Sunshine (31 page)

“Tea?” said Pat blandly.

“Tell me what Aimil is doing here first,” I said.

“Well, we're in putting-all-our-cards-on-the-table vogue now, aren't we?” said Pat, still bland. “Since the other night. So it's time you knew Aimil is one of us.”

“One of
you
,” I said. “SOF. And here I thought she was a librarian.”

“Undercover SOF,” Jesse said.

“Part time,” added Pat.

“I
am
a librarian,” said Aimil. “But I'm sometimes a—er—librarian for SOF too.”

I thought about this. I'd known Aimil since I was seven and she was nine. She and her family had had Sunday breakfast at Charlie's most weeks for years, were already regulars when Mom started working there and then when I started hanging out there. She was one of the faces I recognized at my new school. I'd lost half a year being sick and then Mom crammed the crap out of me the second half of the year so I didn't lose a grade when I went back to school in the fall. (Yes, I mean
crammed
. Second grade is freaking hard work when you're seven or eight.) In hindsight that was the beginning of Charlie's being my entire life: I didn't have time to make friends the six months I was being crammed. The only kids I met were kids who came to Charlie's, not that I got to know many of them because I wasn't allowed to annoy the customers. But Aimil used to ask for me, so I was allowed to talk to her. She talked to me because she felt sorry for me: I was weedy and undersized and hangdog that half year, and always doing homework. I forget how it started—maybe she saw me sitting at the counter studying, which I was allowed to do when it wasn't too crowded.

We'd managed to stay friends outside of school although not inside so much; two years is the Grand Canyon when you're a kid. She'd gone off to library school my junior year and did an internship at the big downtown library the year after I started working full time at Charlie's and we used to get together to complain about how hard working for a living was. Two years later she got a job at the branch library near Charlie's. Sometimes she still had Sunday morning breakfast at Charlie's with her parents.

“When
did you become SOF—undercover, part time, or hanging upside down on a trapeze?” I said. I did not sound friendly. I did not feel friendly.

“Twenty months ago,” she said quickly.

I relaxed. Slightly. “Okay. So
why
did you?”

Aimil sighed. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” She glanced at Pat and Jesse. I glanced at Pat and Jesse too. If they looked any more bland and nonconfrontational they were going to dissolve into little puddles of glop.

Aimil looked back at me. “You're not going to like this,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“SOF monitors globenet usage for who likes to read up a lot on the Others,” said Aimil. “That's how they found me. They have a note of everybody who subscribes to the Darkline.” Which included both her and me. In theory any heavy-duty line into the cosworld will let you look up anything you like on the globenet, and the parameters are drawn only by your subscription price and the weight of the line. But in practice it is a little more specific than that. The Darkline is what you are going to choose if what you are chiefly interested in is looking up all the latest the globenet could give you on the Others without going to a Darkshop or the library or some other public hook-in for it.

If I'd ever given a passing real-world thought to anything outside my bakery, I would have known SOF must do stuff like monitor the Darkline. Which would mean they would know I used it. That, with my dad, was easily enough to interest them in me.

If I'd ever given a passing real-world thought to it, which I hadn't. I'd lived in my own swaddled-up little world. I who had been the star pupil in June Yanovsky's vampire lit class. But that was the point, really. The Others were still something that happened between the covers of books like
Vampire Tales and Other Eerie Matters
. SOF shop talk overheard at Charlie's was just live stories. Dry guys happened, but never to anybody I knew. Vampires were out there, but nowhere near me.

Until recently.

“We'd already found you, of course,” Pat said to me, “because of your dad.”

“Yes,” I said. “You could stop reminding me. Nothing wrong with your dad, is there?” I said to Aimil.

Aimil laughed a little bitterly and bowed her head. As her bangs fell across her forehead they left flickering mahogany bars against her skin. I blinked. “Nothing that I know of. Or with my mom either. That's why it came as such a shock to them when I had two sets of adult teeth come in, one inside the other. Fortunately my mom has a cousin who's a dentist. A discreet dentist. And scared to death there might be something wrong with
his
blood. Also fortunately my second set wasn't the kind that keeps growing, although they were a funny shape. Once they were out they've stayed out. And my mom's cousin doesn't have anything to do with our branch of the family any more. But I'm not registered. Remember Azar?”

I was already remembering Azar.

He'd been the year between Aimil and me. My freshman year in high school, he was the only sophomore on the varsity football team. That was before his lower jaw began to drop and widen to hold the spectacular pair of tusks that started to grow at the same time. They took the tusks out, of course, but they couldn't do much reconstructive surgery on his face till his jaw stopped expanding. After the first surgery his family left town so that he could start school again somewhere they hadn't known him before. That was after he'd been registered. After our school had taken away all his sports awards because he was a partblood and must have had—ipso facto—an unfair advantage. Which is crap. And he'd been a nice guy. He wasn't stupid or a bully.

“It's an interesting situation,” Pat interrupted, “because one of SOF's official purposes is to find unregistered partbloods, register them, and fine their asses good, if not arrest them and throw them in jail, which happens sometimes too. One of SOF's
un
official purposes is to find certain kinds of unregistered partbloods, protect them from getting found out, and persuade them to work for us. We really like librarians. They tend to have tidy minds.”

“Librarian partbloods are probably flash easy to find,” said Aimil. “We'll be the ones who belong to Otherwatch and Beware.” These are the two biggest globenet trawlers for Other 'fo, exclusive to the Darkline. For a modest extra monthly fee you too can download eleventy jillion gigabytes every week and experience mental overkill paralysis, unless you are a trained member of SOF or a research librarian or a prune-faced academic and have a cyborg overdrive button for taking in 'fo. I didn't have the overdrive button. Besides, I'd always had a guilty preference for fiction. Since I seemed now to be
living
fiction, this proved to have been an entirely reasonable choice.

“I spend a few hours every week reading certain threads and—well—following my nose.”

“We contacted her because the filters she'd set up herself on her subscription passwords seemed to bring her a peculiarly high level of source traffic by Others and partbloods, not just about them. So we had her in for a few chats and once she softened up a little.…”

“Did someone turn blue for you too?” I said.

Aimil smiled. “Yeah.”

“—We found out that that nose of hers often told her when your actual Other had actual fingers on the keyboard, and that has sometimes been very interesting,” said Jesse.

“Especially when she picks up a sucker,” said Pat.

They all saw me freeze. “Hey, kiddo,” said Pat. “That's kind of the point, you know? Nailing vampires. Remember?”

I nodded stiffly. The rift—or did I mean rifts—in my life were getting deeper and wider all the time. I only just stopped myself from reaching up to touch the thin white scar on my breast. If any of these people had noticed that I'd spent the entire sweltering summer wearing high-necked shirts they hadn't mentioned it, and they weren't mentioning that I had suddenly stopped wearing them for a mere autumn burst of pleasantly warm weather either.

“I—I just don't like talking about vampires,” I said, after a moment. If one-fifth of the world's wealth—or possibly more—lay in vampire hands, of course there were a lot of them out there with not just basic com gear to handle their bloated bank balances but monster com networks that meant they had probably stopped noticing they weren't able to go outdoors in daylight. Plenty of human com techies never went out in daylight either. But com networks would include trog lines into the globenet. And some vampires who had them no doubt amused themselves chatting up humans.

I
knew
this. But those vampires were scary faceless bogeypeople that SOF existed to deal with. What was I doing here in a SOF office?

Partbloods sticking together, I suppose. What if I told them I
didn't
know I was one of the lucid ten percent? I shivered.

Did Bo have a line into the globenet? He was a master vampire. Of course he did.

Did Con?

I shivered again. Harder.

“Sunshine, I'm
sorry
,” Aimil said. “I know it doesn't mean much, but sometimes when I'm tracking some—some
thing
, even that much contact, through however many miles of trog and ether, it starts to make me sick. I can't imagine what it must be like for you.”

True.

“Now, about that tea,” said Pat.

“You still haven't told me why you're here, like, today, now, this minute, in Pat's office,” I said to Aimil.

She shook her head. “Serendipity, I guess. I showed up this afternoon to plug in my usual report and Pat brought me in here, said I was about to meet an old friend who was also a new recruit, and maybe I could reassure her that having anything to do with SOF doesn't automatically mean you're going to lose your interest in reading fiction and will wake up some morning soon with an overwhelming urge to wear khaki and start a firearm collection.”

Pat, who was wearing navy blue trousers and a white shirt, said, “Hey.”

“Navy blue and white are khaki too,” said Aimil firmly. “But Rae, I didn't know it was you till you walked through the door.”

“Then why are you saying you're sorry about what happened to me? What do you know about it?”

Aimil stared at me, visibly puzzled. “What happened—? Since the—the other night all of Old Town knows you were in some kind of trouble with suckers, those two days you went missing last spring—and a lot of us were already wondering. What else could it have been?”

Right. What else could it have been?

“It could have been a rogue demon,” I said obstinately.

Aimil sighed. “Not very likely. A lot of partbloods can spot other partbloods, right? I haven't got Pat's gift for that. But a fullblood demon—if you'd been held by rogues, I'd've known it. Like cat hair on your shirt. So would whoever from SOF interviewed you have known it. SOF wouldn't have assigned someone to interview you who
wouldn't
have known it.”

“And Jocasta's
good
,” said Pat. “Even better than me.”

“Good” wasn't the adjective I'd've chosen for my experience of that interview, but I let it pass.

“So would a lot of other people who come into Charlie's have known it,” Aimil continued. “Haven't you noticed—well, like that Mrs. Bialosky hardly lets you out of her sight these days?”

“Mrs. Bialosky is a
Were
,” I said.

“Yeah. And her sense of smell is
real
good,” said Pat.

“She's another undercover SOF, I suppose,” I said.

Pat laughed. “SOF couldn't hold her,” he said.

She and Yolande should get together, I thought, but I didn't say it out loud. If SOF had no reason to look into my landlady I wasn't going to suggest it to them. If Pat thought she was a siddhartha, all the better.

And if they already had looked, I didn't want to know.

Jesse said gently, “You know there's such a thing as friends as well as colleagues and neighbors, don't you?”

I had my mouth open to say, “Sure, and you'd've been hanging around Charlie's watching me with at least four eyes a day if I'd just been some poor mug that got mixed up in something ickily Other, right?” And then I closed it again, because I realized that the answer was yes. They might not have been watching me so intensely, and they might not have been watching me in the hopes that whatever had happened might lead them to something they could use without reference to a continuing and uninterrupted supply of cinnamon rolls, but they would have been watching me. Because that was what SOF was for—in theory the first and most important thing it was for—to keep our citizens safe. And SOF for all its faults took that pretty seriously. I sighed. “So, how about that cup of tea? And then maybe you'll finally tell me why you wanted me to meet Aimil here.”

Pat spun his combox around so the screen faced Aimil. She sat down and tapped herself in, and the screen cleared to the globenet symbol. I averted my eyes. Since I'd started seeing in the dark I couldn't look at any comscreen for long, TV, net, personal, GameDeluxe (not my territory, but Kenny had an amazing one), whatever. Brrrr. Vertigo wasn't in it, although migraine came close. At least I wasn't wasting subscription fees on Otherwatch and Beware by not having gone near my combox lately.

I could tell, however, watching out of my peripheral vision, that Aimil was calling up lists of mailsaves. She chose a list, hit a button, and mailtext blocks appeared. I felt an almost physical jolt, and reached out to steady myself on the back of her chair.

“Aah,” said Pat, watching me.

“What
,” I said nastily. I don't like surprises. Especially this kind of surprise, and this was my second since I came through the front door of SOF HQ.