Awakening

by Margaret Ball

  When the café reopened for the evening crowd she hoped to feed Scat some of the leftover muffins, but he was late in appearing at the back door that night. Devra sighed, looked over the seated customers Vess had already served, and noticed a young woman sitting hunched in a back corner. She looked tired, and shabbier than their usual run of customers. There was a child on her lap and another leaning sleepily on her side, and the feet and legs of all three were splashed with the mud that proclaimed they’d only come off country roads and into the paved city that day. She was trying to get the children to sip from the one cup of kahve that apparently was all she’d ordered.

  Vess had told her not to worry and to throw out the remaining muffins before they alienated any more customers. But they were edible; certainly not worse than the coriander thornberry muffins that had nearly saved her life…

  Remembering that very dark night, Devra put six muffins on a tray together with two savory pastries filled with Vess’ chopped meat in raisin sauce and carried the lot to the corner table.

  “Oh, I didn’t order all that!” the young woman exclaimed. “I couldn’t begin to pay for it…”

  “On the house,” Devra said. “We’re coming up on closing time, and what we don’t sell will be stale tomorrow.” That was perfectly true; what she left unsaid was that the chopped meat pies would almost certainly have been sold if she’d left them with the rest of the display. “And besides,” she added with even more truth, “the muffins aren’t very good. They were an experiment that didn’t turn out so well. You’ll be doing me a favor by taking them; if most of them are gone when we close, my boss won’t be quite so mad at me.”

  By the time she finished, both children had their faces full of muffin and crumbs were scattered liberally around them. Devra went back to the serving counter and conscientiously dropped two marks into the cash register to pay for the meat pies.

  Business was slow enough, that evening, that she was able to set the back door ajar and keep an eye out for Scat. The bell hanging from the front door jingled and Devra glanced up whenever anybody came in or out, but at this hour it was mostly people going out, and Vess served the one party of after-dinner customers who came in just before closing with pleas for some of those sweet rolls as dessert.

  “Sorry,” Vess told them, “the sweet rolls are only available in the mornings, when our professional baker from Gunter’s prepares them. But we still have an eighth of a tray of Chocolate Ecstasy, if you’d like to share it.” That was what Vess and Mikal had decided to call the triple-chocolate confection that he liked so much. When, while taking their marks, Vess mentioned the time and her closing hours, the group amiably decided that they could very well eat their slices of Chocolate Ecstasy from absorbent flimsies while they made their way home.

  “And that’s the last of them!” Vess announced as she flipped the sign in the window around, closed the front door and took off her apron.

  Startled, Devra glanced toward the corner where her poor tired travelers had sat. Vess was right – there was nobody left in the café. Now that was strange – and disappointing. She’d planned to catch them as they left and surreptitiously slip some marks into the pockets of the older child, who probably wouldn’t have his mother’s pride about taking the money. And… when had they left? Devra was sure she’d glanced up every time the front door jingled, and she’d been watching the back door continuously for Scat. Oh well, she must have missed them after all.

  A grating screech from the alley behind the café distracted her from the little mystery. Scat was displeased that his evening scraps were late. The fact that he hadn’t bothered to show up earlier was not relevant to him. “Muffins,” Devra crooned, kneeling at the door. “Yummy, yummy muffins just for you, Scat.”

  “Don’t give him those!” Vess interrupted. “Don’t you know chocolate is bad for cats? Look in the pantry for some meat or cheese.”

  Devra drew back the hand holding the muffin, but not in time to avoid a scratch across her knuckles. Evidently Scat felt that he, personally, could digest any amount of chocolate – and Devra wouldn’t be surprised if he could, but she didn’t want to test the theory. The pantry yielded a plate full of raw meat trimmings that Vess had set aside before chopping the rest of the vat-beef; Scat slithered into the room and twined about her ankles, purring, while Devra collected the meat; and Vess snapped, “Get that cat out of here!”

  Vess was evidently Having a Mood, although she called it a migraine; she announced that she was going upstairs to put her feet up and Devra would have to finish the cleanup and the prep for tomorrow on her own. That was okay with Devra; she’d rather work by herself than under the eye of a boss who had turned suddenly snappish. Besides, there wasn’t that much scut-work to do; she cleaned up after herself as she baked, as Gran had trained her to do long before she apprenticed at Gunter’s. Most of her work was preparation for the next day’s baking, which she wouldn’t have expected Vess to help with even if Mikal hadn’t warned her that his aunt had the world’s heaviest hand for pastry.

  Sometimes Mikal hung around the kitchen after closing, stealing bits of chocolate from the pantry and sweet dough from Devra’s bowl. In fact, he did so most evenings; Devra was getting used to his sardonic commentary, and to whacking his hand with a wooden spoon when it sneaked over to the mixing bowl. Maybe their relationship wasn’t strictly professional any more, but it certainly wasn’t improper. Which sometimes seemed a pity…

  Appparently Mikal wouldn’t be keeping her company tonight, though. He was certainly awake; there were too many clunking and thudding noises from the rooms over the kitchen to have been caused by Vess, who was light-footed enough despite her bulk. And, Devra reminded herself, it was of no importance at all to her whether he wanted to annoy her by hanging out in the kitchen. Nor did she care what he did when he was upstairs: tonight it must be some kind of martial arts practice involving sticks and wooden blocks and a lot of kicking, to judge from the noises she heard.

  When she’d done everything she could possibly do to prepare for the morrow, even rinsing out aprons and dishcloths and draping them over chairs to dry, Devra locked up the back, let herself out the front door, and locked that too. A casual glance upstairs showed that all the lights were on, so Vess and Mikal evidently weren’t too tired to sit up late.

  The room that had been assigned her, after Mikal’s badgering of the authorities, was across the street and half a block down, just as Rojer’s had been; though Mikal and the landlord both assured her it was not Rojer’s old room. Which would, Devra thought, have been creepy, so she was grateful for the assurance.

  She was halfway across the street when a familiar rough fur brushed around her ankles.

  “Forget it,” Devra whispered, “I’m not picking you up. You’re too heavy, and somebody would be bound to notice me carrying you in. No pets allowed, remember?”

  The yowling stopped, but Scat bit her ankle before slinking off into the darkness. When she reached her room, she was not terribly surprised to see him sitting in a shadowed corner of the landing; that had been happening ever since the second night she’d spent in this lodging. Cats really were good at moving about unobserved when they wanted to; she supposed they’d developed those instincts when they had to hunt for their food.

  It’s not instinct, Scat said as he darted between her ankles and through the opening slit in the door. It’s discipline and skill. Would you like it if I said you baked by instinct?

  ***

  The next day, when Vess came downstairs to where Devra was already baking sweet rolls and cutting out scones, she told Devra to take the rest of the morning off.

  “But I haven’t done the pastry for the meat pies yet.”

  “You haven’t had any time off since you started,” Vess said. “Mid-week is usually a slow time, Mikal can help me with serving, and I’m starting a pot of soup for lunch. When we run out of baked goods I’ll just declare it lunch time and serve the soup. Fortunately,” she added with a w
ry smile, “soup doesn’t require pastry.”

  “You’ll want bread to go with it. I can start some soda bread, that’s quick enough…”

  “Devra. We’ll manage. Mikal, tell her to take the time off while she has a chance.”

  “I don’t know,” Mikal drawled. “If she goes, are you going to try to make bread to go with the soup, Vess?”

  “Dumplings. Even I can’t ruin dumplings.”

  “Hmmm….”

  Vess swatted him with a pot holder. “Troublemaker! Do you want us to work the girl to death? Besides,” she said, nodding at the stairs.

  “Oh. Yeah. Devra, take the morning off. Catch up on your sleep, you look exhausted.”

  “What, you think I’ll scare your customers away?” Devra snapped. It was unreasonable to be offended when Mikal was probably right, she hadn’t slept well and she was probably sporting big circles under her eyes. But it was annoying to have it pointed out. And there was something strange going on. It almost seemed as if Vess and Mikal were trying to get rid of her for the day. She whipped off her apron, hung it from its hook, and stalked out.

  Behind her, she could hear Mikal grumbling to Vess, “What’s Deborah-Devra mad about now? Girls. They’re a different species….”

  Slamming the door would have been a satisfying way to cut off his grumbles, but the hinges were too ancient to be treated with such disrespect. The whole place was like a memorial to the first days of the colony, when the construction printers were so primitive that they could only produce separate panels that had to be fastened together. Why couldn’t they replace the whole ramshackle structure with a modern, fully printed building? Esilians! They probably liked being backward.

  Well, a free day would give her a chance to catch up on a few things. Starting, since she was already in a bad mood, with the least pleasant of her obligations. Devra ducked into a doorway, snapped her CodeX open and used the code Henrik Grigg had given her to request a meeting at the safe house.

  “You did tell me to get a job there,” she pointed out to Grigg when he complained that she should have reported days earlier. “I can’t just walk off and leave my pastries to burn every time you feel like having an update. The only reason I’m here now is because they decided to give me a morning off.”

  “You should have sent us your schedule,” Grigg said.

  Devra pushed her hair out of her eyes with the back of one hand. “It’s a tiny café run by a couple of amateurs who inherited the place. What schedule? I get time off when the café isn’t too busy and there’s somebody else to work the counter and they have enough baked goods to get through the day.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to settle for that. But don’t let more than a week pass again. If you really can’t get away, at least check in with your CodeX. Now!” He looked like a hungry man staring at the bakery display. “What do you have for me? Seditious talk? Dissidents meeting?”

  Devra sagged back against the chair he’d given her. Apparently accepting the spying assignment had raised her status, and a good thing too; she spent quite enough hours on her feet at the bakery. “Nothing like that.”

  “Plans of sabotage?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. Oh, but I did learn one thing,” she said, hoping her crumb of detection would satisfy Security. “They, these people at the café, they weren’t part of the train sabotage. Why, one of their people was actually killed in that accident!”

  “He might have been a suicide terrorist.”

  Devra shook her head. “I really don’t think so. Vess –”

  “That would be Lizavess Barlo, the owner?”

  “Yes. Look, she was crying over Rojer’s death for days after the accident. And she keeps bugging her nephew to do some investigating and find out why Rojer was even on the coast train line, she says there was no reason for him to be going out of the city. She wouldn’t be raising such a fuss about it if she’d sent him there to sabotage the line, would she?”

  “It could be a cunning feint,” Grigg suggested. “To throw off your suspicions.”

  “Why would she think I have suspicions at all? I’m just a failed teacher who got a job making buns for her café.”

  “You may be right.” Grigg rubbed his stubbly gray hair. “But I am morally certain there is something going on at that place, and if it’s not planning sabotage, it’s something else and I need you to figure it out. You’re just going to have to work harder. Keep track of customers, identify patterns. Do people ever arrive separately and then share a table? Listen to what everyone’s saying. Engage your boss in conversation; maybe she’ll let something slip.”

  ***

  After Devra Fordise left his office, Grigg sat alone for some time, drumming the fingers of his right hand on the desktop. This was an exceptionally frustrating investigation. He knew there was something going on at the Esilian café, he could feel it in his gut, but the Minister for Security didn’t set much store by intuition. He would have preferred to run the Fordise girl on his own, without disclosing his plans to the Minister. But the need for inter-bureau cooperation in setting up the “accident” that created a vacancy for her at the café had made that impossible.

  And now all sorts of people were screaming about that accident, demanding an investigation into the Bureau for Transportation. Ordinarily Grigg would have been okay with that; it wasn’t his bureau, and they had been either lazy or incompetent with that accident, letting a dozen Citizens get killed along with the Esilian target. But in this case there was a risk that his counterpart in Transportation would feel himself endangered by the investigation and would throw him to the investigators as the originator of the plan.

  He might be able to survive that – but only if that girl could come up with some hard evidence of seditious activities at the Green Cat. If Grigg could hand the Minister for Security a good excuse for shutting down the Esilian-owned business, nobody would complain about the way he’d gone about getting the information. If it was good enough, the Bureau for Defense might even expel two or three Esilian diplomats to make the point that Harmony would not tolerate sedition, and wouldn’t that be a harmonious chord in Grigg’s resumé!

  ***

  Two hours before the café opened for the evening, Devra let herself in. They must have sold out of baked goods without her there to replenish them; the empty shelves mutely reproached her. Well, the pastry dough she’d meant to use that morning was still in the cooler, nicely chilled. She’d start the easy stuff first, a couple of trays of muffins and a sheet of bar cookies, then while those were baking she could roll out the puff pastry, shape the meat pies – yes, Vess had left a bowl of the chopped meat with raisin sauce in the cooler, she must have assumed Devra would come in early to start baking for the evening crowd. It was nice to be trusted.

  “Thornberry spice muffins!” Mikal crowed when he came downstairs, only a few minutes after Devra had started mixing.

  “For the customers.” Devra whacked the hand reaching out with her mixing spoon. Mikal’s visits to the kitchen had improved both her reflexes and her peripheral vision. He yelped and sucked his knuckles while she poured out the batter.

  “Not bad,” he said. “It’s almost worth getting hit with the spoon to get a taste of the batter. But aren’t you going to make anything with chocolate tonight?”

  “I’m just starting. How do you know what I’m going to make next?”

  “Well. You’ve got preserved pears, candied ginger and cracked threenuts out, so I’m guessing it’ll be the ginger-pear bar cookies. They’re okay,” Mikal allowed generously, “but not sweet enough. Why don’t you put a layer of cream cheese frosting on them?”

  “Some people,” Devra said while she buttered the pan, “don’t share your belief that chocolate and sugar are major food groups. The pears and ginger add quite enough sweetness to my spice cookie mix.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Well, good, at least you won’t be trying to dip into the mixing bowl this time. Don’t you ever w
orry about getting fat?”

  “No, why?”

  Why indeed. Somehow Mikal’s wiry frame burned off all the extra calories he put into it. Probably, Devra thought, it was all that jittering around. The man couldn’t sit still; since his aborted dive into the muffin batter he had pulled up a chair, then gone to look in the cooler, then wiped some fingerprints off the display case, then twiddled the light controls until the mixing bowl was under a spotlight and the rest of the kitchen was bathed in shadow.

  But no, he didn’t look fat. Or plump. Or puffy. He looked – well, pretty good. Muscles in the right places, broad shoulders, and… Stop that. He’s your boss’s nephew. He’s an Esilian. You’re here to spy on him, not to check out his body.

  And she was not slightly short of breath just because he was leaning over a sink now and displaying his nice, tight…

  “What’s Esilia like?” She asked the first question that came into her mind. “Is it very different from Harmony?”

  “Your climate’s better,” Mikal said. He stood up and Devra relaxed slightly. “The first couple of months after Vess and I got here, I went upriver every chance I got, just to see what the land looks like in a place where water falls out of the sky on a regular basis. You’ve got that going for you. That’s why we still import water-intensive crops like rice and almonds from you; even with the cost of transport, it’s cheaper than setting up massive irrigation to grow our own And, of course you have the sasena monopoly – no way to grow that in our country. So after I got over admiring your rain, I started to wonder.”

  A layer of stiff spiced dough in the bottom of the pan; preserved pears spread over that – it was a tricky job, getting the preserves spread thin and even without breaking up the underlying dough.

  “Wonder?” Devra prompted when Mikal fell silent.

  “Your country’s rich, or it ought to be. And you have water.” The last word sounded almost reverent. He might have been saying concord or harmony.

  “I guess you like it okay, then.” Devra chopped the candied ginger and sprinkled it over the pear preserves, then broke up the threenuts and did the same with them.