An Annoyance of Grackles (Applied Topology Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  “Thalia, we’ve been practically living together for six months. They’re bound to notice eventually.”

  “Maybe.” I dreaded the day when Lensky would get sucked into the dysfunctional maelstrom of my family. It was one thing for him to accept a girlfriend who could step in and out of thin air. Accepting my insane family might be too much to ask. And I shriveled internally when I thought of him hearing what Dad thought of me. What if he realized that Dad was right, that I wasn’t that much and certainly nothing special? “But not now!” Besides, it was looking like I might have to keep my promise to Andros. If the family met Lensky now, they’d have a clue to where I meant to stash Andros until Dad saw reason. I explained that to him without going into my other fears.

  “You could have told me that part last night,” he said, sounding disappointed.

  Well, yes, I could, except that I was in the habit of not telling people things if I didn’t have to. I tried to make him see that this was a necessary survival strategy for living in the same town as the rest of my family.

  “But was it necessary to leave me out of the loop?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. If you didn’t know, nobody could blame you.”

  “I’d still rather know what’s going on,” he said. But he reluctantly agreed to stay out of it for the time being.

  I wasn’t nearly so understanding when I got to the apartment and Andros told me that he didn’t want me to come to Tino’s with him.

  “Andy, are you nuts? Dad will eat you alive!”

  “If I can’t even meet them on my own, how am I ever going to go back? Or were you planning to move back in there to protect me?” He managed a slightly crooked grin. “You can’t spend the rest of your life looking after me, Thalia. For one thing, I don’t think you’d like it in the Marines.”

  My kid brother seemed to be growing up fast. I was proud of him – and terrified for him. I called a car to take him to Tino’s, waved good-bye with a smile pasted to my face, and went back upstairs to wear a hole in the apartment floor by pacing around the living room. He would be coming back here; I couldn’t take refuge at Lensky’s place until I knew how the meeting had gone.

  I’d seen Andros off at 5:30 and didn’t expect to see him back for several hours. All the same, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the apartment. I borrowed one of Ingrid’s books and tried to lose myself in the intricacies of paracompact spaces. The words of the text floated in front of my eyes while in my head I was seeing an unimpressive strip-mall restaurant with plastic-topped tables. It suddenly seemed important to know whether Tino’s tables were bolted to the floor or freestanding. Not that I really thought Dad would go from pounding on the table to throwing it…

  It was time to turn the page; I’d read all the words on it. But I hadn’t taken in one of them. Studying was not going to work.

  Oh, well. Ingrid was out somewhere, probably with Jimmy, so the only person I was fooling with a pretense of calm was… me. And I wasn’t fooled.

  The screen door downstairs slapped against the doorframe and I heard somebody heavy trudging up the stairs. I flew to the door. “Andr – Andy! I didn’t expect you back so soon! How did-”

  The defeated look on his face stopped me.

  “It’s no good, Thalia. Dad started shouting the minute he walked in the door. I might as well never have gone. I called Uber after he’d been going for ten minutes. It took another ten for the car to get back to pick me up and he never did slow down while I was waiting. Twenty minutes of yelling was more than enough.”

  “I should have gone with you.”

  Andy shook his head. “Sis, I love you and you’ve done a lot for me, but even you can’t work miracles. It’s hopeless!” He frowned. “You did say you had another idea?”

  “Yes, but I wish it hadn’t come to this. Listen, Andy, I’m going to tell you some things that I really don’t want Mom and Dad to find out about.”

  “If it’s about your ability to disappear,” he said, surprising me, “I’ve known that for months and I haven’t told anyone.”

  “What! I thought I’d been discreet around the family.”

  Andy shrugged. “You don’t need to be that careful around Mom and Dad, they never notice anything they don’t want to. I followed you a couple of times and saw you duck behind the neighbors’ hedge and never come out. Did you go invisible, or were you teleporting to somewhere else? What other cool stuff can you do?”

  “Um… I’ll tell you some time. This is actually a different type of secret. I’m seeing somebody.”

  “Mr. Sutherland? I thought he just moved in with somebody else.”

  I mentally wiped the sweat off my forehead. At least my kid brother didn’t know everything about me. “No. I was never ‘seeing’ Ben that way. Mom just wanted to believe we had a thing going, and I let her think that because it discouraged her from trotting out nice Greek Orthodox boys from St. Elias for me. This is somebody Mom and Dad have never heard about, and I want to keep it that way.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with him?”

  “Not a thing in the world,” I snapped. “Quite the reverse. He’s sane and I dread to think what effect meeting my family could have on him.”

  Andy shrugged. “Okay. Is that who I’m going to be staying with?”

  “No. His sister-in-law lives here too. Pam has a spare room right now since she broke up with her ‘friend’ Jerry, so it’s just her and Linda – Lensky’s niece – in the house. She doesn’t know you’re underage and a runaway, she just knows you’re a young relative of mine who needs to rent a room for a few weeks.”

  “Lensky,” Andy said slowly. “That’s kind of a funny name.”

  Which I hadn’t meant to let slip. Ben’s right, I am a terrible liar. “Polish,” I said briefly.

  “Oh! Now I remember. He’s the spy at your work! That’s who you’re seeing?”

  I flung up my hands. “Yes, not that I meant to tell you that either. You’re too damned smart to drop out of school, Andy! Swear not to tell them anything?”

  “It doesn’t look like I’ll have the chance,” Andy said ruefully.

  “Nevertheless. Swear on the sacred knucklebone of Saint Elias or I won’t take you over to Pam’s.” (I don’t actually know whether the church Mom goes to has a relic of its namesake saint; Stevie and I had made up this oath as kids and all four of us observed it as faithfully as if Saint Elias himself were checking on us personally.)

  Andy repeated the words solemnly and then destroyed the effect by breaking into a wide grin. “Are you going to teleport us to Pam’s?”

  “Might as well, now that I know you know.” Another week with Andy and I would have no secrets at all.

  “Cool.”

  In the small hours of the morning the grackles formed a cackling, spinning cloud that disappeared as he set foot in the deserted office. He had planned ahead, so he had no need of light to set up the mechanism; pushing a single button would start the deadly countdown until morning, when he hoped the maximum number of people would be gathered there. He would not have to be nearby to trigger anything; once he had left the package, everything would proceed automatically to its fatal conclusion.

  Finding a place to leave the package was a problem of a different order. How to ensure that it was in a central location, yet would remain undetected? The blank wall to the right of the stairs offered no hiding place, and the private offices opening off the central room were all locked. Very likely Chayyaputra’s grackles would be able to transport him into one of those offices, and wouldn’t that be a fine surprise for somebody in the morning! But he didn’t want to place his package near an outside wall; he’d designed it to have maximum effect in a central location. He switched on the miniature flashlight on his key chain, holding a fold of his shirt over it to keep the light from flashing too brightly, and appraised the room swiftly. A desk – not good, someone might open a drawer. A metal filing cabinet – no, that might contain and diminish the damage.

  Finally h
e used the museum putty in his pocket to fasten the package underneath a lightweight table that formed an L-shape with the desk. It wasn’t heavy; the putty should be more than adequate to hold it until the timer ticked down.

  He took one of his three feathers from his pocket and blew on it gently. The grackles returned and surrounded him; time and space tilted around him, until he found himself back in the room he had rented for a short period from someone who had been more than happy to take cash and ask no awkward questions.

  He slept well.

  16. A god of darkness and despair

  After settling Andy at Pam’s I went back to Lensky’s and invited him to distract me from family problems.

  “With food? Or something else?”

  I realized that I hadn’t gotten around to eating all day. Dad had ruined my appetite for Sunday lunch, and this evening I’d been too worried about Andy to get a meal for myself. Anyway there’d hardly been time.

  “Food first. Then… use your creativity.”

  He took that as a challenge. So after making us both sandwiches of prosciutto and fresh mozzarella and hothouse tomatoes, he got extremely creative indeed about distracting me. Outside the condo there was a bleak January night with a hint of snow in the air. Inside was a different world, one that took me away from everything I’d been worried about and challenged me to keep up with Lensky’s inventiveness. I couldn’t think about anything else while trying to do justice to his attentions. Even had I wanted to.

  Monday morning was bright and crisp and the grass outside was white with tiny frost crystals. The clouds were gone and Austin felt remarkably like some place several hundred miles farther north, with nothing between us and Canada but a couple of barbed-wire fences. Had Andy taken his winter coat when he left? I didn’t think so.

  “He needs a coat,” I said unhappily when we were driving to the office. “And he’ll be missing school. I have to fix this soon.”

  Lensky’s hand covered and warmed both of mine. “Thalia, you can’t save the whole world.”

  “Oh, to hell with the whole world! I just want to take care of my kid brother.”

  He sighed and carefully refrained from saying that it might not be in my power to do that. I started brooding about what we’d do if Dad remained obstinate – which seemed almost certain. He’d never yet made any concessions to reality and I hadn’t seen any hint that this was going to be different. Perhaps I could get a real job, one that paid enough to support Andros and me. Jimmy said his father’s company was always happy to hire math majors on the theory that we were smart enough to learn whatever the changing computer world required that week. How much legal trouble could Dad make if Andros stayed with me?

  “Lensky?”

  “Mm?”

  “Isn’t there something called an emancipated minor?”

  “Planning ahead?”

  “Trying to.”

  “Courts and lawyers can get expensive. Why don’t you wait a bit, see if things work out without going to those lengths?”

  Good advice, if I’d been able to take it. Unfortunately my default approach to problems is to try and think ahead to the worst possible outcome and figure out how I’ll handle that. It required rigid self-discipline to keep myself from doing that about Lensky and me; I didn’t have any will power left over to stop myself worrying about Andros.

  I was still wrapped up in the problem of Andros when we got to Allandale House. I didn’t even complain about the grackles that were clustered all around the building, cawing and screeching and flapping in and out of the trees. Dad was easily worse than any number of grackles, magical or mundane.

  Annelise, of all people, brought my attention back to more immediate problems. She and Ben and Mr. M. whisked into the office just after Lensky and I got there; I was still leaning against Lensky’s office door and thinking about emancipated minors, hadn’t even settled down to my own desk yet. I suspected I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on legitimate mathematical problems like refining the flight visualizations, anyway.

  “Eeeu,” Annelise exclaimed as she lifted Mr. M. off her neck. “What smells in here?”

  She poked the toe of one shoe into a white blob on the floor. “This looks exactly like bird poop!”

  It did indeed. And there were more splotches, making a wobbly circle on the floor. I’d walked right over it without even noticing.

  Mr. M. raised his top twelve inches, spread out the hood Meadow had added to his prosthetic body, and sniffed for himself. “Grackles,” he said.

  “You can tell the smell of grackle poop from other bird poop?” Lensky inquired.

  “I can recognize grackle feathers,” Mr. M. said. “Look!” He breathed out and a tiny wind raced around the office, picking up downy black feathers and two iridescent pinions and spinning them in a miniature whirlwind in the center of the ring marked out by grackle droppings.

  Grackles outside the building were bad enough. I wondered what idiot had left a window open for them on the coldest night of the year.

  “There is more,” Mr. M. announced. “Something has not left this room.”

  “Like… there’s a grackle hiding?” Hard to see where it could be.

  “Something that has the stench of those malodorous birds,” he said. He slithered off Annelise’s desk and began gliding around the grackle poop in ever-expanding circles, his head raised, sniffing loudly as he went.

  “What’s up?”

  Colton must have teleported directly into the private side, as I would have done if Lensky hadn’t been so antsy lately about me teleporting into the office. Hearing Annelise, he’d probably come through the wall in the hope of doughnuts and coffee.

  “I do not think it is in your desk,” Mr. M. informed Annelise.

  “What isn’t in her desk?”

  I stepped back to where Colton stood. “He thinks the grackles left something nasty here.”

  “Ah!” Mr M. reared up under the table where Annelise stacked paperwork and emitted a long, loud whistle that swooped up and down the scale. We all covered our ears; even Lensky.

  “What is that godawful noise?”

  Mr. M. bent his neck and preened. “It is a reproduction of the air raid sirens from the Blitz. It does get attention, does it not?”

  “Sure does, sir,” Colton said, respectful as always. “But why? We’re not about to get bombed, are we?”

  “Possibly,” said Mr. M. “Can you identify this device?” He was right under the table now, rearing up and looking at the underside – or at something stuck to the underside? Colton got down on the floor and pushed himself under the table.

  “Oh!”

  “What is it?”

  “I … don’t want to shake it,” Colton said. “Mr. M.?”

  “There is a visible timer,” Mr. M. said. “Occam’s razor suggests that the timer, rather than sudden motion, will dictate the detonation. However, just in case grackles are not as logical as William of Occam, I recommend handling the thing gently.”

  I thought that teleporting out of the office might be even a better idea. While Colton gingerly pried at whatever he’d seen under the table, I glided back to Lensky and grabbed his arm. If I had to teleport, he was coming with me. And Ben could take Annelise, and where were Ingrid and Meadow and Jimmy? Coming up the stairs right now… and Ingrid was afraid to teleport…

  “Evacuate the building?” Lensky said, following the same train of thought.

  “No time,” Colton said, carefully wriggling out from under the table with his hands upraised to hold something about the size of a laptop computer. I saw bunches of wires, something that looked like a circuit board, a small red light blinking on and off. He sat up and stared at the light. “Thirty seconds… twenty-nine…”

  He twisted his body sideways and disappeared, still clutching the mystery package.

  “Colton, you idiot!” Meadow shouted, too late.

  We all stared at the empty place where Colton had been.

  “Was that a bom
b?” Annelise sat down very suddenly, as if her knees weren’t quite steady.

  Lensky cleared his throat. “It looked like Balan’s work – or what we think his work would look like, before the explosion. We’ve only had post-detonation fragments to study, before.”

  “It’s been more than thirty seconds now,” Ben said a minute later.

  Nobody had anything to add.

  “Any idea where he went?”

  “He didn’t exactly have time to sign the log book!” Annelise said in a high voice that trembled on the edge of hysteria.

  “Who didn’t?” Prakash had quietly come up the stairs while we were adjusting to Colton’s disappearance. We hadn’t given him any stars yet; he probably couldn’t teleport into the office unaided.

  “Thalia, fill him in,” Meadow snapped. She stamped into her office and slammed the door.

  Explaining to Prakash what we thought had happened was neither pleasant nor easy. Even though I stuck to what we knew – grackle spoor in the central office, hidden device with timer, Colton’s disappearance – Prakash was as bright as everybody else, and as capable of drawing conclusions from the fact that Colton hadn’t returned.

  “I do not understand, though,” he said, “how you found this device. Do you search the office every morning?”

  “Grackles,” I said.

  “Grackles?”

  “Remember Thursday night? I knew we were in trouble as soon as I saw the grackles. Same thing today. We opened up the office and found grackle poop on the floor and bits of black feathers floating around.”

  Prakash looked, if anything, even more unhappy than before. “Are grackles always a sign of evil?”

  “No, sometimes they’re just obnoxious black birds trying to steal your sandwich. But we’ve had a lot of trouble with them. There’s this guy who seems to have power over them, or to draw power from them, or maybe both; we’re not sure.” I gave him a quick summary of the problems we’d had with the shadowy figure we called the Master of Ravens, ranging from kidnapping and assault to a political attempt to destroy the Center.