“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 unofficial 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.