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“We should extricate ourselves,” Mia found herself saying.

Carson sighed heavily.  “Yeah.”

She pitched her voice to be a whisper, though not softer, because emotion came through. “The whole reason we worked with him was that he was doing it ninety, ninety-five percent right, and what he was doing in that last five to ten percent made sense, even if we disagreed with it.”

“Mia.”

“And what he brought to the table in terms of insulation made up for what he cost in a lack of control, and in that five to ten percent.”

“Mia,” Carson repeated himself.  He put a hand at the side of her head and turned it so she was looking at him.  “I know.  I get it.  You don’t have to convince me.”

“I’m thinking it through aloud, as much as I can with the kids in the house,” she said, whispering still.

“If someone comes to us and we’re helping them with a crisis, cleanup, wiping a crime scene, any of that, why are they hiring us?”

“Because we’re good, careful.  Please keep your voice down.”

“Yeah,” he replied, lowering his volume a bit.  “The most dangerous moments, the ones that get us caught, the words in an interrogation room that add years to your sentence?  They’re words said and made out of panic.”

“Yeah.  Or a lack of information.  This has been happening right under our noses.  We should have caught it.”

“Walk me through how you caught it?”

She did.  Tracing the line to Byrd, his gaming, then the porn sites.

“I’m not that gifted, in case you start getting ideas,” Carson said, dryly.

She allowed herself a half of a half-smile, tugging at one corner of her mouth.

Then she walked through the process of digging up the others.

“I think it’s a talent that you can do that.  I don’t think you ‘should’ have caught that.  I think it’s amazing you caught it in the first place.”

“Others can.  Investigators.  And looking on some of these sites and profiles can raise alarm bells.  I’m being careful, but there are flags that could be raised.  For them, for our contact.  Example: this social media forum, you can put in a data disclosure request and they’re legally required to give you a huge PDF file with information.  I think they intentionally bury things for the people they’re selling data to, padding the file to be obnoxiously large, but in the process, they include some information like who visited the profile and with what device, what IP, and so on.  If I was someone who really wanted to hide, I’d put in a request once every two weeks.  By some channel that can’t be traced back to me.  Send it to some server somewhere that’ll parse the information and pick up any flags, like an increased number of visits to a dead profile on a mostly defunct social media site, and if it detects something, have it leave a message somewhere I’m checking regularly.”

“Hmmm.”

“That’s without getting into what law enforcement might set up.  So, weighing things, I thought it was best to not… to not.”

“Don’t go for regular walks where there might be landmines.”

“I missed the big picture,” she said, sitting back in her chair, dismayed.

“And we’re still missing the whole picture.  Going back to what I said,” Carson said.  He kept his voice level, quiet, and confident.  “Don’t panic.  Don’t start running back and forth where those landmines might be.  Right after a job, especially a job that went wrong, play it cool.  Don’t keep going where there are red flags, going through our entire client list, or you might bump into someone savvy enough to have warnings set up.”

“Yeah.”

“Help Ripley with her project.  I’m going to go drop off the cooler, see if I can’t figure out what’s going on.”

“Okay,” she said.  She ran fingers through her hair.  “Be careful.  With the drop-off and the figuring.  If things start going wrong and you’ve been asking questions…”

“I’m not going to ask,” he said.  “Trust me.”

She pressed her lips together.

“Two things I want you to do for me,” he said.

She reached a bit around him for the plate of food he’d brought, bringing it closer.

“That’s one.  If we’re missing one essential need, shore up on the others.  You’re tired.”

“Yeah.”

“So eat, unwind as much as you can.  Other part?  When you feel the itch or get an idea of something you could look into, and step away from Ripley’s window project for a minute?  Look forward.  Don’t dwell on what we did wrong.  Dwell on what we need, going forward.  What’s he going to do?  What do we need to do?”

“A part of me wants to run.  Drop this life, move.”

“Risky, and it’ll make the kids ask questions, and the kids-”

“I know.”

“And your rule was no big moves after a crisis.  It communicates that something bigger went wrong.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay with both kids, or do you want me to sort something out with Tyr?  If you’re going to be working on that project, with power tools and things lying around?”

“I’ll sort something out,” she told him.

He bent down to kiss her.

She felt like a fraud, kissing him.  Like the world was all in on some great joke where a guy who looked like him, with his energy, was pretending to be interested in her.  Snickering behind their hands and when her back was turned.  But he was beautiful.  He was so warm to the touch, where her hand cupped the side of his neck, faint stubble pricking the heel of her hand, his lips meeting hers.

She was greedy for him.  More so because she hadn’t been with him last night.  It felt like if she wasn’t, if two or three nights passed without that contact, without keeping him happy, or maybe even one, if she was unlucky, the spell would be broken, he’d reconsider.

A part of her hated that line of thought, and half the reason she disliked being apart from him was that it raised the question in the first place.  What example did this set for Ripley?  Tyr?  That level of self-doubt had to show through in some way, which was its own concern, which made thoughts and worries and anxieties spiral further.

The kiss, prolonged, was her refuge.  She could stop thinking, stop feeling anything but this.

A reset button on the spiral.  Feeling supplanting thought.

When he pulled away, she leaned into that void for a second, before realizing herself, and sitting back.

“I missed you last night,” he said, quiet.

She didn’t believe him.  Still, she still felt warm, and she could put that thought aside.  She nodded.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said.

“Please.  And while you’re out?  Some ear protection?”

“Good idea.”

He left, and Mia took a minute to wrap up, sort things out, put away the things she’d stashed in the safe because she’d been too tired to put them away earlier, and eat.

Safe aside, she was able to do most of that while keeping an eye on Ripley and Tyr- the two were playing together, having scarfed down their food.  She watched, pleased, warm in another way as they played, Ripley holding Tyr around the stomach and legs to lift him up so he could place the top cup on a tower of plastic cups.  Tyr was such a little tank, half Ripley’s age and maybe seventy percent the weight, and the grip around his lower half made Mia worry they’d topple.  She stayed close enough to catch him if something went wrong, and called one of the moms down the street.

“Hi, it’s Mia.  I’m doing some work around the house, and was thinking Tyr and Random could hang out?”

“Yes!” Tyr called out.

“A playdate?”  There was a note of skepticism.

“Just offering, but if I can get Josie from a few houses down to babysit, the two of them could hang out here, or I could send him over your way, and I’d owe you one.”

“I could send him over?”

“I’d be here too, just distracted.  I like Josie a lot.”

“She’s good.  A bit expensive.  Um, yes.  Random has parkour at five…”

There was a bit of negotiating of plans, reassurances.  She called Josie to double check, got the a-ok, and then called Random’s mom back.  Josie was the same price whether she was watching one or two, and honestly, Random was a moderating influence on Tyr.  Easier than watching Tyr alone.  Plus it bought implied favors from Random’s mom.

It took a few minutes for people to arrive.  Random arrived first, sent on his own, wearing a mask that matched Tyr’s, but had decorations attached to it that might’ve been a video game character.

Once Josie had arrived, barely in the door before she was engaging the younger kids, Mia was free to return to the bookshelf, with an impatient but polite Ripley.

“Where did you learn all this stuff?  Computers and building things?” Ripley asked, while Mia wired a panel.

“Every time I thought, ‘I don’t know what to do’, I made myself figure it out.  And for a long, long time, I felt that way a lot,” Mia said.

“Because of-?” Ripley asked.

Mia had to pull her head out of the hollow behind the bookcase to see.  Ripley was indicating her head.

“You have to use words if I’m not looking at you,” Mia told Ripley.

“Oh, right.  I forgot that when working with the visually impaired kid, during that one activity day.”

“Mmm.  And yes.  A big part of me feeling lost and not knowing what to do was my head.”

“You never talk much about it.”

“I do.  Sometimes.  But just like I explain the very basic things about puberty and boys and girls to Tyr, I tell you only some of that.”

“Why?  Is it complicated?”

“It’s simple.”

“Then why?”

“Because… parts of it are…” Mia said.  Navigating this conversation, the buzz of her headache, her fatigue, and also soldering wires to a single-board computer was proving difficult.  She paused with the soldering, and craned her head around to meet Ripley’s eyes.

Ripley, in that moment, was distracted by the sound of approaching, stompy footprints.  “No, no coming upstairs!  This is secret!”

She blocked Tyr with her body, which was no easy task.

“Saying it’s a secret that loudly will make people suspicious,” Mia noted.

“No!  Tyr, I said no!” Ripley said, in the tone and phrasing specific to big sisters with little brothers.

“Tyr!” Mia called out.

He stopped.  He tried to peek around to look at her, and Ripley blocked him from looking with her hand over his eyes.

“Ripley, careful on the stairs.  Tyr, what do you need?”

“Something from my room.  Also a secret.”

“Got him,” Josie said, from further down the stairs.  The teenager was long limbed and did cheerleading- primarily throwing, so handling Tyr was a walk in the park, compared to helping to throw a smaller girl up to a higher position.

“One minute,” Mia said, and hurried to put things in order, closing the shelf, moving cushions away from the bay window seat, and pushing tools and wires into her office before closing the door to hide them from view.

Of course, by that time, Tyr had stopped caring about his toy, and went downstairs with Josie.

“You were saying?” Ripley asked.  “About your head?”

“Hmm,” Mia murmured.  She opened the bookcase, glad it hadn’t gotten stuck in a closed position.  “I think that right there is why I don’t want to talk about it.  Other stuff’s a priority.”

“That’s cheating, no,” Ripley said.  “You always have a cop-out reason.”

Mia took Ripley’s hand, and her daughter was annoyed enough to not really want her hand held or anything, but when she realized Mia was positioning her to hold something into place, she cooperated.

“I… do.  I have reasons.  Which is part of it.  I’ll tell you the full story later, but for right now…”

“Or you can tell me it all now.”

“I was messing around with some other kids, friends of mine, and three of us fell.  I hit the ground hardest.”

The Fall.

A stupid game where they’d been hanging off a rope on the side of the roof of a fort they were building together.  A turning point in her life.  One that would, Ripley and Tyr aside, change the course of her life in a way bigger than graduation, wedding, or any sort of milestone.

“I know that already,” Ripley said.

Her impatience and the fact she didn’t get it, the gravity of this, was a piece of why Mia wasn’t going to share the full story.

“I was different after.  Scary.  I forgot things, not memories, but skills.  How to hold a knife and fork, or a pen, or work a doorknob.  How to hold a conversation.  Or say longer words, keep a tone of voice the same.  Remember when Tyr was smaller, and he shouted all the time?”

“He shouts all the time now.”

“More than now.  But I was older than you.  Some of those things, like the doorknob, I figured out pretty fast.  Others took longer.  And I was big for my age, by a lot and that’s not great when you sound like a cavewoman.”

She was glad Ripley didn’t smile.  She felt like the Ripley of a year ago might’ve.

“And I got held back, and so I was even bigger, and I was angry, and frustrated, so frustrated, because I knew these things that I couldn’t do.  They even talked about taking me and putting me in a school with other kids who were… behind.”

“You’re smart now.”

Yeah, Ripley wasn’t quite in a place to grasp it all, maybe.

“Thank you.  Anyway, long story short, a lot of people let me down.  Everyone did, until you came along.  So whenever the subject comes up, I worry, I guess.”

“I won’t let you down.”

“Thank you,” Mia said.

“And you’ve got Dad and Tyr.”

Mia smiled.  “Test it.”

Ripley picked up a dragon figurine and turned it at a right angle, pressing the base against the side of the bay window, where it connected to the bookcase.  It took a moment to find the spot.  Magnets hidden in the base centered it, and a more complex arrangement of magnets toward the center of the base was read by a scanner set inside the wood.

The latch clicked, bolts retracting.

Ripley whooped, grabbing Mia’s sleeve, shaking her, then hugging her.  She draped herself along Mia’s side and shoulder, with Mia kneeling by the open space, and, head at an angle, put the figurine back in place.  She made a pleased noise as the lock worked.

So happy, with only that.

“You’re the smartest mom,” Ripley said.

Mia worried she’d left Ripley with the wrong takeaway, in sharing her story.  It hadn’t been intelligence she’d lost, but… everything else.  Everyone.

“The point of me telling you that story was… don’t give up, okay?  Press forward, when things get tough.”

“Yeah,” Ripley said, “and the point of what I’m saying is you’re not dumb.”

Mia squirmed a bit, using her arm to half-hug, half-wrangle Ripley, until she could plant a kiss on the side of her head.  Ripley pretended she wasn’t that into it, screwing up her face, but she was young enough, Mia figured, that she was happy.  That might change in the teenage years.

This is why I do what I do, she thought.

Ripley squirming away was a good opportunity to refocus.  “Let’s get this all put together.”

“Can we do the other bookshelf like this too?”

Mia’s tired mind took a moment to reel at the amount of work that would require.  “Not today.  But we can talk about it.  Including your dad in that talk.  It’s been months of this being a construction site, and having to steer Tyr away from the hole in the wall.  You should decide how badly you want it.  Enough to count as part of your Christmas presents later this year?”

Ripley considered.

“Think about it.  You don’t have to answer now.”

If Ripley did decide it was that big a deal, Mia wouldn’t take away from the presents, naturally.  But it at least got her thinking about how much she valued it.

“I’ll promise to never put you in a home.  You can live with me when you’re old,” Ripley suggested.

“Wow.  Where are you hearing people talk about that sort of stuff?”

“Friends.  Books.”

I wonder if you and I will ever get that far, me old and you in a position to look after me, Mia thought.  Among other things, Carson and I need to keep it all from imploding.  And we’ve just realized our contact has been building a house of cards all around us, primed to collapse.

True to what she’d talked to Ripley about, she turned those nervous energies and bone-deep concerns into fuel to get her mind focused on the problem.

⬥

Carson came back long after it had gotten dark.  The fires had died down, though some still burned at the horizon, but the smoke had a way of making halos flare around streetlights and car headlights.  Refracting the light.  Carson cut a dark figure as he walked back.  He had a bit of swagger as he came through the door, and winked at Mia.

“Daddy!”

“Tyr the terrible!”

Mia took the bag he had slung over one shoulder so he could sweep his son up in one arm.  She peeked inside.

Money.  Large sums of money never took up the space that most television and movies implied, but this seemed like a fair amount.  Also a bag from the ‘Bed of Nails’ store, with ear protection, she assumed.  And papers?  She shot Carson a quizzical glance.

“How’d the building go?” he asked, asking Ripley.

“Great.  I’m so happy.”

“I know there’s a window, but they were keeping something secret and they won’t tell me what it is,” Josie said.

“Excellent.  Love that,” he said.  “I will shower you two in love and affection, but let me drop off my tools and talk to your mom, first.  Go finish your dinner.”

“Okayy!” Tyr said.

Mia followed him upstairs.  “You didn’t say anything about this.”

He pulled off his shirt, which had accumulated sweat under the pits, at the collar, and in the hollow of his back.  “I met up with a friend, we went out for afternoon drinks.”

“Uh huh?”

“There’s a heavy overlap between the people who frequent that establishment and the people our contact knows.  And who our client knew.”

“You got information?” she asked.  She leaned against the doorframe, where she could see anyone coming up the stairs.

“Yep.  Not much about the people who’ve acquired our services.  But I overheard a fair bit about our very newsworthy friend from last night.  Domestic violence against two different exes.”

“Kadie would be one, I’m guessing?”

“Yeah.  Anyway.  Went to drop off our friend’s cooler,” he said, inclining his head slightly to indicate just what he meant.  “Went masked, to be safe, direct handoff.  Mentioned that, given the client’s history at home, and his unreliability, we would’ve appreciated clearer signaling.”

“Meat, not dinner,” Mia murmured.

“Yeah.  Could’ve done.  Then I hung out at the spot.  He knew I was there.”

Dangerous.

“I saw a message come from the contact.  Vague.”

“Yeah.  Checking I was there.  He sent the guy back, with our pay, by way of apology.”

Mia nodded slowly, trying to work that out in her head.

It wasn’t that she minded, but it wasn’t the sort of thing she understood.

“And as a bonus,” he said, as he put the money into the safe.  “My friend who I met?  I did him a favor a while back, he was happy to pay it forward.  He got some of these from, ah, a client of his own.  He was grumbling about finding a good way to resell them without issues.  I offered to buy them right then.  Cheap, of course.”

“Yeah?” Mia asked.  She could put the pieces together.

He showed her the paper he’d dropped in with the money.  They were printouts.  Mia glanced over them.  Crayona Center, bar code, dates–

“Est Tru.”

“You know her?”

“Of her.  Of course.”  Singer.  One of the more popular ones.  Lots of controversies.

“Know anyone who’s a fan of her?” he asked, though he already knew.

“Josie.”

“We’ll have to run it by her parents.  I figure they’ll use it as an incentive to get her grades up.”

“Her grades are good.  High Bs,” Mia said.  “She works when she’s not in school.”

“But her parents are her parents.  Their call.”

Mia frowned.

“Don’t worry.  When we get closer to the date, I’ll float that I need to know if the tickets will get used or not.  They’ll fold.”

This was Carson’s talent.  He lived a charmed life, in a lot of ways, and he knew how to leverage it.  He’d never really had a proper job, this work aside, but he’d spent a decade floating around, doing a bit of work for everyone, and leaving an awful lot of people feeling like he was their best friend, a guy who could be trusted to be reliable whether they were moving out of an apartment on short notice or breaking someone’s legs.

It was her instinct to be suspicious.  To see a trap in what the contact was doing, giving the money back.  Was it counterfeit?  Was there a tracer, because he was suspicious on his own?  Was he resentful?

On a more warped level, the way her brain filled in the blanks, if he was coming up with money out of nowhere, it could be a long con, a cop in an undercover operation.  But she’d dug into his history, scattered as it was.  She’d tested.  She’d seen him clip alligator clips to someone’s ears and attach the other ends to a car battery.

He wasn’t a cop.  Even a dirty one.

The same with the tickets.  The way her brain wanted to read between the lines, Carson’s friend was a loan shark, and the only way she could see someone handing over tickets that had to be at least eight hundred dollars each- potentially thousands, was if he’d threatened, stole, or done violence.

Carson, she’d learned, understood this stuff.  That world.  Those people.  The degree of respect an ex-gangster like their contact needed, the amount of implications one could lean on.

She couldn’t talk to anyone who wasn’t immediate family without feeling like she was doing something fundamentally wrong in how she was conveying herself.  Carson could walk into a situation where a job had been scuttled, a man killed in a gruesome way and dismembered, and come out of it with full pay and some bonus tickets to a world-class pop star, that he hadn’t even been intending to get, along the way.

She respected his ability to do that.  She adored him.  She lusted for him, in ways that fucked with her head, more than a little.  She’d been honest about sides of herself with him that nobody else truly knew about.

She wished she could trust him.  But maybe that part of herself was broken.

“You should give her the tickets, talk to the parents,” Carson told her.

She looked over at him, surprised.

“Build a stronger bond.  As you’ve said, keep your friends close…”

“…And your enemies far away.”

He, still shirtless, shrugged a shoulder.  “She’s a friend.”

“She is.  I’d fuck it up, somehow.”

“Frame it in your head as a strategic move.  If something were to happen, a secret or a lie slips, this kind of thing might be what makes her decide to keep her lips sealed.  You handle things better if there’s a strategy to them.”

Mia considered.

“I’ll be the one to call the parents and seal the deal, closer to the date of.  Besides, this sells better as a gift from you than a gift from a thirty-five year old guy.”

“Okay.”

“I’m a bit bummed I couldn’t get more.  I hoped to overhear something I could piece together, or something I could give you.  His operation seemed smaller than before.”

“If he is who we think he is, it wasn’t that big to begin with.”

“Seems like it’s him and one underling right now.  The guy he was sending back and forth.  I’m wondering if he redistributed.  If he’s building an army, he needs lieutenants.”

“Pretty sure he’s not building an army.”

“Oh?”

“But I don’t know,” Mia admitted.

He smiled.  “How was your day?”

“Do you mean in general, or what our contact is up to?”

“Both,” he said.  Then he changed expression.  “Mostly the latter.  I really wish I could get more info.”

“I could only do so much, in the margins of everything else.”

“Bookshelf looks good, at least.  It’s good, though.”

“But this was one oddity.  Remember Rivera?”

“Rivera?  Yeah.”

She booted up her laptop, input the passwords, brought up the info, and turned it toward him.

He read the page, frowning slightly as he scrolled.  She watched, waiting.

Around the time he sat down to better study what she’d found, there was a crashing noise downstairs.

“I’ll handle it,” she said, walking over to shut the safe.  “Shut it down before you come down?”

“Yep,” he said, absently.  “You might have to explain this to me.”

“If so, I’ll have to get an explanation myself.”

She hurried downstairs, with that parting note, the tickets in her pocket.

The disaster was relatively minor- Tyr had been leaning over the table and had brought down a half-box of onion rings, with a plate, which was unbroken, but made a lot of noise all the same.

Rivera was a past client.  He’d been an interesting case, when Mia was trying to wrap her head around what was going on.  Rivera had been a point of contention.  A referral from another client they’d successfully relocated, who’d gone looking for them, returning to the same site they’d met up with him, to shoot the passport photo, quiz about the folder of information they’d given him, and give an otherwise full-service package to.  Guy had had a family.

Rivera was a cousin of the guy.  One the contact really hadn’t liked.  He hadn’t been willing to say why or how, because he was keeping his identity secret, or trying to, and that lack of communication had thrown a wrench into the gears.  It had been four years ago, Carson had been new, around then, and had presented the entire thing as a bit of a test.  Could the contact be trusted to put all bullshit aside and let this be a well-oiled machine?

It had worked.  Just barely.  The contact had almost been willing to scuttle an arrangement that was bringing in a few hundred thousand a year for him and for them, because he’d hated Rivera so much.

He’d cooperated, too, when Rivera had referred some others.  Friends of Rivera weren’t friends of the contact, but still.

Which, yes, based on the limited interaction, the guy was not the greatest guy.  Mia could confirm that.

So why were they lumped in with so many others, who the contact was keeping in Camrose, or in the city, or around it?  It wasn’t because they were friends.

Carson came downstairs, looking as confused as she felt.  That expression disappeared when Tyr came running up to him.  He flashed Mia a look.

“Josie,” Mia said.  “You have to run this by your parents.  We’ll help.  But…”

She put the tickets on the kitchen counter.

“We owe you a lot.  You’ve made yourself available.  A friend of Carson’s had these…”

It took Josie about as long to interpret the information-dense printout as it had taken Mia.  Longer, maybe.  But her eyes caught on the singer’s name.

“You might have to take a chaperone, depending on what your parents-”

“OH MY GOD.  You’re kidding!”

Mia blinked, stumbling a bit as Josie circled the counter and tackle-hugged her.

For a good minute, the teenager had all the same energy as Tyr did on a high-energy day, excited, bewildered, terrified- even.

“Oh my god what if my parents say no, I’d die.  They can’t say no!  Will they?”

“We’ll help.  I can be convincing,” Carson said.

The way he said that, given scenes in Mia’s memory, it still sounded ominous, even when it wasn’t.

“I have to call them, I can’t take the suspense of not knowing what they’ll say.”

“Technically we should have run it by them first,” Mia said.

“Pshh,” Carson made a noise, dismissive.

“Maybe let us call?  And you be quiet?”

“I can be quiet.  Please.”

She glanced at Carson.  Who motioned toward her.  He wanted her to own this, to get the credit.

She wasn’t good with people.

She explained, and then Josie’s parents asked to talk to Josie.  Mia handed the phone off, and Josie went across the house to have a private, pleading conversation with her parents.

Carson hugged Mia from behind.  In her ear, he murmured, “Did he change his mind about Rivera?”

“And all of his friends?  I don’t think so.”

“Is he priming things to blow up?  Take out enemies in the process?”

“And his friends are part of that?” she asked.  “I don’t think so.”

Josie, in the other room, was on her knees, hands in a praying gesture, phone between them, against her ear.

“Keeping friends close and enemies closer?” he murmured.

“I think it’s something else.  Simpler.  Worse,” she kept her response quiet.  Barely mattered.  Ripley and Tyr were focused on the dramatic spectacle their babysitter was putting on.

“Shit,” Carson muttered, as he realized what she meant.

You can trust people to disappoint you, Ripley, Tyr.  Better to expect it, than to be surprised.

It looks like our contact isn’t a mastermind.  He’s lazy, lying, or both.  He doesn’t have the reach or the distant eyes to oversee all the locations he’s been saying he sent people to.  He has eyes on the city, on Camrose.  He has connections nearby.  That’s it.

So he’s been sending them here.

Thirty-five people we’ve disappeared in the last decade, and four out of five were here.  Volatile people.  Capable people.  Dangerous ones. 

And that’s more dangerous, because the questions people might start asking, and the threads they might start chasing down, that plays out a lot differently with things arranged like they are now.  It means he’s been acting, playing at being bigger and better than he is, and if we’ve picked up anything about these sorts of people from Carson, they hate looking small.

Hand at the edge of the counter, she fidgeted.  Carson laid a hand over it, stilling her.

“We have to wait,” he murmured.  “Until the heat from this dies down.  Move too fast, people will get twitchy.”

“He should be.  He fucked us,” she whispered back.  “If he took shortcuts all this time?”

Carson nodded.  “But we still have to wait.”

Her personal policies and his instincts seemed to line up in that.

She still hated it.

Her ears rang from the gunshots from the night before, her brain crackled black with a low-level headache, and tension turned her neck to stone.  She put on her best smile for Josie, and for the kids.

It looked like Josie was getting a tentative ‘yes’.

We might not be around to reap the goodwill of your ticket there, Josie.  The best way to handle an incoming shitstorm is to not be in it.

⯁

Most women’s clothing didn’t fit people of her dimensions, and men’s clothing didn’t account for the bust.  It was more pronounced when it came to work clothes, which really only looked good with a certain cut.  The best options available to her, like a blazer, felt like they were too much, putting her above her station, as a health information technician.  Though the hospital wasn’t anything fancy, and most people went into the city for anything more serious than a second degree burn, so her umbrella had expanded to cover a lot of ground, including doing the computer-based secretary work for the half of the hospital that didn’t have department-specific secretaries and appointment systems.  Not that she was complaining.

More access was more access.

Still, it didn’t help her sanity when she was parking outside the school to drop off Ripley and Tyr, and other moms were there, gathered in their groups, talking like it would be their only contact with another adult all day long.

She saw the kids off.  It’d be the last year before Ripley was attending middle school, which would make drop-offs a little more complicated.  At least Tyr would be more able to get himself from the car to the school without getting distracted or sidetracked.  Hopefully.

Mia felt more on guard now.  Every face in the crowd was a potential ex-client .  Could one be someone she’d worked with?  The masks half the people were wearing in case of residual smoke weren’t helping.

The odds were slim.  The numbers weren’t that high.

But they weren’t zero either.

“Mia, what do you think?”

She spotted the mom who’d called out.  “Think?  About?”

“The news?”

Mia raised her eyebrows.

“The election?  It’s only the one thing everyone’s talking about?”

“Oh.”

“One of two things,” one of the other moms said.

“Right.  Of course.  But that’s goss, not news.”

“Goss?” Mia asked.  “Sorry, I know about the election, at least, but haven’t been thinking about it.  I’m so kid-brained right now.  Spent all weekend with them, building project.”

It seemed like she’d offended one or two of the moms, with the implication she spent time with her kids?  Or something else she’d said?

“Are you not done that window yet?”

“No.  But made headway.  Rip’s happy.”

“It’s a bit of an ulcer on the side of the house.  Not the only one in the neighborhood, but…”

“Soon,” Mia promised.

“Not pressuring you, I’m not that big a bitch, haha.”

There were titters of laughter and general reassurance.

One look to Mia from a mom that made it seem like Mia had been the one calling the other mom a bitch, when the mom had said it herself?

Mia felt like an alien, standing among humans.  She smiled, and couldn’t shake the impression her smile was dopey, making it clear just how much she didn’t get this.

“The election, though,” Mia said.  “I thought the writing was on the wall.”

“I hear someone went after the president.  Bypassed the secret service, got close enough to shoot, left a warning instead.”

“That’s insane.”

“Isn’t it?”

Words overlapped one another.  Mia watched Tyr in the play area, where kindergarten-age kids gathered before the school day started.

Her eye fell on someone else.  A woman, with straight blond hair, dark blue sweater, standing apart from everyone.  Or everyone was standing apart from her.  She stood by the fence that separated the parking lot from the sand and play structures of the kid’s play area, face mask over her lower face.

“Oh, you see her?”

“The goss,” one of the other moms said.

“It feels like talking politics is more polite,” Mia said.  Her mouth felt dry.

Just two days ago, she’d been talking to Ripley about recovering from the brain injury.  Not being able to control her volume or string together words, or syllables.

It felt like she was there, now.  Was her volume wrong?

Because the woman turned to glance at her.

She made herself stay, nodding, chiming in when necessary, laughing when something was said.  Her head wasn’t in the conversation.  It was in surviving.  Getting to the end of this.

The bell rang.  Kids filtered in.  Moms splintered off from their groups to get into cars.  Some making plans for the day, together.  Others off to do their own things.

Mia put herself in the middle of that crowd- not the first to leave.  Not the last either.

She only chanced a glance back when she was so far away she’d lose sight of her.

The woman, Natalie Teale, remained where she was, standing by the fence alone, long after the kids play area had emptied.

Natalie didn’t even try to mingle.  If it was even possible.  More removed from it all than Mia was, even.  She had more reason to expect words said behind her back or weird looks than anyone.  The way she stood there, it was like she couldn’t bear to turn around and see people look at her.

Natalie had done the unforgivable, and everyone knew it, or they’d quickly get brought up to date by the ‘goss’.

Now she was here?  When it was already feeling like the world was shrinking, work and life drawing everyone into Camrose and the area that surrounded it?

On her way back to her car, Mia passed it.  It was confirmation she wasn’t seeing things in the summer heat.  A 2008 Bariki Ion.  Forest green.  A bumper sticker was attached below the logo.  Sun and weather had long since stripped everything away from it, leaving an off-white, wrinkled rectangle.

The brand logo read ‘Ion’, with the ‘n’ removed, possibly intentionally, for reasons only the car’s owner or faded bumper sticker might be able to answer.  Scuff marks on the paint where the ‘n’ had been, the paint a little paler.  The rust that poked through there was worse.

Her phone rang.  Her nerves were jangled enough she jumped at the sound, and on hearing it ring once, stop, then another call coming in, she broke from her routine, pulled into a parking lot, and stopped for a second before checking.

Similar to the library code, they had a shared set of playlists between them.  She synced.

New album at the bottom.

Yesternever.  By Est Tru.  40 minutes.

Cute.

And alarming.

Another job, so soon?  Eighty thousand, if she doubled the album length.

The clouds in the sky looked dingy, like the smoke from the end of last week had stained them and it would take longer to recover-more likely, the fires had continued to burn further afield, and the traces of it reached this far.  Car horns honked, and she didn’t need to look to see why.  A train was coming down the tracks, so the gates were closed, bells ringing and chiming out of sync, loud enough she was a block away and felt like she needed to get the ear protection out from the trunk.

Nowhere to go.  She’d be late to work.  She put the car into park and turned off the engine.  A few other cars seemed to expect this train to be a long one, and were pulling off the road.  One person got right out and ran to the nearby pharmacy.

Carson sent a follow-up.

Carson:
Added a song to our playlist.  We talked about it last night, after giving Josie her present.

Uncharacteristic.  Borderline breaking the code, crossing lines of communication.  Using text so soon after she had reminded him not to.  They’d used it too much last week.

Me:
Yeah.  Not sure if I have time to listen.

Carson:
You have to.

The job was mandatory, then.  Carson had an instinct for these things.  That meant more pressure, more demands, when things were already unstable.

She hadn’t told him about ‘Io’ yet.

It wouldn’t change his take, she guessed.

Every instinct screaming at her to ‘go’, cars honking, gate jangling, the train sounding off its mournful wail of a horn, she remained where she was.

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