“I have more than one office,” LaPonsie said quickly, her surface colors taking on the reds and anxious oranges of someone who realized she was saying something she shouldn’t to a cop.
Rachel nodded and let the conversation drop. It was none of her business if LaPonsie had found herself a nice little tax dodge.
They descended to the second floor and Rachel resumed her knocking-and-shouting charade. Unlike LaPonsie, the man stayed rooted to his chair. His core color was a strangely medicinal shade of yellow, and Rachel realized she had seen him before, on that first day Santino had brought her to the loft. She scanned his wallet; the RFID tags in his credit cards identified him as Howard Les Rothbauer. When they reached his door, Rachel turned to LaPonsie and asked, “Do you smell cigarettes?”
“No?”
Rachel didn’t, either, but it was easier to fake a mystery smell than admit she could see through walls.
“Hello?” She pounded on the door. “Sir? Sir, I know you’re in there. This is the MPD. I’m here to take you to safety.”
The explosion of reds and oranges from the other side of the wall was a stronger copy of LaPonsie’s; apparently, every single person who rented an office in this building was scared of law enforcement.
A scurrying motion in the stairwell yanked her attention from the man on the other side of the door. She had kept her scans wide to make sure no one would come in and catch them off-guard. Instead, she spotted someone coming down from the loft: Templeton was trying to sneak out.
“Damn it,” she muttered quietly. She thought about chasing Templeton down, but decided against it; if he wanted to behave like a child, he was old enough to accept the consequences. At least he hadn’t taken Bell with him.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Rachel said, then resumed banging on the door. “Sir, I know you’re in there!”
After another fifteen seconds, LaPonsie said, “Officer Peng? I think it’s empty.”
Rachel ground her teeth together. “Yes,” she said to LaPonsie. “I must have been imagining things.
“But if anyone were still in this room,” she said, loudly, “they’d do well to stay put until the power comes back on, because there are riots in the streets!
“C’mon,” she said to LaPonsie. “Let’s go where it’s warm.”
The two of them went upstairs to the loft, where Bell was heating a copper bowl over a Bunsen burner.
“Oh my God,” LaPonsie said, taking in the details of the makers’ loft. Bell had opened the front door, and the gas lights from the hallway and the comet’s tail softened the edges of the room.
“Beautiful, right?” It wasn’t a question. Rachel gave LaPonsie a gentle push to get her moving again.
Bell was sitting on one of the lab tables, her face lit from below by the burner. “Hot chocolate?” she asked Rachel.
“Yes, please. Bell, this is Grace LaPonsie. She works downstairs.” Rachel said, recovering her own coat from the wreck of a sofa. The temperature in the loft had dropped nearly ten degrees in the five minutes she had been gone. “I’ll be right back. I need to make some calls.”
She moved back into the stairwell. With luck, LaPonsie would assume the fire door had shut out all sounds; it would be a nice change to get through one night without giving the full “Yes, I’m Really A Cyborg” speech.
Santino’s phone went straight to voicemail, so she pinged Jason. “You guys okay?”
“Getting rough down here,” he replied, and let her see through his eyes. He was standing in front of a store with a broken window, the weight of something suspiciously like a baseball bat in his right hand. There was warmth running along the right side of his body; she realized the car beside him was burning.
“You guys in danger?”
She felt Jason roll his eyes. “I’ll call you back,” he said, and broke their connection.
Fucker, she thought to herself. Still, Jason was fine, and he would have mentioned if any of the others were hurt. She considered going out-of-body to their location, maybe serving as an invisible advance scout to warn them of impending danger…
No. Only Jason would be able to see her, and he didn’t need any more demands on his attention right now. She decided to ping Phil, and reached out…
…and couldn’t find him.
“PHIL!” she shouted.
“WHAT?!?” he shouted back.
“Oh Jesus, never do that again,” she snapped.
“What? What did I do? No, never mind—I don’t have time for this.” She was suddenly standing in a stretch of black city streets, a woman and her three children in her arms as she fought against the crowd, trying to find an alcove or an alley or somewhere to get them out of danger…
Rachel pulled herself out of Phil’s body and ran a city map through their link. “Take your next left,” she told him. “There’s a church… St. Paul’s Parish. It’s big, it’ll be open late for community events.”
“Thanks,” he said, and vanished.
She spent a moment catching up with the collective. The others were divided into two groups. The chatty ones were those who were safe, off of the streets, hidden away in their homes or in stores or huddled together in the kitchen at the OACET mansion.
The silent ones were those who were deep in the chaos of downtown D.C. They were few in number, and all the more fascinating for it—Rachel and the others couldn’t help but watch as Mulcahy broke apart a mob at Verizon Center with words alone, his wife standing beside him like his tiny bodyguard as he talked those clustered around him out of a riot. Across the city, Josh had swept through the streets and had converted dozens—hundreds!—of well-armed looters into a parade, singing and enjoying a carnival atmosphere straight out of Mardi Gras...
Rachel shook her head, bewildered. Somehow, Josh had even found beads.
There was nothing more she could do, so she returned to the loft. Inside, she found Bell and LaPonsie huddled under the comforter, sipping hot chocolate from cafeteria-style mugs. Bell pushed a third mug towards Rachel, the heat coming from it in a low red glow in the rapidly-cooling room, and she hopped up on the table to join the others.
It was a weird little slumber party, with the usual amount of secret-sharing. LaPonsie wasn’t too thrown to learn that Rachel was OACET; she had heard that Agents hung out in the loft. (Judging by the cloud of relieved blue which had puffed off of her, LaPonsie would much rather associate with a cyborg than a police officer; Rachel wondered what the IRS might find if LaPonsie was anonymously fingered for an audit.)
She also learned that Bell wanted parents, badly. The girl wasn’t an orphan, not in the technical definition of the word, but she had set out on her own the day she turned eighteen and had never looked back. Bell spoke of Templeton in the same reverent voice that some of Rachel’s squadmates had used for certain ranking officers, a combination of hero worship and thinking they had finally found the replacement for the roughly person-shaped hole that had been cut into their psyche.
“Why did they make you stay?” Bell asked her.
“Hm?” Rachel had been following Phil through the link. He had dropped the family off at the church, and had returned to the streets to help where he could.
“Santino and the guys. Why didn’t you go with them?”
Rachel laughed. “Bell, do you like my dress?”
“I guess, but…”
“And my shoes? How about my pretty cast?”
“Oh,” Bell said, her colors turning into sage greens.
“Yeah,” Rachel said. “I even left my gun at home for the first time in… Oh, I don’t even remember. Right now, I’m about as physically intimidating as a soccer mom. If I were doing crowd control dressed like this, I’d cause more problems than I’d solve. I’ve got no problem holding down the fort until the big, strong men get back.”
The windows shook as the concussion of another small explosion, much closer than before, rocked the building.
“That’s not good,” Rachel said as sh
e jumped off of the table.
She walked over to the windows and took shelter behind a brick support column, pretending to peer around its corner as she ran a scan through the neighborhood. Jason and the others were a few blocks away, and safe: the MPD had arrived and had set up barricades, and her team had taken shelter in the back of a transport van. On a different street—one that dovetailed into the loft—a group of college-age men were flipping cars like pancakes; they were purple-blue and eager, all of them young and healthy and caught up in the invincibility of the mob. As she watched, two women lit a scrap of canvas in an old vodka bottle, and hurled it through a store window.
The women were laughing.
Rachel rested her head against the brick, and reminded herself it took all kinds.
She swept her scan down the street and found a second group moving towards the first. The men in this second group were older and running red.
“Bell?” she said, as softly as she could. “Kill the lights.”
The girl caught Rachel’s mood, and scrambled to obey. The comet’s tail puffed twice before the gas was snuffed out, and the room dropped into black.
“Stay here,” Rachel told them, as she grabbed a length of wrought iron from a nearby rack of materials. “I need to seal the building.”
As the fire door closed behind her, she kicked off her heels and ripped open the toes of her nylons with the sharp edge of the iron bar; nylons provided decent insulation but shitty traction, and she rolled them up to her ankles so she could run silently down the stairs. When she reached the ground floor, Rachel slid one end of the iron bar through the door pull and braced the other against the wall; anyone committed to getting the door open would succeed, eventually, but the bar would give her enough time to run down from the loft with whatever weapon-like objects she could find.
The creaking of metal caught her attention, and she whipped her scans around to find the man from the third floor in the stairwell, climbing towards the loft. Rachel gave the iron bar one last tug to make sure it was square against the wall, and then sprinted up the stairs as quickly as she could.
He heard her coming; even in a grumbling old warehouse, he couldn’t miss the sound of bare feet slapping against a linoleum floor.
“Hey,” Rachel called out from two floors below him.
The man’s colors took on a second overlay of yellow as his fear burst through. “Hello?!”
“Hey,” Rachel said again. To her eyes, the man glowed as he tried to see the source of the voice in the dark. “Do you remember me? I’m with the MPD. I saw you when my partner brought me here to tour the loft.”
“I don’t, sorry,” he said, his anxiety rising. “I can’t even see your face.”
“I took the elevator.”
“Oh!” he said, his colors shifting. “You.”
“Right.” Rachel knew that would work; she’d be shocked if that elevator was used for ten trips a year.
“What’s the MPD doing here? Did something happen?” he asked.
Rachel decided to give him an out. “Nothing’s happened,” she said. “The blackout’s trapped me here, too. Did I miss you when I swept the building?”
“Yeah,” he said quickly, the surface layer of yellows fading as he realized he didn’t have to do anything except lie. “I’m Howard. Where is everyone?”
“The loft,” she said. “Head on up. There’s only three of us—four, now.”
Rachel watched Howard’s colors as he turned to walk upstairs. There was anxiety, reluctance, stress… these faded slightly as he went into the loft and found it ten degrees warmer than the rest of the building.
“Hello?” LaPonsie flashed orange-yellow until she caught sight of Rachel just behind the stranger.
“It’s fine,” she assured the woman. “This is Howard. He works downstairs.”
“I wanted to sit out the riot and go home,” Howard said, “but there… Was that an explosion a few minutes ago?”
“We think it was a car,” Rachel said, as she scraped the bottom of each foot against the side of her leg before she put her shoes on. There was no way she was walking around the loft in bare feet; she had better things to do than discover a new form of tetanus.
Howard instinctively went to look out of the window before Rachel called him back, and the four of them were soon sitting around a lab table. Bell had fashioned a makeshift heater from the Bunsen burner and the ceramic insert from a slow cooker. She had turned the pot upside down over the burner, seating its base on four square chunks of carving marble to hide as much of the light from the flame as possible.
The heat radiating from the pot was practically magic, but Howard’s arrival had broken their easy companionship. He seemed a nice enough guy; he said he was in construction, and there was a half-mention of a wife. But he kept checking his phone as if a good signal would come back before power was restored to the local cell towers, and he had little interest in talking.
Rachel wasn’t helping; she was doing her best to ignore the small group as she kept her scans as wide as possible. She split her attention as much as she could, tracking anything moving in the direction of the loft. Near the limit of her range, smaller raiding parties of rioters were beginning to come together and form larger packs, growing bolder with each additional member. The largest of these were attacking moving cars, breaking store windows… So far, they had stayed off of the streets nearest to the loft, but as Rachel watched, a black Lexus tore through the nearest crowd…
“Oh shit,” Rachel whispered.
The others stopped talking.
“Bell? Hypothetically speaking?”
“Yeah?”
“Did anybody ever get around to printing one of those plastic guns?”
TWENTY-ONE
THE SHRIEK OF METAL AGAINST metal caused them all to hunch over, hands slapped against their ears. Rachel scanned the street below: the driver of the Lexus had lost control, his car scraping the side of a parked van before careening over the curb and into a fire hydrant. She flipped a quick scan through the car: the air bag had gone off, and the driver was trying to swim against the fabric. The diagnostic autoscript chimed in her head, telling her in unpronounceable terms that he had suffered a moderate concussion, along with other injuries that the script couldn’t attribute to the car crash.
She left the Lexus and pushed her scans outwards: the crowd was still several blocks away, but they were burning red and coming at a run.
“Agent Peng?” Bell asked. “What’s wrong?
“Nothing, if the morons who worked in D.C. would bother to use public transport. Bell, I need you to trade shoes with me,” Rachel said, kicking off her heels and sliding them across the table.
“What?” LaPonsie was starting to panic. “What’s going on? Why do you need her shoes?”
Rachel took a breath, and spoke as calmly as she could. “The car that crashed? It’s got a bunch of federal parking stickers on it, and this is a very bad night to be a government employee who can afford to own a luxury vehicle. I need her shoes because I need to go down there and rescue the driver, and there’s no way I’m doing it in mine.”
Bell pushed her old Converse sneakers across the table. Rachel tried to ignore the slightly sour smell coming from them; the sneakers were warm and damp, and had been beaten into shape around Bell’s feet. The rubber creaked as Rachel put them on, as if in protest. She stood to check the fit: a size too small, but better she was wearing shoes too tight than trying to carry a full-grown man’s weight in heels.
Rachel threw a quick scan through the loft, and abandoned the scan just as fast. There was too much junk—it would take too long to search it on her own. Instead, she took Bell by the shoulder and pulled her in close.
“Find me a weapon,” Rachel said her. “Something sharp with a handle, and strong enough so it won’t break.”
Bell’s colors were already pale, and these took on a fearful hue. She swallowed and nodded, and vanished into the dark of the loft.
; Rachel pinged Jason. “I need an ambulance and MPD at the warehouse. There’s been an accident, and a mob is coming.”
“On our way,” he replied.
She started ripping her nylons apart, removing them without removing them. She half-noticed Howard slide his chair closer towards hers, but she glanced up at him when she saw his core of yellow sheltering her own southwestern turquoise.
“No offense,” Howard whispered, “but I should be the one to go downstairs. If things get rough—”
“No.” Rachel cut him off, as she tore the mess of nylon off and tossed it aside. “If things get rough, the three of you are going to break into an office with a fire escape, and hide there until the MPD arrives. Unless the building catches fire, and then you jump out the window and run like hell.”
“Ms. Peng—”
“Agent Peng,” she corrected him. “And before that, it was Warrant Officer Peng, Army CID. So unless you’ve hauled a soldier out of a burning Humvee, I guarantee I’m more qualified to run this rescue mission than you are.”
His conversational colors slowly changed, turning over themselves and losing the yellow of fear as these were replaced with an odd teal. She had seen that color several times before, but she had never been able to place it in her ontology.
“Iraq?” he asked.
“Afghanistan.”
Bell returned, her arms full of long, rattling objects. “Here,” the girl said, kneeling so she could let the rods fall safely from her arms onto the floor.
One rolled towards Rachel. She stopped it with her foot and bent to pick it up. It was nearly three feet long; more than half of it was wood, a rock-hard walnut with grooves sized for larger hands, but it was tipped with a thick wedge of metal sharpened to a flattened point. She ran a cautious fingernail over the edge, and came back with half a manicure; the blade was sharper than a razor. “What are these?” she asked Bell.
“Extra-long chisels for wood turning,” Bell replied. “Jake gets them from a guy he knows in England.”
Maker Space Page 32
