An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  Once past the ID check, I relaxed slightly and took in my surroundings. The place looked like a nursing home, or maybe something slightly less depressing, like an auxiliary activity building for a church. A short hall floored with dark linoleum led to a large, low room where people were unfolding metal chairs. I eased along the wall and stood between two stacks of chairs, where I could lean on the wall and listen.

  That worked just fine initially.

  A youngish man with long frizzy hair was already haranguing the audience. Feeling safe in my invisibility, I listened to the speaker, made mental notes, and - after the first dozen or so stupid, arrogant statements - made faces at the man while he made a fool of himself. There was a lot of the same kind of garbage I'd heard at that protest, all adding up to, "Anybody who disagrees with me and my friends is a hater, hate speech is the same as violence, our violence is a legitimate response to the speech-violence being perpetrated against us." There was some talk of empathizing with the supposed victims of the loosely defined hate speech, but not much; the speaker was more interested in enforcing the principle that anybody who disagreed with him ought to be silenced. By force if necessary.

  That seemed to be a key concept; he repeated, "BY FORCE IF NECESSARY!" as if the words were magic, and the audience shouted them back at him.

  So it was pretty clear who I was eavesdropping on. This must be the local chapter of BFiN, or Be-Fin, as the talking heads on TV referred to them. I'd heard that they were behind some of the Black Bloc violence in California. But I hadn't realized they could get... I counted heads. At least a hundred people, and of course these were only the inner circle.

  The idiot at the podium didn't seem quite so funny any more.

  And now he had finished with rousing the crowd and moved on to specifics. Somebody I'd never even heard of had been invited to speak to the campus branch of Young Republicans in ten days, and this speech must not be allowed. The invited speaker was a Jewish White Supremacist - I blinked at that - a Fascist, a Nazi... the epithets rolled on until I lost track, somewhere between "racist" and "trans phobic," and began to wonder exactly what BFiN planned to do to shut down the speech. Wouldn't they have been better off ignoring it? This was a liberal university in a very liberal city; I doubted that membership in the Young Republicans got out of double digits.

  I suppose it depended: were they more interested in making sure this particular speaker went unheard, or in demonstrating their power to shut down any heretic? The tone of this meeting suggested that the latter was their real aim.

  The plans to shut down the speech seemed pretty much the mixture as before, only with more and better planned violence. After recommending that the leaders carry bike locks (good for bashing people in the head) and cans of hair spray (turns into a flamethrower when you light it) the speaker reiterated the recommended tactics: "Give these signs out to your followers, but keep your own hands free."

  What signs? I wondered, and then my pulse jolted. Everybody in the hall seemed to be staring at me - no, at somebody who was headed for my little niche between two stacks of folding chairs. It was a skinny guy who really shouldn’t be wearing a man-bun; somehow the excess hair on the back of his head emphasized the lack of chin and the wispy goatee on the front. He wouldn’t have worried me on the street, but here? I shrank back as he walked right into my space with his folding table, turned around, and set it up between himself and the crowd. Between the two of us and the crowd, actually, but I doubted he realized that.

  Yet.

  This seriously compromised my escape route. Could I possibly crawl out under the folding table? Before I'd even had a good look at it, somebody else showed up and dumped a high stack of nice, professional-looking, printed signs on the table. Already stapled to hefty sticks for convenient carrying, not to mention that the sticks could double as weapons.

  Somebody had already done serious planning and preparation. I wondered who had paid for the print job.

  But I had more urgent problems to deal with. Sign Man was looking uncomfortable, shuffling backwards and forwards and glancing behind himself when he should have been looking at the people surging up to the other side of the table to get their helping of pre-printed vitriol. A space which had been more than adequate for me was not quite large enough for the two of us and a table. Any minute now he'd back right into the boundary of my camouflage unless I pulled it in very close to my body. If I did that, somebody might notice a person-shaped blur; if I didn’t, it would look to those people as if Sign Man’s edges were blurring.

  We're not supposed to let that sort of thing happen. It's contradictory to the Center's low-profile strategy, and it upsets the observers. Mind you, I had seldom encountered a group of people I was more willing to upset, but not when I was stuck in a room with them.

  I should have used Brouwer to teleport myself to a safe place right then, but I was worried about dropping camouflage when I invoked Brouwer. People flashing in and out of sight would be even worse than fuzzy edges. I pushed very gently against the stack of folding chairs on my left. If I could just scoot them forward a foot, I would be able to get out of here without losing my camouflage.

  That was when the entire enterprise went sideways.

  Just like the chairs.

  They leaned to the left, then crashed down on the floor one after another as if they were trying to be falling dominoes.

  Sign Man tried to grab them. He didn't succeed, but the force of his lunge carried him right into my space. I took an elbow to the breast and had one foot trampled.

  And then everybody in the hall was looking at me, because my concentration wasn't nearly good enough to maintain a visualization of an open cover on a sphere while being squashed like that.

  Sign Man had quick reflexes; he grabbed my arm and demanded loudly, "How did you get there?"

  "What? I was just trying to open a chair so I could sit down. I'm sorry about them all falling over like that..."

  "I don't know her," someone said, much too loudly, from the far side of the table.

  "What's your name?"

  "Sally?"

  He raised his voice. "Anybody here know this girl? She says her name's Sally."

  There was a vague unhappy murmur from the crowd, but nobody stepped forward to verify my bona fides. Not unreasonable, under the circumstances.

  "I came with Bob?" I tried.

  "Bob Whyburn?"

  "You know, good old Bob?"

  Heavy-Set Bob pushed his way to the front of the crowd. "Never saw her before in my life. She's probably a spy."

  Now that one of the two stacks of chairs had fallen over, it was easy for him to come around the table and grab my other arm. Oh, great. Now if I teleported out of the hall, I'd bring Bob and Sign Man with me; that was how Brouwer teleportation worked, convenient for bringing non-magical people with us, not so great for getting away from them. And the effort of teleporting them as well as myself, especially when I couldn’t get a hand into my pocket to access the power of the stars, would leave me too shaky and weak to do anything useful after we got wherever I decided to go.

  Could I think of any place I could teleport to that would be guaranteed to have quick-thinking friends who'd spring to the rescue? Well, no, not really. Not on a Friday night. In the daytime I might have been able to get help in Allandale House.

  And that was a singularly un-useful line of thought.

  "Do you know what we do to spies?" Bob demanded. He was squeezing my arm so hard it hurt.

  "Oh, shut up. I'm concentrating!" Because there was, I'd just realized, one place that would be full of people I knew on a Friday night. Not people I usually thought of as well disposed to me, but I felt pretty sure that in a struggle between me and a couple of non-related, not-even-Greek thugs, they'd take my side. Not only that, but with any luck there'd be baklava.

  Let sleeping case officers lie

  Chapter 6

  Just as I said, "Brou...," Mr. M. uncoiled his tail and raised his head up. He beg
an swaying back and forth like a cobra and hissing at Bob.

  "Ick! It's alive!" He let go of me and went backwards with silly-looking little steps as he tried to both keep his balance and put distance between him and Mr. M.

  "...wer," I finished, and Sign Man and I were in Mom's kitchen.

  So were my two older brothers, my Uncle Stefanos, and his son Elias.

  And my mother, of course. Dominating the room.

  "Thalia, dear!" She surged forward to embrace me.

  "Failure?" Sign Man echoed, sounding bemused.

  "Rhymes-with." It didn't seem the moment to start retraining my family to pronounce my name the way Lensky did, with a broad 'a'. Instead I twisted against Sign Man’s grasp. "And none of your business anyway! Let me go!"

  "Manners, Thalia," my mother said. "Aren't you going to introduce me to your friend?"

  "No friend of mine!"

  "Then why did you bring him?"

  "He's... attached to me. Something," I panted, "that I'm trying to change. Stevie, can you remove this from my arm?"

  "My pleasure, Thalia." My second-oldest brother stood and reached for Sign Man, who let go of me and fled out the back door. "Where did you get it, anyway?"

  "He followed me home," I said, essentially truthfully, "but I didn't want to keep him."

  See, this is an instance of my mother's ability to dominate her world. To her the fact that I'd turned up with a male human being attached was far more important than the fact that we'd just appeared out of thin air. So she simply ignored the uncomfortable part of the facts and focused on the possibility that this hitherto unknown young man was going to provide her with grandchildren.

  And so everybody else also ignored the manner of our arrival in favor of discussing whether Sign Man was an acceptable suitor.

  "Good decision," Stevie said now. "Mom, it's okay. You wouldn't want to have grandchildren who looked like that - that bedraggled weed. Would you now?"

  "He might have been Thalia's last chance!"

  "She's got a point, Thalia," my oldest brother put in. "You've got to stop scaring them off some time."

  I gave him my best Research Fellow glower. "Maybe you and Andrea could spawn, take the heat off me."

  Traditional Greek family attitudes are among the massive injustices of the world. I have three brothers, two older than me. But does the pressure for grandchildren ever light upon Yanni or Stevie? No. Even if you didn’t count Andros because he was still in high school, logically I should only have to carry one-third of this load. But I'm the only girl and I get a hundred percent of the pressure.

  Right now, though, my knees were shaking too much for me to pursue the argument. I took the chair Stevie had vacated and looked for something to eat, quickly, before my blood sugar crashed and I passed out. There was no baklava visible, but Yanni was sitting in front of an open Tupperware box full of dolmathes. I pulled the box towards me and popped a stuffed and rolled grape leaf into my mouth. The rice and pork filling made an explosion of flavor on my tongue. It was really a pity to gobble these things so fast, but I didn't have much choice if I didn’t want to faint. I scarfed down two more before Yanni recaptured the rest. "I was going to take those home to Andrea!"

  My mother took this as a demonstration that I wasn't getting enough to eat. She loaded the kitchen table with leftovers from dinner, a blend of Greek and American cooking: moussaka, a molded Jello shape with mandarin orange segments and mini-marshmallows, spanakopita, mashed potatoes, a tomato and feta salad, reheated pita. The usual.

  "Next week try to get here on time," she said, "before everything gets cold. You can't taste it properly now."

  "It tastes fantastic," I said with my mouth full.

  She elbowed Yanni out of his chair and sat down opposite me. "So tell me, Thalia, how are you and that nice Mr. Southland getting along?"

  I paid for my meal with a solid forty-five minutes of lying, evading, and pretending that Ben and I had any relationship beyond a professional one. Apart from that, it was a relatively successful visit. I managed to keep Lensky's name out of it. Mr. M. stayed quiescent, imitating a belt buckle. My father was out in the back yard, too busy drinking and playing two-handed Pilotta with Uncle Stefanos to come in and express his disappointment with me. My kid brother stayed out there too, watching for a chance to sneak a beer.

  And there was, eventually, baklava.

  Lensky was watching some show about international spies when I got to the condo. It hadn't been exactly easy getting there; if there was one thing Yanni, Stevie, and Cousin Elias agreed on, it was that a sister (or cousin) who showed up late for dinner and with an unwanted weedy excrescence attached to her right arm shouldn't be allowed to wander the streets alone. The least I could do was let Cousin Elias give me a ride home.

  "Home," of course, meant the apartment I still shared, technically, with Ingrid. I wasn't about to try and maneuver Elias into dropping me off near the condo; as far as my family was concerned, Lensky's existence was classified at the burn-this-before-reading level.

  And, of course, Elias insisted on walking me to the door of my second-floor apartment, so I had to go inside and peek through the front window and wait for his car to go away before I felt safe to teleport.

  Lensky hadn't always been so calm about seeing me step through an opening in the air, but he'd had a lot of practice since he moved into the condo. Now he didn’t even stop watching the spy show; he simply saluted me with his beer and asked if I needed sugar therapy.

  "Nup. Refueled at my parents' house."

  "Oh, right. I heard about Colton’s accident. Though I am a bit surprised to hear that you gave up a good excuse to avoid the obligatory Friday night dinner."

  "Maybe I'm a nicer person than you realize." Clearly he thought that once Colton was unavailable as backup, I'd just gone for family dinner as usual. It wasn't quite that simple, of course, but I thought I wouldn't bring up the details until the TV show was over. For some reason that I do not fully understand, the fact that these shows get nearly everything wrong that it's possible to get wrong is a source of amusement for Lensky. If I didn't understand that the first five or six times we watched one together, it was only because his way of indicating enjoyment was to shout at the TV about the mistakes.

  I don’t object; watching Lensky yell at the TV is pretty good fun for me. There had been one never-to-be-forgotten night when his frustration with stupid scriptwriters brought him to the point of taking his shoe off and pounding the floor with it. Tonight's entertainment wasn't quite that glorious; it was just the usual flow of disgusted comments.

  "Don't you ever put in a fresh magazine? Because you used up the first one in the first forty-five seconds of this firefight!"

  “Oh, now you reload – oh, no, no, no! It’s a Beretta, you moron, you don’t have to pull the slide back manually, just push the little button on the side!”

  “Case officer, dammit, case officer! The stupid FBI has agents, we have case officers!”

  There was a certain amount of what Lensky described as “friendly rivalry” between various agencies within the intelligence community. I had yet to see the “friendly” part.

  Finally the music swelled up, the hero took the glamorous (reformed) spy in his arms, and Lensky turned off the TV with a smile on his face.

  "I notice that among all the corrections," I said, "you never complain that the hero has an unbelievable success rate with unbelievably sexy females."

  "Why quarrel with the wish-fulfilment aspects of the story? Besides, that part is totally believable. I mean, here you are."

  It was a nice save given that that he'd been practically drooling down the spy's cleavage for the last fifteen minutes of the show.

  "Are you all right?" he asked after that.

  "Why wouldn't I be?"

  "I don't know, it just makes me nervous when you teleport here and don't immediately demand something to eat."

  "Told you. I got more than an adequate refill at home."


  "Uh-huh. And why did you need refilling just for a perfectly ordinary short jump from the office to your parents' house?"

  Dammit. Most of the time Lensky acts as if he doesn't have a clue about our work. It's disconcerting when he slips up and reveals that he understands more than I thought. Oh well, he was offering me a way to ease into the revelation that my evening had not been one hundred percent spook-approved. "It wasn't that easy. Actually I had to jump from somewhere else. And I had a passenger. Uninvited."

  He sat up and punched the lighting remote. The bright lights in the ceiling came to life. "What happened to your arms?" I looked. There were red blotches between elbow and shoulder on each side. I hoped tomorrow would be cool enough to wear something with sleeves.

  I shrugged. "Told you. Uninvited passenger. It worked out all right, though. Stevie and Yanni persuaded him to leave."

  "Which arm was he hanging on to?"

  What a strange question. "The right."

  "Then what happened to your left arm?"

  Oh. Trick question.

  "Look, it might be simpler if I tell you everything from the beginning, only you've got to promise not to lose your temper and pound the floor with your shoe, okay?"

  "Don't flatter yourself," he said, "you can't possibly be as flamboyantly wrong as the average television scriptwriter."

  I paused a moment, trying to select enough to tell him without making him mad.

  “Well, I thought I’d just look in on that meeting and listen for a few minutes and it would have worked out perfectly fine, only this stack of chairs fell down and I, uh, lost my concentration for a minute and they saw me. So Mr. M. startled one of them into letting go and I teleported to my parents’ house with the other one hanging onto my arm, because there’s always a crowd there on Friday night, and my brothers persuaded the other guy that he didn’t want to stick around. Only then they were worried about me so after we ate I had to let Cousin Elias drive me home, to the apartment I mean, and after he left I came over here.”