by Faye, Audrey
She had no plans to disagree. The Wanderers had been carefully studied, and they had never produced a rogue Talent. And unlike some of the people of KarmaCorp, she knew better than to believe that they had a monopoly on working with the energies of the universe. However, she spoke as Director now, and while that gave her significant power, it also meant her words would be weighed on a different scale. She considered, and made a decision. “If you have children with Talent, we will welcome them.”
He smiled. “Thank you. If we have those who want to come, we will send them.”
Good enough. Carefully worded diplomacy on both sides. They understood each other.
She knew that in this, she would differ from the mainstream opinion in the organization she worked for, but that was her right. KarmaCorp was, in the end, no more than the sum total of the people who worked for it, and she did the organization no favors by subsuming anything of who she was simply because it might not be the view in most favor.
Something the man in front of her clearly understood at the level of cloth and weave. She reached for her pastry, feeling more settled than she had since her shuttle set down. “So. Tell me how you became the leader of a tribe of Wanderers that doesn’t wander.”
His eyes twinkled, and he picked up his own pastry, gesturing it toward hers. “Better ovens.”
The surprised laugh escaped before she could catch it—and then the smells under her nose finished the job. Surrendering to what called her, Yesenia leaned in, closed her eyes, and took her first bite.
It was everything the hungry child could have ever wanted it to be. Crispy, flaky crust breaking under her teeth and letting the sopping juices leak through. Pungent spice landing first, and then the rich oils of meat cooked for days in its own juices.
She didn’t chew, didn’t swallow, didn’t move. She just sat, holding that first bite in her mouth and letting the full magic of it work its way loose.
A hum of deep, joyous gratitude rose in her throat, and she let it come. Let the wise old man beside her hear it. Let him see her dancing fingers move to catch the falling flakes of crust and the errant drops trying to run down her chin.
The hungry child, stepping into a moment of utter, sublime perfection.
She heard the soft rumble of laughter beside her. Heard the crunch as Tamsin bit into his own pastry, adding pungent aromas to the already swirling smells.
She didn’t say a word—she didn’t have to. She just kept eating, one worshipful, intent, delighted mouthful at a time, the fifteen voices in her stomach all rendered speechless.
It had been worth the trip just for this.
-o0o-
“This way, mi’dama.”
Yesenia followed, bemused, as the child of the scarves led her down a narrow, twisting row that clearly wasn’t where market customers wandered. The girl had shown up just as they were finishing their lunch, bowed, and offered to take their honored visitor to see Alara.
A nice bit of theater, even if she was quite certain it had been scripted.
This part, however, surprised her. People who dared to issue a summons to KarmaCorp personnel generally didn’t invite them in the back door.
The girl stopped and glanced over her shoulder, looking a little worried. “Maybe I should have brought you the other way.”
Yesenia cursed quietly under her breath and raised her pastry-weakened barriers. Apparently, half the market could read thoughts, and she was broadcasting hers far too loudly. “Are you a sensitive, child?” It seemed politer to ask than to poke at her energetically to find out.
“Maybe.” The girl seemed unconcerned. “Alara says that’s what the Federation would probably call me. Here, she just tells me I have to be polite and not listen when people are thinking things that are none of my business.”
Well, she could approve of Alara that much, at least. Teaching ethics to preteen girls wasn’t always easy business, but it was a very necessary one. “Alara is your teacher, then?”
The girl scrunched up her face, apparently in no hurry to keep moving. “Everyone teaches.”
Yesenia sighed—she knew better than to impose standard Federation cultural constructs on a group that clearly opted out of most of them. “She helps you learn how to use your gift?”
The child’s eyes cleared. “Yes. She helps, and so do Tamsin and Meedan and Geruni and Sam, except Sam can be kind of impatient, so I only go see him when someone else can’t help me first because Alara said that would be prudent. I had to look up what that meant on the GooglePlex.”
It was impossible not to like the girl, even if she was probably spilling clan secrets as she babbled. “I suspect it’s also prudent that you take me to Alara on the quickest path you have available to you.”
The child grinned. “I am—that’s why I brought you this way. It’s messy, but it’s a lot faster.”
A tribe that fostered independent initiative in their youngest members. Yesenia knew that one of her greatest challenges would be doing the same with the trainees in her care—while making sure they very rarely used it. Talent simply carried too much risk to be given that kind of freedom.
She looked down at her guide, carefree and smiling and swathed in every color of the rainbow, and wondered if the girl had any idea how lucky she was. Raised in a village of plenty with love and guidance at her back.
“I do know.” Dark eyes looked up, suddenly very serious. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to hear that, but you’re thinking kind of loudly again.”
The many and varied dangers of a full belly. Yesenia schooled her thoughts to more innocuous things. “Perhaps I need Alara to train me as well.”
The child nodded solemnly. “Maybe you do.”
Yesenia managed to keep her snort to herself. Nobody trained a Traveler, not a full-grown one, anyhow, but it spoke to the depth of respect for Alara that the child thought she could.
Her guide was on the move again. Yesenia picked her way carefully through ropes and baskets and the colorful riffraff of the part of the market that wasn’t usually seen, and spent the journey pulling her full Fixer self back online. She didn’t know where she was going quite yet, but she was very sure of one thing.
The crux point of this journey was directly ahead.
-o0o-
“You don’t look like a Seer.” Yesenia could hear the terseness in her voice—and the nerves. She hoped like hell that the young woman sitting calmly across from her only sensed the former. The lulling effects of spicy pastries and redolent color were long gone.
It was time for business. With a woman who had just proclaimed that she was a Seer in tones most people used to say they were hungry.
“I could, if it would make you feel better.” The woman’s voice was rich, warm, and amused.
This wasn’t about feelings. “You sent me the message.”
Shoulders covered in rich purple fabric shrugged negligently. “In a manner of speaking.”
The words weren’t what Yesenia was focused on, but they annoyed her anyhow. And her Talent wasn’t picking up anything that made sense, at least not anything definitive. The woman who had dragged her halfway across the quadrant with a whisper had excellent self-control—and, Yesenia suspected, gifts beyond measure. “Do you have a name?”
“Of course.” The woman inclined her head, her tone back to amused. “You may call me Alara.”
“That’s hardly your full name.”
“It’s what you’re getting.”
Not if she could help it. Yesenia switched to a more active probe, sending a light, inaudible series of resonances aimed just under Alara’s ribcage. The solar plexus held the seed of who a person was in the world, and Singing Talent was particularly good at reading the energy of the chakras.
For a moment, the notes hung in inaudible space as two strong women looked at each other in a silent contest of wills. And then something flung the fragment of Song away, scattering it as thoroughly as Yesenia had ever seen her Talent tossed.
She blink
ed, too shocked to be angry. “What are you?”
“Nothing to be probed without consent.” There was no amusement now, just the edge of command and steel.
It wasn’t a probe of that nature, but Yesenia wasn’t here to debate KarmaCorp ethics. “You sent a three-line message ordering me to show up here at the blasted date and time of your convenience. I have a right to know something about the person who is trying to yank my strings.” So far all she had was someone who looked no older than an apprentice Fixer and had a flare for the overly dramatic.
Brown eyes watched her steadily. “You don’t like to be ordered around, is that it?”
This was absurd. And potentially dangerous, even if her Talent wasn’t sniffing so much as a whiff of current threat. Outside the tent, the market proceeded as always, with nary a ripple of concern from the hundreds of people in attendance. Yesenia reached a little farther, but didn’t detect anything that would suggest the more focused intent of someone looking to do harm, especially the kind of skilled someone who would need to be sent to deal with a Fixer of legend.
The Federated Commonwealth of Planets wasn’t a fertile breeding ground for assassins, but she’d met a few in her time. None of them had been foolish enough to get in her way.
“One day you will need to learn to trust.”
Yesenia’s eyes shot back to Alara’s face, which suddenly seemed hidden in shadows. “Is that prophecy, Seer, or mere guesswork?”
“Some of both.”
Her Talent was reading only honest intent. Whatever the uncommon young woman on the other side of the table was, she believed herself to be telling the truth. “I would appreciate it if we could dispense with the theater and get to the point.”
The young Seer smiled. “Sadly, the universe doesn’t always speak as clearly as both of us would wish.”
She wasn’t here for platitudes, even ones delivered with wry wisdom. “It apparently spoke clearly enough for you to feel justified in summoning me away from my duties.” The sheer arrogance of that still astonished KarmaCorp’s newest director. “Do you have any idea how much work awaits me?”
“No.” Alara seemed unconcerned by the specter of piles of paperwork or powerful people kept waiting. “I know that the energies move strongly around you.”
That much Yesenia had known since she was eight years old and time had started rippling as she slept. “KarmaCorp is aware of that, as am I.”
The Seer bowed her head slightly. “KarmaCorp is respected here.”
It was—but it wasn’t revered. Or feared. What lived here stood apart and felt itself equal, and so far, Yesenia hadn’t seen anything to lead her to dispute that. There was power here, and control, and wisdom.
Alara’s lips quirked, as if she heard the unspoken thoughts. “I expected it to be harder to convince you of that.”
Yesenia felt the opening and stepped into it. “I have a Talent that in almost any other age would have made me a sorceress.”
The Seer nodded. “Amongst my people, we would call you that still.”
The Anthros would have a field day here—assuming they were ever let in the door. “I do not dismiss knowledge gained through unusual means.” She simply had high standards for what qualified as knowledge.
That part wasn’t necessary to say. Someone as self-confident as the woman before her would take it as a given.
The young Seer met her gaze for a long moment, and then nodded again and steepled her hands in front of her face. A decision made. “I know this much. I have seen your face in my dreaming for nigh on ten years now. I didn’t know who you were until I sat watching a vid one night with my niece and nephew and you showed up in a news clip. It was right after you’d returned from Halcyon Omega.”
The mission that had made her a household name on far too many planets. “If you’re looking for a piece of fame and fortune, you’re welcome to all of them.”
“I imagine they aren’t a comfortable weight to carry for one who seeks to live in the shadows.”
Yesenia didn’t want to know if that was prophecy or guesswork. Too many people here understood her far too well. She had very little experience with being transparent. “I seek to do my job.”
“You do it well. I believe that will continue.” Alara paused, and for the first time, gave off faint flickers of unease. “It is your personal life that will tangle and bring you grief.”
That wasn’t possible. “I don’t have a personal life.”
“That is a sadness.”
She wasn’t here for counseling. “I have a shuttle to catch, and you’re wasting my time.”
Alara sat up, both hands on the table, eyes full of snapping light. Suddenly, she looked every bit a Seer. “I will excuse your rudeness, Yesenia Mayes, for I have seen your tears and your anguish and your terrible loneliness.”
Something bleak and hard came to life in Yesenia’s gut right underneath her solar plexus.
“You will find love,” said the Seer softly, every word liquid fire. “And then it will be ripped away from you. The one because you must let it go, and the other because you choose it.”
The heart Yesenia claimed she didn’t have squeezed tightly. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I don’t believe I am meant to see what happens.” Alara clasped her hands together slowly. “I am only meant to deliver you this message. To save the ones you love, you must find the four.”
“Four what?” So far, this was a Gordian knot of gibberish.
“I don’t know.” Alara’s eyes cleared, full of sharp intelligence now—and empathy. “I only know that every morning of the last ten years that I have woken with your face in my mind, it has come with those three words. Find the four.”
“Then you’ve spent ten years wasting your time.” Yesenia could hear the sharpness of her tone, a knife’s edge trying to wield certainty where none existed.
“You have Shaman Talent.” Alara’s fingers traced the lines of the largest of her rings.
All Travelers did. “I have all four of the Talents.”
“Then you know that these energies are both imprecise and important.”
They were—if Alara was anything more than a highly skilled charlatan.
The woman across the table smiled. “Believe as you must. I’ve done what the spirits have asked me to do, and that is enough. I trust that if you need my words, you will remember them.”
She wasn’t likely to forget. Not when something deep inside her own soul knew them for truth, as wildly annoying and inconvenient as that might be. And that meant she couldn’t walk out of here a Fixer in high dudgeon, even if every fiber of her being wanted to do just that.
Yesenia Mayes honored truth, even when it was difficult. She bowed her head in the mannerisms of her youth. “I thank you.”
Brown eyes sparked with surprise. And then a corner of Alara’s mouth turned up. “You are not what I expected, Traveler.”
That went both ways. “Nor are you, Seer.”
Yesenia stood up, feeling the energies abruptly release.
Alara stayed seated, hands flat on the table. “Are you headed back to your shuttle? I can have someone walk with you.”
The oddest energy seized Yesenia, tickling her insides and making her want to sneeze. “I believe I have a stop or two to make first.” She had a tube of drawings to pick up—and one final errand she was taking pains not to examine too carefully.
She assumed she wouldn’t have any difficulty finding the young girl with the bright eyes and the gaudy scarves. She had no truck with scarves, and she didn’t intend to start now.
But perhaps her new office could use a rug.
An Assistant As Ordered
“Name?”
Bean looked down at her travel-worn shirtsleeves and tried to remember if she’d left Gastonia with all her body parts, much less a name. And whether she wanted her new life in this new place to begin with a label from the old one.
Then again, telling the customs people a name that didn’
t match her ident card was probably a guaranteed trip to a small room and lots of frowning, at the very least, and she didn’t have the patience or the emotional energy to deal with either. “Lucinda Coffey.”
“Planet of origin?”
She held her breath and kept telling the truth. “Gastonia.”
The agent’s eyebrow went up. “And when was the last time you were home?”
They’d be used to inner-planet travelers here. That much was obvious from the relaxed stance of the official security types she’d laid eyes on and the lack of blasters, hidden or otherwise. This was a place that trusted that things usually went according to plan and that new arrivals were generally nice people. Nothing lax about the security, but the vibe was different from what she was used to.
Not that Gastonia was overflowing with official security types. “I’ve lived there off and on my whole life.” That much they’d be able to read from her ident card, although it didn’t have a record of all her comings and goings. “Most recently, I was off-world to attend higher education training in business systems.” That had been a cover story, but today it was probably going to be a useful one.
The woman on the other side of the counter raised an eyebrow.
Bean knew why. Dreadlocked hair, iridescent skinsuit, and enough jewelry to start up a market stand. She didn’t look like a tech geek.
The agent pulled up a screen on the big monitor and manual keyboard system she used. Old school. Bean approved. Tablets were good for all kinds of things, but they made your eyes cross after a while.
Bean took the time to glance at the name stitched on the agent’s navy-blue skinsuit. Ophelia. She grinned—that was almost as bad as Lucinda.
The agent looked up in time to catch the grin and the direction Bean’s eyes were pointing. “Tell me about it. My mom is a professor of ancient poetry. There was just no way I was getting born with a name that wasn’t embarrassing.”
And yet she’d had it stitched onto her skinsuit. Ophelia Barnes clearly loved her mother. “Most people call me Bean.”