A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1)

by Margaret Ball

  “We really must try some long-distance jumps,” Ingrid said.

  “Soon,” Ben added, and then, sotto voce, “Whee.”

  “That was, you know, really strange,” said Annelise. “And uncomfortable. And I didn’t like not being able to see anything.”

  Ben looked at his new love and disappointment was written all over his face. Here he’d just had this incredible, life-altering, beautiful experience, and Annelise couldn’t share it.

  It was a reminder that this talent of ours would always set us apart from the rest of humanity, and it was sobering.

  “I don’t hear anything from next door,” Ingrid said, a little too briskly. “Do we think it’s empty?”

  Keep listening while I do the locks,” said Ben. “Or – no. Lia, you and Annelise listen, and Ingrid, shield me once I get this door open and have to work in the hall.” He gave me an apologetic look. “I really am going to show you Camouflage as soon as we have a moment to breathe.”

  I accepted the implied apology with a nod and ambled over to stand by the wall with Annelise.

  Ben knelt and muttered to himself. A moment later the deadbolt zipped back as if it had been shot from a gun, and clanged against the metal shield in the wall. Ooookay. If nobody came out of Crowson’s office to investigate that peculiar and very loud noise, I thought we could probably assume it was empty too.

  We definitely needed to learn how to calibrate these effects.

  Annelise and I stayed at our listening posts while Ben and Ingrid moved out into the hall. I felt the sense of a blue-black lowering sky replacing the ceiling, and the air quivered like Jello. I took Annelise’s hand. “Don’t get scared,” I whispered to her. “It’s just Ingrid working Camouflage.”

  She gave me a blank look. “I’m not scared. Nothing’s happening.”

  Just then someone outside the building screamed.

  I sidled up to the window and peered out. There was a woman in the yard next door, screaming again and pointing at the top of our building. “It’s gone! It just disappeared!”

  Oh, shit. Calibration! I scooted to the door of 21B as quietly as I could and shook Ingrid’s shoulder. The air around us cleared and the light went back to normal. Ingrid gave me an annoyed look.

  “What did you do that for? I can’t hold the visualization with you grabbing me like that.”

  “That’s why,” I said in an undertone. “You disappeared the entire building.”

  She gaped at me. “I did?”

  “Maybe just the second floor. This woman outside suddenly started screaming, “It’s gone!” and pointing at us.”

  “But…” Then Ingrid repeated my thoughts. “Oh, shit. Calibration! I knew we needed to do more research before going out in the field.”

  Oh, yeah? She had been just as enthusiastic as the rest of us about this little excursion. If we’d had time and privacy, I might have pointed that out. As it was, I merely hoped – desperately – that we’d turned off the invisibility before anybody else noticed. I didn’t think even Annelise would be able to talk us out of this one.

  I slithered back into 21A while Ben was still working on the locks of 21B and took another peek out the window. Two men – one young enough to be her son, one middle-aged – had joined the screaming woman. Who had stopped screaming. There appeared to be a vigorous argument in progress. I didn’t dare open the window to listen, but if I understood the body language at all, it went something like this:

  Screamer: It disappeared, I tell you! I was looking right at it and it just- just winked out!”

  Older man: Sure looks to me like it’s still there, honey.

  Screamer: Yes, yes, it’s back now, but it went away for a minute!”

  Younger man: Mom, I ran outside the second I heard you scream, and there wasn’t a thing wrong with that building.

  Older man: Have you had your eyes checked lately, honey?

  Both guys were shaking their heads and shrugging now. Probably telling each other that women were too imaginative. Great, no corroborating witnesses. I thought we were home free. It did seem kind of rough on Screamer; I hoped she wouldn’t end up in Shoal Creek Mental Hospital.

  From the sounds next door, we were into 21B now. I went to congratulate Ben and to share the good news that the cops were probably not going to be too interested in the Case of the (Briefly) Disappearing Building. Coming into the office with a grin on my face, I was startled to see Ingrid and Ben looking as if they’d flunked qualifiers.

  “What’s the matter, you guys?” This was a much classier looking room than poor old empty, dusty 21A. Built-in office furniture lined two walls, with a glass desk in the corner. Very clean, Swedish-type style. Very…hard to hide anything in here.

  “We’re idiots,” Ben said.

  “It’s not here,” Ingrid contributed.

  “I should have realized. It’s a laptop. Of course he takes it home with him.”

  “Are you sure about that?” If it was a desktop machine, might it be concealed behind one of those gleaming wooden doors?

  “Of course I’m sure,” Ben said. “I spent some of the worst minutes of my life inside that computer. Do you think I wouldn’t remember the make and model? It’s a MacBook Pro, same model Ingrid has.”

  Both of us had spent some time quietly envying Ingrid’s sleek, lightweight, up-to-the minute machine. I believed Ben when he said that he’d recognized Crowson’s as being the same model.

  Annelise had followed me and heard the bad news. “Well, if he takes it home with him, why don’t we just go there?”

  “Don’t know where he lives.”

  “There’s bound to be something in here with his address…” Her voice trailed off as she surveyed the sleek perfection of the room. It did look as if Crowson had actually achieved the paperless office that “experts” have been predicting since I was in second grade. Or maybe kindergarten.

  Ben straightened. He’d thought of something; I recognized the just-proved-a-theorem look on his face. “And you know what, we’re still being stupid. We don’t have to go to his home address, and anyway we’d have to go by conventional means since none of us have seen it. What we need to do is go where his computer is.”

  “We haven’t seen that either.”

  “Sure we have! We’ve all seen Ingrid’s MacBook, haven’t we? Well, just visualize that… with a kind of slime oozing out of it. That’s what Crowson’s computer feels like to me.”

  At this point you might have thought at least one of us would have realized that we didn’t need Crowson’s computer right away, today, and that it was silly to break – excuse me, teleport – into a possibly occupied house or apartment on the off chance that there was nobody in the same room as the laptop just now. What if Crowson was using the thing, what were we going to do then? Wrest it from his hands?

  I can only say that we were slightly over-exhilarated by the stars, the sugar, and the glory of sliding through 3-space as a point of light. Annelise had taken Ben’s hand and was gazing at him in a kind of hero-worshipping way, so her intelligence was also off-line at the moment. As for Mr. M., he still claims that he thought of all these problems and a few more, and whenever he says that I ask him why he didn’t speak up at the time.

  In any case, we joined hands again and the three of us visualized a MacBook oozing slime. Ingrid was first to nod that she had the picture firmly in her mind, then Ben and I nodded simultaneously and I said, “Brouwer.”

  There was no chance to enjoy the journey this time; as soon as I said the word we were in a room furnished much like Crowson’s office, all sleek wood and gleaming glass. With an elegant little MacBook Pro sitting on a table, hooked up to its charger.

  We have vowed never to reveal who whooped, “Got it!” at sight of the laptop. It could have been any of the three of us, and whoever made the mistake doesn’t deserve to live in infamy. In any case, just as Ben scooped up the laptop, while he paused to unplug the charger, a flurry of grackles screeched at the window and
a sleek, dark-haired man entered the room. His hands flickered towards us and then stopped, frozen.

  “Make haste,” Mr. M. said. “This working will not bind a mage for long.” He had uncoiled himself and was staring at the frozen man, his head swaying back and forth as if he were a cobra.

  Even before he finished the sentence, I saw the man’s lips moving. But we had all joined hands again and I said “Brouwer,” just as his hands began to move again.

  “Next time,” Ingrid said as she slumped against the wall of the break room, “we need to agree on an escape destination before we start. It’s just dumb luck that we were all thinking about Allandale House.”

  She took a deep breath. “Ben, let’s get that thing behind the wall.”

  A whirlwind of grackles swept through the open window and clustered in one part of the room. Ingrid’s hands automatically went to her head. The grackles swooped out again, leaving two splotches of bird poop and the black-haired man.

  Ingrid and Ben turned sideways and vanished.

  He was closer to Annelise than to anybody else.

  Annelise was the only one of us who couldn’t Möbius through the dividing wall.

  Crowson had already had a gun in his hand when he appeared. A split second later, he had Annelise’s arm in his other hand. He yanked her around in front of him and put his gun to the side of her head. “Give it back now, and nobody gets hurt.”

  I turned sideways and vanished.

  Chapter 16

  Pamela had given Lensky an address about ten miles north of the university. He looked around the street after parking. Not wonderful, but not too bad either: a street of aging duplexes with live oaks overhead. Probably more renters than owners, but most of the residents kept their lawns and houses in good shape. There weren’t any dead cars parked on lawns or in the street.

  Pam had told him that he would recognize her place by the prisms on the porch. As a rule Lensky preferred street numbers clearly painted on the curb, but fair enough; there was only one porch with so many hanging crystals that they’d probably blind a man when the sun fell on them.

  Just as there was, thank God, only one Pamela Lensky.

  Pam was, of course, not ready for him. Equally of course, she was full of apologies. “I meant to have her all ready for you, Brad, but she insisted on going over to her friend’s house first thing this morning.”

  “No problem,” Lensky said, “just phone and ask her to come home now.”

  “Well, I don’t exactly… I think she was going to Angelina’s… but it might have been LaTonya’s, and… Jerry, what’s LaTonya’s last name?” she called back into the bedroom.

  “No idea.” A balding man in a T-shirt and jeans appeared at the bedroom door. “Don’t you have the number? Christ, it’s not like the kid has that many friends!”

  Pam then thought that maybe she had written LaTonya’s number on the back of an envelope, or maybe it had been the grocery list that she always kept stuck to the refrigerator, but she’d gone grocery shopping yesterday and maybe the list was still in her purse. She handed the purse to “Jerry” and asked him to look through it for her because her nails were still drying. He rolled his eyes and dumped the entire contents of the purse onto the kitchen table.

  There wasn’t a grocery list, although there seemed to be most of the other things you’d want to sustain civilized life in the event you were stranded on a desert island: two lipsticks, emery boards, loose cough drops, a pack of nicotine gum, a handful of bobby pins, an empty packet of tissues, a smartphone…”

  “I know, it’s in my phone!” Pam picked up the phone gingerly and tapped at it with the tip of one fingernail. “Just let me get to Contacts…”

  “Hi, Uncle Brad,” Linda said. “You’re early.” She tapped the oversized sports watch on one thin wrist. “You said ten-thirty, and it’s only ten-twenty-five.” She gave her mother a tolerant glance. “You didn’t seriously expect Mom to keep track of the time, did you? I set my alarm so I’d be sure to be back in time.”

  When asked what she would like to do, Linda said firmly, “Go to the park.”

  “Oh, hon, you go there all the time. Why don’t you ask your uncle…”

  “I like the park. And I want to show Uncle Brad all my favorite places.”

  “Oh, all right, but do try not to get all muddy, and for Heaven’s sake stay out of the creek, and don’t go making poor Brad climb trees or…”

  “Right, Mom,” Linda interrupted. She took Lensky’s hand and dragged him out of the house. “If we wait for Mom to finish the list of things not to do, we’ll never get there,” she explained once they were outside.

  Lensky inspected his niece. She reminded him of the street where she lived: a little shabby, but basically healthy and clean, he thought. She was a delicate-looking little creature, fine-boned and slim: not much Lensky there, she was all Pam on the outside, down to the wispy white-blond hair that was at present her best asset. Someone – probably Linda herself – had pulled the long hair back and braided it. With those outsize spectacles on her face, she was no beauty, but on the whole he approved. Pamela, in the unlikely event she consented to go to a park, would have gone in high-heeled sandals and a fluttery dress. Linda’s sneakers and shorts were much more appropriate. Some Lensky common sense inside, then.

  “So, things going all right, Lins?” he asked, using her baby nickname.

  “Just fine, Lens.”

  Lins and Lens; it had been hysterically funny to her at five, and the nicknames had stuck.

  “Who’s Jerry?”

  “Mom’s new friend. He’s all right,” Linda volunteered.

  “This latest move okay with you, then? You aren’t missing your friends back in Trenton?”

  Now he got the I’m-going-to-tolerate-this-stupid-adult look. “I didn’t have friends in Trenton, Uncle Brad.”

  “So, it’s better here? Pamela mentioned a girl called Angelina and a LaTonya?” Was anything harder than getting information out of an eleven-year-old? His interrogation skills deserted him with Linda.

  “Oh, well, Angelina’s real…” The pause for thought was longer than it should have been. “Real friendly,” Linda finished. “But she doesn’t understand important things. Like the park.”

  The much-mentioned park was only a few blocks from Linda’s house, a longish strip of green with a creek running through it, a jogging path beside the creek, benches between the street and the jogging path. “To get to the best part you have to…” Linda paused, looking doubtfully at a tangle of shrubbery with an approximately Linda-sized opening in it. “Mom told me not to drag you around, but you do want to see the good part, don’t you, Uncle Brad?”

  Lensky assured her that his life would not be complete without a tour that included the good part of the park, and that he was accustomed to getting through obstacles much more formidable than a tangle of leaves and branches.

  He was rewarded for scrunching down and contorting himself to get through the shrubbery by a bouncing, much happier Linda. She took his hand again and drew him along to see the layers of rock and earth exposed where the creek had cut through, the “witch rocks” that had been worn down until there were holes right through them, and – the grand finale – the Glass City. This was a collection of miniature cairns and towers built entirely from the bits of broken glass that the creek had tumbled among pebbles until all their sharp edges were smooth.

  Lensky whistled at the sight of the Glass City. “That’s a very impressive construction.”

  Linda smiled. “I built the bridge just this morning. To celebrate you coming to town.”

  The “bridge” was constructed of the longest scraps of glass held up by cairns of smaller pieces. But…

  “I thought you were at LaTonya’s this morning?”

  He waited for Linda to tell him that the two girls had come and worked on the Glass City together. Instead she looked down, turned pink, and scuffed one sneaker over a tree root. “Well, LaTonya isn’t exactly… well
…”

  “Interested in this stuff? Did you quarrel? How old is LaTonya, anyway?” Lensky thought his niece was past the age of angrily taking her toys and going home.

  There was a panicked look on Linda’s face. “Um, I’m not exactly… She’s fifteen,” she said quickly. “Almost sixteen.”

  Lensky wasn’t sure he believed in a teenage girl content to pair off with his eleven-year-old niece. “And where does she live?”

  “Um, close to here?”

  “Can you show me?”

  “No! Leave me alone!”

  A new interpretation of Linda’s story occurred to Lensky. “Would LaTonya by any chance be a… an imaginary friend?”

  “Uncle Brad! I’m much too old for imaginary friends! LaTonya is… um… well, sometimes Mom can be…”

  “Ah. LaTonya’s a convenient excuse for getting out of the house alone?”

  Linda nodded. “I knew you’d understand.”

  Lensky understood all right; he wasn’t entirely sure he approved. Pam was already casual enough in her care of Linda; look at the way she hadn’t made sure, this morning, that she knew whom Linda was visiting and had a phone number. He might need to have a little talk alone with Pam – perhaps Monday, while Linda was in school? Or would Pam be working?

  Linda would feel that he’d betrayed her.

  Could he talk Pam into being a little more vigilant without giving away the secret of LaTonya?

  “Anyway,” Linda said, with the air of one who’d faced down and conquered a difficult question, “I don’t think I’m going to work on the Glass City much more. It’s pretty, but kind of… childish, don’t you think?”

  “I think I’d like to get some pictures of it,” Lensky said.

  “Yeah, but…” Linda stated the real reason. “There isn’t a lot more I can do with it. So… I’d like to become a geologist and analyse the rock strata here and at roadside cuts, but...” She heaved a sigh. “That’s the trouble with Austin. Look at the creek here. What do you see?”

  “Well, that looks like a layer of limestone,” Lensky guessed.

  “Right. And that’s another layer of limestone, and below that is another layer of limestone. It’s sedimentary all the way down!”