The absence of footprints might have been a giveaway, though.
Once at Meadow’s apartment building, he flagrantly violated at least six major clauses and several terrifying fine-print injunctions by flying up to her third-floor window and throwing snowballs at it.
“Come out and play in the snow!” he called when she came to investigate the noises.
“You’re insane!”
That was all either of them would say about it, and it seemed to me grossly inadequate to explain how Colton persuaded a girl from the Rio Grande Valley to put on six layers of clothing and join him in making a snowman. I wished they’d taken pictures; bundled in all those sweaters and coats, Meadow must have looked like an opinionated fireplug.
He claimed that he’d even persuaded her to clean up her language by telling her that the way she talked was liable to melt all the snow and then they’d have to go to work.
“That made her laugh,” Colton said, “and once you get a girl to laugh, everything else is easier.”
I asked if he’d helped her warm up after the snow play, but he refused to comment. Well, he’s a gentleman.
Who would have guessed the whole city, including FedEx delivery, would take the day off just because there were a couple of inches of white fluff on the ground? In Bucharest they’d call this a nice spring day. Americans were soft.
Unfortunately, he was dependent on Americans to deliver his scoped rifle.
And nobody was even answering the phone at the FedEx office; he’d heard the recorded message three times. The first time, he hadn’t believed it. The second time, it was beginning to sink in that the soft Americans really thought two inches of snow an adequate excuse for failing to meet their promise of overnight delivery. The third time, he just waited for the message to come to an end so that he could leave a mention of Vlad the Impaler on their voicemail.
Despite having forced us to get up, Lensky didn’t seem to have much to say. He just held me close and ran his hands over me. Not that I objected. Eventually, though, what I was thinking about came out.
“You’ve stopped having that dream. Do you think that means it’s over?”
“Thalia, I stopped having the dream after you agreed to let me drive you to work instead of teleporting into the office. And nothing will be ‘over’ until Sandru Balan is behind bars.”
I sort of knew that was going to be his attitude, but I sighed anyway. “And you couldn’t just count on the FBI to do their job and arrest him?”
He made some comments about the FBI which don’t belong in an informal report that anybody might read, and anyway, I’m pretty sure the part about rocks for brains isn’t literally true.
“If that bomb had killed you, Thalia, I couldn’t…”
“But Colton did get rid of it, and everybody’s alive, and I don’t want to torture myself thinking of things that didn’t actually happen!”
“Don’t get mad. I was just thinking…”
“Do you have to?” I might have started this conversation, but I wasn’t enjoying the way it was going.
“About the future.”
Well, wasn’t that a conversation stopper!
“I’m just happy I still have one,” I said eventually. “Aren’t you?”
“I want to have one with you.”
“Oh, you’re stuck with me,” I said as lightly as possible, “until you decide you don’t want to be.” Something that terrified me when I thought about it. Last fall we’d broken up for less than a week and it nearly killed me. How had I allowed this man to mean so much to me, so quickly? And how was I going to survive if he ever realized I wasn’t all he imagined me to be, but just an ordinary girl with, ok, some extraordinary abilities? I’d vowed to be careful after that, never to take this – or him - for granted.
“I told you last spring,” Lensky said, “that you’re always going to be my problem. I just – hope that’s true.”
“What, that I’m always going to be a problem for you? Very flattering!” I twisted around to kiss him… and to get out of a conversation loaded with pitfalls. He wanted to talk in terms of always and the future. Those words frightened me. If I took him too seriously, I might forget – oh, to be careful. To live in the moment. To be prepared for the inevitable end when he decided he wanted a normal life with a normal person.
Fortunately, he’d recovered sufficiently from last night to be eminently distractible, and I put everything I had into the distraction.
20. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition
On Wednesday the snow was gone and everything seemed to be back to normal. Ben and I finally had a chance to work on the constructs that Colton and Ingrid had developed for flight. We even managed to glide along the hall that connected offices on the private side, a good two feet above the floor, until Dr. Verrick destroyed our concentration by throwing his door open and requesting that we stop giggling and swooping like flying toddlers. I think he enjoyed seeing us crash to the floor. Two feet wasn’t enough of a fall to hurt us, but our egos were badly bruised.
With an acid suggestion that we concentrate on how to exit flight mode without crashing, he retreated back behind his closed door to think about whatever he was working on; new ways to torture topology students, probably.
“I’m disappointed in Dr. Verrick,” I told Ben, very quietly, while we were sitting on the hall floor examining our bruises. The physical ones, that is: his knee, my elbow and chin.
“Why? He wasn’t any grouchier than usual.”
“That line about flying toddlers? Lensky used it first, remember? I always thought Dr. Verrick’s invective was original. Now I learn that he isn’t above plagiarizing spooks.”
He wasn’t above eavesdropping, either.
“Miss Kostis, I suggest you contemplate the possibility that your hi-jinks might inspire the same comparison in two different minds. After which you might spend some time bringing our new intern up to speed, rather than disrupting the office by floating and fluttering to no purpose.
“Mr. Sutherland, I have not yet seen your report on progress in the problem of Riemann surfaces. You have progressed beyond using the images for random fire-starting, have you not? No? Then perhaps your creativity would be better applied to that problem.”
Having startled us and removed a few strips of skin, he went back to his office and slammed the door again. Ben took himself off to fiddle with Riemann geometry, and I sighed and invited Prakash to practice Camouflage. The good thing was that he picked it up immediately; within half an hour he had mastered the visualization of an open cover on an imaginary surface that allowed him to look like a slightly blurred copy of whatever was directly behind him. The only problem that I could see was that learning our techniques so fast wasn’t going to do anything to reduce his overpowering self-satisfaction. Oh well, if he got too bumptious I could always ask Ben to share his work on Riemann surfaces, which, as Doctor Verrick had mentioned, still had an alarming tendency to produce fire rather than the cool light Ben had been aiming for. Either Prakash would have to confess himself stumped too, or he’d figure out how to make light; either result would be fine with me.
I thought out that little plan after sending him out to the break room to recover from the morning’s exertions with a quick sugar hit. We were going to have to show him the stars soon. I just hoped we could knock off some of the towering egotism first. We’d learned by experience that careless handling of Mr. M.’s Babylonian stars could get us in all sorts of trouble, from disappearing buildings to involuntary time travel. I didn’t think Prakash was ready to be careful enough yet.
I was sure of that when he demonstrated misuse of his two new abilities by sneaking back into my office. I was flipping through some of my notes and thinking about the bomb disposal problem. Specifically, about Colton’s promise to get together with Ben and try to find some topological way to accomplish what a pack of C-4 had done to those outbuildings on the farm. They seemed to have forgotten that plan after the snow day. Would it
be a good idea to prod Colton on it? Or could that project safely wait until it was warm enough for them to work outside, preferably in a large vacant lot?
I’d just about decided that it could when I noticed that the right side of my bookcase was blurred to the point that I couldn’t read the titles of any books. I rubbed my eyes and observed that the whiteboard beside the bookcase was also blurry. Fortunately, there was a textbook that I wasn’t all that fond of on my desk. I threw it at the bookcase; the blur disappeared and resolved itself into Prakash, rubbing his arm and complaining that I didn’t need to be that aggressive.
“It’s not nice to sneak into your colleagues’ offices,” I said sweetly. “But as long as you’re here, would you like to tell me how you achieved a seamless transition from teleportation to camouflage?”
He widened his eyes. “What, doesn’t everybody do it that way?”
“What way would that be?”
“Do not be angry, Thalia. I wanted to see you only.”
“Don’t you have anything else to do?” I felt I’d done quite enough mentoring for one day. He could go and pester somebody else while I got back to work on flying half as well as Colton and Ingrid already could.
“Nothing important,” he said, taking his usual pose with one elbow on the bookcase. “Tell me about yourself, Thalia.”
“I am impatient to get back to work. That’s all you need to know.”
He blinked. “Ben told me that asking a girl about herself always works.”
“Yes, well, it works for him because it’s always true. Once he gets interested in a girl, he develops a laser-like focus on her. Did,” I corrected. “He’s only focusing on Annelise now.”
“Sometimes I do not understand you, Thalia.”
“Most of the time, it seems. Let me try it in words of one syllable: Go. Away. Get somebody else to mentor you for a while.” And leave me alone to practice flying.
“Two.”
“What?”
“‘Away’ has two syllables. You really wish me to stay, isn’t it?”
“No, Prakash. It isn’t.”
“Why do women never admit what they are desiring? It is all right, Thalia. No one could object to two colleagues talking in the office. Even the door is open.”
“If you’d leave, I could fix that.”
“I understand the struggle in your heart. It is just like Ayesha in Maine Dil Tujko Diya. She is thinking she must marry Raman, but she is falling in love with Ajay. Raman uses his underworld connections to have Ajay beaten up and nearly killed, but Ajay recovers and marries Ayesha despite all dangers. This man Lensky doubtless is having similar unsavory connections but I am not being swayed by fear.”
“You will have something to be afraid of if you keep hitting on me.”
“I have told you. I do not fear Lensky or his underworld connections.”
“Fine. But you should be afraid of me. Has anybody told you yet about the Toad Transformation?”
Prakash blinked but made a quick recovery. “I am thinking there is no such transformation. It would violate the conservation of matter and energy, isn’t it?”
“Not if it turns you into a very large toad.” If he would just go away, maybe I could find some bit of topology that really did turn people into toads. It would be a continuous function…
Prakash made a dismissive gesture. “You would not do that, even if you could.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Girls are squeamish about toads. You do not wish to have a six-foot toad in your office, no? You are just playing a game, trying to be…what is it? Oh, I remember!” He snapped his fingers. “Hard to get, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” I said between clenched teeth, “and the next move in the game is sending you to a consciousness-raising seminar about sexual harassment.”
“Eve-teasing?” Now he looked wounded. “But this is nothing like that. This is true love! I am waiting for you to understand that only, just like Ajay had to wait for Ayesha’s love. In time you will see that this Lensky is a mistake. He cannot even understand the work you do!”
That had horrible echoes of the break-up last fall, when I discovered just how vulnerable Lensky was to that line of talk.
“Get out,” I said. “You happen to be talking about the man I…” Oh, come on, it shouldn’t be that hard to use the word. “The man I… I… love.”
“That was hard for you to say, isn’t it?”
“That has nothing to do with you!” I left my desk, grabbed his free hand, and teleported us through to the public side of the office. On my way back I visualized the imaginary Möbius strip I was walking as bursting into flames and turning to ash behind me.
Apart from those minor contretemps, Wednesday morning was peaceful enough. We didn’t return to high drama mode until lunchtime.
Ingrid and Colton had brought sandwiches, both making fun of the rest of us wimpy Austinites who thought today was cold. Ben, Annelise, Lensky and I were going down to the Burrito Factory, because their pork in green chile seemed like an appropriate response to this clear, cold day. As it happened, we never got there.
Between Allandale House and the Drag, the grackles attacked. Fluttering and lunging, they seemed to be everywhere, with claws and beaks used as weapons. If that doesn’t sound like much of a problem, you try fighting off two dozen claws and a dozen beaks while being grackled at. Loudly. I ducked and swatted randomly overhead, as did my companions. I heard Lensky cursing. He seemed to be farther off. When the wings beating around my head temporarily disappeared, I saw that he was no longer next to me. Annelise and Ben were even farther away.
We were being herded to separate spots. And if that was what the grackles wanted, we should do exactly the opposite. I raised a shield tight to my body, then slowly expanded it to give me a couple of feet of grackle-free space all around me. Ben could do the same thing if he thought about it; then we’d have to protect Annelise and Lensky, who were both still ducking, cursing, and flailing at the pestiferous birds with both hands.
So was Ben. Deplorable! I wanted to protect Lensky, but I headed for Ben first, to tell him to for pity’s sake shield at once!
The roof gave him an excellent view of the area in front of Allandale House. The first four people to come out for lunch were too close together; holding the feather for speech, he told his grackle companion that he wanted a swarm of grackles to descend on the targets and separate them. It was no part of his plan to fire randomly and take a chance at hitting the wrong person.
The clouds of attacking grackles temporarily hid all his targets. Suddenly there was a clear space around one of them. The wrong one for today. All the same, he enjoyed placing the cross-hairs of the scope over her face.
“Not yet,” he said, “not quite yet, my dear.”
But having sighted her made him feel quietly confident, as though he had placed his mark on her. He could have killed her; her life was his now, even though she didn’t know it yet.
She should have at least a day to know fear and loss before he took her out. A week would have been more satisfying, but the risks of being caught would rise to an unacceptable level.
To start off the campaign, he chose a different target; he would start with her best friend. Coincidentally, the grackles were backing off this one too, as if they knew he wanted a clear shot. Perhaps they did. He centered the cross-hairs of his scope on the man’s forehead and fired.
“Ben!” I shouted as I plunged through the clouds of grackles. A good thing our shields didn’t block sound. “Ben! Manifold!” That was the key-word we’d worked with, visualizing the covered manifold and enabling it as soon as we heard the word.
We hadn’t rehearsed that for some time, but Ben’s reflexes were still excellent. He had his shield up less than a second after hearing the key-word, and as I watched he did as I’d done, extending it outward from his body and forcing the grackles away. Then he turned to Annelise, and I was free to shield Lensky.
It was a good
thing we didn’t have to talk much, because the cawing and crowing of the grackles drowned out nearly every other sound. Every sound except …the crack of a rifle. Were we all shielded? Yes – but a grackle fell dead from the whirring mass of birds.
That was when Ingrid and Colton decided to take a hand. Not that I could see them; it was what I heard that made me look up at the third-floor windows.
Mr. M.’s croak was unmistakable. And it appeared that he could turn up the volume as much as he liked.
There is nothing quite like hearing, “Off we go, into the wild blue yonder,” sung by a synthetic turtle-robot, invisibly swooping down on you.
A handful of little stars suddenly appeared, as if someone had thrown them past the invisible boundaries of a camouflage sphere. They struck down grackles and then zoomed away from us again, disappearing where the side of Allandale House looked blurry. Three or four such attacks, and the grackles decided unanimously that they would much rather be perching in the trees.
Mr. M. sang that they were diving down to attack from under and lights flashed among the trees, lighting up branches and birds much as we’d seen the workers for Texas Bird Services doing. The points of light wobbled, spiraled in and out, shook, disappeared and reappeared. Mr. M. segued into “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” From the sound of it, Ingrid and Colton were flying around the trees.
More lights flashed, this time at the tree nearest us. A clump of grackles departed at high speed and Mr. M. started the second verse.
“All aboard…”
Two more trees lost their burden of grackles.
The rifle cracked again and somebody up in the camouflaged sphere cried out.
Damn! Lensky and I were shielded. Annelise and Ben were shielded. Colton and Ingrid…. Maybe not. Who’d been hurt? I squinted at the blurred bit of sky and thought it might be moving back towards Allandale House.
Mr. M. switched to “Coming Home on A Wing and a Prayer,” and the blur headed for an open third-floor window.
An Annoyance of Grackles (Applied Topology Book 3) Page 15