A Division of Souls - A Novel of the Mendaihu Universe

by Jon Chaisson

CHAPTER EIGHT

  Caren

  Anando, who are you?

  Caren frowned as she stared at the monitor on her desk, arms crossed tightly across her chest. She really should have been looking for that rogue Mendaihu, but with Poe up at the Crest and Sheila out doing the rounds with Nick, she was flying solo in the office again. She should have joined Poe, thinking back on it. Last night’s dream had bothered the hell out of her, though…she had to know who this Anando Shalei was. Obviously a Mendaihu from the same clan as the investigative siblings, but she highly doubted they were close relations. It just felt wrong somehow…not in a bad way, but logically. He was cut from a completely different cloth.

  She might not be a fully trained Mendaihu, but she could certainly spiritsense well enough to know that this was a real thing. He had definitely contacted her — in her lumisha dea, no less — and had told her they would meet each other again. Briefly she entertained the thought…had they met during their college years, on campus somewhere or at a party? But she would have remembered someone like Anando. He definitely would have left an impression, given the one he left last night.

  It should have been easy enough to find him in the general census database. Even though Shalei was an extremely common clan name, ‘Anando’ was a rarity. There were about a thousand or so ‘A. Shalei’ entries in Central Bridgetown alone, and possibly more in the outpost villages nearby. She had no time or inclination to dig through each and every one of them, and it wasn’t that important to find Anando right this second, but her curiosity was just enough to continue just for a bit longer. He was in the city, that much she knew from her sensing, so she narrowed the search parameters and tried again. A second search by race — looking up Meraladian only this time — cut the number of hits in half, but it was still too much to search through. Maybe by district? It was worth a shot. The highest concentration of Mendaihu in the city was in and around the McCleever District. As an afterthought she added her own neighborhood of Berndette Sector, just in case he really was as close by as he’d said.

  She watched the search run its course, laughing to herself. Why was she doing this? Anando had no part in the awakening ritual at all as far as she knew. But he’d shown up in her most private and personal of places, and he had done so for a reason. And she had recognized his spirit’s signature, connected at a spiritual level with him. She’d never questioned or even entertained the thought of her soul’s previous lifetime…she understood and respected the Meraladian belief of spiritual incarnation, maybe even wished she could believe it herself, but had never seriously contemplated it for any length of time. But now…

  Who was this Anando, who had shaken her spiritual foundation?

  The answer to that question came a few minutes later. After a few more parameter tweaks, she narrowed the list down to three Anandos in the city: an extremely old man living in a nursing home in westside McCleever, a middle-aged businessman in Berndette with two children and a wife…and a graduate student almost exactly seven years her junior, living on his own in eastside McCleever, near the warehouses.

  She shivered and giggled, feeling stupid and giddy at the same time. That last one had to be him!

  “Hey, there you are!”

  Caren nearly jumped out of her seat at the loud voice. Sheila stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame with her arms crossed. She had a wide grin on her face and a rolled-up vidmat in her hand. Without preamble she entered the office and took a seat behind Poe’s desk. “I can see I might have interrupted a few things,” she said flatly.

  Caren laughed despite her face turning red. “Impeccable timing as always, dear,” she said, saving her final search and closing down the database. She’d look further into the mystery of Anando at a later time, when everything calmed down. Finally giving her full attention, she gestured at the vidmat. “I see you’ve been busy. Got something for us?”

  “That I do,” Sheila smiled. “A few things, actually. I assume Poe is up at the Crest at the moment, yes? Pity…he’d want to know about this as well.” She unfurled the vidmat on the desk in front of her, tapped her security code in, and started opening up a few files. She was acting like a kid itching to spill a juicy secret, just like Matthew had, and she had to bite her cheek to keep from laughing.

  “First things first,” she said. “Remember that bit Rieflin talked about the other day? About people gathering somewhere in the Waterfront?” Caren nodded. She’d been surprised and blindsided by that moment, just like everyone else had at the ARU, but she hadn’t had time to follow up on it. “Yeah, I thought that was kind of odd too. Pretty damn sure they mean one of the empty warehouses down there, that’s the only place that’ll fit that many people comfortably. That’s also something our department would’ve had knowledge on right away. You don’t have a spiritual gathering of any kind without someone here knowing about it. That made me think: either he knows where the warehouse is and won’t tell us, or he doesn’t know, and it’s possible it’s a rumor.”

  “You requested more information, I take it?” Caren asked.

  “Yes, and of course they weren’t going to give it. At least not right away. I’m figuring it’ll be leaked within a few days, though. So…” She tapped on a file and opened it up, and turned the vidmat in her direction. It was an impressively long list of warehouse names in that district, color-coded and subdivided into different columns. Many of the names had been stricken. “I eliminated all the warehouses owned by the government, businesses we’ve confirmed have no spiritual or religious ties, and others that we know are condemned. That left only about a dozen or so possible places. So I had Nick call in a favor from one of his coworkers in PD. They didn’t give a name, of course, but they gave us an idea where to look.”

  Caren glanced down again, and frowned. One name was circled: Moulding. It was an old building that hadn’t been used for storage or shipping in quite some time, but given that it was still in great structural shape, it was often rented out short-term to various parties.

  “You think they’re establishing camp here?” she asked.

  “Quite sure about that,” she said. “Nick took a drive past there a few hours ago, and noticed a higher than normal amount of foot traffic and plainclothes officers floating around.”

  Caren thought about this for a few moments. Did they really need to know about followers of the One of All Sacred gathering together to pray? If the BMPD were keeping the peace, there was little the ARU could do other than back them up if they needed help. And it sounded like it was a peaceful gathering. On the other hand, there was the possibility this could be a gathering of resources. She hated to entertain the thought…but this could be a Mendaihu congregation, freshly awakened and awaiting further instruction.

  “We need someone down there,” Caren said. “I need you and Nick —”

  Sheila cut her off with a wide grin. “Already on it. Right now we’re plugged into the traffic feed down there. The warehouse takes up nearly the whole block, so we have all four intersections available, and that should cover outside. But we’ll make our way down there soon enough.”

  Caren nodded. She’d have liked to have someone there now, but she trusted Sheila enough to make up for it in other ways. “And the second thing?”

  “The second thing…” she said, twisted the vidmat back in her direction, and tapped open a few more files. She hummed quietly to herself, a kid with a secret she couldn’t contain any longer. “It’s really a pity that Alec isn’t here, he’d want to know as well. Guess who owns it.” She turned the vidmat back to Caren and pushed it her way. On the screen was the picture and statistics of a man in his late thirties. He looked fit and strong for his age, not exactly handsome but definitely someone charismatic. In this picture he held himself with conviction, sure of whatever he aimed for. He wore a black trench coat over a black bodysuit. On his shoulder was a patch of two intersecting circles.

  H
e was wearing the official gear of a Mendaihu Elder.

  “That’s our guy,” Sheila said, a proud smile on her face. “Just confirmed it. Matches our witnesses’ descriptions, right down to the spirit signature.”