An Officer’s Duty (11 page)

“The restrooms downstairs were full. What sort of an experiment?” Aurelia asked, pursuing it anyway.

Ia knew that Thorne’s biological mother was where he had gotten his stubborn determination. Once Aurelia Jones-Quentin sank her teeth into something, it took finesse to get her to let go. Unfortunately, Ia had inherited some of that bluntness as well. Lifting her chin, Ia replied tartly, “Obviously, a
prophetic
sort of experiment? It’s just one more thing I have to do to prepare for the future. Now, if you’ll get out of my way, I’ll exit the bathroom, and you can do your business and get back to work. Don’t forget to wash your hands.”

“Impertinent…!” Giving her daughter a sardonic look—one which mother and daughter shared, since Ia had learned it from her—Aurelia moved back, letting her exit the bathroom. She softened her look, hand gently cupping Ia’s shoulder. “You
are
doing okay, aren’t you? I know all those nightmares still
kept bothering you long after you stopped screaming each night…”

Uncomfortable with even her own mother touching her, Ia’s answering smile was wry at best. She patted her mother’s fingers and slid out from under them. “Trust me, I’m fine. I had the Marine Corps looking out for me while I was gone. Not to mention a chaplain named Bennie who took a personal interest in my mental health and welfare.”

Aurelia tipped her head at that, giving her daughter a speculative look. “Is he cute?”

“Actually,
he
is a
she
,” Ia corrected her mother.

“Is
she
cute?” Aurelia persisted. “I wouldn’t say no to either a son-or a daughter-in-law one of these days.”

Unable to help herself, Ia chuckled. She leaned down and kissed her mother on the cheek. “Look to your sons for grandchildren, Mother. Or to the Free World Colony’s wombpods. I won’t be carrying any of my own. At least, not personally. I do plan on donating some eggs at some point, though.”

The older woman grumbled under her breath. “Oh, sure, ruin my plans for spoiling your children in person, why don’t you?”

Kissing her mother again, this time on the top of her sleek, dark-haired head, Ia stepped through the door to her old bedroom. “I’m giving you an entire colony…well, half of it…to dote and fuss over, Ma. Be content with that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have weird, bizarre, future-probing experiments to conduct in secret…and no, I am
not
going to ‘cut’ myself again today.”

She closed the door before her mother could interrogate her further. Turning around, Ia faced her old bedchamber. It still looked banal, if not quite so crowded. There were two twin-sized beds in here now, instead of a twin and a queen. That meant there were almost two full meters between the two beds, plenty of room to move around. The foot of each bed still served as seating for a built-in desk counter with drawers, and it was to the foot of Fyfer’s bed that she moved.

On the counter were two large boxes. One was empty, while the other had been filled with carefully hollowed thimble-beads crafted from transparent, pastel chunks of crysium. They were pure beads, too, clear and tinted. Some were pale pink, some pale blue or pale green, but most were a pale, clear gold.

At least I could see approximately how many drops per bead I was using, through the timestreams,
she acknowledged, settling everything in place. Squeezing the blood from the container into the shot glass, she picked up the first bead and the eyedropper, dipped the dropper to fill it, then carefully measured out four drops. A pull of energies with her mind softened the bead, and a rolling mush of her fingers mingled the blood with the mineral, until she had a translucent peach bead.
Too much destabilizes the crysium, threatening the decay of the blood and the inability to reintegrate the beads with more of the crystalline medium. Too little dilutes the precognitive resonance between my Feyori-enhanced biology and the Feyori-discarded mineral.

I will need…approximately two milliliters of my blood per wreath. Four drops per bead and twenty per milliliter mean I need ten beads per wreath. I think
…Dipping the eyedropper into the next bead, she squeezed out four more drops. A knock on the door interrupted her. Quickly pinching the bead shut, she rolled it between her palms. “Yes?”

Aurelia opened the door and peered in at her, but saw nothing but Ia rolling something between her hands, looking over her shoulder at her mother. “You do know we moved the wall harp down into the restaurant, right?”

“It was hard to miss,” Ia said, plucking another bead from the box. From the doorway, she could hear the faint sounds of people chatting and tableware clattering; the later dinner crowd was still going strong, downstairs.

“Could you…you know…play it tonight?” Aurelia asked her. “I’ve missed the sound of you practicing on it.”

Ia sighed. “I don’t like people knowing I have these abilities, Ma. I’m freakish enough just from my hair and my size.”

Aurelia pushed the door open wider. “My daughter is
not
a freak. Do you hear me?”

Rolling her eyes, Ia sighed. “Fine, I’m not a freak. But I still don’t want people to know I can play it telekinetically. Particularly now that I’m in the military. It’s too soon for that.”

Her mother lingered in the doorway. Ia molded three more beads before sighing and giving in to Aurelia’s unspoken plea.

“Okay. But I won’t play it while I’m in the same room. And I won’t take requests…mainly because I won’t be in the same
room, but also because I don’t want anyone to know that I’m the one playing it.” Tossing the latest translucent bead into the nearly empty box on her right, Ia glanced back at her mother. “You
do
realize that having someone play the wall harp will only pinpoint you all the harder as heretical demon-lovers in the eyes of the Church, right?”

Aurelia snorted and folded her arms across her chest. “No more so than for being an ‘unnatural man-hater’ or whatever. I don’t actually hate men. I just fell in love with a wonderful woman, and that was that. Anyway…when are you coming down to play the harp? And where will you be, if not in the same room?”

Sighing, Ia closed her eyes and concentrated. “I only have to know exactly where it is in relation to myself, and be within about five hundred meters of it, Mother. I could even go for a run around the block and still be able to play it, that’s how good I’ve grown. Now, where are the picks?”

“In a basket on the credenza under the harp.
Um
…left corner as you look at it, but back by the wall, not the front corner.”

“Five of them?” Ia asked, attention turned inward and outward, looking in the timestreams for the spot her mother mentioned.

“I think so,” her mother offered. “Four, for sure. Are you really going to play it from all the way up here?”

She nodded. “I’ve expanded my telekinetic abilities in the last two years. Mind you, it’s nice to use them for something peaceful this time around.” Faintly through the open door, the first few notes could be heard. It was just a simple arpeggio to warm up her half-forgotten skills, but it still sounded good, just barely audible over the tops of conversations, cutlery, and cooking wafting up from below. “If you swing by the music store tomorrow and get me a dozen, I can play a full concert later. I’ll just play a four-pick melody for now—thank you for keeping it in tune.”

“We’ve had a few psis stop in and try to play it. And for a while, we had a dulcimer harpist performing on the occasional weekend. He brought his own hammers and used them by hand. He ended up being hired by an upscale restaurant in the downtown core, though—could you play ‘La Partida’ for me,
gataki mou
?” Aurelia asked her daughter. “Then whatever else you want,
but make it something pretty and lighthearted? I have to get back down. Weston isn’t bad as head waiter, but I really should get back to work.”

“I’ll play it,” Ia promised her. “But it’ll take all five picks and then some—I’ll play a simplified version for now.”

“Thank you, kitten.” Blowing her daughter a kiss, Aurelia retreated. She left the door open behind her. Ia didn’t bother to shut it, but instead just picked up another bead and the eyedropper, trying to get a feel for this new process manually so that she could replicate it telekinetically later. She would have done so now, but didn’t want to mess up one of her mother’s favorite songs.

The faint strains of strings being plucked in the up-and-down waves of an arpeggio shifted, turning much more melodic. Rising and falling with the song, the notes sang at rhythmic intervals, depending on how strongly or subtly she plucked them. The arpeggio had served its purpose, by adjusting her mind to the physical location of each string. Now she could play it in earnest as she worked.

Wall harps were not uncommon among telekinetics; it was considered a primary test just to be able to pluck the strings with the force of one’s mind, let alone waft a pick into the air and flick it across the metal lines. The real benefit, however, lay in practicing it like one practiced a normal instrument; the more a telekinetic could flick and pluck and play, the stronger they could train their abilities.

Of course, there were limits to psychic training. Everyone—at least among Humans—could train into themselves a baseline level of raw empathic, clairsentient, gut-instinct level sensitivity, with time and effort. For the flashier abilities, one had to be born with them, and then discover them—usually in the puberty years—and then master and train them. Raw ability could rank someone at a certain baseline, and training could push them a few ranks higher, but there were limits. Raw strength could lift and move a heavy weight, but wielding something as tiny as a string pick with enough deftness and dexterity to play a song took practice, practice, and more practice.

She hadn’t lied in telling her mother it would be nice to use her abilities for something peaceful. Nor had she lied about being a lot better at subtle manipulations by now. Still, there
was a difference between telekinetically guiding the outcome of a battle in her favor and plucking a charming tune from harp strings strung on a frame two meters wide and mounted on the wall of the dining half of the restaurant downstairs.

The noise of the diners had muted a bit during her warm-up. Now the melody soared and danced, growing a little louder as her mother slipped through the door at the bottom of the stairs, leaving it, too, slightly ajar. Pots and pans rattled in the kitchen, and she could hear her birthmother, Amelia, ordering someone to clean up a spill, but over all those noises, the wall harp played on.

Ia picked up another bead and carefully measured four drops of blood into the hollow at its center. She worked in time with the tune, thumbs squishing and kneading, palms rubbing and rolling.
Four drops of blood per bead, twenty in a milliliter…that’s eight hundred beads before I run out of blood. As soon as I’ve gotten a good rhythm and habit established up here, and I’ve played enough music for a set…I’ll be able to return the picks to their bowl downstairs and use my abilities on these beads instead. Then things should go a lot faster.

A pity I wasn’t born a Gatsugi, with four arms instead of two. Then I could’ve done this twice as fast by hand…

As much as part of her wanted to stay with her family, to be on hand to help Rabbit and the rest in their coming underground war against the Church, Ia was all too aware that her time here was running out.