My tea was already steeping when I went back to the tiny staff kitchen to find Aimil. “So, how did it happen?” I said.
She didn’t bother to ask how did what happen. “I knew about your SOFs at Charlie’s because you told me about them.”
“I told you so you wouldn’t stop speaking to me because I seemed to like some guys who wore khaki and navy blue.”
“That they were SOF was supposed to help?”
“They told the best Other stories.”
“I guess. I could have done without the one…never mind. Anyway, so I recognized them when they came here. One day Pat and Jesse asked if I’d come by the SOF office some day for a chat—I hadn’t realized you could feel surrounded by two people, you know?—and what was I going to say, no? So I said yes. And then they asked me if I’d be interested in doing a little work for SOF and of course I said no, and then they started working around to telling me they weren’t so interested that I was a reference librarian as they were interested in what I was doing with Otherwatch and Beware. They seemed to know what I was doing at home too, and before I totally freaked Pat held his breath and turned blue. I said, what’s to prevent me reporting you? And he said, because you’re another one…I have no idea how they found out.” Aimil stopped, but she didn’t stop like end-of-the-story stop.
“And?” I said.
She sighed. “Rae, I’m sorry. They also said, because you’re a friend of Sunshine’s.”
There was no window in the little library staff kitchen. I wanted sunlight. What had my friendship to do with anything? She’d been working for SOF for almost two years. “And you didn’t tell me.”
Aimil walked over to the door and closed it gently. I didn’t want anyone to hear us either, but my spine started prickling with claustrophobia, or dark-o-phobia anyway. “I’m sorry,” said Aimil. “It’s only been since I’ve been working for them that I’ve started…have been able to start thinking of myself as Other. As a partblood. The best way to pass is to believe in the role, you know? My parents know, of course, but they haven’t made any attempt to find out where it comes from. None of my brothers had anything weird happen to them, and so far as I know they don’t know about me. I haven’t told my family I’m SOF, and I haven’t—hadn’t—told anyone I’m partblood. Who was I going to tell? Why? The only person who would have a right to know is the father of my children, and I’m not going to have children and pass this on. I hope none of my brothers’ kids…well. Because I’d have to tell them then.”
I didn’t say anything right away. “When did you find out?”
“Yeah,” said Aimil. “Right about the time I met you. You looked as lost as I felt. And then it turned out we got along, and…”
“Did everyone but my mother and me assume that who my dad was was public knowledge?”
“It wasn’t quite that bad.”
I looked at her.
She said reluctantly, “It was maybe worse during the Voodoo Wars but by then everyone knew you, and your mom had married Charlie, and Charlie’s family has lived in Old Town forever, and you were normal by context, you know? And then you had two dead-normal little pests for brothers. Nobody ever, ever caught you doing anything weird at school—you seemed just as fascinated as the rest of us when some of the Ngus and Bloodaxes and so on talked about magic handling. I don’t deny that a few people looked at you a little sideways.”
I’d let my tea sit too long, but the bitterness in my mouth seemed appropriate.
“You were into cooking, Rae. And a generation or two ago the Blaises were top dog, sure—”
Were they, I thought. So many things my mother never told me. Although I couldn’t really blame her for my avoiding reading globenet articles that mentioned the Blaises. Could I? I’d wanted to be Rae Seddon.
“You still heard a little about them at the beginning of the Wars…but then it’s like what was left of them disappeared. So maybe you were genuinely normal, you know? Most people say that magic handling runs out in families sooner or later.”
“The SOFs didn’t think so,” I muttered. Disappeared. Bo’s lot brought me a Blaise. And, not just a third cousin who can do card tricks and maybe write a ward sign that almost works, but Onyx Blaise’s daughter.
Onyx Blaise.
Whose mother taught his daughter to transmute. How did the people who were looking at me sideways count those one or two generations? What else could my gran do? Had she done?
Disappeared how?
“And nobody gets more normal than your mom.”
True. I would think about how to thank her for my very well embedded normalcy later. It might be difficult to choose between cyanide and garrotting.
“Can we go outside?” I said.
The sun was behind a cloud but daylight is still better than indoors. “Aimil. I want to ask you a favor.”
“Done.”
“Okay. Thanks. It’s what SOF wants me to do—try and get some location fix on one of your creepy cosmails. But I want to do it somewhere that isn’t behind proofglass.”
“In daylight,” said Aimil. “Okay. We’ll do it at my house. My next afternoon off is Thursday.”
“I’ll find someone to swap with.”
“It’s not only the proofglass, is it? It’s also SOF. You don’t want to do it just because SOF tells you to.”
I nodded. “I know they’re the good guys and everything, but…”
“I know. Once I found out they were watching me I changed the way I do some stuff. They are good guys and I do work for them and I don’t mind—much. But it’s all a little nomad for me. And I still have this silly idea that my life belongs to me.”
There were good reasons Aimil and I were friends.
I went home that night and stood on the balcony again and said to the darkness, “Con, Constantine, are you all right? If you need me, call me to you.”
For a moment I felt…something. Like a twitch against your line when you’re half asleep or thinking about something else. It may be a fish and it may be the current…but it may be a fish. (I’d learned to fish because Mel taught me, not because I longed to impale small invertebrates on barbed hooks and rip hell out of piscine oral cavities and smother fellow oxygen breathers in an alien medium.) The flicker itself made me think I was half asleep or thinking about something else, because I was straining after any sign whatsoever. And it was gone again at once.
Thursday afternoon wasn’t flash ideal but I managed. Paulie was a little too not-sorry to change his single weekly four-thirty-in-the-morning shift for another afternoon that Thursday, and he hadn’t made up the one he’d missed our last thirteen-day week yet either. I’d worry about just how not-sorry he was later. Meanwhile I got up at three a.m. to do a little extra baking like I had a point to make. As I drank the necessary pint-mug of blacker-than-the-pit-of-doom tea to get me going I stood on the balcony again, testing for quivers in the current. All I got was a stronger sense that there was something wrong; but I was good at feeling there was something wrong even when there wasn’t—something I’d inherited from my mother—and there was nothing in this case but my own glangy unease to look at.