vision of Diana in the drugstore and the Maculates, as well as some minor mental twitches. I numbered each of them, twelve in all, not that the numbers ranked or did anything but identify them. For the second sheet, I shut my eyes and began letting my hand put numbers where it wanted.
When I finished, I studied the sheet and realized I’d put down fourteen numbers instead of twelve. Number thirteen I grasped immediately; it referred to Javert. I looked up and saw Spare14 watching me while pretending not to.
“Okay, Sneak,” I said, “what are you holding back?”
Spare14 turned scarlet. Jan laughed—one mocking whoop.
“Oh, very well.” Spare14 sounded like a man with a bad sore throat. “The Axeman either has a doppelgänger on Terra Six or a gate in his possession that leads there.”
“A gate he couldn’t open until my brother fell into his hands?”
“If it
is
a gate, yes.” Spare14’s color slowly ebbed back to normal. His voice eased as well. “We are honestly not sure. Either he or a doppelgänger has been spotted on Six.”
“Does Javert know about this?”
“Oh, yes. He doubtless would have let it slip sooner or later.”
“Ah, a bit of consolation for you, eh?” Jan said.
Spare14 refrained from answering. I couldn’t blame him.
I scribbled this information under 14 on my list, then returned to the pattern. The more I studied it, the less sense it made. The goddess Diana and the Laughing Woman sat right in the middle with the other clues arranged around them in what seemed like a random scatter. I got up and put the papers away in the suitcase. If I let my unconscious mind and the Collective Data Stream process the pattern, it might make more sense later.
My conscience nagged at me. I’d sneered at Spare14 for withholding intel, but I was doing the same to him. After seeing Willa at work, I knew what lay inside that set of brightly colored boxes I’d found in Dad’s desk. I did a quick Search Aura Field: Links and realized that no matter which type they were, the orbs had a profound significance for the matter in hand. I returned to the living room.
Spare14 and Jan were discussing where to buy lunch. When they saw that I was waiting for them to finish, they both stopped talking.
“Is there any chance,” I said, “of getting a world-walker to take us back to Four? I’ve got to go to my flat to retrieve something we need.”
“Oh?” Spare14 said. “What, if I may ask?”
“A set of world-walking orbs. They belong to my father.”
Spare14 made a small choking sound. Jan goggled and fanned himself with the news sheet as if he felt faint. Ari allowed himself a brief smile.
“I wondered,” Ari said, “when you’d remember those.”
“When they became relevant,” I said, “and they have.”
Spare14 reached for the telephone. “Let me just put in a four-oh-two request. That’s the second highest possible urgency level. The highest only applies if someone’s in danger of injury or death.”
About twenty minutes later Spare14 announced that Willa Danvers-Brown would meet us at South Park. Ari and I went alone on the theory that two ragtag individuals would attract less attention than four. Since my mind had adjusted to the local lines of psychic force, and I wasn’t reeling from a botched Search Mode: Personnel, I figured that the trip should go smoothly.
Although we walked fast, we did our best to blend in with the people on the street. Every now and then we paused to look in a shop window or to listen to a newsboy crying the headlines. No one seemed to pay any attention to us. I received no ASTA or SAWM until we reached the overgrown oval of South Park, version 3.0, and even then the warning felt muted and distant. I glanced around and saw a couple of teen boys in Dodger T-shirts sitting on a patch of lawn some twenty feet away. They had their backs to us, but they were the only possible source of the threat.
Fortunately, we were leaving. Willa, dressed in her bright patchwork of torn clothing, was waiting for us on the dirty gray bench. When we sat down next to her, she took a blue-green orb out of her junk-filled shopping bag.
“Nice to see you again,” she said. “They told me I’m supposed to stick with you once we hit Four.”
“Good,” I said. “I need your opinion about something.”
As before, the trip through the gate nauseated me, though Ari’s stoic expression never changed. From his SPP, though, I could tell that he was merely good at hiding how lousy he felt. What Willa experienced I had no way of perceiving without being hopelessly rude to a fellow psychic. The journey felt shorter, this time through, maybe about ten seconds in all. It brought us right back to South Park, version 4.0.
“Let’s find a cab,” Ari said, “and go pick up the car. I still have the parking card Spare14 gave me.”
“I’m shocked.” Willa grinned at him. “Old Sneak usually keeps that kind of thing clutched tight in his little fist.”
“He probably thinks he does have it. I gave it back to him, then retrieved it again without his realizing it.”
“You’re going to go far in TWIXT, Agent Nathan. I just have this feeling about you.”
So Ari had other skills consistent with his ability to pick locks. Funny how you can live with a guy for a while and not notice details like that. They didn’t improve his driving any, of course. The whole way out to our flat Willa kept clutching her chest with one hand as if she feared a heart attack.
My own moment of fear came when we pulled up in
front of our building. The door to the upstairs flat stood slightly open. I ran a quick SM:L.
“Someone’s in the garage,” I said.
“Stay in the car!” Ari snapped.
He slid out and drew the Beretta, took a couple of steps forward, then stopped. He laughed and holstered the gun just as a damp Itzak Stein walked down the driveway. I let out my breath in a gasp, which was the first evidence I had that I’d been holding it.
“Are you guys back already?” Itzak said. “I was just washing some crap graffito off the front.”
“What made you come out here?” Ari said. “Did someone break in?”
“Someone tried, but I called the police when the alarm tipped my phone. More of that lousy Q wave, whatever it is.” He looked down at his wet white shirt. “You need to get a new hose. The old one leaks.”
Willa and I got out of the car. I introduced her, and we all trooped upstairs. The alarm, Itzak told me, had signaled an attempted break-in on the lower flat, not the upper.
“This time, though, we got a picture on the front camera,” Itzak went on.
“I didn’t know we had a security camera,” I said.
“That’s one of the things Ari and I installed on Sunday. When LaDonna was here.” He sighed and looked forlorn for a couple of seconds. “Anyway, let’s take a look at what’s on the hard drive.”
The camera recorded to a DVD. The DVR linked to the TV in our living room. Willa, Itzak, and I sat on the couch, but Ari stood, pacing back and forth, while Itzak scanned through the stored images with the remote control.
“Here!” He froze an image onscreen.
Even in the gray-scale picture, I recognized whom I was seeing: Miss Leopard-Thing herself, in her long skirt and a human jacket, two sizes too big across the back to accommodate her three pairs of breasts in front. At her throat the silver chain necklace gleamed.