Aware

by Andy Havens

  “Where are the rest of you?” he asked.

  “Out hunting. You told us you wanted us out in shifts. At least a few of us out on the road, a few back here at all times.”

  Rain walked to the window at the back of the house and looked out. Wallace could see/sense that it was a bright, sunny day and he could hear the sound of dog-things playing and yapping out back.

  “That’s fine,” Rain said. “Anything new? Anything interesting?”

  Jimson gestured to his men and one of them headed up the stairs at the far end of the living room, taking them two at a time. In a moment he came back down holding a cardboard box that looked quite heavy from the way he leaned back as he descended. He squatted – using his knees, not his back – and placed it gently on the coffee table, knocking a few of the dice onto the rug.

  Rain walked over to the coffee table as Jimson pulled the top off the banker’s box.

  “Several obvious fetishes,” Jimson explained, gesturing at the contents. “Some minor charms and talismans. I don’t know what some of it is, but it radiates for sure, so Nicky picked it up, just like you said.”

  “Good, good,” said Rain, bending over to paw through the contents.

  He looks like a European aristocrat among American yokels, Wallace thought. Can’t they see how much he holds them in contempt?

  [We discuss attitudes later. You’re missing something important. Tell me what.]

  Wallace directed his attention back to the scene. Two of the tags had gone off to the kitchen at the opposite end of the room from the stairs. One lingered by Jimson and Rain, obviously trying to appear involved; nodding, making small, “Mmmhm” noises as if he understood what they were talking about. More noises from the backyard. The thump of a toilet seat from upstairs and then a flush.

  Inside the box?

  Wallace turned his attention down and in, focusing on the items that Rain was handling. The old Earth Master’s hands paused on each of them, testing and weighing. They did, indeed, look like a lot of Reckoner bric-a-brac. Minor Ways wrapped around personal jewelry. A series of small buttons that he thought would probably provide some kind of protection when sewn into a garment. A ring of colored glass. A set of three matched tumblers with invisible yet powerful ley lines etched into the rims.

  Proof against poison maybe?

  [I don’t care about the stuff in the box. Not yet. What are you not seeing?]

  Wallace turned his attention around the room again and noticed that Dr. Lyonne was standing with her back to the group, looking out the back window, her hands resting on top of a waist-high bookshelf. From the point of his observation in the Way, he couldn’t see her face or what she was looking at or most of the shelf that her coat obscured.

  The doctor?

  [Look.]

  Wallace turned his attention around and around. The Way could only build a picture based on what Jimson had observed. But even a Mundane picked up all kinds of sensory input that went unprocessed by the conscious mind. There were waves and nodes and many, many details that even a junior clerk in the Library could pick up on. For a virtuoso like McKey?

  What does she see that I do not?

  He spooled the memory back and saw Sasha peel away from Rain as he talked with the Earth tags. She ran a finger along the serving shelf between the kitchen and the living room. She looked at the cheap, hotel painting of a moonlit landscape against the back wall. She turned around once, taking in the entire room, listening to the two men as they reviewed the contents of the box. Then she turned to the rear window, leaned on the shelf and lingered awhile.

  When Jimson and Rain were finished, she turned back to the room, hands in the pockets of her coat. She smiled as Jimson said, “Have a good afternoon, doctor. Nice to have met you.” And she followed Rain out to the car as he easily carried the heavy box, almost nonchalantly, under one elbow.

  [Look again.]

  Wallace rewound the Way for a third look. And then a fourth. And a fifth. Each time he tried to see something new about Dr. Lyonne. Her steps. Her hair. The way she smelled. The tone of her voice as she said, “Goodbye.” It was a little higher pitched than on the way in. A little more tense. Why?

  On the sixth time he noticed that she was leaning fractionally more toward her left side as she exited the house compared to her entrance.

  Something in her shoe? An itch? A pulled muscle?

  [Look for what is not there.]

  He resented the clue.

  I’ll find it! Just give me a minute!

  [ // grin // ]

  Wallace smiled, too. He hadn’t actually had this much fun in a long time. Solving puzzles was at the heart of what truly motivated and excited Reckoners of Sight.

  He went back and looked at the scene from a wider angle. Observing the entire room. Letting it move forward slowly, so slowly, looking for things that changed during the time Rain and Sasha were in the house.

  There!

  Something had been on the shelf. And then it was not.

  An off-white, rectangular box. Maybe cardboard. Maybe plastic. Hard to tell. Matte finish, anyway. Not shiny. About the size of a paperback book. No decoration. Just a shallow box and a hinged cover.

  She put it in her coat pocket. Why?

  [Why do Mundanes do anything?]

  Good point. But what was it?

  [See if you can tell. Go back to an earlier memory.]

  The others are all jumbled. Just fragments. This is the only one that was fully drawn from him before he died… but I’ll try.

  A series of sharp, almost jarring images flashed before them as they watched.

  A dark winter’s afternoon in front of the Library, the lions yawning beneath a light snow.

  Another evening in the living room of the tag’s house. The young men laughing and drinking soda, eating Pop Tarts, hot from the toaster and playing darts. One of them in the corner leafing through a set of large cards, looking up in surprise and shock as Jimson said, “Put that shit down, Clay!”

  One card on a table. Late at night. The only light coming from a bulb over the sink. The card looked like a series of whorls and loops and ivy growing over something that looked like…

  “What did you see?” a whispered, hissing voice asked. It was dark outside, dark in the room. No light except a little from the stars. The shapes of furniture and walls barely detectable. “Nothing. Just shapes. Just splotches.”

  Another day. Bright light again. Out back on the porch, watching the dengiin play tug-o-war with a hunk of rope. “What did you tell him?” one of the other tags asked. “What do you think I told him? I told him I just saw a bunch of shapes. That’s what I saw, so that’s what I told him.” Nervous. Twitchy. Lying.

  Another night. Sitting alone in a chair by the front door. Watching nothing. Smoking a cigarette. Tapping nervously on the arm of the chair. Waiting.

  Later that same night (Wallace could tell by the moon and stars and a dozen other signs), Jimson pacing quickly around the dark room, muttering to himself, “I don’t need this shit. I don’t need it. Doing favors for Uncle Stoke and Vernon is one thing. This is…” A single knock on the door and the scene vanished.

  Later, still. The same night. 3:14 am, Wallace could tell from the angle of the moonlight. “Where are they?” the whispered voice asked; the same low, hiss from before. “I don’t know!” Jimson said. Too loud for the room. Clearly nervous. “I’m telling you I don’t know!” He was pacing even faster, but the other person in the room was seated and unmoving, speaking very calmly and softly. “What about the others? Maybe one of them took it. Sold it for some red mash. You all like the mash from time to time.” “We don’t do that stuff. Not anymore,” Jimson said, clearly afraid. “Maybe Clay? He liked to look at them, didn’t he?” “I don’t know. Maybe.” “Call him down.”

  Another moment. Just a flash. The tag called Clay screaming and trying to claw his way out of the shut and locked front door. Blood seeping from dozens of cuts on his face. Jimson shouting at
him, “Tell us! Just tell us!” And, all the time, the other person in the room, unseen even by a Way of Sight, sitting silently. Not breathing even. More of a man-shaped hole in space. A shadow without form.

  Jimson on the floor, bowed down, a supplicant. Breathing heavily. Smelling the cigarette smoke and Cheeto crumbs that had been ground into the cheap carpet. The whispered voice. “Find them. Quietly.” “I understand, sir. Yes. Of course. I understand. I’ll… we’ll find them.”

  And the last scene, Jimson telling four of his men, “When you’re out hunting for Rain, you need to also keep looking for those damned cards. It’s important.” “Why?” one of them asked. “Just a bunch of the same Reckoner crap that Rain always…” Jimson reached out, quick as a striking snake, and slapped the other tag across the face. “Not for Rain. And never mention it to him. This is for the Still Man.” The blood drained from the other’s face, the mark of Jimson’s palm now red against the pale skin. “Yes. Got it, boss.”

  That’s all, Helen.

  [OK. Let’s review.]

  As they emerged from the observance of the Way, Wallace realized that he could now see both Mrs. McKey and Hieretha at the same time. She was sharing that other Seeming with him even back at the Library. It was a mark of respect. Maybe even friendship. Certainly professional courtesy.

  He didn’t have any Seemings to share with her. He always looked like… well, like Wallace Bradstreet.

  “So,” she said. “Debrief me.”

  “Me? Debrief you?”

  “It’s good practice, boy. Tell me what we know that we didn’t before.”

  “That Sasha Lyonne has the deck we went to get from Jimson’s gang.”

  McKey shook her head. “We knew that already.”

  “We did? I don’t know…”

  Crap… he thought. I should have known.

  “That’s the deck of cards Dr. Lyonne used on Kendra the morning she opened the transition molds in the topiary, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Wallace. It is.”

  He nodded. “And you knew that from reviewing the Way Mr. Monday used to examine that day of her story.”

  “Yes, Wallace. I did.”

  “So we went to Jimson’s not to collect the deck, but to find out how they lost it.”

  “Yes, Wallace. We did.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She looked at him hard for a moment. He thought hard before venturing, “First, I should have queried the system to see what item we were going to retrieve. You wouldn’t have left without logging that activity. I could have seen the record of the deck in our archives and recognized it as the same one from Dr. Lyonne’s office. I’d assumed that the ones the greenman and I found were another set, not the same exact copy held by the Library… and that was a poor assumption.”

  McKey held up three fingers… then let one of them fall.

  Two points left… Hmmm….

  “I should have also run a search routine on the deck itself as part of my investigation. It’s odd for a Mundane to have Reckoner art lying around. There might have been… there was a record for the cards and you found it, I assume, at some point recently. Which is why you had me do the ride-along with you.”

  The second finger curled down, leaving the index finger remaining.

  “And…” What’s number three? What am I missing?

  “Ah! If you told me, I might have only seen what I expected to! It’s actually a boon that I didn’t connect the two before we ran the Way, since you got to have my, uh… unsophisticated perspective… on the event.”

  The finger came down, making a fist, and McKey punched Wallace softly on the shoulder. “Your perspective isn’t unsophisticated. But I thought you might notice more things I wouldn’t if I didn’t color your expectations with mine. It’s a good rule… have people with different insights and knowledge bases help review the same evidence. An apprentice can sometimes find a flaw in the main where a master sees only perfection in the details.”

  Wallace nodded. I’ve learned more in the last few days than in fifty years of school…

  “Now,” Helen said, standing up and beginning to pace her office in quick, small strides. “What do we not know?”

  This was easier for Wallace.

  “We don’t know who the ‘Still Man’ is. We don’t know why Jimson borrowed the cards from the library. We don’t know why losing them made the Still Man so angry. We don’t know why Jimson didn’t just report them stolen or lost to us in a way that would arouse less curiosity. We don’t know what threat the Still Man had over Jimson’s gang such that they were willing to fight you… uh, us… over the story of the cards.”

  McKey nodded. “Good lad. You’ve got all but one in your list.”

  Wallace grinned. “All but one? Not bad for a clerk…”

  McKey was looking off beyond the pale yellow walls of her office. Beyond the administrative fixtures and mottled glass door and her name plaque. Wallace imagined that she was looking back at her memory of the farmhouse. Of the bodies and the blood and the flies and the smell.

  She seemed to have forgotten him, and so Wallace cleared his throat.

  “Helen?” he nudged.

  “Ah, yes.” She turned to face him, frowning in concentration. “We don’t know why Lyonne stole the cards. If she meant to use them on Kendra—or other patients—when she took them, or if it was just a lark.”

  Wallace nodded. “Yes. Of course. I should have seen that, too.” He paused, and then said, “And we don’t know why she didn’t tell Vernon about them.”

  McKey looked at him, one eyebrow up. “We don’t know that she didn’t.”

  Wallace grinned, a bit guiltily, and said “You didn’t read my entire report, did you? At least, not in detail…”

  At that, she scowled and he could tell she had called it up via a Way he could barely feel. Within moments, she nodded and returned her attention to him.

  “I had reviewed it, of course. But that detail did escape me. Rain told Kendra that he had no idea about the cards. That’s true. We can’t be sure he wasn’t lying, but I don’t see why he would. He seemed legitimately confused or surprised by the question.”

  Wallace nodded. “So Dr. Lyonne was keeping… something… from him.”

  McKey nodded. “Yes. Something. Maybe more than one something.”

  “Is there anything else you want to review in the Way before I register the event in the Library and with the Sanctuary in town? Or should I use the one closest to the farm? There’s a stone-circle a few miles up the road from…”

  She waved him into silence. “Give the details to Melodia at the local pub. She can put the word out to the other Sanctuaries without any editorial. She knows me. She knows I wouldn’t send her anything unless it’s pure kanli, clean as a whistle. The others will have it within the day and if Jimson’s… employers… want to call us in, we can play the recording.”

  “Must be harder for the other Houses,” Wallace mused.

  “Sure, sure… I mean, we also don’t cause as much trouble, either.”

  Again, she looked off into a distance Wallace could imagine. This time, he thought, I bet she’s looking at Lyonne’s office right now and thinking about stopping by to call on the good doctor.

  “Soon,” she said quietly, almost as if to answer Wallace’s unspoken assumption. “But first, I want to know more about the cards.

  “How?” Wallace asked. “Mer'eket has been dead for centuries.”

  “Yes,” McKey agreed. “But I know his son. And the boy is just as talented as the father, though even more reclusive.”

  Wallace scowled. “You think he’ll help us? Or at least answer some questions?”

  “I know his weakness.”

  Knowing is the beginning of strength, Wallace thought. Another aphorism of Sight.

  “Will you need me to come along with you?”

  She smiled at the young man. Is she… is she fond of me? He wondered. I don’t remember ever thinking Mrs. Mc
Key was “fond” of anything or anyone?

  “Not this time, son. Not this time.”

  As she gazed out into her own thoughts, Wallace wondered, What is she seeing now?

  If he’d known, he would have insisted on staying behind…

  * * * * *

  Thomas Brownfield Edgington was sitting in the day lounge looking out the big bay windows at the south field. He didn’t know how he knew it was “south,” but he did. He was counting things. Every day he picked a new thing to count and he also counted the number of things he was counting. When he couldn’t find a new thing to count, he’d go back and re-count an old thing, because things changed and it was good to have “an up-to-date record.” He wasn’t sure why, but that phrase comforted him.

  At that moment, he was counting a variety of mosquito. Lots of people thought that mosquitoes were just one thing, but Tom knew they were not. Like spiders, there were lots of kinds. And there was a large-ish, slow-ish kind in the south field. So Tom sat in his rocking chair and counted mosquitoes that were, in some cases, nearly two-hundred yards away.

  He'd sometimes tell the staff about the counts. “I counted sixteen-hundred and twelve spots on those small, gray mushrooms today,” he’d tell Sam or Lilly or Reba. They’d nod and smile and ask, “Is that an updated count for today?” And he’d usually say, “Yes.” But sometimes he was still working on it, and so he’d tell them, “I’ll get back to you with that,” and they’d smile.

  Dee once said, “Tom… I’m so glad you keep track of these things so that I don’t have to!”

  That made him feel good. Dee brought him ice cream.

  During the past few weeks at the New Farm, as he thought of it, he’d counted 912 different sets of things. Some days he’d spend an hour or two trying to decide if he wanted to count something new or just go back and do an update. Today he’d noticed, right away, that all the tall fenceposts that held up the electrified barbed wire at the edge of the New Farm were flat on one side! He’d always assumed they were, you know… cylinders. Thick, heavy poles. Essentially upright, smooth logs. But the process of turning them into fenceposts made them flat on one side! Why? How? That was interesting!