A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4)

by Margaret Ball

  “Did you find it?”

  “In – in a manner of speaking,” he said in a hollow voice. “Look here.”

  The full-page, black-and-white photograph clearly showed an intact, if slightly charred, Elephant and Castle standing between two devastated streets.

  “See, even the book says it survived. You’re just confused. You were probably thinking of some other building; a lot of places really were bombed flat or burned down.”

  Will shook his head and wandered off to talk with Meadow Melendez. He spent a lot of time with her over the next few days. He said that he suddenly found engineering and physics very soothing; something about the same input producing the same results every time.

  EPILOGUE

  The next six weeks were relatively peaceful. Once we were out of crisis mode, we were able to put together what I’d picked up at the retreat with the data Jimmy had lifted from the SCI computers, and the outlines of Chayyaputra’s scam became clear. Alec had bragged of his boss’s amazing ability to figure out which of several new businesses would succeed. What Chayyaputra had actually done was to identify start-ups whose only competition was other local businesses, and then put the competition out of work by code-hacking and removal of key people. He himself had done the removal part. I strongly suspected Yung-Su Park of involvement in the hacking, but had no evidence.

  As for his victims, Renata Rivera had revived her cyber security company after her unplanned six weeks’ absence; Jimmy’s friend Logan hadn’t done so well. The other companies he’d destroyed were long gone.

  We talked about how to stop similar attacks from SCI, but for the moment there were none. It turned out that the fire had indeed done more damage than we realized; the building was nearly gutted. Shani Chayyaputra did not return to town, and a brief online notice in Whirred confirmed that SCI had closed its doors permanently. The nice young people I’d met at the retreat would be looking for new jobs. I felt some sympathy for those who, like Ginny and Alec, really hadn’t known anything. Maybe they’d be more cautious next time they got a job offer that was too good to be true.

  I didn’t dare hope that the Master of Ravens was gone for good, but I was grateful not to have to deal with him immediately.

  I had a wedding to survive.

  Actually, I wouldn’t have bet on my even surviving the wedding preparations. There were more than enough tricky incidents to get through.

  There was, for instance, the moment when Lensky opened his mail and discovered that the City of Austin wanted him to pay six hundred and fifty dollars for abandoning his car beside a fire hydrant, even though Colton had moved the car before the city tow truck got there. Okay, that wasn’t, strictly speaking, part of the wedding preparation, but for a few minutes while he was throwing his weight around and shouting I was afraid my little oversight about parking might derail the whole project. Fortunately, once he’d let off enough steam he decided it was funny that I hadn’t even noticed the fire hydrant and lovable that I’d ditched the car there because I was rushing to find out what had happened to him.

  Another mini-crisis, more serious, occurred when my aunt Berenice from New Jersey told Lensky’s twelve-year-old niece Linda that she couldn’t be a flower girl in the wedding because she wasn’t a member of our church. That was completely untrue and poisonous nonsense besides, but at least I didn’t have to deal with it all by myself. My mom and Linda’s mother tackled Berenice together and reduced her to a tearful refusal to act as my Koumbara during the wedding. My only contribution was remembering not to say that I hadn’t asked her anyway and that I certainly didn’t want somebody as nasty as Berenice standing behind me at all, let alone close enough to exchange the wedding crowns on our heads. I’d already asked Aunt Alesia to be our Koumbara, which – unlike most other roles – did require the participant to be a member of our church. I mean, even Lensky didn’t have to be Greek Orthodox; he’d been baptized as a Catholic, which our church considered acceptable for a spouse. In a kind of marginal, strictly limited way, of course. Let’s not even discuss what they think of the various Protestant heresies.

  We got through that and a dozen other crises and finally, on a golden evening in June, Lensky and I stood in the vestibule of St. Elias to exchange rings. Technically this was the betrothal ceremony, although in modern times the wedding ceremony usually proceeded about ten seconds later, so the separation no longer made a lot of sense. The only slight awkwardness here happened because nobody had mentioned to him that we wear our wedding rings on the right hand. He said afterwards that between that and our making the sign of the cross backward, getting married felt like trying to drive in England: everything happened on the wrong side. (He’s wrong, of course – we do things properly, it’s the Catholics who get it backwards – but the man is absolutely unreasonable on some subjects.)

  After the exchange of rings, the actual wedding ceremony went into high gear, with incense, singing, lighted candles for us to carry to the altar, and all the other trimmings. At least, so I am told, and there’s photographic evidence to support the story. I myself was in a state of paralyzed terror in which most of my perceptions were shut down, with only occasional brief flashes of clarity. I do remember when the priest placed the wedding crowns on our heads, because I was impressed at Lensky’s staying so calm about having to wear a wreath of pearls and white porcelain roses.

  I’m told that Aunt Alesia switched the crowns on our heads three times, but you couldn’t prove it by me. As for the reading from the Gospels, it was probably the same passage read at every Orthodox wedding ever, but this time it was just white noise to me; I didn’t take in a word. Then suddenly there was a cup of wine in front of me; I must have missed the blessing the priest said over it. We each took three sips and I did not spill any, though my hands were shaking. When it was time for the triple procession around the altar while everybody sang the final hymns I felt absolutely certain that I would trip over my own skirts, but somehow I didn’t.

  And at the end, after the wedding crowns had been put away for us to keep, after the final blessings had been said and all the hymns sung, there was Brad. Holding me in his arms. And between us there was surely enough love to last forever.

  Continue reading for a first look at the next Applied Topology book, A Smokeless Flame.

  At first sight, the room was grey, dingy, and unspeakably depressing. On a second look, it was worse. There were no windows, and a metal plate bolted over the small barred opening in the door prevented any possibility of getting a glimpse outside of the room, even the sight of what was probably an equally dim and dingy corridor. The plate and bolts were on the outside of the door, which would have prevented most people from trying to loosen them. I didn’t bother because I had little hope that the view on the other side of the door was any better.

  The air hissing through the ceiling vent was cold and smelled stale. This was the end of a long hot Texas July, a time when I am normally pro-air conditioning, but from where I was now – lying on a clammy cement floor – the coolness was decidedly unwelcome.

  Since I was already lying on my back and staring at the ceiling when I came to, I spent some time contemplating the ceiling air vent. It was about the size of half a sheet of typewriter paper. Even I wouldn’t be able to fit through that opening, and Colton would have had to be fed through in pieces. I lay quietly and considered our other options. Besides the one that they were probably expecting, that is.

  Whoever “they” were.

  Colton had been working on a topological application that would demolish abandoned, ramshackle outbuildings for his father and other farmers, but I didn’t know how much control he had; he had taken his experiments out to a field of prickly pears off Highway 183, where there was plenty of room for error. In any case, I wasn’t sure it would be a good idea to use his application on the door of a cell that had no other outlet for the resulting blast. Then, too, Ben and Ingrid and I weren’t up to date on that project. Colton would have had to blow out his own cel
l door, then find each of us – and that was assuming we were all in the same building – and free us individually. Before any of the nice people who’d locked us up noticed any unusual goings-on.

  Fortunately, as researchers at the Center for Applied Topology we had one very obvious way of departing the scene. I just wasn’t sure it was time for us to use it yet. The way we’d been treated so far suggested that our captors had some serious misapprehensions about the limits on our abilities. It might not be wise to give them any more data than we absolutely had to.

  I’d been the last of the four of us to be captured. It had happened when I was leaving the office – this evening? Yesterday? After being drugged twice and having lost my watch, I wasn’t at all clear on the passage of time. I remembered making a gesture towards cleaning my desk – well, okay, piling the papers in neat stacks. The office had been very quiet, but I hadn’t thought much of that. Mathematicians aren’t very noisy, and it was late enough that our receptionist and the rest of the support staff had probably gone home. It had been quite a while since lunch; I thought I’d just check out the break room, in case there were any leftover doughnuts to help fuel my trip home. But when I walked the Möbius strip through the blank wall between the research division and the public side of the Center, there had been no one in the outer office but two strange men, and the double doorway to the stairs was wide open. We really need to replace that lock one of these days.

  One of the men grabbed me while the other slapped my arm with something sharp. Oh, hell. I’ve been sedated like that before. I don’t like it. I had just enough time to think Dammit, not again before I fell into darkness – not the clear darkness of the in-between, shot through with intersecting lines and spiraling shapes of brilliant color, but a cloudy and stifling darkness that suffocated thought.

  When I came to, there was something around my wrists and my arms ached from being forced into a strained position. I was in a dark place that roared and vibrated alternately; if it hadn’t been for the pain, I wouldn’t have been absolutely sure I was conscious and not having a nightmare. A couple of tugs convinced me that I wouldn’t be able to free my hands by any normal techniques. It was probably safer, just for the moment, to pretend I had no other options. I sat still and tried to feel out the darkness around me.

  After a few minutes I could sense other people. No, nothing paranormal about that; there were subtle shifts in the not-quite-total darkness, movements of the air from someone’s breathing, other tiny cues that we don’t normally rely on.

  “Thalia?”

  It was Ben’s voice, barely audible over the noise around us.

  “Ben! Are you all right?”

  “Sssh. Yes. All three of us are okay.”

  “Who else?”

  “Colton and Ingrid.”

  So, not Lensky. Of course not. He hadn’t even been in town.

  “Mr. M.?”

  “Haven’t seen him. You’ve been out the hell of a long time. What did they do to you?”

  “Drugged, I think.” That made me aware that my mouth was dry and my head was pounding; not things I really wanted to focus my attention on. Well, maybe they were; it was better than thinking about the strain on my arms and shoulders or the nauseating bouncing of the vehicle we seemed to be in. “You?”

  “Same, except it wore off faster.”

  I tried to focus. It wasn’t easy. “Well, I’m smaller than the rest of you. If they gave everybody a dose geared to people Colton’s size, I’m surprised I’m not dead. What happened to you guys?”

  Ben, Colton and Ingrid had stories almost identical to mine, except that Ben and Ingrid had been snatched when they left the building. Colton, like me, had been caught on his way to check out the doughnut tray. They had no idea what had happened to the support staff, and that was worrying them too. Ingrid, who was supposed to be marrying our computer expert Jimmy in six weeks, was being very carefully not hysterical in a very controlled tone of voice. As she said, we had to get ourselves out of this before we could do anything to help the others, so there was no point thinking about them right now.

  Her voice hardly even quavered when she said it, so we all emulated her stiff upper lip. Unfortunately, that didn’t help us come up with any creative ideas.

  We were, we thought, in the back of a windowless van that was on a highway. Probably not I-35, we didn’t hear that many trucks and semis blaring to right and left of us.

  We couldn’t use our best escape option while cuffed to rails that seemed to have been bolted to the inside of the van. Colton tried to pull the rail on his side loose, but he couldn’t get enough leverage on it. And even if we had been able to get loose, I didn’t really want to try teleporting out of a speeding van. Too much chance of winding up smeared across our destination point.

  “We could try the way you got out of Balan’s trap in January?” Ben suggested tentatively.

  “Umm. That was rope I burned, that time.” And it hadn’t been a pleasant experience; my hands and wrists got burned too. This time could be even worse, because it felt like I was confined by plastic zip ties now. “I don’t specially want to melt plastic onto my skin. Anyway, I didn’t have to generate all the heat by myself; the carpet caught fire quite well. I don’t think there’s anything in here that we can burn.” Not to mention that while Riemann fire might free our hands, it wouldn’t solve the problem of teleporting while moving at high speed.

  “Nothing we can reach, anyway,” Colton said grimly, “and maybe it’s not such a good idea to demonstrate the Riemann technique to them if they don’t already know about it.”

  And there was something I should have thought about earlier. “They could have this van bugged. Was that why you were practically whispering, Ben?”

  There was a brief pause, then he said, “Yes. I thought we’d better not talk about anything they don’t need to know.”

  That pretty much restricted us to disjointed trivialities for the rest of the journey. I guessed that during the long silences my colleagues were doing the same thing I was: mentally running through the things we might be able to do to escape, or failing that, to give our attackers some grief.

  One very small bright spot did occur to me. “Colton, did they carry you down both flights of stairs?” Our offices were on the third floor of a Victorian mansion with no elevators.

  “Probably. Although having been out cold at the time, I don’t really know. Why?”

  “I’m just hoping they have permanent back injuries from trying to bench-press somebody your size.” Colton was an extremely large and athletic young man. He’d played football for his high school and could have gone through college on a football scholarship if he hadn’t developed an interest in mathematics and a corresponding distaste for repeated concussions.

  After another half hour of being shaken and stirred, I thought of something else. I just wasn’t sure how to convey it to the others without conveying the same information to our hypothetical listeners.

  “I expect it wouldn’t be a good idea for anybody to go to the office just now.”

  “Well, duh, Thalia,” Ingrid snapped. “I may not go there ever again. Thanks to the Center I have now been defecated on by grackles, shot at by terrorists, transported back…”

  “LA LA LA,” I singsonged to drown out what she was about to say. After a minute Colton joined in with his high school fight song and Ben contributed an off-key rendering of “The Eyes of Texas.” It’s hard to get that one wrong, but Ben is specially talented.

  “Very well,” Ingrid said when we ran out of breath. “I get the message. All the same, I don’t mind telling you that this time I am feeling permanently fed up with the Center for Applied Topology.”

  The residual drugs must still be dulling her mind; I couldn’t think of any other explanation for her saying “fed up” instead of “disenchanted” or “surfeited.” Well, that was another reason not to try anything now, when we desperately needed to be working with perfect clarity. Access to our stars woul
d have come in handy, too. I could sense that mine were in the front righthand pocket of my jeans, like always, but that didn’t do me a lot of good right now; no contortion was going to get my fingers and that pocket together. I didn’t want to ask the others about theirs. The stars were something our captors wouldn’t have noticed, and I really didn’t want them to start thinking about invisible stuff we might have. Invisible to them, anyway.

  “I understand,” I said now to placate Ingrid. “I’m just thinking about the interesting times we’ve had, the places where we’ve all been together. Remember the giant water moccasin?”

  “You mean at—”

  This time Ben was the first one to start singing.

  “Yes, there,” I said when he stopped. “I wonder if we’ll ever be free to visit that place again. It was… really beautiful… apart from the snake. I bet it’s even beautiful in the dark.” And the water moccasin was dead now. Shot by our worst enemy, actually. One of several miscalculations he’d made.

  “Colton wasn’t with us then,” Ingrid said helpfully.

  “But he knows the place I mean, don’t you, Colton? It was where we went fishing in May.”

  There was no chance to escape, or even to make trouble, when the van finally stopped; the guys who’d snatched us came in through the back of the van and repeated the drug treatment. When I came to this time, I was on the floor of this dank gray room, looking up at a depressing bluish-tinted light fixture.

  On the good side, my hands weren’t tied, and there was a chair. After I had contemplated the bejesus out of that air vent in the ceiling, I got up and seated myself. Now, instead of having my whole body in contact with a cold concrete floor, it was just my butt on a cold metal chair. A slight improvement. I was stiff from lying on the cold floor and sore from being bounced around in the back of a van with my wrists cuffed. I did creak slightly on getting up, but I don’t think it would have been obvious to any observers. I’d grown up with two older brothers, both on the large side; they’d given me lots of good practice in not wincing when I got hurt. It had often stood me in good stead with Lensky, who tended to overreact when he found out I was even slightly injured.