Mariana laughed, then pressed her lips together. “I’m sorry, but that was kinda funny.”
“It wasn’t remotely funny at three this morning,” Deonne told her, holding back the fury that wanted to boil all over the woman. She put her hands on her hips and squeezed her fingertips into her flesh. “Nayara saw fit to put you in charge while she’s not here—”
“Oh, I’m not in charge!” Mariana squeaked, looking alarmed.
“You do a good imitation of it, then,” Deonne told her dryly. “You fooled me. Why don’t you fool the administrators of this mental estate we’re all prisoners of and tell them I want the idiot living next door to me evicted?”
Mariana smoothed her hands over the rudimentary controls on her desktop. “Deonne, I appreciate that you’re finding it difficult living back here in this time—”
“Do not handle me!”
Mariana blinked. “I wouldn’t do that—” she began.
“You would and you did,” Deonne snapped at her. “Even your voice changed. You could have been Nayara, for all the difference it made. You were very nearly copying her accent, too. Christ, Mariana, don’t you have a single individual corpuscle in your body? You admire them so much you have to channel them every time you open your mouth?”
Mariana swallowed. After a moment, she said quietly, “I am quite capable of thinking for myself, thank you.”
Deonne snorted. “You fooled me again, then.”
Mariana’s face reddened. “I do know how to be kind and empathetic, for example.”
Deonne drew in a sharp breath, shocked. She drew herself up straight as she realized that she was leaning over the small desk Mariana sat behind, in a classic intimidation posture. What did she think she was doing? Picking on the fat, ugly girl at the back of the classroom because she’d had a bad night? Deonne cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for. I can’t even think of a good excuse for my behavior.”
Mariana gave her a small, tight smile. “I think a few nights’ lack of sleep has something to do with it. You may like to know that I have already complained to the complex administrators. I’m not the first, either. But I told them we would stop renting the apartment if it continued.”
Deonne opened her mouth to protest, alarmed at the idea of losing the privacy of her single occupant dwelling, no matter how small it might be.
Mariana shook her head. “Oh, it’s only a threat,” she assured her. “Call it an economic incentive. It’ll help them find a way to fix things. They told me they would look into the matter and report back to me with all haste. My Chinese is still quite weak, but I’m sure that’s what they meant.”
“We own this building. Can’t you do something more than complain?” Deonne spread her hands. “He’s doing it deliberately, you know.”
“Why ever would he do it deliberately?” Mariana asked, sounding shocked.
Deonne rolled her eyes. “Probably because he doesn’t like me.”
Mariana’s mouth opened.
Deonne almost laughed at her expression. “Oh, come on, Mariana. You can’t be that naïve. Lots of people don’t like me. You’re a prime example. It doesn’t bother me, except when they do something about it, like this idiot living next door to me.”
Mariana stood up. “I don’t dislike you, Deonne. I just haven’t got around to liking you yet, because you don’t make it very easy. The man next door to you seems to actively dislike you. It’s an important difference.”
Deonne considered the woman. “You’re right,” she agreed. “You’re right on every point.” Her heart squeezed unhappily. “I don’t make it easy. But you don’t make it easy for people to appreciate you properly, either.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Mariana replied, with another glowing smile. She picked up her notebook—a non-digital paper-filled one.
“Of course you wouldn’t, because you think you’re sweet and charming and pleasant to everyone and you are that. But you’re smart as a whip, too. Nayara is no fool. She wouldn’t have left you in charge here if you weren’t.”
As Mariana opened her mouth, Deonne raised her voice and overrode any protest she might have been about to make. “And don’t give me that wide-eyed nonsense about you not being in charge. There’s no one else here paying bills and dealing with the village administrators, is there? There’s just you. Since you arrived at the agency you’ve written a book and learned Chinese, you’re running this joint and you’re keeping a dozen unhappy humans and one psi in line and contained, all while we’re living two centuries in the past. You did all that while dealing with vampires, who are a strange species to begin with.”
“They’re not strange,” Mariana replied. “They just think differently.”
“So I learned the hard way,” Deonne said. She pointed her hand at Mariana. “You already knew it. Smart, as I said. But you make it hard for people to appreciate your true value.”
Mariana’s eyes narrowed. “Are you saying if I dressed like you people would think I was smarter?”
Deonne shook her head. “You need to dress like you, but you need to dress like a smart woman, not like…like….” Deonne halted, abruptly aware of what she would have to say about Mariana in order to finish her thought. She couldn’t say it aloud. She wasn’t that cruel.
“I see,” Mariana replied, putting the notebook back down slowly.
“Do you?” Deonne replied softly. “This is a subject I happen to know about in a professional capacity. It’s my trade. You may not like hearing it, but it’s a sad fact of life that your appearance absolutely affects how people think about you and how they behave toward you.”
Mariana’s lips were thin, flat lines as she stared down at her notebook.
Deonne pressed on. She had to finish this now. “Do you truly understand that if you enhanced your appearance and made yourself look as intelligent as you really are, when you had complained to the village administrators about my neighbor they wouldn’t have brushed you off with a simple ‘we’ll get back to you.’?”
Mariana whispered something.
“What?” Deonne prompted.
“I said, ‘that’s cheating,’” Mariana told her, her voice stronger. There were red glowing spots in both of her cheeks and her fine grey eyes were narrowed. She wasn’t upset. She was angry.
Deonne swallowed. “It’s cheating to wear nice clothes?”
“Nice clothes?” Mariana seemed to choke. “You’re not talking about just nice clothes.”
Deonne drew a breath to respond, but Mariana cut her off. “No, I think it’s time you listened to me, don’t you?”
Deonne crossed her arms. Fair enough.
Mariana’s forefinger brushed under across Deonne’s sleeve, lifting the fragile übersilk and letting it drift downward so the morning sun shining through the high window caught the emeralds and reds and gold threads running through it. “This isn’t enhancement. You use this, all of this—your hair, your jewelry, your scent, your make-up, everything that you have on your list of enhancements—you use them all as weapons and shields to ram through barriers on your way to getting what you want. You bewitch men and alienate women with your off-the-scale radiance.” Mariana’s mouth curled down. “If that’s what you are recommending I do in order to win respect for my intellect, then I’d rather stay looking stupid and old. People at least smile at me when I walk into a room.”
Deonne licked her lips. It hurt more than she thought it would, even though she had heard all this before. “It’s not what I’m suggesting,” she said, struggling to keep her tone even. “You’re misinterpreting me. I think you’re doing it deliberately in order to slap me around and I probably deserve that much. But think on what I’ve said.” She turned for the door, reaching for it blindly.
“It’s not like I’m twenty anymore, either,” Mariana said, with a sniff, behind her.
Deonne gripped the door handle, breathing hard, absorbing the comment. Then she spun to face Mariana again, her back to the door, th
e handle digging into her back. “You think I’m trading on my youth, Mariana?” She smiled. “You think I’m lording it over you because I’ve got energy to spare and a souped-up metabolism and years ahead of me to conquer the world?”
Mariana looked awkward for perhaps the first time since Deonne had stepped into the room. “Well, you do, um, stride everywhere.”
Deonne took two long steps back over to the desk. She leaned over it, so that her face was mere inches away from Mariana’s. “It’s my business to know people. When I take on a project, I find out as much as I can about the people I will be working with. After that meeting in Nayara’s office a few weeks ago – you must remember it, because you were there – the one you attended when you told me about your neural net group and how you deconstructed the survey with the CERN City mainframe?”
Mariana’s brow lifted just enough to tell Deonne the woman remembered the meeting.
“I made a point of finding out about you,” Deonne told her. “Do you know what I discovered?”
Mariana licked her lips. “Nothing illegal and probably nothing exciting.”
“Not from your perspective, perhaps. It all depends on the spin.” She shook her head. “If you tell another living soul what I’m about to tell you, I swear I will pummel you to death with my boots—while I’m wearing them and I will enjoy doing it. Clear?”
Mariana nodded, her eyes locked on Deonne’s.
“I discovered that you were born only the year before me,” Deonne said and watched as Mariana’s eyes widened, then widened more and her mouth opened. She could almost see the thoughts writing themselves in Mariana’s mind as she stepped away from the desk and back to the door.
Mariana’s gaze travelled up and down Deonne’s body in a frankly assessing glance.
“You see?” Deonne told her. “Appearance is everything. Even you judged me by my appearance and got it wrong. Appearance has been highly valued for centuries and it isn’t about to lose its worth any time soon.” Deonne opened the door and stepped through into the mild spring sunshine and shut it.
Her anger was gone.
Now she was left with nothing but sheer boredom to get her through yet another day in the twenty-first century. “Crap,” she murmured.
She thought of Justin and tried to dismiss the thought. Thinking of Justin only made her feel lonely and sad and miserable.
What was he doing? She couldn’t even make an educated guess, because there was no parallel time frame for her to reference. The one time she had tried to explain her loneliness to him by asking him what he did while she was stuck in history, Justin had used Relativity theories to explain that to her, he was in all times and all places at once, for any time period he had ever lived through or was ever going to be in, so at any one time for her, he was doing everything, including making love to her, in all the times they had been together.
So, while she was stuck in history, he was still with her.
It was a romantic sentiment, but it didn’t make her feel any better. She just wanted to go home.
Chapter Three
Chronologic Touring Inc. – Sydney Office—2264 A.D.: Justin took a step out of his office. “Who the bloody hell has been screwing with my stuff?” he roared.
Three other heads emerged from offices and silent cones, all agents, before disappearing again. The support staff working in the pit all glanced up briefly, then went back to what they were doing.
“It wasn’t a rhetorical bloody question!” he shouted.
No one looked up this time.
Rosa hurried around the corner from the reception area, a sort-of smile on her face. “Justin, I think I can explain, if you want to just step back into your office...?” She glanced over her shoulder toward the pit.
He looked her over, wondering why, of all the people that might come running when he yelled, Rosalinda the human receptionist was the one that appeared. Curious, he stepped aside and let her move into his office first. He followed her in and shut the door. “So, what’s going on?” he demanded. “I get back from Canada and look at this place!” He waved his hand around the office.
The desk was bare of everything but his essential boards. The sideboard was clear of all the junk he had been piling there when his desk got too crowded. The two visitor chairs in front of the desk were neatly arranged, free of dust, even inviting. The screens on his desk were clean and clear of dust and currently showing news feeds in perfect focus and clarity.
The office was neat, tidy and pristine.
Rosa lifted her hand placatingly. “I know, Justin. As soon as I heard about it, I tried to stop them, but it was too late.”
“They cleaned up in here!” His heart was cranking on its own, a sure sign he needed to calm down but he just had to fix this first. “It’s...sterile!”
Rosa nodded.
He grabbed at the back of his chair. “You mean they really did sterilize the room?”
Rosa licked her lips. “I don’t think they went that far. But Justin, you’ve been using this office for nearly twenty years. You had a lot of things...accumulate. They’ve asked you over and over to clean it all out. I guess they just got tired of waiting for you to do it yourself.”
“I was going to do it!” he ground out. “I would have got around to it. Christ, they could have given me a bit of time.”
“It’s been six months,” Rosa replied.
Justin gripped the chair harder. “Fine. Right. Marvelous. I’ve got a clean office. Everyone is happy. Except where are my bloody things?”
Rosa smiled happily at him. “We put all your personal stuff in boxes and had them delivered to your apartment. They’re all nice and safe.”
He pointed to the visitor chair she stood next to. “There was a shawl over the back of that chair. An electric blue shawl. What happened to it?”
Rosa’s mouth opened a little in surprise. “The shawl?”
“You remember it, then?” Justin asked.
“I...well, yes—it was a beautiful color...that was yours? But I thought....”
“What happened to it?” Justin repeated.
Rosa threaded her fingers together. “It was yours?” she repeated. “I thought it was a client’s, that some woman had left it behind, you see....”
“What did you do with it, Rosa?” he asked and realized he was holding his breath, waiting for her response.
Rosa’s face began to crumple, but then her gaze moved beyond him and her eyes widened in shock. She pointed silently.
Justin turned.
On one of the newsfeed screens, Gabriel was silently speaking in front of a huge sea of media people.
Justin cursed and reached for the volume controls. “Call Nayara at the base. Tell her to watch,” he told Rosa as he dialed up the volume.
* * * * *
There were so many spotlights focused on the small corner of the room that despite the lateness of the hour, it seemed like daylight was bathing Gabriel as he spoke.
“…great wrongs have been delivered against me and my people,” Gabriel intoned, his hands clasped in front of him. He wore a suit and his hair was slicked back.
* * * * *
“Who are the three people standing behind him?” Nayara called out. “Someone find out!”
“He’s going to use the guilt card,” Ryan murmured, staring at the big screen over Brenden’s desk. “He’s actually got the guts to try using guilt as his excuse?”
Nayara picked up a hand set. “Is Cáel watching this?” she asked.
“It’s eleven p.m. in Macapá. There’s a good chance he is,” Brenden murmured.
* * * * *
“Our lives were crippled…no, our very existence was threatened, while the activities of others go unmonitored and unchecked,” Gabriel added.
* * * * *
“Oh, fuck,” Cáel breathed into the handset. He put his glass of ouzo down with a thud, making the legislative assistant at the other end of the office turn his head sharply to check on him.
> “He’s going to reveal the baby,” Cáel murmured into the handset he held to his mouth.
“We can’t stop it,” Nayara’s voice whispered back. “Not now.”
“Get Deonne to headquarters,” Cáel told her. “I’ll catch the next g-train and meet you there. Full staff meeting.”
“You’re still in session. You have to stay there,” Nayara protested. “If you leave mid-session, straight after Gabriel’s revelation, you know they’ll put together in two seconds that your loyalty is with vampires. You have to stay there,” she repeated.
He closed his eyes as he clutched the handset. “I can’t do anything from here,” he ground out.
“No, you can’t, but Ryan and I will manage. This is just an opening salvo. Gabriel is warming up. We’ll be fine for now. We’ll call you—our big gun—in when the going gets really tough.”
Cáel gave a dry laugh. “You’re flattering me. A puny human could never be anything but moral support for you two, but it would make me feel better to be there. I’ll stay here for now, Nia, but I warn you, I’ll break ranks and screw keeping up appearances if I think Gabriel is coming after you or Ryan personally…or anyone at the base. You hear?”
“I hear…and I love you, Cáel Stelios. Go and get some sleep.”
“Get Deonne. You’re going to need her.”
“I will.”
Cáel disconnected and watched the screen. Gabriel had finished his canned announcement and was taking questions from the eager journalists.
“Here comes the blow,” Cáel murmured.
* * * * *
“We’re going to get hit now,” Justin said, leaning forward.
Rosa sank down into one of the visitor chairs. “How do you know that?”
“He left a massive opening in his speech. He wants someone to ask him a leading question so he can tell them all about it and say afterwards it was dragged out of him by the media.”
“Why not just say it in the speech—” she began.
Justin held up his hand for silence, concentrating on the screen.
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