Aware

by Andy Havens

  That’s not good. It’s never good when the Lords leave their castles.

  Out loud she asked, “Ezer? Coming here? Why?”

  “Kendra.”

  “Hunh? Why? Increase discarded any claim to her before she was born. That whole thing with her father. Or supposed father. Or whatever. She’s a free agent.”

  “She hasn’t declared for Chaos?”

  “Heck, no. We wouldn’t have her at this point. She’ll cause all kinds of mayhem wherever she goes. We don’t need the headache of bringing her formally into the Court.”

  The crow shook her head, an alarmingly unbirdlike gesture. “That complicates things. I assumed that by now… Anyway, Vannia, I do not know why Ezer is coming. I do know he was heads-down with Rain Vernon just prior to his final encounter with Kendra.”

  “The Warden plotting with an Earth Master? That makes no sense. Earth and Increase are about as incompatible as…”

  “Any two Houses. Yes, yes. I know. But there is a confluence building. Some strange alliances. Other strange… grudges, perhaps, is the right word.”

  “Not kanli?”

  The crow shook her head again. “Nothing that formal. That would require notice. A neutral party. At least one witness to a Sanctuary contract. This is all… clandestine.”

  Vannia thought quickly. She might have looked like a young, blonde girl straight out of a 19th century British folk tale, but she was cannier and more experienced than most Reckoners in matters involving conflicts between the Houses.

  “Ezer is directly involved?” she asked quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s perilously close to a breach in the Law.”

  “Only if he is actively plotting against another House. If he is just… discussing things. Learning things. That breaks none of the Law.”

  The crow paused for a minute, cocking her head to one side. “He can do whatever he wants with Kendra. Since she’s not bound by House or Law yet.”

  Vannia twirled her hair around one finger for a moment, thinking fast and hard.

  “I can’t cover her under Chaos. Not officially. Not in my remit.”

  The bird remained still, suggesting nothing.

  “Maybe your House?” Vannia suggested questioningly. She kept twirling her hair, a casual gesture made a bit frantic by the speed at which she was doing it.

  The bird remained still.

  Vannia sighed. “I know it’s rude to ask. Usually it’s obvious. And if it’s not obvious… it’s not obvious for a reason. But you clearly have an… interest… in Kendra. As do I. The Red Brothers will not intervene, especially if the Warden is directly involved.”

  Tess said simply, “Under the Law, he can take her. He can retain or kill her. The same for Lane. The worst he will face is kanli, and that would be a vague, shallow case even if Release brought it. Which Lady Percy will not…”

  “Because Lane insulted her, gravely, by leaving Release…”

  “Exactly,” Tess replied. “So it is up to us. More precisely, to you.”

  Vannia frowned. “I do not like being constrained. Or directed. Or cajoled. Or manipulated.”

  “None of us do, dear. But circumstances sometimes drive necessity.”

  Vannia thought very hard, very quickly and came to a decision.

  Jumping up from the bed, she stretched her arms over hear head and cracked her knuckles.

  “Thanks for the warning, Tess. I owe you.”

  “Give him a chance to announce,” the crow said. “If he gives fair warning, you may be able to at least invoke hospitality rules and avoid a… confrontation.”

  “But if he doesn’t…”

  “Yes. He’s not here to talk.”

  * * * * *

  The town car pulled up to the curb about a block south of the White’s. Laura knew it was there because of the very slight, subtle Way that clued her into the presence of another on the trusted, inner team. Keeping half-an-eye on the house, she walked across the street and made a slight signal to let the driver know where and who she was. The return Way matched the correct codes, so she hustled down the block to meet the new team.

  One man and one woman got out of the front: both very athletic, both wearing expensive suits, both clearly powerful and well trained. Merely from observing their Ways and the smoothness of their actions, Laura could tell that these two were as high above her in training and craft as she was above your average Mundane crossing guard.

  The man opened the back door of the expensive car and Gareth Ezer stepped out, radiating a sense of purpose and power that was almost overwhelming to her Increase-trained senses.

  This man is… everything I’d ever want to be. I would gladly die for him.

  “Sir,” she said, stepping forward enough to be obvious. “No change in situation. The girl is on the back step of her mother’s house. Lane is inside as well. I can’t confirm any others.”

  Ezer nodded, fixing his cuffs a bit. On another man, it might have looked like a nervous habit or a way of revealing expensive cufflinks in order to demonstrate wealth. On Gareth it was simply…

  I don’t know. I can’t tell. It just… On him… It works…

  She would have slept with him on the spot. In the street. In the car. Or with one of his personal team if he’d asked. Or if they’d asked. Or she would have given up sex for life. Or anything. Or gone away and done nothing if that was what was needed.

  Then he smiled.

  “Ms. Mason,” he said.

  He knows my name!

  “You’ve done well. Ideally, you wouldn’t have triggered protocol. This is a… unique situation. But you did well. Next time, please review your orders more precisely. That’s especially important in unique situations. It’s why we have a chain-of-command.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “I know you do. Please follow Nico and Jessie here. I’d like you to provide additional reconnaissance and comms if necessary.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  I’m not going to be demoted! He’s going to let me assist his personal team!

  She tucked away the panic and nervousness for later, determined to show a professional, capable front to the Warden and his hand-picked assistants.

  As they walked down the block, Ezer gestured to his male guard, Nico, and the man nodded and peeled off to keep an eye on the side street where Laura had been watching Kendra. He jogged across the intersection, stepped briefly around the corner, turned back and nodded at Ezer.

  The girl is still on the back porch, Laura surmised. OK. Good.

  The three continued on to a spot on the sidewalk directly across from the White’s townhouse. The street was almost empty. Just a few cars tooling slowly past. A woman walking her dog at the next intersection. The sound of Billy Joel coming from the nearby building.

  Honesty… is such a lonely word… and everyone is so untrue…

  The female guard, Jessie, took point and headed into the street. Ezer stepped off the curb after her and Laura thought, Every movement he makes is perfect. Only enough effort to do what he wants. So smooth and graceful. I can aspire to that. I can watch him and take his advice and someday, maybe centuries from now, I’ll be asked to…

  The short, glass-tipped wooden shaft pierced her shoulder just above her protective vest before the sound or sight of it even registered on her consciousness.

  If she’d been looking in just the right direction she might have seen a flash of green. Either way, she wouldn’t have been able to stop it. There was a bright note of pain and a shock through her entire system as if she’d grabbed a live electric wire. She had time for one quick thought:

  … will not look good…

  and then fell to the ground unconscious.

  Ezer and his guards were instantly in motion as the second bolt skidded across Jessie’s cheek, leaving nothing more than a bad scratch, but that was enough to slow her down and make her a bit foggy.

  “Neuro only,” she managed to gasp out. “Not deadly.”
And then she slumped to one knee in the middle of the road for a moment. Faltering a bit, still unclear in her thinking, she managed to muster a Way that pumped strength and alertness through her body. She stood up as quickly as she could and placed herself, again, between Ezer and the direction the bolts had come from.

  As she drew a pistol, the third bolt found the small unarmored spot beneath her gun arm. The fourth thudded into her wrist, not penetrating her Way-reinforced sleeve, but knocking the gun from her grasp.

  The toxin from the bolt in her armpit was too much and she toppled into the middle of the street.

  “Get around back,” Ezer ordered Nico in a clear, calm voice. “Get the girl. I’ll take the front.”

  I should have waited for the full ground team, he thought, picking up his pace.

  Thirty feet to the front steps. Twenty. Five. Up the curb, the steps, hand on the front door handle.

  As he touched the cool brass he felt the space behind him expand. He held one hand braced on the door and turned to meet whatever was there behind him with a Way-enhanced block.

  There was nothing.

  From the bush below and to his left, he saw a glint of sharp glass and the tiny, blonde girl who held it trained on him.

  “You guessed wrong,” she said quietly.

  He held very still, not flinching, and replied, “So did you.”

  She frowned a bit and paused long enough to hear/feel a sound/vibration like a whirring top or a high-pitched fan. It was coming from across the street.

  Vannia tensed, about to leap up and put Ezer between her and whatever was making that noise.

  “Don’t,” he said simply. She stopped and heard similar noises coming from at least three other places around the building.

  He nodded. “You understand. One of them is trained on Kendra,” he said simply.

  Vannia clucked her tongue, thinking.

  “I’m not here to fight,” Ezer said quietly. “I’m here to talk.”

  The little girl clucked her tongue a few more times. “I’m not sure that’s true,” she replied.

  “If I’d wanted her dead, I’d have done it quietly. Not approached in the open.”

  Making a maybe yes, maybe no face, Vannia said, “Why didn’t you call first, then? Or send up a Way?”

  “I didn’t know who was with her. I didn’t know you were here. The Brothers? I can bargain with. Some others? I wasn’t sure they wouldn’t kill her if I telegraphed my intentions.”

  God, he talks like a chronic sometimes, Vannia thought.

  “Fair enough,” she replied. “But why come yourself? Why risk… this?”

  The whirring noises were still filling the air with a sinister, promising vibration. Across the street a Mundane had noticed Laura’s body and was bending down to call 911 for a case of what looked, to her, like an old lady who’d fallen and passed out.

  “Inside,” Ezer said.

  “Answer,” Vannia demanded.

  Ezer looked a bit peeved, but he replied, “Because I no longer know who to trust.”

  That answer satisfied the tiny, blonde assassin. Almost…

  “Question first, Warden.”

  “Yes?”

  “I could have killed your first guard. The second one? Probably not.”

  Ezer waited. It was a statement of fact.

  “Why didn’t you have all your Ways in place around you and the first one before approaching.”

  “She needed a lesson.”

  That’s… cold.

  “But you didn’t know I’d be aiming at her. That first shot could have killed you.”

  He smiled at her and didn’t even need to say, Do you really think so?

  “Come in,” she said with a sigh, hopping up onto the step next to him. “Under the rules of simple hospitality. But if you hurt her, I will make war on you yourself, on my own.”

  “Agreed and understood. At the moment, I mean her no harm.”

  That was so carefully said and obviously the truth that Vannia laughed and patted him on the arm as she opened the door.

  * * * * *

  Thomas Brownfield Edgington and his friend Ken were in the attic of the main residence building at the Farm. The building pre-dated the S/W program by almost a century. It had originally been built as a resort for East Coast celebrities before the nexus of film entertainment moved to Hollywood. It was a huge, single-story building with more than a hundred large, airy guest rooms and a variety of support areas and semi-attached outbuildings. The main corridor stretched the length of the building with administrative areas at one end and the “guest” suites and rooms fanning out from short corridors along its length.

  The attic ran the entire length of the main building. It provided access to a variety of electrical and HVAC equipment, quite a lot of storage space and room for many, many bugs, mice, bats and birds.

  Very little work had been done up there since the S/W program had taken over. About the only thing Tom could see that looked less than fifty years old was some pink, foamy insulation that, even though relatively newish, was graying and limp with collected moisture and age.

  The roof was an angled peak with a broad walkway down the middle. The two of them could stand, side by side, without bumping their heads, as long as they didn’t move too far from the center of the walkway. Light came down from a series of small, square panes of glass set on both sides of the roof about every fifteen feet. There were a few lightbulbs in simple sockets screwed to the main beam passing above them, but none were turned on and neither of the men had any idea where to look for a switch. A bright, diffuse haze made the bulbs unnecessary.

  “You didn’t tell me about the… stuff!” Tom whispered.

  Ken nodded, also whispering. “Yeah. There’s lots of stuff. But it’s mostly too big or fragile to sneak down. There’s a large service door with a built-in ladder in the admin wing. But we can’t use that.”

  “No, no,” Tom agreed. “I get it. But it’s just… Cool.”

  “Yeah.”

  Old, fancy furniture. Bird cages. Mannequins. Paintings, some draped on easels and some simply leaning against the rafters. An old-timey bike with a big wheel in front. Piles of dusty, mildewed bed linen and tablecloths. Big boxes that looked like by-god treasure chests. Dozens of mismatched shoes piled up in a huge baby’s crib or child’s bed built to resemble a Viking ship with a dragon’s head and everything.

  They walked slowly down the aisle from their end of the building toward the admin wing.

  Barrels. Boxes. Gardening tools. A stuffed deer with men’s coats hanging on the antlers. A large glass display case with many small trophies, framed pictures and ribbons inside. A device that might have either been an antique vacuum cleaner or maybe something you’d use to shoot tennis balls during practice. A four-foot tall pile of old, thick phonograph records threaded on a metal rod.

  “It’s amazing,” Tom whispered.

  Ken hadn’t really noticed before. He’d been up here a few times, but had concentrated on all the ways he could get in and out without being seen. He’d only really noticed “the stuff” in terms of whether or not it blocked a particular ingress or egress. Or if the items would make noise and alert the staff.

  On one of the shelves, among a bunch of ornate pins and rings and what Tom assumed were handkerchiefs, he saw a small, round disk of glass with an attached ribbon. It seemed to reflect light that wasn’t actually there, glittering more brightly and with more color than a piece of glass should in the dimness.

  Then the lens spoke to him:

  One full turn / burn to burn

  Memories forever and a chance to learn.

  Fast or slow / stop and go

  Keep me in a pocket and you’ll never know!

  That’s very odd. Tom thought. I don’t remember a piece of glass talking to me before.

  Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he recalled a kind old man with white hair and glasses a little like these. More sparkly than they should have been.

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nbsp; He reached out to touch it and Ken laid a hand on his arm. “Be careful. This stuff wants to fall over and make noise. A lot of it is very… It’s… eager. Waiting.”

  Tom nodded. He had no idea what Ken meant, but he knew how to be careful and gentle. Reaching out delicately, deliberately, he touched nothing else but the black ribbon hanging from the circle of glass. He lifted it carefully, silently off the shelf, disturbing only a small puff of dust.

  It spun back and forth on the ribbon and seemed to be… happy… to have been picked up. The flashes of light are like little smiles, Tom thought.

  Holding it by the ribbon, careful not to touch the glass with his bare fingers for some reason, he used the untucked waist of his t-shirt to wipe the lens clean of dust and grunge.

  It wasn’t coming clean very well. He looked at Ken. His friend shrugged and said, “Try some spit.”

  That made sense. Still holding the lens inside a fold of shirt, Tom spit on the glass and pinched it around for a bit. When he was done, it looked pretty clean.

  He glanced back up at Ken, who shrugged again. “You can take that,” Ken said. “I don’t think anyone will notice, as long as you keep it in your pocket or something.”

  Tom nodded and slipped it into the pocket of his robe.

  “I’ll play with it later,” he said softly.

  “Good idea,” replied Ken. “Let’s keep going.”

  Quietly, slowly, they advanced up to the front of the building. As they passed over one of the common rooms near the juncture of the residence wing and the admin wing they could hear faint, mumbled talk coming from below. That made Ken chuckle quietly, and he pointed down and mimed a kind of “I’m spying!” face with one hand beside his ear.

  Tom smiled and nodded back. “Fun!” he whispered.

  They moved on. At the very end of the attic was the large access panel Ken had described. It was about five feet on a side, connected to some kind of heavy pulley mechanism and had a handrail around three sides. There were even remnants of a kind of small crane above the spot and Tom could imagine workers using it to haul up the big furniture and boxes they’d seen along the way. Unlike the crane and handrails, the door itself was made of what looked like newer metal, locked in two places by mechanisms that Tom did not begin to understand.