Broken Angels (12 page)

Darryl began to feel a little sorry as he neared Christine. He hadn’t meant for the corresq to hit her so hard. He’d only intended to stun her, slow her down. He’d have to talk to Zel about modifications, but for now, what was done was done. Two Infinite-Definite terrorists defeated and captured. Another victory.

Still, they were truly a third-rate pair. Their fighting skills were nowhere near the level of their dancing skills, and Darryl had barely managed to hold his own against them. If they hadn’t given him a chance to catch his breath…Darryl didn’t want to think about it. He’d more important things to do.

SIX

Robert was seated in a cushioned booth, but he was far from comfortable. He was trying to think, trying to focus, and trying his damnedest to ignore his two best friends. It would only be a matter of time before they tried to pull him into their latest argument. He wished a waiter would hurry up and drop off a basket of rolls or something.

“Research and personal experience have taught me,” Kurtis said, “that women don’t like to be stared at.”

“Of course not,” Anika said. “You needed research to teach you that? It’s common sense. It’s rude to stare at people.”

“And yet,” Kurtis said, “women put a lot of attention into how they dress, are neurotically concerned about their appearance, spend considerable amounts of time making themselves up—from hair to face to shoes—just so people, men and women, will look at them. But if a guy looks too long, he’s a rude dog. If a woman does, she’s probably a jealous cat.”

“You’re such a chuckhead,” Anika said.

“Rob, am I not right?” Kurtis asked. “Aren’t women confused about what they want?”

Robert again glanced over his left shoulder. “I’m probably not the best person to ask.”

“They’re of a divided mind,” Kurtis said, “wanting every onlooker’s two eyes to operate independently—one admiring the view, the other going about its own business, staring into space or whatever.”

Robert had the talent to see in two directions at once, with a little concentration and under the right conditions. But these conditions weren’t right. He felt a lot of things weren’t right. He’d had an odd feeling ever since entering the restaurant. Shortly after taking a seat in the booth with his friends, he began to feel he was being watched by someone—someone behind him, probably seated at the bar. He didn’t trust the reflections he saw in his knife and spoon, and he didn’t want to make his suspicion obvious. Instead, for the past five minutes, he’d been using over-the-shoulder glances, trying to spot his spy while pretending as if he were looking for his table’s waiter. So far, nothing.

“Oh, nice, Kurt, really nice,” Anika said. “Take a crack at Rob’s vision impairment. Just because he doesn’t agree with you and is too polite to say so.”

“That’s
not
what I said. The only impairment among us three, Nika, is your hearing. I was taking a crack at certain individuals’ opinions on social etiquette, not Rob. His one eye is better than your two ears. Anyway, our boy seems to be too busy doing what the divided minds want rather than caring about what I say about it.”

“Yeah, Rob, what are you looking at anyway?” Anika leaned to her right, out of the booth, peering past Robert and toward the restaurant’s door. The rushing waiter behind her had no time to stop or swerve when Anika’s head popped out in front of him. The head made contact with his hip, causing the waiter to lose his balance, his tray of food to topple, and the food and dishes on the tray to tumble to the floor.

“Oh, I’m so, so sorry!” Anika wailed as the stooping waiter bit his lip to hold in his language.

Damn it. More eyes turned in their direction. That wouldn’t simplify anything.

Anika continued to make apologies as she stooped down to help the grumbling waiter pick up whatever could be picked up before restaurant’s cleaning staff could get there. After Kurtis finished a healthy round of chuckling, he nudged Robert with his elbow, signaling he wanted to slide out of the booth and help. Robert stood up and let him out, but rather than join his friends, he took the fact that two drops of alligator stew had landed on his shirt as a good excuse to remove himself from the center of all eyes and comments.

“I need to go wash this off my shirt,” he said, happy that the mess in front of him was blocking the direct route to the bathroom. He had no choice but to turn around, head toward the door, turn left into the primary dining room area, and then head toward the bathroom. The U-shaped route would take him through the entire patron’s section of the restaurant, giving him the chance to get a good look at everyone, seen and unseen.

Counting, subtracting, compartmentalizing—using only the instruments of the eye and the mind…Robert felt proud his mathematical skills were one of the few abilities the parasites hadn’t given him. He’d been an intuitive math whiz long before he’d gotten infected. Beyond the electromagnetic effects and the physical agility, his adding, subtracting, and measuring skills were often the most useful in dangerous situations. But maybe not tonight.

By the time Robert reached the door of the bathroom, he was still unsure. He’d seen no one who raised his suspicion, no one whose eyes lingered on him too long, absolutely nothing that looked out of the ordinary. Nothing except for the spots of stew on his shirt.

Inside the restroom, he took the plaid handkerchief out of his pocket, wet it, added a dab of liquid soap, and worked on the stains.

Robert stared down at the sink while waiting for the small areas to dry. He didn’t want his eye to meet the reflecting glass dead on. Staring into a perfect mirror, he knew what the results would be. He just couldn’t afford to have his body break down in a public place, especially not now. Not when he needed his friends’ help. Not when everyone at the Institution to whom he’d normally turn had other priorities. Kurtis and Anika had been his best friends for over a decade, and in all that time, they’d remained the best code-breaking cyber-sleuths and quickest researchers he’d ever met. Best of all, they know how to keep secrets on lockdown. They had the skills to perform research discreetly and securely. But he’d yet to tell them what he needed from them now. Anika had asked him to meet them at a spot where they already had dinner reservations; Robert now wondered why he hadn’t tried to persuade her to meet in a more private setting.

He glanced at the mirror, just to make sure he looked fairly presentable. A glance was all it took. He looked fine, eye patch and all. He smiled a wry smile.

On some of the rare occasions he had trouble falling asleep, he wondered how other people saw him—when he wasn’t consciously altering his appearance, that is. He wondered if the eye patch inspired fear, or pity.

“Fear” would be the runaway winner if those who gawked knew what the patch really concealed.

Enough parasites had congregated in his right eyeball to completely remake it. It had ceased being an “eye” long ago. It was now a little black sphere—whose exposure to too much free-flowing air would cause it to react and produce a beam of unclassified radiation. Just thinking about those little bastard alien microorganisms made his head ache.

Robert glanced at the mirror again. This time he couldn’t look away so quickly.

His “normal” eye had taken on a new appearance. He could see well enough out of it, but looking directly at it, it appeared as a miniature moon lodged in his eye socket—pale, cratered, and lifeless. Those goddamned parasites…

Some Virus-carriers were skilled enough to control the color of their irises, as they could manipulate the light reflecting off their skin and clothes, changing their appearance at will. But Robert had no part in what was happening now. Something had inspired the parasites in his head to make him see what wasn’t real. Him thinking of them—resenting them—concentrating too much on what they’d done to his body…

Robert took his pill bottle out of his pocket and swallowed one, to kill the hallucination if nothing else.

As his eye’s appearance began to regain normalcy, small sections at a time, he grinned at the thought of those parasitologists and other scientists who insisted the microbes associated with the White Fire Virus were nonliving. Some people could be insistently brilliant but remain consistently clueless.

Call it a sixth or seventh or nth intuitive sense, but Robert just knew the parasites weren’t the microscopic equivalent of zombies. The tiny creatures hadn’t come from nowhere only to occupy human cells, feed on recipes of blood and light, multiply, and eventually die. They weren’t only alive, they were communicating with one another—like a colony of tiny alien ants, or bees. And their method of parasite-to-parasite communication just had to be, at least in part, responsible for most of the hosts’ supernatural abilities.

Robert imagined a vibrant community of conspirators, living inside each and every Virus-infected body—a community that sometimes softened the reflexes, seemingly unconcerned with alerting its host to immediate danger.

Something banged into Robert’s elbow.

“Oh, sorry dude.” The guy who’d pushed the door into him didn’t seem sorry. “You done?”

“Yeah,” Robert said as he brushed by the jerk.

Time to turn his attention back to business anyway. Just the right time, it appeared.

Robert was surprised to see the mess by his table had been cleaned up so quickly; he was even more surprised to finally catch sight of someone who looked out of place.

A long-legged, raven-haired woman was sitting at the bar, near the door, alone. It wasn’t the attractive woman’s lack of companionship that set off his suspicion. It was her drink. Coffee. Unusual, he thought. And he thought so again when he saw lipstick on the cup. This was the first Robert was seeing of the woman; neither his round-the-restaurant count nor his over-the-shoulder glances had picked up even a hint of her. Had she entered the restaurant, ordered coffee, and added something to it in order to cool it enough to allow her to take more than one comfortable sip, all while he was in the bathroom? Improbable.

But maybe he was overreacting, trying to justify the suspicion he felt due to one look cast in his direction the moment he came out of the bathroom. At least it seemed like a “look.” It was difficult to know for sure. As Robert approached his table, watching the woman the whole time, he saw—in the slim moments when she turned her head—the woman’s eyes were in constant shadow, such a deep shadow that he could barely see the whites of her eyes, never mind the irises. There could be no telling what she was looking at. To his eye, though, the woman appeared to be a little nervous about something, trembling in a very warm restaurant.

“Probably afraid of being alone, feeling alone in such a crowd,” Kurtis was saying as Robert sat down. “Hey, Rob.”

“What are you two talking about?”

“Why Melodie Might feels the need to cry onstage during her performances.”

“Every time,” Anika said.

“Who?” Robert asked.

“Melodie Might,” Anika said. “The ballad-singer. With The Mad-Poet Experience.”

“The what?” Robert asked.

“Man, you don’t know about The Experience?” Kurtis regarded his friend with a mild look of disgust. “Where’ve you been?”

“Oh, relax,” Anika said as she backhand-slapped the air toward Kurtis. “Not everyone has heard of them yet.” She said to Robert, “They’re a collective of artists that stages these humongous concerts at The Poet’s Pit every other weekend, when they’re not on the road, that is.”

“All types of artists,” Kurtis said. “Singers and skaters, dancers and martial arts experts, actors and mimes, ice-sculptors and magicians, acrobats and contortionists—”

“It’s a real circus,” Anika said.

“Sometimes they all perform at once,” Kurtis said, “but for some numbers, only one of the artists performs. Melodie Might is a singer, but she never finishes a song because, in the middle, she starts crying.”

“Melodie
might
make it to the end, one day,” Anika said. “We guess that’s the reason behind the name.”

“We’re catching one of their shows after dinner. Want to come?”

“I’ll pass,” Robert said.

“Ready to order?” the waiter asked. This was his first official visit to the table, but there was impatience in his voice. Robert saw why. It was the same waiter Anika had sabotaged earlier.

“Death by Gumbo,” the girl said. “And again I’m really, really sorry.”

“S’okay,” the waiter said. “We won’t charge you for it. This time.”

Smart guy, Robert thought. Only one accident so far, but he’d already correctly figured she was probably going to cause more.

“And you, sir?”

“I’ll try a bowl of that alligator stew,” Robert said. “Two drops weren’t enough.”

The waiter didn’t get the joke, or found it unfunny; he only looked at Kurtis, who responded, “Death by Gumbo for me, too. And can we get a refill on the ice teas?”

After the waiter left the table, Robert thought of the earlier accident and took another look at Anika. During the confusion, he’d seen a few drops of food touch her clothes too. They were now gone.

“Didn’t take you long to clean up,” he said to her.

“I don’t like to spend a lot of time in the bathroom,” she responded.