A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4)

by Margaret Ball

But for once Lensky aligned himself with Mom. “If you’re really going to go through with this, you will have to have a suitable dress.” He quirked one eyebrow at me and I sighed. Was I really going to have to be stifled, poked, pinned, extinguished under mountains of lace and white silk, just to placate my mother and convince Lensky I was still committed to marrying him? I accepted that I couldn’t get married in my treasured Ramones shirt and my favorite cut-offs, but I’d been hoping to negotiate some kind of middle ground between that and Death in White Satin. Couldn’t I get married in my little black dress, the one I used for obligatory Moore Foundation parties?

  It seemed that was not an option. Lensky even told me to take his car – naturally I’d never before set foot in this Bridal Salon place, so I couldn’t teleport myself there. And, as he pointed out, he would have to stay at the office anyway until I came back to teleport both of us home. Abiding, he said, by our agreement.

  I still haven’t figured out how a deal I’d set up to protect Lensky got turned into me getting stuck with doing yet more bride stuff. He’s twisty like that.

  So while my colleagues were presumably getting an introduction to a fantastic new application of topology, I was stuck in South Austin, being pinned into white satin and trying not to look at my reflection in the triple mirror that some sadist had built into one end of the salon.

  “This was the first dress I asked Beth to reserve for you,” Mom announced happily. “As soon as I saw it I said, ‘Thalia!’”

  How strange. I would have said, “Merde!” Or possibly “Merde alors!” I’d have to ask Aunt Alesia which was appropriate.

  The top half wasn’t so bad, apart from being designed to show off curves I don’t have. But from my waist downwards the ruched satin broke out into an extravaganza of frills and giant, three-dimensional, cabbage-sized fabric roses decorated with iridescent glass beads. I looked as if I was standing in a giant meringue – one that was fixing to rise up and consume me. I looked at Beth of the Bridal Salon, but she was smiling and clasping her hands together as though ravished with delight.

  “I don’t think…” I started.

  “This is one of my premier creations,” Beth said, “and perfect for a lovely young girl like you.”

  “Ah… it’s very unusual,” I said, “but I don’t think it’s quite me.”

  “Oh? What do you dislike about it?”

  For starters, I wasn’t lovely or all that young, but that was far from being the only problem with this disaster. “I, ah, I’m sure it would look wonderful on somebody a little taller.” A blatant lie. Even Ingrid, almost six feet tall and crowned with yards of silver-blond hair, couldn’t have carried off the Monster Mutant White Rose Exhibit. And Beth had to admit, when I pointed it out, that I was somewhat overwhelmed by fabric roses the size of my head. The only person who thought I looked good in it was Mom, and she’s prejudiced in my favor.

  That dress disappeared, not nearly quickly enough, and Beth lifted the next dress over my head. The basis of this one was a simple shift of silk gauze, and apart from being nearly transparent it would have been okay had Beth only left it at that. Unfortunately, her fix for the transparency of silk gauze had been too much of a good thing. Layer after layer of white silk gauze wafted over my head, each a little shorter than the previous one. Some of them snagged on my shoulders and elbows on the way down.

  I looked as if I’d failed to fight my way out of a mosquito net.

  “Of course,” Beth said faintly, “you’ll look taller when your hair is styled.”

  That was news to me. But it was true that short black hair straightened and swept up with plenty of gel looked, well, out of place with dresses like this. I looked out of place.

  “She’s letting her hair grow out for the wedding,” Mom said.

  “I am?”

  “You can’t wear stefana on top of those… those spikes.” Stefana are traditional Greek wedding “crowns,” nowadays usually just wreaths of white porcelain flowers with pearls and crystals, and they’re an essential part of the ceremony. For both bride and groom. I hadn’t yet broken it to Lensky that he was going to be spending some time in church wearing a wreath of artificial flowers. A sparkly one. “Her hair is naturally curly,” Mom told Beth, “just like mine. It’ll be beautiful with a white satin ribbon threaded through the curls.”

  “How long until the wedding?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Hmm. Well. I hope it grows fast.”

  “It will have to.”

  After dissing my hair, they went back to smothering me under dresses that were in general too full, too flouncy, and much too white. I lost track of time and become a machine programmed to raise and lower my arms on command. I began planning to duck under the crinoline supporting the Scarlett O’Hara model and crawl out of the shop. I mentally sold Lensky’s car for two tickets to a Caribbean isle without Internet or phones. Or extradition. And once I began thinking about what we could do in the luxury hotel that had magically appeared on this dream island, the fantasy carried me past innumerable dresses – well, I wasn’t enumerating them, anyway – in most of which I looked like a small sallow blemish on the billowy white creations. Blinding white silk and olive skin just don’t work together, at least not on me.

  Even Mom began to droop a little as the afternoon wore on. But she was absolutely determined that I would be married in a proper wedding dress if it killed her, and Beth said that today was the absolute deadline for picking a dress that would have to be altered to fit in a mere six weeks.

  Eventually I climbed out of a giant white pom-pom and begged for mercy. “No more, please!”

  “I don’t know that I have any more,” Beth announced.

  An hour earlier I would have been delighted to hear this; it was my ticket out of the salon. Now I was too tired and dispirited to throw my clothes on and escape. I sagged down on a chair in my bra and panties and avoided Mom’s eye. It didn’t seem fair that I should feel guilty for failing to live up to her fantasies, but I did anyway.

  Even my underwear was inappropriate for the kind of dresses Beth had been bringing out; she’d made numerous comments about how much better they’d look if I were wearing proper foundation garments.

  “Don’t just sit there like that,” Beth said, “you’ll catch your death!”

  True, the combination of sweaty bare skin and laboring air conditioning was kind of uncomfortable. So when she tossed me a loose ivory satin robe and told me to pull it over my head while she searched the stock room for something else that might be satisfactory, I complied.

  The deep off-white satin of the robe was actually much more to my taste than the starkly white confections I’d been climbing in and out of all afternoon. Creamy, ivory, almost golden in the shadows of the folds… I looked down, idly pleating the fabric with my fingers and cataloguing the subtle color changes, until I heard Mom draw in her breath.

  “Thalia,” she said. “Thalia!”

  “Yes?” I supposed I was going to have to pick the least obnoxious of the dresses I’d tried on. I searched my memory; surely there’d been at least one that I didn’t hate?

  “Thalia, stand up. No, over here.” She urged me into the spot before the mirrors again. “Look at you! You’re glowing!”

  She was right. The rich color of the ivory silk complemented my skin instead of fighting with it. And there weren’t any puffs, sashes, cleverly cut jackets or monster cabbage roses to get in the way and complicate my life. “Too bad I can’t just wear this,” I said idly.

  “You can!”

  “I can?” The sleeves of the robe fell to my fingertips, the “empire” waist was somewhere around my actual waist, and six inches of fabric puddled on the floor at my feet.

  “Alterations,” Mom said. She took a handful of fabric at the back of the robe and pulled it up and away from my body until the front almost looked as if it fit.

  It was possible. The square neckline and Empire waist made me look as if I had actual curves, and
the heavy, soft, creamy fabric fell to the floor in folds that glowed golden in the shadows.

  I could get married in something that wasn’t hideously embarrassing, something I actually liked. “Mom! I love it! But will Beth sell it to us? Without, you know, fussying it up?”

  “For what the alterations on this are going to cost,” Mom said, “she’d sell me the rug on the fitting-room floor.”

  16. Bombers’ moon

  Austin, Friday

  I’m going to assume that you have no idea how much measuring and marking and pinning has to be done, after you’ve picked out a wedding dress, to make sure the alterations are right. I do, now, and I’ve got the pinpricks to prove it. Let’s just say that it was dark by the time we got out of Beth’s Bridal Salon, and Mom and I were both starving. I talked her into the daring plan of getting something to eat at a restaurant and leaving Dad to fend for himself, but that didn’t work out quite as well as I’d hoped. We’d just been served when Ingrid called me.

  At first I thought it was somebody else using her phone, because like Meadow, Ingrid doesn’t do hysteria. Even when she thought she was trapped in 1957, the only way she betrayed that she was rattled was that she actually hugged Jimmy when he and I showed up to retrieve her. I knew the experience had gone deep for her, because she was still leery of teleporting for fear of another accidental time-slip, but she never talked about her fears.

  Ever.

  So when she called me only to babble incoherently about terror and time travel and disaster and Lensky, I knew it had to be bad.

  “Didn’t Brad wait for me at the office?” I interrupted. It was rather late, but it wasn’t like him to be impatient. And he’d promised not to go home on his own. Hadn’t he? And in any case, I had his car.

  “He did,” Ingrid said, “that’s the trouble.”

  “Well, is he okay?”

  “I – don’t know! Thalia, you have to come back right away!”

  “On my way.”

  I scooped our dinners into to-go boxes, paid, and dropped Mom off at her car in approximately the time it would have taken me to reject just one poufy wedding dress, and even that took too long. Then I broke a few minor traffic laws getting back to the office, second-guessing myself at every red light. Should I just have teleported? But what if we needed a car? Oh, help. Ingrid had her car, why hadn’t I thought of that?

  I was on the freeway, terrifying a few idiots who hogged the fast lane only to drive the exact speed limit, when I did think of that, and it was a bit late to do anything about it then. I couldn’t exactly start teleporting at seventy-five miles an hour. We’d never been good at matching speeds when teleporting; even an emergency jump from one place to another frequently ended with somebody losing their balance. I’d probably smear myself across the office like raspberry jam if I tried to teleport there from the freeway.

  Oh, yes, and it’s generally considered poor traffic manners to abandon a speeding car, right?

  I parked at the first piece of bare curb I saw after exiting the freeway. From that spot in West Austin I teleported directly to Ingrid’s office on the private side of the third floor.

  She was huddled in the chair behind her desk, shaking uncontrollably.

  “Ingrid!”

  She had never been fond of being touched, but I went around the desk and put my arms around her anyway. “Are you all right? What happened?”

  She took a great shuddering gasp and sat up straight, brushing me off. “Oh, I’m all right,” she said. “I’m fine. At least until you kill me.”

  “For?”

  “For losing Lensky.”

  “You’re not his guardian,” I said absently. “What happened?”

  “It was the Master of Ravens.”

  I was already terrified for Lensky; now a cold sweat prickled all over my body. “Ingrid. Is Lensky…”

  I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t even make myself go and look in his office. The room darkened. I thought my mind must be shutting down.

  “Not dead. I don’t think. But lost… Oh, Thalia, you’ll never find him!”

  Ha! My brain came humming back to life. And now I had purpose as well as life. ‘Dead’ was the only thing I couldn’t fix. ‘Lost’ I could and would deal with, but the first step was to get Ingrid calmed down enough to tell me exactly what had happened.

  “Where’s everybody else?”

  “They went out to Hole in the Wall for burgers and beer and commiseration. Lensky said he had to stay here until you got back, and I wanted to work out some consequences of Ben’s transformation theory, so it was just us two when he came. And I was back here on the private side.”

  “He? The Master of Ravens? Shani Chayyaputra?”

  Ingrid nodded, tried and failed to gulp down a sob, buried her face in her hands.

  But the offices were shielded; how could he have gotten in here? Maybe Jimmy could get some sense out of her. I stepped back and called his number.

  When he answered, I could hear the noise of a band behind him. Evidently Hole in the Wall was having a ‘70’s nostalgia special this week, because the band was doing the instrumentals for “L.A. Woman.” And the creaky, croaky voice belting out the lyrics sounded like Mr. M.

  Must be a hell of a party.

  “Jimmy. Can you sober up, grab Mr. M., and come back here?”

  “What, all of us?”

  “Whoever’s still there.”

  “That would be all of us. Except you… and Ingrid… and… Lensky.”

  He was speaking with the exaggerated care of somebody who suspected that last drink had been one too many. “I don’t care who else comes, but hurry. Ingrid needs you.”

  Moments later, Ingrid’s office was full of happy topologists and staff members. Or – no, not happy exactly. But definitely sloshed.

  I chewed my fingernails while Jimmy hugged Ingrid and patted her back and said soothing nonsense to her.

  “What occasioned the drunken orgy?” I asked Ben, who was quietly hiccupping beside me. “Celebration?”

  “More like licking our wounds. Things… didn’t go so well this afternoon.”

  “What things?”

  “Later.” Because Ingrid had given one last forlorn sniff and was finally ready to tell her story.

  “After we all got back—”

  “Back from where?”

  “SCI,” Ben answered. “Remember me telling you I’d had another idea? I thought of an absolutely brilliant way to get into the building without teleporting.”

  “Except,” Meadow said, “it didn’t work.”

  “We almost pulled it off,” Ben defended himself.

  “It was a good plan,” Will said. “I helped him work it out. And Lensky okayed it. Well, the general idea, anyway. It’s possible we should have thought a little more about the details.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah, that’s why he was so pleased when your mother insisted you had to go try on wedding dresses. So that you wouldn’t be involved. Because, see, it wasn’t totally safe…”

  These two geniuses had decided that setting the inside of the SCI building on fire would force the fire brigade to break down the doors, after which they would simply walk into the building instead of trying to break the anti-teleporting shield.

  “That part worked just fine,” Ben insisted. “I manipulated Riemann surfaces to start a bunch of little fires all over the first floor, and Colton and Ingrid used the same algorithm to set Shani’s bedroom on fire. We didn’t need to be inside the building for any of that, and he hadn’t thought of shielding against remote applications of topology.”

  “But you didn’t get the trident?”

  “It was confusing,” Ben said. “Firemen all over the place, water spraying everywhere…”

  It hadn’t occurred to the geniuses that firemen were not likely to allow a handful of civilians to stroll into a burning building, and they’d been – reading between the lines – reprehensibly sloppy about keeping camouflage up. Nor had it
occurred to them that the offices might be empty at night, but the Master of Ravens would almost certainly still be there. It was, after all, where he lived.

  There were doubtless innumerable embarrassing details that Ben and Will were glossing over, but right now I didn’t care; all I wanted was to know what had happened to Lensky. And that was Ingrid’s part of the story.

  The Mathematical Mafia and the Center support staff had returned to Allandale House tired, wet, scorched in places, and humiliated by their failure. They had – almost unanimously – decided to go across the Drag to bury their sorrows in beer and live music rather than listen to Lensky’s corrosive analysis of their mistakes. Ingrid was the only one of them who had felt that a nice quiet hour with topological theory would be more soothing than liquor and noise, and she hadn’t been eager to talk with Lensky either. She’d buried herself in her office on the private side with her reference books. She successfully lost herself in the ramifications of transformational mappings until she noticed raised voices out in the main office.

  The internal walls on the third floor were, to say the least, flimsy. When voices were raised, they were audible all over the floor. Once she registered the fact of shouting and started to listen, Ingrid could hear everything that was being said.

  The first thing she learned was that the Master of Ravens was in the office, and he was furious.

  “How did he get in?” I’d thought Lensky was safe in this shielded place. “Did somebody erase the tokens on our walls?”

  “We walked into the SCI building – before the firemen threw us out again,” Ben said. “Maybe he did something similar. Teleported himself to the stairs and just walked up and in without using magic. We usually leave the door at the top of the stairs open, and anyway the lock’s busted.” He flushed and looked away from me. We were both remembering just who had disassembled that lock while researching how to open locks topologically.

  “I knew that,” I admitted. We’d all known it, we just hadn’t considered the implications. Nobody expected the Master of Ravens to walk in on his own two feet. For a bunch of supposedly high-powered intellects, we had been remarkably stupid, hadn’t we? And Lensky paid the price. Whatever it had been.