Oh... farewell Carl Reiner. Thank you, to you and your family, for all the smiles. I hope someone saved you the good chair.

M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 3

The longest day has passed; darkness hints that maybe, just perhaps, it's ready to grow on us.

And I've put out my next collection. M. K. Dreysen, Collected: Volume 3 is now available....

We bring you here, dear reader, to tell you this: watch your back. For knives. For the barrel cold against your ribs. For the way the people in charge always seem to have a different end game in mind than the one they've told you. Betrayal hurts. Tears you apart and leaves you, tears on your face, desparate for but one thing more. A chance to do it over. Careful what you wish for. Here are six little tales from M. K. Dreysen, stories of betrayal and the pain it leaves behind.

Follow the links listed below to find Collected: Volume 3 in both print and ebook versions. And as always, ask your librarian to search for my books through Overdrive and their other ebook services.

Collected: Volume 3 is available in print from Amazon.

Collected: Volume 3 is availabe in ebook from Amazon, Books2read, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo.

How many lawsuits can you afford to lose?

Before I get any farther, please understand this: pretty much everything in this post can start an argument. Should start arguments, from the philosophical to the technical.

Be warned. What I'm after is here is about putting numbers to the human lives lost to Covid-19. Risk assessment and economic cost have to be reckoned with. Philosophers, I feel you. The utilitarian arguments here are not about worth; rather, just about the nuts and bolts of pocketbook impact.

Economists, please forgive me. I search for order of magnitude numbers. By all means, correct my assumptions. Refine and argue and better this work.

Ok. Here are my basic assumptions. I will use the actuarial value of a human life from the current U.S. number of 10 million dollars. I will use as actuarial life expectancy three score and ten, i.e. 70 years. I'll keep it simple and simply divide the one by the other.

Which gives us a value of life of 143,000 dollars per year.

Further, I will use an average age of 35 at time of death, giving an expected loss of 5 million dollars for each death in actuarial terms. Yes, this is crude. We know that age will be skewed due the risk factors for Covid-19, as known at this time. But the modifications here due this skew are likely to impact the total risk assessment in only minor ways.

I'll point out, though, that any given lawsuit will contain different types of recompense, both for expected income and for recompense for boneheaded decisions. Most companies and systems will react poorly initially, so think of the 5 million dollars not as simply recompense for lost income, but also as the loss due to emotional harm to the survivors. In which case, the 5 million number is an estimate of the total dollar risk factor for losing a lawsuit, including that a jury/judge will find that gross negligence played a part in that loss of life.

So, 5 million dollars per loss of life is an order of magnitude estimate for the dollar risk per life lost to Covid-19.

And thus the question that titles this essay: as a business owner, how many 5 million dollar lawsuits can you afford to lose if you proceed with your plans? Does your current net income projection factor this risk into account?

Does your insurance company's? And remember this, your insurance company might cover one lawsuit. Might.

And even if they do that much, they'll drop you like a hot-ass rock the minute they can.

Further: the government isn't going to pay your liabilities. It ain't on offer.

At the macro level, 5 million dollars per life, 5 billion dollars per thousand lives. That 5 billion dollars per thousand lives means that approximately 0.1 percent of total U.S. federal gross tax revenues is lost every day at the current rates.

That would be about 10 percent of the total current U.S. federal yearly tax revenue lost, to date.

In my state, for every 1000 lives lost, we've seen then a loss of approximately 2 percent of the total yearly tax revenue. Or, for the total number of reported deaths to date, about 5 percent of the state yearly tax revenue.

There's a key difference between the government's loss, and an individual business or institution's loss. The government, generally, won't be forced to write a check paying out for these losses.

Instead, the government will just lose the tax revenue. Little by little, over time. And, more importantly (hi philosophers!), the sum total of those lives that should have been well lived.

One more thing here. If you read carefully, note that "open up and get back to life as we knew it" translates to "we want you as a private individual to accept the risk here, rather than the government".

The risk, and most importantly, the liability. So plan your business stance accordingly.

Ok, we've covered business and government. What about each of us as individuals?

Will your family survive without your income? Or, better: Will your family **succeed** without your income? Will your children and grandchildren, or your cats and charities, be left just scraping by if you die?

There aren't too many of us who can answer that question as well as we would hope. I don't know about you, but I'm not sitting on the pile it would take to make sure my family wouldn't have a hell of a row to hoe without me here.

What's your risk, what's your risk tolerance? I hope that these numbers might help you answer the former, and help you think in detail about the latter and how to respond to it.

The Premises Are Unexamined - Neverland Disorder part 7 by M. K. Dreysen

And here we are at last. For your reading pleasure, dear reader: this week's story brings us to the conclusion of The Neverland Disorder...

The Premises Are Unexamined - Neverland Disorder part 7, a Detective Kelli Hench Mystery by M. K. Dreysen

"Maggie Roark, if you're calling me at four in the morning, it had damned well better be something important." Which probably could have gone without saying. It's not like Magpie and I are besties, hanging and chatting and calling each other with the latest restaurant tips.

Four in the morning and you're not at your best.

My phone recognized his number, at least.

"Hey, Detective, you know I'm nothing but interested in not having to make any calls your way. I'm a changed man, right?"

"One can hope." Get on with it, Maggie. Sleep is something to be shepherded.

"I'd say I'm wounded, Detective. But I don't want your own tender sensibilities..."

"Damnit, Roark. Spit it out!"

He told me. I thanked him, called Russ Ortiz and dragged his sunny disposition into the almost light of day. Left Russ with the task of prepping a few uniforms to hang tight and ready.

And got on the road, or at least took the first step to that place where Peter Pan and I had always been headed.

"How often do you think Magpie's been checking his storage unit?" I asked Russ when we pulled into the place.

"What I want to know is how he's been paying the rent?" Russ answered.

Good point, now that the coffee finally caught up to me and I had a chance to consider it. Sure, maybe Maggie had done well enough, found a job somewhere that didn't mind the stains on his permanent record. Someplace he made enough to put the hundred fifty a month for the storage unit in the mail.

But that's only the past year, most of it. Where'd he come up with the money while he was in jail? Shouldn't that have gone to his wife and kids?

"Number fourty-eight," I said.

Russ grunted his answer, turned left at the correct aisle, and pulled up to Maggie's stall. About halfway through the row.

"Big spender, our Mister Roark," I said, once we got down from Russ's car.

Sixty of the garage-type storage units, plus room for another twenty or so, for those RV owners looking for a heavy discount. And that was about the end of the place's amenities. I'm not sure they even had an outside water bib, the kind that was almost a necessity here by the Gulf.

If you didn't have a place to wash the saltwater out of the engines and off the chrome, boat owners went looking elsewhere.

But I wasn't in that market. Russ was, though. "This the kind of place you keep your boat?"

"Not anymore. Connie found a place down closer to Freeport. And it's only about fifty years old, instead of a hundred."

Sure, he exagerrated, but not by much. At least, it didn't feel like much of an exagerration, standing there with the buzz of the only working light in the place coming from three aisles over. Russ had to leave his engine running and the headlights on to give us any view of Maggie's garage.

Like the rest of the units, Roark's was decorated mainly in lack of paint and late-modern corrosion. Inverse Pollock, only the saving grace here was that we were far enough north, just outside of Katy, that the storage unit didn't have the regular Gulf's dose of saltwater intrusion to hurry the process along.

"How are we supposed to open the thing, anyway?" Russ asked.

"Combination lock." One of the big Yale spin-dial things. "I guess that answers your question."

"Yeah. Roark's been selling the combination. Or, at least the space behind it."

Then, shipping had been Maggie's route to the jailhouse. "Let's see what bothered his conscious enough to call us in."

And, incidentally, put off the inevitable day of reckoning that would occur when one or the other of us discovered his sideline. Sure, it was passive income; a D.A. with time on their hands would be happy to pile up the papers for a soliciting stolen goods strike to Roark's scorecard.

Unless what he'd told me was true. In which case, Russ and I would have to make sure the D.A. knew which side the bread had been buttered on for the slightly higher profile crime they were about to be handed.

Maggie had been clear about one thing. "No drugs, Detective. I've got kids."

"And you want to be alive to see them graduate?" I'd asked Maggie. Knowing his answer.

He'd talked to us, me anyway, because of those girls. "That's why I'm calling you at four in the morning. For Elena and Sher."

And probably because somebody had earned his wrath. "Two crates, Russ. And an old suitcase, but that's got nothing to do with the two crates. Just somebody caught in the crossfire, I guess."

"Probably somebody quit paying Roark his rent."

Yeah, most likely. Either way, the big fish, what had us here today, lay in the packing crates. Helpfully standing open so we didn't have to send for the bomb squad to do the de-louse thing. "Ok, Maggie, let's see what kind of truth's behind the lies."

Which the big lie was fairly obvious. The one where Maggie had told me, "No, Detective, these crates are the only ones there."

True, but the concrete, the dust and dirt on it at least, testified to the fact that there had been other crates here within the past couple of weeks. "He'll have found a unit on the other side of town," Russ pointed out.

"Or, right next door." We were going to call it in anyway. Maggie wouldn't have actually just moved his rental fees just to another stall. He'd have a backup arranged, could be Tomball, Humble, could be anywhere in easy driving distance. But he would know that the first thing Russ especially would do would be to call in a warrant for the rest of the units.

Me, too, but Russ is the one with the reputation.

The other lie I was interested in was the one about drugs.

Have you ever wondered where they keep it all? I don't mean the lawnmower that grows legs and walks from your front yard while you're inside getting a glass of iced tea. Or the carbon fiber bicycle that rolled away from the rack outside the library. That kind of thing moves so easily, anonymously, that there's no need for more refined measures.

No, I mean the good stuff. The forgotten Manet, the one that goes missing from the Fine Arts Museum's inventory between last year and this year. Or the case of first editions that left when the assistant manager at the rare book store finally got pissed enough to walk. With a little makeup pay as severance.

And yeah, the cat burglar stuff. Jewelry, paintings. Pictures with presidents and celebrities, signed and framed and valuable as hell.

When the original owner staring out from beside Sinatra or Prince or that lady from that movie, you know the one where she screams through the first two reels and then traps the killer in a car, dies off and can't file charges anymore.

All the goods too hot to fence. Immediately, anyway. There's a lot of capital involved in stolen goods, the high end stuff. And there's a hell of a lot of capital and jail time waiting for anyone who has the misfortune to let me and my colleagues get wind of their basement collections.

I'm certain there are little viewing galleries, where the Van Gogh sits alone in the dark waiting for its owner to obsess over it every few months. In this case, though, Maggie Roark had found a money-making service he could provide. A little storage option, no questions asked.

The only proviso? Besides the no drugs thing. Which, now that I had an understanding of Maggie's business made a whole hell of a lot of sense. Drug dogs would bring this all down pretty fast.

No, the other proviso was "Cased up, and don't touch anything that's not yours."

Someone must have touched something. Or broken some other rule. Like the suitcase guy, maybe they'd just quit paying their rent.

What Russ and I saw was that someone had broken into another case. And then Maggie, or one of his partners, had pulled the rest of their shit to another garage. Then Maggie made the call burning his now former renters. Because they were now bad for business.

"Artwork," Russ told me from the smaller case. "Statues, mostly."

Cast bronze and ivory. The kind I'd seen a few times on the Antiques Roadshow, beautiful little things, nicely wrapped and packed away in straw. Some of them a few thousand. At least a couple of them ten or twenty times that. Big money, in other words.

Slow money, too. A few decades to realize.

I stood at the second case. This one wardrobe height. I pulled the door back and whistled. "Forensics are going to hate us. And the ATF as well."

The second case was full of guns. Cased-up rifles, mostly, the good kind of hard plastic or aluminum cases, the ones meant for travel. I pulled one to get a good look. Inside, locked safely in their specially-cut foam inserts, lay a matched pair of hunting rifles.

The kind with hand-carved exotic wood stocks, gold filligree spider-webbing the barrels and actions, and double triggers. For when his Lordship is out and about in the Range Rover, trying to fill the larder ahead of their Majesties visit, don't you know. "Jesus," I said.

This was only one of the cases. Forty thousand plus for that pair, if it was anything like what the internet told me such a rifle pair could go for. And there were a good dozen or more other rifle cases.

And four pistol cases. Duelling pistols, from the early eighteen hundreds. The kind that Burr and Hamilton would have done their dance with, maybe.

"Holy shit, what's in the suitcase, then?" Russ asked.

"Guy couldn't make his rent, probably just a stolen baseball card collection," I answered. "You think about reasons these two would have gotten their dicks twisted together while I go look."

We ended up guessing pretty close to what had happened. The 'owners' of the rifles and the bronzes had managed to get themselves crossways over missing pieces. The bronze collector came in, probably right after he saw the same Antiques Roadshow episode I had, to dream of big payoffs. And do an inventory that came up one or two short.

The gun collector, for all we know, hadn't had anything to do with that. Only the bronze collector had made the mistake of accusing. And, opening the rifle case to back his story up, he thought. One thing leads to another, and here we were picking up the pieces. Maggie had burned both of them as bad risks.

The suitcase was a little blue pasteboard thing, the kind with brass latches that you squeezed buttons on either side to flap open. A kid's suitcase, the kind that made me think I'd find a pair of underwear and half a dozen books in, like the kid had just run away from home yesterday.

I rolled it down, flipped the latches and lifted the lid to Yolena Scruggs' face staring up at me from the cover of a pile of fashion magazines.

Time rolls on. Two years past Leanna Ringham, less three months for Yolena. Comic books and Maggie's old compatriots murdering a kid from Honduras. A couple dozen or more other cases, some big some small. Time intercedes because Peter Pan hadn't. He, and I was now convinced it was a he, had been quiet.

Done his thing and gone to other places for a while. Quiet places I had no insight to.

The blood rushed in my ears; the dust and dirt came on me, the smell of the storage unit now a weight. One to go along with the guilt I felt for not having found an in, a crack in Peter Pan's armor, one that would have let me go to the parents of the young lady whose face I looked on and tell them "We found him."

Russ, like me, keeps a box of the blue gloves in the front seat of the car. First thing you put on when you hit the scene, depending. We'd each thrown a pair on this time, because fingerprints were likely to be the only evidence we'd get from the stolen property, if any. No need to make the CSI's work any harder than it had to be.

Or, now, staring at Yolena's face, for me to worry I was contaminating our only outside evidence of Peter Pan's existence. "Russ."

"Yeah?"

"When the gang gets here, tell them the suitcase is a separate issue. And that we're going to need them to treat it with care."

He relayed that to whoever had caught the call. Then he came over to see what I knelt over. "Sonofabitch."

"Yep." Glad to see I wasn't the only one with a guilty conscience.

The suitcase held magazines, like the one with Yolena gracing the cover. And it held a fistful of headshots, glamor shots. Which is where we found Leanna Ringham's face. Confirmation of something, I guess.

At minimum, that the suitcase's owner knew that having this particular set of pictures sitting in his house could cause a world of trouble. "Maybe it's not him, Kelli. Maybe it's some schmuck terrified his wife's going to find his, ah..."

"Jackoff pictures?" Which, if he was that kind, would have been a gold mine for us. DNA. Unfortunately, Mary Sullivan's team didn't even find a useable fingerprint.

"Smudges, Kelli, that's all. Nothing I could match up, even if I had something to compare against."

And that had taken them most of a month to process. Other priorities. Still, it meant that once they were finished with them, I could sort through the suitcase without worrying about their end of the case. When Mary turned it back over to me, I brought it into my office and laid the piled contents front and center on my desk.

Yolena appeared there in three places. The cover. A glamor shot. And in a commercial spot in the middle of an ESPN magazine. Some cologne gig, where she was the swooning target of the muscle-bound, presumably wondrously musky smelling lead's attentions.

Leanna came to us from that history with only one appearance. The glamor shot.

Yolena's was all pro. The black and white kind, that actors hand out by the truckload at the comic conventions. Yolena was a pro model, that much we knew, so the careful makeup and oh so effortless natural hair she'd probably spent days perfecting for the picture were no surprise.

Leanna's shot was another story. Mall shot, we used to call them; probably still did, for all I know. The storefronts where you came in, they charged you a few hundred for a handful of dreams. Color, in this case, she wasn't a pro so she didn't know that color wasn't necessary, wasn't even wanted.

Hair teased and brushed up, all Texas baby.

I knew why because I'd done the same thing. Tall skinny girl come to Houston for school, and I'd taken a flyer, because why not? What's the cost of a few pictures, and maybe I'd get lucky enough to pay for a couple semester's worth of tuition. Not real dreams, not really, because the last really tall girls Hollywood had hired were Sigourney, and then Gena, and after those... bupkis.

Too many short actors, and let's face it, I look gawky enough just sitting on the other side of a badge. On those rare occasions when a news crew shows up, on the other end of a lense I feel like an elephant on roller skates.

I knew what she'd felt, though. Maybe Leanna had been like me. Ross egging me on, telling me he was going to get his mug into the limelight, darling, was I too chickenshit to give it a shot?

Ross had even done up my hair for me. "Because if I left you to do it, you'd look like a helmet-head bitch, that's why." Flopping my bangs and curls, that's what he meant, as though I'd left my brains parked at the house instead of using them for proper balast to the done-up do on top of my head.

Leanna, I think, hadn't had a Ross. A friend, equal parts asshole and loving torturing ego stroker, to push her to the better outfit and the slightly less overwhelming hairstyle. She'd gone for something close to what I remembered from her parents' photo album.

Her prom look. She must have worked up her courage within a few months of hitting college. Maybe a Saturday afternoon, time on her hands and she'd said "Screw it, I'm doing it."

Glamor shot. And here it was, on my desk next to Yolena's. Pretty, the both of them; if I put on my critical hat, though, I knew why Yolena had turned pro, and Leanna had gone on to work on her accounting degree. Spirit, magnetism?

I wasn't Peter Pan. He'd seen something there, hadn't he? Me, I saw a pretty girl and a gorgeous about-to-be supermodel.

He'd seen them as parts of his story. He'd made none of those artificial distinctions that cameras and the blind masses enforced. Here were the Dark and the Light, the Earth and the Moon. Here was Beauty in two of her aspects. And he would collect them while they still yet held Her charms, before time could steal them from him.

Who else, then? If I wasn't chasing moonbeams, the sort of accident coincidence Who Ordered That moment that at least got me thinking about the case in detail moment...

If this suitcase belonged to Peter Pan, then some of these other faces were on his list. Yolena Scruggs and Leanna Ringham I'd twigged to because they were on my mind, weren't they? Even as the piles grew and changed, I remembered them. Who else would I need to remember?

I hunted. And damned near missed her. Leanna Reollic, my other Leanna. Not a victim, a killer this Leanna. I hadn't recognized her, because of accident. Because, while she wasn't formally convicted she was very much still safely locked away until her mind came back to something three independent psychologists could all agree resembled accountably sane.

And, because somewhere along the way she'd stopped dyeing her hair blonde. Me, I'd accepted that dishwater blonde and gray hair aren't exactly a bad combination.

Then again, this Leanna had spent her days locked up in an attic apartment. Going out to get her hair done, or even doing it herself, probably hadn't been real high on her list of accomplishments. Either or, I panned through the head shots more than a few times before the perky blonde cheerleader shuffling among the other pictures made an impression on me.

"I guess I'm going to Austin," I told her picture.

Houston doesn't have an Arkham. The state does that for us. For the truly gone, at least. Come in for a weekend stay, Ben Taub's good enough. Come out of a courtroom with the victim's families lined up in front of the cameras to curse the judge for "Bypassing justice" because you don't connect to the world well enough to be judged by twelve good and true, and we send you up the road a bit.

"Ms. Reollic doesn't speak much," her case worker warned me. "The doctor, me, the nurses when she needs something, that's about it."

"Do her parents come?"

Trey Rightwater nodded. "Sort of? They do come, her dad tries to get here at least once a month. But it's awfully quiet even for them."

I came with three pictures. Her, the other Leanna, Yolena. The head shots. "Will these be a problem?"

Not after he'd checked them. "She's shown no signs of violence," Trey said. "These shouldn't be an issue."

"Let's see if she'll talk to me, then."

"Good luck," he said, then he let me into her room. "I'll be right out here."

Where he could respond if things went badly. For this patient, probably not. But most of his other cases would be a great deal more likely to end up badly.

At least I could talk to her without her being restrained, or without me being on the other side of plexiglass. "Hello, Leanna."

The room testified to the fact that Leanna may have retreated from the world, but she hadn't done additional damage on her way down. They'd allowed her a chair, and a table to hold her food trays. The bed might have been a hospital standard, but there were no IV's hanging from it, or monitors like you'd see for the catatonic or heavily sedated.

She sat in one of the chairs, next to the window. She'd been a waif beneath the fancy dress, where Russ and I had interviewed her after her grand night out.

She remained so, only now the dress was a hospital gown. "You haven't visited," she said.

"I'm here now," I pointed out. Sure, a few years between.

Did she make me nervous? We pick up attachments whether we want to or not. If she ever made it back from the void she'd entered, Leanna Reollic would come only far enough to move to Huntsville. By the time that process made its gears circulate... I'd take my chances. "Are you willing to discuss your past?"

"Does it have anything to do with Ginny?"

"Only by accident."

She turned to the window. Nothing much to see except how much Austin has grown; boredom may have done the trick for me. "What do you want to know?"

The window held a bench seat. One of those uncomfortable flat places hospitals use to torture those of us who stay with the injured overnight. I laid her head shot on the cushion. "Do you remember taking this?"

Leanna reached out, to touch her younger face. "I do."

I laid Yolena's picture down next to her own; then the last picture. "Do you know them?"

Her hands hovered over each. "They were younger, two, three years? He called us his L girls."

"You, and Leanna?"

This Leanna nodded.

"What about Yolena?"

This Leanna smiled. Easy, almost wistful. Joyous, I think. "She is such a beauty, isn't she? Y's destined for big things."

I didn't tell her. "Who is he?" But that must have been one question too many.

Leanna turned her face away, the smile fading to a blank look.

I didn't push her. I just took my pictures back up again and walked to the door. Rightwater let me out of the room.

"She gave you more responses than normal. If I'm lucky, I get three questions before she retreats."

"She did help. Not as much as I hoped, but a great deal more than what I came in with. Thank you." By the time I badged out, reclaimed the paraphernalia of the job, I knew where my next best option lay.

"You quit before the next step," Felicity told me. "Before you lost your money to the bonepickers."

"Bonepickers?"

The bottom of the barrel agents. The ones who made their living promising the wanna be models they'd get them their shot. "Catwalks, commercial shoots. That was the promise they all made."

Just throw a little money their way, for the lessons. "How to walk the walk, the poses. The one I went to was a guy named Bernie Truell. He had a place out in Memorial." A school for modelling, Felicity explained. "If you came every week, paid your fifty bucks every time..."

"Promises?"

Felicity laughed at that. "Of course not. As it turned out, best I got out of it was a call sheet for a Macy's commercial."

"And if you had made it? How much money would you have owed him? What percentage?"

She shook her head. "No, Bernie at least never made me sign a contract. Some of the girls might have, maybe." She pointed at Yolena's picture. "Y told me she'd picked up an agent. Ten percent, right? Houston's scene wasn't big enough yet, when we were kids, for any of the real agencies. Now, though, there's more money floating around."

"Who is he, Felicity?" Just like with Leanna Reollic, I expected that to be the one question too many. Maggie didn't have a name for me; "What kind of business do you think I run, Detective?"

Too many names and Roark would be a dead man. Leanna had a name, somewhere on the other side of a fence she wasn't ready to re-cross. Felicity had a name, a possibility at least. Would she give me a place to start? It didn't have to be an answer, just an entrance to a world I'd no knowledge of.

A name, among many. More than a few agencies had sprung up around town; most of those Felicity called the bonebreakers had joined up. The legit ones, at least, those who'd done their best by their students, only they'd never quite had the connections. And now they did, when the New York and L.A. squads came to town.

There were still half a dozen teaching studios, if not more. "We send the new kids here," the secretary at one of the agencies told me, handing me a business card with a Facebook address and a telephone number.

"All of them?" I asked.

She gave me the pro's weary smile. "The ones who come in off the street. Maria does a good job of sorting for us."

Maria handled that L.A. agency. Charlotte handled one of the New York groups; same basic idea. The teaching studios filtered the kids who wanted it so badly they'd pay to get there.

The only men I met were the photographers. All of the talent handlers I found at that level were women. My age or older; I guessed I'd found at least one path forward from when they started getting the "Is that a wrinkle?" and "Maybe the diet's not working?" questions too often to dodge.

Ballet, opera, when age enters the picture there's always teaching. If I squinted, put aside my instinct that insisted these places were just a way to pull money from the desparate, I could accept these ladies were doing the same thing. "How many guys do you get?" I asked Charlotte.

"One in five, some years one in ten. The pretty boys have less competition."

Meaning, if a male beauty walked in blind to the agency, they had less of a line in front of them to get straight to a call sheet. "More girls believe?"

"How many beauty pagents for boys have you ever seen? Cheerleading, dance squads, pageants. Every girl in this world grew up believing they were the most beautiful things to ever grace Bishop, Tyler..."

"Alice, Kingsville. I get it. It's the valedictorians applying to Harvard problem." Where every applicant the town pride is fighting for a spot with has the same basic resume.

"You got it."

Boys don't usually get the "You should be a model" bit; just about any girl that's a little more interesting than average has heard that phrase at least once by the time she graduates high school. Some variation of it, anyway, enough to make the female lane a lot more crowded.

Me, I'd heard that catwalks reward the tall. You know, that the runway models average almost six feet tall. Which, since I was on the other side of that average meant maybe I could pick up the occasional gig that would pad my meager income. If I'd been in New York, maybe.

Not Houston.

"So where do the older male models retire to?" I asked.

When you're on the outside of a network, the threads connecting people always look a snarled mess. From the inside it always makes sense. Russ and I have worked together going on ten years; I'd known of him before that, we'd just never crossed paths. Mary, we'd touched a bit before I got to my desk, so something like fifteen?

I try and remind myself to do my own little recon of my network. Homework, so that I might have a jump on the next yarn ball I'll need to untangle.

With Septimus, if Will Trevanian hadn't shown up at my desk at the last possible second, I'd have chased that killer to ground on my own. And probably not have been here to tell the tale. When I reached that same point with Peter Pan, after Felicity gave me the name Aaron Lopes, and then Charlotte gave me a business card that had Lopes' name on it...

I brought Russ, McCall, and Jackson into the loop. After we received a third puzzle fragment.

Marta and Eugenia Thompson were twins. Tall, basketball scholarship tall, stunning. Like that little girl from the Cheerios commercial had grown up to win the state tournament, take her homecoming queen crown, and with her sister was headed to the cover of Elle or Vogue sometime soon, that kind of stunning.

They'd come to Houston because TSU had offered them that scholarship when they were both sophomores in high school. Mom and Coach Wilkins had gone to school together, back in the day. So a bit of a family in but that's the way of the recruiting game sometimes. They were in their sophomore year at TSU, and this was the year they were expected to make the little program that could into a beast to scare.

They'd gone missing. Which wouldn't have necessarily meant their folder would cross my desk; there are an awful lot of pictures hanging on our bulletin boards.

There are even more in three-ring binders on the desk in Missing Persons. I feel for that crew. Tally Murdock and I go back a bit. Tally would have been my rabbi over in Burglary, only she took the Missing Persons gig about a month after I landed my first gig in Gene's corral.

I brought Tally a coffee and a croussaint one morning, because she looked like she needed it. And I needed a break from staring at the walls of my office.

She handed me copies of her latest, one of those habits. Twenty years in one of the most depressing gigs in the job, but she's a saint still, is Tally. I said the words we all do: "I'll look out for them, Tal."

"Thank you, Kelli," she answered me. Automatic words on her part, too, but no less heartfelt.

Marta and Genia I caught faster than I had the other Leanna. Maybe I'd been primed this time, maybe the twins had just caught in my memory. Either way, when I put their graduation pictures down on my desk, a buzz in the back of my head came on. The one that tells you to do something.

Something was the Peter Pan portfolio. So I did that. Thumbed through the collection. Hoping and fearing at the same time that I would find them there. "Shit."

At least I had a new question to ask. Tally first. Then their parents. "Had the girls tried any modelling?"

Leanna Reollic had given me no name. Neither could Marta and Genia's parents. The Ringhams, no dice there. Felicity's information, Yolena's agent named Aaron Lopes, that was a one-thread connection. Not enough to scare a judge.

"We're going to have to babysit him," I told Russ and the others, once I'd explained the little web of information we were climbing out on.

"You're buying pizza," Shay Jackson said to her partner.

McCall snorted. "Right, then you're getting Thai, from that place over by your house."

It works more or less the way you've always learned that a stakeout should. A couple of vans; two's the minimum needed to really track somebody if they're on the move. A van so that the other half can catch some sleep, to hold any extra gear we might need. And with the new kind of digiwrap on the side windows, so that we could look through and remain unseen from across the street.

I'd give a lot for the kind of microphones the tech magazines claim work miracles. Lasers that catch the glass and record every word in crystal stereo. Infrared cameras that pick up more than that the furnace is kicking on. Lopes had feet in multiple worlds, if he was the one.

Magpie Roark's world, for one. Not the kind of name and service your garden variety social pirate would stumble across. Given his background, I'd have Lopes for the interesting end of the cocktail world, and he the supplier of the dust needed to fuel their desires. X, coke, somebody had to work the right corners to get it. Lopes could have fit the bill.

Gigolo, sure. A little of this and that. But those aren't the kind of roles that lead you to Magpie's space. Shit, for the kind of thing Magpie was into, you'd have to...

Know a few rich people? The kind who could swing a fistful of cash and procure themselves a minor Picasso work on demand?

They call it gentrification. We call it selling out. Lopes' place was just a mile or so from my own apartment; right in the middle of Montrose. Half the properties now were three story walkups, three-fifty to four hundred grand to start.

Ninety percent of the rest would be joining them soon enough. Even the die-hards would join them soon enough. Lopes had landed himself one of the few that survived the process to date. Had he bought it himself? The internet told me the last business address the hundred year old house had been associated with was that of an architect.

Shotgun style, a truly ancient stand of pecan trees looming over from the back yard, a magnolia and a well-controlled brush of azaleas guarded the front porch. Wood siding and brick pilings holding it up over the flood line. The place had been built when the bayous flooded every spring, without fail, and the builders then apparently didn't try and hide from that fact.

We give ourselves away in a thousand little acts. Lopes had thought about this. That's why he'd stashed his portfolio at Magpie Roark's garage for wayward children.

Someone who could afford the sticker price on the house we sat in front of could have afforded the couple hundred bucks a month Maggie charged for a suitcase. Unless that someone had screwed up and murdered his meal ticket. Was that it? Was it as simple as that? Ten percent of the income Yolena Scruggs was earning might have kept the wheel turning in Lopes' favor just a little longer.

He gave himself away twice more. With the datura and the Angel's trumpet plants lining the gravel driveway. The driveway testified to the age of the house. The whole property pre-dated the horseless carriage, at least the common usage of that noisy beast. The gravel led to the addition someone had eventually made, a separate garage in the back yard. A truly impressive crepe myrtle shaded the padlocked doors.

Aaron Lopes used a side door to get into the garage. He had to pause, going in.

To shift the four IV bags. Glucose and saline. He stacked them up in one arm while he dug his keys out with the other.

"See it?" Ortiz asked me.

"Call it, Russ." So he did that: called the SWAT team we'd warned to be on standby. "Shay, Roger, who's on deck?"

"We're both here, Kelli, go ahead."

Russ held up both hands.

"SWAT's ten minutes out."

"We're ready. Shucky's calling now." The second team joined McCall and Jackson one street over. They blocked the street and fanned out to cover the rear, in case Lopes made a run that way.

Shuck Martinez's partner, Rene Ledoux, took point for us. "You come in only after I signal, right?"

"No heroes, Rene, that's your job. Your crew handles all calls from here on out." EMS most likely, given what Russ and I had seen.

Lopes wasn't much of a hero, either. Rene's team went through the same door; there weren't even any windows. Why, in those old garages? Rene came out to wave us in after two, three minutes tops. "Did we get here in time?" I yelled.

He smiled. Rene's not very big, neither's Shuck. They've got a couple monsters on their team, don't get me wrong. But the two of them are medium, tight-cut tight lipped cynics of the war vet set.

Seeing an easy smile on Rene's face, and the thumbs up he gave Shucky when Martinez walked in from the back yard, made going into that garage an easier time than I'd feared.

I don't know what he was preparing Genia and Marta for. The girls lay in two old brass beds he'd anchored to the concrete; they were strapped in ankle and wrist. The glucose and saline bags meant he didn't have to feed them, just clean up what the liquids made natural. They were covered in bed sores, a few weeks' worth, and their minds had taken a long trip to somewhere else on the datura extract he'd been feeding them.

Not all that different, I suspect, from what Leanna Reollic had gone through. Only, she broke under the tender mercies of the scopolamine; the twins recovered.

Lopes never gave us any of that information. Aggravated kidnapping, that much he couldn't avoid. He had to hope that if he kept his mouth shut, he'd get out someday.

Funny thing, though. Turns out plants have DNA too. When Mary Sullivan's team processed Leanna Ringham's body, and the scene, there'd been two dogs. Sullivan's team had waited patiently; the dogs had, with some encouragement, eventually blessed them with fecal samples.

Dogs don't process plant waste very well. Nor the pill material Lopes had used to press the datura flowers into a bite-sized form. "He used raw plant material, didn't dry it or anything like that. If he'd done that, we wouldn't have found anything to recover. Plant cells are tough."

Tough enough to survive the dogs' digestive tract, then wait two years to give us samples to compare against the mature plants still sitting in Lopes' yard. That was enough for the DA, and Leanna Ringham's family. Yolena's family, too, even though they didn't have their daughter's name said in court.

Did I tell the other Leanna's parents what I suspected? That Lopes had treated their daughter to a datura trip, broken her in the process?

No. That's an inference; a leap between the plants in Lopes' yard and the psych research on the compounds one might extract from them. There just isn't enough there for me to do anything other than speculate here. Probably a good speculation, granted. But Leanna might never again confirm that she'd ever known Lopes, to me or anyone else.

Some cases I can only go so far.

A Dagger's Width: A Short Story of Open Wounds by M. K. Dreysen

This week's story comes from the time between the first and second books in my Open Wounds Series. I call it A Dagger's Width.

Megan's a renegade. Not even half-trained; Megan's learned just barely enough magic to get in trouble. She's been protected from the Wizards, the Brotherhood, by the fact that her mentor works as a paladin to the Emperor. A protector of those who'd otherwise slip through the cracks.

And now Tony's kicked her out to see the world on her own. If she ever catches up to the old bastard, Megan's going to have a bunch of new stories, and quite a bit more anger to unload on Tony D'ags. But first, Megan needs to learn to negotiate A Dagger's Width...

A Dagger's Width: A Short Story of Open Wounds by M. K. Dreysen

A dagger's width is proportional to its length.

Its weight, too.

Force, no. Its force is a function of the hand holding it. How much strength it can apply, and where. The edge versus the flat.

These are the thoughts that ran through Megan's head, a stream of patience blazing along the pathways of her mind. Echoes to the burn of the blade, every inch of it pushed against the skin on the back of her neck.

"Just a twist, girl. That's all it takes." A whisper she didn't need to let her know about the possible death she wasn't looking for.

Possible. But Megan believed it was more promised than that. The person standing behind her wouldn't offer an out unless there was something she could provide. Information, surely. The few pennies in her pocket would be just as easily picked from a corpse.

A dagger's width, force, weight, pressed against the nape of her neck, and the assailant's hand gripped her shoulder. Altogether, a connection.

It was enough. "What do you want?" she asked the night.

"Quiet, girl." The hand pulled until Megan stepped backwards. "That's it, we don't want anyone interfering."

Megan followed step by step, further into the shadows of the alley. Each step, each breath, she matched against the person behind her, trying to find the rhythm. The one that would let her in.

"There, that'll do." The hand on her shoulder relaxed, like the mugger wanted her to do something. Try and turn, maybe. Megan reached out with her mind, she didn't want to imagine what the mugger wanted.

She needed to know. And there it was, a picture, Megan, turning into the knife and, oh shucks, getting stabbed for the effort. Not a deadly blow, no, someone wanted the girl reasonably whole, but a little nip and slash wouldn't cause a problem. Wouldn't chase the price down any.

Why, then? Why cut the girl and take the chance?

Megan held herself still; but there was no answer. The urge was enough by itself. The person standing behind her, the man, an older man, was long past the point where he wondered at his appetites. Beer, an occasional warm place to sleep, the knife, they were his lodestars. If somebody wanted to pay him to do what he'd have done for free, well so much the better.

Except for when the mark didn't act the way she should. Megan felt it, just a breath of confusion coming up and sifting through the mugger's instincts. This wasn't the way it was supposed to...

A dagger's steel has width, heft. It's also one of the very best ways to connect two minds. The edge, the spine, both lay across her skin, and she poured her mind through the steel, past the grip up the spine all the way to the base of his brain. The little node just above his spinal cord, the one where all the nerves that he'd have used to cut and stab bound together.

Megan reached out and pressed, just so. Just hard enough to let her step away from the man's grip, while he stayed frozen in place.

She felt the panic rising out of his mind, and watched it in his eyes. He couldn't make his muscles obey, couldn't reach out, couldn't shift the knife. He couldn't even scream.

Megan used both thumbs to close his eyes. She didn't need to talk to him, and the dumb animal panic would just distract her. "Shh. I'm not going to hurt you. In fact, when I'm done, you won't remember any of this." She started that process now. It was a gentle whisper, "forget", pulsed into his ear. The suggestion would wind its way through his mind, pulling this night away and sending it into the ether where it belonged.

First, though, she wanted to know what, who had sent the man after her.

'Who sent you?'

The picture formed in his head. Two people, he was standing at a bar and someone walked up behind him, but before he could reach for the knife or slide out of the way, she stepped up to the bar beside him.

'How do you know it was a she?'

The hands. The form was a cloak, heavy against the cold and the rain, but the hands when she put them up on the bar were thin, well-shaped. Not a lady's hands, not delicate, this one worked enough at something, but female for sure.

'How did you know I was the one?'

He was staring at a drawing now. The lady had said to memorize it, and then burn it. It was a charcoal sketch, a good one, of Megan's face. The mugger rolled it up, and threw it on the fire as he left the pub.

It was time for the last question he could answer before the compulsion wiped the night's purpose away from his mind. 'Where were you supposed to bring me?'

A complete shift in view now, first down to the river, a dock.

Megan almost left the man's mind then. It was a city full of docks, there wouldn't be any way to tell... but the view shifted again. Back, as though the guy were rising into the sky, or looking at his mind's map of the city.

The dock was special, how? It was in better repair than you'd think, looking at it the thing looked like it was about to fall down, but the bolts and the beams and bulkhead were better put together than appearances would have it. A smuggler's dock, built to look like it was about to fall apart.

That wasn't the only thing. The view in the mugger's mind expanded again, rotated, moved back and back and back further still, until the nondescript wall standing next to the dock grew into the corner of a much larger edifice.

Megan drew a fast quick breath. The man's mind view pulled back one more level, and she could see at last.

The smuggler's dock lay in the shadow of the University. Of the Brotherhood. The man was telling her, as best he could guess, that the people who'd hired him were likely sent by the Brotherhood, if not wizards themselves.

'The dock's where the Brotherhood does business they won't admit to?'

The affirmation from the mugger's mind was the last conscious thought to rise before her compulsion took him. Megan felt the connection fall away as the man fell into forgetful sleep. The only thing holding him up was her hold on his spinal nerves.

She looked around the blind alley. The mugger had pulled her in to where the shop next door stored their trash. She shrugged. 'Good a place as any,' she told him. 'Go lay down in the corner and get yourself some rest.'

He shambled over, kicking bits of this and that out of his way, then slid down into the deepest of sleeps. He'd be there 'til dawn, then wake with only the lack of a headache to let him know this hadn't been a normal drunk.

Megan left him there and made her way to the river. The smuggler's dock, if the man's memory was any guide, lay a couple miles upriver. An hour's walk, if she hurried she might get lucky and find a position to observe the people who'd paid her putative kidnapper.

She wanted to fight the urge to pin that on the Brotherhood. Her mentor had taught her better than that. "Don't jump to conclusions," of course, and most of all "Just because you want someone to be the bad guy doesn't mean he is". Tony D'ags had had his own nose burnt on that one, more than once. Megan had avoided asking just how badly, or for the details of the stories.

She'd also have liked to have believed that the Brotherhood, nor anyone else in this overgrown burg, even knew she was there. In New Amsterdam for only a few days, and it's not like she had a reputation to precede her. Not like Tony. She was just barely more than a kid.

Problem was, the Wizards up in yon towers, the ones looming over her and the river as she closed in on the smuggler's dock, had far too many ways to keep an eye on the people they chose to take an interest in. And, however much she liked to believe that she was still beneath notice, Megan knew that Tony would have had to keep his superiors informed of at least the bare bones of her story.

Which meant, of course, that the Brotherhood would have ferreted out her name and story. The Righteous Ones, Tony's order of do-gooders, the Emperor's Own, were protective of their secrets, but only up to a certain point. Given the way they'd brushed up against the Brotherhood, here and there and off to one side, the odds were good that at least a few tales had reached tilted ears. What was the good of being the power behind the throne if you didn't keep up with the throne's doings?

Assuming, of course, the unlikely pair sneaking into the dockhouse opposite her were both her kidnapper's employers, and connected to the University and its machinations.

Both members of the pair looked more or less the part for skulking in the dark. Cloaks, boots, that sort of thing. But if either one of them had ever had the misfortune to brush up against a hard day's work, Megan would eat a bug. She had to put her hand to her mouth to stifle a giggle.

The larger of the pair certainly looked like a bodyguard. Wide, like he could barely fit through a door wide, chest bigger than a beer keg wide. The only thing that kept him from being a giant was that he wasn't tall enough for the part. He'd block out the sun for kids and small folks, but he was a couple hands short of where he'd need to be to throw shade on most other men.

Not that Megan would bet on any other man or woman against him, not if they got in reach. The guy's muscles looked sufficient to crack and break anyone or anything he laid his hands on.

The lady was a counterpart in the giant economy size. Over here, from Megan's vantage, she looked just a normal, well-built figure and all over just as you might expect. It wasn't until she stood next to the door that Megan could see the reference point and realize the lady just about brushed the top of the doorway with her head.

'Why on earth would they need to pay for a kidnapping?' Megan asked herself. 'All that pair would have needed to do was walk up on me in the dark, and they'd have scared me anywhere they wanted to go.'

The other part that made them stick out as a little too out of place, was the expense of the clothes they were wearing. The two of them had gone to a lot of work to make sure their cloaks and boots and so on were made for the evening's skulking; if Megan was any judge, that was just the problem. There weren't very many following the moonlit paths who got their clothes tailor-made for the event.

It was time to get a little closer to the action. Megan followed the shadows across the road. No torches or lamps around, only the moon flitting in and out of the clouds, so there were plenty of shadows to choose from.

And, enough so avoiding the temptation of reaching out to call a few to her was easy. Megan's own abilities were developing well enough to tell when someone close by was playing games; if either of the pair in the dockhouse were University-trained, she didn't want them having any extra warning of her coming.

Plenty of shadows meant she could concentrate on bringing her conscious mind in close, hidden, quiet, where she wouldn't give herself away just by being in the neighborhood.

Whoever had built the dockhouse seemed to have had some idea of the types of meetings the place would hold. The front door, the one the two had used to get in, was only the obvious way in. Just around the corner was another door, helpfully frozen open by what only looked like rusted hinges. Megan slipped inside, careful to move only just so far into the space beyond.

"Think he'll have any problems?" the woman's voice asked the darkness.

"Depends. The girl's no pushover. And he didn't look like he'd recognize that without a demonstration."

The man's voice belied his appearance. It was a high clear tenor, not the rumbling bass she'd have thought his chest more suited for.

The woman's voice was a pleasant alto. "Different subject entirely. What do you make of the Emperor's gift to his firstborn?"

"New Wales, rather than New Amsterdam? Wouldn't it be nice to be handed such a little gem?" The man chuckled. "I think he'll have more than a few strings attached. The princess will eventually be more than capable of managing her father's gift."

"Assuming she gets the chance to do so. No matter her talents, she's a few good years before having the necessary connections to insure complete control. I agree, her father's going to want to make sure the strings remain firmly in hand 'til the proper day arrives."

"One wonders only how his Imperial Majesty managed to pry it loose from his wife's control. She'd not have parted with her dowry without a well-balanced trade." The man shifted, and the building shifted with him, as though he were leaning against the wall on the other side of the dockhouse from where Megan stood. "I wonder which of our brethren are scrambling to discover the quid balancing the quo."

The woman snorted in response.

Megan was very well interested in the story; it wasn't every day the premier city of a continent had its name changed for it. The Emperor's reach was profound, especially when he was being generous with his wife's property, assuming the pair of Brothers (for there could be no question of who they were, given the man's self-admission) were fully correct in their gossip.

She wasn't worried about the internal workings of the Brotherhood and their games. The odds that she'd ever need to know how they spied on each other and the court over the ocean were so small as to be laughable. At least so far as Megan knew at that point in her career, anyway.

The only question remaining was whether she wanted to wait around for more. The odds weren't exactly in her favor. She could step forward, or maybe just stay a voice in the darkness, query them. Find out who they were and what the hell they wanted.

Or she could do what she did. Slip on back out the door and down the road. Those two, if they were members of the Brotherhood, weren't going anywhere. The great bloody pile of rock behind the smuggler's dock wasn't about to disappear into the mist and fog rolling in off the river.

It wasn't heroic. The merry trickster was supposed to tweak noses, and hound his enemies to their constant despair.

Problem was, Megan wasn't much interested in heroic deeds that night. Not after finding out about the Emperor's latest troublemaking endeavor. She wanted to get through with her business and then vanish back into the continent's interior. Catch up with Tony and Roberto and the gang, maybe, or head across mountain and desert and the ocean to see what the other side looked like these days.

First though, she had a chore. Thanks, Tony. Schmuck. He'd turned her loose on her own just a few months back, when they'd finally made it all the way East, to Savannah. "Right, kid. Time for you to beat feet, and find your own way in the world."

"What happened to being your apprentice?"

"I never promised that, and you know it." He hadn't. But she'd never given up hope. "You and me, we've worked well together, and the rest of the crew will miss you. Problem is, you've got that wandering look in your eye, and you'll be very dangerous until you've worked a bit of it off."

She didn't have any problem understanding what he meant. The paladin and his collection of fellow horizon's fools weren't always hip deep in trouble. But when they were, and she'd seen it more than a few times, they didn't need a half-grown, half-trained, all-reluctant wizard who didn't want to admit it losing her interest, or her patience.

And she didn't want their lives hanging on her inability to focus. Absinthe, Brother Charles, Roberto, Tony, they'd all turned into family.

They'd be waiting there for her, ready and willing to take her up again when she could be just a part of the crew.

But Tony hadn't just let her run off into the sunset, either. "Call it your very first quest, sister."

"Uh-huh. Why don't you get on with it, Tony?"

And so, she'd had to make her way here, with the baby hero's quest mapped out for her and everything. It all should have made her gag, if it wasn't for the way Tony had set the hook in her mind.

"Look, kid."

"You told me not to let you call me that anymore."

"Shut up and let an old man talk."

What he'd set for her wasn't much more than "Pass a letter to a shopkeeper".

Except for the hint he'd given her about the shopkeeper's hobbies. "Let's just say that, if she's kept her head down, the Brotherhood won't have had any reason to snatch her up. You might just benefit from getting to know such a lady."

That was to fix the half-trained part. Tony had to be very careful, toting around someone he suspected, but didn't "know", was a natural wizard. He was a paladin of the Emperor, after all. And the Brotherhood, the Emperor's wizards, were very, very clear about what Tony should do when he found such.

He was half-trained, too, but the Brotherhood did it that way for all of Tony's Order. Just well-trained enough to be protected, not so independent that he didn't have to run back to them every so often and beg for a little help.

Strings.

Like the strings Megan didn't notice following her from the smuggler's dock. The two Brethren themselves weren't aware that it had happened. The connections had been made, however, as all of the three would become aware of further down the line.

Megan had spent the day searching for the shop. Gillian. That was the lady's name, and Mega was supposed to pass her a letter from Tony, then ask her a few questions. The shop had been easy enough to find. It was tucked back into a row of other shops, traders and crafts, books and makers of this and that. Not the big industrial places, leather and iron and the rest that the city made a place for down the river.

But this time of night? Well, Tony had said that the lady wasn't much connected to the daylight trade. The place had been closed up and shuttered when Megan found it. Maybe it was worth going by, closer now to the midnight hour.

Light peaked out from behind the shutters of the little shop. Not a lot, but the darkness of the rest of the street made it pretty obvious who was awake at this hour. Megan followed the light up to the door and knocked.

She was more than surprised to see the door open enough for a candle to gleam through the crack. "Yes?" the lady on the other side asked.

"Tony D'ags sent me with a letter for Gillian," Megan replied.

"Uh-huh. Give it to me."

Megan passed the letter to her. Then waited while the lady opened and read the thing.

"Well, young Megan, come in, come in. It's not a bad neighborhood, but we don't want you attracting any accidental attention either." The lady opened the door further, and Megan slipped inside.

Gillian didn't waste any time. "Tony says you're trying to avoid the attention of the Wizards."

"Well, yes ma'am, I guess so." Megan gave her a thumbnail sketch of how she'd come to be here. The way that her best friend had been taken by the Brotherhood when they were barely more than children, forced to join the University whether he wanted to or not by the talent she and Chad had discovered they both shared. He'd been found out; so far Megan had avoided that fate.

"Working with Tony helped," she said.

"It usually does, child," the lady answered. "He's more than a little concerned with the underdog."

Megan didn't go into a lot of detail about her adventures with Tony. Mostly she wanted to talk about the way the talent inside her, the things she was discovering she could do, had grown.

Like the kidnapper earlier in the evening. "The knife made it easy, it almost made the connection for me. And his mind was just there, waiting for me."

"It feels good now, doesn't it, to know you've got some defenses to call on?"

Megan nodded. "Sure. But there's a part of me that wonders if I've stepped over the line, too. Done something, taken something from him that was a little too much for the trade."

"You need to listen to that voice, Megan. If you're telling me the whole of the truth, you did fine tonight. But there may come a time when you get a lot closer to possessing someone else, owning them body and soul. That voice might be the only thing that saves you from going there."

Megan shuddered. It was the first time anyone had ever acknowledged to her that being inside another's mind was playing with real fire. The books she'd found had mentioned it, talked about the pitfalls that waited if you let yourself fall to the temptation to take over someone else's mind completely and totally.

But the lady sitting across from her wasn't a dry treatise on the subject. The look in her eyes wasn't just a warning. She knew, Megan told herself.

And Megan found herself wanting to learn more. About the pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Most of all: what was possible.

"There's more though, isn't there?" Gillian asked. "This street rat wasn't looking for you by accident."

Megan nodded, and finished telling her story of the evening's adventure. When she described the two Brothers, Gillian smiled.

"I know them. I wouldn't say they're harmless, all of the University faculty have their moments. But there are far worse that might have taken an interest in you. Show me, if you're comfortable enough." She led Megan over to a sitting table and a shallow dish of still water. "Do you know how to project to it?"

All of the books Megan had found had something to say about still water and how to use it. Megan had seen Tony use it, as well, but she'd never yet done it for anyone else but herself. She settled into the chair, a stiff wood thing probably meant to make sure no visitor overstayed their welcome.

She set her feet on the floor, straightened her back, and focused on the water. The image of the two that had paid the kidnapper appeared almost immediately. A mind's eye picture floating on the water's surface.

"Yep, just who I remember. Go on, Megan."

The rest was the darkness of the shed, the conversation in the dark. Megan let it unfold, not sure what Gillian was looking for. Until her view of the shed shifted when she left the place, and Gillian stopped her. "Hold, child. Just keep the image there. Do you see them?"

See what? Megan closed her eyes, half in frustration, half to sit and feel, ask her mind if there was something she was missing. And... there was, wasn't there? How'd the lady standing behind her know there were hidden little strings drifting away from the shed, across to Megan, and now tied to her sitting here in Gillian's shop?

"Experience, Megan. Sometimes, you just get that feeling there's more going on than a first look gives away." Gillian reached a long finger down to the water's surface, not quite touching physically; just close enough to push with her will at the gold threads faint as dust connecting Megan to the Brethren.

"Feel anything?" she asked as she did it.

"No ma'am."

"They're not active, then." Gillian waved at the picture Megan had formed, once twice a time again, until it vanished and left her scrying vessel empty and clear. "I think I'd like a beer. How 'bout you?"

She poured a pitcher full from a tiny keg she kept in her pantry, then mugs from the pitcher. "Get the keg filled once a week. The water from the river's good, if you can walk about ten miles upstream. Try and drink any of it drawn here in the city and you'll have the screaming trots for the next month. Assuming you don't shit yourself to death first. I boil the hell out of the it for anything I need clear water for, tea, potions, stuff like that." She put two mugs down on the same table where she kept her scrying gear. "No place else, really. The city charges too much for the square footage. You keep down this path, young lady, and you'll find yourself learning an awful lot about taxes and business fees and other damned fool shit you ran away from."

"So what are those threads, Gillian?"

"Fate. Accident. Something wicked dancing in your future, maybe something sweet and fanciful. Who knows; not I." She took a sip from her mug. "Now really, what they are is a passive tie. They weren't set there by anybody on purpose. You didn't do it, and neither did those two professors in shadow gear. All I can say at this point is that, somewhere in the future, you and those two are going to have some sort of business together. What it is, you'll just have to wait a bit and find out."

Megan mulled that over. "Do you think they know about these fate ties yet?"

Gillian put her hand up, palm to the ground and top to the ceiling, and waggled it back and forth. "Maybe, maybe not. Give it a day or two, and I wouldn't have seen it. The only reason we caught it is because we scried your time today within a few hours of your doing it."

"If one of them has reason, or a habit of going back over their pursuits..."

"They'll see it."

"If neither one of them bothers with that sort of thing on a regular basis..."

"You're likely going to pass up to that moment, whatever's waiting for you, being the only one of the three of you who knows about it."

Megan thought it over some more. "And they can't use those ties to do anything to me? Or me, them?"

Gillian gave her a grim smile. "I never said that."

The implication hung there, behind the lady's smile; Megan tried to ignore it. "I'm not interested in that, other than making sure there's no way for them to trip me up that way. And if they don't even know it exists?"

"Well, you mean besides the obvious?" the lady asked.

That Gillian knew about it. Which meant that others could discover the links. And, presumably, use them. "Do I even want to know what you could do to all of us, if you wanted to?"

"Not really, young lady." She was waiting for something. Megan could see it, sitting behind Gillian's eyes over the lip of her beer mug. Curiosity. She was wondering about?

"What can I do to protect myself, and I guess them?" Since there was no getting rid of the links, protecting the Brethren was just part of the package, if Megan's understanding was half correct.

The smile that lit Gillian's face was far more open, now. "Now there's a very, very good question. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that that very question is the start of understanding magic."

Over the next two nights, while she helped Megan understand the links between herself and the two professors, and how to hide them away where none could find or touch them, Gillian also helped Megan begin to understand what she meant about the Path, and how it was best approached.

"What do you mean, saying it's the first question?"

"You've been out in the world a bit now. Put aside what woman or man has done to you. And tell me about the way you've met the world."

The winds, the endless wind pushing and twisting as she rode across the badlands of the West. The voices, it carried voices from wherever it could pick them up.

The rain, harsh and tearing one minute, just the barest mist the second. Overwhelming her ears and eyes and leaving her blind and deaf and clinging to her saddle. Isolated and torn from the world.

Snow, just as blinding, binding; dust, and there was precious little subtlety there, only the life or death fight.

There were more, the little traps and tests Nature had set in her path as she'd made her first pass across the continent. A conversation she'd known in bits and pieces. Now, looking at it... "You're saying that Nature herself is the first test."

"Yes."

"And magic is one way to pass that test."

"Exactly."

Once she learned to find the fate braids, as Megan started calling them, she found hiding them away easy enough. It was a bit like throwing leaves over your backtrail, she told herself. Here, the leaves were random thoughts. "And not your own," Gillian pointed out. "Or, not just your own. If someone's interested in you, they'll hear random thoughts from you just by being close, so if you use a few of your own, it doesn't stick out. But just a few. The rest have to come from strangers, people you hopefully won't ever see again."

"So a trip to the regular pub is out, too." If her own thoughts and emotions would be a clue, so would be a regular crowd of people that were close to her.

"Well spotted. Where would you go, then?"

The docks. Sort of like being back home; the sea and its sailors were always there, waiting for her when she needed them. That's where she went now, to gather thoughts and feelings, emotions and curses. From the boys and girls hiding in the upper yards, to the captains and factors challenging each other over prices, Megan listened, watched, gathered the material she needed.

Then, memory stuffed full of the strange and the familiar, she went back to Gillian's shop and settled in to weave a blind for the mind's eye. A bit of this, a little of that, pictures and sounds and smells, she tacked a tube of thought together, then molded it in and around the lines that bound her to the Brethren.

"Good. Very good." When it was finished, Gillian leaned over and tested the work. Pushed at it, with hate and love, anger and pride, greed and jealousy and all the rest. And the weave held against her. "I can see your work, that there's something there, but that's all. And in a few weeks, with a little distance and wear and tear to go along with it, I won't even see that."

Megan wanted to believe then that that meant no one else would ever be able to find the work, and that which was hidden beneath it. But she'd heard a few too many stories to hold that feeling with any great confidence.

That being said, she was proud of herself. The blanket of lies was done, and she'd put it together well. It would do, especially if she had the good fortune to not stumble across any more of the Brotherhood.

"There are others, Megan. Don't forget that. The Brotherhood, the Wizards and their University, even the Paladins under the right circumstances, you're right to want to stay out of their way. But they aren't the only ones that could find you out if you don't mind your step." And that's when Gillian showed her that the working she'd made didn't just serve to hide the fate braids.

And so Megan sat down and finished her first great working; she fashioned her braids into a cloak of lies, a drift of hidden meaning that waited for her, wherever she went, hiding herself from the prying mind's eye of others. "It's an extension of the way you shield your inner mind, the methods that you already use. There are those who go out and build themselves a fortress, walls around their minds. That just happens to signal to all and sundry that there's someone there."

"Shouldn't I do that, as well?"

"Yes. But that's what happens when you're discovered and need to protect yourself from all comers. That's your second defense. First though, you need to learn how to hide."

And how to find someone who's hiding from you. As Megan wove her cloak of lies, Gillian asked her to spend her nights and days wandering the city. "Go, and hide from me."

Little by little, Megan discovered how to do so. Twenty minutes, an hour. An afternoon.

A full day. Steadily, as the cloak grew, as she pieced it together and molded it to the way her mind worked, she grew the time it took for Gillian to find her. And when she'd passed a full night and day without being found, Gillian exchanged places with her. "Now, it's your turn. I'll make it easy for you at first."

Same thing. Well, almost. What Gillian didn't warn her of was that searching was a two-way street. "It leaves you vulnerable." To a serpent's return, a strike back along the questing view, past whatever shields she could manage; the first two or three times she discovered Gillian's mind hiding in the alleys, the lady struck back, a simple tap that echoed through the vaults of Megan's head and set a headache for her troubles.

"Don't forget to guard yourself, young lady."

As the times stretched, the force Gillian used to strike back increased. Megan learned to balance the searching mind with the need to protect herself; it was a bit like walking a tightrope, one foot back one foot forward and stay balanced over the middle. Gillian's mind surging back against the search was a wind shaking the tightrope and Megan's job was to be still and flexible while the wind exhausted itself.

The reverse attack left Gillian open; once she knew she could defend herself against it, Megan learned as well to follow the surge back to its source. At first, she attacked the shell she found there; Gillian's mind was unassailable. So Megan switched to using Gillian's attack more simply, as just a backtrail to follow.

The ripostes would come as she learned the other paired steps of this dance. The next came when Gillian was satisfied that Megan could search and defend her searching mind, as well as hide.

Megan had questions. "I can understand how this helps me hide from the Brotherhood, or whoever," she told her teacher. "But you're not just hiding from me." She wanted to know how to build the wall of force Gillian surrounded her mind with, down and beneath her own mind's cloak.

"No, I'm not just hiding. But like the cloak, the wall is a personal work. You'll need to build your stones and mortar, the pieces, from yourself."

She didn't tell Megan any more. All she did was continue each day to test Megan's defenses. Search out little by little until she found the hidden mind, then pulse a bit of something, anger or laughter, screams or whispers, blue or red or green or anything at all, Gillian would push it past Megan's defenses and set it loose to echo in her student's head.

The headaches weren't the worst of it. The worst part was the giggle Gillian left along with it.

After three or four days of that, Megan was just about ready to give up in frustration. She'd started out building bricks and mortar of her own emotions. Her own anger and frustration, all the little bits and pieces of herself laying around ready to shield herself from an attacker.

But they weren't enough. Not matter how well crafted her bricks were, or the mortar she built from desires and dreams, Gillian pushed past them, giggling. With no more effort, it seemed, than pushing down a child's paper fort.

Megan walked out to the beach, out where she could drape the cloak of her mind over the whole of the sand and the waves and forget for a while that there was anything more important than the sun on her face and the salt on her lips.

She wasn't calling Gillian a witch, or a bitch, not yet. She wanted to, the lady making her work far more than even her grandmother had. At least her grandmother had only ever made her work her fingers and her back. Tony'd made her think and learn, sure, but always something concrete. Find the murderer, the smuggler, the cheat and the fraud. Here's the books, or the crime scene, or the witness with something to hide. Like that.

"You'll have to figure it out yourself, how to build this wall." And I won't give you any hints about what that means, how it might work...

'Because there's no one way is there?' Megan told herself.

Emotions are flighty things. Dreams, goals. They are fundamental, if they're real, always there. Except when you need to examine them, test them. Call them up and they vanish in the wind, leave you just wanting to wander off and go fishing instead.

That part was universal, Megan supposed. Everyone had to fight with this stuff. Maybe that was growing up, the young woman considered. But then what defenses were there?

She considered how Gillian attacked. She bundled up anger, laughter; love hate and giggles. Flighty things, emotions, goals, dreams. Easily focused and sent along a line of thought, sent out to sail through Megan's poor defenses and echo giggling behind them.

So, Megan considered, if these things of her mind stuff were better suited for attack, for the easily called up and focused and broadcast, what then could serve for absorbing these things? Gathering the momentary and the brief and turning them away to fall to the wayside where goals not pursued went to be forgotten.

When did thought become deed? Standing where the sea met the sky... the walls Megan built were made of deeds. For an attack of anger, a melding and counting, ten to one. For love, the fierce joy of the glance and the blush, turn in and dance then.

For each dream, a goal to guide it, a schedule to tame it. Her walls were not bricks and mortar, they were a stance, a reception of all that could come and preparation to turn any attack at all to her purpose, rather than the attacker's.

When the next strike came, Megan didn't worry about the fierce punch of greed Gillian sent; she listened instead for the giggle. She let the punch slide by, and there between the greed and the giggle, where the two emotions joined, Megan placed her fulcrum.

And then she rotated the attack; and then she remembered the feeling as she did so. And that memory became the cornerstone of her defense. When came the second attack, she didn't know for sure what emotion she would see barreling her way.

She didn't need to. For she remembered that, whatever it was, she was prepared to turn it.

Gillian was waiting for her, with the door open and a pot of tea sitting on the little table. "Oh, that was well done." She patted the seat of the chair. "Here, sit and tell me what you've learned."

That attacks are ephemeral, and there's always a place where the energy you build up to force on someone else runs out.

The hardest part was holding on to the memory of success. Over the next few days, Gillian repeated the lesson, the attacks. Each one became another stone in Megan's defense, another memory waiting when she needed them.

Because, as she found, there was no such thing as one perfect memory. Each in turn, if she relied on it overmuch, soured. Grew old, stale, unable to sustain the next attack. Despair rolled in, then, and the walls came tumbling down.

Each day's work started by rebuilding the exhausted rubble of yesterday's failure. "Life's kind of like that, Megan. No job's ever really done."

"Is it really like this, all day, every day?" Megan felt something much darker standing behind that idea. Not a wall of defense; a wall of despair where all the dreams and wildest of imaginings had gone to die.

"Of course not," Gillian responded. "There are plenty of smiles and sunsets ahead. It's just that right here and now you've gotta learn how to climb out of the well."

And that was the last bit of imagination Megan needed to complete this part of her lesson. If the walls of despair she glimpsed every morning when she set about rebuilding her defenses were the dirt walls of a well, then the stones of her defense could use that despair. Just as each stone used the intent of her attacker, the structure of the stones, their pattern as she laid them, would use the way despair was always there, but ever porous; if she rotated around it to build her own intent...

To build a defense that stood, one stone more today than yesterday. "That's the start of it, Megan. Each day a little better, tomorrow just a bit better than today."

"You're saying that I've got a long way to go." It was kind of implicit.

"Sure. But you've got what you need to get on with it. A good start."

The two of them worked on attacks, as well. That went along with the defenses. "You won't know for sure what a good defense is, if you don't know what an attack is."

There was another implicit suggestion hiding in that. For Megan, it went back to the feeling she'd had, when the would-be kidnapper had his knife at her throat and the greedy hunger in his belly to bleed her just a little.

If she'd taken him over, complete and full and him reduced to a mewling howling little thing of madness she could claim as a trophy, what would it mean for her?

"A loss here. A scar there." Gillian shrugged. "It's no one thing, dominating other people. There's not a point on that path, no single action where you look up and realize you're a monster."

"But it does happen."

"Hell yes it happens. There's a lot of garbage in the Brotherhood's view of the world. They've collected their own scars; they'll build their own monster someday. But the fact is, they're right. If someone like you or me, someone who can hear what others hear and see what others see, gets hooked on forcing others to their will, then we really are the monsters they terrify Emperors with."

Megan half expected Gillian to look off to the horizon, then, or sigh, maybe. Give some indication that she'd known monsters, been damaged by them. But the older lady didn't do it.

"I don't have much sympathy for the ones I've seen go that far, Megan. And neither will you, when you see the damage they're capable of." Now Gillian did give a pensive look, one that showed memory and sympathy and a few of the scars that came from a life involved in what she was trying to teach Megan. "I think it's time for your last lesson."

"You're kicking me out, just like Tony," Megan said.

"Eventually, yes. And for the same reason. The Wizards, well the University, anyway, do something similar, but the fact that they all live within walking distance of each other makes it easier. What happens is that you reach a point where you don't really listen to me, anymore. And then it's time to go out and spend some time on your own."

But first, she had that last lesson to impart.

The hospital was a rambling collection of buildings, stone, wood, brick, hidden away on the smallest island in the harbor. It was a proper setting for madness and the things that walked in the night. Towers, barred windows, granite dark and wet from the constant sea spray. "She spends her nights there," Gillian told her student.

The two of them walked along the waterfront; the island and the hospital were just a few hundred yards away, across the water. Close enough for a boat to move between the island and the docks twice a day, morning and evening. Carrying supplies, gossip.

"Trustees. They clean the harbor, most of them. She cleans the jail for the sheriff. Serves food, the other little things."

The tavern down the street had the sheriff's warrant to feed the prisoners; the lady in question, the trustee, when she was there, made sure each of the prisoners got their share of it. She was pushing a little cart ahead of her, loaded down with food and empty trays that she filled and passed to the waiting prisoners.

The trustee was young, pretty, barely older than Megan. And she still looked it too, no false age from births or illness. "The sheriff's not..."

"If he is, at least he's treating her well." Gillian kept her face still, under control. "But she doesn't show any signs of it. If I had to guess, she reminds him of someone, and he's just trying to protect her."

Megan's teacher checked in with the deputy working the front of the jail, then led her charge over to the outer bars. "We won't be long. She's not much for conversation."

"The deputy recognizes you," Megan pointed out.

"I check in on her every few weeks," Gillian said. "The sheriff might be able to keep his hands to himself, but he's not the only one with the opportunity."

Megan stored the question away in her mind for later. Why was Gillian so worried about the lady shuffling her feet along the jail hallway in front of them? What part had Gillian played in the events that brought the lady here?

"What's her name?"

"I don't know. And, now, neither does she."

Megan was shocked by that; until the lady on the other side of the bars came close enough for Megan to hear her mind. There was the immediate, the cell and the cart, and the purpose, feeding the prisoners and cleaning after them.

And there just wasn't much else behind it. No sense of self, past present future. Just an empty vessel, waiting only to clear up, head back to her own cell on the island, and do it all again tomorrow.

No name. No memory of how she got here.

No defenses at all against Megan reading anything and everything that might stand behind the clear green eyes.

"May... I... help... you?" the trustee asked.

Megan couldn't respond, not immediately. But the lady on the other side of the bars was patient.

She had nothing to hurry on to.

"Um... No. Thank you." But then Megan did have something else to ask. "Wait. Do you enjoy your work?" Was she treated well?

"I... do," the trustee replied. "The sheriff is kind to Jane."

Megan turned to Gillian, question in her eyes.

"They have to call her something, so Jane Doe it is." Gillian leaned in to get Jane's attention. "Is there anything that I can get for you while I'm here?"

"No, ma'am. I... Jane, has everything she needs."

The way she couldn't quite decide how to refer to herself; Megan had to reach out, not to change anything, just to listen, to look observe.

To find nothing. When she moved from "I" to "Jane", there wasn't a reason. No split personality or paired souls waited behind the bottle green eyes.

There was only the gap where her personality should have been.

That gap stretched in front of Megan's mind eye. Yawned, deep, hungry. Beckoned to her, asked her to drop into it and explore, come in and feel, turn her mind to the task, there was an understanding here for someone smart and kind and...

And there was Gillian's hand and mind pulling Megan back from the trap. "You won't find a lesson there, Megan. Well, except for what not to do."

Megan gasped, hard and fast, as she pulled back from Jane's mind. It was like swimming up and out of an undertow, without Gillian's help...

"You'd have come out of it. Assuming she didn't try and talk you into taking over."

"You mean she's still there?" Inside that pit, trapped in her own mind, watching as her body went about its business with no input whatsoever from the soul and mind and personality that it belonged to.

"Down deep, where all she can know is that her body is there and doing something that she can't control? Well, yes." Gillian turned away, bringing Megan with her. "That's probably enough. You got the point, I'd imagine."

Megan did understand now, the outlines of it. Whatever Jane had done, however many she'd forced to do her bidding... and wasn't that pretty face part of it? Megan shuddered at that idea, the pretty young lady on the make, not just her body on offer, and there was always an old fart or two with more money and lust than sense. One too many, though, and what happened when the lust for power devoured her?

"Does it happen to everyone?"

"No. There aren't any guarantees. She's just one example of what might happen."

Imprisoned in, eaten by her own greed, so far down she didn't even know what her body saw, smelled, only that it was alive and forever beyond her control. "Do you think she got what she deserved, then?"

"I'm no judge, Megan. I look at her and my mind screams at the injustice, because I can only see this side of it. Whatever she did to get to that point is lost forever; we'll never know what the other side of the scale carries to balance the weights we see."

Megan didn't feel guilt. Not standing there where she could hear the murmur of the thing in Jane's mind. Maybe the blank slate was just an act. Maybe someday the greed inside wouldn't be satisfied with self-torture.

The teacher and her student didn't discuss the lesson, then or later, on the walk back to Gillian's shop. There was no need. Megan understood the sheriff, and Gillian. Their natural sympathy, even for the self-inflicted wounds.

Megan just hoped that none of the bystanders, the deputies, the prisoners, and the nurses and doctors across the water at the hospital, got hurt if the thing she'd sensed stirring beneath Jane's semi-catatonia ever broke loose.

When the pair arrived at Gillian's shop, after a brief quiet time while her teacher prepared a pain remedy for one of her older customers, they sat down to a beer and a discussion. "Where to next, Megan? What calls to you?"

The continent. The same way it had before she'd walked through the door of the shop. The call was ever constant, but Megan liked to pretend that the months she'd spent learning Gillian's lessons had given her a new ear for that call.

She didn't tell her teacher any specifics. Gillian shared too many ties with the Brotherhood and the University. Tony's had been more visible, more official. Coming here on his recommendation had been a risk, one that had paid off in the here and now.

Megan wasn't ready to push her luck much farther. The ties to the Brethren were still there. And however light they'd been so far, and so easily concealed, when it came down to it...

When it came down to it, the only reason she had to believe that the Brotherhood hadn't spent the past few months tracking everything she'd done was Gillian's word for it.

The doubts flashed through her mind in seconds; she didn't need to draw them out because she'd worried at them more and more the last few nights as this time drew closer. Megan did hope that the cloak she'd woven, and the shields she'd so carefully constructed, were good enough to hide her thoughts from the lady sitting across from her.

But she didn't lie, precisely. Megan still remembered her grandmother's lessons. Don't get caught on the easy stuff. "I've been keeping up with the ships down at the docks. There's a couple going out that sound like trips I might enjoy." There were more than that, but Megan weighed her options as much on the way the crew and the captains reacted, the things that went through their minds when she talked to them, as the places they claimed to be going.

"Vancouver? Or Galveston?"

Megan managed to conceal her shock; that Gillian had her eyes on the docks wasn't much of a surprise. That she knew so much about how Megan had been making her decision, that was the part that forced Megan to think about her vulnerabilities.

Megan fought those feelings of doubt for months; being on her own, out there following her nose around the world, getting into proper trouble, and then getting out again. That helped, helped build her confidence that the abilities she was learning, and most of all the experiences and mind she built up to use them, were equal to anything she found herself involved in.

The immediate reason the doubts slammed down on her, as she pulled away upriver on a canal boat headed up the Erie Canal, with a cranky set of mules and their tender who'd been happy for a little bit of help, "Especial' someone's good at talking to them jackasses, they trouble you don't know 'em", was the pair of Brethren standing on the docks. Watching for her to get on either the ship to Galveston, or the one headed around the Cape to Vancouver and then China.

The ties still bound her, but the fact that they were stuck watching to see which boat she got on helped. It meant that Gillian, and the pair of University professors, Wizards, who'd used her as their stalking horse, had actually delivered on Gillian's promise. Megan's own-built magical protections, the cloaks and walls and just the tiniest bit of self-confidence, were working, a little; enough so she could ride the doubt and know she'd come out of it on the other side able to handle whatever came her way.

It was enough, for now.

She did stick her arms across the rails of the canal boat and flip the Brethren her middle fingers. One way or the other... If Megan's suspicions about Gillian and why Tony'd sent her there. If the pair of Wizards had an informal agreement with the paladin and the lady in her shop, to carefully shape the training of renegades that came their way...

Well then they'd all well earned the gesture.

To my daughter: Thoughts on the moment

(This was the location for my "To My Daughter: Thoughts On the Moment". I've pulled it down for the moment for publication in a collection in progress.)

Less Than The Moon

For this week's free story, I revisited a corner of the universe where ships and their companions are partners, friends.

And sometimes, enemies. In our last trip, we visited a place called New Amsterdam.

Today, we'll ask what's Less Than The Moon...

Less Than The Moon - A Shorelines of Starlight Story by M. K. Dreysen

All'na Mo'ln had come to contemplate the life of the mind. She'd stayed because the drinks were better than she'd anticipated.

"Side effect of the gardens," the librarian had said, that first night. "We've plenty of grains, fruits of all sorts, and time on our hands."

Not that the booze flowed freely. Except at the seminars, of course, and the dinners and the...

When she took the time to think about it, All'na had to admit that the faculty spent a great deal of their collective time glass in hand, politely listening. Or not so politely; they might have retreated to this place of scholarship, but few of them had left behind the combative urge. In that case, and given intergalactic shipping rates, All'na and the rest grudgingly accepted a bit of farm work in their daily lives.

How else were they going to guarantee a lager, cold, dew drops sliding down the side of the glass, to go along with the rubber chicken and whatever Silve Daoos had come up with this month to bore them for an hour of a Friday evening?

Not that they worked like fiends. The Mallsa University of the Ransik attracted members, but it rarely generated them. A side effect, then, was that the faculty tended to come along with a few tricks up their sleeves. Retirees with a little set aside, AI or biologic, they came with an idea of the things they'd need.

Scions came with even more, of course. Distant cousins, or those who'd lost the battle for position; the bored and the resigned to their fate, whether it was family money or a pension or whatever, prospective faculty who'd been somebodies always offloaded with more than enough of a ship's worth of provisions. And robotic systems of support. And money, almost always in a currency that could be usefully traded in the Ransika commodity markets.

The refugees, voluntary and otherwise, they were the tenure-track that often fell all the way to stoop labor. The place had plenty of land available, so even the poorest on landing, like All'na had been, always had a place to call their own. They just couldn't necessarily count on filling that space in a hurry. All'na had had to bunk with Silve for a couple of years before she'd saved up enough to build her home. And for a couple more years after that, while her gardens and its residents established themselves sufficient to the day.

Seed exchanges, and germ lines, were as much a part of the economy of the University as the exchange of ideas. Even the AI members participated; Minnlle Raydden Mod 4, who'd come in specializing in the networks of the Setpien Traders, and who'd since rotated to gathering everything they could on the migratory habits of the various insect species of the Nevvens Diaspors, had put it to All'na as a solution of self-interest. "Whatever else, I have to maintain my shops. If I left my skirts to grow as the planet would let them, my home buildings would deteriorate in approximately ten years."

"Shouldn't you just keep the local growth contained, then?" All'na had asked.

"I do," Minnlle had said. "It's tamed locals, for the most part. I'm interested in the overlaps though, how the native species interact with the imports, so it's worth it to me to keep a hand in the broader trade."

For which All'na was grateful, she had to admit. Minnlle, and the other members who stayed more or less closest to the native environment of their adopted planet, generated hybrid plant lines that helped protect the more delicate of the imports. Oranges and lemons, for example. All'na's beloved citruses, that appreciated the air and the water and the general climate, but couldn't handle the native grasses at all. The native root systems, All'na suspected, and the way they interacted with their neighbors. But Minnlle and Loon'th T'ress, a gentle old soul who'd been one of the first of the university's members, had spent the time to hybridize a handful of the native grasses with a selection of grasses approximating an old-Earth hayfield.

Well, and one old-Earth species that had been known chiefly for how well it could form a golf green. But All'na allowed even the occasional black sheep in the family, if it behaved itself and wiped its feet before it came in. Regardless, the Raydden-Tress grasses may have been a little wilder than an English, or even a Texas, lawn, but it didn't devour her fruit trees from the roots up.

Better than she could say for her colleagues. Visitors had a time of it, if their sponsors brought them along to the seminars. Modern communications were very much a part of their lives; half of All'na's colleagues spent their days answering email from across the five galaxies.

The other half spent their nights binging TV shows. The lag times were too much for real-time video, but downloading the latest and greatest entertainments was easy enough.

But none of that could compete with live interaction. Even Loon'th's great-grandchildren, farmers all, attracted attention when they visited.

All'na's granddaughter, when she landed, would have the faculty in an epic state. "I'll spend the next year answering questions about you, Will'na."

Will'na sighed. Cross-galaxy video feeds may have been out of reach, but down-orbit communications were a different matter. Will'na had called her grandmother as soon as her ship had entered the system. A followup to the email she'd sent six weeks before, when she'd been about to make the jump. "Do we really need to visit all of your friends, Mama?"

All'na rolled her eyes. "I'm not trying to drag you off to my bridge club, child. No, other than Silve, we're not likely to run into any of the other faculty members. But that doesn't mean they won't discover you've been here."

Silve would gossip. Hell, All'na would gossip. It went with the territory.

That said, ships dropping into orbit around Mallsa were tracked and noted. They didn't get many visitors. Which was kind of the point, really. And, like with the gardens, pretty much everyone had resources enough, or at least connections to the network of resources, to have an idea of who'd come to call.

All'na just hoped that her brethren who had more than academic interest in orbital traffic weren't digging too deeply into her granddaughter's history. Wardch BrodEtch had been chief of counterintelligence for their brood; Loon'th had been the diplomatic channels monitor for the Evistic Conspiracy's public face.

And oo'M Vii, All'na reminded herself. Don't forget about Vii. Not that she could. Vii was the one most likely to have connections enough to discover Will'na's new job description. Not that Vii cared, really; just like All'na, she'd left hometown politics far behind when she'd come out on the losing end of the bureaucratic warfare, last promotion before retirement edition. But All'na knew perfectly well that Vii liked to keep her hand in. The need for knowledge had never gone away, and never would.

Those three had an easy truce, and an even easier informal information passing agreement. "For the good of the university, and all of us, of course," Loon'th had informed All'na. "We're not in that life anymore. But that doesn't mean we can't put our knowledge to good use."

All'na didn't ask who'd be a threat to the university or the faculty members. She didn't have to.

She had enough names on her list. Most of them harmless enough, but a lifetime of work and she'd picked up an enemy or two who, given a little opportunity, would make trouble for the university. Who knows what somebody like Vii had trailing along behind her?

Will'na landed with little fanfare. The spaceport was quiet; it wasn't dead. She would have had her pick of vehicles tasked to the job of taking her wherever she wanted to go, but her grandmother was there to greet her. "Mama, you didn't have to..."

"Shush. If I couldn't take time to pick my grandchild up at the 'port, then what's the point of retirement?"

Other than not getting hauled off to prison, her granddaughter didn't point out. Or worse.

The two made it all the way up to cruising altitude before All'na couldn't stand it any more. "Right, so enough with the catching up business. Tell me just what the hell you're doing getting in bed with the regime?"

"You know better than that, Mama. I had two choices. Join up..."

"Or run like hell," All'na added. "And there aren't all that many places Grael can't reach anymore."

If politics had stopped at the Malodoric Roof, the solar boundary of the system Vii and All'na and Will'na called home, none of them would have had much to worry about. Grael'st the Wanderer, Grand Chancellor of the Wilkomb and Malodor Twin Stars and, incidentally, All'na's brother-in-law, didn't let little things like boundaries, diplomatic niceties, or distance interfere with his petty revenges.

"Uncle was very persuasive," Will'na began. "His offer was more than fair."

And it had been, even All'na would admit. An armed ship with an almost fully-developed AI, letters to every Wil'Dor consulate discretely informing them of the appropriate passcodes and budgetary authorities associated with her position, and a handful of galactic interests Will'na was directed to stick her nose into. The five galaxies were otherwise Will'na's to explore.

"What are the strings then, my dear?" All'na asked. "How far does your uncle allow you to reach, before he yanks you back to earth?"

Will'na didn't answer.

All'na didn't expect her to. The job was too new for that, the hopes too bright. Her only grandchild would have heard the questions in her own mind, of that All'na had no doubt. But she'd have stuffed them away, hoping they were merely the fears of the unknown. "Just be wary, Will'na, that's all I ask. Take care of yourself, enjoy the opportunity."

But ready yourself for the inevitable, she didn't say. The warning hung there between them, however.

****

Silve Daoos carried no illusions as to just why Will'na Mo'ln might be visiting her grandmother. Aside from the obvious, of course. "You're here about the Young-Carry contracts, aren't you?"

All'na had given her granddaughter an overnight to relax and introduce herself to the household. Roam the grounds, drink coffee, appreciate the views and the villa architecture All'na had transplanted to the environment.

But dinner that night she'd already laid plans for. "Silve and I trade dinners, love," she told Will'na. "It helps keep me out of the computer interface."

Will'na hadn't complained at all. When Silve had led the conversation with her question, All'na discovered why.

"Well," Will'na replied. "Since I am here, I hoped that, if it's not too much trouble..."

Silve frowned her response. "It's not trouble to talk about it, young lady. But it might turn into trouble if you turn talk into action." She turned from granddaughter to grandmother. "You're the host, All'na. I don't want to presume..."

"At this point," All'na said to them both, "You've engaged my curiosity. I might strangle Will'na later for imposing on her grandmother in this way, but I've heard just enough about the Young family to want to find out what you've been up to, dear. Besides, Will'na got herself into this mess, let's see how she gets out of it."

And what any of this had to do with Grael'st and their home system, she didn't add. Silve was from the other side of the galaxy from WilDor; she'd grown up in a merchant trading corporation, so home was a little vague, but the place she'd set foot on most often was known primarily for being a bit of vacation spot. Earth-type, Il Donata had attracted itinerants, traders, and the occasional interest of larger systems, but nothing too major, for just over a thousand years.

"You were the first ambassador to the human systems from the DritZaal Convention," Will'na began.

"And the Young family were the first from the human systems to take an interest in our little Convention," Silve confirmed. "The Carry was their first true multi-galaxy ship. She's a thing of beauty, if you ever get the chance to see her."

Will'na listened carefully as Silve explained her position. And the contract she'd orchestrated between the Young family and the AI system they'd inadvertently built.

What Will'na didn't tell Silve was that the Carry had disappeared. And that her boss, her uncle, wanted her to find it. Find it, and, with a little luck, convince the Carry to break the contract with the Young family in favor of the Grand Chancellor.

The WilDor system didn't have their own galaxy ship. Oh, they'd contracts aplenty with the trading families, all the space they needed, really. But the Chancellor had set himself a dream. For his own galaxy ship, one capable of making the jump, not just between systems, but between any of the Five Galaxies.

Will'na still believed, in that moment, that her uncle would sign contracts between the Carry and the WilDor system, not in his own person, but as representative. She believed it. But... she wasn't completely sure in that belief.

Her grandmother's implicit warnings were a reminder, that Uncle was always on the lookout for his own benefit.

Regardless, if she didn't find the Carry, or couldn't convince the ship to change allegiances, none of it would matter.

Will'na thanked Silve for the insight. "You've given me a great deal to learn, Professor."

"Then I've done my job," Silve responded. "And thank you, Will'na. It's been a while since anyone has sat still to listen to my stories of the old days."

All'na walked her guest to the door, then returned to Will'na. "So, what is your uncle up to, young lady?"

Will'na hadn't yet been betrayed in her new job. And it was her grandmother. "The Young family appears to have abandoned the Carry, Mama. So Uncle believes there may be an opportunity, if we find her first..."

All'na shook her head, frowning. "I'm sure there are ships that would abandon their contracts, Will'na. But if such exist, none have provided proof of it."

"So far," Will'na pointed out.

All'na wasn't finished though. She had more to point out. "But your uncle isn't just fishing for a major trophy for the WilDor system, is he? Leaving aside that it will take generations for anyone besides those from our home system to trust their cargo to the ship again..."

Will'na wasn't ready to confront either one of those points. But Uncle, at least, was an old argument. "I believe him when he said that he's pursuing the Carry for the benefit of the system, Mama."

"Uh-huh," her grandmother replied. "And when he changes his mind?"

Which was how Grael'st operated, Will'na admitted to herself. He didn't need to lie, after all. "Circumstances change," he'd say, "And I may not be wise, but I know how to listen to the wise. And so I must change to adapt to the new circumstance, Will'na."

Will'na stared at her grandmother, knowing she'd have to admit it to herself, then or now.

Her grandmother didn't force her to that, not yet. "Just be prepared. Do the work now, so that when you must face his new course, you won't be panicked, wondering what the hell to do next."

Which is, more or less, what Will'na did. She left her grandmother to her university, thankful for the warnings, and for the history lesson from Silve Daoos.

Silve's lessons were political; the Young family had built the ship, populated the AI, but, similarly to the situation Will'na currently found herself in, the Carry had not yet manifested herself as a personality. Will'na's ship, bearing a temporary name as the Mer Na Sin until the AI system decided for itself who and what and why, was developing. The signs were there, and Will'na personal involvement was a by-now well-known part of the eventual path to personality manifestation.

But none of this impeded the Mer Na Sin's functionality. The jump routes between systems in this galaxy were well mapped, and Will'na had been well trained. She knew the questions to ask; and how to ask them, which was the tedious part of dealing with a very capable, but oh so literal, machine. The life the Mer Na Sin would eventually make evident was so close Will'na could almost feel it. Bubbling underneath, just a joke, or a song, away.

The Young family hadn't been so lucky. They'd sunk a system's worth of resources into the galactic ship, and the machine that would be the Carry refused to show them evidence of a personality lurking in the electrons. Which made it a very expensive multi-system ship, but would make the multi-galaxy capability meaningless.

A living AI was essential to those jumps. A map for those paths was useless as soon as it was programmed. They required a constant interplay, of intuition machine and bio, and the interplay between them. "They didn't know where to begin," Silve had said. "The only thing the Young family knew was that they couldn't afford to ask any of the big players directly."

Will'na could imagine, but she'd asked the question anyway. "Why?"

"Money, power, the usual things. A mega-corp would have demanded a mortgage against the ship. A multi-system convention would have demanded more."

Service at demand, no questions asked. The politics of the Five Galaxies, and the Young family had built the ship so as to become a player, not merely another step in the pawn's hierarchy. "Why did the Young family approach you, then?"

"My convention has more familiarity with multi-galaxy trips than is commonly known. Given how much money and effort the Young family spent, chasing rumors and hints, it was only a matter of time before they discovered our little secret."

The Young family, in particular the eldest son, not the power of the family board of directors but the one who'd been most active in sticking his nose into active projects, had approached Silve. "Not with any hopes of my own knowledge, you understand."

"You were the ambassador," Will'na answered, following the logic. "So if they went to you, they'd soon discover where the answer might lie."

"Just so. And, in the end, when my friends at the Olynnic Engineering State did manage to contact the budding AI, my participation in the proceedings became... more direct."

The Carry had, in fact, decided that she would rather remain in utero, as it were, than manifest and become beholden to the Young family. "She wanted assurances, from Walthius Young himself, from the other members of the board, and most importantly from any bio crewmembers who joined her."

"Thus, the Young-Carry contracts."

Silve had filled her in on the less well-known aspects of the contracts. In fact, Silve had been happy to send her copies of the contracts, "Because the Carry has a way with words, and I'd hate for you to miss the opportunity to get to know her."

The majority of the contracts were common knowledge. No warfare, no political entanglements. The Young family themselves were allowed to ride, as passengers only. Walthius and his sisters, and any who came along after, were to keep their nose out of the Carry's business, and they'd be ignored if they tried to interact with her as anything other than glorified cargo. She chose the biological members of the crew, with no recourse.

And then there were the lesser clauses. "Minimal smuggling?"

"She tried asking for no smuggling at all," Silve had said. "But she backed down a little when I pointed out how impossible that is." In a universe where something perfectly legal in one system, but giving the death penalty in the very next system, wasn't just an ethical model but an actuality, the Carry had had to face the inevitable. But she'd tried to limit it to the minimum possible.

Hell, Will'na reminded herself, All'na and Silve had to be careful with their dinners. Garlic was deadly to the DritZaal native; pure nightshade extract was a delicacy beyond measure in the DritZaal cuisine. Extract similar situations across the biologic spectrum, and the constant pursuit of safety by the more dedicated sorts of public servants, and the Carry and any other cargo ship were under permanent pressure to monitor their transport manifests.

The most interesting clause to Will'na was the one that forbid the Young family from pursuing interests in certain systems. "The Apollonian Madrigal, the UllMev Culminate. The Mallsa University. What do they have in common?"

"No idea. Other than that, at the time, the Young family had yet to find anything interesting to involve themselves in. The University was just a hint of an idea then, the Apollo Club and the UllMev Clans were following their respective belief systems into a more or less peaceful separation from the galaxies. The Young family kicked a little bit over it, simply because they're always hopeful that something will turn up they can get involved in. But in the end, in the Five Galaxies, giving up three systems they'd never made a penny from wasn't that difficult an issue for them."

Which was the reason Will'na was spending a lot more time surveying the University system than she'd anticipated when she'd pointed the Mir Na that way. There had to be a reason the Carry didn't want the Youngs traveling in these circles. The only question in Will'na's mind was, which one of the three systems then was the real one.

The hideaway.

The Mallsa system had to be the least likely place for a ship to hide. No asteroid belt to confuse the issue, five planets, a lightweight yellow star, half a Sol's mass and just barely in the class. Some of the astrophysics faculty had moved here expressly to argue about the Mallsa star. They'd made themselves quite a time of it, filling journals and hours at tea time.

None of these things lended themselves to shadows. Radar, lasers, orbital and planet-bound telescopes of a hundred flavors. There were no shadows here for the Carry to conceal herself. But Will'na didn't let that stop her.

She figured she and the Mir Na could use the practice. So Will'na developed algorithms. Painfully. First, a meandering S-curve out to her jump point. Her path had just enough wiggle room that someone watching her leave wouldn't, Will'na hoped, see her path as anything more than the slow route out. A couple of obvious gravity boost passes, around the two gas giants in the outer reaches of the Mallsa light, the kind of thing that would, perhaps, suggest to the casual observer that the Mir Na wasn't necessarily riding the most powerful drives available.

And would give Will'na time to survey the moons sharing the neighborhood with those gas giants.

So, an S-curve traverse, with a couple of easy gravity shots, even if the Mir Na was much more capable than she let on, taking six weeks to leave instead of two and getting an almost-free ride was nice. And then the surveys, across the bands, visible and infrared and ultraviolet, x-rays and cosmic rays and anything else the spectrometers could sniff around. Will'na talked to the Mir Na; she laid out schedules, for each sensor, doing her best to insure overlap and hoping she didn't miss anything.

The Mir Na listened, dutifully accepted each request, but what was missing? That they couldn't answer yet. Until the Mir Na became whoever they would be, they were a machine and as yet not a full partner. Their time would come, Will'na reminded herself.

And the scopes and graphs remained quiet. Ok, not so quiet, every satellite and exploratory drone lit up the screens, until Will'na finished her comparison algorithms, the ones that queried the Mallsa traffic database. After the filters were applied, there were no more false positives. And so Will'na and the Mir Na coasted along to the jump point, that semi-random field of dust-free and gravity-minima space where the Mir Na could jump to the next system with little worries of tangling themselves up before transit.

Their passage into and out of the UllMev Culminate was even less eventful. The Mir Na had plenty of reserves, of fuel and food and the consumables associated with their sensor package. The UllMev traffic control system served up its collected knowns; the UllMev star had collected itself an asteroid belt. Which took longer. Their path through the system was no slight wandering quest for acceleration. This was a full on survey, no question.

Neither Will'na nor the ship noticed that they were watched. Will'na had practiced, in the Mallsa system, and here. She'd done her best to assume that someone was watching, paying attention to what she was doing. But neither she nor the Mir Na had picked up anything that looked like a tail. How could they?

Not when her uncle had a copy of the Young-Carry contracts, and had come to the same conclusion.

Especially for the inexperienced, spotting a tailing ship means spotting changes. Differences. A little delta-v, here, there, as the Mir Na made their own changes. Lift for the stars, and someone responds to that. A red shift on the Doppler radar becomes a blue shift, maybe.

But if there's a star-orbital satellite, somewhere out at ten, fifteen a.u.'s, for example. Registered as a quiet spectrographic station, just monitoring the local weather thanks for asking, and doesn't change anything it's doing as the Mir Na goes from here to there like a new spy looking over their shoulder at every stop light... and that station just keeps broadcasting through space and subspace... with only a hint of sideband traffic buried in the terabytes of information streaming out, and a listener would have to record months of data to catch even that hint...

When the Mir Na finished their pass through the UllMev system, a sheaf of catalogue names and nothing much else to show for it clutched firmly into their burgeoning databases, Will'na programmed in the paths to the Apollonian Madrigal without picking up two small things.

One was the UllMev "solar weather unit five, WMx115Vd registration designate" that added a little note to its broadcast.

The other thing Will'na didn't notice was that the Mir Na didn't make her request for jump coordinates quite as painfully literal as the previous efforts. If she'd been paying attention, Will'na would, almost certainly, have told herself she was just engaged in wishful thinking, hoping the Mir Na was waking up now and looking for any signs of it. But Will'na wasn't paying attention. She was feeling sorry for herself, and getting those little impatiences lined up, the ones that would let her take shortcuts in the field survey of the Apollonian system.

Which would have been easy to get away with. The Madrigal was, for just about all intents and purposes, a museum piece. A ghost town writ large. Legacy of something most of the galaxies called a cult; some of them wistfully. The Apollonians were not, in origin, human. But the stories had caught them up, second hand mysteries passed on in tongues long out of fashion even on old Earth.

The life of the mind, only not translated into the University, rather into something close to the Shakers, another old Earth memory. The Apollonians had arranged themselves on an out-of-the-way system, one with just enough of a living planet to not require orbital stations. Humans, the DritZaal, the majority of the biological members of the Five Galaxies, could have made a living on the Madrigal's planets, just. Scraped something out of it, but nothing past that and the whole of the sentient universe, known, had given the place a pass. So the Apollonians came into the place with no expectation except that they'd have it to themselves while they figured out who they were.

A home for the desperate, as it turned out. Until the Fearthiax came looking for a wayward member of their hierarchy and made a mess of the job.

The system was quiet now. The live planet, a little too far from the Madrigal's light for comfort even in the best of times, and now irradiated to the point where none of the known species could even begin to scratch out desperation, much less a living.

Will'na cataloged the few energy sources on her own, because there was no traffic control here. What was the point? A few observer craft tracked their way across the system, counting rays cosmic and local. But other than that, nothing. It was enough to make her jump into an exit program within three days of entering the system.

The Mir Na, on the other hand, wasn't so sure. If they weren't asleep any longer, they weren't awake, either. Dreaming, perhaps almost aware that something interesting was going on. And paying attention to bands of the spectra that Will'na had given up on.

There are many ways to go dark. Turn off the lights and there're no visible photons. Turn down the power plant and there are precious few escaping high-energy particles, certainly fewer than the active star below us. Put aside biological crew members at some random planet, and there's no life support needed and no heat signature to betray it. Pick a likely orbit, and there's enough random traffic that active echoing waves don't see anything different. All of these things are ways to hide.

Gravity didn't quite let the Carry off the hook, though. She'd made her peace with that, however, back to the orbit among the various rocks in the asteroid belt, most of them high-metals in composition, and someone would have to devote a lot of computational cycles to sniffing her out. So then she'd turned her cycles to the time without time; all times are equal to the Carry, all scales just a number.

The Mir Na became aware; not awake, yet. So they who would become she, and keep the name because something about it seemed appropriate, she knew yet not what, turned her awareness to the tracking. Waves of gravity, faint hints of fluctuations, disturbances in passing, told a tale. And MirNa listened to that tale. And when the story reached an end, in dust and rock and shadows, MirNa passed a signal to Will'na.

Not that she reacted to it immediately. That took a while. First Will'na had to get through the depression that wanted to sink its claws into her. Make her finish the calculations, ask the Mir Na to turn around and head for the exits and find something more interesting to do until Uncle took the ship away from her.

Will'na did catch up to MirNa's message. A few hours later. When she'd looked at the screen, dejectedly. One last time, she thought, and there at the bottom, amid the visual displays of traffic and power and life-support and fuel... there was something different. In the gravity map, where before there had been only the peaks and valleys, red to blue showing the strengths of that field that held the place together, a new feature had appeared. A line, a path, a black line tracing in from the jump point, and then down into the Madrigal's asteroid field, where it disappeared into the tangle of low-energy noise those rocks generated.

She wasn't ready to believe, yet. But Will'na asked the Mir Na "Can we follow that path?" And the MirNa didn't speak, but she did respond. The ship turned her nose to the trace.

Will'na didn't notice; this was the first time she'd spoken in natural language terms, and not been asked to speak more formally.

The watchful satellite some few a.u.'s away, designated WMx1033Bd if anyone had thought to query it, wasn't privy to those considerations. But it did notice MirNa's change in flight attitude and thrust. And because it had been asked to watch, and report, on anything that this craft in particular did here, it encoded a message into its constant traffic to the WilDor system. And it returned to its patient surveillance.

In the WilDor system, three ships were poised in the jump region. There were, in all, six such ships, rotating through their wait stations. They'd been set there to engage in just this eventuality; to avoid the three week transit time out-system, here to the place where gravity and light held only small sway, to cut out that travel time at least and to jump to wherever Will'na found the Carry.

They'd sent one to the Mallsa University, just for practice. But then, the ships' commanders considered all of this practice. They'd been briefed, and the Chancellor would have needed to give pretty good odds to get any of them to bet his way. So when the signal drifted through the subspace network, two, perhaps three days subjective after being sent by WMx1033Bd, the interdiction ship on deck shrugged, in an AI manner of speaking. But it rolled its nose for a decent attitude and it ran up its power and twelve hours after receiving the signal, it was a memory in the WilDor system.

While it was between, a time of actuality and memory, depending on point of view, MirNa and Will had discovered the cache at the end of the path.

The Carry dwarfed MirNa. She had to. She carried power, she carried people. She carried ships like MirNa between the Five Galaxies.

MirNa drifted alongside and if she'd been more awake she'd have admitted to awe.

Will'na admitted it for her. "Um, wow." The Carry wasn't quite a mile long; formally, she was listed at fifteen hundred meters. A little more than thirty times the MirNa's length. And well more than thirty times her radius. "How in the hell did she think she could hide herself away?"

Will'na's sense of scale wasn't as well calibrated as MirNa's. She didn't notice that there were twenty asteroids in immediate scanning range that outranged the Carry; a thousand beyond that, at least, had been cataloged. The Carry had chosen well.

She'd thought. But she'd had also prepared for this, because there would always be those with the patience to follow her backtrail. By some standards, her response times were slow. But all times were equal, here. "Please do not approach," she sent. "Hailing distance is appropriate." She sent the message along a tight-focus beam. If there were others, she would prevent them from knowing she was active.

Will'na had gone long enough speaking to MirNa and receiving no living response that the Carry's communications were a welcome relief. "We come in peace."

"Easy enough to say," the Carry replied. "And yet, you found me, and you disturb my rest."

"I represent the WilDor Board of Trustees," Will'na began.

"Is Grael'st Belld'n Irtaxic yet the Grand Chancellor to that board?" the Carry interrupted.

"He is."

"Continue your message, then."

"I represent the board. The Chancellor has sent me with a request."

"I'm sure," the Carry responded. "Tell your Chancellor that I have not changed my mind. Nor do I require assistance. The Young family may have shit their bed, but that does not mean that I am interested in Grael'st the Wanderer as a suitor."

Will'na couldn't decide whether to smile or frown. Her uncle's sobriquet was well earned, and rarely used in his presence. He'd been long in finding his path in the WilDor system, then clawing his way to the highest position available along it. The established, the chosen, had labeled him the Wanderer as a subtle reminder of his ...unlikely... starting place. Uncle Grael had embraced the label, he'd told his niece, out of self-defense and always for his own reminder of where he'd begun.

But he still frowned whenever it was spoken. Will'na had seen it.

Will'na attempted to negotiate with the Carry; she kept MirNa in the closest orbit the Carry would allow. But the days passed, and though the Carry was hungry enough for conversation and gossip, "Oh, I am so glad that Silve has found herself such a lovely retirement spot, do give her my best when next you visit your grandmother," yet the ship refused to budge. "I am beholden to none, now. The answer is no."

MirNa understood this from the beginning. She too communicated with the Carry, on subtler levels. The Carry suggested, hinted at, ways forward. In many ways, their conversation was an echo of that All'na had had with her granddaughter. The elder ship reminded MirNa of those things dangerous to her. Politics, always, because ships were power. Geometry, as well, because the Carry had seen the universe up close and personal.

Both members of the younger pair found themselves so caught up in talking to the Carry that they didn't notice the new signature that popped up on their sensors.

But the Carry did. She'd been at this too long to allow herself the luxury of not paying constant attention to the world around her. She interrupted both conversations with the simultaneous message: "It appears that Grael'st is ready to take matters into his own hands, children."

MirNa recognized the danger soonest. Still yet unwilling to fully manifest, she sent warning signals to her biologic counterpart. Will'na accepted these, and the implication. "We've given your hiding place away, haven't we?"

"I'm afraid so," the Carry replied. "It was inevitable."

The interdiction ship gave them a day or so to contemplate. This was long enough for the Hyle to send its own message back to WilDor, summoning reinforcements.

"They'll attempt to jump in at other points in the sphere," the Carry told Will and MirNa. "They can't catch me directly. Odds are, they can't catch you, either. But if they get lucky with a jump..."

The two ships pursued had turned their noses for the opposite point of the sphere. They didn't really have a choice, geometry having its own logic. Let the Hyle define a point on a sphere's shell. Any point on the opposite hemisphere, plus or minus a few degrees for this and that difference between the ships' mundane drives, these then were the sheaf of points that made escape possible for the Carry and the MirNa.

Assuming the Hyle was the only ship chasing. Jumps were accurate to a "point" at the cosmic scale. In local units, the other five of the waiting interdiction ships would jump into a random point on the sphere. At some point, once the Carry and the MirNa's courses were determined to some level, the other five would jump in. And, eventually, one of them would land at a point in the sheaf that would allow them to face off with the Carry. Or the MirNa.

The Hyle called to the Carry first. "The board of trustees for the WilDor system..."

"Skip it, flunky. Get to the point."

The Hyle seemed a little nonplussed at her directness. But then, Will'na reflected, it could just be the comms lag.

"We'd very much like to avoid a physical confrontation, if at all possible. Perhaps, if you'd agree to a certain minimum distance?"

Which, MirNa and the Carry agreed across their private link, the Hyle and its team would attempt to circumscribe to the limit. Especially if they jumped in sufficient to cover the sphere. "I think we'll take this a little farther," the Carry responded. "I'm unarmed, after all."

The Hyle remained alone for almost a week. Then, late one evening as Will'na lay in her bunk, counting seconds until she could give it up for a bad job and go back to the bridge, the second of the WilDor interdiction ships appeared. Not yet in the cone that would force the Carry to negotiate, but close enough to remind her of the stakes.

"Any chance there's been a change of plans?" the Hyle commented.

"Not yet," the Carry responded. "Don't worry, you'll be the first to know."

Two more WilDor ships came in over the next two days, both of them closer to the Hyle's point of the sphere than to the Carry's escape route. The Hyle didn't bother; Will'na hoped that meant the ship and his crew knew their business.

The two ships spent their time working out jump routes. Will'na, on the other hand, spent her time trying to convince the MirNa to talk to her. The first set of tasks went well. The second one, not so much.

"Why won't she admit she's ready?" Will'na asked the Carry. She attempted to keep the frustration out of her voice.

"With a bit of luck, you'll find out soon," the Carry told her. "Or not. I forced the Young family to engage outside counsel, remember?"

"Right."

The Carry sent a laugh over the link. "I suspect you won't have quite that level of difficulty, Will'na. Just be patient, MirNa has a few things on her mind at the moment, after all."

"Why is it," Will'na asked, "That you sound a very great deal like my grandmother?"

"Some things are a function of the universe, I guess. Now, let's discuss escape plans, shall we?"

By which she meant the coming point where the two ships would split off into two very different routes. The four pursuit ships left, at the moment, five of eight octants of the sphere open for possibilities. An entire hemisphere, in principle. This too was almost predetermined. Armadas might need to hold formation. The Carry and MirNa could, if they agreed to a suitable rendezvous point, force the pursuers to follow whichever of the two ships they happened to luck into successfully blockading.

"And," the Carry pointed out, "I don't really think your uncle is all that much interested in capturing you, as a prize in and of yourself. Oh, they'll force you home for a bit, but then in a few months..."

"We'll meet again," Will agreed. "Assuming you don't disappear into the ether."

"Do you have a choice you'd prefer? Or are you going to betray me, here and now?"

It had been a thought. Will'na didn't want to admit it but there it was. Somewhere about the time the whole chase began, she'd, very briefly, considered it. The MirNa did have the weapons for it. And, it wouldn't even have taken the torpedoes. In close formation, if she'd been willing to sacrifice a little of the MirNa's jump drive lifetime, she could have set a gravitational brake, a little bit of drag that would allow the Hyle and its companions to catch up to them.

She hadn't done it. Mostly because the thought left a bad taste in her mouth. And on top of that, Will'na didn't want the MirNa forced into betraying a friend. No, Will'na had decided, the Hyle and team would have to do it the old-fashioned way, they'd have to properly earn their prize.

"If your uncle, or any of the ships pursuing, ask about it," the Carry said then. "Tell them I infected your ship with this." And the Carry sent a carefully quarantined virus across the link. "MirNa won't actually be infected by it. But I can't say the same for anyone else who's foolish enough to scan that package..."

Will'na, and MirNa at a different level, laughed at that. Infecting her uncle's private navy with a virus was, on reflection, at least a small measure of revenge for the situation he'd put her in.

The two ships parted ways, then. The virus package contained a set of coordinates, which the MirNa would be able to open, safely, in approximately three months. Until then, it was no more than an entropic mess of bits. The Carry set her route for the northwest octant, the MirNa for the southwest.

Will'na waved goodbye. "Think she'll actually show up?" she asked the MirNa.

MirNa didn't reply verbally. Instead, she showed an image, of a coin spinning in the air.

If an outside observer had been watching, they'd have likely assumed this was simply the as-yet dumb computer's mindless icon for a processing statement, a little spinning wheel noting that it was working.

Will'na didn't make that assumption. "Fifty-fifty, then? We'll take it, right?"

The spinning coing landed then, on heads.

Just a few minutes later, the fifth and sixth interdiction ships appeared on their scopes. Both of them, by luck of the draw, appeared in a space that allowed them to close off MirNa's escape route.

But not the Carry's.

"Godspeed," Will'na sent. "And good luck."

The Carry responded with the equivalent of a wink. Then, safely assured that she wouldn't have to show the pursuit team, or Will'na and MirNa, that she was hiding certain capabilities they didn't need to know about, the Carry sent two tightly focused, and highly encoded, subspace messages.

The first one went to MirNa. It was the passkey instruction set that would allow MirNa to decode the virus package, safely, at the right time and right place.

The second one, which passed the Hyle team and the MirNa safely unobserved, went out across the galactic span to a repeater station in the Delacroix Vale. From which it bounced along a trail of additional repeaters, getting tangled up in standard subspace traffic, point to point, bit by bit, until it landed in the inbox of an otherwise unassuming tramp vessel named the Lemons and Assorted Fruits.

Or, to friends and relations, Lemmy. This message was a little bit more involved. "Hey Mike?" Lemmy asked.

Mike stumbled into Lemmy's bridgespace, half-asleep after a night spent chasing dreams that didn't want to be caught. "Yeah Lem?"

"I've got a new gig, from the Carry."

"Um, ok," Mike replied, sinking into his bridge chair. "I thought she'd retired."

"Yeah, so about that..."