Despite remembering her worst, I said, “You know, she might. If you want, I can bring it up. The thing is, she’s going to leave soon. I don’t know how much time she’ll have to teach you, but I think she’d be willing to teach you something. I think she wants to hang out with me and maybe relax for a second, though. So, she won’t want to teach the whole time.”
Waving her hand as if she were waving away my concerns, she said, “Don’t worry about it. I can’t spend all day with her either. Anything she can show me will put me ahead of where I am now.”
My implant handled the call and Kals and Katuk appeared in my vision, standing against a background of beige cubicles. No longer wearing the green spacesuit she’d been in earlier, Kals wore a black dress made of a material that added overtones of colors that slowly formed shapes that then turned into landscapes or animals. The movement was subtle enough that you wouldn’t notice it if you didn’t think about it, but obvious when you did.
I’d seen similar clothing on her mother and other people who were dressing formally in the Human Ascendancy.
My implant offered me a history of fashion trends in the Human Ascendancy and I slapped it down. I didn’t need to know that right now. Continue reading Distractions: Part 2→
Over the team connection, Travis said, “That’s got to be the Cabal. Big? Strong? Messy? That’s their MO.”
In her dark grey costume balanced on the top of a building downtown, Haley said, “At least it’s not that guy who burned everybody.”
I felt Daniel’s queasiness at the memory of the burned bodies the man had left behind. I couldn’t criticize him for that. I tried not to think about it very often myself.
“Crap,” I muttered, realizing as I did it that everybody could hear me and not just Vaughn, Tara, and Daniel who were sitting at the table with me, but also everyone showing on the big screen.
Up in the right corner of the screen, Travis said, “What happened?”
I looked up toward him, noticing that he was sitting in a van on a dark, city street somewhere wearing a dark suit. He was visiting a team in Philadelphia. He’d told me, but I couldn’t think of their name—except that my implant then supplied it—the Bells. Continue reading Relative Uncertainty: Part 10→
Daniel lowered his head, nodding, “I get it, but I felt like it wasn’t fair to hide that I knew you would be in more danger when I knew that it would benefit me.”
Uncle Steve let out a breath, “I get it. I appreciate your honesty and your willingness to let me decide for myself. I don’t think I have much of a choice though. I can’t survive at the expense of my sister, any of your parents who were my childhood friends, or you kids.”
I wanted to say the same in return, but in my case telling him to take the safest route might theoretically kill everyone else I cared about. Continue reading Relative Uncertainty: Part 9→
“Huh,” I considered that. “It seems as if whoever’s sending people after Uncle Steve might be using it to terrorize us? Because there’s no need to bother all the rest of you if they want Uncle Steve. They only need to go after my mom and dad—though I suppose going after everyone else’s might be insurance.”
Daniel nodded, “That’s what I was thinking, but there’s a wrinkle to it. I think they knew enough to target our families, but I don’t think they know why.”
“Magnus,” Tara’s face became expressionless. “He knows who you are. He’s made no effort to share it, but he has a reason to keep you distracted—the tablets Cassie translated.” Continue reading Relative Uncertainty: Part 8→
“That’s what we’ve been worrying about for the last few weeks. They really could be. They’ve had years to get into place. We don’t know where. We can’t trust our government contacts too far and even outside, any organization could have a silent observer from the Nine or the Dominators.”
I took the call even though my history with Sean wasn’t great. Aside from being a bully to me until it was clear to him that he’d be kicked out of the Stapledon program unless he stopped, he was Haley’s ex-boyfriend, the kind that she’d had to use her poison claw on to stop him from pushing to do more physically than she wanted to.
Vaughn frowned, “What about the other engineers? Should we warn them? They warned Steve. I know they’re not good people, but should we let all the other ones die? Maybe we have to go after the Nine’s people first?”
I felt my jaw drop, “Yeah. I was just thinking about keeping Uncle Steve safe. We ought to do something.”
Uncle Steve shook his head, “That’s going to be hard if not impossible. I don’t go by Steve Vander Sloot on my government jobs. I use different names every time and so do the rest of them—the ones that work for supervillains with any regularity.”
Remembering back to when we’d been on Renewal Island and bugging Armory’s lab, I’d seen one of the True alongside a clone of Cassie’s father visiting to check on mechs Armory was building for the Nine.
“I do,” I told him, watching his expression. “Tara is the daughter of people who defected from the True.”
