by Gwynn White
I froze, mid-chew. “What things?”
“How to talk to them? You were talking almost like her. You didn’t even sound like you. How did you know how to do that?”
I blinked, surprised. “I really sounded different?” I thought about his question. “I guess I just copied her. It seemed like they value manners. We’re her guest. She didn’t have to take us in.”
Cass grinned, shaking her head. “You’ve always had that chameleon thing. It’s freaky, Allie. You’re like a shapeshifter.”
Jon frowned. He didn’t press me on it, but I could tell my answer didn’t fully satisfy him. Cass’s comment didn’t relax that tension in his brow, either. Picking up his knife and fork, he cut into his eggs, taking a few bites before he glanced up at me again.
“Did you catch what she said about your SCARB agent?” he said, his voice still low. He lifted an eyebrow, glancing around us to make sure no one was in earshot. “I don’t think ‘Simon’ is his real name.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I did catch that.” Glancing between the two of them, I hesitated, stalling by chewing on a piece of bacon, then taking a drink of my cappuccino. Swallowing the mouthful, I said, “There’s some things I need to tell you both. About that guy… and the plane. And those men out there.”
The three of us ate while I talked and they listened.
I told them everything I could thing of––about how those were the same three guys I’d seen outside of SFO, about the first note on the plane, everything I could remember about my conversation with “Simon” in first class.
When I finished speaking, there was a short silence.
Jon was frowning though, and Cass looked worried.
It ended up being Cass who spoke first.
“I don’t know, Allie,” she said, hesitant. “None of this sounds good. Do you think all four of those guys are SCARB? Or do you think the first three were Myther terrorists or something?” Still thinking, she added, “If they are Mythers, they might’ve had something to do with that bomb… and you’ve run into them twice now. Maybe three times, if they left you that note this morning. Four if they left you the note on the plane.” Hesitating, she glanced at Jon, before looking back at me. “And what about this ‘Simon’ guy? What’s his connection to those other guys? What’s his deal with you?”
I shook my head, taking a bite of toast.
“I don’t know,” I said, chewing.
Jon sat back in his seat, combing a hand through his streaked blond and brown hair. His plate had been picked clean.
“I agree with Cass,” he said. “This isn’t good, Al. You’re either being targeted by Mythers, or SCARB is investigating you… or both. SCARB might be using you in some way to track those Mythers. Or they might be setting you up.”
“Why, though?” Cass said, looking at him. “Why would they go after her?”
Jon shrugged, taking a sip of his cappuccino. “No idea. They might have profiled her, thought she’d make a good recruitment candidate. Adopted, so they’d know you were harassed by authorities growing up, unreg’d birth parents, weird blood. For all we know, they could be putting you forward as some kind of sleeper agent.”
Swallowing my bite of toast, I took another sip of cappuccino. That sick feeling I’d gotten reading the second note that morning returned. It still didn’t make sense, though. I’d never been remotely religious. I’d never been involved in any activities that would put me on a Myther’s radar. I’d attended a few seers’ rights protests in college, but that was pretty much it.
For the past few years, I’d engaged in no political activity at all.
I would have thought they’d approach Jon before me.
Jon added, “They followed you here, Allie. You realize that, right? There’s a good chance they followed you to New York. Either that, or it’s just a really bad coincidence, them being here the same time as you.” He pressed his lips together, shaking his head. “That one guy, Simon, bought a ticket right in front of us. You know that’s probably what he was doing, right? When we saw him at that first class counter? That means he likely wasn’t going to New York before the bombing at the airport.”
“He might have been following the other three,” I pointed out.
Jon nodded. “True. But all four of them made a point about you before you got on the plane,” he reminded me. “That guy, Simon, went out of his way to pull you to safety. Twice. That means he knew who you were before we got to the airport.”
I nodded, swallowing a bite of toast that suddenly wanted to stick in my throat.
We sat in silence for a moment longer.
I exhaled then, staring down at my mostly-full plate as it hit me I was finished eating. The queasiness in my stomach worsened as I stared down at the untouched pile of eggs. I’d basically picked through toast and fruit without eating much.
“Do you think he’s really a SCARB agent?” I said finally. “Maybe he’s investigating the other three?”
Jon frowned, shaking his head. “Alone? Why didn’t he have back-up, if those others weren’t SCARB? Don’t they always work in small groups? Pairs, at least?”
“Maybe those other guys are SCARB,” Cass suggested. “Only they’re dirty. Collecting seers to resell, you know? There was a whole special on that on the news feeds a few months ago––about SCARB officials being on the take with traffickers.” She looked at me. “Maybe he’s pretending to go along with it for now. So he can bust them later, you know?”
Jon shook his head. “He wasn’t very subtle about pulling Allie out of there. And why are any of them focused on her? It’s not like they can sell her.”
“Wrong place, wrong time?” Cass suggested.
“You mean, those three guys targeted me at the airport just because I was there, and they knew the bomb would be going off––” I began.
“Yeah,” Jon said, nodding. “Yeah, that could be it.” He gave me a serious look. “I don’t really see you being profiled as a recruitment possibility, Al.”
I nodded, silently agreeing with him.
Cass and Jon just looked at me for a moment.
Then Cass burst out in an involuntary-sounding laugh, as much nerves as humor.
“Jesus, Al. Only you could ‘randomly’ get on the radar of Myther terrorists. How is it that you’re like the Bermuda Triangle for anything weird going on, anywhere near you?” Smiling at me, her eyes still betraying her worry, she added, “And now we know you’re a seer whisperer, too. I think that Jewel chick seriously wants to jump your bones.”
I rolled my eyes at that last part, snorting.
Glancing at Jon, I was surprised to see him nodding to Cass’s words.
“I’m pretty sure she does, too,” he said, quirking an eyebrow at me as he lowered his cappuccino cup to the table. “She was staring at your ass pretty intently while you were looking around the room. And she watched your reactions while you were checking out that sex show on stage with more than a small bit of interest. I wouldn’t be surprised if she propositioned you again before we leave here.”
I rolled my eyes, not bothering to comment.
Then, thinking about everything we’d been talking about, I frowned.
“Look, what do we do about the rest of it? Do we go to the cops? I at least want to find some way to report what those assholes did to that seer. Preferably before they ship her out of the country somewhere. Can we… I don’t know… find a way to send an anonymous tip?” I looked at Jon, pressing my lips together. “You have hacker friends at your company, don’t you? Could we get one of them to––”
But another voice cut me off.
“No,” it said.
The single word was harsh, unequivocal.
My eyes jerked up and off of Jon, staring at the shape now looming over our table.
“––Absolutely not,” the voice finished, as cold as before.
The deep tones and German accent already made me stiffen, even before my brain caught up and told me who it was. I found I had to once m
ore struggle to make sense of his features in the shadows, lost in the height of his outline. Once my eyes began to adjust, I focused on the angular face, taking in the faint scowl on his lips, those light, almost colorless eyes.
“No,” he repeated, looking from me to Jon. “You will not go to the authorities with this.” His jaw tightened, pushing out his cheek. “No realistic, image capture-accurate drawings. No hacking. No anonymous ‘tips.’ Stay the fuck away from SCARB.”
Jon flinched, looking at me with a faint frown and a cocked eyebrow.
None of us spoke, and the silence deepened.
Aiming a bare glance at me, the man standing over us shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his expression unmoving.
“Don’t sleep with the seers here, either,” he added, gruff. “You’re right, Jewel intended to proposition you. I discouraged her from that. It’s not a good idea for you right now.”
My mouth fell open in shock. I stared up at him, unsure how to even respond to that.
He shifted his weight again, gazing around at the three of us.
“You can go,” he said, blunt. “Outside. You can leave. They’re gone.”
He looked at me again, longer that time.
Something in the hesitation I saw there threw me even more than the cold bluntness of his words. He looked almost like he wanted to talk to me. I couldn’t tell if he wasn’t talking to me because he didn’t know how, or because he couldn’t decide if he should.
I also wondered what the hell he was talking about with that seer, Jewel.
I cleared my throat, and those light eyes sharpened.
“Thank you,” I said. “For getting us out of there.”
He blinked, but his expression didn’t move.
Taking a breath, I tried again. “Did you find out anything?” I kept my voice polite. “About that note? What I gave you on the plane?”
He flinched. That time, his frown deepened.
He didn’t take his eyes off me, but I could almost see the conflict on him now.
I was about to try a third time, when he shifted his gaze sharply away.
Dropping his hands to his sides, he moved gracefully sideways, turning on one heel almost like a dancer––or a fighter, more likely. In fact, watching him, I realized something about the way he moved reminded me of some of Jon’s martial arts buddies, particularly those who’d studied fighting arts since they were kids.
The black-haired man left the area of our booth and table without a sound, taking those smooth, cat-like strides directly towards the exit.
I almost called after him, in surprise as much as anything.
Instead I shut my mouth, staring after him in bewilderment.
He didn’t give any of us so much as a backward glance.
Jon let out a disbelieving sound. “What the hell?”
Cass snorted an involuntary laugh, exchanging looks with Jon.
Then all three of us turned in our seats, necks craned, as we watched him walk through the darkened hallway, disappearing into the shadows towards the beaded doorway.
I admit, I wasn’t sure how to feel, watching him walk away.
12
Drunk
We got back to the club around six o’clock, a good three hours before Jaden’s band would be going onstage, and a good hour before they’d open the doors to the ticket-holders, some of whom were already queued up outside the club.
We got a few dirty looks for being able to go inside, mixed with curiosity, of course, about who we might be.
Jaden’s band wasn’t there yet, and we hadn’t seen him at the hotel when we went back to shower and change, so Jon and Cass and I ordered a few plates of bar food from one of the kitchen guys, and settled in to wait at a booth in the back, along with the sound guy, one of the bouncers and two of their female friends who got in early like us.
We’d walked pretty much that whole day.
Two museums, a good stretch of Central Park, and we even made it to the Village via the subway, even though I was a little nervous about going down there, especially after everything that happened that morning. After seeing a seer tasered and kicked on a public street, the protests in the Village struck me as almost quaint.
Still, we gave them a pretty wide berth, sticking to the smaller streets in the East Village and wandering up to Gramercy Park and eventually the Empire State Building.
By then, we were hot, tired and hungry.
Even so, we opted to go back to the hotel first, so we wouldn’t have to go back after we got food. By the time I sat down at the booth in the club, I should have been starving, but for some reason, I wasn’t.
Instead, I really wanted to drink.
I’d been struggling not to think about what happened by the park all day. That knot in my gut kept getting worse, though, not better. I remembered the seer, Jewel, in that club, how she’d fed us when she felt us hungry, how she’d taken us in, no questions asked.
I couldn’t help connecting her kindness to the seer by the park.
So while Jon and Cass ate, I sat in the corner of the booth with a pad of paper I’d grabbed from my suitcase and a handful of pens. After looking around for any SCARB or NYPD surveillance cameras aimed in our general direction, I asked the bouncer, just to be sure.
Jon gave me a warning, “shut up” kind of look, but the bouncer only laughed.
“There,” he said, pointing out a God’s eye camera in the ceiling over the main club floor. “There,” he said, pointing to another over the bar in the center of the downstairs floor. “There,” he said, pointing to the other bar.
He pointed out four more––in the corridor near the bathrooms, over the stage, near the front door, near the back door, and near the door that went behind the stage itself.
“There’s more in the alley out back,” he said, smirking a little. “Two more in the backstage area. One upstairs, in the office. One in the kitchen. One in the alley behind the kitchen. Two on the poles outside, that capture the length of the club on the street.”
Winking at me, he gave me a deliberate once-over.
“Anywhere else is fair game, baby,” he said, smiling.
“Are those all SCARB?” Jon said, frowning.
The bouncer turned to him, nodding. “NYPD and SCARB are pretty tight here, since we have our own branch of the World Court in the UN Building. They share all that shit.”
Jon frowned, giving me a look.
Looking back at the bouncer, who was looking at my midriff again, which showed under the lacy top I wore, I pretended not to notice when I spoke.
“So I can draw here?” I said.
When Jon cleared his throat, I ignored him again, looking only at the bouncer.
“…Even if the drawing’s not strictly… SCARB-friendly?” I finished. I was going on a hunch, based on his extensive knowledge of camera placement.
The bouncer chuckled, confirming my suspicions.
“You going to draw a picture of me, honey?” he said, smiling.
I smiled back. “Just someone I saw today,” I said, more or less truthfully. “Someone whose face I wanted to remember––”
“Allie,” Jon said, warning.
But the bouncer only chuckled.
“You draw whoever you like,” he said, weaving his fingers together. “We’re not exactly fans of SCARB down here. And frankly, they’ve got their hands full with the illegal trade going on in this city as it is––not to mention all the terrorist bullshit that’s been happening over the past year. I don’t think they’re going to pinch some cute human chica, just because she likes to draw pictures a little too close to the mark.” He gave me a mock offended look. “Although I’m a little hurt you’re not drawing me, honey.”
Smiling back, I ignored Jon’s foot when he kicked me under the table a second time.
Then the sound guy asked Cass what we’d been doing all day.
Thank goodness, she told him in detail, and everyone turned to listen to her as she started to talk.
Relieved to have all eyes off me, I grabbed a black pen with a sharp tip, and bent over a blank sheet in my drawing pad, starting to sketch with light strokes.
That’s pretty much all I did while Jon and Cass ate and talked and laughed with the others.
A few times, I showed Jon half-completed sketches of Ponytail and his two friends. Although he frowned a bit as he looked at them, he nodded when I asked him if they looked like the men he’d seen that day.
“Eerily so,” he said, frowning harder at my third try. “Jesus, Al. How the hell did you get so much detail from that short encounter?”
I shrugged. I’d always had a good memory when it came to drawing faces.
“I saw him at the airport, too,” I reminded him.
“Well, it’s good enough to be really fucking illegal,” Jon said, swallowing a mouthful of beer. “Especially if those guys really were SCARB agents. You shouldn’t be doing that in here.” Frowning, he added, “Your friend, ‘Simon,’ made it pretty clear you shouldn’t be doing it at all.”
Cass bent over Jon’s lap, looking at the drawings, too. Like my brother, she shook her head, her eyes showing amazement.
“Jesus, Al. Spot on. That’s creepy as hell.” She pointed at the Russian guy’s neck. “I remember that tattoo. I swear, that’s absolutely perfect.”
But Jon wasn’t done. “So you’re not going to listen to your pal, ‘Simon,’ then?” Jon said, frowning when I started sketching the body of Ponytail to go with his face. “I mean, he did save your life. Twice, potentially. Don’t you think maybe he has your best interests at heart? Or were you just drawing those for your scrapbook?”
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. Frowning, I gave him a bare glance. “Do you think Hesh or one of the guys at the lab could send a scanned drawing anonymously?”
Jon exhaled, shaking his head. “I’m more worried about you sneaking those things through customs.”
I waved that off. “That’s no biggie. I’ll just carry them on me.”
Jon grunted, giving me a disbelieving look. “Jesus.”
Pretending not to hear the horror in his voice, I bent back over my drawing.
