Authors: Elle Hill
“You okay?” Reed asked, and she turned back to the mirror. He walked toward her—or, rather, toward her back. A few steps later he stopped, frowning, and glanced behind him.
“Optical illusion or unreal physics: you decide.” Katana sighed. Her one chance per day to be with him, and they couldn’t touch. Sometimes she loathed her mischievous subconscious.
“Can I reach you?” Reed asked. He walked backward and dwindled before her. A few seconds later, he jogged forward again until he appeared only ten feet “behind” her. “This damn mirror is in the way.”
“My subconscious—what a kidder,” she growled. “You can’t reach me because I’ve gone through the looking glass. Maybe it’s sending me a message about not being able to move forward till I move back or something. Stars, I don’t know. I was never a great literary student.”
“You’re one imaginative woman,” Reed reminded her.
“I missed you,” she said.
“I never stop.” She smiled, and he said roughly, “I’m sorry another day has gone by. I tried tapping on walls last night, listening for hidden rooms. I emailed Jade and asked her to recruit some Psychics. It’s about time they did something for you.”
“You never did tell me about Jade and how you started working with the Clan again.”
“Naw? I guess you’re right. A couple months ago, they had Jade contact me and ask me to do some work with them.” He briefly outlined something called the “Sleeper Project” and the Clan’s idea for him to infiltrate the Broschi and gain access to the list of sleeping Hunters.
“Crossovers, huh?” she mused, tapping her chin thoughtfully. “Given your background, I get why you became involved, wanting to prevent people from becoming half-Leech, half-Clan folks. It’s good for . . .” Her words trailed off as she stared into his widened eyes. What, hadn’t he considered his personal connection to his mission beyond the obvious obligation to his mother? “Reed Ayson, champion of people on the borderlines,” she teased.
He harrumphed. “I’m nobody’s champion,” he growled.
“Guess that makes me nobody,” she said, and smiled when he opened his mouth to protest. “You okay working for the Clan, pretending to be a Leech to get in good with them?”
“I am a Leech,” he said gently, firmly.
She shook her head at him. “You’re a half-Leech. You’re just as much Clan as Bruschetta.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” he insisted, but he smiled at her.
“Yeah, I agree. You may be half-bug, half-psychic, but you’re all you. You’re bigger than the sum of your parts.”
Amazingly, he didn’t look convinced. Did this man really believe the Clan when they threw him out? Deep down, maybe that fourteen-year-old kid still thought of himself as a bug in superhero clothing. No wonder he didn’t feel he fit anywhere.
He fit with her.
“So what’s my name?” she asked him.
“Huh?”
“My name. I know the first, and I think you said our family’s last name, but I can’t remember it. Anderson, maybe?”
“Anders,” he replied slowly, a crease between his brows.
“Katana Anders. Hmm. Not too bad. I assume I have a middle name?”
“Ilsa. But, honey . . .”
“After my mom’s sister? Oh, that was just cruel.” She glanced at his face and hurried on. “I don’t think my dad had any sisters, but he must have had a mother. And I’m pretty sure my Mom had more family in Austria.”
“Honey, your first name . . .”
“Just don’t,” she interrupted. “Please. My life before here . . .” She shook her head. “It was tough, you know, being a celebrity, a freak, hated and rejected, homeless. It hurt all the time. It sucks here, and I hate it every second—well, most seconds.” She smiled at Reed, whose eyes stared with a tingly intensity into hers, mirror or no. “But, you know, I got to choose my name, my identity, my actions. She doesn’t have a lot of fun, but I still like Katana. I don’t want to be that other girl anymore.”
After a moment, he nodded at her.
“Reed?”
“Katana.”
She smiled at him. “My dreams are changing.”
His return smile faded. “What do you mean?”
“I mean they’re different. They’ve gone through transformations. Sometimes the menace is invisible, sometimes it’s tangible, sometimes it’s more abstract, other times it’s gritty real. For a while, my dreams tended toward the terrifying and horrifying. But now,” She shook her head. “Lately they’re not so bad.”
Eyebrows clenching, he started toward her without thinking, cursed, and then took a couple of steps backward, all while maintaining eye contact. “Are you okay?”
“Ah, my pessimist.” She tried once again to smile at him and knew from his expression she failed. “Maybe it’s a good sign.”
“What’s changed?” he asked.
“They’re not so scary anymore. They’re more informative, even . . . educational.”
Kind of like they’re winding down
.
His teeth clenched. “I’ll find you, Kat,” he said.
“I know,” she said. She also knew it was time to stop playing damsel-in-distress and see if she could somehow make this dream world,
her
world, birth her back into reality.
Reed puttered about the backyard, trimming here, pulling there, watering whatever most desperately needed it. His passion for plants was profound, but he still couldn’t understand the deluded vanity of people who pumped water into the desert of Los Angeles County, forcing it to produce lush, leafy greenery where the landscape would otherwise have yielded hearty scrubs and succulents. Southern California and its endless hunt for more water, in part to continue the projection of Los Angeles as a cultural and geographical oasis: Sometimes, humans made as little sense to him as the Clan and Broschi.
All the while, his attention remained on the back door of the Daleth’s house. When it finally opened at three p.m. to admit one blue-haired youngster, he immediately stripped off his gloves.
Five minutes later they sat awkwardly in their usual spots in the living room. Cor rifled uselessly through her backpack, as she often did when nervous. Reed stared at his hands.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Although quiet, Cor’s voice whipped forth.
“Not yet,” Reed sighed. He resisted an urge to scrub his face tiredly with his hands.
“I, uh, chatted with the string quartet. It’s all arranged.”
Reed nodded.
Cor hoisted her backpack and relocated herself so that her knee and his touched. “Look,” she said in a low voice. “I am so pissed off at you I can’t see straight, pardon the expression. But we should talk, okay?”
He thought he managed to hide his surprise from her; as she’d said, he was skilled at keeping his emotions tightly bound. “All right,” he said.
They moldered in awkward silence.
“Am I supposed to start this off by apologizing again?” Reed asked a moment later.
Cor sighed. “This is not all about you,
Señor
Narcissist. I’m trying to think how to phrase something.” After another moment’s hesitation, she began. “So at a past All-Fam Jamboree,—this was way before you came, like maybe sometime around Halloween—Al started talking about how cool it would be to have a reserve supply of food. A few of the others had ideas about live-ins and minions and other creepy stuff. I was . . .” She glanced up at him and faltered, but he could feel her revulsion. “Anyway, I remember Quina saying something about how powerful dreams are. Someone joked about keeping a bunch of sleeping humans around, kind of like batteries.”
She shook her head. “It was light-hearted, but Quina started talking about what it would require. Al told her to come chat about it with him after the meeting. He sounded, I don’t know, kind of condescending. I figured he was trying to get her to shut up.
“That’s the last I heard about it. I didn’t think anything about it after that, not until—all this.” She started fidgeting with her backpack again.
“Like a battery,” Reed muttered. He’d guessed it all before now, but to hear it said aloud . . . “So your father knows?”
Cor threw her hands up. “I don’t know. I guess. Maybe.”
He wondered who else knew, how extensive this experiment was, whether Katana was the only guinea pig. Not for the first time, but certainly the most intensely, he hated the Broschi, felt nothing but appreciation and sympathy for the Clan’s mission of exterminating them all.
Cor spoke in a low, fierce tone. “You don’t have any right to be so pissed off at us. You came in here pretending to be our friend but only so you could report back to the Clan. Quina and my dad may be doing something . . .” She shook her head. “But you’re hurting and betraying people, too.”
For a moment, his nerves flashed white hot, his teeth ground, his nostrils flared. How dare she compare him to
them
? But then he looked at her, this blue-haired, twenty-year-old little girl with fury and tears clouding her childishly huge blue eyes.
“Yeah,” he said after a moment. “You’re right. In this stupid war, the only people who really get hurt are the innocent people.” Like Katana. Like Cor. He took a breath. “I can’t say I’m sorry I came here, since I found . . . this person, who needs my help. But hurting you was the one truly stupid and unforgivable thing I did.”
She shook her head. “We’re not evil, Reed. You came to us in deception. How could it lead to anything but betrayal?”
He felt tired again. “Your kind are keeping an innocent woman trapped in nightmares in order to provide themselves with some snack food.”
“My kind?
Mine
?” Cor hissed through her teeth. “Sorry to poke your self-righteous bubble once again, cowboy, but they’re your kind, too. How’d they do it? How’d the Clan find a Broschi we missed and manage to turn him against us? Isn’t that what you’re worried we’ll do with your precious baby Hunters?”
Reed shook his head. “They’re not precious to me.”
“Like hell! You’re willing to betray your kind for them. You must really have a hard-on for the Clan if you’re willing to turn your back on people who thought they were helping . . .”
“Your kind made me,” Reed spat. Cor’s eyes widened, and he leaned back against the couch cushions with a fizzle of self-disgust.
Ah, shit
. Not a discussion he needed to have right now.
“What does that mean?” Cor asked slowly.
Once again, he shook his head.
“You owe me,” Cor reminded him.
He owed a lot of people these days.
Through clenched teeth, he asked, “Have you heard of Aya the Hunter?”
Eyes narrowing, Cor nodded. “Jade’s mother, right?”
Reed gazed at the wooden beams overhead. “She’s my mother, too,” he said quietly.
Cor, not quite as trained at suppressing her feelings, was much easier to read than most of her kind. Her reaction, oddly enough, was one of horror.
Flattering.
“Who’s your father?” she whispered. He was grateful he couldn’t see her face.
“Some raping Leech bastard,” he said quietly.
“Shit,” she breathed. “In this—”
“Glad to see you two so hard at work,” Quina clipped, striding into the room. Reed wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic; one rarely knew with her.
“You know how exhausting it is, planning soirees for the super-wealthy,” Cor chirped. She used her irreverence, her sarcasm, to corral her wayward feelings. He could no longer feel a bit of her distress.
“I wanted to talk with both of you about that,” Quina said. She perched on the arm of a chair, a move casual enough to earn his suspicion. Her hands smoothed over her pale green pantsuit.
He sat forward.
“Alexio and I have been talking, and we’re thinking of changing the fundraising format,” she announced, voice as chilly as ever. But Reed felt the tiniest curl of excitement deep inside her chest.
“It’s only a week away, Quina,” Cor protested. “And we’ve already sent out the invites.”
“You’ve both done a lovely job,” she said. “We don’t plan to gut your preparations, but Alexio thinks, and I agree, this would be better if it were smaller, more intimate. Instead of the fifty plates we originally planned, we were thinking of focusing on ten. If we target the wealthiest, the best connected, and really woo them, we think it will yield better results.”
Target
them.
“Fifty to ten?” Cor yelped. “But we’ve already ordered the food, arranged for the music, hired a cleanup crew. We sent out sixty-two invitations.”
“I know, and you did a beautiful job,” Quina soothed. “Don’t worry, Corinna. I’m taking over the food arrangements. Mari and Javier have already started contacting the other fifty people and telling them we’ve changed the date for a time two months in the future. For now, we want to focus on the ten. The string quarter still works. Your work has paved the way for these plans, and we thank you.”
“Why the changes?” Reed asked.
Quina gazed at him for a moment before answering. With a slight smile, she responded, “These influential people are used to individualized attention. In a smaller setting, we can focus all our attention and resources on them.
“Most of your work still applies, and when we hold the second fundraiser in a couple of months, we’ll have everything in place.”
“But you and Al are taking over from here?” Cor asked dryly.
“With many thanks,” Quina said, thin lips pressed into a smile.
Cor threw up her hands. “Well, I can’t say I’m fighting tears,” she cried, grinning. “‘Event planner extraordinaire’ will never be a line on my resume.”
In a movement as smooth, fluid, and colorless as water, Quina stood. “No need to come back tomorrow, Corinna,” she said.
“Freed!” Cor cried. Then, shaking her head and sighing, she mused, “I dunno, though. Irritating Mari by monopolizing Reed has been the most fun I’ve had in months. Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow just to help her practice that glare-within-a-smile thing she’s got going on.”
Quina compressed her lips and shook her head. “You girls,” she chided, and, with a slight nod at them, breezed out the door like a verdant breath.