Silhouette

by Robin Hale

  It sat, cradled in velvet that I knew was genuine silk even without any of the fiber tests I would have run to confirm it, and glinted in that low, glowing way that had always mesmerized me. I’d half expected that it was a trick of the light, the careful jeweler’s lighting they’d rigged into the glass display case in the city’s small local history museum. I’d visited it every time I could manage. Children were always allowed in for free, and my mother had never been sorry to send me off to the museum when she and my father had meetings in city hall. I’d sat for hours watching the lights on its faceted surface, trying to identify all of the colors I could see glowing within it.

  It was large, an unreasonable size for anything but display. It would never be set into a ring or a pendant, not even the Queen of England could pull that off. But I hadn’t cared. I’d wanted it just like I’d briefly wanted to be a mermaid or an opera singer, despite my complete inability to carry a tune. I had put aside my love of the fire opal not because what I wanted had changed, but because I had accepted that it would never be mine.

  And the Silhouette had given it to me.

  There was an absurd, horrible impulse to keep it. To lock it away in my nightstand drawer and take it out now and again to admire it the way I had all those years ago. For a full three minutes, I allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy. I pictured quiet, comfortable evenings at home, taking the opal from its hiding place to watch it glow and glint in the light. The Silhouette would somehow be watching, satisfied, as I enjoyed her gift. Perhaps she’d be on a neighboring rooftop, watching through the bedroom window. Or I’d hear her on the fire escape and I’d unlock the window to let her in, listen to her silk-velvet voice whisper in my ear, soft lips brushing against my lobe as she told me how much she’d wanted me to have it, how she’d taken it with no other thought than to make me smile. She’d slip her hands beneath the hem of my blouse and —

  I shook my head, clearing the tempting, devastating images from it and trying to remember that I was a grown woman with responsibilities. A moral compass. And no matter how I might be tempted, I could not keep the opal.

  Even if she had made me smile.

  THE CALL to the non-emergency line at the Opal City Police Department had taken only moments. Martha had answered, and, after a few seconds chatting about her grandchildren and what wonders they were up to by their current ages, I’d told her that there’d been another break in at my apartment.

  No, I wasn’t in any danger.

  No, the intruder wasn’t still there. I was sure.

  No, I wouldn’t have called, except they’d left something there that I thought the mayor would prefer to have back.

  As it turned out, no one had noticed that the opal was missing. There was a resin piece in its place and the model had been close enough to pass muster for everyone who had wandered by. It was enough to send me into peals of laughter. Resin? They’d been fooled by resin? Resin, which had neither the depth, nor the refractive index of fire opals. Resin, which might appear to glow if literally set with an LED bulb inside it, but in no other circumstances.

  Somehow, knowing how easily the Silhouette had been able to dupe those charged with caring for the object of my childhood obsession had made the whole gift that much more pointed. It was as though the Silhouette had sat in my romantically lit bedroom in a careless lean against my windowsill and whispered that no one had ever loved it like I did. That no one deserved it the way that I did.

  ‘Beautiful things,’ she might have said. ‘Are for those of us who can see them for what they are, darling.’

  14

  LANA

  Ileaned against the brick wall at the corner of Hamilton and Church, two paper cups of coffee from the nearest espresso bar clutched in my hands, and squinted through the tinted lenses of my sunglasses. Two o’clock in the afternoon was an appallingly bright time to be outside in Opal City at that time of year. It’d required digging through my closet, searching for something that wasn’t black and wouldn’t boil me alive as soon as I stepped out of doors. The sleeveless eggplant blouse that topped my usual black cigarette pants was as close as I could get to an actual color with the current state of my wardrobe.

  Izzy would find it endlessly hilarious, I was sure.

  I mostly just found it sweaty and uncomfortable.

  The discomfort would be worth it, of course. The intel packet I’d picked up from my contacts had been very clear, and if I wanted to make sure that everything went as I’d prefer it to go, then I had work to do at blisteringly-sunny o’clock. Outside.

  Just then, only sixteen seconds earlier than I had expected, Dr. Molly Fawn rounded the corner. Her brow was furrowed and her eyes were fixed on a point in the distance. It was clear that she wasn’t really taking in the world around her, not in any way more meaningful than simply not wandering into traffic. I felt myself smile at her distraction.

  “You know,” I drawled as I fell into step beside the lab rat. “You’re absolutely impossible to buy for, darling. What’s a girl to think, you go sending her gifts back like that?”

  The jolt that passed through the petite, bespectacled genius was more shiver than startle, and I let the pleasure from that realization paint itself across my face. Always nice to be appreciated.

  Fawn found her feet quickly. “You didn’t buy it.”

  I chuckled, glancing sidelong at the quirk of Fawn’s mouth as she fought not to smile. It was no use, the corners of her eyes crinkled and her warm brown eyes practically glittered with amusement.

  “You’re right, of course. I didn’t.” I lifted the coffee nearest Fawn and held it out to her. “I did, however, buy this. Relatively certain I’ve got your order right.”

  The way her eyes widened, the way genuine delight spread across her perfect mouth, the way every bit of her posture seemed to radiate surprised pleasure sent a wave of heat crashing through my every nerve. Fuck. It was exactly the sort of idiocy I’d sworn off of, getting so hung up on someone that I started chasing their approval like some narcotic high.

  Fawn accepted the offered coffee and took a sip, eyelids slipping to half-mast in an expression I could imagine paired with moonlight, red cheeks, and the taste of her on my tongue. The woman clearly enjoyed her coffee, and I was absurdly proud of having thought to bring it.

  “It’s perfect,” she sighed happily. A heartbeat later, she was quirking an amused brow up at me. “As far as paying…where’d the money come from, Silhouette?”

  I waved a dismissive hand through the air, trying to cover the way my mouth had gone dry at the sight of her pleasure. “Details.” I dropped a quick glance at my watch while Fawn took another sip of her coffee. Still time. “I wanted to thank you for the game,” I murmured, taking the opposite turn in Fawn’s usual route for her afternoon walk. She followed me automatically, not resisting the change to her routine.

  “The game?” Big brown eyes glanced up at me over the lid of Fawn’s cup.

  “Mm, yes.” The lazy grin on my face was comfortable. “At first I thought it might have been the good Captain, that he’d spontaneously acquired a new power or he’d finally figured out how to get one over on me.” I caught Fawn’s gaze with a wry wickedness in my own. “But that’s not the case, is it? It was you. The way he managed to find me in a dark room. It was you.”

  There was satisfaction in talking with her about it. It became a shared joke by acknowledging it with her. Something that was ours. It settled beneath my skin, that desire to let Fawn know that I had seen her, that I realized the brilliance in that interaction had been her hand, not his.

  I could recognize the impulse for what it was. I wanted to tie her to me. I wanted to keep her bright eyes, her devastating smile turned my way. I could be distressingly possessive when it came to the things that caught my eye, and it seemed that Fawn would be no exception there.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. Her voice was small, but it didn’t hide the grin that was pulling at her petal-soft lips. “It was a guess.” The lif
t of one shoulder was an embarrassed fig leaf for her obvious pleasure at being praised. “I’d noticed —” She bit off the sentence with a sharp snap of her teeth, and something about the gesture caught inside my ribs and twisted.

  Who the hell had taught her to silence herself like that? They could do with a few hours someplace dark and cramped, if I had anything to say about it.

  “You’d noticed…?” I prompted as gently as I could manage. Which was, to be fair, not overly gently. It wasn’t a quality I practiced very often.

  Fawn shook her head, cheeks going just the slightest bit pink as she ducked her gaze away from me. “Just your goggles. The…the receiver on them, the tech surrounding the lenses. That’s all.”

  There was another pedestrian on the sidewalk, a middle-aged man stalking toward us with the confidence of a whale that a school of minnows would part around it. Fawn stepped out of his way automatically, ducking closer against my side, and it was everything I could do to keep my hand tucked loosely against my trouser pocket, thumb hooked in the edge of it, rather than dropping it to rest against the small of her back.

  “Don’t downplay it too far, darling. If not for your own sake, then for mine.” I quirked an amused brow at the quizzical look she offered me, still walking inside the carefully maintained territory of my personal space. “I’d much rather believe it was brilliance that got Captain Colossal’s hands on me for the first time, rather than nothing too special.”

  “Oh!” Fawn said, eyes going wide. “I didn’t mean —” A sudden frown swallowed the expression of concern. “Was that really the first time?”

  “Really,” I confirmed and took another sip of my own coffee.

  “Huh.” There was a strange look on her face, her lower eyelids drawing up like she was scrutinizing something only she could see. There was something else there, too, a pleased pride that she was obviously trying to tamp down.

  “You’ve never really touched him either,” Fawn said after a long moment.

  That wasn’t entirely true. In my second interaction with Captain Colossal, I had spent an indulgent five minutes dancing around his hilariously exaggerated blows, tapping him with light, two-finger touches behind his elbow, the side of his knee, vulnerable places I could have disabled a man — even him — if I’d wanted to.

  “You’ve never done any actual harm to him,” Fawn amended, and that I couldn’t object to. “Why is that?”

  The simple curiosity in her voice was sharper against my suddenly exposed underbelly than I had had any reason to expect. I didn’t have a reputation for hurting anyone and the reason for that was simple: a properly executed theft did not require violence. If it did, the plan was bad or the execution was flawed. Taking things was a far cry from hurting living people, and it was uncomfortable to hear Fawn talking like they were the same. Or like they should be, for me.

  I covered the hurt with the kind of breezy response that made Izzy want to throttle me. “Oh, well, I think the earnest young man provides an important service.”

  Fawn blinked. “You do?”

  “Certainly,” I agreed. “The world’s off its nut, my dear Doctor Fawn. If someone is going to go volcanic on Fifteenth street, I’d just as soon have the good Captain there to deal with it. I like this city. It’s comfortable. I don’t want to find another hunting ground.”

  Fawn blinked again. “You mean — you mean that you like what the Captain is doing…because it makes Opal City a nicer place for you to steal things?”

  I chased a drop of coffee from my lip with a quick swipe of my tongue and enjoyed the way Fawn’s eyes tracked the movement. “That’s about the size of it, darling.” I took another turn, heading toward the artsier district of downtown. That time of year it would be covered in painters and artisans with display tables along its tree-lined streets. Fawn followed, stepping close enough to me to brush her arm against mine, and it seemed like every ounce of my awareness narrowed down to that single point of contact.

  Appalling. I was a grown woman, not a sighing teenager looking at a girl for the first time and hoping that she would look back.

  I felt more than saw the way her steps faltered when she finally shook herself from whatever reverie she’d fallen into and looked around. “This isn’t my usual route.” She frowned.

  “Oh, isn’t it?” I asked, voice still breezy and careless.

  Those sharp brown eyes turned on me again. “I don’t believe for an instant that you don’t know my route by heart.”

  I cleared my throat to cover my sudden grin, hiding it behind my fist. She was right, of course. I dropped a surreptitious glance at my wristwatch, checking the time and running my mental model of the break-in that was in progress just a few blocks away.

  Fawn stopped walking and the sheer gravitational pull of her planted feet and sharply narrowed stare had me turning to face her like a sunflower following the sun.

  “Why are you trying to keep me out of my lab?” She seemed to be tasting the question as she asked it, testing it against her teeth and fitting it in with all the pieces of evidence she had — trying to sort out if it was real. After a moment, it became clear that she was satisfied with her conclusions.

  Damn. I’d hoped to keep her distracted for another five minutes at least. Hopefully the idiots breaking into OCRL were impatient and ahead of schedule. “Can’t I just be here for the pleasure of your company?” I flashed a teasingly raised brow, a rakish grin, and let a little of the constant, low-simmering heat I felt around Fawn to come into my eyes.

  She was tempted, I could tell. Her eyes went darker, pupils flaring in the mid-afternoon sun, and her lips parted on a soft breath. But it wasn’t enough.

  “You could, but you aren’t.” Her brow furrowed and I wanted to trace the line of it with my fingers, wanted to smooth it away and press her back against one of the well-manicured trees so I could taste her mouth again and coax those pretty sighs from her lips.

  I was in the full, foolish throes of a ridiculous crush and I couldn’t regret a moment of it. I’d always enjoyed them, the rush of knowing that I wanted something. Someone. There was nothing like the certainty of my own feelings and the completely uncharted territory of someone else’s. I’d gotten skilled at reading desire on others’ faces, adept at coaxing someone along to what we both already wanted. Aside from a particularly lovely jewel, there was nothing more appealing to lift than someone’s attraction.

  “I’ve been keeping an eye on some of my less esteemed colleagues,” I began, hearing the caginess in my own voice and wishing I could suppress it. “And it seemed best to keep you out of their way.”

  Dread practically dripped from her lips when Fawn spoke once more. “What have you done?”

  “Fawn, I —” I’d barely started the sentence that would fall inelegantly, trippingly over my tongue when the sound of an explosion split the air and the siren-call of ringing alarms followed a heartbeat after.

  Fawn’s eyes went nearly perfectly round and her hands spasmed, coffee cup crashing to her feet in a wave of bitter brew. “The lab — that was the lab — Those alarms, I —” She staggered, turning back toward the source of the sound, the OCRL building that I’d carefully led her away from as we’d walked.

  I caught her shoulders in the cradle of my palms, letting my own cup fall to join hers on the pavement. “None of that, now, darling,” I murmured. There was a black cloud rising over the rooftops in the direction of the lab, and I frowned at it. What the hell had they gotten up to over there? My intel had mentioned a planned theft, but only an idiot would need to use an explosive to get into OCRL.

  “What have you done?” There was something cracking in Fawn’s voice, something breaking. “My lab — my, my coworkers — my friends, Silhouette. What have you done? Let me go!” She tugged against my grip on her shoulders, but — biting back a wave of nausea — I did not release her.

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that yet, doc. I’ve run the numbers, you see, and the best way to make sure you don’
t get hurt is to keep you right here. For another,” I glanced at my watch. “Minute and a half. Give or take.”

  “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Her voice was tight, and I hated that I had put that tension in it. “Do you know what’s in that lab?”

  I did, actually. I made a point of keeping an eye on our friends at the Opal City Research Laboratory. They had a tendency to do interesting — and often explosive — projects there, and I certainly wasn’t the only black hat who took an interest. It was in my own best interests to know what my less stable compatriots might be after.

  And in that instance, I was relatively certain I knew what it was. “It’s a bit of a bear to tell from here, of course, but if I had to guess I’d say they were after your industrial atomizer. But it’s just a guess.” There was a sharper edge on my tongue than I’d intended, but Fawn didn’t seem bothered.

  Instead, she only looked surprised. It stung, a bit. What would it take for this woman to realize I wasn’t an idiot?

  “Why are you after the atomizer?” She asked, wide-eyed.

  A jolt tore through my chest as the accusation struck home. “Me? You honestly think that I sent a pack of goons into your lab to steal something I could’ve gotten myself without anything so ridiculous as a bomb?”

  Fawn had the good grace to blush at that.

  “Listen, doc. I kept you here so that you’d be out of their way. So that no one would feel compelled to do anything to this lovely face of yours. Atomizers aren’t really my style, even if I do have a weakness for a fine perfume.” My lip curled, not quite a sneer or a snarl, but I felt like a cornered animal anyway.

  I let go of the doctor’s shoulders and she stumbled half a step as she pulled away. I fought back the urge to catch her elbow and steady her.

  “I should have been there,” she insisted and took off at a run back toward her lab.

  “No, darling,” I muttered to myself, retrieving our paper coffee cups from the sidewalk. “You really shouldn’t have.” I adjusted my sunglasses, tossed my hair back over my shoulder, and stalked off into the city. Already, I felt ill-advised plans percolating as the unfamiliar swell of guilt and shame roiled in my gut.