A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1)

by Margaret Ball

  Crowson didn’t come after me when I scooped the drive up again, but my knees were shaking too much for me to do anything sensible like getting up and running. I swiveled around, still clutching the drive, and saw Lensky on top of Crowson. He seemed to be banging his head on the ground. Seemed like a good idea to me.

  “Where – is – Linda?” he demanded.

  Crowson bared his teeth. “Kill me, and you’ll never find her!”

  Someone screamed – again; the screaming had briefly died down, but now a siren was adding to the noise and confusion. “There they are!” a man yelled.

  “On the ground, on the ground, on the ground!” someone else shouted. “Hands on your head!”

  The cops were pointing their guns… at Lensky.

  “Officers!” Lensky kept talking, without releasing Crowson. “Case Officer Bradislav Lensky, Special Actions Division. Reach into my pocket and you’ll find my badge. This man is a terrorist. Don’t let him get away!”

  “No, he isn’t! I heard everything. They were fighting over a girl!” A gray-haired woman shoved her way to the front. She pointed at me. “Is your name Linda?”

  “Lia,” I said. “And he’s telling the truth.”

  All that bit of discussion availed was to distract everybody enough for Crowson to punch Lensky and flee down the steep hill at the end of the park. Lensky drew his own weapon and fired twice without result.

  “Linda,” he said desperately.

  “Lia! Are you OK?”

  That was Ben’s voice. Good. If he was here, Annelise was probably with him, and maybe she could weave one of her ‘explanations,’ and make the cops help us. Or at least go away.

  And… we might not have time for that. She’d just have to do it without Lensky and me. Explaining Mr. M. would be the tricky part; I hoped he would have the sense to play dead. Dropping the hard drive, I inched closer to Lensky until I could put both hands around his ankle. “Brouwer,” I said for the third time that morning.

  We hit the floor in Allandale house, hard: I had been kneeling, and my grab at Lensky had gotten him off balance. I made a mental note that teleporting was much less uncomfortable if everybody was standing up, stable, and prepared for the experience.

  As if that was going to happen on a regular basis around here.

  “Linda,” Lensky said again.

  He could certainly focus well. That might be a help in the experiment I was going to try.

  “We can be with her in a minute,” I said with somewhat more confidence than I felt.

  “What – How?”

  “Remember when I turned up in the park to get your help? I’d never been there before. I wasn’t jumping to a place; I was jumping to a person. I knew you well enough to use you as my focal point.” I hadn’t intended to let him find that out, but my feelings didn’t matter now.

  “You don’t know Linda that well.”

  “But you do. You love her. I don’t know, but if you concentrate on Linda while I visualize the theorem, maybe the two of us together can jump to where she is.”

  Now that I’d put it into words, it sounded terribly weak. I wasn’t at all sure how this was going to work out. We might not be able to leave Allandale House at all if I didn’t have our destination in mind. We might wind up in some unreal variant of spacetime where we couldn’t exist; get squeezed down to points, or spread out to cover a plane.

  Or we might find ourselves with Linda.

  Before the Master of Ravens could get to her. If Ingrid had destroyed enough of his grackle helpers, he might have to stay in this physical world while he went to where Linda was, and that might give us a chance to get to her first.

  There were way too many “if” and “might” words floating around there. I pushed them out of my brain and wrapped myself around Lensky, who was standing up now.

  “What do I do?”

  “Just think about Linda and stay really focused on her,” I said. That was how I’d found Lensky in the park. Could we split the tasks this way? “Brouwer,” I said, deliberately visualizing two glowing surfaces completely separated in space. If this worked, Lensky’s vision of Linda would become the meeting point.

  Darkness, glowing curved surfaces meeting at one point, nothing to breathe, a jolting transition, more darkness. I sucked in a breath. We were definitely in some kind of physical reality; I couldn’t see anything, but I could smell the air. It was thick with the scent of unwashed bodies. Dizzy from the two rapid jumps with a passenger, I tried to get my balance so I could stop hanging on to Lensky. For all I could tell he might need his hands. Or his weapon. Because now I could tell that those unwashed bodies were all around us.

  As my eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness, I realized that we were surrounded by people who were mostly under four feet tall, and several of whom were crying softly. Not terrorists.

  Little girls.

  “Uncle Brad! I knew you’d come.”

  That blotch of light hair must belong to Linda.

  “Linda. What’s happened?”

  She didn’t know. All she knew was that the man she called the Grackle Whisperer wasn’t a nice old guy at all; he’d grabbed her and put a hand over her mouth and there’d been feathers all around them and then they were in a nice place but he opened the door and shoved her in here and this room wasn’t nice at all and she wanted to go home.

  “Good idea,” Lensky said.

  But what were we going to do about all these other children? I didn’t want to jump us out of here into safety for the three of us and leave this roomful of tearful little girls to whatever nasty fate had been planned for them, and I certainly didn’t have the strength at this point to teleport them all to Allandale House. I wasn’t sure, I told Lensky, that I could even move him and Linda.

  “If it comes to that, take Linda, leave me,” he said calmly. “I can take care of myself. For the moment, let’s see if we can’t get out of here before Crowson turns up.”

  “We need Ben,” I said as Lensky rattled the door. “He does locks.”

  “So,” Lensky said, “does this. Everybody stand back and cover your ears.”

  Linda and I did as he said. The other children in the dim room milled around wailing as if they hadn’t even heard what he said. Linda jumped up and down and waved her arms. “Aqui! Hacer como mi!” I thought the Spanish might not be quite right, but it worked; the other girls joined Linda in the corner and put hands over their ears like her.

  There was a deafening noise followed by a series of quiet pings as the components of the lock gave up their positions. Lensky swung the door open. “Linda, can you tell them to come with us?”

  “I don’t think I need to.” The girls had mobbed the door as soon as it was open. Two of them were holding onto my shorts, several more were holding bits of Lensky, and one very small girl had climbed up onto his shoulders.

  Thus encumbered, we made our way down the hall to a spiral wrought-iron staircase… of a style that I’d seen before, very recently. “Lensky. Is this Whitney Harris’s house?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Indeed. Whitney Harris herself was standing at the bottom of the staircase with a gun in her hand. “Stop right there!” she commanded. “What are you people doing in my house?”

  She didn’t sound quite so calm and amused now.

  Chapter 23

  Lensky paused. He must have been calculating the odds. The way Whitney’s hands were shaking, it was quite likely that she’d miss him. But he was the center of a cluster of little girls. If Whitney fired, somebody was sure to get hurt. True, she appeared to be working up a defense of “I knew nothing about it,” and being willing to shoot a child would not be compatible with that defense. But we couldn’t count on her recognizing that in the heat of the moment.

  I had been behind Lensky on the stairs; now I took a quiet step back, detached the girls who’d been clinging to me and transferred their sweaty little hands to Linda’s belt. One more step back, and under my breath… “Brouwe
r.”

  Even shaky as I was, that small of a jump was easy enough; from the top of the stairs to just behind Whitney Harris. And I already knew what to do next. I whacked her gun hand with both of mine before she even knew I was there, and the gun fell to the floor and skittered away from her. A second later Lensky was restraining her.

  And the children were crying and screaming.

  I picked up Whitney’s gun, just in case Crowson showed up now.

  Then I called 911.

  There are times when you actually do want the police.

  “Well, I guess that explains why she didn’t have a resident staff,” I said, hours later, when we’d all told our – suitably censored – stories multiple times and had worked out what had really been going on. Part of the reason this had taken hours was that the Austin police, no dummies, knew that our stories were thin in places, flatly impossible in others, and failed to account for many of the observed phenomena. They could write off onlooker stories about fireworks and talking snakebots and hard drives floating through the air. The dead water moccasin was easy enough; somebody had shot it, and considering the public relations disaster a giant water moccasin in the park could have created, they weren’t going to look too hard for the guilty party. But there were all those exploded grackles littering the park, and there was Lensky’s car at the park miles from Whitney Harris’s house and no explanation for how he and I had gotten to the house, let alone into the locked-off top story.

  However sure they were that we were leaving things out, they had no actual theory of what we were leaving out. And the expensive-looking lawyer who’d turned up to support Lensky persuaded them to abandon their initial plan of, “There’s something we don’t understand and we’re going to keep all these people right here until they explain it to us.”

  They settled for keeping Whitney Harris and the hard drive image of Crowson’s laptop, and warning the social workers who came for the children to keep them available for further questioning. Ben and Ingrid and I had been told not to leave town without permission.

  Lensky had not.

  After taking Mr. M. home and changing into a clean dress (Ingrid) and a clean T-shirt and denim skirt (guess who) we’d joined the others at El Patio. That evening we were using up the entire front seating section. The owners preferred to have large parties sit at the long table running through the middle of the back room, but we needed to be able to see each other and talk across each other; it wasn’t an occasion for getting stuck at a long table where you could only talk to your nearest neighbors.

  “I still can’t believe she had the nerve to throw a Foundation party while she had half a dozen trafficked children locked in an upstairs room.” Ben was trying to monopolize a basket of tortilla chips, but Annelise, whose blood sugar hadn’t even taken any hits during this hectic day, was matching him chip for chip. Maybe there was a future for those two after all.

  “Why not? The Harrises have more money than God. She’s probably never been held accountable for anything before.” Ingrid had gone for the nachos: immediate fuel, slightly higher quality than chips and salsa.

  “I don’t think they have enough money to bury this.” I’d outraged El Patio tradition by eating three pralines as an appetizer, not as dessert. I’d done more jumping than anybody else, and the vending machines in the police station had been limited to peanut butter crackers and Mountain Dew. I still had low blood sugar and the guacamole cheese enchiladas weren’t out yet.

  “God, I hope not,” Jimmy said. He’d seen more of the porn pictures than any of us except Ben.

  “If that happens, can you come back, ‘Boris’?” Ingrid asked.

  “I’ll probably have to return to testify,” Lensky said, side-stepping the issue of whether he’d be able to give us any other help.

  Raven Crowson had disappeared, as had any fingerprints that might have been left in his house and office. Police investigators were following up on all the contacts revealed in his laptop; given that the head of the Moore Foundation had been in this dirty business up to her neck, nobody on his contacts list was going to be presumed innocent.

  There were loose ends dangling all over the place, enough to trip us up a dozen times over, but the general outline was reasonably clear. The emails that had started Lensky’s investigation had been coded, all right, but they referred to sex trafficking of children from Latin America, not to movement of terrorists. The ‘birthday party’ referenced in the emails would not have involved bombs, just a group of vile people getting their pleasure from terrified children. Including Whitney Harris, who apparently really did think that the commoners were not real people. If we’d had time to think we would have realized she had to be involved; who else could have told Crowson about our copy of his laptop?

  And this ended Lensky’s official involvement. His agency was not supposed to operate domestically, except in cases involving counter-terrorism and the crossing of borders. He had been told not to wait for the closing of the police case; he was supposed to return to the office immediately, to avoid even the appearance of involvement with a domestic matter.

  He already had a ticket for the first flight to Washington tomorrow morning. After he left this extremely public meal, I probably wouldn’t see him again. That should be a good thing; I hate long drawn out good-byes.

  I was still reminding myself what a good thing this was when he disappeared, between one beer and the next, quietly and efficiently.

  I changed my mind half a dozen times before the Uber driver let me off in front of Lensky’s motel room. He probably wasn't even here. He would be out with Pam and Linda, celebrating the successful conclusion of his case. Even if it hadn't been anything like we'd all expected.

  So, fine. I would just knock and go away when no one answered, and it would really be better that way, and given that, why even bother knocking? What did I think I was accomplishing here?

  I guess I needed to know that I wasn't a coward. I wouldn't run away before I established that he wasn't here.

  I was going to knock, I swear to God. But he swung the door open before I was ready.

  "You!"

  He grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the room and slammed the door behind me, all in one motion. Then he backed off and sat down in the room's only chair. "What are you here for? And make it fast, because I have limited tolerance for sitting in a hotel room with you and..." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Limited. Tolerance." What an unreasonable man. Who just yanked whom inside, anyway?

  "If it's inconvenient, I can go. Away. I was about to do that, actually."

  "The door's not locked."

  Oh, God. This really was going to be the most hideously humiliating experience of my entire life, wasn't it? On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the night Rick let me know we were through by stranding me at the party and taking Cyndi Simmons home with him, this was shaping up to be a solid eleven.

  "I've been thinking." My mouth was dry. "About... regrets."

  Lensky ran one hand through his hair and sighed. Deeply. "Oh? If this is going to be another excursion into your philosophy of avoiding emotional pain at all costs, spare me! You've made your feelings perfectly clear."

  "Have I? Because they're not so clear to me." I moistened my lips. "Because what I was thinking is that I can spend the rest of my life regretting something I did... or regretting something I didn't do. And on the whole... I'd rather regret doing something than regret not doing it. If it doesn't put you out, of course, and..." My courage was leaking out. God, why was I such a fool? The man had said the door wasn't locked. Obviously he was just waiting politely for me to use it. "Never mind, it's not your problem, sorry to have bothered you, I'll just be going now..."

  He was out of his chair and holding me by the shoulders before I'd even half turned for the door. "Thalia." He bent his head and kissed me. Hard, hungry. "If you don't mean it, you'd better go now. Because my tolerance for this is officially used up. Now." He didn't explain how I was supposed to go anyw
here when he had me backed up against that door and was grinding himself into me until we were seconds away from having our first serious sexual encounter with both of us fully dressed.

  Which seemed rather a waste.

  He picked me up by the hips and lifted me to a more accessible height for his purposes. I didn't have any objection. In the next few minutes he disposed of the clothing barriers – I never did find those panties – and demonstrated that yes, he could hold me up indefinitely even while distracted by doing other things.

  I may have screamed just once or twice.

  Then he was just holding me and kissing me and there were actually glints of moisture in his eyes. "Where'd that rational, reserved little mathematician go?"

  "Oh, her? Turns out she had her priorities scrambled, so I sent her home."

  "And brought the wild party animal over here." He was doing his energetic best to kiss my neck all the way down to my nipples, and my T-shirt was going to go the way of my panties if I didn't do something.

  "I realize this is a boringly conventional suggestion," I told him, "but if you'd put me down on the bed I could take this off."

  We got to the bed, but as soon as his hands were free he got one up under my shirt and filled it with me. The noise he made seemed to indicate that he found my assets adequate. "Do you always not wear a bra, or has this week been specially for me?"

  "Oh my God, you tore my bra off and I didn't even notice!" The look of shock on his face was the funniest thing I'd ever seen. I started giggling uncontrollably and barely managed to choke out, "J-just kidding, I don’t usually wear a bra, I don't really need one."

  "An admirable philosophy," he said, pausing in his fondling just long enough to haul the T-shirt over my head so that he could get down to properly appreciating my breasts. "I certainly don't need you to be wearing one." He didn't seem to have a problem with the fact that I wasn't exactly built like Ingrid - something the late, unlamented Rick had managed to mention at least once every time he got my shirt off, and why the hell had I ever wasted even five minutes on that loser?