A Creature of Smokeless Flame

by Margaret Ball

  “Oh. I didn’t realize Taylor was that subtle.”

  “Thalia… it was my idea.”

  He lifted his bottle, set it down again when he realized it was empty.

  I got two more beers out of the refrigerator and sat down at the table with him. We drank to old friendships until morning light brightened the room.

  A few days later, a large crate appeared on the doorstep of the condo, with a sealed envelope taped to it. Lensky opened the letter.

  “Oh,” he said flatly. “Well, that’s nice.”

  “What?”

  “Victor packed up the stuff we left behind and Taylor had it shipped here.”

  He levered the lid open onto a jumble of papers, clothes and just plain junk.

  “Men,” I commented over his shoulder, “do not know how to pack… Some of this is Ben’s, shall I call him?”

  Lensky wasn’t in any hurry to sift through the stuff, with all its memories; we drank coffee and waited for Ben, and I tactfully refrained from rooting through the box in search of my souvenirs.

  Once Ben got there, he and I started pulling things out of the tangle in the box. We needed a black garbage bag, large size, for all the stuff that never should have been shipped: the bui-bui Lensky tore and the one Ben never used, the tampons we hadn’t needed for plugging bullet wounds… Victor had evidently been intent on erasing all traces of our sojourn from what was now his apartment. We threw our clothes into the laundry hamper as we came across them. A couple of small stacks sufficed for the things we actually wanted. My Kindle, our phones, our real passports (not that I was going to toss the fakes provided by the Company.) I set aside the deep gold bikini, the red and purple coverup, the ruby-heeled slippers and – oh, joy! that little rectangle of Masai beadwork.

  “Glad to get your souvenirs back?” Ben asked, watching me grinning over that last find.

  “Well, yes.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll have many more chances to go shopping in exotic places, now.”

  “You think?”

  “Well, if you’re going to take –”

  “Shut up, I haven’t told Lensky yet.”

  “You guys really need to communicate more, you know?”

  “Shut up.”

  I turned to Lensky. “Brad, I’ve been doing some serious thinking.”

  A quirked eyebrow invited me to continue. I took both his hands. “You were happier on parts of this mission than I’ve ever seen you here in Austin. Steve Harrison told me that you were born to be a field officer. I think he was right. And I – I think you should go back to Foreign Operations.”

  “Leaving you here while I’m away for months at a time?” His voice suggested that was not acceptable. I was glad to hear it.

  “Well… I’ve been thinking about that too. You know that modification of Riemann fire that neutralized the Semtex? Ben didn’t work out how to do it; he was half blind without his glasses. I figured it out. Without my colleagues, without my office, without my books. Don’t you see, Brad, my career isn’t like yours. I don’t really need to be here in Austin; I can do research and apply topology anywhere. Including anywhere you are sent.”

  “Thalia?”

  “If – if that’s an arrangement that would be okay with you?”

  He swept me into a hug that indicated total assent. It also nearly broke a couple of ribs, but I wasn’t complaining. “Okay? Everything I could ask for in life, in one package? Thalia, Thalia, Thalia…”

  I became aware, belatedly, of Ben making disgusted noises in the background. “That’s your decision, Lia? And I suppose you expect me to break it to Dr. Verrick?”

  Lensky relaxed his hug just a little and looked over my shoulder. “What does Verrick have to do with this?”

  “He—”

  “Not a thing,” I said, but Ben refused to be interrupted.

  “He wanted to retire and make Thalia Director of the Center, and up until two minutes ago we all thought she was going to go along with it.”

  “Well, you all thought wrong,” I said.

  Lensky’s shoulders were shaking.

  “Running away, Thalia?”

  Oh, hell. Busted. “Running away with you,” I emphasized.

  “Well, I’m not complaining,” he decided. “I still get everything I wanted.”

  Ben, bored, was poking at the crumpled paper in the bottom of the case. “Aha,” he said now, “I wondered why they needed such a big box.” He pushed the papers aside and moved a squat blue bottle that I didn’t remember seeing before. I didn’t think much about it; I was too concerned about what I could now see peeking out from under the packing paper. Ben lifted out the four-foot African mask. “Victor’s revenge!”

  Lensky started laughing out loud. A funnel of coldness formed at the back of my neck, and Mr. M. lifted his head to stare behind me.

  “Interesting pets, indeed,” said TheSila’s lazy, smoky voice. “I think I shall like it here.”

  Keep reading for a first look at the next Applied Topology book, The Lake of the Dragon.

  The Lake of the Dragon

  It all started with Aunt Alesia and the dragon’s rubies, and that dance at the Austrian embassy in Paris.

  Purists would go farther back, maybe as far back as the day a couple of years ago when I was concentrating really hard on the Axiom of Choice and accidentally selected several objects out of my kid brother’s miscellaneous collections of plastic junk. Without touching them. You could make a case that it all started there.

  But I’d been applying topology, and researching further applications of topology, for nearly two and a half years since then without ever causing an international incident. So I blame this one entirely on Aunt Alesia.

  When Lensky and I agreed that his career would take priority for a while, because I could do my research anywhere that he might be stationed, we’d both envisioned the usual CIA overseas posting. He’d be assigned to some interesting part of the world to collect information and recruit people to bring in more information, preferably not breaking too many laws of the host country too noticeably. We’d set up house wherever he was sent and I would settle down with my books and a stack of blank notepads for a long, quiet period of research.

  What we hadn’t figured on was that after we successfully retrieved the hostages from East Africa, the entire Operations side of the CIA would become very, very interested in applied topology.

  The CIA had funded the Center for Applied Topology from the very beginning, though at first they managed to hide that fact by passing the funds through a non-government foundation. But apart from sending Brad Lensky to pass on occasional requests and to try to keep us out of trouble, they’d left us pretty much alone. In the weeks following the bombing and the hostage retrieval, I realized that this was because most of the people in Operations didn’t really believe in our paranormal abilities. They’d been too afraid of looking like gullible fools to actually use us.

  Now, though, the careful people at Langley realized what an asset they had in the Center, and they were lining up around the block to use us. Their principal interest, to begin with, was in black bag jobs. Every field office in every capital city had a list of places they’d dearly like to bug. Other countries’ embassies were high on that list, together with ambassadors’ residences, military clubs, private political clubs, you name it. Up to now, they’d had to work with a series of difficult tradeoffs. How hard would it be to break into a given location, and what was the cost if they were caught sneaking around there? Everybody in this business spied on everybody else, but getting caught was not cool and sometimes resulted in embarrassing diplomatic conflicts. Putting your own ambassador on the spot could be a quick ticket out of field work and back home to a basement full of analysts.

  Now they thought they could bug every place they’d ever dreamed of, for free – that is, at little or no risk. The theory was simple enough. We – the applied topologists at the Center – could teleport to any place we’d been previously,
and we could take passengers. Let a topologist mingle with the legitimate embassy personnel, get invitations to parties at various embassies and other places of interest, then teleport back in the small hours with a technician who would place the bugs. Even if surprised, we could vanish before anybody believed what they were seeing.

  There was just one catch. There weren’t anywhere near as many applied topologists as there were field offices begging for our services.

  To be precise, there were exactly four of us: me, Ben Sutherland, Ingrid Thorn, and Colton Edwards.

  We did have an infinite set of the magic-enhancing stars that Mr. M. had brought with him from ancient Babylon, but since they could only be deployed by topologists – or Mr. M. himself, of course – that didn’t solve the CIA’s problem. Too, most of them were not real clear on the whole concept of infinite sets, nor did they find it easy to believe in tiny sparkling points of light that were invisible to anybody but topologists – or Mr. M., of course. The stars didn’t really feature in most Company discussions of how to use us.

  Lensky tells me there were some nasty scenes, and almost some blood spilled, in the initial discussions of how to divvy up the treasure that we represented. He was in most of those meetings to advise the department heads on how we could best be used, and he took the opportunity to advocate on our behalf before anybody got crazy or cruel notions.

  We were going to start in European capitals, because those would be the easiest locales for our untraveled crew to begin with. Postings would consist of one topologist and one partner of the opposite sex, because there were always places a man could go that a woman couldn’t, and vice versa.

  This worked out nicely for us, as we all had non-topologist partners.

  I, of course, was married to Lensky. Just before the diplomatic initiative got started, Ingrid had married our computer expert, Jimmy DiGrazio. Colton had a thing going with Meadow Melendez, the robotics engineer who maintained Mr. M.’s prosthetic body and built the enhancements for it. And Ben was living with his rich girlfriend Annelise, who also worked for the Center as our resident liar. She was an expert at spinning stories to convince people who stumbled across our paranormal work that they hadn’t seen what they’d seen, and she looked forward to doing the same, or better, to foreign diplomats.

  For our first assignments, they tried to match us with cities that would be relatively easy for us. The Swedish embassy didn’t actually have a long list of places they desperately wanted bugged, but Stockholm would be a good place for Ingrid, with her parents’ Swedish background, to start work. Colton was assigned to Spain because Meadow was fluent in Spanish. Ben got London, and he swore that Annelise’s rich father hadn’t influenced anybody to give him the easy English-language assignment. “And besides, Thalia, you got the best posting of all!”

  “Paris,” Ingrid sighed. “While I’m freezing in Stockholm…”

  “Paris,” Annelise echoed. “Do you realize Paris Fashion Week is just starting? Balmain, Balenciaga, Lanvin…”

  “Barcelona is pretty interesting too,” Colton said cheerfully. He and Meadow were being sent to the Consulate in Barcelona, rather than to Madrid, because the Catalan independence movement was heating up to boiling again after several months at a slow simmer. “I’ve always wanted to see Sagrada Familia and Parc Güell.”

  “I’ve always wanted to see Notre Dame,” Ingrid grumbled. “The Louvre. The Louis Vuitton Museum: they’re doing a temporary exhibit of that Icelandic artist’s light installations this month.”

  “Well, you can go look at the Little Mermaid instead,” I suggested.

  “Really, Thalia. That’s in Copenhagen, not Stockholm. Why they’re sending a cultural illiterate like you abroad at all escapes me.”

  “I’m a State Department intern taking advantage of this new program to give me a smattering of overseas experience before I settle in to a permanent post,” I said, repeating the line we’d all been told to use as an explanation for our joining the various embassies. In most cases the American ambassador didn’t know any more than that. Officially, at least. Lensky’s agency is very big on plausible deniability.

  In fact, I wasn’t that thrilled about being sent to Paris. Ingrid could have had it with my best wishes. I’m not exactly the person you would think of in connection with elegant Parisians; ever since graduation I’d managed to use the same little black dress for almost every occasion that demanded something more than T-shirts and jeans. Mom had forced me into ivory satin for the wedding, but apart from that my little-black-dress record was perfect.

  There were going to be a lot more of those occasions now, and I had a new wardrobe (courtesy of the CIA and a fashion consultant) with which to meet them. But I was uncomfortably aware that the only reason I was starting off in Paris was because of my Aunt Alesia, whose French husband had died some seventeen years ago. She had lived with us off and on while I was growing up and had become more French every year. I’d picked up her excellent accent over years of French chit-chat over the breakfast table, and had supplemented that with two years of college French.

  That wasn’t a whole lot of equipment, linguistic or otherwise, with which to tackle a glittering social life in the fashion capital of the world.

  “Cheer up,” Lensky said when I whined to him, “you’re vastly overestimating the sophistication of State Department social life. It’s more like an infinitely boring desert with not nearly enough oases.”

  “Tell me again about the infinitely boring desert,” I suggested under my breath while surveying the ivory and gold ballroom that filled the entire second floor of the Austrian embassy. Men in sober black and white were surrounded by women in a rainbow array of formal gowns, many of them sparkling with enough jewels to rival the GDP of a small country.

  The CIA makeover budget did not include jewelry. Fortunately, as a mere intern, I wasn’t really expected to compete in that league. My topaz-colored silk sheath with a frill of lighter gold chiffon bursting out from knees to floor was more than adequate for my official position. All the same, I could have used a modest spray of citrines, or something of the sort, to build up my morale. Too bad I couldn’t wear my infinite set of stars – well, I could have, but since they were invisible to everybody else they wouldn’t have much of an effect. “How am I supposed to compete with that?” I groused as a tall brunette wearing a fountain of rubies and diamonds whirled past. “Holy shit,” I gasped as her profile came into view. “I don’t believe it.”

  “That kind of language will certainly make you stand out,” said Lensky. I ignored him. Men have it so easy; one good dark suit and they could fit in everywhere. I started after the brunette and Lensky grabbed my arm.

  “Hey, when they said mingle, they didn’t mean charge out on the dance floor and trip over people,” he said.

  “Didn’t you recognize her?”

  “Who?”

  I jerked my chin towards the ruby-bedecked brunette. “Considering she was Koumbara at our wedding, I’d think you would remember her. That. Is. My. Aunt. Alesia.” She was thirty years older than me and I was willing to swear she didn’t own any rubies. What was she doing at the Austrian embassy’s ball of the year? For that matter, what was she doing in Paris at all? I’d last seen her sitting at Mom’s kitchen table, peeling carrots.

  “Let’s catch up with her and find out,” Lensky suggested, swinging me out onto the dance floor with surprising competence. The man could waltz like a Viennese, something I had not previously discovered during the year and a half we’d known each other. He was even good enough to make up for my awkward steps; the month of makeover-and-training provided before the CIA threw us in at the deep end hadn’t been nearly enough to turn me into an expert dancer, but it didn’t matter with Lensky taking the lead.

  Staying upright through a Viennese waltz was enough of a challenge without trying to look for Alesia. I concentrated on my steps. We turned, dipped, swooped and suddenly backtracked. The music ended with us standing beside Alesia and her
partner, a short man with thinning blond hair whom I’d never seen before.

  “Thalia, ma petite!” Alesia exclaimed. “What brings you here?”

  “Funny, I was just about to ask the same question.” Up close, I got the full impact of the rubies. The necklace consisted of gold filigree with little fountains of rubies spraying out on fine wires, each ruby surrounded by tiny diamonds. There were matching earrings shaped rather like chandeliers. Only somebody as tall as my aunt, with her long elegant neck, could have carried it off.

  “Oh, Daryush and I are old friends,” she said. “He was the Cultural Attaché for the Taklanistan embassy in Rome when my dear Georges was posted there, you know. And now he’s an ambassador! We were just remembering those happy, happy days.”

  “Not so happy for all of us,” said Daryush in a heavily accented voice, “since you, ma chére Alesia, were so devoted to that Georges of yours!” He turned to me. “All of us young men in Rome wished him at the devil, that lucky Georges, monopolizing the loveliest lady in diplomatic circles!”

  “Daryush, you will shock my niece,” Alesia laughed, “she doesn’t know that old people like us ever loved and laughed. This is my little niece Thalia, Daryush.”

  He clicked his heels, bowed over my hand and just brushed his lips across the knuckles.

  “And she is newly married,” Alesia went on, “so you mustn’t flirt with her, Daryush. Her nice American husband would not understand!”

  “But Alesia, ma belle, you know my heart is entirely yours!” Daryush protested.

  “Do my parents know where you are, Aunt Alesia?”

  She shrugged. “I may have said something about going to Paris with my old friend Solange. Or I may not… I believe, actually, I had intended to return to Austin after meeting Solange in New York. But when she was so kind as to invite me back to Paris, how could I refuse?”