Read Online Apocalypse to Go by Katharine Kerr - Free Book Online Page B

AOS14 had to say. I took Step One immediately.
    “Okay,” I said. “I forgive you. But after this, I want to know when and where you’re passing intel about me and my Agency. You owe me, Nathan.”
    “I realize that.” He hesitated. “Very well, if it happens again, I’ll tell you.” Again, the hesitation. “I had no idea that they would give that report to a third party.”
    His SPP told me that about this detail he was speaking the truth. I also had the odd intuition that he, too, wasthinking that love sucked when it got in the way of one’s job.
    “Should I go live in the downstairs flat?” For that one brief moment he sounded not weak, never that, but vulnerable.
    “No,” I said. “Don’t be a jerk, Ari.”
    He smiled and walked over to kiss me.
    It took us a while to heal the breach, as it were. Once we had, we got dressed, and he went downstairs to work out. I returned to my computer desk, only to find the landline answering machine blinking. The message came from the realtor who handled the building we leased.
    “The neighbors have phoned me twice now,” Mr. Singh’s voice told me. “They complain about graffiti, guns, car thieves, and firecrackers thrown onto the sidewalk. Please call to enlighten me.” He left his business number.
    I thought of several jokes about long-distance enlightenment, canned them all, and came up with a good lie when I returned the call.
    “The firecrackers were the work of the local teen gang,” I told him. “They’re really mad because we keep removing their graffiti. When Ari caught one at it, he tried to arrest him, but the kid got away.”
    “Ah, I see.” Mr. Singh sounded relieved. “Of course, your partner is a police officer. I shall tell the neighbors this. They will be relieved that the gun they have seen is a legal weapon.”
    I returned to the day’s business affairs. Although I offered to videoconference with Mr. Spare14, he preferred to leave the discussion in e-mail. After a few rounds, we had arranged a meeting for Tuesday, the next day. I decided that it would be professional courtesy to let Spare14 know that I knew about Ari’s double-dealing. When I asked about including Ari in the meeting, Spare14 answered that he’d be welcome.
    “I thought he would be,” I typed. “This way he’ll be able to write up the meeting for his superiors.”
    Spare14’s answer came back, “
Peccavi
. Sorry.”
    “I have sinned” covered too much ground to be an honest admission. Had he badgered the information out of thetwo higher-ups to whom Ari had originally sent his report? Or had he come by it some other way? I’d have to wait to answer that question until we met.
    When Ari came back upstairs, I logged off and shut down my computer. The strangest communication of the day arrived at that point, not in e-mail, but on the dead black screen. I’d seen IOIs on a powered-off screen before, but this one came from outside my own mind.
    As I watched, the screen brightened to pale gray. A black circle appeared, fringed with seven stylized arrows, four toward the top, three at the bottom: the symbol of an unbalanced form of Chaos magic. The face of a white guy with a shaved head, blue eyes, and an unsettling resemblance to some of my relatives formed in the center of the circle—the entity I called Cryptic Creep. He’d been contacting me against my will ever since we’d moved into the flat. The graffito that so bothered the neighbors, that very same Chaos symbol, was his work.
    Although he looked like the O’Brien side of my family, his voice reminded me of no one I’d ever known: high and fluting. I heard it as if it came from outside my mind, but since Ari paid no attention at first, I knew it was a psychic communication. I, however, answered him aloud rather than risk opening up my mental language level to someone I didn’t know.
    “Nola,” he said, “you’ve been ignoring me.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Why not? You always deliver the same old