"My mother's got cancer, and I think the feds are going to lock her up in a Biological Research center! It's not just money, Mr. Tudbury."
He'd hunched his shoulders up as if he were trying to pull his head down beneath his collar.
"The tabloids said you didn't do anything but stir up some water. They say the kids went to never-never land. Some sort of alternate reality business. Jumpers, jokers, and all," Zoe said.
"You want me to believe the tabloids?"
"It would beat believing that you're a mass murderer."
"Yeah. It would. Some of the bodies were real, though. Kids in uniform, serving their country, or trying to. Jokers floating in with the tides, and the ambulance crews afraid to pick up the bodies, couldn't be convinced the wild card wasn't like AIDS. Sometimes I ..."
He looked dazed, as if the world had slapped him, hard. Zoe pushed her chair back, leaned across the breakfast dishes, and reached for him. She held his face in her hands and kissed him, gently, half-convinced that she'd gone mad, and totally aware that a buttered muffin was squashed against the pocket of her Versace blouse.
The shower had stopped running. The woman who had been in it stood in the bedroom doorway. She was drying her red, red hair with a towel, and she wore another draped like a sarong.
"Oh, sorry to interrupt. Tuds, you have more old friends than a politician."
Zoe disengaged from what was turning out to be a lingering and very satisfactory kiss, brushed crumbs away from her blazer, stood up straight, and offered her hand to the naked woman.
"Zoe Harris," she said. "You must be ..."
"Danny Shepherd."
From his chair, Turtle yelped out in a voice that had suddenly gone about an octave higher, "She's not an old friend. I just met her!"
If Central Casting had a prototype for a perfect starlet's body, Danny Shepherd fit it. Periwinkle eyes, long legs, high firm breasts, a dancer's muscles, triple-cream skin, Danny had it all. And she had one of the most honest and infectious cheerleader's grins Zoe had ever seen.
"New friend, then."
"She's got a repressed ace. She wants some help, Danny."
"So help her. Jeez, Turtle, do what you can, okay? The way things are going, we're going to need all the ace powers there are. Right?"
"Thanks," Zoe said. "Thank you, Danny."
"He's shy, you know." Danny turned and bent to kiss Turtle's cheek. "Tuds, I forgot my razor. Can I borrow yours?"
"Sure."
Danny wandered back toward the bath. Turtle loved her. That showed in his eyes. She hurt him, sometimes. That showed, too. He braced his forearms on the table and motioned Zoe back toward her chair.
"She's beautiful," Zoe said.
"Yes. Yes, she is. Now about this power of yours."
"I ... animate things. I guess that's what you'd call it."
"What you do. Is it like teke?"
"It's not teke. I can't float a coffeecup in the air. But I could grow legs on it, and it would jump, or I could give it a big floppy ear where its handle is, and it could fly."
"Show me."
"Oh, no!"
"Why not?"
"I'm shy. Maybe that's part of it." So why had she kissed him? Well, because he'd needed it. So there.
"I'm shy myself. Show me."
"I can't do it while you're watching me."
"Fine. I'll go in the other room." He got up and left her there.
Can't work, won't work, nothing was ever this simple. Just do it? Zoe stared at the coffeecup, picked it up, breathed against it, tried to imagine the amorphous latticework of the fired clay flowing into new shapes, the metallic ions becoming gears and levers. Nothing. She heard Turtle say something, and Danny giggling. Zoe held the cup and tried again. Can't do it. Can't.
"Well?" Turtle reappeared at the doorway.
"I have to be scared. I have to be convinced I'm in danger. Sorry, Turtle. You're just not scary enough."
"That's what they all say," he said, very low. He looked disappointed, and wary, as if he still didn't believe she wasn't here on some sort of scam or the other.
"I hurt a mugger once. I think. He had a knife, or I thought he did. I grabbed my special twenty, you know, the one I carry in my bra, and made it turn into a little airplane. Like a paper airplane, but metal, with razor edges, and it went for his eyes. He ran."
"Weren't people watching you then?"
"On the street? No one looks. I'm trying to remember when I've used the power. Sometimes when I can't find my keys, I just open the locks anyway, if no one's watching. I try to forget when I do things like that."
"I'm not sure you can save the world if that's all you can do," Turtle said.
Danny came in and sat down on the couch. She had put on jeans and a bomber jacket, both in a deep butternut color. On her, the simple clothes were a designer's wet dream.
"If I didn't have to wait until I was scared, if I could plan things out in advance, I could think about how to use them better. I could set a watch to watch someone, or put a listener in someone's pocket"
"Electronic bugs have been around for a long time," Turtle said.
"I could make weapons out of things, vases, silverware, coffeepots. Design them to resume their original shapes once they'd been used."
"That has possibilities," Danny said.
"Yeah," the Turtle said.
"Small things," Zoe said. "I have to be able to pick them up. I can't do it with anything that's alive. The energies aren't right, they move around so much, anyway."
"Nothing alive. Nothing big. How big, Zoe?"
"The biggest thing so far was a ..." She had just met these people. She couldn't tell them all her secrets. But if she didn't, she was running from possible help. And she liked them, both of them. "... a bedspread. It almost strangled a guy I was in bed with." There wasn't any way this was going to sound right "No, no, he wasn't trying to rape me or anything. He just scared me."
"Your first time?" Danny asked.
"Yes. I just didn't realize ..."
"How big they could get," Danny said. She began to laugh. Turtle didn't.
"Oh, the poor bastard," Danny said. "Did he recover? Enough to - "
"No. Not that night anyway."
"But later?"
"Oh, yes." Zoe smiled, remembering his embarrassment, her confusion, the mutual reassurances which had blotted out, she hoped, his memories of the bedspread levitating above them, then twisting in the air to form a noose that snaked its way around the poor guy's neck. The relationship hadn't lasted long, though. A few weeks.
"But when you do the keyhole bit, you aren't scared then."
"No."
"How do you feel afterwards?" Danny asked.
"Uh ... fatigued."
"For how long?"
"It depends. It depends on how much energy goes into the animation, I guess."
"Sleepy?" Danny asked.
"Yes." Zoe had never thought about it, but yes, sleepy.
"Uh, huh. Zoe, what's your schedule today?" Danny asked.
Time to go. They think I'm a total nut case, and Danny wants me out of here. "I'm due at the attorney's office." These were sweet people, but they couldn't help. Zoe had to meet with Mendlen again, and she dreaded the encounter, the questions, the mutual evaluations. "Soon. I really should be going."
"Let's do lunch," Danny said. "Tuds, you have an interview. Sell that book, honey."
"Where this time?" Turtle asked.
"It's a radio thing. Here's the address. I'll be back around midafternoon. Come on, Zoe."
"The attorney - "
"Can wait."
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
The waiter led them through a maze of tables and past stainless steel dim sum carts to a red leather booth where Danny sat, except Danny was beside Zoe and the Danny scarfing up phoenix-eye dumplings was a little more angular. Her absolutely perfect auburn hair was cut in a side-parted, chin-length wedge, the sort of cut that Zoe's waves would never let her wear.