A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4)

by Margaret Ball

  Yung-Su stared past my head. Chet twitched slightly, but no one had actually moved when Margo interrupted us.

  “Time’s up!” she said cheerfully, clapping her hands. “I hope we all know each other a little better now. But we need to move right along to your scheduled hour of being in Nature before lunch.”

  Huh? We were sitting on an outdoor deck. No air conditioning. Blue sky overhead. Trees, and the glimmer of a creek, visible beyond the deck. What about this didn’t count as ‘being in Nature?’

  Turned out Margo was thinking about something a little more intense. She planned to space us out all around the guest house property so we could sit on the ground, work on awareness of our surroundings, and meditate on our relationship to Nature.

  It didn’t seem to have much to do with the stated purpose of this retreat. I suspected Margo was recycling certain elements of her more mystical programs. Not that I had any objection. I could do with an hour of not having to answer questions and juggle lies.

  I didn’t get it.

  Mom called again just as Margo was finishing her spiel and preparing to lead us off into the woods, or up the creek, or whatever she had in mind.

  “Sorry, Margo,” I apologized, “I have to take this.”

  I ducked into the cool, shady interior of the guest house. Outside, I heard Margo saying sourly, “Evidently I failed to emphasize this aspect of the retreat, but would the rest of you please turn off your phones now?”

  I would’ve been willing to eavesdrop for longer, but the others moved off with Margo. Anyway, Mom was claiming all my attention. She wanted me to come back to town to pick the invitation cards. And settle the wording. And choose fonts. No, I couldn’t just pick one font for the whole card, different types of information should have different styles.

  “Times New Roman,” I said at random. “Verdana. Calibri. Uh… Arial. OK?”

  Not OK; four types of fonts was too many.

  “Tell you what,” I said, “why don’t you design the invite and send me a picture, and then I’ll tell you if there’s anything I need to change?” Which, I was resolved, there would not be.

  Mom could not do that. She absolutely could not even begin to think of how to do that. Didn’t I know that she didn’t know anything about computers? And we were already late sending out the invitations; they should have gone out two weeks ago.

  She had no clue about computers, but she could harass me about fonts? No use arguing. She was invoking Mom Privilege, the sacred and universal law that your mother is an expert on whatever she wants to be an expert on but knows nothing whatsoever about things she prefers not to deal with.

  “Get Andros to do it.” I might wind up with a logo for DeathVikings 3.3 on the top of the wedding invitation if my video-gaming kid brother was in charge, but at the moment that was a price I was willing to pay.

  That did not, of course, get me off the phone, but at least Mom moved on to the next major issue on her list: did I want to save money by using pink votive candles in the floral arrangements?

  “How does that save money?”

  “Well, the florist won’t need as many actual flowers.”

  “Fine, do it, I’m happy. Let’s have pink candles.”

  “Well… all right; it’s your wedding.” Mom’s voice practically screamed “You’re making a terrible mistake!”

  It cost me a full ten minutes to elicit that even though she’d said pink candles, she didn’t literally mean pink candles, because the flowers were going to be pink so she really thought ivory was a better color for the candles, but of course if I really wanted pink candles she’d just have to work around that…

  What I really wanted, at this point, was to elope and get married in some place without extradition. But I couldn’t hurt Mom that way. The real point of this over-the-top Greek-American wedding was for Mom to enjoy a triumph over all the friends whose daughters hadn’t yet achieved a good marriage. What would really make her day would be if I came marching up the aisle with a visible baby bump: chastity might be desirable in theory, but grandchildren were better for bragging rights.

  Of course I might well be back in Austin tonight anyway, though I didn’t mention that to her. I still didn’t know what I was going to do when Shani Chayyaputra’s dear old friend Brian Lester showed up and said, “Who the hell are you?” or words to that effect. If I had any sense I wouldn’t be here for the confrontation. But I still hadn’t gotten back to Alec about those two companies, and I really wanted to find out if the other one had been Logan’s firm.

  I brooded about that over lunch. Which consisted of tuna salad and canned peaches in sugar-free syrup. In case you haven’t experienced the second, let me tell you that sugar-free “syrup” isn’t. As for the canned fish – something I had hated ever since Mom used to put it in my sandwiches for elementary school lunch—Ginny announced brightly that she’d told Margo that tuna salad was one of my favorite foods and Margo had agreed to put it on the menu as often as possible.

  Oh, thanks, Ginny.

  Nice, thoughtful, considerate people can be such a drag.

  Over lunch, to distract myself from the disgusting taste of canned tuna, I brooded some more over this Brian Lester who’d been sprung on me out of nowhere. His name had never come up in any of our previous dealings with the Master of Ravens, so maybe he wasn’t such a close friend as all that. Maybe I could get away with reiterating that Shani was a very private person. In her babbling yesterday, Ginny had mentioned that she found that statement of mine easy to believe given that he spent most of his time incommunicado in his office on the second floor and mostly communicated with them by email. She thought Shani must be one of those introverts. (Clearly a foreign species to her.)

  She was wrong about that, but I didn’t correct her impression.

  I was one of those introverts; another reason I was the wrong person for this assignment.

  When Margo clapped her hands for attention I thought that lunch was over and she wanted us to move on to another activity. Hallelujah! I had an excuse for abandoning the rest of the tuna salad that Margo had so generously piled on my plate.

  Wrong. “I have an announcement to make. As I told you this morning, an old friend of your boss is joining the retreat, which is wonderful news as it will make our numbers even again, so much better for the couples activities. I want you all to welcome Brian Lester.”

  I cringed in my seat.

  A broad, blond man with very dark blue eyes walked out on the deck to stand beside Margo.

  I stopped cringing. I even got up and went around the table to hug him. “Brian! Lovely to see you again. I hadn’t expected to have the pleasure so soon.”

  “Good to see you too…ah…

  “Sally,” I murmured, very low.

  “Sally.” He turned to Margo while I returned to my seat. “Sorry to be so late. It took a little while to arrange transportation. The car I normally use in Austin was… not available today.”

  He gave me a hard stare. I kept my head down and concentrated on choking down the rest of my tuna salad. The task wasn’t made easier by the way the new arrival kept looking at me with barely-concealed amusement, as though he knew exactly how I felt about the meal.

  After lunch Margo ran us through activities, activities, activities. They were all physical in nature, giving me no chance to pry. An egg relay race. A ‘teamwork’ challenge involving cardboard tubes, strings and rubber balls. Balancing on one leg. Balancing on one leg and hopping. Balloon volleyball.

  I was lousy at most of these; coordination isn’t exactly my strong suit. Oh well, I might as well admit it: physical activity isn’t my strong suit. I spend most of my life sitting at a desk and thinking about topology, or for excitement, drawing diagrams on a whiteboard and thinking about topology. This lifestyle is perfectly fine with me, but it doesn’t exactly prepare you for balloon volleyball.

  The guy who’d been introduced as Shani’s friend was on the opposing team, and he was insanely good at j
ust about all the activities. As one might expect of a man who’d taken off his sport coat to reveal a toned, athletic body. When I wasn’t thinking about how to approach him, I thought about the unfairness of expecting me to compete in physical contests with someone like that.

  Okay, I’m a little bit competitive. (Ben and my other colleagues would probably say, a lot competitive.) Even though I wasn’t here to shine at these stupid activities, I still vastly preferred winning.

  Not much of that came my way on Tuesday afternoon.

  We had a pre-dinner break to shower, which had become increasingly important to me over the course of the afternoon, and which effectively isolated me from any chat before dinner with Shani’s dear old friend Brian Lester.

  Dinner consisted of tuna noodle casserole and Ginny’s nonstop chatter about the activities, which prevented the rest of us from getting a word in edgewise. Or saved us from thinking up anything to say, depending on how you looked at it. I was growing increasingly frustrated with the difficulty of questioning Alec in this crowd. I picked at the tuna casserole, considered the likelihood of fainting from hunger, and zipped off early with a cup of coffee and the excuse that my mother was leaning on me to finalize the wedding invitations.

  “You haven’t sent those out yet?” Hien exclaimed. “When’s the wedding?”

  “Third week of June.”

  “Oh-oh. Only a tad over six weeks to go. Yes, you definitely need to get those done!” I guess she did have experience planning her own wedding. I’m sure everything was done perfectly and right on time.

  This thing was coming at me way too fast. I’d rooted for an August or better, September wedding, on the excuse that Ingrid and Jimmy were planning to get married in June and I didn’t want to step on their parade. Mom had countered that the first two weeks of August were off limits, being devoted to the Virgin Mary – and besides, August and September were much too hot for the outdoor reception we were planning. (This was the first I’d heard of the outdoor reception. I suspected she’d made it up to force me back to June, which I didn’t like because (a) it was considered an auspicious month for fertility and (b) I wasn’t exactly ready to get married. An extra two months would have given me a little more time to accustom myself to the idea.)

  Then Jimmy, the traitor, announced that Ingrid’s mother wanted them to wait until fall so she’d have plenty of time to organize their wedding, and there went my excuse.

  Anyway, when I sat down on the bed and checked my phone I discovered that Andros had already formatted the wedding invitations and sent them to me. If I could send them back today that would be one less thing for Mom to nag me about. Hmm, make some editing changes so she’d think I had given this the appropriate amount of attention… ask Andros to change this font, put this bit in italics. And for God’s sake get rid of the bit about “their beautiful and brilliant daughter Thalia.” Maybe it was a good thing that Mom had made me look at the invitations. This cut down by one the number of ways she could embarrass me.

  Unfortunately, N-1 was probably still an unacceptably large number.

  I was contemplating that fact when my phone rang. And this time it wasn’t Mom.

  “We need to talk.”

  “So?” I wasn’t in the mood to cut him any slack.

  “My room. Third floor.”

  Talk about bossy!

  Once I got there, though, I understood his point. The four guys from SCI filled the first floor, so Margo had put him on the third floor instead of with us women on the second floor, and he had no neighbors. Given the thinness of the walls, this was a better rendezvous than my room, which was sandwiched between Ginny’s and Hien’s.

  “You rat,” I said as soon as the door closed.

  He raised one eyebrow. “Is that any way to greet someone who’s come all the way from Austin to offer you moral support?”

  “It’s how I greet someone who caused me a morning’s intense terror. After Margo announced that an old and dear friend of Shani’s was coming I wasn’t able to think about anything besides how the hell I was going to greet Shani’s BFF and how I was going to explain why he had no idea who I was.” I sat down on his bed. “You could have warned me!”

  “Yes,” he admitted, “but that wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun as seeing your face when Margo introduced me. Besides, I owed you something for taking off like that when I wasn’t around to discuss it with you.”

  “You mean, when you weren’t around to stop me.”

  “Yes. Probably. I don’t know. Yes. On balance, I think you’re taking an unacceptable risk.”

  “Not nearly as much as we thought it might be. I’m pretty sure now that Chayyaputra plays his cards so close to his chest that even his staff doesn’t know much more than we’ve surmised about what he’s up to.” I thought that over. Was it really true of them all? “Chet and the Korean guy might have a clue. This morning Alec – the other software analyst – was trying to tell me a story that might have been about Logan’s company, and those two kept interrupting him and trying to change the subject. They succeeded, too, and with everybody milling around and playing these stupid games I haven’t been able to corner Alec to find out exactly what he was talking about. But I think that apart from Chet and Yung-Su, they’re just nice young people enjoying what they think is a really good starter job.”

  All but one, anyway. “Except Webster. He’s not nice. He’s also suspicious of me.”

  “Isn’t it handy that you’ve got me here now? To corroborate your story?” He started unbuttoning his shirt.

  “Hey! What are you thinking?”

  “That it’s high time I reminded you whose fiancée you really are.” The shirt went flying and barely landed on the back of a chair.

  “We can't do that,” I said from the narrow bed. "Not here."

  “You have access to a better room? No? Then this will have to do.”

  Sculpted shoulders and arms rippling with muscle; tanned, toned, solid torso; sprinkling of gold body hair arrowing down into his pants; he knew what taking his shirt off did to me.

  "Here at the retreat," I said, staring at the hands on his belt buckle, "I'm supposed to be Shani's fiancée, and you're supposed to be his best friend." But I didn't get off the bed while I still could.

  "Maybe he shares generously with his friends."

  “Eeew.”

  He dropped his pants and sat on the end of the bed. "Oh, I wouldn't share if you were mine," he said. "Oh, wait. You are mine. Aren't you?" He snaked an exploring hand up under my shirt. I suppose I could have stopped him then, but he was unfairly overwhelming me with pheromones.

  There really wasn’t room for two people on that narrow bed, especially if one of them was as enthusiastic and energetic as Brad Lensky. We managed to overcome that little problem.

  (Lensky says that in fairness, it should be mentioned that I too displayed a certain enthusiasm. I believe the words “mink in heat” were used. Naturally, I would never include a phrase like that in a report, even an informal one. And he’s not the boss of me, even if he does try to stealth-edit my work.)

  I was still catching my breath, and reflecting that there were definite pluses to having Lensky sneak into the retreat, when a tapping on the window startled me.

  “Get your pants on,” I whispered. “There’s somebody at the window.”

  “Thalia, this is the third floor. Do you think there’s a Peeping Tom on a ladder out there?” But he started getting dressed anyway. I was slightly better off; he hadn’t given me time to take my skirt off. I yanked my T-shirt on, then caught sight of my bra on the floor – good thing it was bright red and easy to spot – and stuffed it into a skirt pocket.

  When I peeked out the window, I saw a long, shiny silver-scaled shape dangling down from the gutter. Its pointed end was tapping irritably on the glass.

  “Mr. M!” Thank goodness the guest house was an old building with windows that actually opened. I pushed the bottom half up, leaned out, felt dizzy, caught hold of
the snake body and hauled him inside without banging his head more than once or twice. Not hard, fortunately, because the head was the one irreplaceable part of him. “What are you doing here?”

  “Protecting you,” he said with an offended sniff.

  “You don’t need to protect me from Lensky!” The two of them had had their differences in the past, but this was a serious overreaction.

  “No. In the larger scheme of the universe, he is negligible.” Another sniff. “The one you refer to as ‘Webster’ is lurking in the hall outside this door. I surmise that he hopes to catch you in flagrante with Lensky.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “Inelegantly phrased, but my sentiments exactly.”

  “Oh, well. Not really a problem, Mr. M.” It turned out to be a good thing that Lensky had insisted on meeting here; it would have been much more difficult for him to leave my room unnoticed. For me, disappearing was a piece of cake. “We can just teleport back to my room.” I wrapped him around my waist, pecked Lensky on the cheek, turned sideways and vanished.

  7. A rajah’s palace

  Austin, Tuesday

  On Tuesday morning, Harper picked Ben up at the apartment he shared with Annelise and they drove to the SCI office building. The parking lot was as empty as it had been on Monday; good. And having Harper let them in with her key was easier than teleporting the two of them inside. After all that had happened on Monday, Ben was okay with not taking any topological short cuts today until he absolutely had to.

  They were better prepared than they had been yesterday. Ben brought in Harper’s stepladder; she carried the fishing net, bolt cutters, and a large terrycloth robe. They had no way of predicting whom they’d free this time. Ben was hoping for either Will or Eli, but to be on the safe side they’d acquired this unisex, one-size-fits-all garment from Walmart.

  “Although,” Ben mused, “we do have almost a 67 percent chance that the next rescuee will be a guy, since Will and Eli have to be two of the three remaining fish.”

  “Don’t you mean a two-thirds chance?”