Campbell smirked at her white lie. A certain level of intrusion was to be expected, but it still looked bad on the paperwork. Nobody could raise a fuss if someone entered a site in the best interests of possible victims. “Sounds about right,” he said. “I’ll make sure you get credit for the find.”
“Thanks, Campbell,” she said. “I mean that.”
She crossed Gayle Street to rejoin Hope and Phil, and the three of them stood around, chatting idly as they waited for Campbell’s team to process the scene. Now that the adrenaline was fading, Rachel could feel the cold starting to creep through her suit; she checked Hope’s colors and found her shivering.
Ten minutes later, they had invaded the nearest all-hours diner. The three of them had spread out in a booth large enough to seat eight, and were halfway through a platter of hash browns. The hash browns had arrived on a diner-dirty plate, with small scraps of previous meals baked onto its surface by countless trips through a dying dishwasher. The three of them couldn’t care less; Hope used a thumbnail to chip off a sliver of old tomato, but it was more for science than sanitation, as she inspected it for a full five seconds before flicking it into a basket of lukewarm creamers.
Rachel used to be picky about food. Well, “picky” was a stretch. Maybe “selective” was a better way to look at it. In the old days, she probably would have sent the hash browns back and demanded a salad on a paper plate. Now, she slathered ketchup on her share and wondered if she could talk the others into adding some ranch dressing.
(Once in a while, she caught herself remembering how it used to be, back in high school and in her easier Army postings, when almost every conversation she had with other women revolved around food. Calories, specifically—one friendship-ending conversation in particular had caused Rachel to implement a policy to never discuss dieting, or dessert shaming, or any personal weight-related topic with anyone outside of the medical profession, ever. It had been a minor epiphany, really, when she finally recognized that eating with other women led to endless rehashes on the consequences of food. And did those same topics come up when she ate with men? No, never. It was ridiculous, she had thought at the time, how much energy women spend resenting energy. But stick a chip in her brain and fast-forward five years, and food had reasserted its rightful place as a commodity instead of a liability. Jenny Davies believed the implant consumed anywhere between thirty to fifty percent of an Agent’s daily intake of calories; less for smaller women than larger men, certainly, but Rachel hated how she was now as obsessed with food consumption as a supermodel. It was poor comfort that she was no longer trying to consume too little, but rather worrying about whether she was consuming enough. Food had value again, and she supposed that was how it should be, but oh, how she loathed the reason why.)
And then she caught a glimpse of a smooth gray core hurrying past the window. “Hey…”
“What’s up?” Phil mumbled around a mouthful of fried potatoes.
“Spotted someone I know,” she told them. “Be right back.”
She pushed open the door to the diner and got hit with a blast of cold air; the wind had picked up. The person’s size and core colors were a match, so she called out: “Bell?
The girl stopped dead in her tracks, her colors snapping tight around her to protect her. She half-turned towards Rachel, and the armor fell away in recognition. “Agent Peng. Hey!”
“What brings you out at this hour?” Rachel asked.
Bell sighed and shook her head. “I lost track of time and the buses stopped running. I’m just trying to get to a working Metro line before I get mugged.”
Whoa, Rachel thought. Washington D.C. wasn’t the biggest city out there, but if Bell was coming from the makers’ loft, she must have already walked more than a mile. At night. And she was wearing another bohemian outfit, more holes than wholes, and was thoroughly chilled in icy blues. Rachel could already hear Santino shouting.
“We can give you a ride home,” Rachel said, “if you don’t mind sitting through an early breakfast with us.”
Bell’s conversational colors flared with a gnawing red at her midsection: the girl was starving. A money-green hue suppressed the red. “Thanks, but I should get going,” she said after a long moment.
Rachel was not personally acquainted with the starving artist phase of young adulthood, but she had seen it often enough to recognize it in others. “My treat, I insist,” she said. “Santino isn’t here, but there’s another Agent. Phil Netz? He works with the MPD’s bomb unit.”
The reds of hunger and pride wove through each other as Bell fought with herself. Rachel sighed—she really didn’t have the patience to see which of Bell’s drives would win—and played her trump card. “Oh, and Hope Blackwell is here, too,” she added. “So if you’re still looking for donors, this might be a good chance to get to know her.”
Bell’s mouth fell open and her surface colors went white. “Blackwell?”
“Yeah,” Rachel said as casually as she could. Hope’s husband might be the reason she was famous, but she was the reason Patrick Mulcahy was rich: Hope was apparently a literal genius when it came to day trading. The woman’s net worth was somewhere upwards of fifty million dollars and climbing. She worked as a paramedic because, in her words, she got bored easily and there were fewer fights at home after a twelve-hour shift.
Guaranteed food and the possibility of money? Bell couldn’t resist. “If you’re sure they won’t mind…?”
“I promise,” Rachel said. “Come on, you’ll like them.”
Phil’s colors lit in blue recognition when Bell came over to the table.
“You’ve met her?” Rachel asked him while Bell introduced herself.
“Only in your construct,” he said. “I didn’t realize her hair was actually green.”
Interesting, Rachel thought to herself. She had been sure she didn’t pay attention to faces. If Phil could recognize Bell from nothing but Rachel’s image of the loft, then maybe she was better at visualizing people than she had assumed—
“Sorry, no. I didn’t recognize her from her face,” Phil cut in. “You nailed her movements and build perfectly, though.”
Rachel snapped their connection shut with a mental snarl. She wasn’t sure if she was mad at Phil or herself, so she took it out on the hash browns.
It took Bell a few minutes to adjust to warmth, food, and strangers. She kept her hands wrapped tight around a thick cafeteria mug until she had drunk three cups of coffee so light they were mostly sugar and cream. Phil drew her out; by the time her omelet arrived, the two of them were happily discussing the pros and cons of six-speed manual transmissions.
“So,” Rachel finally interrupted when the car talk had reached soporific proportions for her and Hope. “When I was at the loft, Bell showed me this incredible project she’s working on for military vets.”
Bell nodded. “It’s a physical therapy device. It’ll take some time to get the system in place, but the potential is crazy.”
“Oh?” Hope said.
That was all the opportunity Bell needed. She launched into the same presentation she had given to Rachel, minus the visual aids and with as much medical terminology as she could cram into it; Hope was in her paramedic’s uniform, and Bell was tailoring her pitch to her audience.
“That’s amazing,” Hope said when Bell had finished. “How did you get started with this project?”
“Oh, God, it’s so sad,” Bell said. “The guy who owns the loft? Terry Templeton? His son was killed in Iraq. He offers free workspace to qualified candidates—students, mostly—and when he interviewed me, we got to talking about medical uses for 3D printers. He’s the one who put me in touch with the V.A. hospital so I could get funding.
“Some funding.” Bell corrected herself as quickly as she could. “I’ve won a few government grants, but those don’t go nearly as far as they did before the recession.”
“The economy’s starting to come back,” Phil said. “It might not be too long bef
ore the grants pick up, too.”
“Doubt it. The government’s screwing researchers,” Bell said, squeezing a generous helping of ketchup across the top of her omelet. “It takes years for the science and service sectors to get funding, and when that funding’s pulled, it’s almost never replaced. Drives me crazy, how the politicians and the military gets everything they want—Congress even gets their gym renovated!—but the science side gets screwed over. Seems like we’re the only ones who are trying to do good, but the government’s just interested in the bottom line.”
“‘Government’... I hate that word,” Hope said. “Such a shitty catch-all.”
Bell went bright red in embarrassment. “I’m sorry!” she said. “I didn’t even think…”
“No, no,” Hope said, waving the girl’s concern away. “It’s not what you said. I just hate that term in general. I mean, my husband? And Phil and Rachel here? They’re with the government, but they’ve got nothing to do with science or funding.”
“No kidding,” Phil said. “Every time Congress goes up for a vote, I walk around telling strangers I’m not with those guys. I’d fund your projects over a new military base any day, Bell.”
Rachel, who used to wear thick rubber-soled shoes in the shower to keep from being electrocuted by the current running through the metal floors of Afghanistan’s repurposed Soviet-era bathrooms, kept her mouth firmly shut. Like most former grunts, she had learned long ago that there was the military, and there was the idea of the military, and these could not coexist within the same mind without a hell of a fight breaking out. She dumped more eggs on her plate, and let the others decide how to run the country.
“But…” Bell was struggling to say exactly what she thought Hope wanted to hear, her surface colors thick with Hope’s pulsing blue-black core and wrapped tight within the color of dollar bills. “… if we don’t call the government—well, the government!—what should we call it?”
“There’s nothing else you can call it!” Hope said. “Not without breaking each department down, and that’s just not gonna fly in everyday conversation. But to call it ‘government’… No. That term’s just wrong. It groups every person who works in a government office into a single thing, and they aren’t. The government’s not even a hydra with a hundred heads. It’s… It’s a bunch of poor dudes stuck in the same clown car, ‘cause that’s the only way they can get to work.”
“That’s about right,” Phil said. “And half of the time, you’ve got to wonder who’s driving the thing!”
Bell laughed, a light, happy sound, and Phil smiled at her. He was slowly shifting from casual blues to a more intense purple, with a thread of red lust. The lust was hard to place; Rachel couldn’t remember the last time she had seen it in him.
Phil caught Rachel looking. “What?”
“Little young, isn’t she?”
“Half your age plus seven,” he replied.
“And how old would that be, again?”
“I don’t want to ask her,” he sighed across their link. “If she’s old enough to vote, I’m just barely safe.”
Rachel tried not to wince. They had lost five years to the Program, and she couldn’t quite wrap her head around how she had woken up one morning and had chronologically aged out of her prime dating years. These days, women who should have been attractive had become… girls. Bell was smart and cute, but she was exhaustingly young. Rachel wished Phil luck.
“If you want to see a part of the government that’s actually working, I’ll take you on a tour of the MPD’s Consolidated Forensic Laboratory,” Phil said to Bell. “There’s an Agent who works there, and he’s got the most impressive video setup you’ll ever see.”
Bad move, Phil, Rachel thought to herself. Phil was cute in his own way, but Jason was haughty and model-sleek, and Bell was still young enough to find arrogance an attractive trait. Best for Phil to keep her away from Jason’s lab complet—
There was a sudden thin tremble in the air.
Everyone at the table stopped talking.
“Earthquake?” Bell said, when the shaking had stopped.
“I don’t think so,” Rachel said, throwing her scans back towards Gayle Street, two blocks over. She hoped she was wrong…
She wasn’t.
She felt Phil’s scans pulse beside her own. “Penguin,” he said, his mental voice almost broken. “Did we cause this?”
The coffee shop they had explored barely an hour earlier was gone. She searched the space where it had stood, her scans not finding anything but a fresh rolling cloud of smoke and debris. “No,” she told him. “We absolutely did not cause this. We weren’t the ones who booby-trapped the store.”
She didn’t mention that it was absolutely their fault for not finding the trap, and broke their link, hard, before Phil could pick the guilt out of her mind.
“Phil, take care of Bell.” Rachel dropped her long-distance scans and stood.
“They need me—”
“No.” She came down on him with her full mental weight. “You will see Bell home safely, and then call Sergeant Andrews and tell him to join us at First District Station for debriefing. You will not talk to anyone else. Do you understand?”
There was a moment when she thought Phil would fight her. It passed, and Phil looked down and away. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll take her home.”
“Thank you.” Rachel turned away from the other Agent. “Hope? You good to run?”
“Shit. Yeah.” Hope threw her paramedic’s bag over her shoulder, and the two of them were out the door before Bell could ask what had happened.
They sprinted back to Gayle Street. The moment they turned the corner, Hope froze.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “That could have been us.”
“It wasn’t.” Rachel grabbed Hope’s arm, maybe a little too roughly, and pushed her towards the group of law enforcement officers clustered around three men sitting on the ground. Hope stumbled forward, then launched herself into paramedic mode and went to do what she could for the injured.
Rachel turned to the nearest person shouting orders, and waited until he was done before asking, “What happened here?”
“Agent Peng?” Special Agent Campbell seemed to barely recognize her. He had his left arm up and his coat sleeve pressed against his forehead to staunch the blood from a cut on his forehead. “We don’t know for sure. We were processing the scene when the back room blew. Did you… You didn’t see anything when you were back there to suggest there was a second bomb?”
“No. I scanned that building from top to bottom. There was nothing live in the entire place that could have been a—oh. Oh no,” she said, finally realizing what she and Phil had missed.
“What?”
“There was a battery-operated radio on a shelf, and a big emergency flashlight on a charger. Both of those still had power.”
Special Agent Campbell’s colors shifted towards reds; her turquoise core appeared within the middle of his anger. “Agent Peng—”
“I know what you’re thinking,” she interrupted him. “But there was no way I could have known if either of those had a bomb in it. I’m not omniscient. I can tell when a radio has power, and I can look inside of it, but if I don’t know what the interior is supposed to look like, it could be filled with plastic explosives shaped to mimic speakers and I’d never know the difference. I wasn’t even thinking of looking for traps. After I realized it was a murder scene, I got out of there and called it in.”
Rachel intentionally left Phil out of the discussion. Phil did know what a bomb secreted inside of an electronic device would look like, but he had been the one who had gone outside to call for backup. She needed to keep the focus off of him.
Special Agent Campbell weighed her words, then nodded, reds fading at the edges. His own team had been trained to spot hidden explosives: there was plenty of blame to go around. “Do you think someone remote-activated the bomb?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said, shaking her h
ead. “If it was hidden in the radio, maybe. I would have noticed if the flashlight could talk back to me, but the purpose of a radio is to pick up radio waves. If it was wired for remote detonation, I wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong.”
“So it was in the radio.”
Rachel turned to look at the speaker, an MPD officer she didn’t recognize by either his voice or his core. She pinged the RFID tags in his badge and got his name and credentials: Officer Kerry, out of Fourth District Station. “I didn’t say that,” she told him. “What I said was that I wouldn’t notice if it was. As far as I know, this could have been caused by a landmine on a tripwire. I went in, saw it was a probable murder scene, and got out.
“I have the ability to talk to machines,” Rachel said, hitting Officer Kerry with the cold, soulless gaze that was only possible when the other person had no idea they were looking into the eyes of a blind woman. Almost everyone she met assumed her eyes worked; this assumption, coupled with her long experience in dealing with problems that didn’t want to be solved, gave her an unbeatable competitive edge in staring contests. The officer took a step back and turned away, but she kept the pressure on him, moving forward and leaning in as close as she could. “But none of the machines in the store told me they were bombs. I did not presume to check for explosives. I did not think to bring a bomb-sniffing dog. Please tell me what you would have done differently if you were in my place.”
And please, she silently begged any higher power listening in, don’t let them remember that a man who works with their own bomb squad was the other Agent with me.
Kerry finally relented. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Sorry.”
“All right, then.” She took a breath to steady herself. “How many were killed?”
“No one,” Campbell said.
Relief smashed into her so hard that she nearly bent in half. “Seriously injured?”
Maker Space Page 20
