A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4)

by Margaret Ball

  “There is?”

  “Yes! Look at that one’s dorsal fin… oh, darn, he’s swimming away… that one, then!” She pointed and Jimmy bent down for a closer look.

  “What’s that lump on its back?”

  “I don’t know,” Harper said. “The pictures I saw don’t show anything like that. With the first one I thought it was some kind of deformity, but they all have it. So maybe a contagious growth of some kind? And whatever it is, the machalees don’t like it. They’re all the time rubbing up against the decorative coral, as if they itch right there, and the coral is ripping up the webbing between the spines. See how ragged they all look? So I was thinking, you have to talk to Mr. C. about your work, and maybe you could just mention that I’m afraid the machalees are dying?”

  Jimmy and Ben looked at each other. Then Ben fished out his glasses and stared at the tank. Coward! He was leaving Jimmy the task of letting the girl down.

  “I don’t think…”

  Jimmy stopped at the stricken look in Harper’s eyes and started over.

  “We’re probably not the best people to approach the boss about this. I mean, we don’t know anything about fish.”

  “Yes, but if—”

  “It’s not a natural deformity,” Ben interrupted her, straightening up. “Not a tumor, either. It’s been put on them.” He glared at Harper as though it was her fault. “What kind of an idiot clamps a huge heavy metal tag on fish? Oh, I guess there are places where you could do that without harming them, but not in the webbing of a fin!”

  “All right, then,” Jimmy said briskly, “we know what the problem is, Harper. All you have to do is explain to Mr. Chayyaputra that the tags are harming them…” He trailed off at the look of betrayal on Harper’s face.

  “I told you, he’s always too busy to talk to me.”

  “You’ll just have to be firm.”

  Harper’s brown eyes filled with tears, and Jimmy realized it was no use telling her to be firm, any more than you could tell a kid to be mature.

  “And besides,” Ben said, “she’d have to wait a week to talk to him, and who knows how many of the fish will be left then? Tell you what, Jimmy. Let’s scoop one of them out and see if we can’t remove the tag ourselves.”

  “Oh, would you?” Harper looked up at Ben as if he was her hero. The lank brown hair fell back from her face and this time she didn’t brush it forwards.

  She had a lot of freckles.

  “Sure,” Ben said, “no trouble.” He looked at Jimmy. “We won’t charge Mr. Chayyaputra for the time this takes, will we?”

  “Certainly not,” Jimmy said. It wasn’t as if they were going to charge him for any of their time here.

  4. Practical demonology

  Austin, Monday

  Collecting one of the machalees proved to be a tricky job. Ben had to climb to the fourth step of Harper’s stepladder in order to reach down to the bottom of the tank with her long-handled net. He rolled up his sleeve but still had to reach down so far that it got wet, and his groping fingers found nothing but the sharp edges of decorative coral.

  “You need to get the net a couple of inches lower,” Jimmy told him, and Ben stretched to obey.

  “A little bit over that way!” Harper called. “No, that way!”

  “I can’t see…”

  “What? I can’t understand you!”

  “When I’m diving into the damned tank,” Ben said, righting himself temporarily, “I can’t see where you’re pointing, so saying ‘that way’ is no help whatsoever. And exactly how much is ‘a little bit’ when it’s at home?”

  Finally he felt the rim of the net brushing against something soft. He leaned even farther over, dipped and scooped, and was rewarded with a machalee flopping desperately inside the net. Standing, he decanted it with a plop! into the shallow plastic tub which Harper had already filled with water from the aquarium.

  “Look at that!” Ben said indignantly as they bent over the fish. “That thing is iron. It’s rusting. And whoever put it on punched a huge hole in the fin. I tell you what, Jimmy, this isn’t so much a tag as a fish torture device.”

  Jimmy remembered, tardily, that Ben had double-majored. If mathematics was his first love, marine and freshwater biology was a close second. No wonder he was bonding with Harper over the mistreated fish. Jimmy wasn’t at all sure that a fish’s nervous system was capable of saying more than “Yes” and “No,” but he was pretty sure that this fish’s system was saying “No no no no no!” It arched and writhed away from Ben’s hand when he reached into the water to touch the tag.

  “You know, Ben,” he said uneasily, “maybe we should wait and let Chayyaputra handle this. Harper could get in trouble if we kill one of his fish.” Not to mention that if she told the truth about what happened, Chayyaputra would know that somebody had infiltrated his offices and his computer system.

  “I don’t care about that!” Harper exclaimed. “Do you really think I could be so, so mean and selfish? The poor thing is hurting now, and that horrible tag is going to kill it. We have to get that thing off of it! And we’d better do it fast,” she added, “because there isn’t enough water in the tub to let it breathe comfortably for long.”

  The fish flopped and writhed, breaking the surface of the water. “Oh, hold still, stupid!” Harper said. “He’s not going to hurt you. He’s going to help you.” And the fish actually did stop thrashing, almost as if it understood her words. More likely, Jimmy thought, it was just exhausted. This time, it let Ben touch the iron tag without flinching away from his hand.

  “I can’t find any kind of a clasp,” Ben said in frustration after a few minutes of feeling around the tag and fin. “I mean, there’s bound to be some way to remove it, but I can’t tell what from just touching it and I can’t get a good look because the fish goes crazy if I try to bring it up to the surface. I don’t suppose you have bolt cutters in your car, Harper?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve never needed anything like that, and I didn’t think— I’m sorry,” she apologized again.

  “You could hardly be expected to carry a complete tool shop for emergencies,” Jimmy said. “Ben, can’t you open it some other way?”

  “I can hardly do it with my bare hands!” Ben snapped.

  “I know. But you’ve got other ways to do things,” Jimmy said. He knew that all of the Center’s research fellows could teleport, move small objects, and light fires – that last had been sort of an accident, an unexpected consequence of Ben’s attempt to make light, but it had turned out to be surprisingly useful. They had other paranormal abilities too, though he couldn’t offhand think of any that would serve to slice through an iron fish tag. Why iron? he wondered. Didn’t whoever tagged the fish realize that an iron tag would rust and eventually fall off?

  “Ben. Let me check something, okay?” He knelt beside Ben and reached one hand into the tub.

  After a moment’s fumbling, “I meant, move your hand so I can feel the tag.”

  Both flat sides of the tag were rough with rust, but nowhere near rusting away. But the bar that passed through the dorsal fin to connect them, that was a different story. The corrosion had gone deep here. Ha! Who said they couldn’t do this with bare hands? Jimmy put his other hand in the water, grabbed the back side of the tag, took a firm hold of the front piece and twisted. The oddly shaped front and back pieces didn’t give, but he thought he could feel a slight motion. He twisted the pieces, moved them, twisted the opposite way. He could definitely feel some motion now. Another couple of twists of the rusted bar—

  The lights dimmed, and the fish was writhing and struggling under his hands, and the water was growing colder so fast that his hands ached with the cold. But the tag had snapped loose, leaving him with a piece in each hand. He didn’t look at the pieces, though, because like Ben and Harper he couldn’t look away from the thrashing body in the water. The water itself was roiled as if a storm was raging inside the plastic tub; there was ice around the rim of the tub
; the thing inside it no longer looked like a fish.

  It was pink, though.

  The lights dimmed even more and the shadowy air around him became icy. His dripping hands were no longer dripping; the water on them had become a thin film of ice.

  “What’s happening?” Harper whispered.

  Jimmy shook his head. Had Chayyaputra embedded a curse inside the tag? It seemed likely, but that was a theory that wouldn’t reassure Harper. It didn’t reassure him all that much either. Neither he nor Harper was equipped to fight back; they’d be dependent on Ben to save them. And Ben was somewhat flaky at the best of times.

  The mini-storm in the plastic tub reached a howling peak as if actual winds were lashing it, and something pink and much larger than the machalee fish rose from the water, filling the tub. What was it, some kind of demon? Had it been bound by the iron tag? He was still holding the two halves of the tag; in desperation, he threw them at the pink shape.

  “Ow!” said a very human-sounding voice. The thing rose higher and higher yet, its shape swelling and rippling as it grew, and the cold in the room chilled him to his bones. But he hardly noticed in his astonishment as the thing, now more than five feet tall, took shape as a naked human.

  A naked woman.

  A screaming naked woman.

  “You son of a bitch, I’ll sue you for everything you’ve got!”

  It didn’t exactly sound like a typical demonic utterance. Jimmy wrenched his eyes from the woman and looked at Ben. He seemed equally nonplussed. Bad sign, that. Bad sign. Jimmy’s role at the Center for Applied Topology was wrangling computers; the research fellows like Ben were supposed to deal with the paranormal.

  Harper jumped to her feet and ran outside. A wise move, Jimmy thought.

  But in a moment she was back with some kind of rug, or something, which she threw over the figure as if she thought blinding it would slow it down.

  The screaming stopped abruptly; the very human-looking hands grasped two edges of what Jimmy could now see was a stained and tattered blanket and wrapped the fabric tightly around its body, just under the armpits. A well-padded, middle-aged woman with short frosted hair glared at them. She no longer reminded Jimmy of anything demonic – until she opened her mouth. “I’m glad to see that somebody here has some sense of decency! You two jokers can quit staring now, the show’s over. And give me back my clothes!”

  “And shoes,” she added, stepping out of the tub. She left wet footprints on the polished tile of the lobby floor. “The floor is freezing. And why were you making me stand in a tub of ice water? Is this supposed to be some kind of torture? Because it’s not working!”

  Jimmy recovered his wits. “Uh, ma’am, we weren’t trying to make you stand in the tub. We were actually trying to get you out of the water.” Not that they’d exactly known it at the time.

  “Then who took my clothes away and made me stand here?” she demanded.

  “We were hoping you could tell us that.”

  “Well, I can’t. The last thing I remember is telling that cyber-pirate Shani Chayyaputra that he couldn’t buy my company.”

  “Ah. As it happens, we have a problem with Chayyaputra ourselves.” Jimmy glanced apologetically at Harper, but she wasn’t looking at him.

  “Then what the hell are you doing in the lobby of his building? And where’s everybody else? And why—”

  “Lady, that’s a long story and I’m not sure I want to trust you with it.”

  Harper had busied herself with putting away her tools and mopping up the puddles of water on the floor. Now she intervened.

  “I expect this lady—”

  “Renata,” the woman snapped. “Renata Rivera, CEO and owner of Rivera Cybersecurity. As you people perfectly well know.”

  “Renata. Wouldn’t you like to go somewhere more comfortable to talk this over?”

  Renata twitched the edge of her blanket. “What, dressed like this? I’m not going anywhere until you give my clothes back!”

  They wound up back in the main office, scrounging chairs from four cubicles so that everybody could sit down. This room wasn’t quite as cold as the lobby, and in any case the whole building was slowly getting back to normal.

  Renata told them that her fledgling computer security company had suffered several accidents in the past months, culminating in a planted virus that sneakily introduced subtle errors into the code of the program they were developing for sale.

  “If those hadn’t been caught,” she said, “our product would have been dead in the water. Fortunately, my best developer guy has a fantastic memory. When he spotted lines of code that hadn’t been there the day before, it took him and the rest of the tech team about five minutes to verify that none of them had done it, ten minutes to disable the code while leaving it in place, and fifteen minutes to notify me.”

  Jimmy wasn’t surprised to hear that it had taken the programmers longer to decide to notify Renata than to fix the code. The CEO was a formidable lady; he too would much rather interact with a computer.

  “The next day – the next day,” Renata said, “your Mr. Chayyaputra—”

  “Not ours,” Ben interjected. “Jimmy told you, we have a problem with him too.”

  This time Harper looked upset, but not nearly as unhappy as Jimmy had expected. Perhaps discovering this one of Chayyaputra’s dirty tricks had changed her feelings about the man. Or – more likely, he thought – she was just saving her breath for a really good fit of hysterics, and who could blame her?

  “Oh? Well, it can hardly be as bad as what he did to me.” Renata forged ahead, eager now to recount the rest of her story. “The bastard called and said he wanted to do me a service. He felt I should be warned that CodeSense – that’s our proprietary software – contained fatal errors and would likely damage any computer that it ran on. He said that his people thought they could fix the software and that he’d buy it from us—at about the price we’d planned to charge for one license. I hung up on him and then I came right over here to tell him in person what I thought of his mob-style ‘offer.’ I told him my guys had already identified and disabled his code and that we now had a copy of CodeSense stored on a computer with no Internet connections.

  “He laughed at me! He said he didn’t need the Internet to wreck our software, that we were going to continue having problems until I gave up, that the software wasn’t very good anyway and I’d be much better off accepting his offer than trying to market it myself. That Rivera Cybersecurity was a tiny company that no one had heard of and that no one would pay us to handle their security.

  “I told him that we got one of SINET’s awards for innovative security technology last year, when we were running a much less powerful version of CodeSense than we had now.” She dusted her hands together. “So much for being unknown! And then I told him that he couldn’t buy me or my company, and…” She frowned. “I was going to threaten to sue him, but I suddenly had trouble breathing. And then everything went weird. I fell down – I was choking – and then I had the damnedest hallucinations. Thought I was flying through the air, then imagined I could swim underwater for hours and hours without suffocating. It seemed to go on forever. He must have drugged me somehow, and now it’s worn off.” She shivered in the cool room, and pulled Harper’s blanket up over her bare shoulders.

  “I’m afraid it’s worse than that,” Jimmy said. He looked at Harper, who was sitting bolt upright and twisting her fingers together, and then turned back to Renata Rivera. “Ah – when did you visit SCI, Ms. Rivera?”

  “Today!” She frowned. “Yesterday? It was cloudy then.”

  “What day of the month was it?”

  “Is this some kind of a joke? The fourteenth, of course.”

  Jimmy and Ben looked at each other. It was the last day of April. At a minimum, Renata Rivera had been a fish for two weeks.

  “April?”

  “March! Do you think I don’t know what month it is?”

  “Harper, what’s today’s date?”<
br />
  Harper stared at him. “Don’t you know?”

  “I just want Ms. Rivera to hear it from somebody she doesn’t already distrust.”

  “Oh, all right.” At least she was still speaking to them. And not screaming. Jimmy was in a mood to count even the tiniest of blessings. “It’s April 30.”

  The blood drained from Renata Rivera’s face. “That’s not possible!”

  “Step outside for a moment,” Jimmy suggested. “And then tell me when it’s ever been ninety degrees and sunny in March.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until I get something better to wear than a filthy blanket that smells like it’s been on somebody’s car floor forever,” Renata said firmly, “and anyway, Austin always has occasional freakish hot spells. Weather doesn’t prove anything.”

  “Ben,” Jimmy said, “Can you get Ms. Rivera here some clothes and a copy of today’s Austin-American Statesman?”

  Ben frowned at him. “Not without, ah…, you know. I mean, oh well, I guess I could go out to the lobby…”

  “You might as well do it from here,” Jimmy said tiredly. “Harper hasn’t run away screaming yet, and I think Ms. Rivera here might be able to understand the situation better if she sees a practical demonstration.”

  Ben shrugged and stood up. “Okay, but you better catch her if she faints.” He turned sideways and disappeared.

  Jimmy had an extremely difficult half hour while they waited for Ben’s return. Renata Rivera took Ben’s disappearance into thin air as proof that she had been drugged and that the hallucinogens were not completely out of her system. She announced that she needed to go to the emergency room to be screened for drugs as soon as she was decently dressed. Harper, on the other hand, took Ben’s disappearance as proof that her two new acquaintances were magicians with unlimited powers.

  “What’s taking him so long?” she asked after only a few minutes had passed.

  “It may take a while for him to find clothes. I don’t think any of Annelise’s will work.” Ben’s live-in girlfriend, the receptionist at the Center for Applied Topology, probably weighed as much as Renata Rivera, but she was significantly taller.