By Sun Read online

  “You startled me!” Lucy grimaced, set the brush down, and pulled a large navy bandana from her back pocket. She swiped at her face.

  “Sorry about that. I just needed a break and figured you might, too.”

  Lucy glanced at her watch, a heavy black thing that weighted down her tiny wrist.

  “I guess I could take a short break. There were a couple of things I wanted to check with you about anyway.” She clambered down the ladder and turned to cover the paint tray with a fitted piece of hard plastic.

  “Suco!” she called into the next room. “I’m taking a break.”

  “Okay, boss!”

  Jack gestured to Lucy’s face, where her handkerchief had turned the spatter into smears. She shook her head and reached for the bandana again.

  Staring at the smears, a thought floated through his brain. There were sections of code that seemed disconnected, but all it would take was one common force to link them into a flow. A flow that would work.

  But what was it? Jack needed the coding equivalent of Lucy’s bandana. He stood stock still as the tumblers in his brain clicked over. The back of his skull felt as if a great hand had pressed itself against him. So close.

  “Jack? You okay?”

  He blinked. Lucy stared at him, an eleven creasing itself between her dark eyebrows.

  “Sorry! Just had an idea.”

  He looked into her eyes. The thought was gone now. Jack hoped he could manage to call it back.

  3

  Lucy

  Lucy piloted her blue work truck toward the Willamette River. The truck was huge on the outside and comfy inside, with tan leather seats and AC that actually worked, unlike her last truck, a battered beast that had finally given up the ghost the year before.

  She missed that truck.

  Her right hand still itched, and right now, the tingling drew her west. She was trying to teach herself to follow its lead. As Brenda used to say when Lucy first joined the coven, If you want to train your psychic skills, when intuition tells you to do something, do it as soon as you can. If it tells you to take your vitamins, don’t argue. Just take your vitamins.

  As a witch who worked with psychometry, her hands were the core of her magic. So, even though she didn’t trust the new weirdness in her hand, Lucy was taking her metaphorical vitamins.

  She squinted, and fished a set of sunglasses from the overhead console. It was mid-afternoon, which meant heading into the sun, but at least traffic going west on Powell was relatively light at this time on a Wednesday. Ladders rattled on the rack over the truck bed, a metallic counterpoint to the LeAnn Rimes streaming from the radio.

  The rest of the coven teased Lucy about her love of country music, but what could she say? Her ancestors were actual cowboys and she’d been raised on the Mexican version of country. The crossover between the canción ranchera of her grandfather’s favorite Norteño bands and country western was pretty natural, even if gringos didn’t get it.

  Few people were aware that there’d always been Black and Mexican cowboys in the United States. That fact had been effectively whitewashed from history. Thanks, Hollywood.

  She braked for a light at the big intersection at Powell and Milwaukie, glancing at the old Aladdin vaudeville house to see what bands were coming. Nothing she recognized. And besides, when was the last time she’d been out to hear live music, or go dancing?

  “Too long,” she said. There was always something to take care of at home, or with the business, or coven, let alone local politics, which could become a full time job if she allowed it.

  Lucy was glad she’d had the impulse to stop at a Quick Market for Mexican ice pops, which she’d loaded into a cooler that lived permanently in the truck bed. On Wednesdays, immigrant families were required to check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the ICE building off of Macadam. Even if the magic in her hands told her nothing, a cold treat would bring them a little joy.

  She had to admit she missed the OccupyICE encampment.

  The camp that activists had erected next to the big square of a building had kept the place closed for weeks in protest of the increased raids, arrests, and deportations that left many children separated from their families, languishing in actual cages with no comfort to be found.

  Then the Department of Homeland Security executed a pre-dawn raid and cleared the veterans’ camp from the long driveway, trashing the art and altars people had set up in front. The destruction of the rest of the camp came two weeks after that with the help of the Portland Police Bureau. They’d fired pepper balls and other less-than-lethals at the ICE Breakers. Lucy had seen some of the bruises from the close-range projectiles. They weren’t pretty.

  The dirty business went on. Children hooded and chained to desks. Molestation accusations. Parents deported without their kids, kids sold into “adoption” with white parents….

  Lucy flushed with anger and turned off the music. Even LeAnn Rimes wasn’t helping to distract her anymore. Though she’d worked off and on with local immigrants’ rights groups for years, the current situation had her feeling pretty helpless. And feeling helpless pissed her off. Bringing ice pops for the kids and families walking out of the government building felt like too little.

  But at least it was something tangible.

  Yeah, if Lucy’s itching, tingling hand was forcing her to get to the ICE building, she could at least bring treats. Psychic hoohah was all good and well, but manifesting world action was even better.

  Arrow and Crescent coven had felt assaulted from all sides for the past year. They were working on so many fronts, their attention hadn’t even turned to these latest atrocities.

  Well, if Lucy had anything to say about it, that was going to change.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” she said, glancing down at her hands on the dark tan, leather-wrapped steering wheel, “but it better not just be that asshole Alchemist tugging at me again.”

  The tingling didn’t have the psychic flavor of the Alchemist, but her hands—and her right hand especially—was trying to tell her something, that was for sure. And time at her altar each morning had increased enough in intensity that Lucy was now getting up at five in the morning just to say her prayers and make offerings before getting to the first job site by seven.

  Lucy had to check in on all the jobs, put in calls to distributors when necessary, and generally ride herd on her own set of painting ranch hands before making her way to whatever job she was working on that day.

  Crossing the Ross Island Bridge, she thumbed the windows down. The heat of the day hit her skin, followed by the mingled scents of river water, oil, and steel. She couldn’t smell any smoke, which was good, but there was that indescribable dry smell that only happened when there’d been several scorching days in a row.

  There was nothing Lucy liked better than that. She had sometimes toyed with moving someplace really hot, like Austin, but the Willamette and Columbia rivers, and the volcanic ring around the city, were in her blood. Despite the whiteness of Portland, her family had been on this soil too long for Lucy to feel one-hundred-percent comfortable anywhere else.

  So she would stay here, and fight for the rights of others to make a home.

  Two sailboats paced one another on the water to her right. That coaxed a smile out of her, at least. She loved everything about the river, though she’d never been much of a sailor herself.

  Navigating around the big loop that would take her south to Macadam and Bancroft, Lucy poked along behind a green Prius that didn’t seem to know which lane it wanted to be in. She took a breath, throttling down impatience.

  Lucy was impatient with the whole world these days, and it wasn’t the damn Prius driver’s fault. Besides, at her last physical, Doc Napier said that her blood pressure was decent but given her family history and the recent tobacco poisoning, Lucy needed to keep stress and certain foods in check. So she was trying.

  Luckily, all of her witchy deep breathing and grounding techniques help
ed, but she’d had to cut back on salty snacks, which sucked.

  No chicharrones for awhile. Or salami. Or bacon, which really hurt.

  The Prius finally decided on the right-hand lane right before Lucy swung the Blue Beast onto Bancroft. And there it was. A three-story tan-and-white rectangle, currently surrounded by an ugly seven-foot steel mesh fence that blocked sidewalk access. Immigration and the Department of Homeland Security had erected the illegal fence when they re-took the building.

  The activist camp had been beautiful in a ragged way, with banners waving in the sun, and art and posters everywhere. A giant altar to replace the one smashed in the first raid, tucked against the building opposite ICE, filled with images, flowers, and flickering jar candles. The ICE Breakers, the activists called themselves. A ragtag group of anarchists, religious groups, members of the houseless community, and assorted other folks who dropped in and out daily.

  The building looked naked without the encampment. Beneath the anger, Lucy had to acknowledge that she just felt sad.

  “The building is showing its true colors now, at least,” she said to the hot air in the truck cab.

  The building looked like a part of the machine that it was. A place where no one was safe. A fast route to disappearance.

  Lucy wiped the sweat from her face and looked for a place to park.

  4

  Jack

  “You still working on the sheriff’s website?” Jack’s friend Olivia pitched her contralto voice low. Despite being in an open space, Olivia was always careful.

  They walked beneath the tall pines in the park near Jack’s house. His home office was relatively secure, but if Olivia could have a meeting outside, she preferred it, both for security reasons and all of those “fresh air and exercise” reasons.

  Olivia was a big woman with ruddy white skin, and Jack could feel her slowing down to match his pace, as if it pained her to contain herself. A self-proclaimed fatlete, Olivia competed in power lifting and won at least half the time. She also ran five miles before breakfast.

  No way in hell could Jack keep up with her physically, so he didn’t even bother pretending to try. Olivia’s girlfriend was equally badass. Another coder, Grace headed up the local wheelchair basketball league. Sometimes being around them made Jack feel bad about himself. Made him think he should start some sort of exercise routine.

  Whenever that feeling gripped him, he usually ate another piece of pizza and took another swig of cola, and the feeling passed.

  “I’m so close to cracking it. Their Facebook page was so easy…”

  “Any script kiddie can hack a Facebook page, Jack.” Olivia sounded mildly disgusted at the thought, as if both script kiddies and hacking social media pages were equally abhorrent. Jack didn’t mind either, despite the fact that Olivia clearly viewed them as vermin. Anyone who wanted to do a little low-key hacking for the public good was okay by him, whether they actually knew their way around a piece of code or not.

  “Simmer down there, code master,” he said. He enjoyed the way his sneakers crunched on the dried pine needles, but sweat rolled down his back and he was pretty done with being outside already. “You sure you don’t want to head back to my AC?”

  Olivia shook her head. “You don’t have nearly enough interference set up for this conversation.”

  They both carried their phones in homemade, portable Faraday cages that blocked electromagnetic fields, increasing digital privacy. In Jack’s case, his custom messenger bag was lined in metal-impregnated fabric. He had a smaller sleeve just for his phone for days when he didn’t carry his bag.

  For today’s conversation? He had the phone in the sleeve inside the copper-lined purse.

  Olivia? She kept every damn thing in a sleeve and had also taken the battery out of her phone before they started walking. Belt-and-braces security. That was Olivia. Always.

  Jack worried that if he got any deeper, he was going to have to do the same. That meant he’d have to give up his preferred phone for one with a removable battery. He sighed. It was always something.

  Kids shrieked from the public pool, snapping Jack’s attention back.

  Olivia cleared her throat. “So what’s the idea?”

  “It’s only half of one, really.” He stopped, and stepped off the path into a cluster of five towering pines. Olivia crossed bare muscled arms across her massive chest. She wore a black tank top with the Electronic Frontier Foundation logo on it. Black cargo pants and sneakers completed the look.

  “Just talk,” she said. “I know you wish you had a whiteboard, but make do, man.”

  She was right. Jack’s fingers itched for a marker. He tapped his fingers on his jeans.

  “Okay. I’ll start with the image, then. It’s a spatter. Like paint. One source, but sprayed out in an array.”

  Olivia squinted at the spaces between the trees, as if trying to imagine it.

  “See, instead of the information moving in a web with obvious links, it jumps.” He looked at his friend. She trained her brown eyes on his.

  “You’re asking me how to do it. How to skip over the obvious connections? Or how to make the connections invisible?”

  “That’s the problem. I’m not sure.”

  Olivia jerked her head toward the pathway. “Let’s walk. I can’t think if we’re not walking.”

  They fell back into step, Olivia making a better effort to slow down. Jack was relieved. The heat was making him feel a little ill, and walking quickly only made it worse.

  “The more I think about it, the more I think that the connections are invisible. You know…with paint spatter, the paint was connected at the beginning—at the source—and the molecules remained connected in the air, as it flew. Just because it looks disconnected when it lands, doesn’t mean the connection isn’t still there. We just can’t see it anymore.”

  “Except in the pattern,” Olivia pointed out.

  Jack stopped again, dead in his tracks. That was it.

  “Of course. Shit. The pattern itself shows the connections.”

  They walked some more. A squirrel darted across the pathway, and a group of parents made a brave attempt to corral a group of toddlers up ahead. A clutch of high-tech strollers huddled together at the edge of the play area.

  “That seems to be the root of your problem,” Olivia finally said. She slipped a steel water bottle from one of her cargo pant pockets, snapped the lid open, and took a swallow.

  “What?”

  “Even if the connections are invisible, if the connections exist in the pattern, all it takes is for someone to be able to see the pattern to trace it. Figure it out.”

  “If they’re good enough,” Jack replied.

  Olivia snapped the bottle shut. “If they’re good enough.”

  “If I make the spatter array big enough, it’ll be hard to see the pattern, right?”

  “You’re talking…”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “All of a sudden I’m working on something a whole lot larger than the local sheriff’s website, aren’t I?”

  And that was always his trouble. He tried to fix something small and ended up creating an entire world instead. He should’ve been an epic fantasy writer, except his brain worked better in code than words.

  “Do you know what it is?” Olivia asked.

  “Not yet. Not even sure if it will be applicable to anything at all.”

  “Oh,” she said, slipping the water bottle back into a pocket, “it will. Trust me. That’s how all the big inventions work. We’ll need whatever it is at some point, and the application will become clear.”

  Jack knew that was true. But it didn’t make him feel better. As a matter of fact, it worried him.

  “Well,” he said, “keep thinking about the smaller problem for me, will you? And now I’ve got to get out of this heat. Let’s go grab some lunch.”

  “Hey Jack?” Olivia stopped him as he turned. “I do think you’re onto something…and I’ve got a group that’s been working on a project
that may end up needing it. Maybe even soon.”

  A finger of uncertainty touched him, stopping him in his tracks again. But no thoughts followed. The information stayed just beyond his reach. So he shrugged, and started walking toward the café across the street from the park.

  “Just keep me posted, okay? Let’s get lunch and some iced tea. I’m buying.”

  5

  Lucy

  Lucy hoisted the small red cooler out of the truck bed and began the two-block walk to Portland’s ICE headquarters. A neatly printed cardboard sign in one hand, the cooler in her other hand bumping against her painter pants, she walked past some food carts parked in an old industrial loading dock, heading toward the shiny six-story loft buildings catty-corner to the ICE building.

  The building really did look menacing now. Lucy wasn’t sure if that was simply because she was aware of what went on inside—how some people went in for an appointment and their families left in tears, without them—or if the building itself had changed.

  Or maybe, she thought, as her right hand pricked and tingled, I’m just getting clearer psychic hits now.

  She didn’t used to be able to get such strong information from a distance, but maybe that was changing, too. Whatever the Alchemist’s intentions in making that tainted flying ointment, he seemed to have changed Lucy’s magic. Perhaps forever.

  She headed toward the dirt slope near the metro tracks, an area only recently filled with garden beds, art, meditation tents, and a children’s play area.

  She set the cooler in the shade of some maple trees on city property next to one of the seven-foot-tall mesh fences abutting the concrete driveway and guard shack at the edge of ICE’s property.

  Red and silver tape marred the big light pole next to the sidewalk, where signs had been taped up, facing the building. A bright display of radical stickers still festooned every pole on the block, reminders of the people who had held the building down for weeks on end.