A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4)

by Margaret Ball

  Unfortunately, pouring myself a cup of the Inner Light Guest House’s coffee awakened another persistent headache – the one threaded through my belt loops. Mr. M. had insisted on accompanying me today, saying that after last night’s near-disaster we needed renewed and redoubled vigilance. Once he smelled the coffee, of course, he changed that to “renewed and redoubled coffee.”

  This was a problem of some delicacy. I did want Mr. M. to be happy enough to resume his masquerade as a belt before any of SCI’s employees turned up; they would probably not take well to the sight of my elaborate belt buckle unwinding itself and complaining. But coffee has a way of making Mr. M. a bit too happy. He starts doing things like whizzing around the ceiling. And singing. And getting distracted from whatever he had been planning to do. That last would make him useless as a guard, but it hardly mattered since the first two symptoms would probably empty the guest house at high speed. He was currently in a classic rock phase: specifically, this week, in a Doors phase. By the time he got through “Riders on the Storm,” there’d probably be nobody left but me and Lensky – ah, I mean ‘Brian Lester.’

  “Coffee later,” I promised him.

  “You are indulging now.”

  “I,” I said as sternly as I could, “do not react to caffeine by dancing on the tabletops and singing.”

  “What a pity,” said ‘Brian Lester’ behind me.

  At the first sound of his voice Mr. M. had whipped back into his disguise shape, an intricate knot of silver scales surrounding his beak. Now he loosened the knot enough to say, “I will not sing.”

  “Promise?”

  “I swear by the Lights of the Medes, no music shall pass my beak… as long as the nectar of the gods does pass through my beak.”

  Blackmail or promise? It was hard to tell. I held the coffee cup just below his head for long enough for him to slurp up about a quarter of a cup. Any more, and he might start forgetting his promises, the fragility of my position here, and the entire concept of covert action. So far, the day was peaceful. It would be nice if it could stay that way.

  “If I promise not to sing,” Lensky said, “will you be extra nice to me too?”

  “Oh, maybe…. if you play your cards right…”

  “How about if I return your property?” He dangled a bit of red silk in front of me.

  “Stop waving those around!” I grabbed my panties and tucked them into a pocket. Fortunately, they weren’t bulky. “What are you trying to do, blow my cover?”

  “I might ask you the same thing,” said Lensky. “You are aware that you left your panties under my bed last night?”

  “Oh, is that where they got to?”

  “I had to stand on them for fifteen minutes,” he said, “when your buddy Webster came in to ‘talk’ to me. I thought he was never going away.”

  “Oh, that explains the huge muddy footprints. Well, it’s not my fault. I’m not the one who threw them under the bed.”

  “Threw what under the bed?”

  I was really a terrible spy. I had not, for instance, learned to keep one eye on the door at all times. Now here was Ginny, looking bright and bouncy and curious. “Ah, my sandals,” I improvised. “I had to fish under the bed with a coat hanger to retrieve them this morning.”

  “And I was just mentioning that despite Sally’s protestations of innocence, it can hardly be coincidental that all sorts of things wind up under her bed,” Lensky said.

  “Oh.” Ginny looked confused, as well she might be. “I guess you’ve known Sally for a long time, then?”

  “Not nearly long enough,” said Lensky, “but I’m hoping to get to know her much better soon.” Behind Ginny’s back, he winked at me.

  Ginny had been only the leading edge of the breakfast invasion; the other employees were close behind her, and conversation died down in favor of the determined chewing required to get through Margo’s granola. I filled a bowl and moved to the other side of the deck, away from Lensky and his double-entendres.

  That was peaceful, but it also left me isolated when Webster strolled through the door. “Sally,” he purred. “I’ve been hearing so much about you.”

  “What, already? Isn’t it kind of early to start gossiping?” I hadn’t even started on my second cup of coffee. It was still relatively cool on the deck. Too bad Webster had such a gift for poisoning the atmosphere.

  “I sent your picture to some acquaintances. They recognized you.”

  “How depressing,” I drawled, “to think we have mutual acquaintances.” I started visualizing an instance of the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem, just in case I was going to need to teleport out of here in the next few minutes.

  “They said you aren’t Shani’s fiancée, you’re just some girl who graduated from UT a couple of years ago. Math major.”

  Well, nothing damning in that. Damning would be somebody saying, ‘That’s Thalia Kostis, not Sally Bhatia,’ and wouldn’t he have led with that card if he had it? I raised one eyebrow. “Webster – Webby,” I corrected myself, “are you claiming that being a brilliant and talented mathematics student is incompatible with planning to marry Shani? I’ve got news for you: some men like bright women.”

  “That is low, Webby, even for you,” said Hien.

  “He’s probably judging Shani by himself,” Ginny said. “You don’t like bright women, do you, Webby? We scare you.”

  Webster scoffed. “Don’t overrate yourself. Being an office manager isn’t exactly rocket science, Gin.” He looked around, trying to bring the guys into the conversation. “Seriously, don’t any of you find it strange that I could find plenty of people who recognize Sally as a math major, but none who know her as Shani’s fiancée?”

  “Clearly,” I said, “your friends don’t know me very well.” If they did, they would have spilled my real name. “That is quite a relief. I’m reassured to know that my real friends don’t have anything in common with your crowd… Webby.”

  Margo interrupted the nasty little showdown then and hustled us off to the other, larger deck for more Activities. Having team members verbally eviscerate each other on the dining deck probably wasn’t good for the guest house’s reviews.

  “That little worm is seriously out to get you,” Lensky murmured to me when we were paired off for a personality analysis game. “What did you do to him?” And aloud, “My three adjectives for Sally are headstrong, reckless and irritating.”

  “Nothing!” I leaned back on the bench and put my elbows on the picnic table behind me, prepared to defend myself. “Look, I don’t know what his problem is. And my adjectives for Br… Brian are stubborn, patronizing and overprotective.”

  “Guys, you’re supposed to do one negative, one neutral and one positive,” Margo corrected us. “Like Hien and Chet.”

  “Chet is conceited, blond and clever,” Hien said on cue.

  “And Hien is sarcastic, fluent, and quick-witted.”

  “Sally and Brian, why don’t you try again?”

  What with all the instructions, shuffling people into and out of teams, and quick changes of activities, it was really hard to find ways to snoop on the others. What I really wanted was to get Alec alone and learn what he’d been going to say the previous day when Yung-Su interrupted him. Why couldn’t I have been paired with him for this personality game? Or for the next activity, or the next? A suspicious person might think Margo had been bribed to keep the two of us apart.

  Lensky ditched the last activity before lunch with some excuse about having business phone calls to make, and he wasn’t back when we gathered on the dining deck. I looked at the buffet table with foreboding. Possibly Lensky had disappeared because he’d been warned: today’s lunch was open-faced tuna melts with tomato and red pepper slices. Margo said that he’d had to go into town on some errand. If I’d known, I would have asked him to get me something to eat. Something that had no connection with canned fish.

  He was late getting back, too; we had to do the first two activities with an odd number of play
ers. He slid into place after the second afternoon activity (Team Building Treasure Hunt; don’t ask), looking remarkably smug for a man who’d shown up just in time to be trapped in a “game” called Fear in a Hat.

  “What canary did you consume over lunch?” I asked him while Ginny and Alec were arguing about whether “girls with multiple piercings” was a valid fear or something Alec had made up to avoid digging deep into his psyche.

  “There are ways and ways to learn things,” Lensky said, and he refused to go into detail.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “I will probably expire from starvation before you have a chance to reveal your nefarious schemes.”

  “Ah. Come to my room before dinner?”

  “If I have the strength to climb the stairs.”

  “Use your other abilities?”

  “I don’t have the strength to do that either.” Teleporting was hell on the blood sugar, and mine was already dangerously low.

  “I brought mini bacon quiches. And cheese Danish. And grapes. Oh, and chocolate.”

  I decided that I could forgive a lot of secrecy and games-playing in a man who had such excellent grasp of the important things in life.

  In the brief spell between activities and dinner, Lensky forked over enough mini quiches to save my life and told me what he’d been up to. He’d gone in to Wimberley to meet Meadow Melendez, who had bought the technical equipment he needed in Austin. Then, while the rest of us were making fools of ourselves after lunch, he’d bugged all the other rooms.

  “Voice-activated recordings,” he said, “digital, of course. I don’t even have to retrieve the devices; I can remote-download them to my phone.”

  “Very nice,” I said.

  Lensky smiled. “Those of us who can’t apply topology do have a few real-world skills. Who knows, sometimes the classical solutions are still the best.”

  “And you’re going to be unbearably smug if your little bugs glean more information than I can get by applying all the topology I know.”

  “Do you think that’s likely?”

  “You could hardly get much less. The problem with being around all of them at once is that it’s almost impossible to get one of them alone and lead the conversation where I want it to go.” Yung-Su, for instance, had been hovering over Alec like a watchful mother ever since he’d interrupted whatever Alec had been about to tell me. That was suspicious behavior, sure, but it wasn’t information. I broke off a piece of dark chocolate and put it in my mouth. Chocolate, at least, always delivered. That was more than you could say for me, this week.

  “Oh well, just think of this as a vacation. Enjoy the resort amenities.”

  “Tuna salad, a very narrow bed, and sharing a shower with Hien and Ginny? It’s more like summer camp.”

  He slipped an arm around me and hugged me close. “Okay, I’ll enjoy it for both of us.”

  “Actually, I never went to summer camp,” I confessed.

  “Oh? Well, you didn’t miss much. It was never this good. There was a phalanx of nuns with rulers between the boys’ cabins and the girls.’”

  I leaned against his broad, solid shoulder. “We still have to sneak around to be together. Not so different from camp, then.”

  He slid a hand down to my waist. “I could show you some differences… Where’s Mr. M.?”

  “Napping. When the caffeine wore off, he decided to sleep rather than observe more team-building exercises. But it’s almost time for dinner.”

  Lensky indicated the remaining food stash. “We could skip dinner.”

  I was tempted. But – “Both of us? Webster would hot-foot it up here in the hope of catching us in flagrante.”

  As it turned out, I did miss most of dinner, but not because I was doing anything as much fun as playing summer camp with Lensky. I’d only begun to push this night’s offering around the plate with my fork when Mom called and I excused myself to deal with another list of instructions, demands, and urgent questions. Having indulged freely in Lensky’s quiche, pastries and chocolate, I was just as happy not to have to pretend an interest in Mexican Macaroni and Cheese. The one bite I’d taken suggested that the “Mexican” part was based on somebody having dumped a jar of mild salsa in with the yellow powdered cheese. This is the kind of provocation that could lead to another war with Mexico if they ever found out about it.

  I would have bet money that even my mother hadn’t had time to think of yet another thing I had to do immediately. Clearly, I would have lost that money.

  “No, Mom, I haven’t thought about a wedding program.”

  Squawk. Squawk. What was wrong with me that I hadn’t thought of that?

  “Well, I hadn’t thought about it because we don’t really need one, do we? We’re getting married at Saint Elias. In the Greek Orthodox rite.” The only kind of wedding my family would ever consider. Lucky for me that Lensky, having been baptized Catholic, was eligible for marriage in our church. “That means the sequence of events is already cast in concrete.” I’d been dragged to enough weddings for classmates and children of Mom’s friends that I could recite it in my sleep. “Rings, candle lighting, wedding crowns, readings, wine, procession around the altar, proclamation, blessings. Who needs a program?”

  Evidently we needed a program in order to tell everybody that what had happened at every single Greek Orthodox wedding since the dawn of time was going to happen at this one too.

  Perhaps she felt that an official program would head off possible unscheduled events such as The Bride Passes Out From Terror or The Bride Spills the Wine All Over Her Beautiful Dress or The Bride Trips Over Her Own Feet. The possibilities for disaster, once I thought about the details, dialed up my panic from eleven to twelve. Fortunately, I could slide out from under this one the same way I’d done with the invitations. “Get Andros to format it and send it to me, I’ll look over it… um… later.”

  Now that I’d been in Lensky’s room twice, I could easily teleport to it. That was much safer than taking the stairs. It would have been safer still if I’d waited until everybody was asleep, but after yet another excursion into the Land of Brides I wasn’t willing to wait. I needed him to tell me that we were both going to get through this ordeal. Also, I had remembered that along with the munchies, he’d bought a bottle of wine that we hadn’t yet opened.

  There are lots of advantages to being with somebody who already knows you well. For one thing, he didn’t shriek and point when I stepped out of the air into his room. For another, he had already stolen an extra glass and deployed the corkscrew.

  “When I heard you talking to your mother,” he said, offering me a tumbler that was not nearly full enough of white wine, “I figured you’d remember where you could get a drink.”

  I tossed about half my wine back before thanking him. “Weddings,” I said, glowering, “are extremely unfair. I have to go crazy dealing with flowers and programs and cake tastings, and all you have to do is show up at the church.”

  Lensky shrugged. “Hey, I didn’t make the rules. Anyway, I’m perfectly willing to taste any cake you want to bring me.”

  “Just remember,” I said, holding out a tumbler that had somehow become completely empty, “that part of your job is keeping me supplied with enough booze to silence that little voice.”

  “Little voice?”

  “The one screaming, ‘Run! Run now!’”

  Lensky poured me a generous second serving. “I certainly don’t want you to run away, so I guess I’ll have to humor your alcoholic tendencies for the time being.” But he held the glass just out of reach. “No more sitting on the only chair while you drink,” he told me. “When I ply a girl with liquor, I like to have her close at hand.” He sat on the bed and pulled me down onto his lap. I took the glass back and leaned my head on his shoulder. It was the best part of the whole day.

  “If I’d thought summer camp would be anything like this,” I told him, “I’d have pestered my parents to send me. But I have a feeling it would have been lacking
in some vital features.”

  “No booze?”

  “And no incredibly hot guys.”

  I needed my hands free; the obvious solution was to finish my wine and put the glass down. His shirt was partly unbuttoned already. I slipped a hand inside and ran it over his chest, enjoying his indrawn breath.

  “I’m pretty sure Our Lady of Good Counsel Camp was sadly lacking in gorgeous girls of easy virtue,” he said.

  “Hey, watch who you’re calling easy, or tomorrow night I’ll make out behind the cafeteria with somebody else.”

  “I retract it. I retract everything. It’s not that you’re easy, it’s just that you can’t withstand my combination of sexy looks and incredible animal magnetism, right?” He reached both hands up behind me, under my shirt, and unfastened my bra.

  “Not to mention your smooth moves. When are you going to learn how to do that with one hand?”

  It wasn’t trivially simple, but this time I did keep track of my underwear and made sure to retrieve everything before teleporting back to my own room.

  9. What is your good name?

  Austin, Wednesday

  By Wednesday Ben felt he had the revised version of their secret mission at SCI down to a formula. Drive over to the SCI building with Harper, help her lug her stepladder and tools inside, scoop out a tagged fish, remove the tag, offer clothing and reassurance to the freaked-out human being who had no idea what had just happened to them. Then they’d take the rescuee back to Allandale House, Harper would rush off to take care of the clients she’d been neglecting due to the demands of fish rescues, and they’d try to find out if the new rescuee could shed any light on Shani Chayyaputra’s plans.

  “Faelyn wasn’t much use,” he groused, “except that now we know he doesn’t limit his fish curse to business opponents. He’s perfectly willing to attack people based on pure spite. Which is not a great surprise. I wish we’d got Will out instead of Faelyn, he may have some idea what Chayyaputra’s up to.”