She looks at me sadly. Then, “You must not let Simon wear a dress.”
I snort. “I’d prefer it over the leather and chain shirt and top hat he has planned.”
Chimes. A minute later, Kenzo escorts Simon and Ez in. Ez wears a lovely forest green dress. Simon’s a study in contrasts, a fine white suit setting off the glowingly dark bruises on his mouth and eyes. Intentional, of course.
Ez hugs me, looking around at the lavish living room. “Bet you’re glad you got evicted.”
Otto enters, saving me from having to answer.
“Ez, Simon, welcome,” he says warmly, drawing near to them, taking Ez’s hands. My heart swells with pride. Like Stuart, Ez is a dream invader, and all she needs is skin-to-skin contact to forge a link. But my fiancé risks shaking her hand, to show his trust. “Justine is so lucky to have such friends. We both are.”
Ez smiles her elfin smile. “Thanks for having us.”
Otto moves to Simon.
“Twice in a week,” Simon says as they shake.
Kenzo has brought out more champagne. Simon and Shelby talk in the corner while Ez entertains Otto and Kenzo and me with anecdotes about her new role in the Midcity Rep—she’s Hedda in Hedda Gabler. Ez shows us five different ways a person can angrily hold her tongue during another actor’s monologue, which amounts to four hard stares at a couch, and one blank expression.
I sometimes wonder if Otto pulled strings to help her get the part. I know he feels badly about wrongly imprisoning her for three years—he’d used his force fields to seal her inside a coat check booth.
Shelby and Simon have moved farther away, deep in conversation. It’s strange to see them being friendly after so many years of despising each other. Then again, we’re the only three disillusionists who haven’t gone to the dark side with Packard. It makes sense we’d pull together.
Kenzo and Otto want to know if I think the rest of the hors d’oeuvres should be put out, even though my last bridesmaid, Ally, is running late. I decide yes on that.
Otto and Kenzo leave; I spin around just in time to catch Ez exchanging meaningful glances with Simon and Shelby.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“Ez hopes to see your night garden,” Simon says, sauntering toward me.
“What? Did she just communicate that silently?”
“No,” Simon says. “She told me before.”
“Famed night garden. Ez has never seen it,” Shelby adds.
Why are they acting so weird?
I take them out to the humid rooftop patio full of the tropical plants that Otto tends obsessively. I do my best to replicate the botany tour I’ve heard Otto give other guests.
“How the hell do they get this dome thing on here in winter?” Ez asks.
“Helicopters and workmen.” I cross my arms. “So you all think you’re all off the hook? Something’s going on. Not about the garden.”
Simon says, “I’m sorry, are the bridesmaids not allowed to have awesome secret surprises for the bride?”
“Where is the girl Ally?” Shelby asks.
“The girl Ally is late. She called.” Yet another change in subject. I watch their eyes. “What’s the surprise?”
“We will not tell you,” Shelby says.
I think they’re lying. Am I being paranoid?
“Will the king be joining us?” Simon asks.
“Don’t call him that. His prisoners are putting a lot of pressure on his head today.”
“I thought that was all in his imagination,” Simon says.
“It’s not, and it’s an enormous strain to keep those people confined. It’s not as if he can put someone like the Belmont Butcher or the Brick Slinger in a human jail—they’d escape in a minute.”
“If it’s such a strain, maybe he should lay off the personal force field of his,” Ez says. “Must take a truckload of energy to power that thing.”
I spin around. “What? A personal force field?”
She gets this blank look. An oops look.
“Like a force field around himself?” I say. “Otto doesn’t have that power. His power is only with buildings.”
“Oh, okay.” Ez shakes her head. “Brain fart.”
But I can tell she believes it. “Why would you think he has a personal force field?”
“Never mind,” she says.
Simon gives her the eagle eye. “You mean his personal magnetism, Ez? Is that what you meant?”
Simon’s covering for Ez’s misstep. Why?
“Does not matter what she meant,” Shelby says. “Is all the same, anyway. Is all the same utterance in the end.”
I focus on Ez. “Even if it was within his power to do that—to somehow secretly have this personal force field I don’t know about—he wouldn’t. If you recall, Otto walked around in the public even at the height of the Dorks, exposing himself to enormous danger.”
Ez doesn’t reply, but she clearly differs. This, of course, is not the kind of conversation we can have around Ally, who is a normal human and completely in the dark about us.
Ez shrugs. “Forget I said it.”
“Yet you won’t retract it.”
“Brain fart,” she says again, like that explains everything.
“Look, it’s obvious you think he’s fielded himself,” I say, “And I want you to understand that I touch his energy dimension, and his skin, all the time. He just couldn’t, and wouldn’t.”
Ez’s gaze turns diamond bright. “Just because you don’t detect it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
“Actually, it does mean that,” I snap.
“Excuse me,” Ez says hotly, “but I was imprisoned inside an Otto Sanchez force field for three years. I think I know what one feels like.”
“Kids, kids,” Simon says.
“Otto would tell me if he’s developed an entirely new branch of power, like he’s in a walking protective field,” I say. “And I touch his energy dimension all the time.”
“A highcap power isn’t like a jacket you put on; it’s more like a secret skin,” Ez says. “The only way you could tell it’s there is if you tried to penetrate it.”
“Then how would you know he has one?” I ask.
Ez gets the look of an elf in headlights.
“Unless you tried to penetrate it?”
The awkward silence confirms it.
Ez tried to penetrate Otto’s energy dimension. I feel sick. “Were you trying to dream-invade my fiancé?”
Simon puts his hands on her shoulders. “Lay off her, Justine. Of course she reaches out.”
“Penetrating is more than reaching out. There’s only one reason Ez would try to penetrate…”
“She was cut off from all touch for years,” Simon interrupts. “Can you blame her for wanting to know she can fight Otto if she has to?”
“He trusted you enough to take your hand, and you tried to punch through and dream-invade him?”
“He only took my hand because he knew I couldn’t penetrate.”
“It was Stu who framed you for that crime, Ez, not Otto. Otto made an honest mistake.”
She twists up her lips. “I know. I know Stu framed me.”
“Then why?”
“Justine,” Shelby says, “Ez is dining in home of man who imprisoned her for three years. She needed to know she could link to him. Like sighting person with rifle.”
My heart pounds. “And you’re telling me Otto’s fielded himself, with a field so deep and so subtle that I can’t detect it?”
Ez turns up her palms. “Hey, I could be wrong.”
Except she doesn’t think she’s wrong. And Simon and Shelby don’t seem surprised.
I swallow down a pang of grief in the silence that follows, feeling suddenly and strangely alone.
“Justine, if you’re so curious, you could try penetrating him,” Simon says. “You don’t have to zing him. Just poke in and spelunk him again.”
I spin around, glaring. “How can you even suggest that?” Spelunking
is a maneuver where you punch down inside another person’s dimension and actually merge into them.
“He’d never know. Just get in and out.”
“I’d know.”
“So?”
“It would be a violation of…everything.” Specifically, it would be like pulling a thread that would unravel our whole relationship, just when I need to trust again. I think back to how he felt inside when I spelunked him last year: cool, orderly, solid. But it was such a violation.
“Don’t you want to trust him fully?” Simon asks.
“Trust is a state of mind, but it’s also an activity,” I say. “A choice that you make. Trust is my choice.”
Just then, the door opens and Otto strolls in with a beaming Ally on his arm. “Look who I found coming off the elevator.”
Ally’s my jock friend—my rollerblading buddy and former coworker at the dress shop. She’s a big, blonde tomboy, and like most Midcitians, she idolizes Otto.
Otto. Secretly fielded. Could it be true?
I go to her and we hug in a big, jolly way. But then I meet Otto’s eyes over her shoulder, and I get this flash of unease that cuts clear to the bone.
He escorts us to a candlelit table, bantering with Ally, who’s on a tirade about the Felix Five.
Am I being paranoid? It wouldn’t be the craziest thing in the world for Otto to figure out how to wrap himself in a secret personal force field—he does have powerful enemies, and the city is under siege, after all. He’d be protected from bullets as well as a highcap attack. Or disillusionist attack, for that matter. But why not tell me? And it’s not as if I can bring it up to him.
I slam a glass of champagne. Somebody’s not being honest.
Distractedly, I play the hostess as Otto and Kenzo deliver the crab. I exhort Otto to dine with us, but he reminds me he’s no bridesmaid. The crab is a huge hit. People praise Otto and Kenzo’s chefly genius.
My unease stays.
I try to focus on my party. Ez and Ally get along surprisingly well. Simon’s pushing it, as usual; his stories are starting to shock Ally, and I have to kick him under the table after one too-extreme anecdote about his losing everything he owns and then getting beaten up so badly he gets hospitalized. The last thing we need is for Ally to start looking at the bunch of us too hard.
I’m mostly worried about Shelby. She seems more sullen than normal.
Basically, I’m overwrought throughout the whole dinner. But then, I am getting married in two days! Maybe overwrought is natural.
Otto comes in later and takes the chair at the far end of the table, looking suave and sexy in the candlelight.
Ally asks him about the crime wave, and he pronounces it nearly handled. “Things always look messiest while you’re in the middle of cleaning.” He has lots of grand plans for the city after the curfew is over, and he updates us on one of his favorites: the new port that will replace the blighted docks up around Sailor’s Sweep. He paints his vision of how it will revitalize the north side, and he wants it to be a rich site of public art and interaction. My friends have fun making suggestions; even Shelby gets into it, though her jagged-glass park idea will probably not be implemented. Ez declares that there should be people acting like citizens from different historical periods of the city, mingling with the park-goers and having conversations about the leading concerns of their various eras.
Ally, who’s quite drunk now, thinks the Sailor’s Sweep tragedy of 1849 should be represented. In the Sailor’s Sweep tragedy, an empty ship crashed into the shore after a storm—it’s believed that a rogue wave swept all the men away into the ocean, though their bodies were never found. “We should have guys pose as the dead sailors in period sailor suits, crawling around on the boulders and scaring people.” Then she claps a hand over her mouth and turns to Shelby. “Oh my God. I’m sorry. Your man—I didn’t mean to remind you of—”
“Is only reminding when one forgets,” Shelby says.
It was on those lakeshore rocks that Avery died.
“I’m still sorry,” Ally says.
“Be sorry for killer of Avery,” Shelby says. “Because I will kill him slowly. And painfully.”
A hush falls, heavy as a sledgehammer.
“And I shall saw off his tongue with dull, serrated knife,” Shelby continues. “Then I will pierce his brains with ice pick through his eye. Then I will remove his heart and throw it to crows. He will wish he never lived, I promise you.”
Her hatred feels strangely intimate—an uncouth article of grief.
“Do you know where Packard is, Shelby?” Otto asks.
Shelby grits her teeth, hate flaring in her eyes. “Would I be here, do you imagine?” She tilts her head as she addresses him. “Do you think I would dedicate my life to destroying killer of Avery, as I have indeed done, and then squander opportunity to make him pay, just to dress up and have dinner?”
“He’ll be brought to justice,” Otto says. “Mark my words.”
“Do you know where he is?” she asks Otto.
I shoot her a warning look she doesn’t acknowledge.
“Not yet,” Otto says.
Shelby pushes wild rice around on her plate, fork clinking on the china.
Ally drains her wine and slams down the glass with such force I’m shocked it doesn’t break. “Well, if Police Chief Sanchez was still…” she looks confused. “I mean, if you were still Chief Sanchez, instead of Mayor Sanchez, you’da got the guy.” She squints at Otto. “Am I right, or am I right?”
“I can assure you,” Otto says, “Chief Sanchez is most definitely on this case.”
Ally nods. “There we go.”
Shelby’s fixated on the candle.
“Well, Shelby, we’re all glad you’re here,” Simon says.
She glowers up at this sentimental utterance.
“Because really,” Simon continues, “it’s gauche for the maid of honor to go on a murderous rampage in lieu of attending the bridesmaids’ dinner.”
Shelby snorts, eyes on the candle.
“And I should warn you,” Simon continues, “killers’ severed heads on posts are not acceptable as reception décor this season.”
Ez raises a finger and says, “Nor their intestines as streamers.”
“Nor fingers as finger food,” Simon adds.
“Yuck!” Ally’s waving her hands. “Yuck!”
Shelby wears a mysterious smile. Though she claims there’s no such thing as happiness, she does delight in this sort of talk.
I’m not finding it amusing. Sure, I saw him kill Avery, but the idea of Packard hurt or dead upsets me deeply. I know that’s why I called out when it was too little and too late yesterday—just enough to scare him, but not enough to get him caught. Why should I feel so protective of him?
I feel Otto observing me and I give him a quick smile. What does my detective see? I reach across and take his hand, smoothing my fingers over his. It really is outrageous that Ez thinks he has a secret personal force field.
“The crab was so delicious, so exquisite.”
“You said that already, my dear,” Otto says.
“And I might say it again.” I squeeze. His skin feels normal. His energy dimension feels normal. It would be easy to punch in and test him, but I won’t.
I shouldn’t!
Kenzo arrives with a carafe of coffee, plus creams and sugars, then he retreats. I make my coffee cow brown, as Packard used to say. Thinking of him saying that gives me a good feeling in my heart, and then I force myself to remember what he did. And then I tense up in fear, waiting for the cranial pain. God! I’m so sick of myself. My mind is like one of those snakes trying to eat their own tails.
“Justine!” Ally pokes me and I look where everyone else is looking—Kenzo is back, now with a pyramid of chocolate truffles on a tray.
“Oh my goodness!” I say. “Kenzo, will you marry me?”
“Oh no you don’t.” Otto comes over and stands behind me, gently places his hands on my shoulders, and k
isses the top of my head. I put my hands over his.
Again I glide across his energy dimension. I could settle the whole question right this instant. Simon’s right—I could spelunk him. Really fast. In and out, though it’s a dangerous maneuver, because you risk getting trapped. Simon developed the technique, needless to say.
I trail my pale fingers over Otto’s dark knuckles. I could just burn a hole and slide in. Otto would never know.
I try to shake the idea out of my mind, but I can’t. Hell, maybe it would be better if I tested it. Just to remove the suspicion!
“We are so going rollerblading tomorrow,” Ally says. “The whole circuit. Bring your goggles; it’s going to snow more. Cleatskates.”
I nod. “Sounds like a plan.” I rub the backs of Otto’s hands, pressing them to my shoulders. I touch his energy dimension, the dimension that surrounds and pervades a person’s physical body; it’s cool, orderly. Could he really have fielded himself underneath? Right there, I decide I have to know. I tell myself it’s because of the way Packard abused my trust. But that’s just an excuse—I have to know, and before thinking about it any further, I use my focus to burn a tiny hole, just to see if I can. I’m gratified to burn through easily. Unfortunately, the fact I can burn a hole in his energy dimension doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a force field under there. I could make a hole in somebody’s sweater; it doesn’t mean they’re not wearing a bulletproof vest.
Ally’s talking about the last time we went rollerblading, how Max the bodyguard grumbled.
I push my awareness over the hole, readying myself to spelunk. You have to trick yourself into spelunking a person because it goes against human nature to join so deeply with another. It’s wrong on every level, what I’m about to do, and certainly not what a loving, trusting fiancée does. Nevertheless, I take a deep breath and start easing down into him, letting the separation between us dissolve.
But I just slip sideways over the surface.
I try again, with more intention this time, allowing myself to freefall.
Nothing.
I attempt to plunge in, outright, the way you might jump from a high dive into icy water, shoving aside all hesitation and simply going for it. Much to my shock, I’m blocked. I can’t jump in, punch in, plunge in, nothing.
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