* * * * *
Driving in Manhattan really put Stella Rosin on edge. She found it difficult to subdue the urge to run red lights and weave through traffic, but breaking laws would attract too much attention, police attention. And she knew from past experience that police attention often ended with lots of dead police. That was precisely the kind of idiotic mess that Stella Rosin liked to avoid.
Besides, it would have been a feat even for Stella to weave through downtown gridlock in a '96 Buick. Luna Latum hunters, for innumerable practical reasons, preferred speed bikes and auction-acquired ambulances, and indeed Stella's favored Ducati had been flown out to Long Island at her request. Abe, however, had insisted that they use a car to get around. It would be less conspicuous, he'd said. Stella Rosin suspected that he was just a pussy.
Abe had quite a lot to do with her sour mood.
Dr. Abraham Sharma. The high-ranking specialist she was shadowing for this most unusual (and undesirable) assignment. This was very clearly his hunt, not hers, and it was about as exciting as a tax return. The urgent situation addressed at the Consulate meeting―that proverbial shit nearing the proverbial fan―had turned out to be the apparently imminent union of the Vessel.
That had been Stella's first shock. According to everything she'd ever been taught, the Vessel story was complete rubbish, a fairy tale, a parable at best. Most alarmingly, however, it had nothing to do with hunting down and disabling Hollows. Which frankly made her wonder why it had anything to do with her, since that was the one and only thing hunters were good for.
We want you there as a precaution, a consul had said. For Mr. Sharma's sake, but more significantly, for the protection of the Vessel. That is of utmost importance. Other hunters will be in the area if you need them, but they will not be briefed on the situation to the extent that you have been.
Protection. As if she were some sort of bodyguard. Security detail. The thought made her teeth grind.
Stella's second shock had been Abraham Sharma himself―or, more precisely, his title. Abe was the head of an isolated research department which existed solely in anticipation of the Vessel. The fact that Stella had never heard of this department was no great surprise; it was not in a hunter's job description to know the doings of other Luna Latum units. What shocked Stella was the troubling fact that any so-called Vessel "department" existed at all. Mostly because Stella―along with all other hunters before her―had been conditioned to regard the Vessel the way most women her age regarded Santa Claus.
So imagine if you will, that at the tender age of forty-one, someone told you that you'd been lied to, that Santa Claus was indeed real, along with all his impossible abilities. Then imagine being told that he's actually one of the reasons you have a job, and oh, by the way, you're supposed to go find him and deliver him safely to the North Pole.
That's about how Stella Rosin felt.
Now imagine trying to drive in Manhattan weekend traffic with a know-it-all workshop elf chattering incessantly in the passenger seat.
Abe's enthusiasm was unbearable. He carried with him an arsenal of unidentifiable gadgets, and had the most annoying habit of making sudden exclamations while using them, blunt facts which often trailed off unfinished through a thunderstruck smile. In this way he more more closely resembled an eleven-year-old with a Game Boy than the fifty-something Nobel-laureate doctor that he was.
"Almost, almost ...." Abe pinched his graying eyebrows together in delighted concentration, handling what looked like a slightly oversized GPS unit. A modular street map of the city filled its small screen, defined by layers of coded color. Abe deftly filtered through them until only blue patches highlighted a perfect outline of New York's many islands and peninsulas, then zoomed in closer to the Buick's location.
Too much blue. Way too much. He increased the concentration of the reading and scrolled around until he saw what he was looking for: a tiny but blindingly bright pinpoint of blue on Staten island.
"There you are!"
"Which one?" Stella asked flatly.
"Water."
"Which way?" She forced the question out, clenching her hands on the wheel. Acting as chauffeur was not within the boundaries of her temperament.
"Left." Abe braced himself as she gunned for the correct lane and sped through the first seconds of a red light. His eyes never left the screen in his hands and its precious news. "Yes, keep going and take the bridge. This one's definitely much closer."
Stella glanced subtly at the monitor herself. She knew how to be careful with her questions. Hearing a little of the wrong thing could severely limit future assignments; knowing too much of the wrong thing meant forced retirement.
"Clarify this for me, Dr. Sharma," she said, cutting off a delivery truck in order to pass a cab. "How do they know how to find one another?"
"We don't know exactly." Abe shrugged, sounding almost wistful. "We suspect it's similar to the way Hollows hear each other."
Obviously, the five beings in question were figuring something out. High concentrations of divine activity―undoubtedly the Vessel themselves―had only started showing up on Luna Latum radar little more than a year ago. In the beginning, when the signals were faint and infrequent, they had appeared on four different continents. At present, the signals were all consistent, and all showing up in North America: two were in New York, and the other three appeared to be headed that way.
Stella frowned. "And you don't know what happens when they do find each other?"
"Correct."
"Correct, what?"
"We don't know." Abe smiled at the apparent wonderment of it all.
Stella's razor-colored eyes narrowed. "Don't you think it might cause some kind of natural disaster? Some enormous crisis?"
"Could be." Abe tapped his knee with his free hand, drumming along to his own little song. He had yet to take his eyes off the monitor.
"And you still feel that we absolutely should not interfere until they come together?"
"Nope."
"What?"
"We should not interfere."
Stella gripped the wheel and took a hard right, following directions for the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge. "Why is it so important, then?" she asked. "That they find one another before we approach them?"
"We don't know."
Did this insufferable quack and his department know anything at all? Stella cursed herself for ever accepting this assignment. Opting for retirement after all that briefing would've been less tedious.
"At least," Abe said, clicking through the monitor settings with brimming anticipation,"we can identify them first."
Stella Rosin gritted her teeth. There was a forced detour ahead, strewn with screaming orange signs and countless police officers. One look at the bridge and she understood why.
"Identify them," she repeated. "And just how do you propose we do that?"
Abe looked at her and cheerfully wagged his divinity monitor.
Stella curtly gestured at the windshield.
Thirty thousand or more people were packed together along the full length of the bridge, mulling around with their registration numbers, their water bottles, and their running shorts.
The New York City Marathon was about to start.
Abe looked at his monitor, at that indiscriminate little blue pixel, and then over again at the endless forest of spandex covering the bridge. He frowned. His bottom lip quivered.
"Let me guess." Stella Rosin looked across the seat at him mirthlessly. "You don't know?"
C H A P T E R 6
Vessel, Book I: The Advent Page 21
