99 Gods: War

  Chapter Seven? Instant bankruptcy, shut down the company, liquidate, kapoof and it’s gone? Insane. Giant companies didn’t do such things.

  “But why?” the man next to Dave asked.

  “Nobody knows,” the woman said. “Their stock price wasn’t doing anything more than following the market. I don’t know of any special pending lawsuits. The reporters and bloggers are dumbfounded, with nothing but rumors to go on.”

  Dave shivered again, recalling Tiff’s comments from last Friday night, after Dave had returned from his chamber music practice. He turned and hurried off to return to DPMJ Consultants.

  Lunch grumbled in Dave’s stomach as he looked over the DPMJ financials again. Take-out food, eaten during an intense meeting, had never been good for him.

  He sat with his three partners in the main meeting room; they had chased out the admins and the other technical staff members just after lunch, a half hour ago. Boxes and paper wrappers still littered the table among the tablets and laptop computers, papers and printouts. “We don’t need to declare Chapter 7 or 11 immediately, but unless we can drum up some replacement clients soon, it’s inevitable,” Pete said, wiping his face again with a lunch napkin. “We sank too much money into equipment during the last two pre-God boom years.” Dave and Pete Diaz had founded DP almost a decade ago; Jose and Miguel had bought in one and three years later, sparking the name change to DPMJ.

  “I think I found a way,” Miguel said. Jose’s phone warbled; he took one look at the screen and dismissed the call. “I don’t want to suggest this, but we can restructure our way around this and scrape through.” He tapped his tablet screen and a set of financials appeared on the giant flat panel touch screen they used as a whiteboard. Dave grimaced.

  “Ouch,” Dave said, looking through Miguel’s idea. Simple, but painful: Pete, Jose and Miguel would buy Dave out, lay off all of Dave’s technical staff and his executive assistant Lupe. The remaining PMJ would take out loans for the buyout; the loan payments would reduce the hemorrhaging to where PMJ would have at least a year to get things back into the black.

  You can’t do this to my company!

  But they could, easy as opening a bag of cheese curls. Hernandez had been Dave’s big client. With Hernandez gone, Dave wasn’t contributing, at least not much. He had become a liability.

  “I’m not sure we need to go that far yet,” Pete said. He pawed through numbers, as did Dave. “Dave?”

  “I see what you’re saying,” Dave said. He sent his numbers to the whiteboard display. “If I go on unpaid leave, save for travel expenses, you can squeeze out another two quarters before having to buy me out. This would hopefully give me enough time to drum up enough new business to replace Hernandez.”

  “This isn’t going to be easy,” Jose said. He stared out the window at the sparse pine forest surrounding the small building DPMJ rented. Most of the building served as a workshop and a warehouse. “The market’s down twenty five percent from its post-God high and still falling, and the commodity marketbasket tied to our clients is down nearly thirty percent. People are getting jittery about what the impact of the Gods is going to be on the economy, long term, and they’re all starting to sit on their money.”

  Which meant yet another killer recession, Dave realized. Goodbye utopia, hello breadlines. Dreadlines?

  “We’ll still need to lay off our dedicated Hernandez tech staff,” Miguel said.

  “That’s going to make it very hard for me to get any new clients,” Dave said.

  “We need to if we want to avoid going into Chapter 11 ourselves,” Miguel said.

  Dave sighed. “Gotcha.”

  “I don’t think we have any choice,” Pete said. “I’ll start my people working up some buy-out options, Dave. It wouldn’t be fair not to give you any input in this.”

  “Thanks,” Dave said. Damn.

  “They’re going to be covering your travel expenses?” Tiff said. Dave nodded. “That’s at least something.” They sat in the living room, each with their own tablet computer. Olinda puttered about the kitchen, preparing the kids’ usual healthy late night snack. After today, Dave would rather relax in their hot tub than stare at an iPad. Life called, though, angry, the bitch before you die.

  “We bet on growth,” Dave said, talking about DPMJ. “Not on this disaster. Hernandez had been in business forever. They got their start in the big 70s boom, the 1870s; their deep pockets should have absorbed the commodity price drop for years. I can’t for the life of me figure out how this…”

  “Focus, Dave, focus,” Tiff said. “We have our own financial disaster to think about. We don’t own this house, remember.”

  The bank did. The house and its location had been Tiff’s idea; she had thought there wouldn’t be any problem committing a quarter of their substantial income to a mortgage. They hadn’t had to scrimp or cut corners for years, and they hadn’t after they had built the house, at least until now. Dave found himself feeling unprepared, like being young again, save for the part about the old creaky and well-poisoned body.

  “We can do this,” Dave said. “I’m sure we can.” His head throbbed, and he rubbed his forehead and tried to relax.

  “What to cut, though?”

  “The after-school day care and Olinda, for one.”

  Tiff frowned. “Are you volunteering to be home when the kids come home? You’re going to be out of town drumming up clients, or so I thought.”

  Ouch. “What’s your suggestion?”

  “I don’t have any good suggestions. Everything either nukes our careers or forces us to dip into our investments.”

  “We may need…”

  Tiff shook her head. “Short term, perhaps. Long term? I won’t hear of it.” She paused. “I don’t think we can count on being able to sell our house, either. If you want, I can show you what’s happened to the real estate market in the past month. It’s gotten 2009 ugly again.”

  “You worried about the place you work for?”

  “Yes, long term,” Tiff said. “Not short term.” She took a sip of water. “Dave, cutting the day care is not an option.”

  “Fine,” he said, and went on to the next topic.

  “You need to give up sponsorship of your chamber music group,” Tiff said. They had already decided to yank their kids out of their private school and send them to the local public school. Although the school didn’t meet Tiff’s high standards, Parmalee was the area’s best local elementary school. Tiff had made sure of that before they built the home, just in case.

  Oh, and they had agreed to drop the lawn service, the maid service, their planned vacation to Majorca, and the once a month expensive night out.

  Dave grimaced, his head pounding. “My sponsorship isn’t much money.” They had already told Olinda the bad news; she hadn’t taken it well and had stalked off in a huff before putting the kids to bed. He and Tiff had finished that unfamiliar activity a half hour ago, attracting too-adult questions from the kids. Excess domesticity didn’t agree with Dave any more than it ever had. Tiff just lied with a straight face.

  “It’s as much as our maid service,” Tiff said. “Look, I know how much this means to you, but it is a luxury.”

  “The chamber music is my main hobby.”

  “It’s budget fat. Besides, if you’re going to be out drumming up clients, you’re going to be living up to the demands of your career for the first time and…”

  “Hey,” Dave said, interrupting his wife. “I’m not sure I like the ‘living up to the demands of your career’ comment, Tiff.” He and Tiff hadn’t talked for so long on one subject for years. Tiff’s commentary wore on him, an itchy shrunken woolen sweater.

  “You could grow up about this,” Tiff said.

  “You could cut your hours,” he said. “You’re putting in seventy hour weeks. Those are desperate hours suitable for a desperate twenty-something, not the hours a successful someone in her la
te thirties should be forced to put in.”

  Tiff frowned back at him. “I’m not being forced to put in those hours, Dave. I like what I’m doing. If anything, I’d like to be able to work eighty or ninety hours a week. For what I’m trying to accomplish, I need the hours.”

  Gad. He knew Tiff had become a workaholic grind, but he hadn’t expected her comment. “It’s just, well…I have a life and I don’t want to lose it,” Dave said. “I’m being honest, here.” He had thought Tiff’s long hours a phase, not a goal. No, she didn’t just work with the computers. It appeared she wanted to become one.

  “I can be honest, too,” she said, typing on her screen as she spoke. “What I see is someone who doesn’t want to lose their youth. I mean, amateur chamber music, in your forties? Opera, ballet and plays? Peter Pan doesn’t have anything on you, Dave. That’s not a life, just a bunch of childish whims.”

  Dave turned away, shocked. He hadn’t realized Tiff felt so intensely on the subject. He enjoyed his life. Hell, he even thought people were supposed to enjoy life. He enjoyed his work, too, but not enough to throw away the rest of his life.

  His dearest wife had locked her inner child in a safety deposit box and thrown away the key.

  I don’t know this person anymore, he realized. He looked away at their living room decorations, put there either by Dave or the decorator. The ceramic chickens were out of place again. Through the curtains, he saw a few drops of rain spattering the two story windows, singing down the dust in narrow twisted rows. He couldn’t remember the last time Tiff had done anything positive around the house other than throw money at things that needed doing. Other than her office, of course.

  I’m not sure I want to know this person anymore, he continued in thought.

  For the first time ever, the word ‘divorce’ crossed his mind.

  “It’s my choice,” Dave said. “You could have mentioned it earlier…”

  “I lied,” Tiff said. She did lie. Often. “I’ve haven’t been coming to your plays and your recitals because I like them.” He didn’t perform in the plays, he was a volunteer assistant stage manager and costume whiz. “It’s because they’re an obligation. You sure you want to hear about this?”

  Save me. “I don’t want to hear about this at all, but I do think this is necessary,” Dave said. “In fact, I think you’re going to need to tell me what you’re actually doing in this all-consuming job of yours. I don’t have the information necessary to argue my point. How can I judge how important your hours are, anyway?”

  “Take my word for it, they’re important,” Tiff the admitted liar said, very tense.

  “I disagree. I need to know why.”

  Tiff balled her fists, closed her eyes, and tensed even more. Slowly, during the ensuing quiet, she relaxed. “Do you mind if I can’t tell you everything?” she said, curling her upper lip. “I’ve signed confidentiality agreements on the subject, you should already know.”

  “Fine.”

  She didn’t turn toward him as she spoke. Instead, she stared longingly at the hallway leading to her gigantic home office. “Let me give you a fake example of one of our clients, right out of one of our training manuals. The fake client’s called Happy Friends, and their corporate motto is ‘detailed personal information examination makes everyone a happy friend’. The name and motto are fake, but there are dozens of companies in the United States with similar names and mottoes, all brazen, brass and in your face. They come to us for the basics and also when they run into very difficult information problems.”

  “You’re an illicit data broker?” Dave said, the bottom dropping out of his gut, a sudden elevator lurch.

  “Your reaction is why I never talk about what I do, Dave. Everybody has such an unjust view of companies like mine,” Tiff said. “We’re not illicit. Companies like Happy Friends have their own clients: car dealerships, mortgage lenders, investors, politicians, political consultants, political parties, lobbyists, insurance companies, law enforcement agencies, private investigators and so on and so forth. They hire Happy Friends to provide information about the lives of the people they’re going to be financially or commercially entangled with. It’s these clients’ money, so they have every right to know absolutely everything relevant about who’s going to be receiving their money. What we do is make it possible for Happy Friends to do this without having to re-invent the wheel.”

  How to break the law and cover it up, basically. “And your part in all this?” Dave fought the bad taste in his mouth. Tiff had grown a hunchback, snaggleteeth and warts.

  “I’m a supervisor in the social engineering department,” Tiff said.

  “Which means nothing to me.” Tiff had said she had a purely IT job. Clearly not, just another lie.

  “The social engineering department handles the difficult cases,” Tiff said. “I can’t tell you about our methods, as they’re confidential, but I can give you the goal: when we’re given a difficult case, our social engineers are trained to immerse themselves in the data we’ve gathered to where they and our helper AIs become the person or company they’re investigating. Once they immerse, they can usually ferret out all the inconvenient secrets.”

  Grotesque. Monstrous. Enough to make him want to grab a placard and lead a Libertarian protest march. “And this is all legal and everything? I find this hard to believe.” His headache got worse.

  Tiff rolled her head back, with a little eyeball skyward roll as well. ‘Of course you don’t believe me, you prejudiced fool’ he read. She had joined the bad guys.

  “Our company doesn’t deal with individual clients, just companies like Happy Friends. It’s up to the companies who hire us as consultants to decide whether their activities are legal and fit under the current corporate free speech Supreme Court rulings. All we do is gather data, give reports and do some judicious consulting on difficult cases. We’re fully and legally inoculated.”

  And if he believed this, he ought to drop weights on his toes to see if any of the weights perhaps fell up. She hadn’t just joined the bad guys, she had joined the super-slimy smarmy suck-ass bad guys.

  Tiff turned to him and looked him in the eye. “I’m Social Engineering’s top supervisor and my boss is thinking of moving to a more relaxing position in the company. I want his job, Dave. That’s why I need to work those hours.”

  So stick a fucking knife in his back, Dave thought. He couldn’t keep a grimace off his face.

  12. (Nessa)

  “…and take this ring and stick it up your ass as far as you can reach!” Nessa said. She threw her wedding band at Ken and stalked out of the Palm Beach motel room, shaking with anger. Her mind filled with unwanted thoughts, from the driver who thought her a lunatic bag lady to the grifter on the lookout for retiree men who smiled. Nessa jaywalked across Ocean Boulevard to the honking of horns, stalked across the parking lot of the less seedy multi-story beach resort blocking their dive’s view of the Atlantic, and trotted down the resort’s sidewalk to the beach. She took a deep breath, an attempt to calm herself.

  Nothing. Nessa sat on the sand at the edge of the beach, a hundred feet from the water, and steamed. The bright mid-day sun hurt her eyes, despite her dark sunglasses. She tried to relax, to let her mind open to the world around, but couldn’t.

  No Opartuth. Nothing. How could she ask for help rescuing Uffie, or find out what it had to do with the 99 Gods or whatever, if the damned thing wouldn’t show up? She balled her fist and beat it on the sand three times, then stood and stalked down to the beach, into the wash from the crashing waves.

  “Miss, is something wrong?”

  Nessa turned to look at the person who had the temerity to talk to her, and found an official looking young man in a resort uniform giving her the once over. She took a good look at herself from his eyes and realized she wore a long-sleeve pajama top, blue jeans, and mid-heel pumps. And she stood in the surf running up to her knees.
>
  “You must think I’m bizarre,” she said to the man. “Now go away.”

  He went away.

  She called out to Opartuth again; again she got no answer.

  Nessa took a deep breath and closed her eyes. The headache pounded worse. She turned and walked back up the beach, across the resort, and back toward the motel room. She and Ken had been fighting, but her anger had evaporated. She couldn’t remember what the fight had been about. The headache remained, as did her feeling of utter failure. She wondered if there had ever been anyone as pathetic as her.

  Through the open door to their motel room wafted out moldy skanky air-conditioned air and the humid fish-market stench of the Atlantic. She walked in and found Ken punching clothes in a suitcase. Anger filled the room, a tremulous cloud. Everything in the hotel room was in the wrong place, upside down, or bent out of shape, typical effects of Ken’s anger. He looked up at her, eyes hot.

  “Lunatic bitch,” he said, and turned back to his packing.

  “Uh huh, yup, yessireediedeedie, that’s me,” Nessa said. She ended with a false cackle worthy of a bad nightclub act. “What were we fighting about, anyway?”

  Ken stopped mid stuff and melted to the floor to lay face down. A moan escaped his lips, and he pounded the compacted pile carpeting three times, reminding Nessa of when she had pounded the sand. Only, when he pounded, the slab rumbled underneath her feet.

  “This is impossible,” he said.

  “What’s impossible?”

  “You are.”

  “Uh huh,” she said, tone rising and turning the ‘huh’ into a two syllable word.

  Ken made a noise somewhere between an ‘aargh’ and a yelp. No words, thoughts hidden.

  “This place brings out the worst in me,” Nessa said, a wheedle. She wanted sympathy. She needed sympathy. A bar of chocolate, too. Lindt would be good. Valrhona would be better. “I hate the sun. It’s why when I worked for you, back in Los Angeles, I preferred to work nights. Except when Ron made me work days.” This place also reminded her of all her failed attempts at life before her move to Eklutna.

  “You hate the sun,” he said, deadpan. “Let me guess, Nessa. You always hated the sun. You just never got around to telling me.”

  “I didn’t always hate the sun.” She walked over to Ken’s prone body, sat down beside him, and rubbed his back. “I get headaches. The headaches started after I had my breakdown in college.” After six months of nightmares, from looking into things normal mortal humans shouldn’t ever look into. She still blamed those others. “They weren’t as bad back when I was working for you as they got later.” He tried to slap her hand away, but she avoided his arm and he gave up. She kneaded his neck. That’s what she wanted right now, someone kneading her neck.

  “Wonderful. Well, if that’s what the problem is, we can switch around and sleep in the daytime,” Ken said. “I’m not sure what this has to do with cooperation.”

  “What about cooperation?” Nessa said. Rubbing his back didn’t help. His anger remained. She took off her sunglasses, lay down beside Ken and buried her head, at eye level, into the corner of his arm. She let the smell of his body drive away the odor of the beach air, moldy air conditioner, and the indescribable foul salty odor of the floor. Her mind relaxed in the darkness.

  “You aren’t being the least cooperative. You didn’t like me bringing that up or something, because when I did you exploded, tossed your wedding ring at me and stalked out.”

  Oh, so that’s what I did? Nessa sniffed, tears dewing the corners of her eyes. “Can I have the wedding ring back? I’ll try to be better.” Ken didn’t answer or move his body, which did a fine imitation of concrete. “I’ll even cooperate, though I don’t know what I wasn’t cooperating with you on.” No answer. “When did I start not cooperating?” Pause. “If I wasn’t cooperating.” Longer pause. “Which in your opinion I was. Wasn’t. Whatever.” Seven blocks away, a guy got a tattoo in a tattoo parlor. In pain. She couldn’t stand his pain, so she blocked out everything.

  “I don’t want to go through this again,” Ken said. Nessa wiggled her head ‘no’. “Okay, this started after you said you sensed a couple of strange types flying up in outer space when we were on the airplane. You haven’t cooperated since.”

  “Well, you didn’t believe me,” she said. “I wasn’t making it up. What am I supposed to do?”

  Ken groaned.

  “You don’t like admitting I can be better than you in something,” Nessa said. “Is that your problem?”

  Ken groaned again. “I know you’re better than I am in lots of things. It’s, uh, just what you claimed didn’t make any sense.”

  Nessa sighed. Ken kept picking at her! She tried to remember what she said about the two strange types. She hadn’t been informative, she recalled. Perhaps that was the problem.

  Of course, she wasn’t informative because Ken doubted her from the start. She wanted to make up with him now, though. Get him to rub her neck. She liked that. Or would, if he started. “Well, one of them was a person and the other one wasn’t. It didn’t make any sense to me. Then the I-am-not-a-person person projected herself into the airplane and I poofed her projection.”

  “You didn’t say this before,” Ken said.

  “I know I didn’t.” Ken always had to be so difficult about things. She thought about the problem for a few seconds, and decided she would go halfway and not say she hadn’t told him about the projection because he had interrupted her. “They were both women.”

  “You were sure they were in space?”

  “I said so,” she said. She wasn’t sure that’s what she meant. “Well, I don’t know for sure. I’m not sure how high planes fly or anything.” She had gotten through high school by leeching off the memories of others and hadn’t realized until later that by doing so she hadn’t formed any memories in her own mind of what she thought she had learned. By then it was too late for her to learn any other way. She hadn’t been able to read textbooks without having fits for years and years.

  “How many plane-heights were they, then?”

  “Plane-heights?”

  “You can sense how high you are above the ground when you’re in an airplane, I know you can,” Ken said.

  “Yes. So?” She hated to discuss her limitations and handicaps. But, well, this was Ken, her husband, her partner in this mess. He had a right to know about her problems, even if they terminally embarrassed her. She had agreed to marry him just for this reason.

  Or so she thought, right now.

  “Think of measuring their height in multiples of the distance the plane was above the ground,” Ken said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Because it involves fractions.” She didn’t understand what one exactly did with fractions. She used to, but she had lost the knowledge somewhere. Too many ‘nominators’ among the terms. She wouldn’t mind getting the knowledge back.

  “Nessa, I know you can do fractions,” Ken said. She didn’t respond. “Round down.”

  “What’s rounding?”

  Ken explained.

  “Oh, well, then, uh, none.”

  Ken thudded the carpet with his fist twice more. Nessa sniffed. Men were so strange. “Can you explain ‘none’?” he asked. Falsely polite.

  “I’m not sure I can,” Nessa said. “They were almost as far above us as we were above the ground, but not quite. Between three quarters and all the way.” Was three quarters a fraction? She wasn’t sure. It also sounded like seventy-five cents.

  Right now nearly everything confused her. Not remembering fractions? How could she not remember fractions?

  She always wanted to scream when her mind got this screwy.

  “Oh,” Ken said. “They weren’t in space, then. But they were up a ways. Commercial airplanes don’t fly that high.”

  “They weren’t in a plan
e. They flew like superman. Well, not exactly,” Nessa said. “The one who wasn’t human flew like superman. The human held onto the non-human’s hand, sort of dragged along by the other one’s trick and wasn’t wholly happy about the flying business.”

  Ken paused. “Why didn’t you say she was a God?”

  “A God? She was?” Nessa said. “You’re kidding. She wasn’t even as powerful as either of us.”

  Ken rolled over. With her eyes no longer in Ken’s armpit, the light blinded Nessa and she moaned from the pain. He took her in his arms and she buried her eyes in the angle of his arm again, this time on his front side. “You’re wet,” he said.

  “Wet happens.” Someone nearby ate waffles. The smell lingered in his nose and as he ate he satisfied Nessa’s appetite. Late teen, some guy who liked breakfast foods all day long. He didn’t understand why matching shorts and shirts looked good on women. Or why they took so much out of his paycheck in taxes.

  Ken sighed. “The God I met wasn’t very powerful, either, but unlike the two of us, his power level went up and down radically over the short time I, um, encountered him. Freaky. The one I met hit two orders of magnitude of power difference.”

  “Whatever.” Anyone who tried to order her magnitudes was going to end up with lead poisoning, that was for sure. Ken had tried to sneak her guns away from her and throw them away, but she fooled him into thinking he had succeeded.

  “Ignore the comment,” Ken said, and stroked her hair. A tiny bit of subconscious influence from Nessa soon had him rubbing her neck. Ummm. Ummmmmm. “So now you know what Gods sense like. What was the other one? Why was she different than either of us?”

  “The power wasn’t hers, but someone else’s,” Nessa said.

  “Her companion’s power?” He continued to rub her neck.

  “Nope. You believe me now?”

  “Yes, I believe you now,” Ken said, and sighed an artistically long theatrical sigh. Surely she hadn’t been that bad. Ken always over-reacted to everything. “Now, can you explain your headaches and your sun sensitivity?”

  “No. But they do happen,” Nessa said. “Right now is about as bad as ever.”

  “If you open up your mind to me, I’ll take a look,” Ken said. Nessa shivered.

  “I’ll try.” She wanted to trust Ken, especially right now when she could touch him and huddle up against him. Especially when she had this horrible headache. She had so many layers of shields, though. Some she never let down, never ever, but she could expand those so they covered Ken as well and they would both be on the inside. She moved things around, damping some of her shields and expanding others. It took more time than she planned. “That better?”

  “Jeez,” Ken said. He quieted.

  “Is that all you can say?”

  “Well, okay, how about Holy Fuck.”

  “I told you I was a mess.”

  He didn’t comment for longer than she thought conversationally appropriate. Nessa shivered. It would serve her right if he left her. She knew how bad a mess swirled and groaned in her mind. She couldn’t lie to herself about her head mess. “Ummm. What’s this?” Ken asked. Finally.

  He mentally tweaked her mind. She thought about it and figured out what he touched. “Oh. You tweaked my stamina trick. But the stamina trick can’t be why I have trouble with the sun. I haven’t been pulling on it much since I’ve been with you. You’re so relaxing to lie next to I can’t help but fall asleep. I don’t have to stay awake.” She had tried to learn martial arts once, but her temper had gotten the best of her and she had abused the mind of the poor Sensei. He had tried her patience.

  “I think it’s the other way around,” Ken said. “I think your headaches come when you’re not exerting yourself. Not using your stamina trick.”

  Nessa laughed. “Well, I guess I’m going to have to start exerting myself more. Starting now.” She knew sex cured her headaches. Some of the time. “Besides, it’ll give me an excuse to get out of my wet jeans.” Give her an excuse not to think about how messed up her mind was today.

  At least she wasn’t forgetting names.

  She just hated it when she forgot her own name.

  The night air hung leaden with humidity, thick enough that breathing took extra work. Nessa walked hand in hand with Ken along the beach. They had walked down to the south end of the barrier island, to some inlet, nearly eight miles, far enough south so they weren’t in Palm Beach any more. They talked the entire way, sharing their lives and scanning for Opartuth. Nessa’s feet ached, not used to walking on sand.

  “The sun’s going to be up before we get back,” Ken said. Nessa sensed his exhaustion. “Your headache will come back.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to keep going.”

  “I was thinking we could take a taxi back.”

  “What’s so special about this inlet here?” Nessa said.

  “One of my hunches. I think…”

  “It’s not Opartuth,” Nessa said. “But…”

  She pushed out with her mind. Although close, the contact pushed back, as difficult as she remembered from her youth. She quickly took off her sandals and waded into the water. “Come with me.”

  “Okay.”

  Partly in the water the contact became clearer. Contacts. “Oh, no!” Nessa said.

  “What is it?”

  She queried the minds she contacted. They couldn’t answer in human words, of course, but she understood the gist of it.

  “Opartuth’s no more. Dead, I guess,” Nessa said. The world spun around her. She fought for control. “I think I’m going to have one of my fits. It’s going to be bad. Bad bad bad.” The fit had been building all day long.

  Opartuth couldn’t be dead. Not possible. It didn’t make sense. However, Opartuth was no longer present.

  Ken backed off.

  Nessa howled with her voice and with her mind. She became the howl. Her sense of self fled.

  “Tell me,” right sock said. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “Loss and pain,” Nessa said. She felt like herself again. Almost. Enough to know her own name and remember fractions. She had her right hand in a sock, an impromptu sock puppet, and they talked. This wasn’t the first time she had talked to a sock puppet. Not even close.

  “Death, you mean,” right sock said. “You can’t run from death.”

  “I have so far,” Nessa said. A car rumbled overhead. She sat on damp sand under a bridge. The bridge was the A1A bridge over the inlet. She hadn’t gone far, physically, while she had her fit.

  She hoped Ken had coped. She sensed around with her mind and found him peering around the corner of a bridge support fifty feet away. She loved him for staying close. He was worried and terrified.

  “The running is why this is so painful for you,” right sock said. “Why doesn’t it bother you when your animals die?”

  “Because they’re animals. Isn’t that obvious?”

  “This is different how?” Right sock always asked hard questions.

  At least she only spoke to one sock. Two sock conversations? Much worse.

  “Opartuth,” sniff, “was more than just a normal mind. Opartuth was immense. Immense power. Immense wisdom, even though we had our differences. Big mind. Big loss.”

  “You wanted the easy way out,” right sock said. “You wanted this to be like before. You wanted to go to Opartuth and have Opartuth admit to being behind the 99 Gods, agree to stop, and have the entire 99 God problem go away. You knew it wouldn’t work that way, though. Not this time. Even if you refused to admit this to yourself.”

  “Yah, I kinda thought Opartuth wasn’t involved.” Sweat covered Nessa, fully drenching her top and her shorts. She needed water. “But even so, I thought Opartuth might know what’s going on. Be able to give me some advice. Help me rescue Uffie.”

  “You didn’t want the responsibility,” right sock said.
r />   “Of course I don’t. The whole idea that Ken and I are going to have to deal with the 99 Gods by ourselves is ludicrous. Even though I’ve seen how weak the Gods are individually. I mean, they’re Gods. If they don’t blow us out of the water with their godly shazams, they’ll just steal a nuke and blow us to atoms. We’re nothing but bugs on the windshield of life. Even if the one I sensed wasn’t impressive.”

  “Don’t get cocky,” right sock said. “You haven’t seen enough. You’re lying to yourself again. Like with Opartuth. You and Ken, again, here, just like when you were kids. Did you think you could go back and recreate your old triumph? Don’t you know how much the world’s always changing? Think back to back then. No smartphones, or cellphones of any variety. No laptops. No MP3 players or HDTVs. No DVDs, even.”

  Nessa nodded. “The world had promise, then, and my name was Vanessa. Now it’s all gray dirt.” She wouldn’t mind a change of clothes. Matted angry hair lay sideways across her forehead. Her braid had come loose and her long hair had spun everywhere.

  “The world had promise because you were young. The world had promise because you had promise.”

  “I failed. I didn’t live up to my own promise,” Nessa said.

  “You only think you’re a failure,” right sock said.

  She had argued this with right sock far too many times. She didn’t want to have the argument again. “So what do I do now?”

  “Opartuth is gone, but you heard others out there with names and a human voice. You sensed these replacements to the south, but they’re too far away for true verbal contact. You know where they are now. Visit them. Ask them. They might be able to help.”

  “I’ll have to learn them. We’ll fight.”

  Right sock laughed. “You fight with everyone and everything. Then you apologize. You can do better.”

  “Okay. I promise I won’t fight with these new ones.” She crossed her fingers and lowered her voice. “Unless they dis me.”

  “You would’ve even fought with Opartuth.”

  “Would not.”

  “Would so.”

  “Would not,” Nessa said. She looked at her left hand, where her wedding band hung loosely. Ken had put the ring back on her finger at the end of the afternoon. She hadn’t tossed it again, to her surprise. Of course, with Ken’s tricks, if she had tossed it in the ocean he would have been able to find the ring and get it back. “We’d settled.”

  “Twenty seven years ago you’d settled,” right sock said. “You know better. You’re lying to yourself again, and…”

  Right sock quieted as Ken stood and ran over to them, radiating notice.

  “Nessa, snap out of it, we’ve got big problems.”

  Nessa looked up at Ken. He looked just as agitated in her eyesight as he looked in her mental sight. “Go away. This isn’t the time.”

  “Pay attention to what’s going on around us,” Ken said, his voice harsh and commanding, his boss Private Investigator voice.

  “Shut the fuck up, dammit!” Nessa said. She stood and balled her fists. How dare he interrupt…

  Her train of thought derailed when she sensed a mental presence flying through the air toward them. “One of the fucking Gods!” The God pissed her off. “Right sock’s going to sort this piece of shit out.” She jogged out from under the bridge. Debris, drift lumber and other human garbage marred the inlet’s sand, not at all like the pristine beach she remembered from her youth. Over the Atlantic, the sun brightened the eastern horizon, predawn. She jogged farther out along the beach, toward the whitecapped water, to where she could see to the south. Nothing. The God remained invisible to her eyes. Her less accurate trick senses picked him up, though, now that the bridge’s concrete didn’t obscure her view.

  Ken followed. “Wait, wait. We need to be ready to defend ourselves. This one’s Miami, the God who attacked me.”

  Nessa couldn’t care less if Jesus fucking Christ himself came by for tea. Nobody interrupted a discussion with a sock. Either sock. “Whatever fucking piece of shit you are, Mr. God sir, if you know what’s best for you you’ll leave before I get angry with you,” Nessa said, and projected her message mentally to the God. “I won’t harm you if you leave.”

  The God kept coming and didn’t answer. He stopped twenty yards to the south and a dozen feet in the air, paused for twenty seconds, and became visible. The God appeared impressive, larger than life, using several little tricks to fool the mind into believing the God larger and scarier than his reality, that of a dark haired young man in a fancy business suit. “I told you to never come back to my territory again,” the God said, to Ken. “I couldn’t make you dance, but let’s find out if I can make your white slave floozy dance.”

  The God turned to Nessa and said “Strip, bitch” and pressed at her mind to make her obey.

  Anger whirled within her. The nerve of this so-called God. She flipped him the bird.

  The God’s face turned red. “What the fuck are you people, anyway?” The God flew closer, and the pressure on her mind grew stronger as he approached.

  “Last warning, shithead,” Nessa said to the God. His ‘I am better than you’ tricks pissed her off. The God ignored her warning.

  “He’s gotten better,” Ken said, a whisper. He hissed and the air around them filled with sand, a sandstorm fifty feet wide. A cloud of fog appeared above them and spit tiny splays of lightning. Nessa’s hair stood on end from the static electricity of Ken’s new shield. Nessa smiled, impressed. She hadn’t ever seen Ken do this trick before. The sand and fog didn’t hold back the God as he approached, but the trick did slow him down and did stop cold his attempt to take over her mind. Ken normally held back from this level of power because it scared him.

  Ken liked to be as human as possible.

  Nessa no longer saw the God, but he remained in her mind’s eye. As the God approached, he reached out toward her with his arms.

  “Don’t let him touch you!” right sock said, startling Nessa, filling her with adrenaline.

  Nessa used the adrenaline and drove her anger and her grief at Opartuth’s passing and her annoyance at having to leave her Eklutna home and the God’s sexist dismissal of her into a full-bore mental blast, screaming “We’re Telepaths!” as she blasted, answering Miami’s idiot question. Ken winced and yelled from the backwash as her attack passed and detonated in the God’s brain.

  The God fell without the slightest resistance to her mental blast. Nessa sucked breath; she hadn’t meant to kill the poor helpless thing. She thought something with enough brass to call itself a God could stand up to a pathetic loser like herself.

  Ken let the sand shield fall a moment later, but kept up his original telekinetic shield. “Holy fuck. Holy fuck,” Ken said. The God had vanished from Nessa’s sight. “What did you do to Miami, Nessa?”

  “I blew his fucking brain out his fucking ears,” right sock said. Right sock normally spoke with the voice of reason, patience and loosy goosy utopianism. The comment sounded almost like left sock.

  Nessa shivered and walked over to the Godly remains. She licked her lips, took the sock puppet off her right hand and stuck it in her pocket. Nope, no more quiet discussions with right sock today, not with its blood up. “This’s absurd,” she said. The Godly remains stained the beach, a mottled silver puddle standing a half inch high, an amalgam of black grit in mercury: no bones, no blood, no brains. Nor did the goo seep into the sand. Nessa knelt and peered down. She hadn’t expected the Gods to be anything like this. She hadn’t expected to so trivially harm a God.

  “Get back!” Ken said, a scream. He stayed back. Nessa sensed Ken’s fear and felt him put up another of his top end telekinetic shells around them, this one thick enough to bend light funny.

  A hand rose from the gritty puddle, reminding Nessa of some nasty movie she had seen back in her private detective days. No, the God hadn’t died. She sensed the God’s m
ind hiding now, wounded, behind a new set of crafty mental shields. Nessa slapped at the hand with a second mind blast. The hand vanished. “No more of that, Goddy,” she said. She blasted the puddle a dozen more times until she nearly exhausted herself.

  Ahhh. Wonderful. Exerting herself always helped. Nope, no more headaches today.

  “Damn,” she said. “This fucking thing’s still conscious, no matter what I do.”

  “You tried to kill a God?” Ken said.

  Nessa turned to face Ken, a bounce in her step. “Me? I’m no killer,” Nessa said. “I’m just pissed. Right sock’s pissed, too. Hell, I’m still pissed. I just wanted to make sure he stayed like this. What is this shit, anyway?” She reached into her soaked fanny pack and got out a lipstick tube. She used her meager teek to remove the lipstick from the tube, the effort of such a minimal teek more taxing than her mental blast. The tube empty, she reached down to scoop up some of the gritty amalgam. The God’s distant mental howl rang through her mind after she separated a piece of the God’s remains from the rest. “Awwh, poor Goddy didn’t like what I did.”

  “Nessa, this is one of the damn Gods you’re shitting with,” Ken said. “Haven’t you ever heard of hubris? Let’s get the fuck out of here before he recovers.”

  She put the lipstick tube’s cap back on and stuck the tube and its contents into her fanny pack. “Watch this thing with your tricks,” Nessa said to Ken, referring to her lipstick case. “Warn me if anything at all changes. I’ll put a telepathic whammy on it to keep this thing mentally warded and shielded, just in case.” She looked at the main patch of the God’s mottled silver remains, cognizant of the thing’s ample mental activity. Even after her dozen mental blasts, the God still thought his godly thoughts and she could no more read his mind or control him than before. “What the fuck is going on?” Nessa said, her voice a raw whisper from her earlier fit. “This is fucking insane.” Nothing obeyed her preconceptions. She had attacked the God’s mind, not his body, yet his body had sustained the damage. His mind huddled in anger and fear behind decent but not excellent mental shields. She didn’t think she had hurt his mind in the slightest.

  Ken grabbed her arm. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “This isn’t good, Nessa. Now the Gods are going to know Telepaths exist.”

  “Couldn’t Miami figure it out from your first clash?”

  “He saw a skin-tight teek shield that didn’t look like much, and my attitude,” Ken said. “His frustration at not being able to cow me did the rest.”

  Nessa nodded. She felt wonderful. Hell, she felt nearly orgasmic. “Flattening him was a blast,” she said. “I haven’t been able to cut loose in years.” Her earlier mental chaos storm had vanished. She could think again.

  “I know,” Ken said. “It’s like I’m floating on air.”

  Nessa looked at Ken. “You are floating on air,” she said, and tried to pull Ken back down to ground level. “I guess we both needed the mental exercise.” She pointed, where a car had come to a stop. She let Ken walk her over to it and open the back of the sedan up for her. In her reflection in the door window she looked a fright: wet matted hair strewn everywhere, blotchy dirty face, and dark circles under her eyes.

  She made sure the car’s driver didn’t see them. “We need to go down to the Keys, at least to Plantation Key.”

  “You’ll let this poor slob go?”

  “Ke-en. Of course I will, after he takes us back to our hotel and we pick up our rental car. That should be safe once we’re out of Goddy’s sight,” Nessa said.

  “Won’t Miami just find us again?”

  “The only reason he found us in the first place was me,” Nessa said. “I got that from his mind as I waxed his eustachians. He didn’t know we were even in his territory until I had my fit. I’m not impressed with these Gods at all.”

  Ken nodded. “Miami must have figured out something from my earlier confrontation with him. From what, um, right sock said, it sounded like Miami had a nasty attack ready to use on us. I also have a hunch Miami picked up from whatever you projected in your fit that you were another special type, the same way I am. These Gods learn fast, Nessa. We’re going to have to be on our toes.”

  “Shut up,” Nessa said. She didn’t like anyone knowing about her sock moments. Even Ken.

  A gentle prod to the driver and they sped off.

  The driver let them out in front of the Palm Beach and Nessa sent him on his way, dropping a wad of seawater soggy ten, five and one dollar bills on the front seat beside him. “You sure we don’t have time?” Ken said. He grabbed her around the waist and breathed heavily into her ear. She felt the bulge in his pants against her back.

  “I thought you were the cautious one.”

  “I love you,” Ken said. Nessa melted back into him for a moment.

  “Love you too,” Nessa said, only a little horny from the fight. More like a no-headache afterglow. “But business first.”

  Ken sighed. “So what’s the plan?” He didn’t let go of her. His hands crept up toward her breasts. She intercepted them before they reached their targets.

  “We grab our stuff, check out, and go, big boy.”

  “Right. Like sneaking away’s going to solve everything? Just because Miami’s a God doesn’t mean he can’t use more mundane methods to track us,” Ken said. He loosened his grip on her. “You might want to wash your face and put on some new clothes.” She needed a shower, but dealing with her hair afterwards took hours, which they didn’t have. She decided to just brush the sand out of it and call it a day.

  “Good idea,” Nessa said. “Then I’ll go check out. We wouldn’t want any of the staff here remembering our faces.”

  They cut over to the turnpike and headed south, away from the coast. The car hummed its soothing rumble as the miles passed.

  “We’re going to need to get help,” Nessa said. Ken drove.

  “What sort of help?”

  “People to keep me sane. Sane-er,” Nessa said. She hadn’t suffered through anything as bad as the earlier mental shit-storm in years. At least one she remembered. Stress, most likely. “Two dozen would be good.”

  “Two dozen? You’re talking a full-fledged entourage, a large one,” Ken said. “We can’t do that. We’d be endangering all of them. Like before.”

  “I know,” Nessa said. “That’s why I didn’t mention it earlier. But we can’t have me breaking down every day, like I have been. We’re going to have to do it.”

  Ken sniffed. “I thought the hunches were my trick and yours were only subconscious.” Ken’s hunches, his wild precognitive insights, were one of his best tricks. She didn’t always appreciate his best trick, but only his teek topped his hunches in her mind. He could toss cars around with abandon and destroy buildings, his favorite, with his teek.

  “Huh?” Nessa said. She didn’t want to go into the details about her hunches again.

  “Like you’ve decided we’re going to have to keep going after we talk with this new replacement to Opartuth.”

  Nessa chewed her lip, and took Ken’s hand in hers. “The chances that Opartuth’s replacement created the 99 Gods are quite small. And don’t forget about Uffie.”

  “Uffie. Right. I didn’t want to mention this, but I don’t have high hopes for your collaborator,” Ken said. “If she ran afoul of a God as nasty as Miami, she’s most likely dead.”

  Nessa shook her head and watched the road ahead, her mind elsewhere. “She’s not dead. She’s been in pain, and in danger, but she’s not dead.”

  “You can reach into her mind all the way to Africa?” Ken acted nervous. He didn’t like it when she showed her real spooky tricks.

  “Kinda sorta. She’s linked to me, so I know a little of what she’s going through, no matter where she is.” Nessa smiled. “An entourage. Hadn’t thought of things that way. I’d like to have a bunch of fawning admirers to take care of the
crap.”

  Ken glanced over at her. “Get that gleam out of your eye. This isn’t the time for one of your harebrained schemes.”

  “Why not? We’re over the line already by what we’re doing. Why not go for the whole hare?”

  “It’ll just get us in trouble,” Ken said. “We don’t have the money for an entourage.”

  “Well, I’ll bet there’s got to be some rich people somewhere who are being pressed by the 99 Gods and willing to donate money to someone opposing them,” Nessa said. “I’ll find them and prod them a bit. Money won’t be a problem.”

  Ken cleared his throat in an over-dramatic fashion. “Has that ever worked?”

  Nessa sighed and leaned over to put her head on Ken’s shoulder. “Just because the trick didn’t work in the past doesn’t mean it won’t work this time.” She always had hope, in moments like these.

  “What if we kept it under a dozen and lived off the land?” Ken said.

  “Not enough people. Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless we get some Telepaths for our entourage. I know one in Chicago and one in New York City.” Nessa let the ideas percolate through her mind. “One Telepath will provide more stability than any three normals.” She paused. “Or we could get Mindbound. Mindbound people provide over twice as much stability as normals on the average. Some are even better than Telepaths for that.”

  “Mindbound!” Ken said. “Now you’re asking for trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “You can’t control the Mindbound, Nessa. Some of them you can’t even read. That used to bother you.”

  “It still bothers me sometimes, but I’ve grown,” she said, and sighed. “I’ve discovered a few things about us over the years to change my mind about the Mindbound.” She didn’t want to talk about it. Mindbound others were the crème de la crème of mental stability support, at least when they weren’t doing the Scoobie Doo mystery investigation crap.

  “Such as?” Ken followed her verbal prod with a telepathic prod as well.

  “Well…” Nessa hesitated, and Ken began to knead her shoulders with his teek. Unfair! “I think being telepathic is part of every human, every animal. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be able to read their thoughts and put thoughts into their heads. Because us human types have language, our minds are set up to communicate with each other and it gives us an edge over the other animals.”

  “Uh, okay,” Ken said, continuing to knead her shoulders. “Mindbound?” His teek backrub didn’t seem to interfere with driving the car.

  “I’m getting there, okay?” Grumph grumph grumph. “We’ve all got these subconscious information flows, going from one person to another, only they’re so minimal we don’t notice unless we look. I can see what, um, a friend of mine…”

  “Friend?”

  “Okay. My right sock. Hmph. My right sock calls this ‘propagating coincidences’. Me, I think of this as all these language-using minds creating a big pond and these subconscious information flows are the waves.”

  “Mindbound, Nessa?”

  “A little lower and to the left,” Nessa said, leaning into Ken’s teek backrub. “Ummm. Yes. Well, you know, when Telepaths like you and me do things, we create big ripples in the pond. If the wind isn’t blowing hard and creating big waves, the ripples we create cause lots of coincidences to occur. When I started looking, I realized that the stronger Mindbound and Psychics create ripples that are just as big.” A Psychic was a Telepath who only worked unconsciously and sporadically. They were the fools who ended up on daytime talk shows and in testing labs, not Telepaths. “And Mindbound are all over the place. Eklutna had a dozen of them.” Mostly because she had attracted them, but she didn’t want to talk about her attraction trick.

  “And?”

  “Mindbound people help me keep sane because I can’t casually read their minds. Everyone else in a community, at least the people I interact with, starts to look like echoes of my own mind over time because of the ripples I make. The Mindbound don’t, which is why I wouldn’t mind having an entourage of them.” Some normals naturally resisted her ripple effect as well, but they were as rare as Telepaths and Psychics. They had to survive multiple traumatic experiences to teach them proper stubbornness and firmness of mind. Mindbound, although rare, were more common than any of these others.

  Ken shook his head. He didn’t speak for many minutes, as downtown Miami passed on their left. His teek backrub ended almost lasciviously. “That’s your call, as this is all outside of my area of expertise. I can’t sense the difference between Mindbound, Psychics and normals without putting a lot of work into it.”

  “Oooh, all professional on me and everything.” She paused, remembering Ken’s tendency to let his telepathy atrophy. “Subtle telepathy’s your strength, Ken, as far as telepathy goes. All you need to be able to pick this up are some examples. I’m good enough to teach you these days.

  Ken sighed. “Sure. Whatever you say. About this entourage idea, though… Nessa, it’s going to keep all of our wits and tricks just to keep ourselves alive. Miami’s trigger happy and jealous of anyone else with abnormal power. We add any more people to the mix and we’re going to be attending funerals.”

  Nessa shivered. “I know. We can’t trick them into joining us, either. That wouldn’t be right. Instead, we’ll have to tell them about the hazards ahead of time. However, they’re out there, scared stiff about the 99 Gods, people who would do anything to get rid of them. Even something as risky as helping us.”

  “I’ll give this some thought,” Ken said. “I’m also not sure I’m happy with the idea of contacting other Telepaths. We don’t want to piss off any of the distant ones.” The world’s other top end Telepaths. “Uh, Nessa? You know we’ll have to warn anyone we recruit about our, ahem, little, ahem, mental problems, too.”

  “Of course.” Every ointment had its fly, Nessa knew.

  Plantation Key. Wall to wall resorts, rental condos, and palm trees. Shelly limestone rocks everywhere, built into everything. Summer lingered here, high summer, noticeably more summery than back north in Palm Beach. Ken got them a room at Plantation Harbor, a cheap one-story motel built from painted cinder blocks. The room stank of mold and mildew again, and this time the air conditioner, a window model, rattled loudly.

  “Geez Louise,” Nessa said, looking around the room. “I thought this place was better from the road. We’ve got to get ourselves more money. This is ridiculous.”

  Ken humped in the two suitcases and closed the door with his foot. “How’s the bed?”

  “How’s the bed what?” Nessa said. She sat down on the bed. “Hard as a rock.” She sucked on another piece of chocolate, another bit from Ken’s stash. Nessa studied her hands. She swore they weren’t as visibly gaunt as they had looked back home in Eklutna. She suspected she had gained ten pounds, all Ken’s fault. He probably even thought the extra weight looked good on her.

  Ken sat on the bed beside her. “I’d rather have a hard bed than a too soft bed,” he said. “I need to sleep. Unlike you, I can’t go indefinitely without it. First, though…”

  Nessa turned her head and found Ken’s nose close enough to bite. Time to mate. “Oh, right.”

  “At least it’s warm enough to go out in bathing suits at night,” Nessa said. They had walked down the beach to find a more secluded location. On the way they passed actual fields, grass and trees that weren’t palm trees. Nessa suspected the resorts had planted the palms for the tourists. Imported plants for imported tourists.

  The grass and trees appeared to be more native.

  “If we go any farther, we’re going to be trespassing on the yacht club,” Ken said. Stars glistened overhead and the waves lapped the beach with their slow nighttime pulse. A sliver of a moon hovered near the horizon and illuminated only the tips of the waves with an eerie pale glow.

  “Oh, is that w
hat that place is? This is far enough for me.”

  She didn’t sense any human minds within a quarter mile, and at two in the morning, didn’t sense many people awake within a mile. She took Ken’s hand and dragged him out into the dark surf. Two foot tall waves splashed over her bathing suit, a momentary shock of cold, until she decided the water was warmer than the air and it was the air that cooled her.

  “Sure there’s no sharks here?” Ken said, wary as always about the ocean. She continued to lead them deeper into the water.

  “I told them to go away.”

  “Right.”

  “I did!” He never believed her. She tangled his feet together with some devious telepathy.

  Ken didn’t notice.

  “I didn’t know you could get something as mindless as a shark,” Ken said.

  “I learned how to get fish and other little critters a few years ago,” Nessa said.

  “Fish? You?”

  “Uh huh.” She giggled. “Yes, a scheme. No, the scheme didn’t work. Just because I’d learned to kill and clean one fish turned out not to mean I could do it wholesale.” She paused. “Let’s also not talk about the looks people gave me when I stood at the shore and called the salmon to me.” She had such bad luck with her schemes.

  “No, let’s not talk about that,” Ken said. “Instead…”

  “You hear that?” Ken said. “Someone’s out in the water, whispering in some foreign language.”

  Nessa sent, telepathically. “It’s Opartuth’s replacement. Close your eyes and hold my hand. You should be able to talk to them too,” Nessa said to Ken, aloud. She stopped walking. The larger swells came up almost to her nose and dragged her hair behind her. The salt water got up her nose and stung. “Use the translation trick in my mind.”

  She paused.

  Nessa held her breath.

  “Damn,” Ken said. “You were right. They didn’t have anything to do with the 99 Gods.”

  “Of course I was right,” Nessa said. She didn’t know where to go from here.

  A different mental voice.

  Nessa asked. The warm embrace of the water lifted her, loved her. She could lose herself in the water’s warm love forever, always a danger.

  said the second mental voice.

  “Uh oh,” Ken said.

  Nessa shook her head, dug her toes in the sand below her feet and found herself again.

  Korua said.

  said Spang.

  Nessa interrupted. Ken grunted at the strength of her mental shout.

  Korua said.

  Spang said.

  Korua said.

  Nessa sent.

  Korua said.

  Ken sent, mentally. His mental voice sounded small, tinny and distant compared to Spang and Korua’s voices.

  Korua asked.

  Korua said.

  Ken sent.

  Ken sent. Nessa giggled. She had suffered through much of this nonsense and fancy from Opartuth. Always the utter nonsense.

  “Remember my old stories, Ken. In a way they don’t live and think in our reality,” Nessa said. “Think of this as a story.”

  Spang said.

  Korua said. Pause.

  Nessa sent.

  Korua said.

  Spang said.

  “Nessa?” Ken said.

  Nessa sent.

  Korua said.

  Ken sent.

  Nessa sent.

  Korua said.

  Spang said.

  Nessa sighed. Their schemes always made her schemes sound sane. Opartuth’s old ‘believe in the UFOs’ scheme, the scheme she hadn’t managed to talk him out of, even seemed to work, keeping society’s mind fixated on outer space.

  Korua said. Nessa winced.

  Nessa sent. Silly silly silly. She giggled out loud. “Truthfully it’s no crazier than any of their other schemes.”

  Spang said.

  “Did you get your penchant for crazy schemes from them or did they get it from you?” Ken asked. Nessa spat seawater at him.

  Spang said.

  Nessa sent.

  Korua said.

  Nessa sent.

  Nessa picked up a mental image of the man.

  Nessa sent, amused at the ‘aside’ and the way history repeated itself. Opartuth had forced her to introduce herself to Ken. She paused.

  Spang said.

  Nessa sent.

  Korua said.

  Ken sent.

  Nessa sent, grumbly grumbling.

  Korua said.

  The two minds faded out of contact. Nessa laughed.

  “They’re impossible!” Ken said.

  “I’m beginning to think this is a common trait of their kind,” Nessa said. “Okay, Mr. Telepath Private Investigator, your turn to play idiot. Your job is to find this Alton whateverhisnamewas.”

  Ken splashed water at her.