Unseen (25 page)

That was the extent of our friendship. He drove off almost before the truck door had slammed, leaving me feeling unexpectedly alone and exposed under the glare of a spotlight in front of the closed bus station. I waited, pacing to ward off the cold, until a lone bus arrived in a huff of air brakes. I climbed on board and paid the driver, then huddled—like the others—in a plush but battered seat. No one noticed me; as I looked around, I saw a bus full of people wrapped in their own personal struggles and tragedies, with no interest in mine.

It was perfect.

Dawn broke as we arrived in Trenton, and I found the sleeping skateboarder, who looked hardly old enough to be in the FBI. He glared at me through glazed eyes, and then muttered an address. I repeated it, and he rolled over and went back to sleep, apparently. The bus station had a map on the wall, and I used it to locate the address, which was more than a mile away. I walked, hands in my pockets, head down, as the city began to come alive around me. I looked needy, poor, and a little desperate, and I soon realized that these were things that served to isolate me as surely as if I had been walking the street alone.

I found the address, which was a dreary-looking coffee shop. I didn’t have instructions on what to do, so I ordered the smallest, cheapest drink I could with my remaining crumpled cash and sat in a corner, sipping slowly, practicing a dull, weary stare.

I was still practicing it when a woman came in dressed in an expensive business suit and ordered coffee. Once she had it, I expected her to hurry on, as most everyone had done, but she picked up her briefcase and walked over to me with sharp, confident steps. She sat, opened her briefcase, took out an envelope, and looked at me as she sipped her coffee. Bright brown eyes, and an even, regular face. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Laura,” I said. “Larkin. Hi.”

“You come far, Laura?”

I nodded. “From Arizona,” I said.

“Really?” She blew on the surface of her coffee lightly. “Whereabouts?”

“Tucson,” I said.

“Where’d you hear about us?”

This was gray area, and I shrugged. “Around.”

“Around where?”

“California,” I said. That was a safe bet, I thought; it was reasonably close to Arizona, and not unlikely that if I’d been struggling to find food and shelter, I’d have made my way there at some point. “Near San Diego, I think.”

She watched me for a few seconds, and I realized that this woman, whoever she was, had a shrewd sense about her—almost a Warden sense, perhaps. “You living rough?” she asked. “On the streets?”

“I get by.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I lost my last apartment,” I said. “My job went away. Not my fault.”

She sipped her coffee, and finally said, “There’s something about you, Laura. Something—special.”

I didn’t want, at this moment, to be special, not at all. I tried to think what I might have said or done that would create such an impression, but couldn’t. Instead of letting that agitation show, however, I forced myself to seem encouraged. People always wanted to feel special, apart from their fellows. It was something ingrained in human DNA, and my reaction seemed to please the woman, who smiled slightly in response. “Yes,” she said. “Very special. What skills do you have?”

“Um ... I cook,” I said. Laura Rose Larkin had been prepared with a specific set of things; I hoped no one would immediately ask me for proof. “And I’m good with the stuff nobody likes to do, washing, cleaning, that kind of thing.”

“Not afraid of work?”

“No, just haven’t had a lot of luck,” I said. “Like a lot of people.”

“Oh, I doubt you’re like a lot of other people,” she said. “Our job is to find the things that make you different, Laura. To bring out your gifts. Everyone has a gift. Pearl’s taught us that.”

Pearl’s teachings were convenient for her, to say the least; she preyed on the human desire to become something more, something special, and slowly but surely warped that desire out of true, into her own tool.

But I nodded. “I want to learn,” I said.

“And you’ve got nowhere else to go.” I looked away, turning my empty cup in my hands. The woman reached out and patted me on the shoulder. “Nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. “We get all kinds of people—people like me, who just aren’t happy with the life that’s supposed to be so great. We also get people who are lost and alone, even people who bring special skills because they believe in the cause. We’re all unique, and we’re all equal.”

She said that, but I could sense from her that she didn’t believe it, and never would; she believed that she was more important, and that sense of entitlement allowed her to speak to me as if I was a lost child that needed saving.
No
, I reminded myself.
Laura Rose needs saving.

The part of me that was still stubbornly Cassiel didn’t like it.

“So,” she was saying, as she drained the last of her own coffee. “Here’s what you do. You write down your name and social security number on the outside of the envelope, and take what’s inside. We’ll be back in touch.”

She handed me a pen. I laboriously wrote
Laura Rose Larkin
and the number that I’d been given by the FBI, making sure that my handwriting was as bad as I could make it while still legible. She nodded, then took the pen back, and I shook out the contents of the envelope.

A cell phone, small and cheap. A small, bound number of bills. A blank business card with a number written on it in pen—not a phone number but a five-digit number.

“The cell won’t make outgoing calls,” the woman said. “It only receives calls. When you get a call, give them that number on the back of the card.”

I looked up as she snapped shut the latches on her briefcase. “What do I do now?”

“Whatever you want,” she said. “We’ll find you.”

She dumped her cup and walked out into the bright morning sunlight. I watched her from the window as she hailed a taxi and was gone in only a minute.

The phone, I was reasonably certain, functioned as a tracking device. I considered shorting it out, but that seemed unwise, given the circumstances. Instead, I put the money and phone in my pocket, along with the business card, and set out to walk the streets until I was called.

 

It took two days, during which I slept at cheap motels and ate even cheaper food; even with the frugality, my money didn’t last long, and my stomach was growling in frustration as I considered the dollar left to support me through the night. I was carefully weighing the options between fat, sugar, or both when a new sound filtered up from my pocket.

The cell phone.

I pulled it out, pushed TALK, and heard a businesslike voice say, “Identification number, please.”

I recited it from memory. There was a short pause, and then the voice said, “Go directly to the Trenton bus station where you came in and wait. Someone will be along.”

It was dark, and chilly. I could have thickened the material of my coat, but it occurred to me that they would have been photographing and observing me these past few days. Anything out of the ordinary would be noticed.

I would, as Rostow had said, be dropped.

At the bus station, motionless people slept sprawled in chairs and on benches, or wandered aimlessly. There was a minivan parked outside, and a man beckoned to me as he slid back the door. Inside were four others. One was Merle, but he looked at me blankly, and I forced myself to give him the same basic regard as I dropped into a seat in front of him. The driver shut the door, climbed behind the wheel, and drove us on into the dark. Nobody spoke.

“Phone.” I hadn’t noticed, but someone was sitting in the passenger seat in the front, and was now turned toward me and holding out her hand. It was the woman I’d last seen in the coffee shop. Funny, I should have seen her; again, I felt the telltale tingle of some kind of power. She’d veiled herself—I was almost sure of it. I found my cell phone and handed it over, along with the business card. She tossed the phone into a bag with others. “Put on your seat belt, Laura.”

I nodded and fastened it as the van sped on into the unknown.

To my surprise, we were not taken to the encampment that the FBI had been observing. We were taken instead to an old building on the outskirts of the city, which seemed to be unsettlingly isolated—I worried not so much for myself as for the others, excluding Merle, who seemed as expressionless as before. Our companions seemed to be honestly frightened for their safety.

I was not sure they were wrong.

“Inside,” said the driver, and shoved open the front door. Light spilled out in a blinding fan, and we were hustled through quickly, not given time for our eyes to adjust. Merle, who was in the lead, suddenly froze and held up his hands in a position of surrender. I saw why, a second later; there were two men in the room, each in a separate corner, pointing guns at us.

Large guns.

“Sit,” said the driver, and pushed the last woman into the room before slamming the door behind himself and locking it. Merle settled into one of the four dented chairs, and I sank down next to him, followed by our other two recruits

“One of you is a spy,” the driver said, and walked in front of us. He was a big man, and it was hard to focus on his face. I realized that once again I’d lost track of the woman in the business suit. She was here, somewhere; I could feel her presence. With a little effort I could have broken through her veil, but I let it stand.

Nobody had responded to the big man’s declaration, so he said it again. “One of you is a spy, sent by the government. I’ll give you one chance: Say who you are, and we’ll let you go.”

I felt a perverse sense of relief. With
two
of us infiltrating, his supposedly insider knowledge seemed a throw of the dice at best. I almost glared at him, and remembered my timid exterior at the last second. Instead, I glared down at my own frail, shaking hands lying impotently in my lap.

“Ain’t me,” said the man on my left, a rawboned young man with smooth, dark skin and big, wickedly amused eyes. “Don’t suppose they’d have me, anyway.”

He seemed strangely cheerful about it. Maybe he found having a gun pointed at him exciting, which I found curious; I could count on surviving such an encounter. He couldn’t. When the man kept focusing on him, the younger man lost his smile. “Dawg, you think you’re scary? I been shot by grannies scarier than you.”

“Show me,” the man said. The young man stared at him for a second, then grinned in a flash of perfect teeth, stood up, and skinned his shirt up to hang around his neck.

“This one I got in a drive-by when I was ten,” he said, pointing to a scarred dimple low on his right side. “Got this one two years ago.” The other scar was both more recent and more impressive; it was in his chest, and it looked dire. He also had tattoos, a lot of them, subtle and dark against the tone of his skin. It reminded me irresistibly of Luis and his flame tattoos.

“All right. It isn’t you,” the man said. “Put your shirt back on.”

The young man laughed and yanked it down as he sat. I risked a quick glance up to find that the gunman was staring at me. I looked down again and folded my trembling hands together. From my peripheral vision, I saw him shake his head. “Not you, either.”

Merle sat back, arms folded. Unlike me, he was staring straight at the man, as stone-faced and immovable as ever. He didn’t say anything. The gunman assessed him for a long moment, and then jerked his head suddenly to stare at the last one in our little group, a woman. “You,” he said. “Talk.”

She was an older woman, gray in her hair, heavy and tired. I didn’t need to be a Djinn to read the hardness of her life, the pain, the struggle. When she spoke, she had an accent—Eastern European, I thought. “I don’t like police,” she said. “I just want to have peace.”

The young man, the one who was so scarred, looked sharply at her, and I could see in him in that moment that he wanted the same thing. Peace. A place to be safe.

It made me angry that Pearl was betraying them.

The gunman prolonged his drama a few seconds longer, then made a show of clicking the safety on his gun and holstering it on his belt. “All right,” he said. “Wait here.”

He walked away, into the shadows at the end of the room. I stared after him, and willed the shadows to fade, just for an instant—long enough to see the woman I’d met in the coffee shop in the veil. She’d been reading us, of course, monitoring our heart rates, our aetheric pulses. Earth Wardens were difficult to fool when they were focused on determining the truth.

He came back another moment later and said, “Get up.” We did, with varying degrees of reluctance. “Go change your clothes. Strip down and leave everything, and I mean everything. Watches, jewelry, underwear, socks. You leave it all behind.”

It was a wise precaution, and it wouldn’t matter to me. I supposed Merle was prepared for it as well. I followed the gray-haired woman into the room indicated, and found that there were two stacks of clothing. I expected the fabric to be uncomfortable, but it felt surprisingly good against my skin. I left behind the items I’d been wearing—almost as colorless as what I had been given—and walked back to join the others. Merle and the young man were already in their chairs, dressed identically to me and, in another moment, the older woman.