An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  There! Beautifully calibrated, an identity between the inside of his room safe and the inside of ours. I added a little pull to the reach and opened my eyes.

  “Didn’t it work?” Lensky, of course, hadn’t been able to see what our room and the target’s room looked like in the in-between, or how I’d neatly overlapped just the space within the two safes.

  You could call it, I thought, a Safe Space.

  “Look in the safe.”

  We hadn’t bothered to lock it; Lensky flipped the door open and gave a gratified, “Hah!” He came back to the couch with a wallet, a tiny spiral notebook, and a bundle of legal-size papers. While I leaned back with my eyes closed, I could hear him flipping through the papers. “Hah…. Hmm…. Oh…. Oh well,” he said on a downward, disappointed curve.

  “Not Blondie?”

  “Not unless Blondie does a side line in representing porn stars. All these contracts… well, I can certainly see why he doesn’t want to lose them, but there’s nothing actually illegal here. And I doubt this guy would have time to build bombs in between representing VaVa Voom Vixen and Nurse Cinder-Ass.”

  “You made those names up.”

  “I’m not nearly that creative. And there are more here, if you want to look.”

  “Pass. Can I send them back now?” The longer the contents of a safe stayed with us, the greater the risk of detection.

  “Is it easier if I put them back in our safe?”

  “Please. And in the same order they were in?”

  “OK, got it. Go ahead.”

  I was surprised by a stomach-twisting lurch right after I glanced at the diagrams, closed my eyes, and built the visualizations. Oh, right: I wanted to send things away this time. I mentally flipped the shift graphs and felt the papers flowing through the in-between to their original location.

  The next target had a room directly above us. Three floors above; not a terrible distance, but I added half a dozen stars to those already glowing in my hand. (Figuring out how to select a finite subset from an infinite set of sentient, gregarious stars had been the hardest thing we’d done to date, and also the most useful. Applying full star power to a transformation could have earth-shaking results. Literally.)

  This time it didn’t feel like I was lifting anything at all, but I did hear a quiet clink from the room safe. Lensky jumped up, looked inside, and said something in explosive Polish.

  “Didn’t it work?”

  “It may have,” he said, somewhat grimly. “If the only things in the safe were two wedding rings.” He opened his hand and showed me. I squinted at the engravings. A very large band read BJ+AC 9/21/04. The lighter, daintier band read SM 4/7/09.

  “Cheating couple,” I said, “not wearing their rings in public, but don’t want to risk losing them.”

  “How do you know they’re not married to each other?”

  “Different wedding dates. Read the engraving.”

  Lensky squinted, held one of the rings out at arm’s length, twisted and turned it under a lamp, and eventually said, “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Back with the wedding rings, then, and on to the third and most difficult target. This one had a room five stories down and several rooms east of us, and I’d been hoping we would identify Blondie before I had to do this one. Room service had delivered to our targets in order of easiest to hardest, but now I was tired from the first two shifts. Four shifts, really; putting stuff back was just as much effort as taking it.

  I took my time setting up for this one. Redrew my diagrams on clean paper so they’d be fresh in my mind. Added another dozen stars to my active collection. I wouldn’t have minded taking a break for dinner, actually, but we needed to do this while the target was busy with room service and not likely to open his safe.

  This time the shift felt like pulling something sticky out of a narrow-necked bottle. At first nothing moved and then all the contents of the safe came out with a Whoosh! and turned into a mini-tornado of paper scraps spiraling down to the coffee table.

  “Not much hope of putting those back the way they were,” sighed Lensky.

  At first I was afraid my last hard yank at the papers had fragmented them, but as Lensky spread the scraps out it became evident that our target just liked to take notes on little bitty scraps of paper. Lensky made satisfied noises, took out his cell phone, and clicked away getting pictures of every scrap. I was too tired to try reading them, but I could see that a lot of the bits of paper had Arabic writing scribbled on them. Not in itself a sign of guilt – since neither of us could read the writing - but it sure made this guy look more likely to be Blondie than the two previous targets.

  “I wonder how old Blondie is?” Lensky mused.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Estimates only. If there’s any part of his past that can be obscured, he’s hidden it. We really don’t know much at all before he came out of the woodwork in ’04 as a commercial demolitions expert. It’s just… well, I only ever knew one other person with such a compulsion to use every tiny scrap of paper. He was an older friend of my father’s, went to elementary school right after the war. He said there were shortages of everything, and to his dying day he never threw away a pencil stub or a square inch of paper.”

  I did some mental arithmetic. “You mean, right after World War II? That war?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, if Blondie started kindergarten in 1945, he’d be what, seventy-seven by now. Isn’t that kind of old to be an active terrorist?”

  “Not to be a mastermind and organizer. But yeah, if he were pushing eighty he probably wouldn’t be doing his own demolition work. But he could have grown up someplace that had similar shortages. Gaza? Lebanon?”

  “Romania?”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, you said he was more likely to be a mercenary than a jihadi. And Romania was short of just about everything by the time the Soviet Union collapsed.” One of my grade school teachers had gotten out of Romania just before the collapse. We discovered that it was very easy to deflect her from world geography by getting her to rant about the shortcomings of the Ceauşescu regime. This wasn’t so great for my map-reading skills, but I feel the expanded knowledge of current events made up for it.

  “That guess as to Blondie’s motivations,” Lensky said, “was made before anybody knew about his habit of writing little notes in Arabic.” He stood and tapped on his phone. “I’m sending these images straight to the analysts. It will be very interesting to see the translations.”

  I hoped for his sake that the mysterious notes didn’t turn out to say, “Quart of milk, cat food, pick up dry cleaning.”

  “Should I send them back now?”

  Lensky frowned. “I don’t know. Can you get them back inside his room safe?”

  Extracting the papers from a safe that distant hadn’t been easy, and pushing them back in would be equally if not more tricky. “It might be easier if I were closer to the room.”

  He scooped the paper scraps into a single stack and closed his hand over them. “Then let’s go stand outside his room. I’d like to return them as soon as possible.”

  “I have no chance of putting them back into the safe in the same order they were in before, so is it really worth replacing them at all?”

  “If we’re lucky,” Lensky said, “he’s such a slob that he throws all his written materials into a pile and has no idea of ordering them.”

  I thought somebody who built bombs professionally would likely be more meticulous than that, but what did I know? Anyway, it couldn’t do any harm to go along with what Lensky wanted.

  Or so I thought.

  Blondie’s suite, 1215, like ours, was reached via an interior balcony that ran round the inside of the hotel. Unlike ours, it was the last in a row of doors that went: 1207, 1209, 1211,…long doorless wall and, naturally, no 1213… with 1215 at the very end.

  “Figures,” Lensky muttered. “He’s got the most isolated suite possible. No reason for anybody
else to come to the end of the balcony.”

  I felt nervous enough before he’d pointed that out; the back of my neck was prickling in a most uncomfortable way. Never mind sitting down and checking diagrams; I was going to do this standing or not at all.

  As I took a deep breath and prepared to close my eyes, the door swung open. “About time…” the man who opened the door said. Then he said nothing at all. Our eyes met; he made a fast movement and I saw something black in his hand. I grabbed Lensky’s arm and said, “Brouwer.”

  Black sheets, white sheets or the kitchen table

  Chapter 12

  Lines of light, curving and swirling; zipping down a long spiral of rainbow light, turning through dimensions I’d never seen. Two crumpled surfaces met at a single point and we stumbled onto the carpeted floor of Lensky’s living room.

  There was something in his hand, too; he must have reached for his weapon just before I teleported us. Good reflexes, but not quite as good as mine.

  “We blew it,” he said.

  “We did not blow it.”

  “What, you think Blondie’s not alerted now?”

  “I think Blondie’s going to have a real interesting time if he complains about being stalked by vanishing people!” I was still high on the lights and colors of the in-between; second most exhilarating experience in life, and I wanted to top it off with the only thing that was better.

  Once Lensky put away his weapon, he seemed as interested in that as I was. It was a contest to see who could get the other one’s clothes off first. “I know what’s gotten into me,” I panted while attacking his belt buckle, “but what’s your excuse?” The wild ride through the in-between was just a blank space to normal people.

  “Being shot at and missed. Well, almost shot at anyway.” Right, that was his idea of the second best experience in life, and apparently it had the same effect on him as dancing through the in-between had on me. He fumbled for my bra clasp.

  I pulled the thing off over my head; I didn’t want to wait for him to figure out the clasp. This was the most powerful effect a jump had ever had on me. I was dizzy with wanting him, my breathing had gone all shaky, it even seemed that the lights dimmed and brightened in rhythm with our movements.

  Then, dammit, they went out.

  It was only for a moment; I don't know why Lensky got so upset. To me, it was just... I'd been on top, then the lights dimmed all the way to black and brightened again and somehow I was lying on my back and Lensky was calling my name. I blinked and got hit in the face by a tidal wave.

  "What was that for?" I felt querulous. Hard done by. One minute I was happily embarking on a victory fuck and the next I was getting water thrown in my face.

  "You fainted! I was trying to revive you."

  "Oh." Now that he mentioned fainting, I realized that my dizziness hadn't been entirely about lust. "Too much applied topology – moving all those papers around, they weren’t heavy but the precision required was exhausting – and then that long jump home.”

  “You shouldn’t have pushed that last one.”

  “What, you’d rather we stuck around the hotel to trade shots with Blondie?”

  “No, but why teleport all the way back to Austin? My car,” he said pointedly, “is still in San Antonio.”

  So were my toothbrush and a new nightgown I’d been meaning to show him, consisting mainly of very sheer dark red silk. Who cared? We could collect all that stuff later.

  “Because my mother didn’t go to Aquarena Springs on her birthday every year.”

  “Huh? Thalia, are you feeling all right?”

  Apart from the shakiness of overdoing the topology applications, and being temporarily thwarted in my plans for Lensky’s body, I felt fine. Just, too tired to work on making sense.

  “I didn’t have a previously established jump point closer to the hotel,” I translated. “I’ve had a lot of practice teleporting to your living room, so that was the easiest spot to pick in an egerm- emeren- in a hurry.” The shakes were starting to overwhelm me, making multisyllable words a challenge. “You got anything sweet here?"

  He came up with bread and honey - more accurately, bread soaked in honey, and after I'd gone through three slices I was as sticky as a toddler. "Honey-coated Thalia is one of my favorites," Lensky said, and he would have earned maximum points for his uniquely personal take on honey removal if he hadn't made the mistake of adding, "It's the only time you're even remotely sweet."

  I stalked off to the shower to finish removing the honey. He didn't follow me. And when I came out he was half dressed. So quickly do those golden moments vanish.

  I wasn't too upset about it, though, because I was still feeling a bit wobbly after crashing my blood sugar with that long jump. Wrapped in a towel, I rummaged through his kitchen for a more substantial snack to supplement the emergency sugar treatment. I loaded a plate with feta, Kalamata olives and cherry tomatoes, and settled down on a pile of pillows at the head of the bed to refuel and enjoy the view. He hadn't put his shirt back on, so there was rather a lot of broad, toned torso, with tanned skin under a sprinkling of gold chest hair, to look at; and below that, I thought I could see indications that the pants were going to come off again before very long.

  "Try not to drop cheese on the sheets," he said.

  It might not have been meant to tease me. Feta is very crumbly and very white; anything I did drop would blend right in with the sheets.

  "Why don't you get some more interesting sheets? Colored ones?"

  "Huh? Sheets are white."

  "Is that intended as fact or philosophy? Either way, you're wrong."

  "Really? There are colored sheets?"

  "Well, clearly not in this establishment, but as a general matter, yes. There's a whole rainbow of options to choose from. I should get you some."

  He winced. "Not to be anything-phobic, but I would really prefer not to have rainbow sheets."

  "One color at a time," I assured him. "Maybe black to start with?"

  His eyes lit up. "I can have you on black sheets? That sounds even better than you in black lace lingerie."

  He could have me on black sheets, white sheets, or the kitchen table if he liked, but I didn't mention that. It's not good for a man to get too complacent.

  "Through? Let me take that for you."

  I thought he meant the empty plate, but it was the towel he was referring to. And after he unwrapped me there wasn't a lot of casual conversation. Yes, the pants did come off again. The man was insatiable.

  And I wasn't much better.

  Eventually we did get around to talking about the op. It hadn’t exactly been a total success by anybody’s lights, but Lensky called in with a brief summary and didn’t get yelled at nearly as much as he’d expected. Translators and analysts were already diving into the images he’d sent and apparently they contained so much good information that nobody was too upset about our brief appearance in front of Blondie’s room; especially since there wasn’t anything to connect us with the missing papers. Which, evidently, were not shopping lists – or not for such mundane items as cat food and dry cleaning, anyway.

  They were also pleased to have Lensky’s description of Blondie, which would be augmented by a drawing as soon as they could arrange for Lensky and me to sit down with their sketch artist. And somebody else – not, they said pointedly, Lensky, not now that he’d been seen – would pack up our belongings, check us out of the hotel, and drive Lensky’s car back to Austin.

  “Pretty good service, your agency,” I commented on hearing this last.

  “Mmm. And we don’t have to do anything else tonight.” He wrapped an arm around me and pulled me closer, copping a feel on the way.

  “What, again?” Not that I objected exactly.

  “Well, no, not immediately. It’s just nice to have you here. To talk to. We don’t talk enough, you know? We’re always zipping from crisis to clusterfuck.”

  I thought that wasn’t an entirely fair description of the Cente
r, but there was some justice to it. Thing was, though, I’d been satisfied with it that way. It’s not like I had a lot of practice – or a great success record – with actual relationships. Fighting, scrambling to get out of a tight spot, and falling into bed – I was pretty comfortable with all that.

  Talking, not so much.

  But with my head resting now on Lensky’s warm, bare chest, feeling his strong, steady heartbeat and listening to the rain dripping through the shrubbery outside, I felt as safe and loved as I ever had.

  And he started the talking.

  He’d mentioned his dead brother briefly last spring, when we were just getting to know each other. He’d downplayed the loss: Aleksi had been a hopeless gambler who ruined his own life and everyone else’s, it was a relief not having to clean up after him any more. Now he opened up a bit more.

  Before he was a gambler – or, at any rate, before that had become the defining characteristic of his whole life – Aleksi had been the ten-years-older brother who tried to take the place of Brad’s dead father. The glamorous grown-up brother who showed up at Brad’s middle school events and had all the teachers half in love with him.

  “He was – handsome. Charming. Not much like me,” Lensky said ruefully.

  I punched him lightly in the ribs. “Don’t put yourself down. You turned my head, and that was before I even liked you.”